From the “we told you so time and again department”, Canadian weather data is a mess. It took an FOIA to get the “fess up” out in the open. Anybody got a copy of the EC report? So far all we have is press reports.
See our WUWT report below, it isn’t just Canada that is in the red with poor data. Though you can see a vast swath of red and lots of missing grey area in Canada.
GISS & METAR – dial “M” for missing minus signs: it’s worse than we thought
From the Financial Post
Sustained cuts to Environment Canada weather-service programs have compromised the government’s ability to assess climate change and left it with a “profoundly disturbing” quality of information in its data network, says a newly released internal government report.
“The common assumption among users is that the data has been observed accurately, checked for mistakes and stored properly,” said the report, printed in June 2008. “It is profoundly disturbing to discover the true state of our climate data network and the data we offer to ourselves and the real world.”
The stinging assessment, obtained through an access-to-information request, suggests that Canada’s climate network infrastructure is getting progressively worse and no longer meets international guidelines.
Key findings in the report:
• Automatic precipitation sensors are subject to significant and well-known errors, which have significantly compromised the integrity of Canada’s precipitation data;
• National coverage of certain climate elements, such as hours of bright sunshine, have been effectively terminated;
• Human quality control of climate data ceased as of April 1, 2008. Automated quality control is essentially non-existent. There is no program in place to prevent erroneous data from entering the national climate archive;
• Climate data, which could be gathered at minimal additional cost, is not being gathered due to lack of funds;
• Climate data, which could be gathered with minimal additional effort, is not being gathered due to lack of personnel;
• Some existing data, which needs to be interpreted and processed before being placed into the national archive, is being ignored due to lack of resources;
• A significant portion of the volunteer climate network will likely be lost due to a decision on the part of the Meteorological Service of Canada to discontinue processing paper forms and to emphasize electronic input;
• Clients of Environment Canada (both internal and external) cannot obtain the information they need. This has significant implications for programs carried out by all levels of government, the private sector and the international scientific community; and
• Lack of resources and delayed quality control of climate data have resulted in updates of Intensity/Duration/Frequency curves that proceed in fits and starts. Systematic and regular updates are desired by the engineering community in order to design public infrastructure (roads, buildings, sewers) that will be able to cope with severe storms and phenomena associated with changing climate.
• These issues are widely recognized by staff within the department, and are becoming increasingly obvious to outside partners and clients, damaging morale within and credibility outside the department.
Source: Degradation in Environment Canada’s Climate Network, Quality Control and Data Storage Practices: A Call to Repair the Damage. June 2008.
I’m dumbstruck. If a country of Canada’s standing is in this much mess, do we dare even lift the lid to look at the quality of some countries’ data?
Since the temperatures have flat-lined since 1998, it’s expedient to let the measurements slide until they start up again.
At first blush, this sounds like the usual complaint that the evil government cut some of our funding, so now we cannot possibly accomplish any of the work we really, really want to do, so give us more money and everything will be wonderful again.
As a Canadian I am excited – Environment Canada has been in bed with Gore, Ignatieff etc for too long. Perhaps the much needed improvements will be forthcoming now.
The worse the data, the faster the warming.
The US and Europe have the best data in the world and even before correcting for UHI have essentially no warming.
Africa and the poles have the worst data and – surprise surprise – the fastest warming.
OMG, it’s worse than we thought!
Oh wait, it isn’t.
Perhaps this is the way forward, or rather the way out. Blame the data gatherers (volunteer and otherwise) and exit quietly through the side door of “insuffficient data” over the coming decade.
Of course gridding, anomolies, and teleconnection will save you – except you’ll be asked if that’s your IQ or your shoe size if you bring that sort of thing up once the exit has begun.
Canada has the best quality climate data in the world. His name is Steve McIntyre.
Eureka!
Ecotretas
Well, what else can you expect when budgets have been cut to the bone? Maybe this report will spur Parliament into providing a decent level of funding to Environment Canada.
I’m sure we have somewhere that can retrieve the situation with ‘value added’ quality. I’ll think of it in a minute.
I’d be happy with using this to force Hansen to pull Canada entirely out of his homogenization manipulations.
Who cares about REAL data anymore?, science as usual is better and btw one doesn’t get cold out there!. Lack of funding is right, productivity increases as they direct those funds to a few of cooperative researchers.
mikelorrey says:
August 23, 2010 at 2:26 pm
They are used to ask for homogenized massages.
Rattus Norvegicus says:
August 23, 2010 at 2:17 pm
Well, what else can you expect when budgets have been cut to the bone? Maybe this report will spur Parliament into providing a decent level of funding to Environment Canada.
———————————————
Cut to the bone?.
Take a look here:
http://www.ec.gc.ca/gc-sc/Index.cfm?lang=en&state=reports
So all that GISS and NOAA red in Canada is the result of a crumbling infrastructure?
How many other places have gone silent, but as of yet undiscovered?
The Southern Oceans turn up with major gaps, the Antarctic has poor coverage, and now Canada falls to pieces.
If major cooling is sneaking up on us, we’ll be the last to know. Sounds like a disaster is already in place, just add an event and stir.
Good Grief !!!
It might be time to privatize this department. We should stop providing this information for free. If people want to make money off of weather data (forcasting for the news, planning for future events etc.) they should nave to pay for it not the taxpayer.
Ecotretas,
No, Eureka has significant UHI.
I was a forecast meteorologist with Environment Canada for many years and I still to contract forecasting. The issue of degradation of the weather observing network in Canada is definitely a large issue. All of the key findings in the report have been concerns of forecasters for many years. Funding cuts started to really take their toll in the mid-nineties. Many, if not most, reporting stations were converted to automatic with little or no human intervention. Meteorologists are not sure if there is any quality control of data now. We know of numerous systematic errors and do not know what happens with them. I will give you an example that we always find amusing. In one location where it is often very windy, the wind will activate the precipitation sensor. So when the wind starts to really blow the station will begin reporting rain. Generally the weather condition under such a scenario is sunny and dry. Does this bad precipitation data make it into the database,…we don’t know. Another funny example is when it gets real hot and the heat coming off an airport tarmac interferes with the visibility sensors, which start reporting drizzle. The radio broadcasters do not know any of these problems and you often hear them advertising the hot temperature along with drizzle in some areas.
I could go one at great length with many of the problems with the automatic stations. These concerns have been brought forth to government officials many times, but there is no will to improve. In fact, more cutbacks are usually done. There was a time when a forecaster could call the observing station and talk to a real live person if they suspected an error in the observation. Those days are mostly gone.
The interesting additional aspect to all the cutbacks is that many of the forecasts are now automated. So you have automated data (which may have errors) input for automated forecasts, which ingest this data and produce erroneous forecasts. Kind of like a closed loop with no human intervention.
