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.
I expect that, if these past-cooling developments continue, in 2020, NASA scientists will find out that the Younger Dryas ended in 1970.
And young scientists will write papers, trying to find out how Medieval cathedrals were constructed when, according to their data, Europe must have been covered by miles of ice…
Great piece Anthony.
“Those who cool the past are condemned to repeat it.”
Hahaha!! Brilliant.
In a similar though I admit much less wittier (Conradesque) vein:
The shamlessness! the shamelessness!!
Does the truth have no bounds for the climate hysterics and shills?
Now the temperature increase since the last cyclical high in the 1940s has gone from 0.2 to 0.4 degrees, a 100% leap, and only generated by adjustments.
All these adjustments have taken place after 2003, the year when climate science became settled, and so called scientists and affiliated climate and other agenda warriors at universities, media and politics started to go after individuals, editors and journals with dissenting views.
American Patriot said on March 19, 2012 at 12:54 pm:
High quality peer-reviewed published research has conclusively shown in the case of a zombie plague, humanity’s best option is extremely intense violence. Quarantine attempts and cures that return them to normal are losing strategies, you must eradicate the zombies whenever and however possible, as many as possible. Download the pdf, it’s all very scientific with world-class modeling and theory.
It’s already known how to stop zombies, you have to destroy the brain. If you wish to treat Hansen the Marxist as a zombie, then you know what to do. Going by the available info on Hansen as activist, the required action is known and has been contemplated by many people, yet still no one has been willing to deliver a strong steel-toed kick to Hansen’s butt.
Arctic adjustments? You mean artificial or artfull adjustments.
“The future is known. It’s the past that keeps changing.”
– old Communist Soviet Union saying.
OK so 2010 was the warmest year on record eh? Time for a straw poll. Who agrees? Please global answers are best.
Anthony
You said “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.”
Don’t you bother checking your sources before publishing something? If you read the USHCN desctiption of the adjustment process here http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/research/ushcn/ushcn.html you will see the descripton of the major adjustments. Step 6 says:
“The final adjustment is for an urban warming bias which uses the regression approach outlined in Karl, et al. (1988). The result of this adjustment is the “final” version of the data. Details on the urban warming adjustment are available in “Urbanization: Its Detection and Effect in the United States Climate Record” by Karl. T.R., et al., 1988, Journal of Climate 1:1099-1123. “.
And if you look here
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/img/climate/research/ushcn/ts.ushcn_anom25_diffs_pg.gif
you see the effects of each of the different adjustments. Including a cooling adjustment for UHI.
‘they’ don’t ‘argue so fervently against a UHI effect’. They recognise it and have already included an adjustment! Check your facts a bit better Anthony.
The largest single adjustment over time is for Time Of Observation Bias. When the time of day that readings are taken has changed, that would introduce bias into the record unless an adjustment is made for it. Other adjustments include for instrumentation changes. missing readings and checking for bad readings.
RobW says:
March 19, 2012 at 8:18 pm
OK so 2010 was the warmest year on record eh? Time for a straw poll. Who agrees?
Not according to the two satellite records.
RSS
1 {1998, 0.55},
2 {2010, 0.476},
3 {2005, 0.334},
UAH (http://motls.blogspot.ca/2012/01/uah-amsu-2011-was-4th-coldest-in-this.html)
1 {1998, 0.428},
2 {2010, 0.414},
3 {2005, 0.253},
But according to records with UHI issues, surface station issues and adjustments…..well who are you going to believe?
The only reason for trying to splice together this kid of global temperature record from land based stations is to allow comparison with the historical record. There isn’t a historical record over the Arctic so I don’t see the point in tying to extend such measures to those regions by extrapolation.
For temperature trends in modern times either look at SST or the satellite record both of which are far more reliable.
