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:
===============================================================
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.
===============================================================
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.
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
James Allison says:
March 19, 2012 at 2:42 pm
How does HUDCRUT4 data compare with satellite data?
We will not know for sure until it comes out and we can plot it. But see the graphs below. Presumably HadCRUT4 will be more like GISS.
In the graphs below, there are 4 slopes from December 1978 when the satellites started. Without looking, do you care to guess which one is GISS?
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/uah/from:1978.9/trend/offset:0.31/plot/rss/from:1978.9/trend/offset:0.22/plot/gistemp/from:1978.9/trend/plot/hadcrut3gl/from:1978.9/trend/offset:0.08
Green Sand says:
March 19, 2012 at 2:38 pm
….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?
_______________________________________
That makes absolutely no sense. I knew the guy in Toronto who was doing the data keeping for Canada. As far as I know he was still alive and kicking in 2007.
Werner Brozek says, March 19, 2012 at 11:29 am:
“With regards to the top comment, how can “the world (be) warming even
more” if it has not been warming for 15 years by their own admission? For
proof of the lack of warming for about 15 years, see:”
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3gl/from:1995/plot/hadcrut3gl/from:1997.25/trend
The 15 year period starting with 1997.25 starts with a century class El Nino
and ends with a double-dip La Nina.
A much more fair period would be one selected for lack of upward or
downward trend in ENSO or AMO. For example, the 13 year period from the
beginning of 1999 to the beginning of 2012. There, HadCRUT3gl has an
upward linear trend of .044 degree/decade. I suspect this may be close to the
actual rate of warming from anthropogenic increase of CO2.
Since CO2 has increased at a rate around .066 log scale doubling per
decade from 1980 to 2010, climate sensitivity to CO2 change *may be*
.67 degree C per doubling or halving of CO2.
Jurgen says:
March 19, 2012 at 2:40 pm
New data or new interpretation?….
__________________________________
That is why there has been such a fight over getting the raw data, the methods for adjustment and it is why Jones at CRU “Lost the data” http://strata-sphere.com/blog/index.php/archives/11630
Hadcrut4 and GISS have made their choice: they have decided to be effective.
And this thread wouldn’t be complete without Edenhofer’s candid quote:
“One must say clearly that we redistribute de facto the world’s wealth by climate policy. One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. This has almost nothing to do with environmental policy anymore.”
~Ottmar Edenhofer, Co-Chair UN/IPCC WG-3
Mosher: “Its not surprising that when you add more Northern Latitude data that the present warms.”
Really? What do you get when you amplify zero, Mosher. If the Northern Latitudes show warming amplification from what the rest of the globe experiences, then the amplification of zero warming is still zero warming. So adding northern stations should not effect the trend for the past 14 years.
“This has been shown before. It’s pretty well known.”
Yeah, now all you have to do is think about what it means.
“As you add SH data you will also cool the past.”
Why?
More data. Folks used to clamor for more data.
This is stupid Mosher. You want to claim that the areas of the earth that were not measured had different temperature trends than the ones that were. But convection would assure that no areas would maintain their own trends for more than a couple of decades. You can’t suddenly show up with some new stations and claim a complete change in trend. It’s simply impossible. Areas of the earth have their own weather, not their own climate. Of course if you overrepresent stations with a shore ice effect you can diddle the numbers. If you drop the reading of arctic SSTs when those are available and replace those readings with shore stations subject to shore ice effect, you can diddle the numbers.
You know that the satellites are much closer to reality and that the surface stations are nothing more than a political shell game. So why do you go on with this dumb charade Mosher. I can only imagine the rationalizations that you let your left hemisphere invent for you.
Steven Mosher, it looks like more is at work than simply adding in more stations. If you look here,
http://www.climate4you.com/Text/Climate4you_February_2012.pdf
You can see than the new corrected version has increased the disparity between the satellite lower troposphere trends and the (previously corrected) CRU data, in the era since 1995. Why is that?
ddd says:
March 19, 2012 at 2:47 pm
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.
