Examination of CRU data suggests no statistically significant warming

Steve Mosher:
It would be really helpful if you could provide a list (or link) showing exactly how the Met Office/CRU/or you! adjust the raw readings. What are these adjustments for – in plain English? What is their magnitude? How are they worked out? How are they applied?
From my perspective, it seems that we are trying to measure annual global temperature anomolies that are far smaller than the likely measurement errors. Is that where the statistical magic is necessary?
Many thanks (and apologies if these questions have been exlained elsewhere.)
RobB

onion says:
November 26, 2010 at 2:19 pm
Are you trying to imply that Anthony and the Mods don’t know their onions? If that is the case it is self evident from the replies that they recognise you for what you are. Now run along, there’s a good troll.

“Steven Mosher says: November 26, 2010 at 4:33 pm
You are most likely seeing the effect of the TOBS adjustment. This adjustment is required. the raw temps are wrong without it.”
So, at what point in time was the TOBS adjustment applied to the ‘raw’ data?
As I understand it, the McMillan blinkers are all the stations in those states, as downloaded in July09 and Nov09. It is my further understanding that the datasets were not labeled as having changed, let alone having been massively ‘corrected’ for TOBS ‘bias’.
I had the impression that the great homogenizers were hard at work on V3 in that timeframe, and that the TOBS and other adjustments had been out long enough to become old hat, if not an embarrassment.
Would not the agency have announced with great fanfare, the deployment of a big correction like TOBS across a reference database?
McMillan has fulfilled the requirements you placed on others; ‘data provenance’, and ‘the code’, which in this case is ‘plot the raw data’.
Your supercilious dismissal of the McMillan blinkers seems rather flip…
RR

Steven Mosher says:
November 26, 2010 at 4:33 pm
You are most likely seeing the effect of the TOBS adjustment. This adjustment is required. the raw temps are wrong without it. that has been demonstrated by committed skeptics of global warming. time after time.

I used to be a TOBS denialist myself, but now am a True Believer. See
http://climateaudit.org/2007/09/24/tobs/
However, rather than using the arcane but well-intentioned Karl et al model to guesstimate the TOBS adjustment, I would now favor just treating any change in TOBS as a new station, with a new offset to be determined by something like RomanM’s “PlanB” method.
Despite your assurances about CRU, I’m highly skeptical of its thirties-noughties warming, given its heavy reliance on airports. Here in Ohio, 8 out of 10 stations used by CRU are airports (if you count Cincinnati as being in Ohio), despite the available of 26 non-airport USHCN stations (at least a few of which are not terrible). Is CRU just measuring the growth in aviation over the past 80 years?
Another factor that concerns me is Sensor Blackening, http://climateaudit.org/2007/10/20/sensor-blackening/. Anthony pointed out long ago that this is an issue with Stephenson Screens, but I am also concerned that the MMTS readers, which apparently receive no maintenance, get dirty over time and therefore absorb more solar heat.

P.Skilz says: November 27, 2010 at 3:43 am
The most important question, with which we should all be immediately concerned, is what will we do to adapt to a less hospitable world with fewer resources? How will we survive for another 50,000-80,000 years? (as tribal societies have done)
You mean with the onset of the next ice age soon to come? After all we have been cooling since the Holocene Optimum(or Maximum). Ever wonder why it is called
“optimum/maximum”?

