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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Steinar Midtskogen says:
An analysis should include a list of stations fairly well distributed over the area for which an average temperature is to be calculated, and all stations must have an unbroken record requiring an absolute minimum of homogenisation, if any at all, and they must be little affected by urbanisation. This will disqualify nearly all stations, but if the remaining ones show a pattern, it will be a genuine one, and then I think it’s fair to make statements on “warmest” or “coldest” based on what we know.
And that has been done. TonyB has done it for long lived stations. The net result? We’re not warming, but there is a cyclical rise / fall.
I did some similar (though much less detailed) work and found that as you removed stations with the “shortest lifetime” from the data, you got a more stable world. If you looked for “what part of the data has the warming signal” it was all in the “newer” stations. That lead to several discovers. The massive move to Airports (which are by definition “newer” than 1919 and often “newer” than 1960, especially in the 3rd world. The tendency for a ‘step function’ hotter in 1990 in the data series right when a change of “modification flag” indicates that a change in the processing of the data was begun. I even went so far as to make my own analysis code that did NO homogenizing, NO infill, NO “anomaly” comparing one location to another (as GIStemp and the other folks do…). That is the “Dt/dt” code in the link above.
It finds no net warming in many (most?) countries.
It does suffer from “splice artifacts” (as does any ‘infill’, homogenize, or Reference Station Method code) but part of my goal was to visualize those splice artifacts. (I have two variations on the code, one specifically tuned to mark splices, one not.) This describes the one that smooths the splice in the data a bit more:
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2010/04/22/dmtdt-an-improved-version/
IMHO, most if not all of “AGW” is a splice artifact from splicing young poorly sited stations with a warm bias to their adjustments onto old station data. The “Hocky Stick Trick” done on temperature data.
And that will not be the entire world or even entire countries. But it’s better to state what we do know and don’t than simply to fill in the holes and thereby contaminate what we actually do know.
I agree. That’s why I made Dt/dt. One of the interesting bits is that you can look at a given country (say, Sweden, Germany, France, Japan) and see what THEIR instruments say. Then look at subsets of those instruments.
The “Climate Scientists” typically have a cow about then (a Spherical one 😉 and assert one simply MUST do it exactly the way they do to get valid results (areal averaging, THEIR kind of anomalies, etc.) This is “exactly wrong”. In a forensics examination you do things differently from the crook to see where they’ve tuned things. In figuring out a magic trick, you do not sit center front, you move to the side. For “climate science” you change the method and see what happens.
What I found was fascinating. Netherlands is very slightly cooling. Right next to it, France is warming. But only some of the places in France. And some of the months! One of the most fascinating bits was that the individual MONTHS go in different directions in various countries. Often right next door to each other. So England and France will have different months that warm and cool. Japan had (roughly) every other month going the other way. Warm, cool, warm, cool, warm, cool…
Even countries in the same geography area could have “opposite months”.
Think about it… No physicality to the cause…
Best guess I’ve got so far is that it’s variations in solar impact on the record from WHEN thermometers were moved to Airports and how each airport responds to the added heat of sunshine on tarmac. So if France added a thermometer on the Southern Mediterranean Coast, it has a different “sun” profile of exposure than the one they dropped in, oh, Paris. Sun heats tarmac and “Viola!” sunny MONTH warms… (but since both were likely sunny in August, August shows no added warming trend from the move, only the “newly sunny month” shows the trend…)
In one case in particular, Marble Bar Australia, I take the stations in the region and slowly glue their records together, letting you watch the “splice” artifact form. The end result is a greater warming trend than seen at any of the stations alone. This was stimulated by the fact that Marble Bar set a temperature record that has never been beaten; yet GISS shows the area as “warming” since then….
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2010/04/03/mysterious-marble-bar/
Currently too many long series exist that were constructed by splicing and adjustments that will bring too many assumptations into the final figures when these sereis are combined to create a national or global temperature.
BINGO! Give that man a Cupie Doll!
The way the codes, like GIStemp, make their “anomaly” is simply wrong. It is a splice artifact creation system.
