Has the CRUTEM4 Data been fiddled with?

What is so head-shakingly galling is the utter shamelessness of these data-fiddling cultists. They know they are being scrutinised. They clearly couldn’t care less. When challenged they will, as usual, just deny it. Post Normal Science. Shameless charlatans.

Looks like a cold weekend in the UK, will be interesting to see how HADCRUT4 reports it. Calling for the possibility of the coldest May temperatures ever recorded with -9C forecast along with snow in Scotland and N. England.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2138728/The-big-May-Day-Bank-Holiday-weekend-freeze-Forecasters-predict-snow-sub-zero-temperatures-biting-winds-rain.html

The changes in CRUTEM4 in comparison with CRUTEM3 is that we have more Arctic represented and thus more Arctic amplification of warming.
However, this Arctic amplification should then also be seen around 1930-45, but its just not really there to be seen:
http://hidethedecline.eu/media/ADJ/11.13.gif
So yes CRUTEM4 is not surprisingly yet another freely painted dataset, and thank you for bringing it up!

Forget these massive databases. We need a “few good men”, maybe 50-100 unimpeachable rural locations with long records but still operating, spread around the globe. This would produce a much more reliable and trustworthy record, and it would be much harder for CRU, Hansen etc to apply their “tricks” to the data without being caught.
Adding vast quantities of unreliable data to good data and then trying to correct the errors is scientific idiocy. Sydney Airport is included? What a joke!

What, exactly, is the justification for adjusting historic data? Do they have the original instrumentation and methodolgy to hand to know that they were over reading during Victorian times?
The “fact” that adjustment directions are virtually 100% predicatable is something of a smoking gun.

Hey, by the time CRUTEM20 comes out, the 19th century should be featuring subarctic temperatures for the whole temperate world. They’ll need to rewrite history that the Civil War was fought in the snow all year long. And Washington did not cross the Delaware in boats, they walked across the ice! It’s no longer good enough to “flatline the whole Holocene”, it needs to be driven 6 degrees under (zero) as well. Also, thermometers will need to be rezeroed to show more degrees.

braddles says:
” We need a “few good men”, maybe 50-100 unimpeachable rural locations with long records but still operating, spread around the globe. ”
I central and western Europe there are just a handful such rural stations not placed on a coast and not placed on a mountains (both shows ocean trends).
Heres what happens for Europe temperatures when examining the few.. :
http://hidethedecline.eu/pages/ruti/europe/western-europe-rural-temperature-trend.php
In general we need more data and thats why my “RUTI” has to compromise on “Rural” data by using more urban data, although not the metropols:
RUTI is world wide, but here for europe, (I use RAW GCHN V2, RAW Nordklim and RAW NACD version1..!) + data from original writings, which are presently coming in fast so I have to update soon.
Overview RUTI results europe:
http://hidethedecline.eu/pages/ruti/europe.php
Im awware of all the arguments against this project, but I would appreciate more help and backup in stead since there is no alternative I we should just be honest.

This is what I believe marketeers call post-hoc justification. Their deception is not aimed at skeptics but at those evangelists who already believe and thus whose vigour will be renewed………..

It looks like the most reliable historical temperature information we now have is the anecdotal evidence from personal diaries and records, ships logs and media reports.
Everything else would appear to be worthless.
If the evidence is about to destroy one’s case then corrupt the evidence.

Block adjustments only make sense to me if there is some known change to the measurement method – if, say, Adelaide had a poorly set up station from 1857 to 1886, then we might be able to estimate a set of offsets to apply to a block of data. And it’s not so unreasonable to suppose that those offsets might be calculated month by month, based on averages for those months.
One thing that springs to mind is that Adelaide has unusually low humidity compared both to the rest of Australia’s populated areas and Northern / Western Europe, so there is conceivably some humidity-related adjustment that has been calculated.
But of course this is groping for explanations. I don’t see how you can get away with publishing this sort of data set without also giving at least some specific explanation for each adjustment made (something at the level of, “Compensation for factor X, calculated monthly according to x = y * z). And when all those unexplained adjustments just happen to nudge the line more towards a stick used for playing hockey, it all smells a bit.

All adjustments in the same direction that just happens to fit the original theory?
Absolutely screams “confirmational bias” to anyone that knows anything about science, measurement and statistics.

Gotcha!

its all right to fuge temp readings as long as your not found out

[snip . . OT . . kbmod]

are the warmista going to appear and tell us the logical reasons for these obvious adjustements?
somehow, I doubt it……
as I’ve mentioned many times, does anyone actually have the ‘raw’ data? (from Jones testimony, it seems not?) does anyone have a record of the adjustments since the first prepared data sets? (again, IIRC, from Jones testimony, I think not!). So, in a nutshell, this data is not ‘as recorded’ data anymore, it is essentially worthless to use for any meaningful interpretation, IMHO.

