Over at JunkScience.com Steve Milloy writes:
Skeptic Setback? ‘New’ CRU data says world has warmed since 1998 But not in a statistically significant way.
Gerard Wynn writes at Reuters:
Britain’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU), which for years maintained that 1998 was the hottest year, has published new data showing warmer years since, further undermining a sceptic view of stalled global warming.
The findings could helpfully move the focus from whether the world is warming due to human activities – it almost certainly is – to more pressing research areas, especially about the scale and urgency of human impacts.
After adding new data, the CRU team working alongside Britain’s Met Office Hadley Centre said on Monday that the hottest two years in a 150-year data record were 2005 and 2010 – previously they had said the record was 1998.
None of these findings are statistically significant given the temperature differences between the three years were and remain far smaller than the uncertainties in temperature readings…
And Louise Gray writes in the Telegraph: Met Office: World warmed even more in last ten years than previously thought when Arctic data added
Some of the change had to do with adding Arctic stations, but much of it has to do with adjustment. Observe the decline of temperatures of the past in the new CRU dataset:
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UPDATE: 3/21/2012 10AM PST – Joe D’Aleo provides updated graphs to replace the “quick first look” one used in the original post, and expands it to show comparisons with previous data sets in short and long time scales. In the first graph, by cooling the early part of the 20th century, the temperature trend is artificially increased.In the second graph, you can see the offset of CRUtemp4 being lower prior to 2005, artificially increasing the trend. I also updated my accidental conflation of HadCRUT and CRUTem abbreviations.
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Data plotted by Joe D’Aleo. The new CRUTem4 is in blue, old CRUTem3 in red, note how the past is cooler (in blue, the new dataset, compared to red, the new dataset), increasing the trend. Of course, this is just “business as usual” for the Phil Jones team.
Here’s the older CRUTem data set from 2001, compared to 2008 and 2010. The past got cooler then too.
On the other side of the pond, here’s the NASA GISS 1980 data set compared with the 2010 version. More cooling of the past.
And of course there’s this famous animation where the middle 20th century got cooler as if by magic. Watch how 1934 and 1998 change places as the warmest year of the last century. This is after GISS applied adjustments to a new data set (2004) compared with the one in 1999
Hansen, before he became an advocate for protest movements and getting himself arrested said:
The U.S. has warmed during the past century, but the warming hardly exceeds year-to-year variability. Indeed, in the U.S. the warmest decade was the 1930s and the warmest year was 1934.
Source: Whither U.S. Climate?, By James Hansen, Reto Ruedy, Jay Glascoe and Makiko Sato — August 1999 http://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/briefs/hansen_07/
In the private sector, doing what we see above would cost you your job, or at worst (if it were stock data monitored by the SEC) land you in jail for securities fraud. But hey, this is climate science. No worries.
And then there’s the cumulative adjustments to the US Historical Climatological Network (USHCN)
Source: http://cdiac.ornl.gov/epubs/ndp/ushcn/ts.ushcn_anom25_diffs_urb-raw_pg.gif
All up these adjustments increase the trend in the last century. We have yet to witness a new dataset release where a cooling adjustment has been applied. The likelihood that all adjustments to data need to be positive is nil. This is partly why they argue so fervently against a UHI effect and other land use effects which would require a cooling adjustment.
As for the Arctic stations, we’ve demonstrated recently how those individual stations have been adjusted as well: Another GISS miss: warming in the Arctic – the adjustments are key
The two graphs from GISS, overlaid with a hue shift to delineate the “after adjustment” graph. By cooling the past, the century scale trend of warming is increased – making it “worse than we thought” – GISS graphs annotated and combined by Anthony Watts
And here is a summary of all Arctic stations where they cooled the past:. The values are for 1940. and show how climate history was rewritten:
CRU uses the same base data as GISS, all rooted in the GHCN, from NCDC managed by Dr. Thomas Peterson, who I have come to call “patient zero” when it comes to adjustments. His revisions of USHCN and GHCN make it into every global data set.
Watching this happen again and again, it seems like we have a case of:
Those who cool the past are condemned to repeat it.
And they wonder why we don’t trust them or their data.
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It’s worse than we thought,
by the time we get to HadCRUT10 the Earth will be a second sun.
Hansen is a Marxist. He lamented to Clinton years ago about the injustices of global wealth distribution. He’s been outed many times but these Marxists are like zombies. You have to whack them more than once.
I just watched the video of Peter Stott from the UK Hadley Centre. He claims the two changes for HADCRUT4 are
1) after the second world war the British ships threw buckets over their bow to measure sea surface temperatures. They have now “corrected” these measurements for cooling by evaporation of water in the buckets during the few minutes before the temperature was actually measured. Hence the drop in temperatures during the 40’s is reduced !
