Andrew Revkin asked me to provide comments on this article of his where the National Climatic Data Center was asked to respond to Watts et al 2012:
A Closer Look at Climate Studies Promoted Before Publication
Here is what I sent to him:
My comments on Thorne’s response are pretty simple.
They still refuse to get out of the office, to examine firsthand the condition of the network and try to come up with hands on approaches for dealing with station inhomogeneity, but instead focus of trying to spot patterns in data and massage it. In my view this is the wrong approach and the reason that we are in this polarization today. We are conducting a grand experiment, and like any scientific experiment, you have to carefully watch how the data is being measured in the experiment environment, or problems will invalidate the measurement. If Climate Science operated under the same rules as Forensic Science, the compromised data would be tossed out on its ear. Instead, we are told to accept it as fully factual in the court of public opinion.
Until I came along with Watts 2009, they really weren’t looking closely at the issue. The SurfaceStations photography forced them into reaction mode, to do two things.
1. Close the worst USHCN stations, such as Marysville, CA (the station that started it all), Tucson, AZ (the University Science Dept/Weather Service Office that had the USHCN weather station in the parking lot), and Ardmore, OK (the USHCN station on the street corner). There are many others that have been closed.
If they are able to correct the data gathering problems back in the office with algorithms, why do they need to close these stations? Additionally, if they think they can get good data out of these stations with the myriad of adjustments they perform, why did they need to spend millions of dollars on the new Climate Reference Network commissioned in 2008 that we never hear about?
According to communications I received from Texas State Climatologist John Nielsen-Gammon, the National Weather Service is developing plans to eliminate up to half of all COOP network stations (of which USHCN is a subset) as a potential cost-cutting measure.
Some possible reasons: (1) not central to the core mission of the NWS; (2) poor data quality; (3) too much of a public relations headache with people putting embarrassing photographs online.
I would argue not for removal of bad stations, but rather for the replacement of bad stations with well-sited stations, with simultaneous overlapping data collection so that biases can be both measured directly and permanently eliminated. I don’t see anything in what they are doing with Thorne that addresses this. To me, all they are doing is trying to put lipstick on a pig.
2. Attack me without publishing an appropriate paper intended for peer review first, such as the ghost authored “Talking points” memo issued by NCDC’s Dr. Thomas Peterson, who wouldn’t put his name on it, yet circulated it to every NOAA manager and the press. If the data from these stations is so strong, and the adjustments and corrections so valid, why the cloak and dagger approach?
Note, that in the Thorne response, they carefully avoided saying anything about station siting, preferring instead to focus on data manipulations. From my viewpoint, until they start worrying about the measurement environment in which our grand global experiment is being measured, all they are doing is rearranging data without looking at and learning from the environment and history that created it.
Perhaps they should follow the advice of the General Accounting Office report that backed up my work:
GAO-11-800 August 31, 2011, Climate Monitoring: NOAA Can Improve Management of the U.S. Historical Climatology Network Highlights Page (PDF) Full Report (PDF, 47 pages) Accessible Text Recommendations (HTML)
Finally, let’s spend a few moments looking at another network in the USA that doesn’t seem to suffer from the same sorts of magnitude of issues. The U.S. Population-Adjusted Temperature Dataset (PDAT) developed by Dr. Roy Spencer, which better handles UHI.
The following plot shows 12-month trailing average anomalies for the three different datasets (USHCN, CRUTem3, and ISH PDAT)…note the large differences in computed linear warming trends (click on plots for high res versions):
Where’s the warming?
Revkin? Seriously? Why would you bother dealing with him?
“Where’s the warming?”
Indeed…Where IS the warming?
Thanks Anthony for everything.
Who trusts revkin to cover this impartially?
“Where’s the warming?”
*
Exactly! Well done! 🙂
Once again it basic stuff taught to any undergraduate or even high school student , that you need to use the tools of measurement in correct manner or what they tell you loses value, its actual a reality which is accepted which why there standards in the first place. But what seems to have happened is they think if they throw enough computing power at it the problem goes away. The simply fact is you cannot correct for error in any meaningful way if you neither know its magnitude nor direction. really basic stuff .this
I presume Anthony is the author of this post? I don’t see a byline.
The main point is that until these people go out and look at the HISTORIC CHANGES, not only at EACH AND EVERY site, but also in the LOCAL NEIGHBOURHOOD of each site, then they CANNOT POSSIBLY make proper allowances for local factors on the temperature trends.
If you don’t account for these local trends first, the major cause probably being the large jump in urbanisation in the 1970-2000 period, then the whole calculation of so-called “global” land temperatures is just a crock of s*** !
Roy’s PDAT and this paper by Watts et al. go some small way to addressing this issue.
Is it far enough.. probably not..
“Some possible reasons: (1) not central to the core mission of the NWS; (2) poor data quality; (3) too much of a public relations headache with people putting embarrassing photographs online.”
So my car(evil gas powered IC) breaks down on the side of the road, because I put the wrong size tires on, and instead of replacing with the right ones, I just burn it there,and tell my insurance company everything is honkydory, because the offending vehicle has been removed from the system.
Must have been a long day. Can’t seem to wrap my head around this logic.
“They still refuse to get out of the office, to examine firsthand the condition of the network”
And there you have it in a nutshell. Crap in = crap out (albeit highly processed crap. Those computers make it nice and smooth)
What is the yearly cost of a COOP station? Given computer and internet technology today, shouldn’t it be coming down?
Why with the price of technology getting cheaper
and information handling costing next to nothing
and so much at stake in the Climate Change debate,
is NOAA not ADDING to the COOP station network instead of shrinking it?
Sounds like enlarging COOP is a good use of “Stimulus” funds, to me.
Here’s my own take:
we’re all in the blue.
Excellent response for reasonable people but not for those with bias as the main agenda
NOAA’s attitude to data is akin to the Titanic’s crew rearranging the deckchairs, sadly NOAA hasn’t realised it’s sinking yet…
Or it’s like cooking with garbage, doesn’t matter what recipe you try the results are still going to taste of garbage…
Fine….they cook the books and numbers…..but it still shows the
temp-plateau since 2000 we are on. And this plateau will continue…..
no more warming to come…..
What has been exposed is a total lack of governance, quality control and configuration management. Instead of quick easy ‘fixes’ to data because one station looks odd man out then run the standard algorithm on many thousand observations; each station needs a full quality record.
The quality record would provide siting issues and local information. Any adjustments would be applied specifically to that one station, be justified with fully documented details of why and how the adjustment was being made and who by, be signed off by a QA and Configuration Manager as being appropriate for that station. The signatories would then be responsible for that change. Any subsequent ‘adjustment’ to that one station would again have to be agreed and justified and the reason that the previous adjustments were not correct gully documented. This way stations that are odd ones out because of their geographic position or whatever will not be homogenized out as their readings are accurate. The entire worship of the average that climatologists seem to like is not borne out in reality.
