Guest Post by Ira Glickstein
According to the latest from NASA GISS (Goddard Institute for Space Studies), 2010 is shaping up to be “the warmest of 131 years”, based on global data from January through November. They compare it to 2005 “2nd warmest of 131 years” and 1998 “5th warmest of 131 years”.
We won’t know until the December data is in. Even then, given the level of noise in the base data and the wiggle room in the analysis, each of which is about the same magnitude as the Global Warming they are trying to quantify, we may not know for several years. If ever. GISS seems to analyze the data for decades, if necessary, to get the right answer.
A case in point is the still ongoing race between 1934 and 1998 to be the hottest for US annual mean temperature, the subject of one of the emails released in January of this year by NASA GISS in response to a FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) request. The 2007 message from Dr. Makiko Sato to Dr. James Hansen traces the fascinating story of that hot competition. See the January WUWT and my contemporary graphic that was picked up by several websites at that time.
[My new graphic, shown here, reproduces Sato’s email text, including all seven data sets, some or all of which were posted to her website. Click image for a larger version.]
The Great Hot 1934 vs 1998 Race
1) Sato’s first report, dated July 1999, shows 1934 with an impressive lead of over half a degree (0.541ºC to be exact) above 1998.
Keep in mind that this is US-only data, gathered and analyzed by Americans. Therefore, there is no possibility of fudging by the CRU (Climategate Research Unit) at East Anglia, England, or bogus data from Russia, China, or some third-world country. (If there is any error, it was due to home-grown error-ists :^)
Also note that total Global Warming, over the past 131 years, has been, according to the IPCC, GISS and CRU, in the range of 0.7ºC to 0.8ºC. So, if 1934 was more than 0.5ºC warmer than 1998, that is quite a significant percentage of the total.
At the time of this analysis, July 1999, the 1998 data had been in hand for more than half a year. Nearly all of it was from the same reporting stations as previous years, so any adjustments for relocated stations or those impacted by nearby development would be minor. The 1934 data had been in hand for, well, 65 years (eligible to collect Social Security :^) so it had, presumably, been fully analyzed.
Based on this July 1999 analysis, if I was a betting man, I would have put my money on 1934 as a sure thing. However, that was not to be, as Sato’s email recounts.
Why? Well, given steadily rising CO2 levels, and the high warming sensitivity of virtually all climate models to CO2, it would have been, let us say inconvenient, for 1998 to have been bested by a hot golden oldie from over 60 years previous! Kind of like your great grandpa beating you in a foot race.
2) The year 2000 was a bad one for 1934. November 2000 analysis seems to have put it on a downhill ski slope that cooled it by nearly a fifth of a degree (-0.186ºC to be precise). On the other hand, it was a very good year for 1998, which, seemingly put on a ski lift, managed to warm up by nearly a quarter of a degree (+0.233ºC). That confirms the Theory of Conservation of Mass and Energy. In other words, if someone in your neighborhood goes on a diet and loses weight, someone else is bound to gain it.
OK, now the hot race is getting interesting, with 1998 only about an eighth of a degree (0.122ºC) behind 1934. I’m still rooting for 1934. How about you?
3) Further analysis in January 2001 confirmed the downward trend for 1934 (lost an additional 26th of a degree) and the upward movement of 1998 (gained an additional 21th of a degree), tightening the hot race to a 28th of a degree (0.036ºC).
Good news! 1934 is still in the lead, but not by much!
4) Sato’s analysis and reporting on the great 1934 vs 1998 race seems to have taken a hiatus between 2001 and 2006. When the cat’s away, the mice will play, and 1998 did exactly that. The January 2006 analysis has 1998 unexpectedly tumbling, losing over a quarter of a degree (-0.269ºC), and restoring 1934‘s lead to nearly a third of a degree (0.305ºC). Sato notes in her email “This is questionable, I may have kept some data which I was checking.” Absolutely, let us question the data! Question, question, question … until we get the right answer.