I leave it for others to decide if that is due to “malice” or “stupidity” and stick to Hanlon’s Razor: “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity”; though I note that the level of stupid needed is becoming quite high…
They take a batch of theremometers in, say, Central France in 1950-1980 and make an average of them (with some attempts at merging to a common base) then make a different average of a different set of thermometers in the present “Grid / box”. Then those two AVERAGES are compared to get the “anomaly”. This, IMHO, is just broken. Yes, I know Hansen got it “pal reviewed”. It still just lets you cover over splice artifacts prior to making your “anomaly”. For many boxes there simply IS NO THERMOMETER so the “anomaly” is based on a complete fiction. This is easily seen if you realize that with 8000 “grid / boxes” in the early GIStemp code and only 1200 or so thermometers in the 2009 GHCN world data set, many of those boxes have NO thermometer in them. Recently they moved to 16,000 “grid / boxes” as though that would make things better… but that just means more of them are empty… and filled with a created fiction instead.
The Dt/dt method makes the anomaly as the very first step and does so ONLY comparing a given thermometer to itself. (IMHO, the only proper way to make an anomaly). It finds cycles of warming and cooling, but overall, no warming. Further, it finds that individual countries have “interesting patterns” that point to significant splice artifacts in the data. Especially around the 1990 change of “duplicate number” or “modification flag” in the data. That is also when a huge number of thermometers are dropped from the record. AGW is a data fumble artifact, not a real event.
While it looks like they have broken the graph again (so I’ll get to patch up this posting again), this posting looks at an interesting graph of temperatures in Sweden. It finds that it was warm in Sweden prior to the LIA…
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2009/03/02/picking-cherries-in-sweden/
I’m still seeing the graph here:
http://www.smhi.se/sgn0102/n0205/upps_www.pdf
And that illustrates the problem. Are we warming because 1880 was cold? Or was 1880 cold because 1720 was just as warm as now? AND it shows the 1930’s as about the same warmth as now…. so it’s NOT just a US thing.
All the combined instrumental Arctic stations (most are between 64N and 75N) show recent temperatures no different from the 1930’s when comparing the trend in the actual data, not using zones and creating made-up data.
http://img141.imageshack.us/img141/7617/arctictempstrend.png
bubbagyro says:
With more measurements, the outliers statistically rectify themselves, with a too high here matched with a too low there. That is the way statistics deals with crude measurements, with lots of readings! that sort each other out.
IFF you are measuring THE SAME THING.
Where the temperature codes go off the rails, IMHO, is that they think averaging a bunch of DIFFERENT readings from different things will have the same property. It doesn’t. It’s like sampling 100 cars in 1950 and 10 in 2010 and saying you know the average weight of the cars to 1 gram. The problem is they got 1 Chevy 2 Mercedes and 97 VW’s in 1950 but got 8 Mercedes, 1 Dodge 4×4 Crew Cab Truck, and a cement mixer in 2010. Average those all you want, it does NOT improve the accuracy and the precision is all False Precision.
(I’ve had folks endlessly berate me thinking I don’t know you can calculate an average to very great precision. You can. That’s not the point. The point is “Does that average have MEANING?” (not all averages do) and for temperature data, it simply has no meaning. As soon as you start by putting a bunch of different things into your “grid / box” and averaging them you have lost it. Intensive variables are that way. Using the car metaphor, it’s like they make a “1000 lb adjustment” for each VW vs Mercedes so they are “comparable”… execpt they aren’t. They each changed weight at a different rate over time, so the ‘correction’ has an unspecified error term. Then there is that Cement Truck that just got glued on in 1990 at the giant Jet Port… )
So the codes end up finding their own error terms and calling it a significant warming…
But you look at individual thermometers and find they are not warming… Strange, that. And you look at “warming places” and find they never set a new warm record (Marble Bar). Strange, that. And you look at “warming” countries and find that the thermometer moved from Paris to Marseille Airport and that only the months that are “Sunnier In Marseille” are warming, while some of the other months are cooling. Strange, that.
And in the end you look at the GIStemp code and say: “Ah HAH! Strange that is!”