The moving thermometer writes, and having writ, adjusts itself.
=========================

After reading enough comments I’m kindof wondering if there exists a complete dataset of just the raw temperatures anywhere in this world, or has it basically been destroyed through these multilayered, multisite adjustments to the data itself?
If it does, who holds it? Is it public and available?
For instance, I have download and processed both of the BEST datasets, about 13-17 gigs each unpacked, that is supposed to be “RAW” just to find out that even their “RAW” data has already gone through a whole series of manipulations and the worst, detrended. Where’s the beef?

“It is difficult to conceive w­­­­­­hat the justification could be for these changes.”
Not at all. It would be charitable to call it inept programing and abysmal quality control. However, the very purpose of these people is to produce a dataset to be used by the world. It cannot be that they are so useless at their primary task. Therefore, it is no accident this is deliberate.
It is possible that the intent is to provide useful figures to Rio+20 supporting a hockey stick in the hope that the morass of figures with changed station numbers would hold reviewers at bay for a few months.
How very sad that an accredited academic institution should be involved.

Surely a matter for investigative journalists in the mainstream press to get their teeth into..?

I’m with Rooster Cogburn on this.
“Give em a fair trial and a nice hanging.”

If you have to adjust the data, it ain’t science.

Great post!
But I have to disagree on a minor point: given the importance of the dataset to the notion of climate change, the availability of money to study such things – I do not think it ALL unreasonable to expect a well-documented and understood dataset. Just my view.
Think of squadrons of graduate students in math, statistics, meteorology and geography who could be employed to ensure raw data is pristine and well-handled. You did this work in your spare time for free…
I’m getting tired of this….

Well, if they didn’t keep lowering old temperatures they couldn’t claim that the temperatures are still rising, now could they? 🙂

In the 2009 “Climategate” email of climate scientist Kevin Trenberth, he says “The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t.”
It looks like the climate gang has figured out how to get rid of that pesky decade plus stall in the temperature increase. They are just following Hansen’s lead http://stevengoddard.files.wordpress.com/2010/10/1998changesannotated.gif?w=500&h=355
I really, really want to see those e-mails of Mann.

Looks Like the Mann Correction Vector is being reborn….
when will these fools learn?

Regarding “Climate and weather of Australia by H.A.hunt and Griffith Taylor and E.T.Quayle” , looks like you can get it here
http://openlibrary.org/books/OL7221939M/The_climate_and_weather_of_Australia
pdf, epub, read online.

Ed Thurstan,
Your contribution is invaluable. Thank you.
Your findings of fact can help form the basis for an answer to my question, “Why would UEA/CRU consciously choose to have its products be produced in such a non-explained and non-professional way?”
I think the reason they do so is necessarily connected to why they vehemently fight FOIA requests even to this day after a decade of consistently fighting FOIA requests.
John

I’m happy to make an FOI request to UEA for details of the changes made between 3 and 4. If you want me to do so please email your specific request to me via my website.

Frank Lansner says:
May 3, 2012 at 1:48 am
This was similar to something Courtillot did. He was refused data by the UK MO and CRU so went to all the stations he could one at a time, gathered them together, drew the graph and came up with …………………………………………. the same as you!! Now there’s a thing.

Great post by Ed Thurstan. Thanks!
Funny how after so much devious effort to hide the decline of temperatures HADCUT4 still shows a very slight cooling since 2002 after warming some 0.4°C since 1980. Note that HADCRUT4 now only covers till 2010.92.
Forget the lying thermometer databases they have been corrupted into compost.

It’s worse than we thought, as long as we’re not caught.

Pamela,
Your point is extremely important. If error bars were used to represent the uncertainty instead of “correction”, I would imagine that the magnitude of the error bars would be so large as to highlight the absurdity of the excercise. It would make any conjecture about tenths of a degree warming or cooling appear as ridiculous as it truly is.
[quote:]
Pamela Gray says:
May 3, 2012 at 6:55 am
The researchers who adjust data seem to have lost the gold standard research principle that raw data is the data and that error bars are the proposed problems with the raw data. More clearly, the demonstrated extent of adjustments should be used to determine error bars, not to adjust the raw data average. The anomaly average from unadjusted raw data should be shown as is, with problems in the data calculated into error bars. For AGW purposes, error bars will then provide the suggestion that it “could be” warming if indeed reasonable, researched, and fully explained adjustments would be to raise the anomaly in recent years and decrease it in historical years for reasons x, y, and z. Now that would be refreshing transparent work.
[/quote:]

