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.
What’s the problem of most of you people here with climate change? I give three options:
(1) Nothing changes and the ‘scientists’ got it all wrong.
(2) There is some minor, negligible change.
(3) The earth is warming and changes the world as we know it.
If I think about which option to choose, I go for number (3). Why? First of all, looking at this ‘adjusted data’, look at the US economic data that is changed, i.e. ‘adjusted’ all the time. There is preliminary data that is corrected after all the information has been gathered. One simply can’t know all the facts at the time. The weather station on my terrasse will tell me that it was like 45 °C the last summer. In my area, air temperature never was 45 °C. My weather station just is not a reliable source. This reading is required to be corrected for direct sun irradiation, adjacent walls that heat up, and so on and so on.
And anyway: we can’t destroy earth. Life is bigger than human existance. We could bomb the whole planet, life would not be gone. There would be some kind of climate and some kind of animals and plants. So why care about the current climate? Because I really like the climate the way it is right now. I mean: drylands could become fertile with climate change, wetlands could became farm land. What is positive and what is negative? The world will go on and adapt to every change we make, but will you still want to be where you are right now? Doing what you are doing right now?
These ‘scientists’ are trying to preserve is the world as we know it.
Mosh, could you elaborate or point me in the right direction? Why would adding more data cool the past and warm the present in reference to average global temp anomaly? I am assuming the data is previously unaccounted for temp anomalies. I don’t understand how you can assume a long term temperature anomaly, one way or the other, from geographic location.
Thanks,
JM
How can anyone make any decisions based on historical trends when the history keeps changing?
Why tomorrow 1951 may become as hot as Venus or as cold as Pluto! And the next day it could reverse, depending on political and budgetary needs.
“David A says:
March 19, 2012 at 11:08 am
Of course Hadcrut and GISS will now move even further from the satelite measurements. Any minute now we can expect Steve Mosher to swing by to tell us that is all a-ok, when clearly it is not.”
You were wrong, It actually took 1 hour and 35 minutes.
Anybody from Canada know why the UK was deprived of your data or was it by Met Office choice?
The following was issued by the Met office on 2nd Dec 2010:-
“Global-average annual temperature forecast”
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/research/climate/seasonal-to-decadal/long-range/glob-aver-annual-temp-fc
Scan down to the bottom of the page:-
Figure 3: “The difference in coverage of land surface temperature data between 1990-1999 and 2005-2010. Blue squares are common coverage. Orange squares are areas where we had data in the 90s but don’t have now and the few pale green areas are those where we have data now, but didn’t in the 90s. The largest difference is over Canada.”
Why did the Met Office no longer have the Canadian land surface temperature data? I am not aware of any of the stations being closed? If they have been could somebody please point me in the right direction?
No doubt they will argue that these adjustments were required in the interests of accuracy. And no doubt also they have all their arguments marshalled ready and waiting should someone wish to dispute what they have done. However there is no need for us to actually dispute the reasons for these adjustments. It is enough to note that there is a clear pattern of temperature readings declining with age of reading for whatever reason. We really don’t care about why that is so. It doesn’t matter. The mere fact that temperature readings fall with age of reading is indisputably something that should be taken into account in computing temperature trends.
The way to do this would be to graph temperature reading decline against age of reading and model it (as is traditional) with a linear model. This “rate of decline with age” should clearly be deducted when computing temperature trends.
Let me stress that this argument is indisputably correct regardless of whether the adjustments were made for proper reasons. That is because we may expect that current measurements of temperature will also be adjusted downwards as they age. The reasons for that adjustment are irrelevant. To refute this argument it would be necessary to explain why the clear pattern of temperature measurements declining as they age should not be expected to continue into the future.
New data or new interpretation?
It is a bit confusing both in the post and in the comments no clear distinction is made between the data as they are collected in the past on the one hand and the interpretation of them as presented in a graph on the other hand.