5) Time for another ski lift! January 2007 analysis boosts 1998 by nearly a third of a degree (+0.312ºC) and drops 1934 a tiny bit (-0.008ºC), putting 1998 in the lead by a bit (0.015ºC). Sato comments “This is only time we had 1998 warmer than 1934, but one [on?] web for 7 months.”
6) and 7) March and August 2007 analysis shows tiny adjustments. However, in what seems to be a photo finish, 1934 sneaks ahead of 1998, being warmer by a tiny amount (0.023ºC). So, hooray! 1934 wins and 1998 is second.
OOPS, the hot race continued after the FOIA email! I checked the tabular data at GISS Contiguous 48 U.S. Surface Air Temperature Anomaly (C) today and, guess what? Since the Sato FOIA email discussed above, GISS has continued their taxpayer-funded work on both 1998 and 1934. The Annual Mean for 1998 has increased to 1.32ºC, a gain of a bit over an 11th of a degree (+0.094ºC), while poor old 1934 has been beaten down to 1.2ºC., a loss of about a 20th of a degree (-0.049ºC). So, sad to say, 1934 has lost the hot race by about an eighth of a degree (0.12ºC). Tough loss for the old-timer.
Analysis of the Analysis
What does this all mean? Is this evidence of wrongdoing? Incompetence? Not necessarily. During my long career as a system engineer I dealt with several brilliant analysts, all absolutely honest and far more competent than me in statistical processes. Yet, they sometimes produced troubling estimates, often due to poor assumptions.
In one case, prior to the availability of GPS, I needed a performance estimate for a Doppler-Inertial navigation system. They computed a number about 20% to 30% worse than I expected. In those days, I was a bit of a hot head, so I stormed over and shouted at them. A day later I had a revised estimate, 20% to 30% better than I had expected. My conclusion? It was my fault entirely. I had shouted too loudly! So, I went back and sweetly asked them to try again. This time they came in near my expectations and that was the value we promised to our customer.
Why had they been off? Well, as you may know, an inertial system is very stable, but it drifts back and forth on an 84 minute cycle (the period of a pendulum the length of the radius of the Earth). A Doppler radar does not drift, but it is noisy and may give erroneous results over smooth surfaces such as water and grass. The analysts had designed a Kalman filter that modeled the error characteristics to achieve a net result that was considerably better than either the inertial or the Doppler alone. To estimate performance they needed to assume the operating conditions, including how well the inertial system had been initialized prior to take off, and the terrain conditions for the Doppler. Change assumptions, change the results.
Conclusions
Is 2010 going to be declared warmest global annual by GISS after the December data comes in? I would not bet against that. As we have seen, they keep questioning and analyzing the data until they get the right answers. But, whatever they declare, should we believe it? What do you think?
Figuring out the warmest US annual is a lot simpler. Although I (and probably you) think 1934 was warmer than 1998, it seems someone at GISS, who knows how to shout loudly, does not think so. These things happen and, as I revealed above, I myself have been guilty of shouting at analysts. But, I corrected my error, and I was not asking all the governments of the world to wreck their economies on the basis of the results.
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mike g:
Oh, we can measure temperature quite well. What you see them propagate is an average of some averaged extrapolated average. Guess how the basic average is built: [s] they measure the temperature every minute and add up the numbers over a whole day and divide the sum by 1440. They may use a shorter interval, say 10 seconds, but the gain in precision isn’t worth the effort modifying the computer program. You guessed wrong! Their algorithm is much more sophisticated. You have to be a trained and certified climate scientist to understand how
it works. [/s]
But it gets worse: what location’s temperature are we interested in? Is it the height where we breathe (1.8 m), where most of our crops grow (0.8 m), grass grows (0.08 m), trees grow (18 m), fish grows (-x.8 m)…
[s] I know, the particular location doesn’t matter since you build trends and those would only be off by a specific factor depending on different locations so the temperature itself and the methode to get the numbers isn’t really that important… [/s]
Not my quote, but that of Richard Littlejohn, which sums this up beautifully:
“Today’s driving force is the great global warming scam, entailing the recruitment of legions of eco-warriors and enviro-crime fighters, on salaries commensurate with their self-righteousness.”