Thank you for that. But now I have several questions and comments. First of all, there is a different HadCRUT3 data set at:
http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/temperature/hadcrut3gl.txt
This one does show a 0.07 C gap between 1998 and 2010 that Louise Gray alluded to with:
“Between 1998 and 2010, temperatures rose by 0.11C, 0.04C more than previously estimated.”
Things get confusing with two different HadCRUT3 sets! Another point is that with the one you are referencing, 1998 does NOT change by even 0.01 C. However all other dates in the 2000s change from 0.03 to 0.06. It looks suspicious to me.
cui bono says:
March 19, 2012 at 4:03 pm
Presumably there is a full audit trail of the changes made by NCDC, showing the changes made, the date of change and the reason?
_______________________________
Only if they were REAL scientists. If you try and get that info you will probably get the usual “My Polar Bear Ate My Data” (Another cartoon idea Josh)
This time they are saying they added in the Arctic temps except there is not much data. And the data has problems see: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/09/22/arctic-isolated-versus-urban-stations-show-differing-trends/
…All the GISS temperature anomaly maps show the Arctic warming faster than the rest of the globe, especially northern Alaska and Siberia, but the satellite data shows a different pattern…
Ian H says:
March 19, 2012 at 2:38 pm
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.
—————————————————————
Ian, I like the way you think!
Of course, following your argument to its logical conclusion, it means that either they will have to truncate the decline in past temperatures at some point, or admit that their global temperature estimates are chronically overstated. And if they are, it will play hell with their forcing models. Alternatively, if they truncate the downward revisions, they can expect some pretty searching questions about splicing issues.
Although, not a lot of remorse about data splicing has been exhibited in the past.
Donald L Klipstein says:
March 19, 2012 at 4:11 pm
The 15 year period starting with 1997.25 starts with a century class El Nino
and ends with a double-dip La Nina.
I agree with your sentiment. If it makes any difference, there are two reasons that I could not start the graph in January of 1997. The January 2012 anomaly of 0.218 has been deleted and the February anomaly is not out yet. Of the February anomalies that are out, RSS and UAH show a slight decrease and GISS shows a slight increase. So I would expect that if February were out, I could go back to January 1997 showing basically a flat line. For HadCRUT3, anything below 0.4 would push the months back where the slope is 0. However RSS does go back to the middle of the La Nina since there I can go to December 1996 and get a flat line. And with the January and February values, the claim that this is the warmest La Nina on record is no longer as convincing as it was before. See: http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/rss/from:1995/plot/rss/from:1996.9/trend
And so it was The Little River Band who wrote a forward looking ode to the climate change scientists of today….
Time for a cool change
I know that it’s time for a cool change
And I know that my life is so pre-arranged
I know that it’s time for a cool change
Gail Combs says (March 19, 2012 at 4:31 pm)
—-
Nice one about the polar bears! And I guess if the northern land ice melts, polar bears are going to have to s**t in the Medieval Warm Period woods revealed beneath. 🙂
Did anyone seriously expect anything different from these guys? Really?
These global warming alarmists insist that loss of sea ice would be BAD for animals like the polar bear but, you wonder why the scientific name of the polar bear means “sea bear”, hmm……. wonder why that is? 🙂
Gail Combs says:
March 19, 2012 at 4:12 pm
That is why there has been such a fight over getting the raw data…
– – – – – – – –
You would think any publication is only to be considered of scientific merit if at least the primary data are available to the scientific community. There are more criteria of course, but this one looks pretty basic to me. If it is not met, something is very wrong.
How many publications in “climate science” will pass this simple test? It should be a “sine qua non”. In any science. Not open to debate you would think…
i just love how this year, when the rest of the world has been in an Icebox, the warmists scream at the US warmth as proof of AGW, when Europe experienced some of the worst cold in over 40 years and Alaska almost broke the all-time record low temperature for North America. Then to top it off, areas like Anchorage are within 2 inches of breaking their all time record for most snow, and the Bering Sea is still over halfway covered in ice, and it’s Spring!! Then Siberia and most of northern Asia experienced yet another cold and brutal winter, and only now are warming up. Then, Arctic Sea Ice is approaching the satellite era average, with the Antarctic above average and Global tropical cyclone numbers are near all time lows. Don’t hear a peep out of them. If they find it hard now to find areas of warmth, just wait until next fall and winter comes around, nature is going to give them quite the cold shoulder!!