P.Skilz says:
November 27, 2010 at 3:43 am
The most likely outcome of Mr Watts’ efforts are to provide fuel for the corporations like Exxon and BP that are prime offenders in making the world a less hospitable place for future generations.>>
How odd. Is a tent city in Darfur that consumes 0 oil a more hospitible place to live than a large city where courtesy of Exxon, BP and others we have heated homes when it is too cold, cooled when it is too hot, food frozen until it is needed, fresh fruit and vegetables delivered from which ever part of the world they are in season, and at a price that almost anyone can afford. Sounds like they are making the world more hospitable, not less.
Key issues associated with global warming are:
– Reduction of biodiversity (life species) on land, sea and air>>
Actually the geological record is quite clear that a warmer earth results in higher biodiversity as well as density. Plants can’t even live at CO2 levels below 160 ppm but they thrive at CO2 levels many times our current level, suggesting that much higher CO2 levels are the environments they evolved in and the current levels are constraining their growth, hence the use of CO2 to increase production in greenhouses, which I note, are usually warmer than the surrounding area and out produce it 10 to 1 or more.
– Pollution>>
You may want to reword that. You just claimed that global warming causes pollution.
– Exhaustion of finite resources including forests and fossil fuels>>
Uhm… forests are finite? And here I thought they grew back. As for fossil fuels, yup, gotta be some limit there. Burning what we got so far will take a couple of centuries during which a lot of new technology will come along, not to mention discovery of new reserves, and in case you hadn’t noticed, nuclear reactors actually do work. Even ultra-lefty France is building them like crazy.
– Insufficient government regulation and control of corporations>>
Global warming causes that? Wow. You know what increased government regulation and control of corporations causes? Its called a recession. Do you know what massively increased regulation and control causes? A depression. Do you know what total government regulation and control causes? The USSR. Oh wait, they collapsed didn’t they?
The changes proposed by Al Gore are needed whether he is right or wrong.>>
If he is wrong we need to do what he says anyway? What god like power he must have that we should do what he says even if he is wrong.
You oppose him now, but in 50 years from now, if he is right, will you have the courage to look your grand children in the eye and say “I had an opportunity to help fix this mess, but I was too interested in my own personal comfort. Now you will do my suffering as well as yours.” >>
Well if he’s wrong I get to look my grandchildren in the eye and explain why they have to go to be hungry tonight because there’s no food again, and they all have to sleep in the same bed to keep warm… What you fail to understand is the medicine proposed is magnitudes worse then the potential harm from something we don’t even know exists, is so small we can barely measure it at all, and appears to be coming to end due to a global cooling cycle. I’ll look my grandchildren in the eye all right, and proudly tell them that I lobbied hard to discredit alarmists screaming for action to fix a problem they invented to try and deprive you young uns of a future of comfort.
Alarmist? Hell yes, because that’s what it takes to move people out of their complacency.>>
So we should do what Al Gore says, no matter if he is right or wrong, and its OK to scare people to make them do it. Have you read any history books and can you identify the people you sound like? Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot, Genghis Khan, Attila the Hun….
I’m not much into labels, because I think that diminishes the value of what people are saying, but if I were to label those that oppose global warming theory I’d call them, including Mr Watts, ‘the hedonists’.>>
I don’t recall Mr Watts opposing global warming. I recall much evidence presented that debunks or calls into question the science that claims global warming exists and is causing the negative effects claimed.
The most important question, with which we should all be immediately concerned, is what will we do to adapt to a less hospitable world with fewer resources? How will we survive for another 50,000-80,000 years? (as tribal societies have done)>>
Well I can answer that. If we adopt the “Al Gore” approach, that is EXACTLY how we will survive. As tribal societies. As for your timeline of 50,000 years, puhlease. Just a hundred years ago we had no television, commercial air craft, internet, desk top computers, nuclear reactors, electric grids, cell phones… need I go on? We’ve enough resources for the next few centuries and you want to put restraints on their use now to protect people 50,000 years from now? And sentence them to live like tribal societies to do it?
Don’t be daft.

