Guest post by John A.
This is a shout-out to a fascinating post by Pat Frank on Jeff Id’s blog on the mysterious changes to climate history coming from James Hansen’s GISS dataset. Here’s how Pat describes it:
I’ve just had a guest post on Jeffid’s the Air Vent, showing that between 1988 and 2010 there is a strange mutability in the trend of global air temp as produced by GISS, under Jim Hansen’s by-line.
Folks here might be interested. According to GISS, in 1988 the early 20th century warmed at about the same rate as the late 20th century. By 1999, the late 20th century warmed 2.3 times faster, increasing to 2.8 times faster by 2010.
This increase in rate wasn’t due to an accelerating late 20th century trend. It’s mostly due to modifications of the 1880-1920 record.
Do the systematic changes show an increasingly sophisticated understanding of early 20th century natural variability? A better perception, perhaps, of UHI effects or station site inhomogeneities? None of that seems likely.
Rather, it seems more likely that anthropogenic climate change has much more to do with the climate data than it does with the climate itself.
Well worth a read.
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“Here, the expected 1990 – 2003 period is missing so the correlations aren’t so hot! Yet the WMO codes and station names /locations are identical (or close). What the hell is supposed to happen here? Oh, yeah – there is no ‘supposed’,
I can make it up. So I have.”
~Harry the programmer,
“Harry_read_me file” metadata
Curiousgeorge says:
May 14, 2011 at 4:01 pm
“Sort of related: CNN Opinion. Climate change is responsible for the Mississippi flooding this year. http://www.cnn.com/2011/OPINION/05/10/kemp.mississippi.river/index.html?hpt=Sbin”
Having lived many years in St. Louis, I just love these “thousand year flood” stories. I called a local news station in 1993 to ask them if this thousand year flood resembled more the thousand year flood of 1982 or the one of 1973.
I guess none of the news channels are commenting on how many of the flood victims live in a flood plain. Apparently, today, if a developer builds a levee, no matter how incompetently, then whatever is behind it is no longer in a flood plain. The work that the Corps of Engineers should be doing is cracking down on those who build in flood plains.
@Ian George:
I don’t understand how these two graphs can actually be on the NASA web site, yet they are. I couldn’t find the page that you accessed these pages from, did they provide any explanation why “identical” graphs are so different?
Thanks.
So, if I am reading this right, the data has been altered in a way that late 20th century warming is shown as greater than early 20th Century, but it mutes the actual warming? Well that makes perfect sense to me. It’s always been more important to the warmers to match temperatures to CO2 than it is to show actual warming trends.
By showing a marked increase in warming in the last half of the century they get a better fit to what CO2 was doing in that time. Greater warming that mostly in the first half of the century would be incredibly inconvenient to the narrative.
“It’s not that it isn’t happening…We KNOW it’s happening. We just don’t understand the data.”
I see why.
For the record, between March and April, UAH went UP 0.22 C, bit GISS went DOWN 0.02 C.
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/tabledata/GLB.Ts+dSST.txt
Britain’s very warm April that was commented on in other threads meant nothing from a global perspective so it certainly cannot be used as proof of global warming. In the last 10 years, according to GISS, three Aprils were warmer.
Polish SSR snark-adage: “The future is certain. Only the past is subject to change.”
4 1000-yr floods in 40 yrs, now! There’s only one possible ‘splanation: Time Is (Anthropogenically) Disrupted! Time’s job is to keep everything from happening all at once, they say, but it’s falling down on the job. It’s probably because of Moore’s Law, or SLT.
Hi Bennett:
This is the main link to all the GISS data.
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/station_data/
The opening page gives you the ”after combining sources at the same location” (‘raw’) data set.
Click on the world map area for the station you want. The new link will give you a selection of stations in that area. Choose one to get the station you want.
Then go back to the front page and click on “after cleaning/homogeneity adjustment” in the data set window. Go through the same procedure as above to see the data set for the GISS ‘manipulation’.
Notice the ‘set=1’ and ‘set=2’ in the web address – this is what distinguishes them.
Some stations have not changed but I noticed that last year a few stations that did have adjustments applied have reverted back to the original ‘raw’ data.
Hansen did write a paper on why GISS ‘changed’ the data. Maybe there is an explanation here.
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/
I see a new Hockey Stick in the making.
As I’ve explained many times there were many changes between 1988 and the present
1. different stations.
2. different datasets
3. different adjustment
4. different algorithm.
nothing here to see again.
Australian Temps are being tortured by our Gov,s BoM.
[url=http://kenskingdom.wordpress.com/]http://kenskingdom.wordpress.com/[/url]
James Hansen lead the way. The Man who made global warming:
http://www.appinsys.com/GlobalWarming/US_NoWarming.htm%5B/url%5D
And not to leave New Zealand out of the game this : search for the NIWA temps fraud.
With all these DATA screw ups I feel truth in Climate Change Science-Change- Science-Climate-Science-Change——a future script for a nuthouse movie.
Here last winter- Katoomba we had a record cold of six consecutive nightime temps below -3deg minus -6deg once.
