Jo Nova reports:
Australian Temperatures in cities adjusted up by 70%!?
Ken Stewart has been hard at work again, this time analyzing the Australian urban records. While he expected that the cities and towns would show a larger rise than records in the country due to the Urban Heat Island Effect, what he found was that the raw records showed only a 0.4 degree rise, less than the rural records which went from a raw 0.6 to an adjusted 0.85 (a rise of 40%). What shocked him about the urban records were the adjustments… making the trend a full 70% warmer.
The largest adjustments to the raw records are cooling ones in the middle of last century. So 50 years after the measurements were recorded, officials realized they were artificially too high? Hopefully someone who knows can explain why so many thermometers were overestimating temperatures in the first half of the 1900’s.
50 years later?
…
Remember Dr. David Jones, Head of Climate Monitoring and Prediction, National Climate Centre, Bureau of Meteorology said:
“On the issue of adjustments you find that these have a near zero impact on the all Australian temperature because these tend to be equally positive and negative across the network (as would be expected given they are adjustments for random station changes).”
Yet it’s obvious that there are far more warming adjustments than cooling ones, and remember, many (almost all?) of these urban sites will be markedly different places than what they were in say 1920. The encroachment of concrete, cars and exhaust vents can surely only go in one direction, though I guess, it’s possible all these sites have new sources of shade (why aren’t the themometers moved, if that’s the case?) Like the rural records, the temperatures overall are roughly a quarter of a degree higher after the “corrections”.
Read the entire report here
Stay tuned to WUWT, as in the next couple of days I’ll publish yet another shock related to how climate scientists view temperature data. – Anthony
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All these adjustments follow a world wide method – the method came from the CRU at East Anglia. Simon Torok in 1996 followed that method and adjusted the Australian temperature record. He previously worked for CRU. The recent adjustments Ken has found for the HQ set all follow the CRU method and no doubt the New Zealand adjustments all follow the CRU method. I’m sure the UK adjustments would follow CRU but they’ve lost the raw data.
If you add a Stevenson screen – that’s a .5C drop in temperature adjustment – if a station is moved – that’s a .7C adjustment etc etc.
Here’s how it was applied to Sydney’s Observatory Hill and it’s pretty clear that UHI was involved when you look at it’s surroundings.
http://users.tpg.com.au/johnsay1/Stuff/Observatory_Hill_Full_Adjustments.png
The interesting aspect is that according to the satellite data the southern hemisphere has remained stable for the past 30 years. All the Global Warming has occurred in the Northern Hemisphere
http://www.climate4you.com/images/MSU%20UAH%20TropicsAndExtratropicsMonthlyTempSince1979%20With37monthRunningAverage.gif
and most of that warming has occurred in the Arctic region whereas the Antarctic has cooled slightly.
http://www.climate4you.com/images/MSU%20UAH%20ArcticAndAntarctic%20MonthlyTempSince1979%20With37monthRunningAverage.gif
Now surely some one has a theory as to why the Arctic is warming – is it volcanic activity as seen recently in Iceland, or undersea volcanoes etc.? IMO that is the question of the day.
Beware of climate-model adjusted temperature records, and watch out for photoshopped original records..
It certainly appears that the temperature records, the `corrections, etc are a mess. But keep in mind that we are still in an interglacial and using the Sangamon as a reference we still have some warming to come. So warming shouldn’t be unexpected, quite the opposite. If I recall correctly, temperatures in Nova Scotia Canada were similar to those of present day Georgia during the last interglacial. In addition, raised marine platforms are found ranging from ~4 m to 7 m bove present day sea-level. They are overlain by beach deposits with shells, and then in turn overlain by 3 distinct tills with different colours representing different provenances.
So yes, I absolutely agree that present warming tied to anthropogenic factors is a real stretch. However, tha temperatures have increased is probably true … though this doesn’t mean we won’t get cycles of warming and cooling, but probably up over thousands of years.
There is certainly lots of evidence for historic warm and cold. I have seen pictures of cattle being led across the ice to an island during the winter…. that was 10 miles out to sea in the late 1800’s. People commonly walked across the ice to the mainland to get the mail. Pack ice flowing out of the bays in southern Nova Scotia is almost a thing of the past.