Its not like there are a huge number of stations, even worldwide. It is perfectly possible for government funded agencies to run a quality system without great expense. But they do not want to, as the repeated massaging of the data by compliant climate scientists plays to their confirmation bias.
It’s not Revkin so much as it’s the New York Times. They are “the paper of record.” Unfortunately.
I refuse to subscribe. I do subscribe to the WSJ.
Last post directed at Sean Peake:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/07/30/my-response-to-ncdcs-op-ed-in-the-new-york-times/#comment-1048064
Puzzling. We can launch satellites to try to measure temperatures. We have the Argo network. We’re surrounded by ‘smart’ things, including ‘smart meters’ for loads of stuff.
Yet on the ground, where it should be easiest, we have a mess which requires constant ‘adjustment’ by sedentary statisticians.
Well done Anthony!
Apropos of nothing but accuracy, but didn’t the General Accounting Office (GAO) change their name to Government Accounting Office?
Plain, simple, and straightforward. In a word, brilliant. Keep their feet to the fire. They are not empiricists and will fight to the death rather than admit that temperature stations should be classified according to the physical characteristics of the heat sinks in which they exist.
Actually that’s wrong too. Government Accountability Office is closer.
Once in my career, I was principal investigator on an IR&D project at a major defense contractor. The project had already started when I was assigned, and the results from the lab were abysmal, huge standard of deviation from multiple experiments that should have been measuring the same thing. I got myself down to the lab full time, rolled up my sleeves, and set about finding out what the problems were. After a couple of weeks I solved a lot of contamination and experimental technique issues, and we got down to SDs of about 5-10% of the mean with very repeatable results from experiment to experiment.
Who knew that I could have stayed in my office and just made up “adjustments” to the data instead of getting my hands dirty in the lab? What a dummy I was!
Ah, yes…”manipulation”.
It is insightful to define what “manipulation” means, as in “data manipulation”.
First, to the root word “manipulate”:
ma·nip·u·late (me-nip`ye-lat)
tr.v. ma·nip·u·lat·ed, ma·nip·u·lat·ing, ma·nip·u·lates
1. To move, arrange, operate, or control by the hands or by mechanical means, especially in a skillful manner: She manipulated the lights to get just the effect she wanted.
2. To influence or manage shrewdly or deviously: He manipulated public opinion in his favor.
3. To tamper with or falsify for personal gain: tried to manipulate stock prices.
4. Medicine To handle and move in an examination or for therapeutic purposes:
I’ve highlighted the two definitions that apply (although the first one has potential in a devious way, too). How can anybody claim to be a scientist and be in favor of “data manipulation”?
If so, the definition “scientist” no longer applies.
Well said Mr Watts !!!
Exactly what I was saying 24 hours ago on another forum. Shift the measuring sensors into approved locations following the sighting guidelines set out by your own countries (Australia?UK/USA/Europe etc) and international standards and we won’t see this corrupted data being used to manipulate the entire worlds opinion on global warming.
I bet Borenstein is on the case like white on rice. HAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
anthony –
a good response, but i’m afraid there’s a new CAGW PR push, starring the “Muller Conversion” because:
30 July: Reuters: UPDATE 1-U.N. carbon credits fall to new record low
CERs fall to new record low of 2.67 euros a tonne
Reporting by Nina Chestney; Editing by Anthony Barker
Benchmark United Nations’ carbon permits fell 7 percent to a fresh record low on Monday, taking their lead from lower prices for European Union emissions allowances and extending losses made last week…
Volume was low at 575 lots traded.
EU allowances (EUAs) for delivery in December 2013 fell by 3.76 percent to 6.66 euros a tonne, narrowing the spread between the two benchmark contracts to 3.99 euros.
The EUA contract dropped below a 6.85 euro support level earlier on Monday which prompted selling, he added…
Most of the demand for CERs comes from the EU ETS, the world’s biggest carbon market, which itself is oversupplied by over 1 billion carbon permits. Many analysts expect the EU scheme to be oversupplied at least through 2020.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/07/30/carbon-market-idUSL6E8IU8Q820120730
31 July: SMH: Ben Cubby: Climate sceptics unmoved by scientist’s about-face
”I’m not convinced that [Professor Muller] was ever a sceptic although, of people I respect, there is a couple who do have a decent opinion of him,” said blogger Jo Nova in Perth, the author of The Skeptic’s Handbook…
”If [Professor Muller’s study] removed stations that are near concrete, car parks, airports and airconditioners, and used only the best data we have, I’d be open to accept their warming trend calculations,” she said. ”But even so, it’s another leap entirely to say that just because the world has warmed that it’s man-made.”
The ”urban heat island effect” is real – it has been documented by meteorologists for decades – but the Bureau of Meteorology removes suspect thermometer sites from its climate change measurements. The two groups of data – one for weather forecasting and one for climate – are available for scrutiny on its website…
http://www.smh.com.au/environment/climate-change/climate-sceptics-unmoved-by-scientists-aboutface-20120730-23a6s.html#ixzz229xt3NT6
I sense a disturbance in the farce.
If we want to assess global warming then we should use Anthony’s best-site-only analysis.
If we want to assess UHI, then we should use the poorest sites.
If we want to exaggerate global warming, then we should adopt the Menne/NOAA/NCDC approach.
If we want to fix the temperature record, we need new statistical people at the NCDC (which probably requires voting Republicans into the Senate, House and Presidency – politics is part of this you know).
Looks like it is going to be a interesting few weeks. They will be coming from all directions. I believe you will have much fun in the process and that many will learn much, inadvertently, from the MSM.
Now, more importantly, when can we see the Global surface stations work? They would be much better than the US stations, no? Its not hard to globally position cell phone pictures now days for verification. Ya know that metadata thing 🙂
Keep up the good work and stay strong.
I assume you hurried up the press release to counter Muller’s BS. Unfortunately, it would probably have been better to wait, as it turns out. He is getting all the MSM press anyway, and the real players know what a joke he is. Your fully vetted paper would have been a more credible response. Of course, like many, I specialize in hindsight….
How many things can you get wrong in one post?
– it’s not an ‘op-ed’, it’s a quote in a blog.
– Given that CRN was commissioned in 2008 – after a decade of reports describing the need for such a system, how can you claim that no-one was doing anything until Watts (2009)? Does NCDC have time travel too?
