WUWT readers may recall the bizarre saga of Douglas Keenan’s attempt to bring the research data of CRU’s Dr. Phil Jones and SUNY’s Dr. Wei Chyung Wang to sunlight, which I’ve covered here and here. At issue, is the metadata (or lack thereof) of Chinese weather stations used in a 1990 study by Jones and Wang which concluded that UHI didn’t exist in China. Keenan made complaints of academic misconduct to Wang’s university based on the fact that Wang couldn’t or wouldn’t produce the Chinese station metadata to back up his claims.
The metadata location history of where the weather stations were sited was crucial to Jones and Wang’s 1990 paper. It concluded the rising temperatures recorded in China were the result of “global warming” rather than the UHI effects of China’s rapidly growing cities and industrialization.
The IPCC used the Jones and Wang study in the 2007 TAR to justify the claim that “any urban-related trend” in global temperatures was small. Notably, Dr. Phil Jones was one of two “coordinating lead authors” for the relevant chapter.
From Warwick Hughes:
The IPCC drew that conclusion from the Jones et al 1990 Letter to Nature which examined temperature data from regions in Eastern Australia, Western USSR and Eastern China, to conclude that “In none of the three regions studied is there any indication of significant urban influence..” That has led to the IPCC claim that for decades, urban warming is less than 0.05 per century.
Really? UHI is easily observable. I’ve been telling readers about UHI since this blog started. One notable example that I demonstrated by actual measurement is Reno, NV:
Click for larger image
Even in my small town of Chico, CA the effect is measurable:
Oddly, Jones recently wrote what may now be viewed as a CYA paper, seeking to distance himself from Wang’s data. I reported in March 2009 that:
A paper in JGR that slipped by last fall without much notice (but know now thanks to Warwick Hughes) is one from Phil Jones, the director of the Hadley Climate Center in the UK. The pager is titled: Urbanization effects in large-scale temperature records, with an emphasis on China
In it, Jones identifies an urban warming signal in China of 0.1 degrees C per decade. Or, if you prefer, 1 degree C per century. Not negligible by any means.
Now, Steve McIntyre of Climate audit has put the entire tale of Jones, Wang, and Keenan together in one encompassing history. True to form, Steve finds and documents many minor but important details in this two decade long saga which many journo’s have missed.
In Brit parlance, it’s “gobsmacking”.
Steve outlines the Chinese Weather station issue in three parts. It is well worth the read because to really understand the depths of the pea and thimble management that went on over the years, you really need a complete history. Call it metadata.
Part 3 has this Climategate email from Wigley worth noting:
Phil,
Do you know where this stands? The key things from the Peiser items are …
“Wang had been claiming the existence of such exonerating documents for nearly a year, but he has not been able to produce them. Additionally, there was a report published in 1991 (with a second version in 1997) explicitly stating that no such documents exist. Moreover, the report was published as part of the Department of Energy Carbon Dioxide Research Program, and Wang was the Chief Scientist of that program.”
and
“Wang had a co-worker in Britain. In Britain, the Freedom of Information Act requires that data from publicly-funded research be made available. I was able to get the data by requiring Wang�s co-worker to release it, under British law. It was only then that I was able to confirm that Wang had committed fraud.”
You are the co-worker, so you must have done something like provide Keenan with the DOE report that shows that there are no station records for 49 of the 84 stations. I presume Keenan therefore thinks that it was not possible to select stations on the basis of …
“… station histories: selected stations have relatively few, if any, changes in instrumentation, location, or observation times”
[THIS IS ITEM “X”]
Of course, if the only stations used were ones from the 35 stations that *did* have station histories, then all could be OK. However, if some of the stations used were from the remaining 49, then the above selection method could not have been applied (but see below) – unless there are other “hard copy” station history data not in the DOE report (but in China) that were used. From what Wang has said, if what he says is true, the second possibility appears to be the case.
What is the answer here?
The next puzzle is why Wei-Chyung didn’t make the hard copy information available. Either it does not exist, or he thought it was too much trouble to access and copy. My guess is that it does not exist — if it did then why was it not in the DOE report? In support of this, it seems that there are other papers from 1991 and 1997 that show that the data do not exist. What are these papers? Do they really show this?
Now my views. (1) I have always thought W-C W was a rather sloppy scientist. I therefore would not be surprised if he screwed up here. But ITEM X is in both the W-C W and Jones et al. papers — so where does it come from first? Were you taking W-C W on trust?
(2) It also seems to me that the University at Albany has screwed up. To accept a complaint from Keenan and not refer directly to the complaint and the complainant in its report really is asking for trouble.