This distinction is paramount. Tot be able to understand the reasoning behind the interpretation and the conclusions on the basis of the data as they are presented you cannot do without.
Citation: “Britain’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU), which for years maintained that 1998 was the hottest year, has published new data (…)”
As I read on I get the impression it is not about the original data but about ways they are interpreted, corrected, and presented in graphs with new data added.
When you coin a phrase like “changing the data” it gives the impression someone has messed up the original collected “primary” or “raw” data. No surprise you see words like “fraud” or “should go to jail” in the comments. But has this really happened?
In my opinion it is up to anyone any time to interpret primary data as they like or combine with new data, as long as they don’t change the original “raw” datasets. And of course, as a scientist, you better explain your interpretation and be open to scrutiny.
How does HUDCRUT4 data compare with satellite data?
Steven Mosher says:
March 19, 2012 at 12:43 pm
So you’re saying that Hansen’s method of filling in the gaps doesn’t work because adding more data changes the result?
1998 is cooler by 0.01°C in the new hadcrut4 not more than 0.1° like in the false joe d’aleo graph….also the anomaly values are all wrong.
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/news/releases/archive/2012/hadcrut-updates
And of course all of those polar stations were moved by the shore ice effect, thereby revealing only local, not arctic wide, differences.
http://reallyrealclimate.blogspot.com/2010/01/giss-temperature-record-divergence.html
pretty soon I will have been born in the little ice age!
Surely fraud charges have to be in the works by now. A new twist on “hide the decline” or same ol same ol for “climate science” which btw is NOT science.
Changed data or new interpretation?
It is a bit confusing both in the post and in some of the comments no clear distinction is made between the data as they are collected in the past on the one hand and the interpretation of them as presented in a graph on the other hand.
To be able to understand the reasoning behind the interpretation and the conclusions on the basis of the data, you cannot do without this distinction.
Citation: “Britain’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU), which for years maintained that 1998 was the hottest year, has published new data (…)”
As I read on I get the impression it is not about the original data but about ways they are interpreted, corrected, and presented in graphs with new data added.
When you coin a phrase like “changing the data” it gives the impression someone has messed up the original collected “primary” or “raw” data. No surprise you see words like “fraud” or “should go to jail” in the comments. But has this really happened?
In my opinion it is up to anyone any time to interpret primary data as they like or combine with new data, as long as they don’t change the original “raw” datasets. And of course, as a scientist, you better explain your interpretation and be open to scrutiny.
In real science you try and get the models to fit the data.
In ‘climate science’, the data has to be changed to fit the models.
Most ‘climate science’ models are pre-set to demonstrate catastrophe is imminent. The real data shows this is nonsense, so the data has to be manipulated/tortured/adjusted to confirm that catastrophe is imminent.
The inconvenient fact is that real data is not allowed in climate science unless it has been properly manipulated to reflect the findings of the models; this process of manipulation is now starting to accelerate.
All these comments but no real answers as to what can be done. Why do we accept the manipulations of data that emanate from HADCRU et al? What’s the point of posters here agreeing with one another that this sort of behaviour by so called “scientists” is totally unacceptable. It is but what can be done about it? I dunno but surely someone must. Aren’t you all totally frustrated and aghast at the bastardisation of science? I am but what is to be done? Nothing it appears as this type of data manipulation is increasing. Governments don’t want to know. Climate scientists are protecting their salaries so we’re stuffed!! Good bloody Oh
I’ll bet they got a shipment of the Arctic temperature data that Hansen makes up from nothing extrapolating Arctic warming of huge regions with no data, using data from Arctic Rim sites that are suffering UHI as all of these sites are in or near settlements or airports.
I’ll bet good ol’ Hansen is such a talented “scientist” that he can take a datum point from a single temperature site and come up with a entire temperature map of the world and a long term trend. It must be awesome to be so talented!
“This has been shown before. It’s pretty well known.”
I see that Steven Mosher can still make vague, unscientific references.