The point about clients not being able to obtain the information they need is certainly valid. It is hard to even talk to a meteorologist any more, there is little public access. In a lot of cases the meteorologists are just not able to access data like they used to. We have an inside saying “Due to technological advancements we are no longer able to provide you with that information”.
PaulH says:
August 23, 2010 at 1:57 pm
At first blush, this sounds like the usual complaint that the evil government cut some of our funding, so now we cannot possibly accomplish any of the work we really, really want to do, so give us more money and everything will be wonderful again.
———-
Agree entirely. Once the conservatives came into power, the science alarm-bells began ringing about an anti-science government that would fail to support science at the level which it deserves. The miracle is that this report did not emerge earlier! Who made the request for information?
This document leaves me wondering how far back the problems go? Do they predate the Conservative minority government, and if so, why is no indication given as to the approximate dates of the emergence of the different problems? How far back is data-quality compromised? More context is needed before this can be fitted into the climate ‘science’ and alarmism narrative.
Sounds like an appeal for more funding. They clearly need more money for more [personnel] advocates to skew [interpret] data than is currently available.
Research suggests their current “lack of resources and delayed quality control of climate data” has obviously led to an unsustainable drought of media-worthy catastrophism. The resulting data-stress is having an impact on the employment diversity required to maintain the recycling of their departmental grants.
Everyone should click on that link to the dial “M” piece. It’s long and well worth the read (or reread) as it shows how errors creep into the data. It’s one of the better pieces that’s been done on WUWT.
“Don’t bother me with reality; what I’m looking for is a good fantasy!”–Environment Canada.
Could this be a trial balloon to prevent any committment to an accord in Cancun?
MaxL says: “Another funny example is when it gets real hot and the heat coming off an airport tarmac interferes with the visibility sensors, which start reporting drizzle. ”
Yes, but the unfunny thing is the temperature sensor reading high from “the heat coming off an airport tarmac “.
A pound to a penny that this is not corrected for.
When government programs are cut or not funded with ever increasing amounts of money it is the field work that suffers first. Data collection , QA/QC and storage is farmed out where possible. This could be a plus if the private data collection system was properly supported. In my experience it’s not and any available money is funneled into complex automated data collection and storeage systems that no one really understands. When someone in authority realizes that the data is compromised even more money is funneled into an even more elaborate and bug ridden system.
Agreed, they are not cut to the bone, but they do waste a large amount of money on grants, look here. http://www.ec.gc.ca/gc-sc/Index.cfm?lang=en&state=quarter&quarter=4&fiscal=2009%2F2010
That’s just the 4th qtr of last fiscal year, ducks(canards) unlimited is good for close to $2M, and the UNEP gets a nice chunk also.
Stop wasting money and they would have enough to actually gather some quality data.
MaxL’s comment goes a long way towards explaining the dismal record of Environment Canada in forecasting Edmonton weather. The week forecast is totally unreliable – almost invariably the last few days seem to be based on some long term median or average (with an unrealistic amount of sunshine) and it shifts constantly to the right as the days advance. The next day prediction usually bears some relationship to what actually occurs, but not enough to plan an outdoor event on. I used to wonder if they just didn’t have enough stations to keep accurate track of the movement of the air masses, but it sounds like what few stations they do have are unreliable too.
It would seem that the less convincing the data is (observations that is), the more money and personnel they want to throw at it; presumably with the aim of making it somehow more convincing.
Most folks spending their own money, would put it where they have the most convincing data; not the least convincing data.
I would say; buy Peter Humbug a copy of Windows-7, or maybe the latest Playstation operating system upgrade; and be done with it. He so far hasn’t come up with anything which mimics reality; even the reality that already was; let alone the reality that is yet to be.
As for the dearth of Southern Ocean data which Curry and Liu decry.
Hey it already gets more attention than it deserves. New Zealanders enjoy idyllic weather; and the Emperor Penguins are too darn stupid to move to some place that is more hospitable.
So who’s to benefit from more money poured into the Southern Ocean; well besides Dr Curry’s grad students ?
Bank robbers rob banks, because that’s where all the money is. Climate scientists concentrate on the Northern Hemisphere, because that’s where most of the people live.
The weakness of the science,
The bleakness of the lies, since,
With uncertainties so massive,
And numbers pulled from arses,
Their confidence is laughable,
Their desperation’s palpable,
But none of them is culpable,
And we’re left with grand delusions,
Climate science lies in ruins,
Herding weather in a stone fence,
Buttressed poorly with weak nonsense,
As if floods and storms could prove it,
As if science could be purchased
From their wealth of carbon credits
Manufactured from consensus…
Now Canada confesses
Their data’s mostly guesses
Derived from Arctic misses
And lacking in the numbers
That they need to blame the Hummers
That thunder on the tundras
And the cities and the towns
Now need to try again
And find out who to tax and blame
‘Cause the weather shouldn’t change,
If it does, then hey, for shame!
You rich folk fixed the game!
Because weather’s gone astray,
Now those employed must start to pay
Every bill that’s carbon based,
Which, surprise, makes no darn sense,
But who cares? It’s just madness
To Deny us recompense,
Since you surely must have taken it
From those weaker than yourself!
____________________
©2010 Dave Stephens
vigilantfish says:
August 23, 2010 at 2:46 pm
This document leaves me wondering how far back the problems go? Do they predate the Conservative minority government, and if so, why is no indication given as to the approximate dates of the emergence of the different problems? How far back is data-quality compromised? More context is needed before this can be fitted into the climate ‘science’ and alarmism narrative.
==========================================================
I think this is it:
“said the report, printed in June 2008. ”
“The report said the cuts are part of a trend that began 10 to 15 years earlier when the former Liberal government was trying to eliminate the federal deficit, prompting a shift toward automated stations to replace people in the field. In one case, the report quoted an employee who had observed first hand, as an automated weather station was “fooled” into reporting drizzle on a hot sunny July day in Edmonton with temperatures approaching 30 C.”
What is the point of worrying.. satellites will do the job infinitely better. Just get rid of the useless ‘stations’.
MaxL says:
August 23, 2010 at 2:45 pm
Another funny example is when it gets real hot and the heat coming off an airport tarmac interferes with the visibility sensors, which start reporting drizzle. The radio broadcasters do not know any of these problems and you often hear them advertising the hot temperature along with drizzle in some areas.
===================================================
That is not funny Max!
Well, I for one await the apologists, whom doubtless will explain why this worthless data is highly significant. Doesn’t NASA GISS use one station in Canada calculate the whole Arctic? No wonder it is so hot up there.
