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.
They have found another way to “Hide the decline”. Has anyone actually calculated how many Arctic stations were required and byu how much lower their readings would need to be in order to reduce the 1998 peak anomaly by more than 0.0125 as shown in their graph?
If the relatively few Russian stations in the Arctic can have this affect on the whole global database then it only goes to show how shaky HadCRUT’s sampling is.
But, as usual, Piers is right. “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.”
Strange. The ones defending the upward “adjustments” by adding data now as being perfectly warranted and scientifically sound are the same ones who argued removing thousands of records (the great march of the thermometers) had no affect at all.
Mosher,
Why are you making up stuff as you go along? Hansen and others (IPCC) predicted the Antarctic would be as warm or warmer than the Arctic. As you like like say, GIYF.
…. Your claiming adding SH “data” (I use that term loosely) will cool the past is pulled out of your butt.
Just had a look at the new Crutemp4.
The warmest month on record on land is December 1852 at +1.8C.
(shouldn’t be a typo since there are some other very warm months around that period).
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/crutem4/data/diagnostics/global/nh+sh/global_n+s_monthly
Some questions for the proprietor and his votaries:
http://nailsandcoffins.blogspot.co.uk/2012/03/anthony-watts-misleading-his-readers.html
So, I’ve been playing around with the new versions available of both Crutemp4 and HadSST3.
One thing we will have to watch for is the 1961-1990 base period.
The adjustments that seem to occuring have different relative values between the datasets in these periods.
Morten Sperger says:
March 19, 2012 at 2:20 pm
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.
Apples and kumquats. US economic reports, such as those issued by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, are based on estimates from models (sound familiar?). They are only corrected after the actual data comes in.
Then they’re further “adjusted” (i.e., manipulated) if the results don’t make The Boss’ economic policies look good — which is just as much a lie as “adjusting” hard scientific data because it doesn’t make your agenda look good.
This is all rather silly. Don’t like GHCN? Well, don’t use it! http://curryja.files.wordpress.com/2012/02/berkeley-fig-3.png
Don’t like adjusted data? Use raw data!
http://curryja.files.wordpress.com/2012/02/berkeley-fig-2.png
Don’t like common anomaly method? Try multiple different methods!
http://rankexploits.com/musings/2011/comparing-land-temperature-reconstructions-revisited/
You may have some marginal changes (e.g. things like whether or not you use a land mask can make a reasonable difference), but the overall picture doesn’t change much.
Zeke Hausfather says:
March 20, 2012 at 8:17 am
Hi Zeke – Do you know where to find the TOB-adjustment software that NCDC uses?
Thanks.
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.
What a good scientist does is stop recording the data, move the thermo to a better site recommence taking the data. Save both sets for later comparaison. DON’T FIDDLE !!
Zeke Hausfather says:
March 20, 2012 at 8:17 am
Cock up as usual. Go back and review where BEST got their data. Some of it was pre-ajusted because the raw had been lost. Invaid data!!
Stephen Richards,
Please provide an example. If you give me a list of non-raw station ids, I’d be happy to rerun the analysis excluding them.
Frank K.,
It may be here: ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/ushcn/v2/monthly/software/
If not, I’d suggest emailing Matt or Claude to ask where it can be found. If its not currently on their ftp server, I imagine they would be happy to stick up a version for you to play around with.
Werner Brozek says: (March 19, 2012 at 4:06 pm)
Your comparison of the trends between the surface and satellite data sets uses the wrong off-setting values. here is the correct chart:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/gistemp/from:1979/offset:-0.35/trend/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1979/offset:-0.26/trend/plot/rss/trend/offset:-0.10/plot/uah/trend
Thanks Zeke. The link doesn’t work for me (may be a firewall issue).
Another question for you. When you process the raw temperature data (without TOB), do you apply your own TOB algorithm? Or do you accept the data as processed by NCDC with TOB and other homogeneity-related adjustments?
Thanks.
Moose says:
March 20, 2012 at 7:49 am (Edit)
Some questions for the proprietor and his votaries:
http://nailsandcoffins.blogspot.co.uk/2012/03/anthony-watts-misleading-his-readers.html
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Thanks for the link. I went across and read the article ( and a few more ) . Interesting but moreso for what he leaves out than what he actually covers in his critique.
I also left an invite for him and his readers to come over here and give the old girl a whirl round the dance floor and see if they like it. The blog owner seems very shy though so perhaps he won’t enjoy the rough and tumble here.
Frank K.,
For a global land reconstruction, I generally just use all raw data (with no tob adjustments). For U.S.-specific analysis, I usually use tob adjusted data as a starting point.