(3) At the very start it seems this could have been easily dispatched. ITEM X really should have been …
“Where possible, stations were chosen on the basis of station histories and/or local knowledge: selected stations have relatively few, if any, changes in instrumentation, location, or observation times”
Of course the real get out is the final “or”. A station could be selected if either it had relatively few “changes in instrumentation” OR “changes in location” OR “changes in observation times”. Not all three, simply any one of the three. One could argue about the science here — it would be better to have all three — but this is not what the statement says.
Why, why, why did you and W-C W not simply say this right at the start? Perhaps it’s not too late?
—–
I realise that Keenan is just a trouble maker and out to waste time, so I apologize for continuing to waste your time on this, Phil. However, I *am* concerned because all this happened under my watch as Director of CRU and, although this is unlikely, the buck eventually should stop with me.
Best wishes,
Tom
P.S. I am copying this to Ben. Seeing other peoples’ troubles might make him happier about his own parallel experiences.
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Juraj V, it is not clear that there is such a thing as “…high quality stations…” I suggest that you explore Anthony’s Surface Stations web site at: http://www.surfacestations.org and report back.
They so wanted the past warming to be due to aCO2 emissions and not something like natural cycles or UHI that they would take any risk to except any squirely data as long as it supported their preconceived notions, even if it bordered on outright fraud. Now with their eggs all in one basket, they are standing on the precipice, staring at a perfect storm of conditions to drive down global temperatures, their Machiavellian manuvureings are being should to be sophomoric and the narcissistic high-priests of climatology looks like a “three stooges” movie
The failure to deal with UHI properly is one of the most shameful aspects of current Climate Science. Its presence means that recent temperatures don’t correlate with the Sun therefore the Sun isn’t the cause of recent temperature rise. Its presence poisons everything.
Here’s one of the best UHI pieces I’ve seen, a Russian scientist at Heartland conference part 1 shows with good statistics the UHI increases for different populations. UHI begins at a pretty low population level.
Then there’s Ross McKitrick’s study.
Then, so many other bits of evidence. Like this seasonal temperature record from Salehard, Yamal, Russia.
Does that Stevenson screen in the illustration have galvanized legs and roof?
No need for the BBQ.
David, the “and/or local knowledge” phrase does not appear in Jones’ 1990 Letter to Nature. In his email to Jones, Tom Wigley suggested they should have included that phrase as a caveat.
Presumably, had they done so, they’d have had a convenient escape to explain any missing station metadata. With Tom Wigley, they’d be able to evade questions about stations with missing histories by ascribing their choice of those stations to “local knowledge” that they were good stations. That knowledge, of course, would have been lost when the original source died or moved away; conveniently unrecoverable.
There’s no evidence in Tom Wigley’s email, or in Jones 1990, or in Jones’ posted email, that Jones and Wang relied on “local knowledge” to support any of their station choices. So, Tom Wigley was apparently suggesting that they should have built in the space for a convincing lie, in anticipation of later challenge.
If our pal Phil ever got put in a real game of “You bet your life” he would sing a really different tune if he ever realized what the stakes were. This is just a shell game to these guys and they will do or say anything to prevent loss of face and thus income.
“Hank Hancock says:
November 7, 2010 at 10:50 am
When I first moved to Las Vegas, we had a population of approximately 350,000. Today the population is 1.9 million. All this growth in less than 30 years of the instrument record. Instruments that were once outside the city and unaffected by UHI”
Now that is one serious hockey stick of population growth. The population in Vegas multiplied by 5.4 in 30 years.
O/T
Matt Ridley (Rational Optomist) has an excellent article about a letter he sent to the Times and subsequent correspondence with David MacKay, the chief scientific advisor to Britain’s Department of Energy and Climate Change.
http://www.rationaloptimist.com/blog/best-shot
Ray G, that is the nub of the matter isn’t it? Without reliable data there is no provable basis for AGW regardless of how pretty the computer models might be.
HaroldW>/b> says:
November 7, 2010 at 9:12 am
I also find it very difficult to credit such a low rate of UHI effect on the temperature trend, but please be precise that the claim is (or was) that UHI had minimal effect on the temperature *trends*, not on the temperatures themselves. It’s conceivable (at least in theory) to have a site within a UHI which has elevated temperatures, but the temperatures at that site change at the same rate as an uncontaminated site (say, outside the city and upwind of it).
World population has increased almost fourfold during the 20th century. It is very easy to measure effect of local population density on UHI here & now (with no reference to history at all). It is somewhere around 0.27°C/doubling, lending a logarithmic dependence down to very low densities (well below 1 per km^2).
Population distribution is fairly fractal-like, that is the land area occupied by the vast majority of world population is very small compared to the entire land area (149 million km^2). At the same time location of a surface station is not selected randomly relative to this fractal, but there is always some nearby human habitation or workplace (otherwise maintenance costs would be too high).
We can also safely assume UHI is fairly ergodic.