Ed_B @August 23, 2010 at 3:29 pm
“satellites will do the job infinitely better”
Unfortunately this seems not to be the case:
At Least Five Climate Measuring Satellites Compromised
REPLY: Sensor failures are a regular occurrence on all satellite systems. This is overhyped IMO. – Anthony
Wow…
What’s really disappointing is that presumably several/many government employees, that is civil servants, would have seen the report and not spoke up about it.
The ambivalence is not surprising and is always disappointing.
Would someone please get this poor Canadian professor a pill or stiff drink?
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/23/opinion/23homer-dixon.html?_r=1&ref=opinion&pagewanted=all
By jove he’s got it! He’s really got it…
Dave Stephens says:
August 23, 2010 at 3:25 pm
The weakness of the science,
The bleakness of the lies, since,
With uncertainties so massive,
And numbers pulled from arses,
Their confidence is laughable,
Their desperation’s palpable,
But none of them is culpable,
Some Canadians have known this for a while as it has been used to justify Ontario Green Energy Policy and the Green Energy Act. However, upon examination many of the climate reports have contained outright falsehoods and errors.
You can see may reports at the Ontario Ministry of the Environment and make your own judgments.
Alan Simpson not from Friends of the Earth says:
August 23, 2010 at 3:48 pm
It’s anomalously impossibly hot up there in Canada, and it’s GISS unbelievable.
Antarctica – scratch.
Canada – scratch.
Himalayas – scratch.
Africa – scratch.
Siberia – scratch.
China – scratch.
Arctic – scratch.
Southern Oceans – scratch.
Wanted – climate data, will take anything. Desperate.
Could someone run a Bayesian model on the Canada data to determine whether it’s better than noise? If it’s not better, you can cull the weather stations altogether and go on running your weather service with a random generator.
The data’s worse than we thought!
No doubt EC has many problems as MaxL pointed out. I have a few problems with the Pembina Institute, the apparent story source. You will notice that they don’t even list this issue on their web site. My experience is, take what ever they say with a large grain of salt. Specifically if they are talking about climate change, coal, CO2 or Oilsands. We all know EC has suffered from budget cuts and I am sure the network is not as good as it should or could be. I am also sure some of what Pembina is saying is factual. Knowing these people however I am also quite sure some of it is skewed, left out, misinterpreted, etc. for political and ideological reasons. Where possible it is best to contrast what Pembina says against what the Fraser Institute says. The truth is usually someplace in the middle.
The pattern that is emerging, it’s far easier to hide the lie in a mess. It seems to be the pattern worldwide, doesn’t it. Might I say, data a mess, it’s the first sign of a scoundrel.
A little background to this “report”.
Canada has been ruled for 80% of its history by a “Liberal” establishment; mostly personified by the Liberal Party of Canada, a virtual familly business of Paul Desmarais in the past couple of decades. Being in government for so much of the time, all the establishment, including the “civil service” and judiciary, is stuffed with like-minded grovelling Liberals.
There has been several recent episodes of heads of sections of the Canadian government bureaucracy speaking out against the heathen non-Liberal gvoernment.
This report falls into this same story-line. Note that the source of this report is Environemnt Canada (EC). It does not criticize the competence of those at EC, rather it lays the blame at a non-existance reduction in financing of the EC projects.
These are bureaucrats who feel threatened by non-team members running the government and, shudder, should they get a majorioty, they may reduce government payroll.
That map shows quite warm in Calgary. It has NOT been quite warm in Calgary AT ALL. My tax dollars funding obfuscation.
This is just another example of how corrupted the data is that’s used to claim global warming. My God, if Canada’s system isn’t working, how in the world can we have any confidence in places like the Sudan, Myamar, Burkina Faso or Bolivia? Or even in western nations, when Canada would have to be included as one of the most competant societies ever.
I’ve completely lost faith in the climate system, and that’s why I’m here at WUWT. Someone, somewhere, is going to have to untangle this mess, and Anthony is one of the few I trust to help do it. Lots of work to do, folks, and lots of damage to undo.
Let’s be careful with this report and the FP article. Let’s NOT forget that EC and the meteorological society is a hot bed of global warming activists. It is the funding for militant climate change research that has funneled money away from meteorological work. The same people now are crying and appealing to Harper…
The budget cuts are also their way to promote funding for their pet projects about climate change and not what they should be doing that is offering quality previsions instead of telling you what weather it is when you can simply glance through your own window!
There was an excellent article by Tim Ball last January about the Canadian example:
“Gordon McBean was the person responsible for the singular and devastating direction the department took. He came with a PhD and quickly achieved high rank. He brought his political view of environmental issues and particularly global warming expressed in a speech to the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) in 1995. He spent his career promoting these views and virtually destroyed the Canadian weather service while wasting billions of dollars. The Auditor General put the cost at $6.8 billion from 1997 to 2005.”
Read the rest at http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/18468
rbateman said:
If major cooling is sneaking up on us, we’ll be the last to know. Sounds like a disaster is already in place, just add an event and stir.
Good Grief !!!
One gets the impression that it is a kind of mixed bag at Environment Canada. They know about the past cold but they seem to push global warming mostly despite the declining annual national temperature departures since 1998..
If one goes to the Environment Canada web page on Climate Change one gets the impression that they only see global warming ahead for the globe and Canada. The entire web page talks to” global warming” under the guise of “climate change” http://ec.gc.ca/default.asp?lang=En&n=7E1F9B7B-1
Rarely is any mention of the equal possibility of global cooling .For example they say,
Every region in Canada is feeling the effects of the changing climate. In the Arctic, snow cover and sea-ice has decreased. Glaciers and ice-caps are retreating. In the south, winter snow is melting earlier. Water levels in the Great Lakes are dropping. Sea levels are rising. Plants are developing earlier and growing seasons are longer because of warmer temperatures. Average temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere over the past half century are higher than at any time in the last thousand years.
The changing climate is also causing an increase in extreme weather events such as heat waves, droughts, floods, forest fires, storm surges and coastal erosion. These hazards can be costly and dangerous. http://www.ec.gc.ca/default.asp?lang=En&n=2967C31D-1
Yet if one were to read Environment Canada’s own web page called Canada’s Top Ten Weather Stories, a completely different picture emerges. http://www.ec.gc.ca/meteo-weather/default.asp?lang=En&n=3318B51C-1
. Below are some quotes from the above web page and some weather stories from 2008 and 2009. Similar winter climate and cooler annual climate in general may occur during the next several years with the coming La Nina and the negative PDO to be followed by a negative AMO some years later
YEAR 2008
A NEVER ENDING WINTER
Ontario and Quebec endured one of the longest and snowiest winters in years. At times, even snow enthusiasts had had enough and were desperate for spring. Every winter sees snow on the ground for weeks at a time, but not every winter has snow falling almost every day. Winter 2007-2008 was defined by the amount of snow and the record number of snow events. The Great Lakes and St. Lawrence River Basin registered its third-wettest winter in 61 years, with most of the precipitation falling as the white stuff.
