By Steve Goddard
Dr. John Christy recently wrote an excellent piece “Is Jim Hansen’s Global Temperature Skillful?” which highlighted how poorly Dr. Hansen’s past predictions are doing.
This post raises questions about GISS claims of record 2010 temperatures. The most recent GISS graph below shows nearly constant warming from 1965 to the present, with 2010 almost 0.1°C warmer than the actual warmest year of 1998.
HadCrut disagrees. They show temperatures flat over the past decade. and 2010 about 0.1°C cooler than the warmest year 1998.
Looking more closely, the normalised plot below shows trends from Jan 1998 to the present for GISS, HadCrut, UAH and RSS
GISS shows much more warming than anybody else during that period. Hansen claims :
The difference of +0.08°C compared with 2005, the prior warmest year, is large enough that 2010 is likely, but not certain, to be the warmest year in the GISS record.
The discrepancy with the other data sources is larger than Hansen’s claimed 0.08 record. Is it a record temperature, or is it good old fashioned bad data?
Either way, it is still far below Hansen’s projected temperatures for 2010. This is not pretty science.
Hansen made temperature forecasts which have proven too high. Now his “measured” temperature data is pushing higher than everyone else. Would you accept the other team’s coach doing double duty as the referee? In what other profession would people accept this sort of conflict of interest?
0.08C during a cherry picked time interval is a meaningless number – unless it gives you an excuse to rush to the press and politicians with a statement about “the warmest year on record.”
“Second warmest El Nino in the last 30 years” doesn’t sound quite as impressive.
It is all about science, no doubt.
Seriously Steve, you play word games, you rile everyone up by choosing cherry-picking start dates to imply that GISS is gaming the system to imply that Hansen is working to massage the index to match his previous predictions. You actually know why the indexes differ in methodologies. You purposefully neglect to mention the reason (arctic interpolation) until we called you out on it. After leading people down this path of innuendo you end with the following quote:
But now you claim you never meant to imply any malfeasance. Seriously Steve SimonH said it best above.
This post and your previous one where you appear unable to do arithmetic or understand English when arguing with Leif do not enhance the stature of this site. Your attempts at gotcha journalism are not science.
Steve, thank you for the prompt response.
“1. The criteria for urban ( nightlights) is not the best proxy. Ron Broberg, (mostly) Zeke and I have been working on different criteria. We all have different approaches to the problem. It will be interesting to see what MATERIAL difference that makes
2. My preferred approach is just to drop Urban. No adjustment. Live with the spatial uncertainty.”
I too believe it appropriate to drop any UHI “adjustment.” Surface level land temperatures are where we live and IMO temperature series over land masses should reflect where humanity resides. It seems to me, though, that estimates of “urban heat island” effects are needed for purposes of cause attribution with aggregate UHI effect decomposed into rising temps due to land-use change versus changes in atmospheric composition. I may be mistaken, but I tend to think such a decomposition of UHI effects would lead to relative downgrading of global CO2 concentrations in GCMs.
jeez
If you consider human nature to be malfeasance, then you must be a difficult person to get along with. Everybody is biased to find what they want.
You also seem to be a mind reader, and a few other terms come to mind.
Reading about GISS, HadCrut, satellites and so forth on WUWT for the last few months one could be forgiven for thinking that the record or near record temperatures being reported by all approaches is an indication of just about any conceivable thing EXCEPT rising temperature. There is a stark disconnect between the tone of recent writing and the reality unfolding. Global temperatures are rising and no amount of invoking UHI, data smoothing, confilict of interest or any other red herring alters this fact.
Ammonite
Do you think Hansen will also cherry pick the upcoming 12 month La Nina period to prove that global temperatures are plummeting?
At GISS, El Nino is climate, but La Nina is an excuse.
Steven mosher says:
August 16, 2010 at 10:40 pm
steven g.
“GISTEMP departs from HadCrut because they generate Arctic data where they have none.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but GISS hasn’t been applying 0.5 degrees warning to the areas they have no data for. They’ve been applying 2, 4, and sometimes 6 degrees all summer. I’ve seen a lot of red on their charts all summer. But, the people who have the most data there have been showing it below average up there the entire summer.
stevengoddard says:
August 17, 2010 at 8:43 am
barry
If I measure mid-point to mid-point people complain. If I measure peak-to-peak people complain.
For some reason, people seem to be fine with Hansen’s trough to peak, which is the most meaningless of all possible measurements. Even worse, trough to peak error gets worse in satellite data because of amplification.
The only measurement which makes any sense in this case is peak to peak i.e. 1998 to 2010.
_____________________________________________________________
Methinks that someone here doesn’t understand cyclic behaviors, such as diurnal, annual, tidal constituents, waves of perminent behavior, etceteras.
For example, doing an FFT on the global temperature record (any global temperature record) will not produce the sharp peaks in the energy density spectra as would be seen for diurnal and daily temperature data at one location for many days or years, or the annual cyclic behavior seen in Arctic and Antarctica sea ice extent/area data over many years, or the tidal records over many days or years which have many well known components, all of which produce very well defined narrow banded large amplitude spikes in the FFT spectra.
So unless you can catagorically state the exact periodicity and amplitude of ENSO or other such ocean oscillations that occur at unknown and varying decadal-scale timeframes and varying amplitudes, what’s your point, other than you don’t understand the difference between truly cyclic stationary behaviors and non-stationary behaviors.