(To the rest of your points: Yes! BTW, in most cases the old stations still exist, it’s just not making it from the local country data set into the GHCN. Ask NOAA / NCDC why… )
Doesn’t really matter if 2010 is the warmest year on instrument record or not. AGW will only be seen in the longer term trends such that the decade of 2010-2019 will be warmer than 2000-2009 etc. and Arctic Sea ice will continue to show a downward trend during the decade of 2010-2019. When anyone, “warmist” or skeptic alike jumps on an individual event or even year as proof for or against a positiion then it starts to smell like politics and not science. The only place one can honestly say they see proof of AGW is in longer term trends (decade to multi-decadal) and individual storms, droughts, warm years, cold years, etc. can only be said to be consistent with or inconsistent with what GCM’s say should be happening relative to increases in GH gases over the pre-industrial average.
these are the same “scientists” that tried to hoax us into believing that the moon landings were not staged in Neveada
Hugh Pepper says:
December 25, 2010 at 7:08 pm
Of course we should care! Peer reviewed research from several data sets confirm that the planet is getting warmer. This is not a controversial statement anymore. It is a change which clearly needs to be mediated, to avoid consequences which will be catastrophic for everyone. If you have real data to disprove this, please present it!
——–
You’re an idiot.
[ Watch the name calling. OK, you have some proof. Still, play nice. -MODe]
And now, to avoid being guilty of the Ad Hominem fallacy, let me tell you why.
1. “Peer reviewed research from several data sets confirm that the planet is getting warmer.” — there is evidence strongly suggesting these ‘several’ sets of data are cross-contaminated. That is, they are essentially variations of the same underlying raw data. However, I’ll put that aside, and grant your point.
2. “…the planet is getting warmer. This is not a controversial statement anymore”. – never has been. Even granting point (1) above, no skeptic has claimed the world has not been warming since the end of the LIA. This is a typical straw man people like you, and your ilk, trot out in vain attempts to discredit skeptics.
3. “It is a change which clearly needs to be mediated, to avoid consequences which will be catastrophic for everyone.” — Baseless claim. Absolutely baseless. There is no evidence — NONE — that consequences of a warming planet will be catastrophic either on balance, or at all, for anyone, let alone everyone (as you ridiculously claim). In short, PROVE IT!
4. “If you have real data to disprove this, please present it!” — Did you read the posted article? It is up to you to present evidence to support your claims, not the other way around. The article nicely rebuts many claims of the CAGW movement. It’s now your turn to rebut the points of the article, if you have any. That’s how the scientific method works. Unfortunately, CAGW conjecture (NOT theory) has turned the scientific method on its head. CAGW is a new religion. It is not science.
@de^mol:
I think you will like the graph here that shows no connection between CO2 levels and tempertures over the geologic past:
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2010/12/16/no-correlation/
gofer says: 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.
That they report temperature averages to 1/100 C implies they believe that is their margin of error. The codes, like GIStemp, do not compute one internally. You can find pronouncements of one from GISS, but it’s not from the code, it’s made up in some other way (God only knows how…)
The raw data were recorded in Whole Degree F increments in the USA. Don’t know about ROW, but suspect Whole C for some of it. Then monthly averages are computed to 1/10 C in GHCN. (Let’s see, an average of an intesive variable means what again? So we average the months daily data and get what again?…)
The US Data in Whole Degrees F may be simply made up and this happens at several points. The observer may simply “guess” if something is wrong with the instrument. (NOAA took down the web page I’d referenced that gave these directions, but it was the guidance at least until a year or so ago…) So any guess what THAT does to you error band?
Missing data can be created and filled in by a variety of odd processes at just about every step from NOAA / NCDC “Quality Control” steps that may toss out observations and replace them by an average of nearby ASOS stations that, BTW, round UP to whole degrees of C for aviation use and are located at airports near the tarmac. One hopes they use a different data feed from the ASOS (as it has 1/10 C available) but then again, they are using the METAR records that are for aviation so??? Oh, and this substitution is done silently. Maybe you can find a way to find which dailies were substituted, but by the time its in the GHCN monthly averages, it’s hidden… And an average of temperatures (from “nearby” ASOS) means what again?
These data go off to GIStemp who also creates “data” to fill in missing bits via various averaging of averages. “Good luck with that” on the error bar thing…
Onion says:
But not in the global product. Only in the US product (2% of the global product).
OK, I’ll bite: Exactly what is the “GIStemp Global Product” vs the “GIStemp US Product”?