Scottish Sceptic
What is the alternative to collect raw data and then when possible present these in a transparent manner that will make Hadcrut and their CRUTEM4 look like the iron curtain?
At this point the database for RUTI is growing and one day it will kick ass, just wait and see.
I just encourage everyone to send me raw temperature data from old writings or databases.
– And then its really fun to work with 😉
K.R. Frank

Alpha Tango says:
May 3, 2012 at 6:09 am
Thing is though that these adjustments will come back to haunt them – they may have adjusted recent years up, but that means that the next few years will be cooler when compared to those recent years – assuming they don’t keep adjusting the new figures up :0. If they do then they will start to diverge from the satellite data in a way that will become apparent to even the dullest hack.
_____________________________
When you have several nasty winters and very cool summers and call it “The Warmest Years Evah” People are going to get really ticked.

ZT says:
May 3, 2012 at 8:05 am
Here’s the basic 6 point plan if you want to run society….

– – – – – –
ZT,
That is a keeper. Thanks.
I think there may be a point ‘0’ (zero) preceding your 1st point. I suggest it is:
Point 0. – Locate people in government, academia and the media who are ideologically gullible enough to believe in the concept of original sin; they will be necessary to voluntarily advocate your plans to control society.
: )
John

KenB says:
May 3, 2012 at 4:40 am
In the book published in 1913 by the Commonwealth Bureau of Meteorology “Climate and weather of Australia by H.A.hunt and Griffith Taylor and E.T.Quayle” There is at page 11 a mean monthly Temperature and rainfall of all the Australian Capitals (cities) including Adelaide . . .
Printed copy available from
http://books.google.com/books?id=avCvNQAACAAJ&dq=editions:NYPL33433090738521

My bad — Google links you to libraries, sorry for the bad info.

Any blinking compareter graphs of these changes?

Alpha Tango says:
May 3, 2012 at 6:09 am
Thing is though that these adjustments will come back to haunt them – they may have adjusted recent years up, but that means that the next few years will be cooler when compared to those recent years – assuming they don’t keep adjusting the new figures up :0. If they do then they will start to diverge from the satellite data in a way that will become apparent to even the dullest hack.

Perhaps their adjustments are aimed only at affecting publications and irrevocable decisions in the near future.

PS, also note how the significant late 19th century cooling gets warmed up.
This is a real trend that is seen in a number of different proxies such as 0-50m ocean temps and tide gauge readings, but does not fit the CO2 propaganda.

The major adjustment that needs to be done throughout the data is for urban heat island temperature increase – which is not done.
One can argument how much one wants, the urban heat phenomenon is real. Think of the locations where we have thermometers – in cities which grew – and a growing city has a growing urban heat – it is logical if one puts 2 or more such UHI islands the resulting one will have a little higher urban heat island.
Now Steven Mosher and others will say that Berkeley proved that UHI is not creating any trend – they found even a bit cooling in the cities lately – but why?
Simply because all the database is contaminated with urban heat.
There is practically no location in the database that is not influenced in a way or another by the UHI. And why did they found a difference showing less growing in cities?
Because growing had stalled in many cities. Birmingham, Leeds Frankfurt, Vienna, Budapest – name those cities – are no longer growing as they did between 1800, 1900 and1950.
Exactly what Berkeley found – cities not warming as much as other locations since 1950s – is the fact that demographically human locations are not growing once the countries get at a certain level of energy comfort and civilization. UHI for American, Russian and European cities is indeed getting stationary or growing slowlier since growing of those cities stopped – some in 1950s some 1960s some later.
So what Berkeley found is UHI signal on trend in the database – exactly the opposite of what they say. And this UHI growing should be removed.
Once that is removed then we bring terrestrial measurement closer to satellite measurement.
Of course no warmista wants to do it as it will cut half or more of the temperature increase. This is why they all try to hide the UHI effect on temperature in all ways. And this is why they rely only on locally measured data which they can adjust how they please and not on satellite data which cannot be adjusted so easily.
And this is another reason why the Earth temperature is no longer growing “lately” as it did before as the population is no longer growing as it did before – UHI effect on trend is getting less significant.

Mosher: “As we add more data from the SH during the 30s you will see the global average come down. Why, because of polar amplification. The trend tends to be higher in the NH than the SH. during the 30s the sample is skewed to the NH. As we add stations ( remember the argument that we need more stations ) from other archives as we add more SH data the 30s will come down a bit.”
So, we will not expect hemispherical trends to change in a specific direction with the addition of new stations?