Werner Brozek says in part, March 19, 2012 at 4:29 pm:
“First of all, there is a different HadCRUT3 data set at:
http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/temperature/hadcrut3gl.txt
”
There are 2 versions of the annual figures of HadCRUT3. The UEA version
uses ordinary averaging of the 12 monthly figures. The version by the Hadley
Centre of the UK Met Office uses “optimized averaging” of the 12 monthly
figures.
The Hadley Centre version appears to me to show slightly more warming
trend from 1998 onward, and slightly less ~62 year periodic component, in
annual figures than the UEA version.
In response to Glen Tamblyn’s message (above):
Glen, you argue that the adjustments to the land temp datsets are necessary and that all is above board and you refer to the largest adjustment being for time-of-day issues. But you seem to forget – we have a record of unbiased satellite data that comprises far higher numbers of readings taken across the globe (exclusing the poles) 24/7, 365 days a year and going back in time to 1979. So these are available as a true reference dataset – to compare against the land temperature readings and adjustments…
And they tell us that from 1979 when the reference data set began, the (adjusted) landbased trends have borne increasingly less resemblence to the historical reality as more and more adjustments have been made… how do you keep a straight face mate?
Something wrong with that claimed 1980 GISS graph. The new colored graph is indeed of anomalies relative to 1951-1980. You can see the average looks like zero, as it should be.
But the black graph seems to be quite positive through the period, except for a very small and brief dip. In fact, I very much doubt that GISS was using the 1951-1980 base in 1980.
HadCRUT Haircut?
Werner Brozek says March 19, 2012 at 5:14 pm:
>>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.
> However RSS does go back to the middle of the La Nina since there I can go
> toDecember 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
1996.9 to February 2012 has a century class El Nino peaking about 1.4 years
after the start time, and ends with a double-dip La NIna (for 2 NH winters) but
does not begin with one. So, I see linear trend here being contaminated by
downward linear trend of ENSO.
1996.1 to February 2012 is “more fair”, but has stronger La Nina activity
towards its end than its beginning, and a stronger El Nino towards its
beginning than its end. I think that outweighs AMO peaking slightly after
the center of that period. To me, this means that the linear trend here of
about .027 degree C per decade underreports the actual effect of growth
of CO2, but possibly not by much.
The figures in that graph showing NASA temperatures as of 1980 match Fig 3 of this Hansen paper, though it isn’t the same graph.
There’s no mention of an anomaly period. It looks very much as though their standard was the average over the period plotted, which was 1880-1980. So of course they look higher than current figures on a 1951-1980 base. The reference base is lower.
Tilo Reber says, March 19, 2012 at 6:29 pm:
>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.
I disagree. I see better to use a period beginning and ending with two
double-dip La Ninas, and lack of linear trend in ENSO indices. Starting at
a time that barely includes the 1998 El Nino and ends with 2nd double-dip
La Nina in 5 NH winters has downward linear trend in ENSO indices.
After Climategate, a number of enquiries cleared Hansen and Jones et al of any wrong-doing. I believe this may have emboldened them and they can now do virtually what they please as no-one in authority will be able to take them to task – you know, the ‘oh dear, those poor scientists who are just doing their job and being bullied by those nasty deniers’ type of defence.
How about commenting on the 2001 version of HadCRUT global temperature?
I like to look at what happened from the ~1944 peak to the ~2005 peak.
It appears to me that 2001 version of HadCRUT warmed by .215 degree C in
61 years, roughly one cycle of AMO and of the periodic component visible in
HadCRUT of 2001-2010 versions.
To make the ~1944 peak appear to resemble the ~2005 peak, I would adjust
the ~1944 peak downward, by up to .04 degree C.
This means global temperature trend from ~1944 to ~2005 has increase of
.215-.255 degree C in ~61 years. This means .035-.042 degree/decade.
I have “somewhat figured” CO2 increase in that period on log scale to be
averaging about 75% of the 1980-2010 rate of ~.066 log-scale-doublings per
decade. This means climate sensitivity of .71-.85 degree C per doubling of
CO2, before adjusting slightly downward for that period having a significant
temporary growth of anthropogenic GHGs other than CO2.