To paraphrase comrade Stalin, “Controlling who counts the votes, is more important than controlling who votes.”
Donald: “The 15 year period starting with 1997.25 starts with a century class El Nino
and ends with a double-dip La Nina.”
This is nonsense. That 98 El Nino was immediatly followed by two years of La Nina. The effect of the two on the trend cancelled out. That is why ENSO corrected data has almost exactly the same slope as uncorrected data – mainly, none.
“A much more fair period would be one selected for lack of upward or
downward trend in ENSO or AMO. For example, the 13 year period from the
beginning of 1999 to the beginning of 2012.”
Wrong again, you have chosen to start at the beginning of a long La Nina. The best option is to use both the 98 El Nino and the following two years of La Nina.
Werner Brozek says:
March 19, 2012 at 4:06 pm
Yeah thanks – thought that would be the case. I can see why “The Team” are now consistently ridiculed by the majority of climate followers and only supported by a few fringe far left eco-greenies with uninformed religious like fervour. And really, we hardly see any of them trolling WUWT these days. Who’s left , Physee, Lazy, Gatetsy spring to mind …. my apology to those I didn’t mention. Its almost kinda sad except for the legacy of increased costs, destroyed tropical forests, opportunity cost of tax money spent and world governments lapping up increased taxes etc etc. Anyway I hear the next new religion is gonna be environmental sustainability. Something I’m sure they’ll be able to latch onto with equal fervour resulting in similar socio- economic costs and consequences to the societies we live in. Amen.
“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” ~ George Orwell
I guess now that past and present ground-based temperatures are “fixed” (he, he), the satellite temperatures will need “recalibration”, too to match the: Brave New Reality…
And so it goes……until it doesn’t…..
Maurizio – Omnologos asks why cannot the Russians cool the past too? My understanding is that it has already been substantially cooled in Stalin’s time especially in winters because the state handouts to the towns depended on how cold it was, and no meteorologist worth his life would report temperatures less cold than required to get enough to eat. What we should ask (if I am not mistaken) is what efforts have there been or can there be to put these Stalinised temperatures right? – making the past warmer! (oh-oh forbidden zone)
Today we have a similar problem. None of the GW fraudsters will do anything to negate the message of their gravy train.
I think we can safely conclude without fear of contradiction by any rational objective sentient being:-
1. The ‘corrected’ figures are fraud.
2. The temperature variations real or fraudulent are of no consequence to man, plant or beast, the temperature changes themselves, if real, about 0.5C in a century are not something that humans can even feel in a day.
The obsession with temperatures by all sides in this non-debate is insane, what changes weather and climate is jet stream shifts and other circulation pattern changes, and these control temperature rather than the other way around. Of course – wait for it – solar activity (magnetic and particle) and lunar modulation thereof is the main controller of weather and climate change. This approach is now able to reliably forecast certain key major changes on the sun – eg Earth-facing coronal holes, and key extreme features of USA weather weeks and months ahead. For example see our WeatherAction USA, confirmed predictions of the present very warm center and E/SE USA alongside cold West and the preceding severe thunder, tornadoes and giant hail in lower mid-west around mid month – from (in this case) 3 weeks ahead to timing of a day or so:
http://www.weatheraction.com/docs/WANews12No17.pdf
Anybody or organisation which is serious about the weather needs these forecasts. However I am finding that those in authority forego what they need to fulfill their supposed ‘duties’ to protect the public and save lives, in order to preserve the fraudulent ideology of man-made climate change.
Thanks,
Piers Corbyn
I wish they would stop making changes to settled science. It’s very unsettling.
I like how their chart omits the cooling year of 2011.
This is a hoot. This guy can’t figure out the HC4 trend is greater than the HC3 one.
http://nailsandcoffins.blogspot.co.uk/2012/03/anthony-watts-misleading-his-readers.html