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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The x axis is not clear to me. It seems that every line on the x axis is 10years. Are data points given for one specific year? (Is it a yearly graph or a monthly graph?) There doesn’t seem to be much space for a monthly graph. If that’s the case, why would the December 2010 data point go on the graph, when it should be the point for the 2010 year? Just trying to understand this graph.
The Daily CET Anomaly page at http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/climatechange/science/monitoring/indicators.html is also down.
David Larsen says: “Were there digital calibrated instrumentation used back in the 1600′s to record that data?”
No, but common digital calibration isn’t significantly better than the methods used then.
“What was their benchmark?”
Boiling water and ice. Duh.
“A drunken bishop recording the data on sheep skin…”
I’ll not peruse this nonsense any further. Go and Google metrology, get some actual facts, then come back with your sheep skin, your Eminence.
Why would the Met office try and hide this data? Thousands of people will have downloaded this data.
There is what you would expect, typically random English weather.
Stephan says:
February 14, 2011 at 9:50 am
It will take about another 3 years before it is proven that the deniers were right and none will lose jobs etc they will simply fade away….
They’re probably hoping to hang on long enough to claim credit for the cooling. Ever heard the joke about the white lines and the elephants? No? It goes like this:-
A workman is painting white lines in the middle of the road and a guy comes up and says ‘What are those white lines for?’ Well, this isn’t really a dumb question – white lines are there for all sorts of reasons. But the workman is having a bad day, so he says ‘They’re to keep the elephants away.’ The other guy, not wanting to appear stupid, says ‘But there aren’t any elephants around here.’ To which the workman, quick as a flash, replies, ‘That shows how well they work, then, doesn’t it?’
Analysing a joke is thankless, but in this case it’s worth pointing out that obviously the humour relies on the ascribing of a major effect (the absence of elephants) to a trivial cause (white lines), when there are clearly many other far more important factors at work. So, to re-phrase the joke:-
Joe:- ‘Why am I paying so much for my petrol and electricity?’
Warmist:- ‘That’s to counteract Global Warming.’
Joe:- ‘But it’s getting colder!’
Warmist:- ‘That shows how well the measures are working, then, doesn’t it?’
Like I said, the warmists will try to hang on as long as they can and then it’ll be ‘Look at how clever we’ve been – we’ve fixed the Earth! Now if you just keep on subsidising those windmills and funding our research…..’
Not sure how I got these but here are some ‘daily’ updates on:
http://hadobs.metoffice.com/hadcet/cet_info_mean.html
and here for monthly updates
http://www.junkscience.com/MSU_Temps/Warming_Look.html
Maybe they’ve hired the folks from over at the BBC, specifically, the ones that gave us this:
From http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A387029:
Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal
Daft as a hairbrush, the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal is arguably the most insanely idiotically dense creature in existence. It believes that if you can’t see it, it can’t see you. Therefore, if you are faced by the horrid (yes, horrid, in spite of its intelleigence, or lack of) Beast you should wrap your towel around your head (you do have one, don’t you!?) to TEMPORARILY ward off the Beast’s voracious apetite and furious… fury… sorry. Yes, temporarily. The Beast WILL eventually realise its mistake and find you. Also, for further confusion on the Beast’s part, you may scratch your name somewhere. To that we will come. In vanity or for poor memory’s sake, each Beast keeps a record of its killings and eatings. This list is usually in an ante-room from the main chamber, and therefore easily accessible. This list is easily accessible and defacable, to which we are, by degrees, coming. It is easily defacable by the many rocks strewn about the lair floor invariably favoured by Beasts of Traal. Which is terribly convenient, Traal being a very rocky planet. Whilst being concealed with in your towel, grab a handy rock and scratch your name into the list. The Beast will now think it has already eaten you, giving you more time to escape. Note that no one has actually PROVED this first-hand, and neither the Guide nor any of its researchers (especially myself) take any responsibility for any personal injury sustained during the execution of the above tactics, and be warned you take this advice at your own risk.