– Where’s the warming? I suppose the changes in plant hardiness zones are fictional, the melting glaciers in the Rockies are fictional, spring arriving earlier is fictional, adjacent ocean temperature rises are fictional, the satellite temperature rise over the US is fictional etc. etc.
– whatever happened to taking the science as it comes instead of this clinging to the wreckage of failed ideas?
The GAO is pretty good. They did a similar trashing of the big EPA secondhand smoke study of 1992 — with the same result: the media never mentioned it and 95% of the US population continues to believe wisps of tobacco smoke pose a deadly threat. Very excellent job Anthony and the rest of you! You’ve stuck with the battle, being what I always like to call “the sand in the gears,” and it looks like you’re finally knocking those treads off the enemy tanks! The big trick lies in getting the media behind you.
You probably thought, as we did in the smoking battle, that having the GAO come out for you would be the telling nail in Warmers’ coffin. How did they wriggle out of it? Simply by ignoring its existence? You need to be vocal enough to make sure that doesn’t happen with your current work. Grab every opportunity possible, no matter how difficult, to get your stuff out to the general public and force the opposition to do more than
A)ignore you, or
B) try to pass you off as denialists who disagree with “all the cognizant authorities” or “the scientific consensus,” or
C) try to paint you as simply being stooges/shills/dupes of Big Oil or the Republicans or whatever.
A suggestion: when you show that three datasets graph, follow it up with a smoothed version (maybe a rolling 1 or 3 year average or some such) so that the casual passersby (who are really the people we are both trying to educate in our battles) will absorb the message at a quick glance. The problem we face is very similar: in both cases most people don’t have the time, energy, education, and motivation to study and evaluate the data carefully. They tend to simply agree with “established authorities” because “that’s what most folks seem to believe” and that’s what’s been set in their minds for the last 20 years; and, in order to shake up that comfy little thought-world you need to make your images clear enough that they cut through the haze and motivate the viewer to take a little more time and thought over what you’re saying. If things look “complicated” (such as a very jaggy graph) they won’t take that time — so that’s why the simplifications are important (as long as you always back them up with the real data nearby for anyone wanting to look more closely.
Well done!
🙂
MJM
This is probably the most powerful argument I have heard from WUWT in years. Thank you Anthony.
Imagine any other science that relies on a million precise measurements that refuses to calibrate their gauges… at all.. and that simply relies of fudging the data to match the gauges they assume are the good ones.
In any discipline that behaves like that all you can really expect to see from their results is data that trends in the direction the scientists thought the trend would go.
I’m rather liking Andy Revkin these days. The Team gets annoyed whenever he swims in a pond not flooded with their dogma (I forget who it was who threatened to “cut off access” to all mainstream climate scientists if Revkin persisted in speaking with The Wrong People. It was funny. The poor idiot sent his email threat to a large list, some of whom were not sympathetic to the proposed intellectual knee capping…)
More and more, I think Revkin is an honest broker. He must take The Team seriously: they are the funded mainstream. But, gently, slowly, he is looking for truth. ….Lady in Red
Typical government-run agency. It’s not capable of doing any real work so it hires subcontractors to do everything. The FBI and the CIA are probably the only agencies that do real work.
Great response, Anthony. Most of the commenters at Revkin’s disparaged you, but I didn’t see any disparaging what you actually said. I think it’s time I contribute to your tip jar. Thanks.
I know I’ll sound like a “broken record”, but I’d LOVE to see the “per decade” breakdown of the temp increase, one decade at a time, from (what?) 1885 or 1900 onward.
I’m sure it tells an interesting story with periods of rise, periods of decline…and (probably, really) decline or flat for the last…what 12, 15, 17 years?
One comes to that age old question, what is the TIME CONSTANT for the system response. I.e., is new equilibrium established in one year, two years, three years or decades, or 100’s of years?
Important considerations.
Max
My opinion, before they dump $500,000,000 into another Solynda, they should put together a number of mobile teams and set up around the various stations. Maybe 4 or 5 units to a team equiped with weather instuments. (Anthony has nice units.) Surround the station being “checked” at a distance that would eliminate/minimize siting problems. Set up for a week or two. Come back different seasons of the year. Move the teams from station to station year round. Compare the mobile data with the station data. That should give a good value to “adjust” each station data by or leave the data alone if it’s accurate.
Those “Green Jobs” would be real and worth it.
Bill Illis says:
July 30, 2012 at 6:39 pm
If we want to assess global warming then we should use Anthony’s best-site-only analysis.
Actually the Watts et. al. draft paper ignored the most modern and best equipped sites entirely. And that speaks volumes about the quality of the work in this paper.
p.s. The paper published by Menne et. al. (2010) did not ignore the best sites.
Separate Anthony’s tip jar, poor Andy Revkin could use some Thoughtful, Reasoned Support at the NYTimes for writing about this in the first place.
All The Usual Suspects are trashing him for moving off The Team’s reservation. (It is interesting how thoughtless most of these comments are, without reason. Just: You Should Never Talk To Those People, Revkin!
Help him.
Remember, folk: It’s the data — and repeatable science — this “profession” needs. If we focus on Feynman, the truth will out…. ….Lady in Red
Swing *THWACK* miles and miles and miles
The GHCN has a large percentage of airports (over 50% last time I looked) and airports figure strongly in the QA process (where out of ‘acceptable’ readings are replaced by an average of 5 or so ‘nearby’ ASOS stations – at airports…) so checking station quailty ought to start with “Airport Heat Island” effects. Yet it isn’t done.
I did a quick check using Wunderground. It lists 30+ ‘nearby’ stations to the one you select, so you can get the large Airport and the surrouding in one snapshot. Most of the time the temperatures decrease with distance from the airport. Sometimes by a few degrees C.
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2012/07/27/more-airports-hotter-than-nearby-stations/
(It helps to take the ‘sample’ at night so any ‘slow to report’ stations report high instead of low. Even with that it is very clear that Airports are way hot as reported.)
Until Airports are purged from the USHCN / GHCN (or suitable AHI correction of a couple of degrees C is applied) all they are finding with their statistical manipulation is that tarmac and concrete are hotter than grass fields…
The new method applied by Anthony will be sensitive to that ocean of heat sink around the runway… (Where the thermometer ought to be placed for aviation use; so “density altitude” calculations for take off / landing are correct. The primary purpose IS to report that hot runway… it just makes them unfit for ‘climate science’ use; especially when compared to the grass fields that were there in 1920…)
I’ve just looked at Roy Spencer’s site and the lower tropospheric temperature from 1979 until June of 2012. There is a blue line for monthly values – it crosses the zero anomaly line so many times counting that is difficult. Mostly recently it was at zero or below in 2011 and 2012. The running 13-month average crosses the zero line a dozen times or more. I am not convinced this is going to be catastrophic.