Re: Steven Mosher at 1:51 pm: think hard, it might be a trick question
Yes, indeed. It is a trick question. For Steven Mosher’s idea of “very rural” is hardly what I think of as very rural: See CA “Berkley ‘Very Rural’ Data Dec 20, 2011, 12:01 pm to Jan 1, 2012 12:36pm

Correction: …Surely, you are not going to tell me that you by “the past” meant the 1930 and “the present” 1940 🙂

NHills says:
May 3, 2012 at 6:21 am
Regarding “Climate and weather of Australia by H.A.hunt and Griffith Taylor and E.T.Quayle” , looks like you can get it here
http://openlibrary.org/books/OL7221939M/The_climate_and_weather_of_Australia
pdf, epub, read online.
Thanks, yes that is the same perforated copy (University of California) I had printed off many of the pages while doing research on historical data/writings relating to floods and droughts in Australia, and within that report is a great deal of information on early documented reports before the Australian Bureau of Meteorology was formally set up. The historical hydrological information is also “interesting” in view of the ‘modern” C.S.I.R.O./B.O.M. propaganda that came out supporting Flannery’s claim that we would see decreasing rainfall patterns in Australia (now flooding of course) instead of confirming the weather variability that we know applies to Australia.
In that more complete copy that you linked, It is interesting when you flip through to the end, the library lending record shows it to be then held at the UCL Berkley and appears to have been last accessed in the 1960″s. I wonder if the copy is still in that Library. (Mosher and Nick Stokes should be able to confirm!)
There is a wealth of information within that booklet for more detailed examination by those studying the historical Australian climate record. I commend the work being done by some dedicated Australians to try and undo the vandalism to our Australian Climate History, especially those who have been successful in digging out old photographs of Stevenson screens in situ in the 1800’s and , confirming their use.
Also useful is the actual B.O.M (Australia) 100 year official History “The Weather Watchers” by David Day first published in 2007 ISBN 9780522852752 and its neat graphical depictions of each years weather variability maps for the years 1900 to 2005. I commend the title as it fits neatly to this subject – who is now watching over our precious weather watching record. Thanks Anthony
for your dedication and to those Australians who really care about integrity in climate science.

Clivebest
Thank you for that note. I missed your original post, and I did not think of the possibility you raise.
I have just compared the two databases for exact matches on Lat/Long. I get 122. You got 124.
This means that 122/4 stations should get aliases so they will be treated as matching stations, and be treated accordingly. I don’t think it changes the tenor of my argument much, if at all when I include the effect of deletions/replacements. But I will nut out how to do it over the next few days, and figure what other implications it has before I introduce aliases..
Thank you.

@Mosher: The argument that the whole database is contaminated is lacking one thing: evidence.
…
My question is do you accept Anthony’s endorsement of CRN as good stations?
Here are some of the things Anthony said about CRN wrote about CRN on April 7, 2012. (You provided no link, so I attempted to find someting…)

The goal of [Anthony’s] project is to provide a publicly accesssible one-on-one live comparison of temperatures between GHCN and other hourly reporting stations from the older surface network, to the new Climate Reference Network (CRN). The impetus was the heat wave in Texas last year, where I noticed that while there were a number of record setting high temperatures, many of them were higher than temperatures seen in the CRN. This suggested to me that UHI and siting effects play a role in elevating such temperatures. [evidence?] ….
Basically, the CRN is NCDC’s response to their realizations of problems in the existing climate observing network, something that I’m long since identified in my own surfacestations.org work,….
…. Given the advanced way it is measured, there’s no need to adjust the CRN station data whatsoever
Overall I’m pleased with that CRN project and the USHCN modernization, and I endorse it. But little of the data from it is finding its way into the public realm, and I aim to change that.
…
The first job was to arrange for and to program data ingestion. Initially it looked like the project was designated to be done with an Internet based FTP fetching, which can be fraught with problems related to network delays, timeouts, server load, etc. Fortunately it was discovered that the entire CRN data set was delivered on an hourly basis via one of NOAA’s satellite feeds…..
….
REPLY: Yes they are UHI free, I’ve visited a few around the country and they live up to that claim – Anthony

I note that there are only 4 instances of the word ‘rural’ in the thread, none by Anthony. I also note that there a comparative handfull, at pressent only 114, of these CRN stations.
I also note the following from NCDC on the need for CRN:

On the other hand, to ensure credibility of future climate change assessments, it is necessary for the scientific community to acknowledge that a crisis exists in the quality of our long-term observing systems – a crisis to which it must respond.

