The Central England Temperature Record has been getting some inconvenient attention as of late. Joe D’Aleo at ICECAP pointed out recently:
The Central England Temperature record is one of the longest continuous temperature record in the world extending back to the Little Ice age in 1659. December 2010 was the coldest December in 120 years with an average of -0.7C just short of the record of -0.8C recorded in December 1890 and the Second Coldest December Temperature in the entire record (352 years).
I don’t know if it is simply sloppy webkeeping or related to the fact that the CET isn’t cooperating with the AGW expectations, but the Met Office seems to be burying the data from easy public access. They haven’t eliminated it, but it is now harder to find, and what was once a direct link now points to a general purpose climate change page.
WUWT reader Steve Rosser writes:
…the UK Met Office website, it’s undergoing a refresh at the moment and the CET link seems to have been mysteriously cut. It used to be readily accessible via the UK Climate summaries page, see below, however this link now redirects you to a global temperature page instead.
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/climate/uk/2010/
Thinking it may be a genuine mistake I e-mailed an enquiry and received a very polite response redirecting me to find it via the obscure link below. It’s hard to argue that this location provides a sufficiently high profile for such an august dataset..
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/research/people/david-parker
It may be that the original link will reinstated over the next few days in which case this is a non story. However, it looks suspicously like they are taking the focus away from the CET as after 2010 it’s showing an embarrasing disinclination to follow the AGW orthodoxy (+0.4 deg C since 1780). To do so would be a betrayal of their lack of impartiality which I’d personally find very disappointing. It would also send a message that rather than face-up and make the case for 2010 being a rogue year for UK temperatures they’d rather brush the whole thing under the carpet. I hope I’m wrong.
I checked the pages, and what he says is true. First here’s the main climate page of the Met Office: http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/climate/uk/2010/
Note the CET link highlighted in yellow:
This is the page that CET link takes you to:
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/climate-change/guide/science/monitoring
There’s not a single mention of the CET on that page, but plenty of other datasets are mentioned.
Fortunately, the CET data page is still available, on another Met Office server here, but if you don’t know where to look, you won’t find it easily via the Met Office Climate page.
As I said earlier, this may be sloppy, or it may be intentional.
Given the mess related to the winter forecast we’ve recently seen from the Met Office, I’m inclined to invoke the
“never attribute malice to what can be explained by simple stupidity”
clause.
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Have noticed that NOAA records in many categories has been clipped off after 2000.
With all the snow this year in New England, I tried to find total snowfall by year in Boston (and other prominent places) to see how we fit in. But the data just drops off after around 2000 dependent on location.
If anyone has a link I’d be grateful. Be happy to be wrong on this.
Down the memory hole, Winston.
I must concur with tonyb, the link I use (and so does tonyb) is still up:
http://hadobs.metoffice.com/hadcet/cetml1659on.dat
REPLY: I don’t think either of you read this story carefully. Look at the last sentence, I attribute this to blunder. Nowhere in the story was “conspiracy” mentioned. Tony B was the first to use that word in his comments. Also, please note that this isn’t about bookmarked links, but about public links on Met Office web page changing. – Anthony
is that a twelve month running average in the last graph? it dont look nearly right!
*(in the past 7-10 years)
vukcevic at 7:14 am
Are you looking at minima or mean? The mean for 2011/1 is 3.7 and according to my math the average 1659-2011 is 3.24.
Having worked for government institutions in the UK I would suspect cock-ups and not conspiracies in most cases, including this one. I was warned by a friendly Saffer when I began working here that English civil servants don’t fix problems – they write reports outlining the problem, send the report of to a superior, then sit back, proud of themselves and secure in the knowledge that they did their duty, while the problem continues unabated. Most of us Colonials have a lifelong habit of fixing problems as we stumble into them; that behavioural trait seems to have become a genetic difference between our UK cousins and us.
“never attibute malice what can be explained by simple stupidity”
Those in power stuff bureaucracy full of stupids and red tape, so that their malice can be more easily passed off as a result of stupidity and red tape.
I’d attribute malice myself.
December was a cold month in the UK, but 2010 was the 12th coldest year since 1910. This doesn’t exactly fit well with the general CAGW theme of the web site, thus I can understand why they would not want the information to be too accessible. It was not easy to find it:
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/news/releases/archive/2011/cold-dec
I have always found the Met Office site “difficult”. I also noticed that we were treated to the UK National Series for their “2010 statistics” and not CET:-
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/news/releases/archive/2011/cold-dec
And there is no doubt the CET trend is cooling, something of which I have not heard or seen the MO comment upon:-
http://hadobs.metoffice.com/hadcet/graphs/HadCET_graph_ylybars_uptodate.gif
Maybe somebody else has?
I have had the same link for CET for many years now and it still works, hasn’t changed.
http://hadobs.metoffice.com/hadcet/cetml1659on.dat
Anthony
I have just noted your reply to other posts similar to mine. Changes in web pages maintained by public organisations in the UK (eg BBC) are not always directed or logical, sadly. I don’t think there is anything sinister here.