One of your items is “plant hardiness zones.” I’ve lived in a number of places over the last 60 years and have checked. The plants growing in those places are the same as before. Currently, my tomatoes struggle to set fruit and when they do, most of the fruit does not ripen. Still, I try. I’ll tack a hardiness zone update in their midst so they are sure to get the message.
Hilarious post. Great comedy. The lines couldn’t be sequence any better to demonstrate the hilarity!
First Anthony Watts take full credit:
Until I came along with Watts 2009, they really weren’t looking closely at the issue.
Then Anthony Watts complains how they spent millions:
… why did they need to spend millions of dollars on the new Climate Reference Network commissioned in 2008 that we never hear about?
Hmmm… didn’t 2008 come before 2009?
And of course, this new network of our most modern and best equipped and sited stations, was completely ignored in the Watts et. al. draft paper being discussed.
This fact speaks volumes!
Anthony, you have done a great job of framing the debate. You have put NCDC in the painful position of appealing to highly sophisticated magical statistics for the purpose of defending NCDC’s decision not to address siting issues with their temperature stations. You have created such a powerful meme that I fully expect some intelligent politicians to pick it up.
So, is the SD, Cottonwood site straightened out wrt the MMTS location?
FWIW Revkin is IMO doing a decent job here … reporting and obtaining comments from all sides.
I’ll cross post this from the other thread as its relevant here:
A. Scott said:
Anthony is up on Foxnews.com:
http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2012/07/30/weather-station-temp-claims-are-overheated-report-claims/
[REPLY: Very nioce. It links to the BEST website, Muller’s NYT op-ed and even MIkey Mann’s facebook page, but, oddly enough NOT to WUWT or the paper. Real Smooth. -REP]
“I would argue not for removal of bad stations, but rather for the replacement of bad stations with well-sited stations, with simultaneous overlapping data collection so that biases can be both measured directly and permanently eliminated.”
Maybe if they named each new station after a politician, they’d get more funding for the project. 🙂
Or how about corporate sponsorship? Do you think air conditioning manufacturers would want to have their names on climate stations? 🙂
What astounds me is the money, time, and energy spent on trying to get good results out of garbage data, see for example the *BEST* (but not best) effort, yet thes *real climate scientists* say zip on improving the quality of the measurements.
Mr. Watts, your devotion, expertise and tenacity is truly a thing to admire and aspire to. Congratulations and best wishes for continued success.
I am still in a state of disbelief that so many so-called scientists have been willing to abandon the basic tenets of the scientific method in accepting, and even actively peddling, a hypothesis so clearly lacking in supporting data. Worse yet, it’s becoming more and more obvious that many of them are even prepared to manipulate the available data to produce a biased outcome.
What on Earth is happening to us? First of all, how can any scientist bring him/herself actively to undermine the very institution which has dragged humanity out of witchcraft and ignorance? And second, how can other scientists (almost certainly the great majority) witness this appalling deceit and choose to say nothing?
If there is a category of things we might call outright evil, the Global Warming deceit must surely be perilously close to falling within that category. Scientists knowingly spread disinformation because it lines their pockets, trusting school children are deliberately fed blatant lies and exaggerations disguised as scientific facts, countless thousands of the world’s poor starve while food crops are converted to unnecessary and environmentally damaging biofuels, and investigative reporters deliberately neglect to investigate the facts.
Why? What do these rogues and fools hope to accomplish except the destruction of their own lifestyle, their own prosperity, and ultimately their own freedom? What can they themselves possibly gain by it? It appears they want to throw away individual liberties it has taken millenia of struggle to achieve and turn over our future to an unelected and unaccountable ‘Green’ bureaucracy. In the words of the old adage: ‘They are making a rod for their own backs’.
By the grace of God, arrayed against this prostitution of science and misrepresentation of the truth, the rest of us have the likes of Anthony Watts, Stephen McIntyre, Professors Lindzen, Plimer, and Carter, Lord Christopher Monckton, and Joanne Nova, to name just a few of our champions.
Only very rarely in the field of scientific endeavour have so many owed so much to so few. (Apologies to Churchill.)
These individuals have spent years suffering the slings and arrows of outraged climate alarmists by publicly pointing out the flaws in ‘the science’ and decrying the lies. That takes stamina, determination, and above all courage, and I thank them all profusely from the bottom of my heart for their sacrifices.
But it also takes money to carry on the fight.
I have just sent $50.00 to WUWT and I urge you all, those who haven’t done so already, to send whatever money you can afford so that true science can be supported further. I’m not clever enough or brave enough to do what Anthony Watts does on our behalf, and maybe you’re not either, but we can do the next best thing and give him the means to finish the job.
I think he’s more than worth it. Dig deep! Do it now!
Me too. I’ve always cautioned commenters here who claimed “the last nail in the coffin.” I suggested they say, “It’s another arrow in the elephant.” But now I think that this, plus the recent “bad homogenization” paper, are going to make a considerable number of warmists, even marinated-in-the-meme climatologists, stop and ask themselves: “Hmm, could it possibly be (perish the thought) that the skeptics might be right?”
They will then start to review mentally some of the other findings our side has come up with and begin to look at things from a new perspective. As Sherlock Holmes said, once you shift your perspective ever so slightly, circumstantial evidence can point in an entirely different direction. At a minimum, I think this momentary re-think will lead to expressions of a lesser certainty in their case, a lower degree of scorn for contrarians, and a greater willingness to bethink themselves that they might be wrong.
So I’d call these papers the first nails in the coffin, from a psychological point of view.
In doing some digging I also found that NCDC also has its own “surface stations” program and site http://www.surfacetemperatures.org/ … apparently created after the Sept 2010 WMO CIMO meeting which endorsed the Leroy 2010 method.
Much hand-waving about establishing benchmarks for surface temp monitoring. They made some efforts thru 2011 but appears they’ve made no progress since.
Sure appears to have been largely abandoned – no blog posts – no progress reports – since beginning of year.
A “Benchmarking Position paper submitted for peer review” was scheduled due for April 2012 and appears was never completed.
Almost laughably – to me at least – they show they planned to get around to actually beginning to create benchmarks in November 2015! When does it take 5 years to figure out what a simple picture or site visit would show? When its the gubmint spending our tax dollars – and when its a group of scientists performing triage with no apparently real intent to actually do anything – thats when.