I accept Anthony’s endorcement of the CRN project as an improvement of USHCN modernization. I even accept that the few stations that he visited are absent of UHI — today. How well that quality is maintained over time is anyone’s guess. That Anthony is undertaking a privately financed, but sorely needed, project to disseminate the data to the public is not one of CRN strong points.
Ok. I accept Anthony’s “endorcement”. CRN is good. It is an improvement. What does that say about the crisis of non-CRN data that comprises the bulk of the whole database use in analytical work?

As someone who has been a committed sceptic for the last 10 years, a supporter of Anthony and all the other heroes (and I consider myself a modest one, putting my arse on the line, along with Andrew Bolt down under) Given the climate of persecution on this matter, I am curious about this abrupt response to a post of mine yesterday:
“[snip OT . . read Tips & Notes for what you are looking for . . kbmod]”
I was simply asking what had happened to Goddard’s blog. Maybe there is some politically correct line that I have crossed..
[REPLY: It was Off-topic, but there is nothing wrong with Steve Goddard or his blog. There was a disturbance not long ago that you can read about here. -REP]

I don’t know where else to ask this. I watched a documentary a couple of days ago on the reason the Maya civilisation collapsed – Dick Gill spent 20 years exploring it and shows it was drought. The Mayan area has no natural lakes, rivers or underground water, relies completely on water collected during the summer rainy season, around 800 AD this failed. During the telling of it he said that normally the rains come because of a particular high pressure system which more or less stays put, somewhere in the Atlantic I think, but that this moved considerably further south than it normally does which altered the climate by making it colder in the north, which in turn didn’t bring the rains up into the area. All this to ask, is this the mechanism which triggers the El Nins? If so, what moves the high pressure system?
http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/ancient-apocalypse-maya-collapse/
The graphic and that explantion are towards the end of the docu, sorry can’t say exactly but around forty minutes in.

clivebest says:
May 6, 2012 at 6:43 am
“Stephen – taking your analogy for climate sensitivity to a 1 watt increase in solar energy further. We know that 3.5 billion years ago the Earth had liquid oceans while the solar radiation was about 80 watts less than today. The sun gradually brightened by ~0.02 watts/million years. The Earth’s temperature has changed very little since then, in fact it seems to have cooled – otherwise we would not be here able to discuss it”
clivebest, what people do not take into account here is that the earth has lost a quarter of its water. This gradual loss of water compensates for the increase brightness of the sun. The oceans define earth temperature.
http://sciencenordic.com/earth-has-lost-quarter-its-water
There are several attractors where the earth with its oceans reaches its thermal equilibrium.
These are defined by specific behaviour of the oceans, first would be the high capacity of the oceans to absorb heat – in a three dimensional volume (gradually in depth to 200 meters) but lose heat only at the surface.
Second would be the evaporation which is taking a lot of heat and does not allow the surface to reach higher temperature – it will not radiate much heat as a rock would do.
Then it is the ice at the surface which creates an isolation sheet over the ocean in the parts that are in the dark for too long time.
Of course then come the clouds which – if too much evaporations clouds form and shield the ocean from further heat intake, heat transfer through enthalpy and so on.
Only after all these do come the “greenhouse gases” with heat transfer through radiation where carbon dioxide is a small player.
With the earth losing some of its water, it can capture and redistribute less energy as the continents warm much more under the sun and radiate the heat away – radiation increases with T**4.
This is why globally the climate is getting slowly colder even if the sun brightened.
Of course how currents circulate the stored heat plays also a major role too.

@Larry Plume.P
Interesting. The study supports water as being the Earth’s thermostat, with the main mechanism as being changing albedo. Too hot more evaporation and clouds lowering albedo. Too cold less cloud and higher albedo. It appears the earth was mostly covered in oceans 4billion years ago and now it is 70% water. The loss of water through methanogenesis implies 50 to 500 times more methane then , but still far below levels either of methane or CO2 for a greenhouse explanation. However water vapor content in the high atmosphere could be another thermostat at play. Either way it is a remarkable fact that Earth’s temperature has remained so constant , and the only constant factor has been a dominant water surface.

Who could help?
The big change in are lower temps 1814 until 1895, producing a steep
increasing line….
HadCRUT sets the global warming century figure 1900-2000 at 0.74 C. Now,
who can tell the global warming figure for the preceding century, 1800-1900.
Would it be 0.74 C as well, or something more or less? Help appreciated…..
JS

Gah. Shameless, relentless. Convinced the teflon shield will shed all filth that lands on it.
There must be a lot of still, quiet voices shrieking in agony.