2) They have “discovered” some new station data in the Russian Arctic region covering recent decades. This region has been warming more than elsewhere and adding these new data the global temperatures have consequently “increased” a bit.
My questions.
– What about poor coverage in the southern hemisphere which has shown little if any warming ? Have new stations been discovered there ?
– Surely any new Arctic stations within a single 5×5 degree cell will only effect the average temperature in that one particular cell reducing any error – certainly not the global average.
I hope they release the new station data soon so that these claims can be independently verified !
This is blatant fraud and has nothing to do with science. Political activists have hijacked climate science. These people have a political agenda – the destruction of capitalism, freedom of speech and thought and the imposition of a green dictatorship. They will do anything to impose their foolish goals . . . Anything ! Morality means nothing to these sick-in-the-head people.
So those that insist on integrity in data sets are anti-science Luddites? Those that commit fraud are the Defenders of the Earth (TM).
It’s no good trying to reason with these people. It’s like talking to farm animals.
Another way of looking at it, perhaps?
1) First attempt – they got it wrong
2) they adjusted, saying it was now right but still it was wrong
3) they adjusted yet again and still not right
4) more adjustments, so all of the previous adjustments and there reasons were incorrect or badly judged. And yet they NOW say it’s RIGHT!
Hmm, this really is crying wolf a bit too often……..
Peter Ward says:
March 19, 2012 at 10:14 am
There is of course nothing wrong with amending data in the light of increasing knowledge. But that implies a process which can be explained and justified, which is transparent and is published so that all can understand and comment
EVERYTHING is WRONG about adjusting past data. Past data is sacresanct. You may manipulate data in the present but you MUST save the old and raw data for post-analysis. These clowns manipulate the data and then discard the original.
Obviously the way to fix global warming is just to wait. Apparently the temperature in the past gets lower all by itself. By 2022 the 2012 temperature will have dropped all the way to normal – whatever that is.
A pity that they’ve no doubt learned to be more reticent with their email and we won’t get to see them discussing this. No doubt someone would have argued for the need to counter the “no recent warming” meme. Anything for the cause you know.
Just out of interest have any of these ‘Climate Centers’ passed a Quality Audit – the ISO-9000 series for example? Are governments making decisions based on data that does not meet the government mandates of quality assurance for companies that are suppliers?
“Steven Mosher says:
March 19, 2012 at 12:43 pm …”
So what was (according to Moshtemp) the average temperature in Reykjavik in 1940: 5°C or 3°C?
Steven Mosher, yes its just ‘lucky chance ‘ that all adjustments happen to be in one direction and help to support ‘the cause’ which is keeping them in gravy. Now hows about they provide good scientific reasons for the need for these ‘adjustments’ and make the process transparent , for if their science is OK they really can’t have any reason not to do so.
so Steve M…if I have a stalls selling apples, and I want to compare this years sales with last years sales, can I add my new stall I opened this year, then compare the 2 stalls and decide that last year I had a terrible year selling apples, as I sold many more this year?
Next year when I open my third stall, I will realise that my original stall hardly sold any apples at all. And I thought I was doing quite well, that first stall allowing me to open new stalls and all. Gosh how little I knew.
Blimey…good job I don’t sell oranges or pears as well or I would not know what to think.
Ok…sarc off. I think we all are grown up to know exactly why extra data is added, and why its not added sometimes. We have all sat around enough board rooms and decided how to make it fit what we want to project. But lets not actually believe the output of our data manipulations ourselves eh?
I think the posters pouring scorn and satire have the right attitude. It is, after all, laughable.
Steven Mosher says:
March 19, 2012 at 12:43 pm
Questions for Steve: Where is this “new” data coming from? Are people today suddenly discovering “lost” climate data under their beds or in their closets? Do you have links to this “new” data? Can you conclusively demonstrate that the past will always cool and the present will always warm? If the new data is located physically close to existing stations, are the “new” old data consistent with the “old” old data?
Thanks.
Steve Mosher,
Please explain where greenhouse theory allows the surface to warm at a faster rate than the troposphere. As I recall, that is not what the “theory” predicts. You have avoided this contradiction at every turn.
In 1865 meteorologists in Sion, Switzerland, measured an average temperature of 10.5°C; that is about 1.3°C above the mean from 1961-1990, which is 9.2°C.