http://www.ec.gc.ca/meteo-weather/default.asp?lang=En&n=B2EA41B2-1
YEAR 2009
From December to August inclusive, the Prairies tied for the coldest nine months in 27 years. Every city in Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and central and northern Alberta endured nine straight months with below normal temperatures. In Winnipeg, for example, there had never been ten consecutive months below normal in a century – possibly the longest stretch since the 1880s.
http://www.ec.gc.ca/meteo-weather/default.asp?lang=En&n=82C7E150-1
“Human quality control of climate data ceased as of April 1, 2008. ”
No wonder GISTEMP is off the farking chart….
latitude says:
August 23, 2010 at 3:30 pm
MaxL says:
August 23, 2010 at 2:45 pm
Another funny example is when it gets real hot and the heat coming off an airport tarmac interferes with the visibility sensors, which start reporting drizzle. The radio broadcasters do not know any of these problems and you often hear them advertising the hot temperature along with drizzle in some areas.
===================================================
That is not funny Max!
You are darn right it is not funny! But when you have to deal with things like that on a regular basis, after a while you can only laugh.
Whenever one does their own analysis of climate data, you have to, as well, do your own quality control and not assume all is ok.
Ok, the certainty may have caveats, the consensus may be a spoon or two short of a picnic but what’s the problem?
We are all doomed. We are going to die.
Youre right, of course, but for the wrong reason!
Death is but the chasm that divides stupidity and
pragmatic acceptance.
That we will die is an axiom that you predicate that we will die because we are evil is an issue that you need to get help for!
Ah yes … blame everything on the Conservatives. As a Canadian , once again the incompetent civil service cries … “We need more funding” … it never ends.
Environment Canada has been pumping the “global warming” for years and one of the most prominent global warming champion was Environment Canada’s Senior Climatologist David Phillips , though of late he seems to have been silent about global warming … I guess we can blame this on the Conservatives as well eh ?
“Perhaps this is the way forward, or rather the way out. Blame the data gatherers (volunteer and otherwise) and exit quietly through the side door of “insuffficient data” over the coming decade”
Z’s got it. This is how the politicians teflon their way out of the public ridicule of AGW that’s coming.
“All those sloppy scientists, who can blame us for believing them…?”
I’m particularly interested that mere employees aren’t being paid off from the ‘Green Billions’.
Harry knows where the skeletons are 😉
Come on people. Just a few threads back we were told so many different models by various independent sources were in good agreement;
the surface station networkGISS wasquality controlledvalidatedreplicated over and over . What is so difficult to understand?Nothing to see here, move along.
It is so important to save the earth now but when asked why the answer is we do not know. The data has been lost or it is unobtainable. But then with enthusiasm paint the unknowns red, that solves the problem.
As a Canadian, I would like to see Environment Canada spending their resources on real data and stop promoting the global warming scenario.
We need a new acronym: IWTWT (It’s Worse Than We Thought).
A few years back I had some correspondence with a manager in charge of EC quality control. I pointed out a number of ‘very unusual’ records (some actually physically impossible). He readily admitted problems, some quite serious – no hesitation whatsoever – (and this was in writing). Shortly thereafter he wrote back announcing his position was being phased out.
Climate has nothing to do with left/right politics. Many of us are putting our political orientations completely aside as we explore the mysteries of natural climate variations. Politics: a complete bore. Natural climate variations (on the other hand): anything but.
200cm of snow appears overnight – and then vanishes….
650cm of snow on ground today, then 0cm the next day, … repeat this pattern at random intervals… (and no helicopters & Olympics involved…)
…And every time the temperature drops below 0 degrees C, even if to -17C, just record 0 (because we all know it “never” goes below freezing in Vancouver, right?) …watch for strings of zeros at some stations during arctic outflows.
Starve the beast. Coming soon to the US once the Dem’s are turfed starting this Nov.
“Canada’s climate network infrastructure is getting progressively worse and no longer meets international guidelines.” So all the funds being poured into climate research, government policies such as British Columbia’s carbon tax,is based on at best fraudulent information and the government must have know this. Climatic research scientists must have know this but keep with thier doom and gloom for more funding.
When will this hudge misdirection of money stop?
I wonder how the data effects this: http://vortex.nsstc.uah.edu/data/msu/t2lt/uahncdc.lt
According to this data we beat 1998 this year in the NH by a hair.
How hard is it to read a thrmometer? How hard is it to design an automated system? We have them on a few planets beyond earth. Before you reply that it can be a challenge, I want you to know my rejoinder will be that then it must be impossible to make sensible forecasts of the climate if weather data is useless.and certainly the error bars on 0.1F climate graphs should be increased to about ±2 to 5F. There seems no alternative but to expand the surfacestations project to actually gathering the weather data. The recent revelations of corrupted data from a number of places I believe to have been an avalanche started by Anthony’s project.
Let’s start with a name change from Environment Canada to something like The Canadian Weather Service. The bass-akward naming of Canadian government departments and services has gone on far too long. It’s a Trudeau/bilingual thing that has outlived it’s welcome. Change the name and change the attitude of the employees, do like Reagan did for the air traffic controllers. With modern technology, people really can be more productive than they used to be, all they have to do is get busy.
Maybe it’s because Stephen Harper has completely ignored the environment and wants nothing to do with “greenie” type things such as research…
It is a good thing that the Pembina Institute made the Freedom of Information Act request, because very few of the rest of us mortals can. However, the Pembina Institute puts its own political spin on the causes of the calamity by blaming Stephen Harper and his party instead of John Chretien and the Liberal Party, the real culprit responsible for the budget cuts, while the elephant in the room goes unnoticed.
Perhaps the report contained no information on what the elephant is. If so, it is amazing that neither the author of the Financial Post article nor the Pembina Institute were sufficiently astute to notice the biggest problem of all, which is that the vast majority of Canada’s weather stations that once regularly reported on weather conditions now no longer exists.
One could argue that weather satellites eliminated the need for ground-based temperature measurements, but that would be far too simple a reaction. Weather satellites do not measure local conditions such as rainfall-and snowfall amounts, wind-speed and -direction, relative humidity and hours of sunshine — all absolute necessary not only for climate change modelling but also for accurately forecasting the weather.
The deterioration of the weather services programs was not only caused on account of automation, as claimed in the report, but primarily on account of closing down hundreds and perhaps thousands of weather stations. That was done many years before Stephen Harper and the Conservative Party of Canada made it into Ottawa and even before the Conservative Party of Canada even came into existence. The fault for the severe cutbacks to the data-collection network lies squarely with the Liberal Party. It did not happen by accident. It happened because it was a deliberate policy of the Liberal government.