Hey, if you can’t see it’s getting colder, it must be getting warmer…
Al Gore says the North Pole will be ice free by next year:
http://gatewaypundit.rightnetwork.com/2011/02/horror-junk-scientist-al-gore-predicts-north-pole-will-be-completely-ice-free-by-next-year
Jorge, I worked at GE for a while until the division I was at was sold when Neutron Jack came on board. We used the National Bureau of Standards (NBS) calibration standards for all instrumentation. It was done in a lab and we controlled the environment enough to get a high standard and low tolerance variance in the instuments. What analog thermomaters were calibrated. What was the benchmark. What if the lines on the thermomaters were wider in one area and not in the other. Were all the thermomaters calibrated to the bottle of cognac or what? You have no concept of what the scientific method is let alone replication to verify if it is indeed a fact or hypothesis. Confidence intervals in minipulated data groups don’t mean anything either because there was no standard then. Let alone 10 or 50 thousand years ago.
Sorry folks I have not read all the post’s – but had to put this in.
http://c3headlines.typepad.com/.a/6a010536b58035970c0120a7c87805970b-pi
tonyb says:
February 14, 2011 at 9:17 am
Once again I must stress I do not subscribe to any conspiracy theory. The Met office data sets are in exactly the same place as I have always found them
What is interesting is to see the extremely gentle rise in temperatures which can be seen here from 1659
http://c3headlines.typepad.com/.a/6a010536b58035970c0120a7c87805970b-pi
I think your valcualted trend and regression line is misleading. For example, the 1800-1900 LS trend is ~0.03 deg per century, i.e. virtually flat. Whereas the 1900-2000 LS trend is ~0.65 deg per century. There is more going on here than a gentle montonic rise from 1659. The rise accelerated considerably over the course of the 20th century.
[“What was their benchmark?”
Boiling water and ice. Duh.]
Actually it used to be the internal temperature of a horse and then the arm pit temperature of a thermometer maker’s wife. The boiling water high mark appeared with the F scale of 1724. Yet though the absolute T might be off by a degree or two, the relative changes, year to year, read from the same thermometer, would only be off by a fraction of a degree since the high point calibration error is divided by 100 or 212 depending on what scale type of thermometer they were using. The quality of workmanship in the post Renaissance era isn’t exactly something you’d call medieval!
I don’t know if it is politically intentioned – but I would say that the Met office website has certainly changed over the last few months…….IMHO. Perhaps this could be verified by web archiving sites (I don’t know about these things, but understand they exist?)
Gee Anthony, that third chart, “Mean Central England Temperature” looks almost a dead match for the ‘Integration under the curve of the Sunspot Count’ chart I sent you over a year ago. Also much like the Jean et al chart you had in “It’s the Sun, Stupid” post. Could it be, oh no!, the sun after all ??? Oh my!
Told you back then we were in for a big dive. Well… not me, the data.
So that’s what a untainted temperature chart looks like. I like it!
I clicked on the Met Office link above: http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/climate/uk/2010
I entered CET into search box and got 8 results, the first said:
Central England Temperature (CET)
Central England Temperature is representative of a roughly triangular area of the United Kingdom, enclosed by Bristol, Lancashire and London. The monthly series begins in 1659, and is the longest available instrumental record of temperature in the world.
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/climatechange/science/monitoring/hadcet.html
But not as live link, the live link is in the title.
Comes up:
Page not found
The page you requested does not exist. Here are some options to help you find where you want to go:
The first three options: Get your bearings on the Met Office homepage, Use our site map, Refer to our frequently asked questions, did not have any obvious path to CET and several links followed in dead ends for it, gave up.
The fourth option, Search for the page you’re looking for: I again put CET into box, got the same eight links as before, clicked on the first and came back to Page not found.
Fifth option is to: Email the service desk details of this broken link. If it is from somewhere else on our site, we can fix it.
I moved on to the sixth option: The page you requested may be available in the UK Goverment Web Archive. Check for the page you requested in the Web Archive.
Check for page etc., live link which took me to: http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/+/http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/climatechange/science/monitoring/hadcet.html
Live link at the bottom of the page: >Further information and data for HadCET
– takes to new window: http://hadobs.metoffice.com/hadcet/
I haven’t tried all of the further 7 links from the search. David Parker and Tim Legg links both have a CET live link to above hadobs.metoffice, but the Layout 1 pdf, teachers downloads CC science poster – even after great magnification I couldn’t find any mention of CET.