So what is my point? Not much really other than don’t outright dismiss warming as in `climate change’ and only flog cooling. There is lots of evidence for both. What actually surprises me is that even with all the `corrections’, the absolute climate variability is so rediculuosly (sp?) small.
Much more low profile to adjust 50 year old records when everyone knows their instrumentation and methods wereas not as precise or accurate as they are today than to be messing with recent measurements. Maybe not a conspiracy, just convenient groupthink down the path of least resistance…
UnfrozenCavemanMD says: at 12:56 pm
“ . . . our grandparents had to walk to and from school in hip-deep snow, . ”
My mother would say this about her own trips to the one-room school she walked to. She would hold her hand at her waist and say “the snow was up to here.”
Then we would ask her how tall she was in 1915. The hand didn’t move but she would smile and change the subject.
isotherm says:
‘Much more low profile to adjust 50 year old records when everyone knows their instrumentation and methods wereas not as precise or accurate as they are today than to be messing with recent measurements.’
But why always downwards? If the instrumentation was not precise, it could read lower than the actual temp.
And as janama says above, they dropped the temp 0.5C when a Stevenson Screen was introduced. Yet according to Warwick Hughes, there was a SS in Darwin during the late 1800s (he has a photo) yet Darwin was still adjusted downwards.
This is another way of saying that we are pushing temperatures up. The latest data sets are being inspected by everyone so there is little latitude for upward adjustment. But past data sets can be adjusted downwards to show the same slope of increased temperatures. In reality the errors for the thermometers used are unknown so they might have been under reading. If this was the case then we are in a period of falling temperatures. But we do not know so best to leave the old data sets alone.
I had a BoM page showing massively high temps for the 30s in Marble bar longreach and Kalgoorlie? I posted the maps that were there and saved the link.
a few weeks later going back the link led to a whole different page and the charts and data were vanished! something about tidying up? their system..yeah suuuure!
as in so much that Kens found already its a planned and systemic corruption of data.
and it stinks to high heaven!
The point is that the adjustments are always in the direction supporting warming, and specifically AGW. That creates a firm presumption of intent to deceive — i.e., fraud.
This is realy the biggest fraud of the entire climate science. If correctly adjusted, modern temperatures should be down adjusted to compensate for urbanization. Historic temperatures are supposed to be the ‘control’ in the whole study. Whenever they are adjusted, it is a pure fabrication. All credibility is lost.
This is esentialy what ClimatGate was about. Destryoing evedence that historic data was fraudulantly adjusted down.
janama says:
September 14, 2010 at 4:49 pm
All these adjustments follow a world wide method – the method came from the CRU at East Anglia….. [thanks for that info]
Now surely some one has a theory as to why the Arctic is warming – is it volcanic activity as seen recently in Iceland, or undersea volcanoes etc.? IMO that is the question of the day.
_____________________________________________________
There are at least two other areas of volcanic activity. Iceland as you mentioned – There were earthquakes north of Iceland in the sea with >3 magnitude this summer. The other areas are Alaska and Russia. These have also been active volcano areas this summer.
You can see the earthquakes north of Iceland here: http://en.vedur.is/earthquakes-and-volcanism/earthquakes/
The Alaska and Russia volcanoes:
http://www.avo.alaska.edu/activity/avoreport.php?view=kaminfo
It would seem the Arctic is tectonically active so who knows what is actually happening under the sea.
Submarine Ring of Fire Exploration, NOAA-OE:
http://oceanservice.noaa.gov/education/yos/multimedia/oceanexplorer.noaa.gov/oceanexplorer.noaa.gov/explorations/06fire/welcome.html
Thousand of new volcanoes revealed beneath the waves:
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn12218
amicus curiae says:
September 15, 2010 at 7:38 am
Noticed this too.
There has been a bit of cleaning up, not only on the BOM site but at GISS NASA where they may be cleaning up some of the ‘raw localised data’ and their homogeneity adjusted data.
Yet more fudged data. Fata?