Have a look at some pertinent comments on the report (at wattsupwiththat.com)
*
MaxL says: August 23, 2010 at 2:45 pm
*
Dave in Exile says: August 23, 2010 at 3:16 pm
*
Dennis Nikols, P Geol. says: August 23, 2010 at 4:37 pm
One of those comments (the first on the list) was made by a Canadian weather forecaster. It seems to be obvious that no other commenters either at the FP article or at the wattsupwithtthat.com posting have any appreciation of what is necessary to produce accurate weatherforecasts. It even seems that most of the commenters see no need for accurate weather forecasts, which makes me wonder why they bother to comment on the article except to complain that funding for weather-forecasting is a waste of money.
Many of the commenters see the Environment Canada report as a cry to stimulate more funding, somewhat justifiably surmising that the bureaucrats responsible falsely feel that if we only throw more money at the problem, the quality of the data produced by the Canadian weather services programs will be improved. It is very doubtful that will any improvement will happen, although all extra funding will doubtlessly be used up. After all, Environment Canada’s size grew within a relatively short time from an office with with about 15 employees to become a large employer with a workforce that grew to very large proportions.
Environment Canada is a federal government department with approximately 4,700 employees located in 100 communities. (Source: Environment Canada, “What We Do: Key Facts and Figures,” About Us, 31 March 2003, , 13 May 2004)
The Wikipedia entry for Environment Canada, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environment_Canada , presently shows an employment figure of ~6,000, although I have no idea how old that figures is, while it seems to me that not very long ago I read an article that put the total number of Environment Canada employees at 10,000. Darn it, I did not bookmark that.
Regardless of how much money is being thrown at that problem, even with the best intentions, the quality of the data outputs of the weather service programs cannot be better than the quality of the data that is being input: garbage in = garbage out.
Robert says:
August 23, 2010 at 7:45 pm
Maybe it’s because Stephen Harper has completely ignored the environment and wants nothing to do with “greenie” type things such as research…
———————–
I hope you are right. Mr Harper please do not waste my tax $$ on “greenie” type of research
Why is it that the more money gets flushed down the CAGW toilet of research that the poorer the quality the data becomes? Call me naive but I would have thought that the data quality should be getting better?
EC has spent upwards of 4 billion $ on climate change. Long suspected stations where recording junk as manned stations mostly all gone. Strange the decline of data gathering accelerates as Liberals promote AWG. Pausible deniablity?A Canadian joke, how can you tell a liberal is lying?..Their lips are moving. We are truly governed by nitwits and worse. Crazy, lazy and or stupid our civil service. I am sorry to see its worse than I thought at Environment Canada but strangely unsurprised. Just another place Harper can cut with no change in “service” to the taxpayer.
MaxL, Canada has lots of money — more now than in most times past. And yet, your word is that the meteorological budget is getting cut. Any thoughts about where the money is actually going?
Even back in 2002, there were published complaints that the Canadian climate record was not processed to remove any more than the most obvious biases and errors.
For example, Vincent, L.A., Zhang, X., Bonsal, B.R. and Hogg, W.D., Homogenization of Daily Temperatures over Canada, J. Climate, 2002, 15 (11), 1322-1334; doi: 10.1175/1520-0442(2002)0152.0.CO;2.
Quote: “adjustments have only been carried out for identified step changes and the homogenized monthly temperatures have not been adjusted for artificial trends at this time.”
Pat Frank says:
August 23, 2010 at 9:08 pm
MaxL, Canada has lots of money — more now than in most times past. And yet, your word is that the meteorological budget is getting cut. Any thoughts about where the money is actually going?
============================
The simple answer to that is, I don’t know were the money is going. I know where it is not going. It is not going into improving the forecast system. It is not going into meteorology research, in fact it is still being cut from there. There is a lot of frustration in the Meteorological Service of Canada (MSC). The forecasters really do try to do their best but their tools and data are being degraded. There does not seem to be much will on the part of government to invest in science and research, at least not in weather related areas.
The money has been going to mid-level and high-level bureaucrats. It’s been getting worse and worse ever since Samy Watson went through and nearly destroyed the meteorological service by requiring reports on reports on reports from everyone about the most minute things they were doing. The money that would have gone to observation has instead gone to the bureaucracy required just to file and read these reports. He did the same thing at Agriculture Canada.
The observation network is required to be maintained and actually useful (which it largely is not) to provide better forecasts. No extra money is needed, just cut the bureaucracy and let the people doing real work (forecasters, technicians, etc.) do their jobs.
And that’s not even mentioning the pitiful, embarrassing state of the upper air and radar networks.
Government report: Canadian climate data quality ‘disturbing’
Even more disturbing is how much original data is now trashed beyond recovery, and how big of a hole is blown in the side of the good ship Global Climate consistency?
Jimmy Haigh says:
August 23, 2010 at 8:49 pm
Why is it that the more money gets flushed down the CAGW toilet of research that the poorer the quality the data becomes? Call me naive but I would have thought that the data quality should be getting better?
==================================
Right, but in their reverse-darwinian parallel universe, it does not work out that way.
Defies all known laws of logic, reason, and common sense…but in their universe, only the weak…survive!!
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA
Johann says:
August 23, 2010 at 9:41 pm
Johann, your comments are right on the mark! It is interesting that you mention the pitiful radar network. Most television stations in the U.S. have more sophisticated doppler radar technology than the Canadian meteorology service.
Jimmy Haigh says:
August 23, 2010 at 8:49 pm
“Why is it that the more money gets flushed down the CAGW toilet of research that the poorer the quality the data becomes? Call me naive but I would have thought that the data quality should be getting better?”
Jimmy, you need to look at this from a less idealistic and more of a practical perspective; and let’s use the case of funding for Environment Canada as a generic example.
Weather service programs make up only a relatively minuscule fraction of the expenditures of Environment Canada. Weather-data-collection efforts have been steadily reduced over the years, for which reason many weather stations (even in the far north, where they should count far more than the other, far more numerous stations in the relatively narrow band along the the U.S. — Canada border) were closed down. Curiously, and perhaps in contradiction, data processing (that is where a lot of the enormous budget figures went) for forecasting, especially for long-range forecasting, have been increased substantially. Considering the cuts in funding for data measuring, collecting and recording, does that make sense? Absolutely!
Think of the votes a few million dollars annually in funding to a university will create in the voting districts involved, versus the insignificant impact of a few additional jobs dispersed over very many voting districts all over the country. Keep also in mind that the expenditures for automation of weather stations happen where the bills are being paid, in Ottawa, not in electoral districts in the Arctic.