No mention that Arrhenius wrote further, or that Mauna Loa is a volcano, or .. etc. What this needs is a real teacher’s correction on all the points made in it – quite useful for that, could be in an Advent calendar form, open the flap and get the real gen. Not as easy as that sounds, succinct rebuts to fit the space.
(As there’s a post on IR on WUWT front page) I notice that the Sun doesn’t send any to us.
Anyway, looks like it’s off the main Met Office site.
The acid test will be if they actually fix the link or not in the next month (allows for the ‘process’).
As for how the link got ‘bad’ – more a symptom of using a site CMS that does not support ‘logical linking’ – i.e. you link to the object that represents the page and query the page object for its final location on the site. That way if things do move all the links track and you can put in redirects to the new location as required..
they should all be locked up but the gov’t has no money to do it so they are all very lucky
There is one thing that all the honest, accountable, genuine readers of this blog will never understand, and that includes Anthony, you will never ever understand the workings of the criminal mind.
How many of you have said, or words to the effect, “I don’t know how he / she could have done such a terrible thing ?” ?
We make those statements because the actions of the dishonest are totally incomprehensible to the honest so we make allowances for their actions, like, they must have made a mistake, they were stupid, or some other feeble excuse and we never consider that they plotted and planed their actions right down to the last detail.
And we make those excuses to only make ourselves feel good, to be able to rationalize their actions takes away our pain.
The skeptics will never win this war by being honest nice people. The AGW crowd have the criminals in all the right places of power, they have the backing of Billions of dollars, and they have the backing of the MSM.
Every little stunt they pull is just another nail in our coffin, like hiding web pages. Eventually, the CET record will disappear completely.
How many times in the past have the criminals “burnt the books”.
As abhorrent as it sounds, we must take the fight up to the criminals now, both barrels, using their tactics. It will be too late when we are poor, cold and hungry.
The actions of the people in Cairo, Egypt, recently is the only way we will ever overcome this 30 year scam.
What other way did the Egyptians have to remove 30 years of oppression ?
Aren’t we in the same boat ?
A google search for “central england temperature record” gives the correct page as the second result on the list.
Google these days is so good at finding things, and academic research institutions are generally so awful at writing functional web pages, that it is usually much quicker to find academic stuff via google than by going to a main page and trying to navigate links.
Roger Knights says:
February 14, 2011 at 10:12 am
meemoe_uk says:
February 14, 2011 at 8:07 am
I’d attribute malice myself.
Me too.
And me
Perhaps we should be a bit skeptical about measurements prior to the early to mid eighteenth century. It looks like the first alcohol thermometers might have been made around 1630, but things that we would recognize as thermometer capable of producing results that could be calibrated against modern instruments didn’t turn up until the early 1700s
Does anyone have any idea how measurements were made in 1659 and the following years and how they were later assigned values on modern temperature scales?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_temperature_and_pressure_measurement_technology#1500s
John Finn
Don’t know why you would want to use a century trend when we have a 350 year one.
You missed out on the 1700-1800 trend in your list-was there a reason for that?
tonyb
> 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.
Hi there. This is your hippy-dippy climateman with your hippy-dippy climate, man. Now I imagine some of you were surprised by the really cold weather this past winter… especially if you read our winter forecast last fall, man.
With apologies to George Carlin, RIP. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z2HpB5CGfLQ
Note that the CET has existed with the urban heat island effect without anyone taking that into account . . . well until the late 1980. What did they do all of a sudden? Did they give the normal documented temperature, with the unimagined but natural included UHI effect, a double dose of the UHI effect because they imagined it because they believed it didn’t exist in the set before they included?
Hah but the creation of the IPCC can be said to show up in Englands CET set. Its creation in 1988 was just in the nick of time before temperatures skyrocketed out of proportion and CO2 levels broke through the “safe and normal” 350 ppmv (of course before industrial time that was 280, but heck who’s counting.)
It’s truly utterly amazing how many statistical coincidences happens around late 1980 all in economical favor to the alarmists. How many times does the same set of people hit the jackpot before the house starts pondering the cheat?
LMAO. Some commenters will get why 🙂