That said, there has been some interesting work lately looking at how automated methods (Menne’s PHA or Rhode’s scalpel) can automatically correct for most tob issues. Williams et al talks about it a bit in this paper: http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2012/2011JD016761.shtml
DWR54 says:
March 20, 2012 at 9:01 am
Your comparison of the trends between the surface and satellite data sets uses the wrong off-setting values.
Is there even such a thing as a correct offset? Either way, they show the GISS has the highest slope.
P.S. Andrew says:
March 19, 2012 at 11:46 pm
I agree, but others are not convinced. So for them, perhaps temperatures will do the job.
P.S. Tenuc says:
March 20, 2012 at 1:57 am
Thank you. However this does not tell me which version of HadCRUT3 was used to make HadCRUT4.
Mosher: “Yes, the modelling involved to get the “temperature” from the brightness at the sensor is not without assumptions. and assumptions bring with them uncertainty.”
It’s about more than just assumptions. They have been calibrated to Radiosondes that used real thermometers.
Glenn: “It is reporting temperatures several thousand metres up.”
Yes, and according to CO2 models that means that the satellites should actually be showing higher temperature anomalies than the ground stations. The fact that they are showing lower anomalies means that the ground stations are even more overcooked that we observe just by looking at the raw differences between the satellites and the ground stations.
Please climate-change denier morons,
Look at this which address Mr Watts above post:
http://nailsandcoffins.blogspot.co.uk/2012/03/anthony-watts-misleading-his-readers.html
Mr Watts yourself – are you truly convinced by your own arguments? Or have you got a SERIOUS vested interest in trying to mislead people with the utter drivel you write?
Apologies, was in a rush – this version corrects my typos (incidentally, I don’t expect this to be published as you’ll most likely censor it won’t you?)
Please climate-change deniers,
Look at this link which addresses Mr Watts’ above post:
http://nailsandcoffins.blogspot.co.uk/2012/03/anthony-watts-misleading-his-readers.html
As for you, Mr Watts – are you truly convinced by your own arguments? Or have you got a SERIOUS vested interest in trying to mislead people with the utter drivel you write?
Zeke: “This is all rather silly. Don’t like GHCN? Well, don’t use it! ”
No, Zeke, your assertion is all rather silly. First of all, BEST uses GHCN. And if you use GHCN data, then you can use what they call their “raw” data. But as they will tell you themselves, their raw data comes to them adjusted from their other sources. If you use other sources like BEST and exclude the GHCN data then you are getting data that is too unstable and fragmented for GHCN to use. Plus, you are still getting adjustments that were made by the sources of those data. And in most cases you cannot find the metadata that explains why adjustments were made. In other words, you can never go from the real raw data to the end product and reproduce what was done. And without reproducability, you don’t have science.
I spent a couple of hours looking at individual stations in the GHCN record last night; and looking at the adjusted and unadjusted comparisons. While I went through a lot of upward adjusted stations, I didn’t run into a single downward adjusted station. And that is just plain politically oriented junk science.
Tilo Reber,
The graph I linked compared GHCN-M stations to all the non-GHCN-M station data Berkeley has collected. While I cannot guarantee that all of it is 100% raw (e.g. some 1920s records may have had tobs adjustments), I can say that in nearly all cases it is a compilation of the rawest data that exists today. The Berkeley folks went out of their way to avoid using any pre-adjusted data as they wanted to develop their own homogenization process unbiased by past efforts.
I have a question for the group and its slightly off topic but relates to the ‘missing original temperature data’, plus the latest raw data CRU refuses to give up. As a meteorologist I know the basic unadjusted data has to be available if some detective work took place. Pick any country first because its easier, obtain the AWS data from the metoffice responsible. I’m sure Miss Marple could find it. Yes, its a wee bit of work, but rather than lament I don’t understand why some gung ho youngster doesn’t run with it.
My balcony really is not a good place to record temperatures. But what if some weather guys put a station in a nice place outside the city in – lets say – 1940, which by now is part of that same city? Of course one can put up a new one, but in order to have a complete record (and reliable time series are everything): what was the temperature at that new spot before? And then it starts! Keep the old station, but correct data for local influence? Or try to estimate the past temperatures for the new location?
The US and Europe have weather stations for a century or more. But what about the rest? How to include these other data in order to get a complete picture of some pre-satellite era?
And further more: raw data is not hard fact. As I said: I can put a thermometer with any given accuracy in the sun, and it will not be able to indicate the correct air temperature. Still, its not wrong. It will indicate ITS measured temperature.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/feb/21/heartland-institute-leak-climate-attack