Around 50 or so stations existed once in the far North and have been reduced to somewhere around a half dozen (virtually no voters there). In another discussion thread at WUWT is was discussed that only one of the remaining stations in the north (Eureka) is now being used for the GHCN. http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/04/22/dial-m-for-mangled-wikipedia-and-environment-canada-caught-with-temperature-data-errors/
I don’t know why only the data for the Eureka Weather Station are being used for the GHCN and can think only of one possible reason, namely that by extrapolating from the stations farther south an arctic warming trend can be shown for the Canadian North. It seems that of the remaining stations in the North, Eureka is the best for meeting the objective of showing warming in the North. Eureka’s climate is somewhat milder than that of the other weather stations in the North, except, of course, for those along the Pacific coast and close to Alaska. All of those stations will show a warmer Arctic than local measurements would show.
There are various reasons for the closing of the stations in the North. The primary reason is to save money for other things Environment Canada involves itself in. Have a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environment_Canada#Division
The first item on the list of four major divisions is concerned with weather forecasting, but notice that even within that there are aspects that have little direct involvement with the weather or forecasting it.
Only a very small fraction of the staff of Environment Canada is directly concerned with anything connected to the weather. It appears that the vast majority of Environment Canada caters to the green machine.
I cannot help but feel that accuracy with respect to the weather is no longer the primary objective of Environment Canada (once-upon-a-time it was), but that the politics of climate change drive much of everything they concern themselves with now.
The reason for the emphasis on environmental pollution is simply nothing other than that things like 1,600 dead ducks in the tar-sands settling ponds in Fort McMurray have a much greater impact on upcoming elections than a period of bad weather will have that the forecasters failed to predict. That is why the media kept silent about the plan to eradicate 165,000 Canada geese in NYC by gassing them and why they never say anything about bird-swatting wind turbines. Not expedient, you see?
The dead ducks, by popular demand, can be kept in the front pages and the evening news for weeks at a stretch and repeatedly for years (every time the case goes to court), while unexpected bad weather bores people within a day or so, after which people adapt and soon forget. Politicians will not be held responsible for bad weather, even though they are the ones who are responsible for the lousy quality of the weather forecasts — and they know it.
People expect a poor quality of the weather forecasts. The vast majority of the comments in this discussion thread are proof of that. The politicians don’t need polls to figure that out. Therefore they will concentrate on what gets them elected; and they will make as many cuts as they can get away with to the funding for weather service programs. The commenters at the Financial Post article (except perhaps one) clearly expressed that to be their wish, and very few people who commented here differ.
Obviously, the more bureaucrats they hire, the better Environment Canada does its job. That’s the way it works everywhere, right?
/sarc
Looking at that map and looking at those red things over northern Scandinavia. Well…
SMHI runes a daily service where one can see temperature for each day and an average for the whole month starting from the first day of the month.
http://www.smhi.se/sgn0102/maps/avv_day_201003.htm
Swedish lesson: “Daglig temperaturavvikelse, Mars 2010” reads “Daily temperature deviation from average , Mars 2010”
And: http://www.smhi.se/sgn0102/maps/avv_month_201003.htm
Swedish lesson: “Temperaturavvikelsen från den första till aktuell dag, Mars 2010” reads ”Temperature deviation from the first day to the current day, mars 2010”
So there we can see that in the in circled area over Scandinavia there must be an error. We were close to average. Hopefully they have corrected it and not counted that.
/Sven Hagström
Paul Vaughan @ August 23, 2010 at 7:11 pm
Climate has nothing to do with left/right politics. Many of us are putting our political orientations completely aside as we explore the mysteries of natural climate variations. Politics: a complete bore
Certainly climate has nothing to do with politics; but government bureaucracies are inherently political.
Following the Climategate revelations about the poor state of the historic global temperature record and the recent Satellitegate scandal, which puts much doubt on the veracity of their temperature data record, this new Canadagate fiasco will be the final straw.
Even die-hard believers in the failed CAGW conjecture must now admit that the evidence for global warming it not fit for purpose. In the mean time weather/climate continues to oscillate up and down in an unpredictable way to the rhythm of the energy delivered by our variable sun.
I don’t know what all the fuss is about. There are lots of trees in Canada and we have several world renowned scientists who will be able to tell us the exact temperature (to 2 places of decimals) using tree ring proxy data. Who needs actual measurements?
Lark says:
August 23, 2010 at 11:20 pm
Obviously, the more bureaucrats they hire, the better Environment Canada does its job. That’s the way it works everywhere, right?
/sarc
I see it all the time, 4, 5 or 6 managers and 1 engineer.
This is how civilizations fall.
There seems to be a connection between a.) the number of jobs, and perks, and benefits, and gizzmos used, and b.) the quality of the of the products the employees produce. As a.) goes up b.) goes down. And as a.) goes down b.) goes down. There just has to be something wrong in a.) to make b.) always go down.
This plays well with the Concervative neo-con base in Alberta.
They think that by eliminating the data they can eliminate the problem. That won’t work.
One wonders who is paying the salaries of the 28 new Canadian experts selected by IPCC as lead authors,co-ordinating lead authors and review editors for the 5th Assessment Report. While everyone is focused on man induced minor global warming , natural planetary cycles will cool the planet in a major way for the next many years. Strange world we live in when our priorities are so mixed up .
http://ec.gc.ca/sc-cs/default.asp?lang=En&n=45A00F81-1
So the rub here is the report date: 2008. And it took this long, with a FOIR, to get a copy of it? What a stupendous surprise. Let me back-cast this scenario. Someone reports that climate information sources are bad. A commission was authorized to do a report on the condition of climate data. When the report was done, the commission was disbanded because it met the obligations of the process. Most governments are process oriented, not results oriented. Once reports are done, everyone goes home, confident and happy in the knowledge that reports were done.
Report notes stored apples are bad. Apples continue to be stored and then when shipped out to grocery stores, reports note apples are bad. Everybody goes home confident and happy in the…
You don’t suppose that somewhere in the bowls of the US government, there is a report about bad eggs a few years back?
Sven Hagström says:
August 23, 2010 at 11:58 pm
“….So there we can see that in the in circled area over Scandinavia there must be an error…”
The circle on the map is a little misleading. Your focus of attention should be on the gray area in Canada for which no temperature values were measured.
Your comment implies that if we can measure temperature deviations from an average monthly trend on Mars, then it should be possible to do it here at home, and that, hopefully, it will be done correctly.
The question is one of relative importance or respective priorities. For either location more money would have to be spent to be more correct. On Earth it would be necessary to calculate temperature deviations to at least the same accuracy as is being done for Mars. Would that be reasonable? What level of accuracy is required?
That depends on what harm would result if temperature deviations were not measured or were measured somewhat inadequately. It also depends on who is affected. No-one lives on Mars; no harm can be done there. Hardly anyone lives in the gray area in Canada that is shown on the map; hardly any harm can be done there.