“”P.Skilz says:
November 27, 2010 at 3:43 am
Key issues associated with global warming are:
– Reduction of biodiversity (life species) on land, sea and air
– Pollution
– Exhaustion of finite resources including forests and fossil fuels
– Insufficient government regulation and control of corporations””
Sir/Madame,
You sound sincere in your argument, but. And your use of the word ‘hedonists’ does denigrate your argument somewhat. It speaks to arguments we’ve heard many times here: the anthropogenic source of climate variation. Do you believe we currently posses the technology to mitigate a catastrophic change in climate? Do you think we will have it 10yrs., 100yrs., or 1000+yrs.? Many have shown here and elsewhere that we do not and will not…it is smply too big and too chaotic, an we are so small.
The IEA has just published it’s outlook, they don’t appear to think so either, and they project that by 2035 only 8% of the global energy output will be generated by alternative technologies (I’m going off memory here it may be only 3%, but that may be wind energy alone), the link is provided.
http://www.worldenergyoutlook.org/docs/weo2010/WEO2010_ES_English.pdf
The biodiversity impacts you speak of are a non-issue given that 99% of all species that have ever existed have already gone extinct. There have been no increases in extinction rates of any species, see here:
http://data.iucn.org/dbtw-wpd/html/Red%20List%202004/completed/figure3.2.html
Your point on pollution is well made and at least some of the $$BILLIONS$$ spent over the last few years on AGW cap&trade scemes should/could have been better spent on cleaning up some of the mess we’ve made.
Your point of more regulation of corporations? Really? Perhaps you’re not in/from the USA and are not aware of the current situation in CA, arguably the most “green” state in the union…they’re going bankrupt trying to “save the planet” by initiating environmental policies that are decades (IMO) premature, will not have any appreciable impact on GHG’s in the atmosphere, and are currently driving corporations out of the state. Maybe you were speaking on further regulating pollutants, BTW of which CO2 is not a polluting gas.
In fact the argument here is that:
1. It has not been proven that CO2 is causing/has caused any warming at any time in Earth’s history.
2. It has been proven that our ability as humans to even ascertain an accurate global average temperature that everyone agrees on is, at best, lacking.
3. Human technology will always be evolving away from carbon based energy sources with the full knowledge that fossil fuels on this planet are in a finite supply.
4. Extinction events will always take place on this planet and, long before we came along, and will continue long after we’re gone. To say repeatedly, as I have read, that, “scientists concerned that species that have not yet been dicovered are becoming extinct at an increasing rate”. Do you see the stupidity of that statement? Are these people that you can trust?
5. Forests are increasing, are not in danger, something that increased CO2 levels will accelerate creating more biodiversity.
6. Since we don’t fully understand why or how much the globe is warming, and given that there has been no warming for the past 15 years or more, do you feel that the $$BILLIONS$$ that have been spent on this charade might not have been better spent actually saving people lives: in 2000 the UN said that $175 billion would eradicate poverty on the planet…and they wasted that opportunity, and continue to waste that opportunity with my, yours and our TAX DOLLARS?
Just sayin’ Al Gore is wrong, not to mention that he has millions invested in cap & trade scemes all over the planet. Google his name and follow the money. This is not a guy you want to get behind!

Please excuse the typos in previous post ie, should be schemes, etc, etc. Hey I hod to GO bad! 🙂

“P.Skilz says:
November 27, 2010 at 3:43 am
The changes proposed by Al Gore are needed whether he is right or wrong. You oppose him now, but in 50 years from now, if he is right, will you have the courage to look your grand children in the eye and say “I had an opportunity to help fix this mess, but I was too interested in my own personal comfort. Now you will do my suffering as well as yours.”
There have been several excellent responses already, but I would just like to add this: If I recall correctly, Al Gore proposes carbon capture as one of his solutions. This is a total waste of money!! Our province has plans to spend 2 billion dollars on carbon capture over the next few years. And even if Al Gore is right about the catastrophic effects of global warming due to CO2, it would be better to spend every penny of that money on nuclear fusion research which will greatly mitigate that problem. If we get it to work, nuclear fusion will create much pollution free energy. And if that happens, I can look my grandchildren in the eye and say I spoke up for an abundance of good clean energy for all and not for throwing money away into the ground for no good reason.
At a physics conference I recently attended, speculation was that within 4 years we may get more energy out of fusion than is put in. Of course it would take longer to be commercially available.