From these premisses it follows with a force of logical necessity, that
1. We should differentiate between effect of UHI on true average surface temperature trend and temperature trend computed from surface station data. The former may be negligible (but it is not measured per def) while the latter is considerable.
2. It does not make sense to calculate UHI effect on trends based on rural/urban comparison. The correct procedure, if any, is comparing local temperature trends to local log population density trends.
3. An order-of-magnitude estimate of UHI effect on 20th century average surface temperature trend (as measured by surface stations) is +0.5°C/century.
Therefore about two third of 20th century warming as it is measured by surface stations is due to UHI (via increasing global population), while the rest may well be unforced natural fluctuation with some solar forcing and black carbon (soot) albedo effect on snowy surfaces. It simply does not leave room for a measurable greenhouse warming.
It’s also worth mentioning local population density is only a proxy to UHI, as economic development and land use change going with it (the true factors behind UHI) can continue even after population explosion has stopped. If UHI trend correction is to be calculated relative to local population density trends, we should count on at least a several decades long hysteresis loop (as man made structures don’t go away immediately whenever population density drops).
It is always important to remember the social context within which data are collected. In the Soviet Union under Stalin, allocations of fuel apparently followed ‘need’ so there was a strong ‘value slope’ (a nice term from Iain Boale) towards colder readings in winter (as the late John Daley described it).
Let me tell you an anecdote from an academic colleague in Beijing in the 1990s. Upon preparing to leave for the day, his party were warned by reception to take bottled water with them. They replied that they had checked the forecast on TV and it was only for 35°C – they were Australians, and could easily handle this. It was explained that it was in fact going to be in the high 30s, but officially it would not exceed 35, because the law required that workers outside should stop work in temperatures above 35°C, which (officially) it rarely did. Can we have faith in official temperature records under these circumstances?
Err no. It’s given to them on the understanding that they spend a good proportion of it buying British goods and services. We wouldn’t bother otherwise, would we?
Anthony,
Thanks for another of Steve McIntyre’s who-dun-its. Always a pleasure to read them.
I think the behavior of ‘the Team’ is so contorted it could never make good mystery fiction . . . . people would think it is too weird.
John
HaroldW says:
November 7, 2010 at 11:13 am
“I agree with you that the general growth in the area is such that it seems plausible that there’s a significant UHI component in the land temperature record…
All that I was complaining about…. … but mischaracterizing its argument does not advance the criticism.”
The discussion has got NOTHING to do with the significance of the UHI effect! Have you actually read anything that Anthony refers to here? Forget about whether there is or isn’t UHI and it’s significance, and focus on the fact that Jones and Wang referred to data that was either fabricated or cherry picked, and for 17 years they have tried every possible devious and underhand method possible to hide their dishonesty and/or incompetence.
It is indefensible-they have been caught.
Juraj V, RayG – that’s exactly the point.
These guys are amateurs.
There are two ways to get reliable data – that is, numbers whose tolerances and deviatiosn are narrow enough to make the kinds of assessments that these guys are working toward.
The first is that you engineer for it from the beginning. You build the equipment to measure temperature, you design the siting, and you constantly monitor, document, and contemporaneously feed back into the process appropriate adjustments to handle any environmental changes that occur.
The second is that you have such a large body of data that you can perform statistical comparisons to determine data quality and externalities by inference.
In the climate science field we have almost none of the first case and very little of the second, yet the Phil Joneses and Michael Manns march blithely onward.
These guys have never worked in a field where, say, an incorrect tolerance on a dimension on a drawing results in a part stressed in the wrong spot that breaks at the wrong time and scatters bodies across the landscape.
They’re working with numbers that tell them they’re dealing with something round and bright in color and grows on a tree, they want to believe it’s an orange so they’ll work to ensure that any evidence of yellow apples is suppressed.
Off topic but here’s some music to celebrate Death of the Chicago Climate Exchange: I’m a Denier! (apologies to the Monkees)
I wonder if the climate change folks are the same ones working at the election stations that suddenly find missing votes favoring their candidate when their candidate is losing the election. And just enough to win.
Somehow it all seems to be the same.
With all the ever increasing rice production, they likely have a rural heat island effect.
If the wider world could be made to see what went on here…
But it cannot be reduced to a single headline. How to make other people aware of what has gone on?
The trail is so convoluted it does not lend itself to an easy verifiable soundbite. What to do?
I just bore all my friends, but they are finally getting the message.
Juraj V. says:
November 7, 2010 at 11:01 am (Edit)
So.. what is the global record with high-quality stations only? Has anyone tried to do so?
yes. It’s hard.
After reading the incredible 3 part story I can only shake my head. Whatever happened to science ? Jones, Wang et al behave like kindergarten kids.