It boils down to the question of whether we can afford to and should spend money on measuring and forecasting the weather where no or extremely few people live. Would the funds required for that be a luxury or a necessity?
So far, it was politics that came into play in convincing people to pay the taxes of which a portion was used to do weather monitoring and forecasting at the level of quality we have become accustomed to for an area in which hardly anyone lives. My guess is that there will not be an improvement in the accuracy of weather monitoring and forecasting until someone can demonstrate that the priority for that needs to rank higher than, say, the lives of migratory waterfowl or, say, the adequate and assured quality of health-care services that will prevent people now in their fifties from experiencing a drop in their average life-expectancy.
Yes, I know, Paul, (Paul Vaughan @ August 23, 2010 at 7:11 pm), “Climate has nothing to do with left/right politics.” However, how we react to the vagaries of the climate is governed primarily by two things, by our wishes to be comfortable and secure from all harmful influences of the weather, and by our ability and will to do what is necessary to cope with and adapt to the weather so as to ensure the level of comfort we desire.
We cannot react instantaneously to anything the weather throws at us. Some planning is required for things that need to be done hours, days, weeks, months and even years ahead. For that we need forecasting of an adequate level of accuracy, because both, the forecasting and the planning, will permit us to be approximately right about the future instead of being exactly wrong. We would be exactly wrong if we were to neither monitor the weather nor forecast it nor plan for it.
It takes a communal effort to determine how important it is to be comfortable compared to barely surviving or perhaps to perish. It takes a communal effort to provide the funds and to do the work required to do better than subsistence levels of survival. It takes the manufacturing of concern for the assigning of priorities, and that takes and affects politics.
Many of the participants in this discussion thread live by the maxim “Publish or Perish.” It seems to me, that maxim reflects a jaded view of reality. A more realistic and vitally important maxim for climate scientists is: “Without politics, jobs in climate science will wither.”
Rattus Norvegicus says:
August 23, 2010 at 2:17 pm
Well, what else can you expect when budgets have been cut to the bone?
—————-
What bone? I thought government was populated by spineless invertebrates, especially the department of redundancy department.
For those following Canadian Weather records it is worth a visit to Canadian Surface Temperatures as site created by Richard Wakefield. His work at analyzing temperature trends is worth a look. He makes it clear how difficult it is to support the stance of EC about CAGW.
http://cdnsurfacetemps.blogspot.com/
IMO his work is first class and deserves to be noted.
In particular dig out his short note on “infilling” temperature records. It is a bit of an eye-opener for those uneducated in “estimating”, interpolation and extrapolation and ties in neatly with the commentary on the southern ocean.
Cheers
About fifty years ago I came to the considered professional opinion that GDP was no more than an announcement of a best guess, and that only after a little political massage has been applied. The reason for that is too much data, double counted data, unprocurable data, inaccurate data, uncheckable data and deliberate manipulation of data by in-putters for manifest reasons. I have had no reason to change my opinion of GDP numbers in the intervening years, regardless of the country from which they come. When I started to take an interest in the climate argument a couple of years ago, what first struck me as the fundamental problem? Data. There is far too much of it for it to be subject to meaningful quality control and serious errors are a certainty. Data sampling error. The data that is available is not evenly distributed around the pudding, nor around its different altitudes. This doubtful data is then subjected to the averaging of meaningless averages.
I don’t wish to hurt anyone’s feelings but it seems to me that climatology has a long way to go before it can call itself a science.
” Robert says:
Maybe it’s because Stephen Harper has completely ignored the environment and wants nothing to do with “greenie” type things such as research…”
The weather station outside Broadview Saskatchewan and many of the others closed (budgets being shifted away from “collecting actual weather data across Canada” to environmental advocacy in Ontario, Quebec and BC) long before Stephen Harper was anywhere near the throne in Ottawa. Feel free to try again though.
Oh and the reduction in yields this year will be showing themselves in your Supermarkets this winter. Enjoy the fruits of AGW’s cooling effects on the Canadian prairies. Prices at the farmer’s markets won’t change much here but those of you elsewhere are in for a real spike but its not all bad news, not being able to dine as freely will certainly force carbon footprints into tighter shoes.
evanmjones says:
August 23, 2010 at 6:56 pm
We need a new acronym: IWTWT (It’s Worse Than We Thought).
I think we should all run around going “Oh NOAAs!”
With a land area greater than that of USA, Canada is represented in GHCN by only a handful of small towns with reasonably intact records spanning the last century. What is really disturbing is that these records are not consistently updated, leaving mostly large cities or suspect records for the current geographic coverage.
E.g., Sydney NS completely drops out after 1995. The subsequent years in that region are covered only by the much-fragmented record at Port-aux-Basque and the airport record at Sable Island. Apparently, GHCN would have us believe that there was an airport there in 1900 and that the loss of consistent datum-level at the former station can be accurately compensated. That’s how spurious trends are created!
I’m really surprised you are surprised by that news.
It’s been a debate for about a year (if not more) in the weather community in Canada after the current administration (a government in Canada), had cuts 100% of all the climate research funding – closing all agencies working on that issue (that was not only EC’s budget). Once one of the most renown climate bureau or agency in the world – the ESCER – was about to be shutdown soon.
Since then part of it has been re-financed by some provincial gov. like Ontario and Quebec – see : See : http://www.escer.uqam.ca/presse/gazette-13juillet2010.pdf
Actually all the $$$ that used to be spent on climate will now be used to allow more fossils fuel research in the northern ter. (Nunavut) and near the polar circle. No words on who will look at the pollution from the crude sands in Alberta – no more budget for the polution inspectors as well, of course… Who needs those disturbent agent near our oil fields.
If it was just a climate mather, i think many Canadians would not care much. But the cuts at the services doing the daily weather forecast and monitoring is something really bad that will have huge economic impacts (poor forecasting) down the road, and will cost lives (more delay to have weather watchs, warnings, alerts). Actually Env. Canada cannot tell about severe weather if no one tells them on site what is currently happening in the fields. If it was not for the growing storm chasers community, no one at EC would be able to tell and warn other people down the path of a storm what is coming down on them shortly.
This year alone i reported two tornado. On the first one there was not even a weather watch, and on the second one it was only a watch (not a sever weather watch) – and that storm had already produced hail and heavy rain downpour upstream, criteria for severe weather warnings/alerts anywhere else.
So when your equipements is failing, your radar network is outdated, your tools are not giving you the right information – continue to blame the poor forecaster or the guy trying to do his job on the severe weather bench. But the real problem is the $$$ needed to run such service, and the current administration does not want to spend a dime for such critical service.