Hmmm …. seems to me their first task should have been “Review Leroy 2010 and implement”
HOW HARD IS IT TO LOOK AT THESE TWO EXAMPLES AND FIGURE OUT A SIMPLE SITE ANALYSIS PROGRAM?
http://surfacestations.org/images/OrlandCA_USHCN_Site_small.jpg
http://surfacestations.org/images/MarysvilleCA_USHCN_Site_small.jpg
I would remind folks to visit Anthony’s http://surfacestations.org/ site as well … it is obviously a very good resource on this topic
Great work. But, I strongly suspect that the overlap of new stations with old ones will reveal that for many of them the relationship between the new clean data and the old contaminated data is rather random.
As a worst possible case, take an airport site. The amount of additional heat will depend on so many factors like which way was the wind blowing, which planes went down which runways and when, which way did they turn and point their engines, what type of planes were there. All of these things will influence the amount of extra heat that hit that station. And the amount of heat will be essentially random. Then, given that many records will only contain hourly records how could you possibly remove any contamination reliably?
Where heat sources are less intense and less variable the contamination will be less but the principle will be the same.
I suspect that several PHDs later we will have compelling evidence that the data from many old stations cannot be retrospectively adjusted and simply has to be thrown away.
Manipulate the Data!
The spokesman for NOAA said, adjusted data better fits the projected computer models then raw data…!!!!!!!!!!!!
Why take data at all as it is no longer needed, just take down the computer results and save all that money wasted on data collection and entry.
Oh yeh! closing stations and just using Major airport automatic reports and projecting the temperatures for everything with 1200km is the way things are to be done in the future. pg
This graphic stands out to me.
http://surfacestations.org/images/USHCN_equip.gif
The new study notes that MMTS stations report cooler temps and have been adjusted warmer – according to this graphic that would mean 55% of the stations with MMTS were adjusted warmer to match the older technology.
Completely silly it would seem when both the newer MMTS sites and the well sited high quality rural sites both showed cooler. What possible reason is there to choose to adjust warmer – to adjust the newer and high quality rural sites warmer to match the old tech and poor quality sites?
If I may ask a broader question (from this non-scientist) about the scientific significance of surface Tmin and Tmax records, even if we had “ideal” Tmin and Tmax records, has anyone assessed whether that would really tell us enough about climate?
i.e., do we really know that the surface temp record would be adequate to understanding the “climate system” even if the record-keeping were… adequate? For instance, how do we know what is “really” happening between the Tmin and Tmax during each 24 hr period, through every minute and hour of the cycles, across every mile or Km. of a large land area? Temperatures change in so many ways and at varying rates depending upon local weather. Can min., mean, and max. numbers represent the “real” energy during all of that time and space? And to the extent that this is a difficult kind of problem (this is what I’m really getting at now), do flaws in the siting/instrumental records get magnified as great uncertainties by the fact that they really represent only momentary snapshots in an extremely complex and constantly changing system?
I know this is not phrased well enough, but does anyone know if these kinds of issues are sufficiently addressed in the scientific literature? TIA for any help….
Watts (2009) was preceded by years of threads on his blog documenting the ongoing results from his SurfaceStations project. These were what stirred the pot.
Great job! Thank you, Anthony, and all your help!
If they adopted your wireless monitoring devices, the data could be fed from the local wireless receptor straight to the home office. And the stations could be correctly sited without digging an expensive trench. The expense would go down and the reliability would go up.
RE: FoxNews: Global warming believer-turned-skeptic Anthony Watts, a former TV meteorologist, …
Nicely put. We forget.
Anthony, you ought to adopt that as a standard suggested introduction. It was NOAA, with their neglected station quality, who is most responsible for you becoming a skeptic. As a conversation piece, it leads right into your realization the surfacestations.org was needed.
@Anthony and Evan, You guys are doing great work on this blog and have turned out a valuable paper as well. This AGW monster will be taken down by a thousand cuts and not at one blow. This cut may fester for a long time as it calls into question a large body of work that this thing has been created from. A tactical win, yes. A strategic blow, I think yes. pg
Anthony, your response has hit the nail squarely on the head. The simple fact that the temperature source data is badly corrupted & completely untrustworthy must be repeated over, & over, & over, in a loud voice, until even our politicians hear about it!! Only then can the war against the AGW scare be won.
We see the standard response of academia “It’s not peer reviewed, so I won’t comment”. Circle the peer group. Call in the Rapid Response team for heavy air cover! Meanwhile the paper has 600+ comments (last I looked). Many typo corrections, some editorial suggestions, some stylistic suggestions, and a couple of thoughtful “you might want to think about” sciency (™ S. Palin) suggestions. All in two days.
Journal Pal Review by four pre-qualified commenter’s takes forever and our government scientists prefer not to comment until that hurdle is met. I’m searching for a word that won’t get snipped. Wussies.
Remember the laws of thermodynamics Carbon dioxide traps heat , where do you think it goes.
Cecil, you’re quite correct in your criticism of “peer review.” I co-authored a paper in 2005 and we submitted it to the BMJ. They held on to it for almost three months while getting only ONE peer review (which was actually somewhat positive) and then rejected the paper on the grounds that it “provided nothing new to what is already known” — which was a bit odd since it flatly and 100% contradicted everything they’d ever previously published on the topic (smoking bans and heart attacks.) We then submitted it to “Circulation” where an unknown number of anonymous reviewers reviewed it and we were allowed to see a few selected snippets of their reviews, and got rejected again. Finally we submitted it to “Tobacco Control” and received three anonymous and strongly negative reviews and were rejected a third time. Eventually, between 2009 and 2011 our work was corroborated by three similarly large studies: the one done by the Rand Corporation and Stanford was published in an environmental journal while I believe the other two are still homeless despite their authors having impressive credentials and the work being both well done and verifiable.
Peer-review isn’t worth a pixel on a computer screen nowadays if the journals have a policy that runs counter to the conclusions of a study. Anthony, I’d recommend you submit your work to ONE good weather/environment journal in the mainstream, and if it’s rejected there, immediately look for publication by a journal in a less disagreeable field.
– MJM
In the real environmental world, litigation often relies upon the quality of the data. So much so that prescriptive standard methodologies for sample extraction and analyses commonly turn on USEPA Level IV scrutiny, to the tune of many millions of dollars. Here, we are asked, nay prescribed, to readily accept, as sacrosanct, data collected from highly questionable, protocol-failed, frequently, throughout recent time, instrumental sitings, numerable, undisclosed, undocumented mathematical manipulations, particularly over the recently rapid evolution of such instrumentation. In effect, we, the jury in this case, are beseeched to believe such a proposition, proscribing any and all scientific objection.
I just could not dream of taking such a sorry, unsupportable argument to trial. What Anthony et al have provided is precisely what I would seek out to sequentially neuter the very base of whatever argument “I” might devise in “support” of my “side” in such a judicially tortuous venture.