Donald L Klipstein says:
March 19, 2012 at 9:29 pm
There are 2 versions of the annual figures of HadCRUT3.
OK. This version has 1998 at 0.529 and 2010 at 0.470.
http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/temperature/hadcrut3vgl.txt
This version has 1998 at 0.548 and 2010 at 0.478.
http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/temperature/hadcrut3gl.txt
This version has 1998 at 0.52 and 2010 at 0.50.
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/news/releases/archive/2012/hadcrut-updates
That is three different versions. Which one of these three, if any, is being changed? If none of these, what are the numbers for the real one being changed?
There is far too much adjustment of raw temperature data for far too many reasons. Beneath many adjustments there is a fundamental problem with the ‘anomaly method’ of presentation.
Here is a graph from a location I was working up last evening. Cape Leeuwin is on the S-W tip of Australia and the site has not sensibly moved in over 100 years. It is remote from UHI sources.
http://www.geoffstuff.com/Cape-leeuwin_calib_period.jpg
The anomaly method uses a calibration period, very often years 1960-1991, from which an average is taken. This average is subtracted from temperatures outside that period to give the residual anomaly so often presented in papers.
Many counties from the British Commonwealth started their temperature recording in degrees Fahrenheit. Australia changed to degrees Celsius in many places about September 1972. There are different problems reading and rounding F thermometers than with reading and rounding C thermometers. http://joannenova.com.au/2012/03/australian-temperature-records-shoddy-inaccurate-unreliable-surprise/
The bottom block of the C. Leeuwin graph has a couple of pertinent unanswered questions. Additionally, I often wonder how often the calibration period is adjusted when adjustments of temperatures either side of it are applied for specified reasons. Are we in a loop?
Conclusion: THE TEMPERATURES OF THE WORLD NEED A PROPER AUDIT, COUNTRY BY COUNTRY, continuing the work in the style of the JoNova blog. Much work so far has not dug deep enough into the raw.
I recently said in part, March 19, 2012 at 10:35 pm:
(Referring to ~1944 to ~2005)
“This means climate sensitivity of .71-.85 degree C per doubling of
CO2, before adjusting slightly downward for that period having a significant
temporary growth of anthropogenic GHGs other than CO2.”
It appears to me that anthropogenic increase of GHGs other than CO2
accounts for about 20% of the increase of “GHG effect” from the early 1970’s
to about 1995, and much less at other times in the 1944-2005 time period.
I would like to estimate that in the 1944-2005 time period, increase of GHG
effect via GHGs other than CO2 not continuing after 2005 accounts for about
10% of radiation forcing in that time period. At this rate, I suspect global
climate sensitivity to CO2 change *may be* roughly around .65-.77 degree C
per 2x change of CO2.
I recently said at March 19, 2012 at 10:58 pm:
“At this rate, I suspect global climate sensitivity to CO2 change *may be*
roughly around .65-.77 degree C per 2x change of CO2.”
However, if the WWII peak of AMO was stronger than the recent one,
this figure gets larger. But, I doubt climate sensitivity to CO2 change
exceeds 1.5 degrees C per 2x CO2.
Nick Stokes.
Looking at the 2 GISS curves – 1980 & 2010 there is apparently another problem.The 2010 curve looks like it is the Land & Ocean index rather than the Land Only index. But the 1980 curve has to be land only since GISS hadn’t started incorporating SSTs back then. So the two curves aren’t comparing apples with apples.
Donald L Klipstein says:
March 19, 2012 at 9:57 pm
1996.1 to February 2012 is “more fair”
We may reach that point in a few months, but it would be almost impossible to stay there since 1995 was warmer than 2011, so if we reached 1996.1, we would almost automatically get into 1995 for the longest straight line. Fairness is one issue. And it is one thing to discuss fairness with a 6 year period, but if it gets to 16 years, then you can safely say CAGW is not happening.