I like you blog Ira, expect regular visits from now on.
I thinketh you complaineth too. Act II
Ira,
Great post! You might find this paper of interest:
J.-L. Le Mouël et al., Evidence for a solar signature in 20th-century temperature data from the USA and Europe, C. R. Geoscience (2008), doi:10.1016/j.crte.2008.06.001
Le Mouël’s USA reconstruction shows the mid-1930’s to be just as warm as the late-1990’s.
There was an old man called Jim
Who stuck himself out on a limb
Now armed with a saw
He’ll soon hit the floor
Trending up just as fast to meet him
Re E.M.Smith
December 25, 2010 at 9:55 pm
“GISS uses a code called GIStemp. It is that US CODE that is finding 1998 warmer than 1934 (sometimes).”
But not in the global product. Only in the US product (2% of the global product). Globally 1998 has always been well ahead of 1934. Overall looking at the entire globe not much has changed in GISTEMP over time. GISTEMP 2010 is not much different than GISTEMP 1999. This is all I was saying.
“That means “assume the ‘fellow’ is flat out lying unil proven otherwise”.”
Being arrested in protests doesn’t make a person inherently dishonest or signal that they are a fraudster. Squeaky clean people (and I don’t mean that as an insult, I am one of those) who stay within the law are just as likely to be fraudsters, in fact of the various scientific frauds of the 20th century I bet most were conducted by scientists who had no existing criminal records. I just don’t think there is a good enough correlation to base any assumptions on there.
What I prefer to do, and this is all round just more friendly, is to assume people are honest until proven otherwise. Hansen hasn’t yet even been proven wrong – although I do have a specific (personal) requirement for such a thing.
The only real evidence that GISTEMP is wrong in my opinion would be to have an independent temperature analysis that “does it right” which shows a different result. Nothing short of that will really do it for me (and I guess a lot of people). We can complain about the roughness of some of the methods in GISTEMP but that doesn’t prove the methods aren’t “good enough” for the job. For example if a better method than the reference station method was used would it really turn out that 1934 was warmer than 1998? If not then that’s clearly not much of an issue.
It is not the warmist year in history. That peak would have been 2008.
Onion:
What percentage of the Earth’s surface does the Arctic comprise? Should we be similarly unconcerned about temperatures there? If so, I think we can very safely assume that there’s no problem.
However, the point is that something seems fishy when someone re-analyses the data until they get the ‘right’ result, and then ‘conveniently’ loses the data.
Nothing living experiences “global weather” (unless you’re a giant the size of the earth). All life experiences only local weather. Seeing that my local weather hasn’t been unusual for the last 120 yrs by the temp records, the answer is no. Seeing proxy data, it’s been relatively stable for the last 10000 yrs other than the usual ~1000 yr (MWP, LIA) cycles. Again, no, unless one is worried about future colder periods leading up to the returning ice-age.
Right now, I’m concerned about how the current US east-coast snowstorm plays out.
All those temperature changes… Does it really matter in the big discussion whether CO2 is the cause of rising temperatures on earth (no, not of climate change: this is a convenient word alarmists added to be able to get it right even when they are wrong). Even a similar trend does not mean CO2 is the cause. Climatologists normally do not look any further then their own research and temperature data to find out what is causing what, and only if temperatures and CO2 are really that closely related.
In fact, yes, it seems there is a correlation when you look at small oscillations in the past, but, all data point to an inversed relationship than what alarmists are claiming: CO2 follows temperature changes and not the other way around: there is a 800 year lag between CO2 (and CH4) and temp. It means temperature changed CO2 amounts, not the other way around. There is a good explanation for this: ocean degassing. There is no explanation for if CO2 would be the leading force in the past. No, volcanism can not explain a sudden increase in the past, because there is no geological observation of volcanic activity that would sustain this theory, and it is even harder to explain sudden decreases in CO2 amounts in the past (where did it go if they don’t buy the absorption theory of oceans).