Werner Brozek says:
November 27, 2010 at 10:43 am
…Our province has plans to spend 2 billion dollars on carbon capture over the next few years. And even if Al Gore is right about the catastrophic effects of global warming due to CO2, it would be better to spend every penny of that money on nuclear fusion research which will greatly mitigate that problem. If we get it to work, nuclear fusion will create much pollution free energy.

Ah, but the green revolutionary leaders don’t want us to have clean, cheap energy. Just ask Paul Ehrlich:
“Giving society cheap, abundant energy would be the equivalent of giving an idiot child a machine gun.” – Quoted by R. Emmett Tyrrell in The American Spectator, September 6, 1992
Or Maurice Strong of IPCC:
“We may get to the point where the only way of saving the world will be for industrial civilization to collapse. ”
I think Strong and his ilk think we’re already at that point, and are trying their best to make it happen. Somehow, thought, I think the collapse won’t apply to them, since they have to lead us through the coming dark times.

Werner Brozek says:
November 27, 2010 at 10:43 am
re; fusion power (con’t)
Here’s what -should- be our research focus for the ultimate source of energy instead of the great fusion boondoggle:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space-based_solar_power
The only thing keeping this technology from getting off the ground (pun intended) is the cost of lifting mass to orbit.
But there’s a very promising technology (carbon nanotube cable) that could solve the launch problem real soon now and unlike fusion has actually been progressing by leaps and bounds:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_elevator
Japan appears to be leading the charge in the above effort which makes me very sad as an American but better them than no one.

In 2007, Elevator:2010 held the 2007 Space Elevator games, which featured US$500,000 awards for each of the two competitions, (US$1,000,000 total) as well as an additional US$4,000,000 to be awarded over the next five years for space elevator related technologies.[27] No teams won the competition, but a team from MIT entered the first 2-gram (0.07 oz), 100% carbon nanotube entry into the competition.[28] Japan held an international conference in November 2008 to draw up a timetable for building the elevator.[29]
In 2008 the book “Leaving the Planet by Space Elevator”, by Dr. Brad Edwards and Philip Ragan, was published in Japanese and entered the Japanese best seller list.[30] This has led to a Japanese announcement of intent to build a Space Elevator at a projected price tag of £5 billion. In a report by Leo Lewis, Tokyo correspondent of The Times newspaper in England, plans by Shuichi Ono, chairman of the Japan Space Elevator Association, are unveiled. Lewis says: “Japan is increasingly confident that its sprawling academic and industrial base can solve those [construction] issues, and has even put the astonishingly low price tag of a trillion yen (£5 billion/ $8 billion) on building the elevator. Japan is renowned as a global leader in the precision engineering and high-quality material production without which the idea could never be possible.”[29]