😉
Old news, see my WUWT postings on Makiko Sato’s FOIA email to Hansen that details how 1934 was over a half degree C warmer than 1998 according to her 1999 accounting. Then, after SEVEN adjustments, with 1934 continually getting downgraded and 1998 being repeatedly propped up against its tendency to cool down, they end up in a dead heat in her 2008 accounting. The graphic analogizes their data adjustment process to a downhill slope for poor old 1934 and ski lift assist for their favorite, 1998. At the time of the analysis, the 1934 data was old enough to qualify for Social Security, but NASA GISS made it work for them :^)
My Hansen juggling the globe WUWT posting includes a blink graphic detailing how wholesale adjustments were made to systematically cool down data from before 1970 and superheat data after 1970 to exaggerate the amount of warming by at least 0.3ºC, more than 40% of the supposed warming since 1880.
The above wxamples are for US mean temperature anomalies. If US data, under our control, is so screwed up (according to the need to continually re-adjust it) how screwed up must the world data be? And we are forcing worldwide “environmental” laws that will continue to wreck our economies on the basis of this flawed data? Or, is the original data less corrupt than the agenda-driven analysis and re-analysis?
alclimatists
climate sciostitutes.
my entry for the descriptions of the worst of the worst
alclimatists
climate sciostitutes.
Well, I guess all this warming was due to the books being cooked!
Hansen, what a creep. Why he still draws a paycheck from NASA is beyond me.
This new term “Anthropocene” I hear bandied about should actually be changed to the “Anthroobscene” to describe a nefarious scheme to skew the data; to tilt the hockey stick; to fudge the data without conscience–such obscenely unscientific actions will mark this period as one of the darkest in earth’s history.
Having lived many years in St. Louis, I just love these “thousand year flood” stories. I called a local news station in 1993 to ask them if this thousand year flood resembled more the thousand year flood of 1982 or the one of 1973.
Nice work, Theo, very funny. I’m from St. Louis, used to visit a lot – as in all of those Summers, and still have one sister there in close communication, who is very interested in the weather, facts, logic, etc.. The Warmists really have no idea what they’re up against.
[snip – inappropriate ~jove, mod]
As Bob Carter says at the start of a lecture.
‘Has there been any global warming? Well, it depends where you start measuring your temperature.’
It also depends on the applied corrections. (and the bias of the corrector)
Well done Pat Frank, and thanks John A. for bringing it to our attention. Proof that not only have the official “records” been tampered with before, but that they are still being routinely tampered with. The more of this sort of thing I see, the more firm my conclusion that – as things stand – the phrase “climate science” is an oxymoron; this is not science in any sense I recognise. Disgraceful and inexcusable.
I’ve posted this link before. I was interested in Death Valley temperatures because dry places (deserts and the poles) are the “canary in the mine” for CO2 GHG effects. The 1998 yearly average for Death Valley was the third coldest when 1998 is claimed to be the highest due to GHGs. Why isn’t Death Valley much warmer in 1998? I captured the old data up to about 2003. The current published data values are not quite the same. See for yourself: http://jamesbat.files.wordpress.com/2010/02/dv-all.jpg. The 1998 yearly average for Death Valley is no longer the third coldest.
Jim
I have been reading about another consensus held by scientific experts in the 1940’s.
The consensus was, that after two inferred cases of bats giving humans rabies bats needed to be exterminated in the USA.
Hundreds of millions of bats were killed off despite there being no epidemic of bat induced rabies.
Today the attempted extermination of bats is considered to have been misguided but that won’t repair the damage caused by that particular little bit of consensus science.
Email exchanges between dissenting scientists and RealClimate scientists are always fun to read.
Rancourt (a physicist) recently wrote a paper on radiation physics, the greenhouse effect, and the Earth’s radiation balance, arriving at the conclusion that “the predicted effect of CO2 is two orders of magnitude smaller than the effects of other parameters.” He sent the paper to the Real Climate folks for input. He now presents the email exchanges.
He introduces the exchanges as follows:
How do scientists operate? How do they attempt to influence each other? How do they protect their intellectual interests? Do they use intimidation? Paternalism? Do they mob challenges from outside their chosen field?
Consider this example from the area of climate science, involving some of the top establishment scientists in the field…
Peer criticism — Revised version of Rancourt radiation physics paper.
1. Rancourt writes original version of article, HERE.
2. Asks for and receives peer criticism, HERE.
3. Rancourt writes significantly revised version of article, HERE.
4. Asks for and receives further peer criticism about revised version, PRESENT POST.
5. It appears that Rancourt’s revised paper is correct: The predicted effect of CO2 is two orders of magnitude smaller than the effects of other parameters.
Following the posting of THIS significantly revised version of Denis Rancourt’s paper about Earth’s radiation balance, Rancourt asked the climate scientists at RealClimate for follow-up criticism — resulting in this email exchange:
http://climateguy.blogspot.com/2011/05/peer-criticism-revised-version-of.html
2 videos that show the change in GISS compared to other data sets. The change is clearest starting around 1998.
Part 1