In opposition, a litany of images from the surfacestations.org works would suffice to instill “reasonable doubt” in almost any judge or jury, followed with seemingly interminable, undocumented “adjustments”. New Zealands’ data is likely all it would take. But that’s not hammering. Watts et al, 2012, is.
A properly prepared attorney would easily shred such an argument, even to the perception of a jury of 12. Which is what makes the defense of such an argument incomprehensible to a ready, willing and available “climate ambulance chaser”………
I would have no qualms advising my attorney-client to inquire “Is that all you got?”, before seeing how much WATTage they could take………experts on the stand, et al, of course.
“The defense calls Dr. Michael Mann………..”
But stranger things have (Australia), and will (AB-32, California), happen, meaning that
“a stern chase after a lie is a long one.” – unknown
Phillip boccuto on July 30, 2012 at 10:43 pm
Remember the laws of thermodynamics Carbon dioxide traps heat , where do you think it goes.
I’m trying to remember where it says it traps heat….
NCSC say “Our approach always moved in the right direction” – which direction might that be, I wonder?
Phillip Boccuto, you really need to understand the audience of WUWT before making inane statements like that.
“Phillip boccuto says:
July 30, 2012 at 10:43 pm
Remember the laws of thermodynamics Carbon dioxide traps heat , where do you think it goes.”
I’ll try more latent heat of evaporation and increased cloud cover to reflect more sunlight and a small rise in temperature. Where do you think it goes?
“Ray Boorman says:
July 30, 2012 at 9:53 pm
Anthony, your response has hit the nail squarely on the head. The simple fact that the temperature source data is badly corrupted & completely untrustworthy must be repeated over, & over, & over, in a loud voice, until even our politicians hear about it!!”
And emphasize that the homogenization process elevates the good sites to match the bad sites, a built in predjudice of the data which must have been understood by those processing the data originally.
I hope that the alarmists scientists who are developing the datasets who claim that there is a clear human signal in the warming, never have to measure anything for real.
This is the heart of the global warming alarmist problem. How do we know if we are causing a problem if we are not even measuring it correctly.
The FoxNews article has as related articles the FoxNews Feb. 26, 2010 which talks about USCRN being developed with an interview with Watts and examples of some of the worst contaminated USHCN stations. U.S. Climate Data Compromised by Sensors’ Proximity to Heat Sources, Critics Say
It also has the classic slide show from surfacestations.org 9 Wacky Weather Stations. Including the BBQ grill under the sensor and another in CA 5 feet from the makeshift incinerator.
At last you have said it “where is the warming? I dont think ther is ANY warming and there hasnt been any probably since 1880. I’ve been saying this for the last 6 years after considering the adjustment and reading posts from fellow bloggers like “I travelleved from my city a just 1 mile out in to rural and my thermometer fell by 3-5 c repeatedly”. It was obvious. The only problem is that the persons involved with AGW will NOT admit as their jobs , blogs, investments and so on, depend on it. It will be more like “old soldiers never die they only fade away”. The process has already started with CG1 and obvious non-warming beginning to be noticed by ordinary folk on the street, but will still take another 3-5 years to be 100% acknowledged (even if Romney wins in the USA).
“where is the warming?” BTW the above statement contradicts to some extent what has been said at FOX news by AW? There is definitely warming ect.
Interested, that comment deserve being said again in total. Those are the same deep questions I keep shaking my head at every single day since I learned what is really going on. How can these persons that call themselves scientists be doing this. The only answer I keep coming up with is pure personal greed or possibly fear. Thanks for putting it in so many words.
Gary says:
July 30, 2012 at 6:57 pm
How many things can you get wrong in one post?
– it’s not an ‘op-ed’, it’s a quote in a blog.
It’s more than just a single quote, the site is clearly labeled “The Opinion Pages” of the electronic edition of the NYT, and it was written in response to a request by the writer, so it qualifies as an op-ed.
– Given that CRN was commissioned in 2008 – after a decade of reports describing the need for such a system, how can you claim that no-one was doing anything until Watts (2009)? Does NCDC have time travel too?
CRN was *commissioned* in 2008. What did they actually do before Watts (2009)? Nothing – they talked, but did nothing.
– Where’s the warming? I suppose the changes in plant hardiness zones are fictional, the melting glaciers in the Rockies are fictional, spring arriving earlier is fictional, adjacent ocean temperature rises are fictional, the satellite temperature rise over the US is fictional etc. etc.
Where’s the rapid, severe, debilitating, catastrophic warming? The official plant hardiness zones have been changing ever since they were first established. When I was a kid back in the ‘50s, Black Birches (which are cold-soil trees) on Long Island were vanishing – now they’re common.
http://pbisotopes.ess.sunysb.edu/esp/Science_Walks/Weld/Weld.htm
What about the glaciers in the Rockies?
http://www.nps.gov/features/romo/feat0001/GlcBasics.html
As for “spring arriving earlier is fictional” – try selling that to someone living in the Northeast Corridor in the US. Or to a Brit. Wear earplugs and be prepared to duck frequently.
– whatever happened to taking the science as it comes instead of this clinging to the wreckage of failed ideas?
Because most of the CAGW canon is built on the wreckage of failed ideas – the boffins just planted shrubs around the ruins, gave them a fresh coat of paint via PowerPoint, and then declared the result the “Settled Science Consensus Community”…
Soooooo —
How many things can you get wrong in one post?
Keep trying – yours is nowhere near the record.
Phillip boccuto says:
July 30, 2012 at 10:43 pm
Remember the laws of thermodynamics Carbon dioxide traps heat , where do you think it goes.
Which laws did you have in mind when you wrote that?
“They still refuse to get out of the office, to examine firsthand the condition of the network”
The devil is always hiding in the details and they are too obsessed with their computer programmes to go out and study reality any more.. It’s GIGO for them all the way.
My understanding is that warming of Earth’s surface is not assessed using the near-surface temperatures of one country, even one as large as the USA. It is also my understanding that the greatest rise in heat content is in the oceans.
On the subject of peer-review, it provides for some control of scientific quality, something a blog posting doesn’t have. Having published many papers in my own discipline, as well as having served as journal editor and reviewer of many manuscripts, I know first-hand that the concept of expert review is actually a good one. Yes, occasional papers “squeak through” that shouldn’t; others get rejected that may deserve to be accepted (although often those manuscripts will be accepted if resubmitted having addressed key scientific criticisms). If a manuscript doesn’t hold up to journal peer review, usually there is a good reason.
The reason they fear the Surface Station Project is because they know once the truth comes out, a lot of them are going to become redundant and lose their funding. Rather than fight the truth, they should retool themselves and learn new skills to make themselves employable. Those who selfishly try and hide the truth to protect their own ricebowl are harming the progress of mankind. Think of the children.