Jeff Alberts says:
November 27, 2010 at 12:13 pm
“How many is “every few years”? How would it compare to regular maintenance on IC engines? As the technology becomes more robust, the costs would come down, as they always do.”
See here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_car#Comparison_with_internal_combustion_engine_vehicles
How long depends in large part on battery technology, driving habits, and tolerance for lower and lower number of miles before needing a recharge. Each recharge reduces the capacity of the battery. Generally speaking lead acid batteries will wear out under moderate use in three years. Lithium Ion is said to last 7 years but I never had a L-ion notebook battery last more than half that long before it held so little charge as to be virtually useless.
A Tesla Roadster, according the manufacturer (so it’s probably optimistic), driven 40 miles per day will need its L-ion batteries replaced in seven years. Estimated battery replacement cost works out to 12 cents per mile. A gasoline engine costs about 10 cents per mile for fuel. Electricity for the Tesla isn’t free and if you live where Anthony lives it isn’t less expensive than gasoline but for me it’s about 3 cents per mile. Maintenance and repair of internal combustion engines is hard to put a number on but I’ve owned several Hondas and Toyotas that happily went over 200,000 miles with less than $1000 maintenance/repair cost for the motor which works out to a half penny per mile.
And don’t forget to add-on the huge purchase price premium of an electric car vs. a similar size gasoline vehicle. Government rebates don’t count as someone (read you and I the taxpayers) end up footing the bill for those rebates.
So anyone thinking that owning an electric vehicle is going to save money is in for a big surprise. And they aren’t even all that “green” either as they require a lot of toxic materials in the batteries, rare earth (non-renewable) elements for the electric drive motors (niobium), and copper (non-renewable) also for the drive motors. And because weight is so important to reduce in the electric vehicle they also use more energy-intensive to produce body materials like aluminum and FRP instead of steel.
The all-electric vehicle is a huge boondoggle. Hybrids make a little more sense because they have far smaller battery packs and internal combustion motors can be very very efficient when designed to run at constant RPM. But the engine that has my eye is the TDI diesel which are almost as efficient as constant RPM motors and they’ll run on anything from diesel to peanut oil and everything in between. Couple those TDI engines with bio-engineered saltwater algae that efficiently produce vegetable oil and ya gots a real 21st century solution for the transportation fleet more economical than anything preceding it. Saltwater algae don’t even require arable land to grow them and what’s left after squeezing the oil out of them has a decent protein content suitable for livestock feed (or human consumption too if push comes to shove – it can’t taste worse than tofu).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algae_fuel

E.M. Smith says:
November 27, 2010 at 2:12 am
Ian W says:
Surely all this misses the point – temperature especially ‘average temperature’ is the wrong metric.
The entire AGW hypothesis is based on trapping HEAT. Heat does not equal temperature
Even worse than that, temperature is an intensive variable, so can not be averaged at all, yet it is. There really is, practically and theoretically, no such thing as a ‘global average temperature’. It is a fiction, and not even a polite one.
The average cost of a house in the UK supposedly went up last year by 9.2% which would indicate a booming housing market which it is not, the reason the average went up was because there were fewer sales and those few sales were mainly expensive houses in the south of the country. Is this not similar to removing temp stations from cooler areas leaving less stations in warmer areas.

Darn! Being from Dakota Territory, I was hoping for some global warming, though I would not object to Mother Narure shoving this down the throat of the hyteric warmist crowd.
Mention was made about heavy handed adjustments. It’s good to remember that 1934 was the warmest year on record [by a half degree] until, after adjusting it down and 1998 up, we got a new queen [by fifteen thousandths of a degree].
http://www.judicialwatch.org/files/documents/2010/783_NASA_docs-2.pdf
However this all turns out, warming trend…cooling trend…no trend, it is good to remind other folks of the key points: 1)We are only talking about an anomaly of about 0.7 C, all within the range of natural variability [or did they want us to stay stuck in the last little ice age?]
2) CO2 is not a problem; it is not a pollutant; it is plant food.
3) Government cannot even fix things they do have control over, like the budget, and they want to ‘fix’ the climate???

Werner Brozek;
I am not in a position to do a huge analysis of using fusion to get a steady flow of electricity. This may never work. >>
The progress of technology is not hostage to a single solution. Saying fusion reactors will be possible in x years and that will solve the problem is foolish. Saying that we’re doing research on fusion, thorium, tidal, orbital, efficiency, etc etc etc and that one of these will solve the problem is also foolish. What one CAN say is that there is a lot of research going on and the inevitable result is that we will get more from less as time goes on. Will it be incremental or a giant leap? Dunno. Will it be one thing or a combination of many things? Dunno. Will it be something that no one has even started researching yet? Dunno. But we’ll be getting more from less, that I am confident of.