If you look at large scale earth records there is NO relation to CO2 and temperature at all. About 600 million years ago the amount of CO2 was about 10 times higher then today (~7000 ppm). For long periods of time CO2 decreased with steady temperatures! So it seems that CO2 and temp relationships are only related on smaller changes, where ocean-CO2 oscillations are measured and the total amount of CO2 in both ocean and atmosphere were steady. When the total amount of CO2 decreased (total that is ocean AND atmosphere) there was no relation measured between CO2 and temperature. This means that on a scale of hundreds of years the oceans will absorbe most of the increase in CO2 we pump into the air right now, in the end it will end up with a slight total increase of the amount of CO2, but this will, based on historical earth data, hardly affect temperature. Maybe heat exhaustion from cars and buildings could well be a larger temperature affecting parameter than CO2.
In addition, CO2 is a very welcome gas, in fact the best gas we have on earth. A gas from which all life starts: photosynthesis. That CO2-amounts reduced from 10 times bigger values 600 million years ago (when life really sparked off) is best explained by plants and algae using photosynthesis. This means that over millions of years CO2 depletes on earth and that on the long run life will end when plants will suffocate by not enough CO2 (only enough animals and men can compensate this trend by doing the opposite). Suffocation already starts happening when CO2 amounts get under 200 ppm. (remember: from 7000 ppm in the Cambrium to 280 ppm a century ago!). So that we are pumping it up a bit to 400 ppm is not bad, but in fact good. It also enhances crop outputs. In the Netherlands for example they inject CO2 in the glasshouses that produce flowers and crops like tomatoes and paprika’s. It is proven in those glass houses that a doubling in CO2 increases crop-output by 30%.
Why use these adjustments for temperature only? Lets apply their methods to other historical events and see what we get. Nixon never actually went to China, and was in fact a really nice guy. Enron was making an honest profit. Dewey did in fact defeat Truman. And Al Gore was the real 43rd president, thus becoming the first sitting president to win the academy award!
There is a difference between the GISS RIGHT answer and the TRUTH. I doubt GISS knows what they are doing to themselves, all they see is the giant pot of taxpayer money they scammed at the end of their “RIGHT ANSWER QUEST”.
So who is stupid enough to believe it anyway?
Science was quest for truth, regardless where it takes you. As a person with an engineering background, this whole sea level and temperature issue is becoming measurement noise. For instance, how good were cave men at measuring things 10,000 years ago, a blink in time. And who thinks the last 130 years of time means anything. A very short history is a very meaningless history.
It’s Christmas, who believes God would make a home for carbon lifeforms, ie man, that he can destroy by exhaling CO2 or keeping warm. It’s laughable.
Average temperature is a weird concept. You lose so much information when you do an average so as to render it near useless. Take the average score in a class for a test. Do you know if all the students got the same score or if the highs and lows were spread apart? You can then look at the standard deviation. But with temperatures, you don’t even have all the “scores”. Or even worse, the scores that you do have aren’t always accurate.
Warmists had their worst year in 2010…..in Cancun.
Is it reasonable that history is defined as the last 131 years? How good was the global temperature data 131 years ago? Oh, and I don’t really care if 2010 broke global temperature records by any factor. It just doesn’t matter.
Onion says:
December 26, 2010 at 5:13 am
No need for an independent temperature analysis onion.
As I stated in my post #12:29am GISS themselves have “redone” the analysis 7 times. They were wrong 6 times (according to them) so what makes you think they are right this time?
How many times does GISS need to say “we were wrong” before we stop believing they are right this time?
Is there such an thing as “margin of error” in temperture reporting? I never seem to see anything about error. Is seems somewhat improbable to boil all the data down to such a level without any errors anywhere along the line.