Since there is only one code, and I’ve run it, and it doesn’t keep the globe and the US in different “products”, I’m curious just what you think you are talking about…
There is an NCDC GHCN and NCDC USHCN product, but that’s not GISS…
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.
And that is very wrong. They completely changed how they handled USHCN data in November of 2009. Use a whole different data set now. The “newer version” of USHCN with an entirely different processing history. You will also find that GIStemp in prior years had 1998 hotter, now have it colder, so clearly it is “much different”, even globally.
“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.
I agree. It is the testimony under oath in a court of law that violation of the law and destruction of property are JUST and MORAL if you think your cause is for the greater good that makes him “inherently dishonest”. He has TESTIFIED that he thinks “The greater good” outweighs law and property rights. So he would apply that same belief to the property of the temperature data as he is rabid about the “greater good” of doing whatever it takes to get AGW believed.
I”VE sat in protests (and just barely missed being arrested). But I’d never say that it’s OK to break things, damage private property, do whatever it takes and expect no consequences because you think it’s “for the greater good”. Once you go there, you are no longer a “trusted conservator of the truth” in the data record. He has stated, in essence, “The ends justify the means if the ends are worthy IN HIS EYES.”
I just don’t think there is a good enough correlation to base any assumptions on there.
No “correlation” to anything is needed. Just look at what he has said are HIS guiding principles. “It’s OK to do what it takes if you believe” is a rough paraphrase, and we know “he believes” in spades. He didn’t just protest and get arrested, he testified that folks ought to get off without penalty for breaking the law as their ends were just in his eyes.
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.
And, IMHO, I’ve done one. The Dt/dt method. It has some minor issues (like the splice artifact one, and you need to apply it to subsets of the data to get a kind of areal average – but doing it by small country blocks like, oh, Netherlands and France, let you see more interesting details in the data structure). It shows a very different result, but oddly, one rather like the “long stations only” independent study done by TonyB, and like the historical record pre “reimagining” and like several others out there. It’s GIStemp that’s really wrong, CRU that’s somewhat buggered, and the Satellites that are probably best (but can’t be compared to anything early enough to say anything about climate; and may have some artifacts of their own).
So yes, having “done it” (both running GIStemp code and making my own) I’m quite comfortable saying “GIStemp is wrong”. That, and the buckets of snow globally while they are runing around hair on fire screeming hottest ever…
Per your desire for a benchmark:
Start with explaining the variation in warming / cooling BY MONTH in these graphs:
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2010/04/22/dmtdt-an-improved-version/
Or just start with one station, Darwin Station:
http://chiefio.files.wordpress.com/2010/04/darwin_dmt1.png
with a nice hot 1930’s era and a dropping overall trend, but with an odd compression of the data range at the recent end when GHCN data processes were changed. Tell me that’s showing warming from CO2. Just try to explain it.
And you can do that for every country in the world and you find the same thing. I did. See:
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2010/04/11/the-world-in-dtdt-graphs-of-temperature-anomalies/
Yes, that’s the Canonical Set of The World Graphs. ALL of them. I spent months making them, so you can look at them all in mere hours. There’s your benchmark (that’s why I constructed it, to be a data benchmark of what the DATA shows prior to any significant processing). Enjoy.
The individual stations are generally NOT uniformly warming. Many countries and places are cooling. For stations that are warming, often they have many months flat or cooling (so the December trend may be warming in all December data while the January trend is cooling across all January data). It all argues for data artifacts (IMHO mostly UHI, land use changes, siting changes – more airports up to 92%, and processing changes in 1990).
To quote myself:
“(To the rest of your points: Yes! BTW, in most cases the old stations still exist, it’s just not making it from the local country data set into the GHCN. Ask NOAA / NCDC why… )”
It’s interesting to note that when the Met Office of Turkey looked at ALL their thermometers instead of just the cherry picked ones that make it into the GHCN, they found Turkey is cooling. “Strange that”… Peer reviewed paper too…
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/joc.3370150507/abstract
The Great Hot 1934 vs 1998 Race
Hands down on the US record, 1934 wins by a long shot.
In both the records and first-hand accounts of those who lived through it.
What is even more impressive is that it started out on the West Coast in 1932 and migrated to scorch most of the country.
Taking the 2 years into account, this pattern of West to East holds today.