Someone mentionned about paying for the service… Actually you have to pay for most of the EC’s services beside local weather. Something as stupid as the lightning data is not available in real time if you don’t pay for it. Lucky for my, i live near the US border and there’s a US radar that can tell me what kind of weather is coming in my area – the local EC Radar has been down for the past 1.5 years and has just restart three months ago, but is still experiencing outages.
The problem with EC’s weather services, is mostly because EC is doing other things not related to weather – not much of EC’s budget is going to the weather. This might be very strange for any US reader – but in Canada we still don’t have a network to warn the people of bad weather coming in, there’s no warning system whatsoever. There will be one soon, but it will be done by the private sector, and guess what – we’ll have to pay for it. Thanks to Harper and the ultra conservative boys running that country on behalf of the western oil industrial cartel – Power corporation strawman or M. Desmarais’s personnal strawman. As someone said, they really believe that if you can’t show there’s a problem, then there’s no problem. And the biggest irrony is, Harper is betting on the newly available Arctic natural ressources, while at the same time rejecting the idea of GW. But to be able to extract anything from the Arctic soil and sea, he will badly need the GW to happen. That’s how stupid and short view the guy really is.
Having looked closely at the Canada data, I’m not surprised. It’s pretty rough.
I would point out that two of the other red areas on the map up top are Turkey and Pakistan. Now in Pakistan we have bright red in areas that the government freely admits it doesn’t even have control. Just how good are THOSE readings going to be? And for Turkey, we have a peer reviewed paper by the Turkish Meteorologists saying that if you use ALL their stations instead of just the few cherry picked for GHCN you find Turkey is cooling, not warming….
So what we are finding is what I’ve been “on about” for a while now. “Global Warming” is all about bad data quality.
Regg_upnorth says:
August 24, 2010 at 5:17 pm ….
We all know that the previous governement signed the Kyoto treaty and talked the good talk, was loved all over the AGW and IPCC world, but what was the actual result? Is it true that CO2 emission went up (not down) 30% in that time, and that there is absolutely no chance that Canada can adhere to Kyoto?
Ed_B says:
August 23, 2010 at 3:29 pm
Just get rid of the useless ‘stations’.
Reckon they are working on this based upon the way ‘stations’ are dying off.
satellites will do the job infinitely better.
As for the satellites… there is no way to verify the results… no checks and balances like http://www.surfacestations.org and there is no way they will be able to keep their hands off the data.
If the satellites and land stations are in close agreement then you know the data are in big trouble.
If the satellites are owned, operated and processed by the powers that be then you know the data is being baked.
If you asked me to choose between TREES, SATELLITES or GISS then I would still go with the TREES… because trees don’t lie – they are only be misunderstood.
REPLY: Sensor failures are a regular occurrence on all satellite systems. This is overhyped IMO. – Anthony
This is underhyped IMO.
Magic Java has been blocked from verifying the Aqua-AMSU data… unless the appeal against their FOIA decision is upheld: http://magicjava.blogspot.com
Leading US Physicist Labels Satellitegate Scandal a ‘Catastrophe’
http://johnosullivan.livejournal.com/22385.html
To Alexej Buergin
Look at the same data (CO2 Level and emission) by province. You will understand that it is not possible to achieve with Alberta in. If you put Alberta out, then we would already be below the line for CO2 emission – or about.
Now, whose from Alberta, and whose managing the country, then see what decision the gov. is taking. Kyoto has never been implemented thankfully to the same guy because the only place where it would had hurt is Alberta.
Next time you go on Modis , take a good look at the fields surrounding our beautiful oil sands production area. What a nice place to live.
There is a reason that the Canadian data is pretty “rough”:
The Trans-Canada Highway was officially opened by Prime Minister John Diefenbaker at a ceremony in Roger’s Pass, British Columbia on September 3, 1962.
http://transcanadahighway.com/general/transcanadahighway.htm
A lot of the country was not accessible in the time that we would have liked to have thermometers spread about. True we had the train from east to west but the coverage for transportation routes was not as good as it is now. Many Northern communities are only or more easily serviced by air.
Most of the population is in the south near the US border.
So guilty — but with a reason.
Reminds me of this amazing Climategate piece by Rex Murphy (The National – CBC Canada)
“You wouldn’t accept that at a grade 9 science fair…”
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/12/03/you-wouldnt-accept-that-at-a-grade-9-science-fair-cbc-finds-a-moment-of-clarity/
Oh Canada.
Anthony, I’m just reading over your METAR post again. There seems to be a few spacing/spelling/missing quotes? issues in a few passages which maybe you could attend to when you are not busy?
The relevant ones are-
“This, in my opinion, is a huge mistake because in addition to those issues
E.M. Smith aka “Chiefio” reports that in GISS (which uses GHCN) worldwide, there has been a wholesale migration towards airport weather data as a climatic data source. In an email sent to me on Jan 20, 2010 he says that
Look at:
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2009/08/26/agw-gistemp-measure-jet-age-airport-growth/
which as a fairly good descriptions of the problems in the data, we have a global report for GHCN as of that August data. There is more deail in the link, but I think you care about “now”:”
Detail for instance is ‘deail’, and is there a missing E.M. Smith quote?
Just a suggestion,
“Toronto — The Canadian Press
Published on Thursday, Aug. 26, 2010 12:05PM EDT
Canada is on track to have the warmest year on record — if La Nina doesn’t blow it.
The record was set in 1998 when temperatures were almost 2.5 degrees higher than normal for the whole year.
Environment Canada’s David Phillips says this year has been hotter than usual, and the trend will continue in early fall — at least in the eastern half of the country.
The senior climatologist says from January to July it’s been 3.5 degrees warmer than normal.
Phillips says the stretch from Manitoba to Newfoundland, and most of the north, will be warmer than usual in September.
But in the West it will be either normal or cooler than what’s usually seen in September, and cooler than usual into October and November because of La Nina.”
The rest of this garbage at:
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/environment-canada-predicts-2010-may-end-as-warmest-year-on-record/article1686134/
If its all down to ideology on Harpers part, try this. Harper is helping clean up Gods Oil Spill in Alberta. Whats the matter? You against cleaning up oil spills?The relevations of satillite decay &cover-up are just another, its worst than I thought. The promotion of sciency studies and solutions is crashing and burning as it meets reality.Computer modelling on garbage data will produce garbage, EC has spent billions to not figure this out yet. An the conservatives are to blame? Crack reportedly produces that kind of wisdom, so does natural stupidity. Govt= lazy,crazy&stupid. But they’ are here to help you. JRR
JRR, that’s the point… I’m paying for the mess done by the oil industry in that area. Where i live, if i create a mess in the local river – i’ll be sued for it and will have to pay for it. But for the good old Harper’s friend and club, don’t worry there’s 30 millions (minus one) stupid tax payer ready to pay the bill.
That’s the point.