Gary Paul K2
P.G. Sharrow @ 9:05 pm got it dead to rights with this gem of scientific-naff:
‘How do you like them apples’, Gary and Paul K2? Or maybe, that’s what you two believe as well.
Bill Illis says: July 30, 2012 at 6:39 pm
Well put
Paul K2 says: July 30, 2012 at 7:59 pm
Your words speak volumes about your own quality. Your point, however, is noted and will hopefully be dealt with / explained.
Theo Goodwin says: July 30, 2012 at 8:52 pm
Worth emphasising. However, the c-y-a mentions here, at BBC, and elsewhere, are still micro-moves in the right direction. Though WaPo counsels readers to keep their eyes averted until peer-reviewed.
This paper isn’t just a nail in the coffin of AGW imho.
I think this is a gift that will in the future be able to keep giving nails indefinitely for everyone to hammer into the AGW coffin for themselves – when properly edited and corrected by the scientific end of the open-peer-review here – as noted by Leif et al.
I hope Steve McIntyre can help with this.
Who are the real deniers?
Those who, having once believed in AGW, now deny, on Anthony’s good (and about-to-be-improved-by-open-review) fundamental evidence, that manmade global warming even exists as a hazard;
or
Those who refuse to look properly at Anthony’s paper, but do things like:
Nitpick
Distract
Cherrypick
Misrepresent
Appeal to Authority
Ignore and Obscure
Distribute anonymous criticism
Counsel others “not to look until peer-reviewed”
Refuse to look beyond their office at the stations themselves
?
Ian W says:
July 30, 2012 at 5:27 pm
What has been exposed is a total lack of governance, quality control and configuration management….
_____________________________
AMEN, You can not “adjust” data higgly piggly like these jokers do. You either toss it out as contaminated, use LARGE error bars or you have a valid justified reason for adjusting each individual data point, calibration off, wind direction from the road…. AND you had better have the studies to back up the amount of adjustment too, for each individual station.
This historical data is good to +/- 1F and that is being very generous. See Australian temperature records shoddy, inaccurate, unreliable. The USA and Australia would be expected to have the best climate records in the world. They obviously do not.
As far as I’m concerned, we have no surface data from this system, just numbers. If you can massage these numbers into something meaningful, then why bother with the weather stations at all? It’s no greater feat of magic.
Kapoooow!!!
I have always been very sceptical about how they are able to make accurate adjustments for the Urban Heat Island effect. Do they make adjustments for unconscious bias? How do we know their adjustments are correct?
US taxpayers are not getting value for money. Why should it take a blogger working pro bono and a band of volunteers to examine thermometer locations????? Where is the oil funding when you really need it???
I’ve never understood the reason for giving the warmmongers more grants. After all, the science is settled.
Bill Tuttle says:
July 31, 2012 at 1:40 am
Thanks Bill for setting the trolls straight.
I’ve been observing Anthony’s work since 2007, way back when Roger Pielke Sr’s blog was open for comments 🙂 I remember some of the first pictures of the US surface stations showing poor siting and poor maintenance. And I also remember that Tom Karl of NCDC (among MANY others in the well-funded climate science cabal) was NOT very interested in “amateur” involvement in NCDC matters, especially when they pointed out glaring problems with the network. The icing on the cake was Tom Peterson’s “ghost written” talking points memo from 2009 cited by Anthony above. Here’s one of the best bits:
Q. What can we say about poor station exposure and its impact on national temperature
trends?
A. Surfacestations.org has examined about 70% of the 1221 stations in NOAA’s Historical
Climatology Network (USHCN) (Watts, 2009). According to their web site of early June 2009,
they classified 70 USHCN version 2 stations as good or best (class 1 or 2). The criteria used to make that classification is based on NOAA’s Climate Reference Network Site Handbook so the criteria are clear. But, as many different individuals participated in the site evaluations, with varying levels of expertise, the degree of standardization and reproducibility of this process is unknown.
Yes – you read that right. NCDC thinks that citizens “with varying levels of expertise” taking pictures of poorly-sited climate monitoring stations requires some form of “standardization and reproducibility”!
Finally, it would be very revealing to compare the budgets of the citizen Surface Stations Project with NCDC annual budget. What ARE they doing with our tax money, anyway? Oh yeah, they’re blowing it on the National Climate Service!
“House Science Panel to Investigate NOAA Climate Service”
by Daniel Strain on 22 September 2011, 4:29 PM
A political feud over a “shadow” climate science service is heating up again. Following months of partisan sparring, Representative Ralph Hall (R-TX), announced yesterday that the House of Representatives Committee on Science, Space, and Technology that he chairs will investigate whether the Obama Administration has ignored Congress and created a centralized climate service within the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
Last year, NOAA Administrator Jane Lubchenco announced the agency’s intention to create the climate service, which was envisioned as a parallel entity to the National Weather Service that would issue long range climate forecasts. Republican lawmakers, however, opposed the idea, and inserted language into a 2011 spending bill that barred the agency from using any funds to “implement, establish, or create a NOAA Climate Service.”
Some members of the House science committee became upset after NOAA climatologist Thomas Karl appeared to suggest in a December 2010 interview that NOAA had moved ahead regardless. Soon, Hall was writing to Lubchenco, asking for an explanation. In a series of letters, the committee asked for information regarding, among other requests, the responsibilities of Karl and a few other climate-focused employees and funding for their positions.
Mr. Watts et al, I must thank you from the bottom of my heart. You all are doing what I wished I could do. Make a difference , have an impact on the AGW propaganda machine. Thank you.
I was once alone in the AGW forest. When I found WUWT, I found a home amongst others who were also skeptical. Anthony you’re the best.
I debated making a comment here as to the science of monitoring stations. Anthony I applaud your good scientific work. It is quite impressive. I also applaud many of the comments made both here and in other blog posts. Many of the commenters have gone through the same experiences I have gone through in our working careers.
I was very much involved in EPA’s primary and secondary air monitoring stations. They had set standards for siting these stations, but no one seemed to really know what the surrounding conditions were at each site. EPA figured they had enough data in the early 1980’s and then shut down most of the sites. They only “needed” a few to keep up the data stream. Financial cut-backs were the reason.
I was also involved in the asbestos contrivers starting at about 1976. Much of that information and data that was used for the EPA statements and MSM at the time was GIGO. Very little science used here either in their determinations for regulations imposed on the public. Environmental monitoring of asbestos levels did not take into consideration the surrounding geology, meteorology, land use, etc. People set up stations and left them. Going out and looking and evaluating sites was not necessary by the powers to be in EPA. My impression is that they thought they didn’t need to actually look at the sites.