If we didn’t use so much Air Conditioning in the Summer things would be a whole lot cooler on this planet. I remember when I was a kid we didn’t have AC, we rarely if ever used a single fan in the whole house, and things weren’t bad at all. UHI is all the fault of that guy named Otis too. If he hadn’t developed those bling blangin elevators things would be a whole lot cooler in cities and we wouldn’t need Air Conditioners. Ever ride in on a subway train, in the first car, with the doors and all the windows open? It’s cool.
>> Onion says:
December 26, 2010 at 5:13 am
But not in the global product. Only in the US product (2% of the global product). Globally 1998 has always been well ahead of 1934. Overall looking at the entire globe not much has changed in GISTEMP over time. GISTEMP 2010 is not much different than GISTEMP 1999. This is all I was saying. <> Being arrested in protests doesn’t make a person inherently dishonest or signal that they are a fraudster. <<
If a person is willing to break the law in order to 'save the world', why wouldn't he be willing to merely fudge some data in order to 'save the world'?
Today at 9 am the temperature in the UK city of Hereford was -15.6 deg C (or 4 deg F).
While this might seem balmy to a resident of Winnipeg, it is mind bogglingly cold for England. At the age of 69, until today, I have never experienced temperatures in the UK lower than 12 deg F!
For more than two months of 2010 (Jan and Nov/Dec) temperatures have been massively below average.
Still, if GISS say this is the warmest year on record, I suppose it must be true.
Seeing that 1998 and 2010 were El Nino’s years and the 98 one,one of the strongest
whats the hoo-ha about,Hansen will be quick to shout about the colder LA Nina’s years when the global temp starts dropping.Sceptics need to shout this from the roof tops.Was 1934 a El Nino year as well?Plus i think Hansen has lost alot of credibility
by his rants and adjustments to suit the AGW message.
We have become ants looking at the difference in length of toothpicks over the years toothpicks were made. In terms of a temperature graph, an ant would get his or her knickers in a twist over the ups and downs. Me, not so much. I know how large the noise is.
Here’s an idea. Let’s put a graph together showing degree change using a scale more appropriate to such a noisy data set. It sure ain’t in 3 decimal places. And add error bars to the running average. Plus the linear trend is complete and utter statistical nonsense when applied to noisy, multi-variate data.
Meanwhile, we are breaking snow and cold records here in Wallowa County. And not by a 10th of a degree. Pocket penny change does not matter to livestock and pipes. Whole degrees do very much matter.
We argue over a tempest in a teapot and Hansen is sucking tax dollars to measure it.
One can see the constraints these guys are under. If they raise 1998 to much then they erase GW for 12 years up to now. Therefore its necessary to push 1934 down. You’re an engineer, you can see the problem.
Thanks for your comment and your points are granted. There have been natural cycles before and after the LIA. But the topic of this thread is net warming (and cooling) over the past century or so, and the possible contribution of human activities to it.
You and I agree we are up over the past 150 and 50 years, but net out even over 60 years. What is your estimate on how much and what part of that is due to human activities? I think our best skeptic tactic is to admit some human-caused temperature change and then point out it is far less than claimed by the warmists, is not a crisis, and that it seems to have stabilized and may turn down in the coming decades.
I agree with you that clean coal is our best bet. But it is not necessarily precluded by the AGW mantra. Some of the more sane environmentalists (an oxymoron?) are changing their views. The December 2010 issue of The Atlantic, an influential mainstream literary magazine shows an amazing turn-around by the Global Warming alarmists, discussed here by me. Yes, they are still alarmed and predicting imminent climate change disaster, but … BUT, they have reversed themselves on their previous ‘ol devil coal! (This follows their equally sharp reversal on nuclear energy over the past few years.) Turns out we need coal to generate Watts of electricity for our electric cars and, they say, we can do it in a way that is environmentally correct. Their cover story, by respected author James Fallows, is titled Why the Future of Clean Energy is Dirty Coal. {Click the link to read it free online.}