According to the “homogenized” data of Meteoswiss, it was actually 7.9°C, that is 1.3°C below the average:
http://www.meteoschweiz.admin.ch/web/de/klima/klima_heute/homogene_reihen.Par.0054.DownloadFile.tmp/vergleichoriginalhomogen.pdf
So Hansen is, in comparison, actually quite cautious, almost conservative.
Mosher,
That can’t explain why they are slicing between .3 and 2C of temperatures off individual stations. Such a strategy implies they view their data adjustments (model) as more reliable than the actual data.
March 19, 2012 at 12:43 pm
Are you trying to say that adding stations in the Southern Hemisphere makes (eg) Reykjavik’s past colder and present warmer? I would love to see the physical mechanism for that.
An ultimate way to hide the decline is the Metoffice website.
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/climatechange/science/monitoring/hadcrut3.html
Declining temperatures are obscured by a side ad.
@Steven Mosher, more Arctic data does not mean the global average would become warmer. Average is not calculated as a simple average of available stations, but more Arctic stations means the individual Arctic grid values would be more precise.
As somebody told above, those new Arctic data must be warm like hell, if the relatively tiny Arctic now skews the WHOLE GLOBAL RECORD upwards instead of decline. Gotta wait for McIntyre analysis.
It’s worse than we thought!
If you add in the Arctic stations, the 1940s should get warmer (not colder).
This rationale is completely bogus. The records previously showed polar amplification made the 1940s even warmer in the Arctic than the general global temp anomaly.
(But it might explain the recent flurry of Arctic records changing 1940s cooling – they were making room for Hadcrut4 to increase the warming trend).
On the other hand, the Gore Effect will now strike. The Arctic is going to get very cold now. Then they will have to come up with some other adjustment process etc. etc. (why don’t they put 5.35*ln(CO2now/CO2orig)*0.81C into the global temperature record right now – they know they want to – just do it).
Kevin says:
March 19, 2012 at 10:33 am
Statistically, shouldn’t adjustments themselves have zero trend? It looks like the adjustments themselves account for 0.5 deg C per century of warming.
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Yes, It is one of the methods of figuring out if you have fraud going on in a laboratory. I have fired a few rears after catching some idiot tech messaging data (ain’t statistics great). Too bad the taxpayer can not do the same with these jokers.
I think we need a dose of the way-back machine again. I was more or less ignoring “global warming” until 2008, when I attended a conference and in one session the speaker said, “You don’t need to take a poll or google it or ask your friends about global warming, everything you need to know about global warming is right here.” (I’m paraphrasing, of course, that was 5+ years ago and I didn’t record anything) and gave the realclimate web address. He also said, “The debate is over…” and that’s when I was sure I needed to research this.
So when I got back home to my desk, I first checked out the realclimate website. This conference was the annual GovEnergy conference, held in Phoenix 4-6 August 2008, although I wasn’t back at my desk ’til Monday the 11th, so I visited realclimate some time after that, I can’t remember if it was days, weeks or months. The very 1st thing, top of the bar, I think, but could have been posted before I went to the conference, was an article declaring, “…we know global warming is happening, but we can’t find it in the record. So the record must be wrong… and we’re setting about to fix that.” I can’t remember who wrote and/or posted this article, but I thought it was the Webmaster, Mr. Gavin Schmidt himself. But I could also be wrong about that. Nonetheless, I took that as my clue to research fast, before everything disappeared. Furthermore, this altering of the records comes as no surprise, we were warned!
Since then, however, I have tried to search realclimate archives and I can’t find that article. This is why I guess we need the way-back machine, I think it was “disappeared”. Is there anybody that can help?
First, reading about is some weeks ago when it was announced, I got annoyed
about the HOT SPOT CHASING and then REDRAWING PAST TEMPS……
Now I got calmed down because once we will have the Warmists out one day, we
will redraw the temp statistics to the previous HadCRUT2 and 3 values….and put the
forgers to where they belong……Result:
A forgery is NOT permanent by only temporary for 1 – 2 decades until Warmists
will throw in the towel…..
But all their forging will not be capable of HIDING THE Temp-DECLINE OF THE
FUTURE….global temps reached their top plateau and cannot rise any further,
they even will go down 0.1’C per decade……. considering ongoing forgery
towards HADCRUT5, 6,7,8 aimed at hiding this 0.1’C decline, then the Plateau
will continue for the next decades and stay constant instead of decreasing
So we will have to live with it until the tide turns…
JS
Andrew30 says:
March 19, 2012 at 11:10 am
This is why the Arctic Sea Ice levels are so important.
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Who says those can not be “Adjusted” too? We are not the keepers of the data “They” are. Thank goodness for Dr. Spencer.