Andrew
This makes me so f&$*&%g outraged…
How are they getting the Arctic data? There’s very few temp sensors there? Do these temps agree with what we can get from the satellite data? What does the satellite data show?
No, he’s saying the Phil Jones was told to ‘get with the program’ and added in Hansen’s faked-up Arctic data where formerly there was no data.
This is just plain out wrong, we have OBJECTIVE SATELLITE MEASUREMENTS SINCE 1979 that have an accuracy of 99.99%, don’t see no reason to change it, but organizations like NOAA, NASA, and CRU think it’s ok to make up data sand use it to prove their anti-capatialist, global warming alarmist agenda. This should be a good sign for the skeptics, as we know that things aren’t turning out as ‘planned” for them, and the world isn’t really warming as they though it would. I would expect more data tampering and misrepresentation in the future from organizations like these. Regardless, the AMSU temperatures since 2008 (the flip to cold PDO) have cooled about half a degree centigrade, and mid tropospheric temperatures are near ALL TIME LOWS, so clearly, the IPCC’s hot spot from CO2 isn”t happening. This fall doesn’t look any better, as the Japanese climate model, which accurately predicted last winter and fall’s temperatures, predicts that the world will enter the “Icebox”. With the oncoming El Nino coming on next winter, it won’t give any reason for the alarmists to indicate any “catastrophic global warming” here in the US, like they did this year.
Morten Sperger says:
March 19, 2012 at 2:20 pm
What’s the problem of most of you people here with climate change? I give three options:….
….Because I really like the climate the way it is right now. I mean: drylands could become fertile with climate change, wetlands could became farm land. What is positive and what is negative? The world will go on and adapt to every change we make, but will you still want to be where you are right now? Doing what you are doing right now?
These ‘scientists’ are trying to preserve is the world as we know it.
________________________________________
Cow Manure!
The Climatologists are in it to move the world into a “Socialist” one world totalitarian government. CAGW is just the lever they are using to do it and lying, dishonest activities are perfectly acceptable if used in the furtherance of the “CAUSE” We have had ample evidence that they lie and cheat, Gleick being just the latest.
I suggest you look at: Finally somebody comes right out and says it: climate + world governance is a match made in green heaven here at WUWT and Climate Coup — The Politics and Climate Coup — The Science at Jonova’s site.
Activist admits lying is good politics: http://atomicinsights.com/2012/03/conversation-with-an-anti-society-antinuclear-activist.html
Most of us here have been looking at the science AND THE POLITICS for years. Only actual hard evidence not fudged data sets will convince us.
Here is an example of the fudging: http://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2012/03/15/an-adjustment-like-alice/
and another:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/12/08/the-smoking-gun-at-darwin-zero/
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/12/20/darwin-zero-before-and-after/
Hansen’s at it again
http://www.real-science.com/hansen-tampering-down-under-too
Its no longer a joke the fellow or anybody involved with thiss must be held to account by the American and Australian Justice Systems
Steven Mosher says:
March 19, 2012 at 12:43 pm
And as you add more current data from the extreme high latitude you can expect the present to warm.
Well that sounds plausible enough. But my huge problem is with the title of Louise Gray’s article: “Met Office: World warmed even more in last ten years than previously thought when Arctic data added”
I thought global warming started in 1750 and really should have taken off around 1945 when CO2 greatly increased. So exactly what supposedly happened in the last ten years that was different from what happened in 1998? It seems to me that “global warming” is the wrong term. The correct terms should be “recent alleged north polar warming”.
There is also the matter of enthalpy of the air. It seems as if most of the increased warming is due to extremely cold and relatively dry Arctic air warming up. It takes a lot less energy to warm dry air at -40 C to -30 C than to warm moist air from +30 C to +40 C. However I do not believe this is factored in.
Presumably there is a full audit trail of the changes made by NCDC, showing the changes made, the date of change and the reason?