feet2thefire says:
November 26, 2010 at 8:55 pm
‘Where did they go wrong’
Good question.
I also looked at your Redux 1970 blog, thank you
‘The question then is, of course, counter to whose intuition? ‘ (p8 of Rand article link below)
Wendy Allen, Rand Corporation (1975) critiques Forrester and Meadow’s assumptions underlying a computer based model of the global ecology (World Model). This World Model was worked up prior to the book release ‘World Dynamics’ (1971) and later with a global publicity campaign ‘The Limits to Growth’ (1972) was released, financed by Club of Rome (12 million copies). LtoGrowth predicted an energy- commodity: pollution-population crisis (ref Gollub, Townsend 1977 Malthus, Multinationals and The Club of Rome).
Allen states ‘as for modeling the future under conditions imposed by this test, all that can be verified is the accuracy of the data on which one’s projections are based.’ p13 http://www.rand.org/pubs/papers/2008/P5540.pdf
Will follow up the Club of Rome and ‘Moral Force of Unified Science’ with Willis E blog on People in Glass Planets, http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/11/27/people-living-in-glass-planets/
as he has provided a link to Judith Curry requesting ‘Engaging the Public on the Climate Change Issue’ and ‘Raising the Level of the Game’ – the social feedback loop discussed by Allen in 1975!
____________________________________________________
P.Skilz says:
November 27, 2010 at 3:43 am
How will we survive for another 50,000-80,000 years? (as tribal societies have done)
Comments by others noted
I would be interested if you (Skilz) would explain exactly what survived in these 50-80,000 years? Likely that natural disasters and disease caused much human loss, as did warfare, but I think you are stating that tribal societies have a world view to offer.
Perhaps you are with the anti-DDT brigade, maintaining starvation and death in the hunter or agrarian tribal societies? No risk there of ‘them’ having freedom, education, individual choice. Almost like a twisted causal argument – maintain tribalism = your agrarianism; rather than human dignity. The same variables you list were listed by Forrester (see Allen p1) 39 years ago.
1. Demographic trends: limiting population growth- particularly in the urban areas or resettlement from rural areas;
2. Food production – by not increasing land productivity or providing technological advancement (or rural resettlement);
3. Industrialisation – Pollution is your preferred language and mind-set
4. Maintain diversity (but not of girls or children), but forests and plains which are resources to preserve
5. Finite resources to your mind – however you genuflect to cultural practices by referring to tribal societies [not the tyrannical practices by collective individuals] which are designed to instil fear and pain
Your post has remarkable similarities to Gaia theory and eugenics.
Eulogising tribals as comparison to those developed or trying to develop democratic societies and nations is a poorly devised case control study on humans. Using tribal society as a proxy for naturale environment – two independent variables rolled into one, you erroneously dismiss and condemn the hope and goals of thousands, if not millions.
This video may serve to educate further to the ‘tribalism’ of men and women in these ‘societies’: their local governance and that of their lack of rule of law. Perhaps you like rule of the jungle? Or see that the UN commentators, another centralised global governing agency, work towards education of individuals and OF the nation state in seeking human dignity and just law? http://www.france24.com/en/20101125-2010-uganda-female-circumcision-cut-clitoris-genital-mutilation-law-fight-enforce-customs-ritual-elgon-sabiny-tribe

Please use only my signature OLd.

Anthony, Thank you for reviving the important and fundamental subject of the world temperature data series.
Although it is right that the authorities should be pursed relentlessly to explain why and how they have adjusted the raw data, because that has to be the ongoing scientific challenge in the face of official obfuscation, it remains nevertheless true that the official temperature data even as it stands is distinctly un-alarming.
My own analysis of the HadCRUT3 official world temperature data (see temperature chart and commentary at http://www.thetruthaboutclimatechange.org) is that there is absolutely no sign of any variation that cannot be explained by natural climate processes.
I think Steven Mosher gets it just about right (26 Nov 2010 at 10.55am) when he says “For myself I did the following: using the raw data source from GHCN…I get the same answer as CRU. Further, you might want to head over to the cosmic ray thread and explain to them that there is no warming for the rays to explain.”
As Steven pithily implies, there really is, in effect, no case to answer.