It seems incredible but Las Vegas was one of the fastest growing cities in the United States for several decades. Back in the late 80’s, early 90’s, there was no concept of a rush hour traffic jam. One could drive from one end of the city to the other in 15 minutes at any time of day. Today, you have to avoid the several rush hours if there is any hope to cross the city in an hour on the “215”. When I first purchased my home, I was way outside of the city and my street was a dirt road. Today, the city has grown around me. One of the city’s largest malls is within walking distance. I can certainly feel the UHI effect – no more evening cooler breezes like I used to remember. Too much heat radiating from the buildings and paved roads when the sun goes down.
There is just one word that is now called for:
Replication!
Friend Jones has AGAIN lost all of his data.
No worries!
Just ask him to replicate his UHI findings under carefully controlled conditions.
Publish all the code, data, meta data and so forth.
Audit the procedure AS IT PROCEEDS.
Let Jones himself demonstrate that there is (or is not) global warming occurring.
Let’s stop all this arguing pro and con AGW.
REPLICATION – that’s what is called for now.
Simple really.
Next problem?
Harold W. above comments that the Jones 1990 paper finds the rate of warming in urban and rural areas didn’t differ, or words to that effect. The crux of the problem, as I understand it, is that the reputedly rural sites were changing throughout; the identities and locales weren’t clear; and the rural areas may have included areas of populations exceeding 500,000-1,000,000. It is known that the urban heat island effect begins with initial clearing of land (per Pilke, Sr. and others) and the change as a function of population density is non-linear. That is, going from a population density of 5 /km square to 5o / km sq has a larger impact than going from 1,000 / km sq to 10,000 per km sq. So, a precise definition of urban and rural, tracking of site location changes and localized changes in measurement, as well as the quality of the measurements and records are absolutely critical.
Since the “team” is so loose with providing raw data, information on adjustment techniques and access to their own methodologies, it is extremely hard to trust the outputs. The conclusions they draw are written on quicksand until they make the process transparent.
It needs to be noted that there have been some rather significant land use changes in the rural areas of conflicting natures.
What was once a family farm underwent a radical transformation in the last twenty years. The farm was progressively established in an Illinois woodland and prarie border in the period of about 1811-1832. By 1870 the extent of woodland felled and fields of agricultural cropland were stabilized at a level that stayed very much the same for the next century to about the years 1970 to 1978. This farm was heavily bordered by oak, elm, maple, and assorted other indigenous species of trees along with heavy growths of shrubs, sub-shrubs, vines, and blackberries. A mature orchard of peach and pear trees a century old remained into the decade of the 1970s along with a farm pond and a 19th Century house and former schoolhouse used in its last years as a hay barn. A steel equipment barn, small farm pond, and other minor improvements existed.
In the years soon after the farm was sold by the family to another farmer, every improvement on the farm was erased from the face of the Earth. By the time the bulldozer had finished, the buildings were demolished, the century old orchard was eliminated, the pond disappered, the fencerows and blackberries were wiped out, the trees in the fencerows and around the houshold were cut and uprooted out of existence. Even the culverts in the ditches leading into the farm road and paths were removed. All that remained of the diverse farmstead was a flat field of dirt plowed, cultivated into row crops, and blowing dust for miles around, where before the fence rows and trees blocked the views. Seeing this brought to mind the question of what the farmer/s were thinking by removing all the barriers to the soil blowing away the next time a mega-droguht like the one in the Great Depression of the 1930s occurred and blew away so much of the topsoils?
Conversely, on another former family farm tens of miles away from the other farm, woodland had reclaimed the land on which so many row crops once grew in fields under the Sun. In the space of only ten years, small trees had become towering trees, saplings had become countless small trees, and new saplings made walking through the former backyard of the homestead a very difficult task and totally blocked the road to the place where the barn once stood. Old barbed wire fences were sometimes embedded in the heart of large trees. The former cornfield in which the family was photographed fifty years ago is now a shaded woodland. Although the farm is not located inside a National Forest or Park, other nearby farms have now been incorporated into the National Forest. In recent years, it has become more and more difficult to discern where the farm and its row crops of grain once existed.
As the U.S. population became more urbanized in the 20th Century and crop yields improved, the smaller family farms have been abandoned and have returned to woodland. Farm roads, county roads, railroads, churches, and cemeteries have returned to being dense woodland. This massive change in rural land use has been one of the reasons why the amount of forest in the United States has made major increases since their lowpoint in the decade of the 1950s.
Given the extent of which so much farmland has been reforested while other farmland has become more intensely cultivated, you have to wonder how the changes in balance have impacted rural temperature profiles over the last 150 years in the United States? First impressions would suggest the reforested former farmlands could have decreased the temperatures where the soil was previously heated directly by the Sun, while temperature increases might be expected where the hedgerows and small woodlands have been replaced with open plowed fields in other rural areas.