R. Gates says:
December 26, 2010 at 11:28 am
For once, RGates, you are correct: AGW will be seen in the long term… as a natural phenomenon, lovingly referred to as the “Good Old Days”. We’ll tell our grandkids that someday the weather will be nice again, just not now.
Joe Romm has a post up seeking slogans for bumper stickers. I managed to sneak these two under the radar:
Stroller says:
December 26, 2010 at 3:07 pm
Act on Global Warming
Impound my car!
Stroller says:
December 26, 2010 at 3:09 pm
Global Warming Hypocrites
Drive me Round the Bend!
http://climateprogress.org/2010/12/26/good-climate-bumpersticker/
Have fun…
Here’s what appear to be the talking points to explain why 2010 is the hottest year:
How Will We Know if 2010 Was the Warmest Year on Record?
Different Groups’ Methods Yield the Same Finding: Warming Surface Temperatures
By Tom Yulsman Last (Updated: December 22nd, 2010)
Including: “In other words, they [GISS] extrapolate across some pretty large gaps — ones as far across as 700 miles.
Hansen and his colleagues argue the approach is valid because research shows that any particular temperature anomaly will tend to be large in geographic reach, particularly at middle and high latitudes.
But the NASA-GISS approach has come in for particular criticism from climate change skeptics, who severely question the scientific basis for extrapolating data across such large gaps.
However, there is significant scientific support for the approach, and for the determination that the Arctic is warming rapidly. Hansen and his colleagues point out that independent measurements of temperatures in the Arctic using infrared instruments reveal significant warming over large areas.
Support also from comes observations of shrinking and thinning Arctic sea ice, thawing of permafrost, and changes to Greenland’s ice sheet — all indicators of widespread warming.”
Quick dodge from the question of extrapolation to other “independent measurements” and then the Hail Mary to the shrinking ice sheets and all that. Half expecting a supporting quote from a polar bear. Instead, it is a quote from:
“Gavin Schmidt, Hansen’s colleague at NASA-GISS, points out that whether you fill gaps or not, you are making a decision about what the temperatures were in those gaps.
“When you have a data gap, you can either interpolate/extrapolate from nearby sources or not,” he says. “Each approach has an implication. If you leave it blank, it is equivalent to assuming that it has warmed at the same rate as the globe. While if you fill it in, you assume that it is changing at the same rate as nearby points. This makes the biggest difference in the Arctic, which is warming substantially faster than the globe. I think the interpolation/extrapolation approach is a better solution.”
A “better solution.” The Arctic is warming most where they extrapolate most.
This article also features a scary looking graph – “Historical surface temperature trends. Credit: U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change” – which ends in 2005… for this story allegedly about 2010.
http://www.climatecentral.org/news/tracking-the-temperature-of-a-warming-planet/
I too share your distrust of the global warming oversimplifications. My paper on the science of climate change which I posted on http://billpeddie.wordpress.com shows substantial oversights in the measurements of temperature to date. I fear that there are now so many media releases purporting to show that we have run away global warming with a simple carbon dioxide cause it will take a long time for the general public to realise they have been duped with shoddy science.
“Dave F says:
December 26, 2010 at 8:28 am
Show me what they were using to measure temperatures. Trees?”
Yes, very special trees, hand picked by some of the finest magicians that the scientific world has ever produced.
thanx mod for drawing my attention to the “Jim and Bill’s excellent misadventure” thread. with the christmas distractions, i had missed it. loved the comments there as well.
R. Gates says:
Doesn’t really matter if 2010 is the warmest year on instrument record or not. AGW will only be seen in the longer term trends
So far, we agree. Now look at a really longer term trend. You find that the averages are trending lower (though with hundred year scale ‘wobbles’) and even our present “high” individual instrumental record (seen at the right margine in the graph link below) is lower than the individual record excursions (seen as thin colored lines that pop and drop also in the same graph).
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/ca/Holocene_Temperature_Variations.png
which I talk about here:
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2010/09/13/an-interesting-view-of-temperatures/
So you can look at the averages, the really long term averages, and find a nice “peak” in about 5000 BC; and with a consistent down trend since then. And if you fit a curve to the tops of the individual data sets (including our current one) you get the same rounded rise / fall pattern.