…interesting thing about the warm bias of satellites during El Nino, the warmists regained respect for them (with only grudging ackowledgement of the bias). This after all but disavowing them during the previous la Nina.
EFS_Junior
Blah blah blah blah …..
El Nino to El Nino
http://www.woodfortrees.org/graph/uah/from:1998/to:2010/trend
La Nino to El Nino
http://www.woodfortrees.org/graph/uah/from:2000/to:2010/trend
Steve,
You are talking about 2010 temps. I’m only quoting you. Your words:
The graph you display to demonstrate this here runs to 2009, NOT 2010.
Hadley does have a graph at their website with 2010 to-date included. This is what you should be pointing at for 2010 temps according to HadCRUt.
You also show us GISS’s graph of the latest 12-month running mean and say:
That’s only a result of using that particular 12-month running mean. It is wrong to compare that GISS graph with Hadley’s calendar-year graph to say anything about temperature trends.
If you run GISS as a calendar year plot, the modern warming period doesn’t start until 1976, same as Hadley.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/gistemp/from:1960/every:12/plot/gistemp/from:1965/to:1977/trend/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1960/every:12/offset:-0.2/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1965/to:1977/trend/offset:-0.2/from:1965/to:1977/trend
GISS don’t intend that 12-year running mean to be used as a new calendar year record, only to show how warm the *last* 12 months was.
If you don’t point these things out in your post, readers will be confused.
(RSS latest 12-month average is also warmer than any previous twelvemonth with the same start and end month – not so for UAH and Hadley)
barry,
The last 12 months was El Nino.
Will GISS be crowing about the next 12 months?
Not likely, because GISS portrays El Nino as climate and La Nina as just weather.
Tom says:
August 17, 2010 at 5:54 am
The idea that James Hansen has doctored the data is a totally non-falsifiable conspiracy theory.
oh, really.
Bob Tisdale says:
August 17, 2010 at 7:21 am
The following is a comparison graph from January 1998 to May 2010,
What some readers might not be catching is how low GISS is at one end and how high it goes at the other:
http://img196.imageshack.us/img196/5923/23m9c7k.jpg
GISS is different. Why is it so different?
Steven Mosher says:
August 17, 2010 at 11:47 am
“The only thing that matters is data. It’s hard to argue with data Steven Goddard is presenting. GISS is different.”
yes, and if it was EXACTLY the same you would say whats the point of having CRU and GISS.
Huh. I would?
Steven Mosher says:
August 17, 2010 at 11:47 am
Purpose matters. and so, it becomes a discussion of intent, whether intended or not
Relax with the putting of words in my mouth. You don’t even know me. Kind of an unusual introduction you make of yourself to me.
Believe it or not, I only care about the data. Somehow this thread has become surreal. There are people thinking they know what other people are thinking and intending.
jeez says:
August 17, 2010 at 1:22 pm
You purposefully neglect to mention the reason (arctic interpolation) until we called you out on it. After leading people down this path of innuendo you end with the following quote:
The tone of this thread really should lighten up.
Steven Goddard has talked about GISS Arctic temperatures for weeks now. It’s nothing new. Also, you can drop me from the list of people being led down this path. I can see the data for myself. Something is wrong with GISTemp.
Let’s all have a nice night now.
Amino
Exactly. Surface data should not show the El Nino 14,000 foot satellite amplification. The fact that GISS does (in 2010 only) is a clear indicator that recent GISS data is flawed.
stevengoddard says:
August 17, 2010 at 5:29 pm
EFS_Junior
Blah blah blah blah …..
El Nino to El Nino
http://www.woodfortrees.org/graph/uah/from:1998/to:2010/trend
La Nino to El Nino
http://www.woodfortrees.org/graph/uah/from:2000/to:2010/trend
_________________________________________________
So you’re saying ENSO has a clockwork-like periodicity of 10 yeas, no make that 12 years?
ROTFLMFAO!
Steve,
So was the same 12 months in 1998. The GISS chart is only saying that, for their data, the current twelvemonths is warmer than the same twelvemonth period around 1998, the time of the ‘el Nino of the century’. RSS have a similar result. Hadley and UAH do not.
You still have a Hadley graph that only goes to 2009, using it to demonstrate something about 2010. Hadley has a graph at their website that includes 2010 temps-to-date, which you could, and should reference. I understand now that you will not.
It seems that you will not discuss the time-period distinctions between the GISS 12-month running mean graph and Hadley’s calendar year graph – nor that you will label the GISS 12-month running mean graph clearly to distinguish them.
Ah well. Have a good day/evening.
I suggest you show error bars on the trends (taking into account autocorrelation of course following Santer et al. 2008; CCSP 2006). There is no way that the temperature trends for the time period starting in 1998 are significantly different among the datasets. Hence, this is not a meaningful way to evaluate the fitness of the GISTEMP dataset for climate monitoring.
convective
Hansen boasts a world record by 0.08 degrees at every opportunity to the press. Is that within your insignificant error bar?
barry
Exactly, that is why I chose 1998 as the start date.
EFS_Junior
Your meaningless posts are like clockwork.
stevengoddard says:
August 17, 2010 at 8:11 pm
a clear indicator that recent GISS data is flawed.
That it shows an overall warming trend so different from other data sets says something too.
Funny that a guy can get jumped on for the saying that an environmental activist—‘acclaimed as the grandfather of global warming’—has a data set that may be biased. Or that there could be a conflict of interest. You could argue there isn’t bias. But you can’t argue there is no conflict of interest.