REPLY: Which is why my last sentence says: “never attribute to malice what can be explained by simple stupidity”. For some reason, some commenters don’t seem to get this. – Anthony
“David has helped develop and improve the 350-year Central England Temperature (CET) dataset”
Philip Eden’s site describes the development and improvement, otherwise known as surreptitious falsification of the CET record, on the two pages of his website that I have linked below, q.v.
http://www.climate-uk.com/page5.html
http://www.climate-uk.com/CETcheck.htm
He produces his own continuation CET record, post Manley, from sites that are more representative of those used by the late Pr.Manley up to 1971.
http://www.climate-uk.com/index.html
In all that I have read by him he appears to be an even handed follower of the scientific method, and never given to fits of climactic climate change hyperbole.
Sam the Skeptic says:
February 14, 2011 at 8:01 am
……….
Yes, minima; sorry omitted ‘min’.
The global temperature data above shows the change from 1980 to be 0.5K. The HadCet shows closer to 0.9K. The Arctic is … greater than 0.9K since 1980. Same with New Zealand, officially.
Since the local is greater than the average, there must be a large area with 0.3K since 1980, or even a negative amount. Since the warmists cherry pick to show how hot some areas are, it would be interesting to identify where and to whate extent on the planet things have been minimally warming or even cooling since 1980.
The global thing isn’t global. It can’t be with the numbers we are shown.
A Bing search on “CET data page” (without the quotes) returns the proper link as the second item — first is a link to this WUWT page.
350 years of CET data = invaluable.
First (1659) and last (2010) dates identical = PRICELESS!!
Or maybe they simply moved the link until they can “adjust” it to “properly” reflect the temperatures.
It is an example of many web pages that are changed without a lot of weight put on what the end user might really be looking for.
Aviation uses a check list that is tested for content, accuracy, and relevance. True the web site content lacking something as treasured as long term temperature data is not a serious safety issue, but it shows the lack of producing any sort of check and balance to the content deemed important. For all we know, it was just redone to produce some work for bureaucratic self generated importance. There is no liability in not posting a specific link, so therefore a redirect of what was important at the time of reconstruction.
Personal opinion: A strange way appear professional and a good way to attract criticism.
REPLY: Which is why my last sentence says: “never attribute to malice what can be explained by simple stupidity”. For some reason, some commenters don’t seem to get this. – Anthony
========================================================
How many mulligans do they get? Is it cheating or the simple fact they can’t play?
Some of us are incredulous to the thought. The thought goes something like this, “How can it be that the worlds smartest climate scientists are simply too stupid to maintain a link that has been there for quite some time. If the organization can’t perform such basic tasks, how and why is it that so many lend such credibility to them.” How many mulligans do they get?
Whatever happened to the CET hokey stick? Not enough adjustments lately?
You mean there was
Global WarmingClimate Disruption back in 1890 ?This is why WUWT is so important to me. I am no climate scientist or meteorologist but my work for 40 years and life is very close to the earth and it’s weather. I was also raised to understand the scientific method and see it as very important. Many projects I do entail Environmental Impact Studies and the project hinges on the outcome of those studies. I find it facinating to observe the collection of data and the assesement process. It seems to me the observer changes the observed. Dishonesty, no, conspiracy, no but something happens with the assimilation process and human nature. I’ve followed this website since it started and it seems to be a common thread throughout and the many website which have sprung from the debate. A scientist or study group introduces a hypothesis and then everyone jumps on that hypothesis and criticizes the collection of the data. But the real problem, I think, may lie in the unspoken, unconscious ability to tweek the outcome of the effort. This temperature record is one of the most important ones of it’s kind because of it’s simple factuality. I try and pick up these simple illustrative pieces from this website and communicate them to politicians who may see value. These politicians are inundated with “studies” and tweeked information from all sides. Simple accurate information is what they need from us. Thank you again.
Were there digital calibrated instrumentation used back in the 1600’s to record that data? What was their benchmark? A drunken bishop recording the data on sheep skin. What is the variability in analog versus digital data? The short guy looking up at the thermometer thought is was hot. The 6 foot 2 recorder looked down and saw cold temperature. To compare apples and oranges and expect to get some conclusion based on two different technologies and methodoligies is patently absurd. Was the data for analog gotten from the original data set or passed down from three conversions? Worthless information meaning nothing.
Central England is but the oldest of about two dozen single site thermometer records that mainstream climatologists would rather did not exist. All but a couple if these show any sign whatsoever of recent warming that bucks the natural trend, and yet are classic old cities that show no uptick even in the unadjusted raw data. Here are the ones that have name recognition, in a single glance: http://oi49.tinypic.com/rc93fa.jpg
The Brits are just now making CET graphs as obscurely hard to run into as the Yanks have made their own old site records. And of course when you do finally find a chart they cut off the oldest data and use deceiving chartsmanship (akin to how the NOAA presents its version of the global average, as I have pointed out here: http://oi49.tinypic.com/2mpg0tz.jpg ).
It is a rhetorical question whether alarmists would plaster these records all over their report covers if they formed nice little hockey sticks. These records are to climatology what hand axes being found amongst dinosaur bones would be to evolutionary theory.