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?
stevengoddard says:
August 18, 2010 at 11:23 am
“You are an interesting character.”
Likewise, usually when someone has a flaw in their argument pointed out, they address it, sometimes they just ignore it and don’t respond. Responding without addressing or acknowledging the flaw, even when it is pointed out that their replies are merely evasion is very “interesting” behaviour IMHO. Sadly it is not a scientific behaviour, or one that lends itself to having yourself taken seriously, I have done my best to suggest a little self-skepticism on your part would do you no harm, but you can lead a horse to water…
If you think that persistence in getting to the truth of the matter (in this case whether there is a flaw in your analysis) is a hallmark of an “interesting character”, you clearly don’t know many scientists!
Dikran Marsupial
You have taken the discussion in so many different directions, that I have no idea what you are talking about any more. Are you a lawyer per chance?
What is it specifically that you are complaining about now?
stevengoddard says:
August 18, 2010 at 11:54 am
“What is it specifically that you are complaining about now?”
still the same flaw I pointed out from the start, namely short term trends are meaningless as they are dominated by ENSO, and that picking a start date on the very strong 1998 El-Nino biases the trends towards cooling. Note that the satelite data are more sensitive to ENSO than the station data, and the 1998 El-Nino was stronger than the most recent one, so there is reason to expect the satelite trends to be lower than the station data trends, because of their greater sensitivity to ENSO.
There you are, I have pointed it out yet again, if you think the discussion is meandering, it has been meandering around that point and I have been trying to get you to address it.
Dikran Marsupial
If you believe that 1998 was warmer (as you just stated) then you must also believe that Hansen’s claim of a 2010 record is incorrect.
Anything else I can help you with?
Dikran Marsupial
While I agree that short term ENSO effect trends and I’m sure everybody does, the point Steven is making is to try and address this situation. The problem here is also 30 years periods are also short trends influenced by the ENSO. There has to be a point of period that can be used to compare data sets to show how changes in the methods effect these. That why recent changes with GIStemp show a warming bias trend that generally none of the others do, reasoning in my last post.
Not happy about peak to peak El Ninos which help eliminate some of this ENSO bias, why not include either and look at a 10 year period not influenced by these. There have been the strongest 2 El Ninos over recent decades so why not exclude both? Here is a decade period which just does that and still shows this same GIStemp warm bias.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3gl/from:2000/normalise/to:2010/trend/offset:-0.12/plot/gistemp/from:2000/normalise/to:2010/trend/offset:0.095/plot/uah/from:2000/normalise/to:2010/trend/offset:0.025/plot/rss/from:2000/normalise/to:2010/trend/offset:0.05
Steven Goddard,
Is this the recent data you are talking about?
http://img714.imageshack.us/img714/9896/to2010.png
The amplification is not showing up in UAH but in GISS. The opposite is supposed to be happening.
” Dikran Marsupial says:
August 18, 2010 at 12:14 pm
…short term trends are meaningless as they are dominated by ENSO, and that picking a start date on the very strong 1998 El-Nino biases the trends towards cooling.”
Bias only if you do not end on an El Niño, too.
12 years are not that short; long enough that according to IPCC world temperature should have gone up at least 0.2°C in this time. But it has not.
Did you read Bill Illis’ comment on how much stronger the EN of 1998 was than the EN of 2010? What does Wolfram say about this?
Amino,
Exactly. Recent GISS data is inconsistent both with other sources and with theory.
GISS changes like this
http://i31.tinypic.com/2149sg0.gif
so what can people think of GISS?