So I guess that means we’re in complete agreement, the long term averages AND the present record when compared to the individual records, shows we’re in a definite cooling trend from 5000 BC to present. (BTW, this also agrees with such archeological data as the way the shore is further out to sea now as the sea level DROPS over that time period…
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2010/12/06/ostia-antica-and-sea-level/
Of course, if you go back further, you find both sea level rise and fall beyone present levels. Clearly the prior interglacial was even hotter than this one.
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2010/12/07/florida-rising/
Wonder how SUVs did THAT 120,000 years ago…
such that the decade of 2010-2019 will be warmer than 2000-2009 etc.
So, we can hold you to this PREDICTION? You will guarantee a record number of record highs and vanishing number of record lows?
and Arctic Sea ice will continue to show a downward trend during the decade of 2010-2019.
As they say “good luck with that” …
http://www.ijis.iarc.uaf.edu/seaice/extent/AMSRE_Sea_Ice_Area.png
shows 2010 high above almost all the others and the low about middle of the pack. Not seeing any real trend in that set. Just variation and with 2010 more or less ordinary. (Though the longer persistance of ice last winter and the cold this winter do argue for our getting more ice over time. Oh, and the time lag for ocean heat to hit the Arctic is about run out, so when all the present cold water starts getting up there, well, lets just say I’d bet on more ice cubes. Big ones.)
So, given that long term temperature chart above, are you now ready to embrace the fact that we’ve been cooling for about 7000 years and continue to do so? It’s only when you measure from that nice little “dip” in the “Little Ice Age” that we are warming in comparison. And per that warming: to me, “That’s a good thing”.
E.M.Smith says:
December 26, 2010 at 1:46 pm
Chiefio loves cricketing terms.
Chief this one would be called “stumped”.
Existence proof of greater benefit than that:
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/07/090731-green-sahara_2.html
tallbloke says:
December 26, 2010 at 12:14 pm
Thanx Tallbloke, I should be comment #77.
We’ll see if it gets past mods.
I have a few.
Global Warming
Follow the Money.
Co2 The stuff of Life
Not Pollution, Plant Food.
Global Warming,
How could we be so Gullible?
Repeat After Me
Warm good, Cold bad.
Food grows in Greenhouses, Duh!
I Believe in Global Warming,
I Force my Opinions on Others.
Want Alternative Energy?
Drive an Ox n Cart
Would you like some more?
[And why, perforce and perchance, would you be concerned about getting past the mods? 8<) Robt]
hehe he Robt, not concern…just interest.
Ira says
——————–
. 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.
————
As you say it depends on your assumptions:
1. You finally do forget the distinction between US and global temps
2. You engage in guesswork about the reason for the variation in US temp analyses
3. You assume the costs of dealing with CO2 will be expensive when the cost estimates are all over the place and therefore subject to their own asumptions.
Apart from that I find your story interesting.
tallbloke says:
December 26, 2010 at 12:14 pm
Joe Romm has a post up seeking slogans for bumper stickers. I managed to sneak these two under the radar:
Stroller says:
December 26, 2010 at 3:07 pm
Act on Global Warming
Impound my car!
=======================================
You’re an evil genius, tallbloke. Can’t stop laughing over that one!
@Brian H:
Thanks for the pointer to the article. Someone needs to tell the IPCC that their
predictionsprojections of more Sahara desert are a bit “off”… 😉FWIW, my opinion is that we go back toward the Roman Optimum conditions at most and those included a lot more grain grown in what is now desert North Africa… Maybe even a bit of Lake Chad coming back…
But what I find effective is to show to AGW believers that even with the IPCC numbers, it’s just not a problem…
E.M.Smith says on December 26, 2010 at 3:33 pm
What is the probability that the warming will continue and is not over?
A.C. Adelaide RIGHT ON! …also to affirm most comments here. I’m a “lay” skeptic as of 2006…research daily since, and I can spot the faulty reasoning in just about everything I read, hear, or is published or posted…with FACTS!
“Oh, and yes, science is based on consensus to some extent”
Science might be I suppose, Truth is not.
“nuclear, clean coal, and renewables[sic] and reduce energy waste.” have nothing t0 do with either weather or climate; only with redistribution of wealth, and control of other non-elite people.