I take intense interest in the climate change debates. There is a lot of good science (much like the recent study done by Watts et al) and lots of GIGO science that seems to be the popular view point by the public. Thanks everyone for your good comments and articles. My little part to help promote good science is to spread the word as long as I can, to a local college by teaching. Everyone needs to do their part to spread good, reliable information to others that don’t have the time nor attention to learn on their own, good science.
All the facts in the world will not change the central fact that AGW Catastrophism is a systematic political-economic assault on post-Enlightenment industrial-technological civilization (Ehrlich, Linkola, Schellnhuber), not under any circumstances a scientific inquiry. Let doubters of this assertion answer, Why is “Railroad Bill” Pachauri still Chairman of the UN’s IPCC?
Imagine if Anthony had with great fanfare announced, like that fellow Muller, that he had “recanted,” that he had “seen the light,” and “realized the deeper truth” that man-made greenhouse gases were “polluting the Earth” and “would soon raise the atmosphere to unsustainable temperatures.”
You can bet that this “former leader of the anti-science denialists” would be an instant celebrity, showered with praise and inundated with requests for interviews, op-eds, speeches. His name would be on the lips of every mainstream television anchor; indeed, he would probably be invited to the White House, along with the high priests of the Watermelons, Algore, Michael Mann, John Holdren, and other ‘green’ luminaries.
Instead Anthony and his colleagues have performed a seminal service to the cause of rationality and good science, pointing out with careful observation that the “global warming” emperor is wearing only a tissue of fabricated data. What should then be the response of the True Believers to this heresy? To denounce it would be to draw the attention of the public; better to ignore it, leave it in the weeds by the road where the emperor marches, like the story-book child who pointed out the obvious.
Just watch: The days will roll by, and the months, and even the brief flurry in the alternative media will die away. The Establishment will continue to press for taxes, and controls, and the elimination of “fossil fuels,” all in the name of “sustainability” and the “green economy.”
The only hope for a real change, for the replacement of cant with science, is to elect people to government (local, state, national) who will cut off the funding to the agenda-driven “green” bureaucracies and the rent-seekers in the universities who pad every grant proposal with homilies and obeisance to “climate change.”
Send Anthony’s press release and some of the better reports about it around to every candidate you can find. You will find some willing ears.
/Mr Lynn
Closing stations willy nilly will only further destroy data continuity. The US has fairly clear cut regional climates that warm or cool over long periods of time due to oceanic and atmospheric oscillations that can span 30 to 60 years. If station numbers and mix do not take this into consideration, you will bias the data set as you go forward with a climatologically different mix of stations than what you had before, resulting in more spurious trends, not less. I agree with Anthony. The proper thing to do would be to match each station closing with a properly sited new station within the same climate region, take over-lapping data, and then either possibly adjust the old station data accordingly, or if that can’t be done, junk the old data. It would also be well to remember that new stations set weather “records” all the time and has nothing to do with hypothesized catastrophic anthropogenic climate trends. An average day at an old station will set bells off at a new station.
****
Bill Tuttle says:
July 31, 2012 at 1:40 am
Where’s the rapid, severe, debilitating, catastrophic warming? The official plant hardiness zones have been changing ever since they were first established. When I was a kid back in the ‘50s, Black Birches (which are cold-soil trees) on Long Island were vanishing – now they’re common.
http://pbisotopes.ess.sunysb.edu/esp/Science_Walks/Weld/Weld.htm
****
Here in w MD Sugar maples (a cool-soil tree) are invading toward the SE into areas where they didn’t occur originally. Initially they invade along the stream floodplains & eventually up the adjacent slopes to some extent.
How does satellite data compare with the three datasets?
The problem with that observation is that the most recent available data appears to have these “highest quality” sites being adjusted as well. If the “data adjustors” were intent on bringing all data into line with the most accurate available records, you would expect “adjustments” to trend toward zero as superior new equipment and methods of data collection are introduced and replace older stations and equipment. This doesn’t happen.
A look at adjustments shows an increase in adjustment with a crossover in adjustment direction in the mid-20th C. Current adjustments make the first half of the 20th C somewhat cooler (though not consistently, and persistently increase temperatures with time after the mid-century point. See this:
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/img/climate/research/ushcn/ts.ushcn_anom25_diffs_urb-raw_pg.gif. It’s right there on the NOAA site. That ski jump to the right should not appear if more recent data is superior in quality. Instead, it shows the greatest “adjustments” occurring in data that should be of the highest reliability. From about 1969 onward the adjustment is about 0.1 deg-C per decade. Since the NOAA graph shows the difference between “Raw and Final” data the slope is not showing an increase in temperature. It is an increase in adjustment. As of the last few years on the graph where there is a plateau (ca. 1990 to 2000), the adjustment is tacking on about half of a degree C to the raw data for each of those years to “correct” it.
That could mean a couple of things including: 1) the superiority of modern gear and methods is overblown and is not openly acknowledged, 2) the researchers really expect a signal that isn’t there and are inserting it deliberately or unconsciously. I say unconsciously because it’s quite possible that there are errors in the correction algorithm that are showing the analysts what they expect, and because of this they aren’t questioning the increasing magnitude of adjustments when such adjustments should be diminishing as methods and gear “improve.” One scientific issue is that in most “hard” sciences, and even in most of the “soft” ones, numerical data is not “adjusted.” It is collected with an error estimate. Adjusting data is “blue sky” winging it.
That should be The Quote of the Day.
/Mr Lynn
Duster: You didn’t understand what I was talking about, at all! I was referring to the US Climate Reference Network (USCRN) stations installed between 2003 and 2008. These stations were sited across the CONUS to give us an exemplary temperature record database. Almost all the stations have been operational (114 stations at 107 sites) for five years now, which should be more than enough data to use as the comparative standard against both the Class 1/2 stations and Class 3/4/5 stations in this paper.
USCRN stations don’t require any of the normal adjustments inherent in the US Historical Climate Network. Therefore your comments are completely off the mark.
If there are significant siting biases, or faulty adjustments, a comparison of the last five years data with the USCRN station in the same grid would show the problem. Its such an obvious and relatively easy exercise, that one wonders why Watts et. al. didn’t do this? The authors of Menne (2010) did check their USHCN stations against the USCRN stations, and got an excellent degree of correlation.
You can’t excuse away this gap in the current paper methodology.
[The use of a 5 year record to show anything of significance seems to be way off the reservation . . whatever happened to standards? . .kbmod]
Interested says:
July 30, 2012 at 8:54 pm
I am still in a state of disbelief that so many so-called scientists have been willing to abandon the basic tenets of the scientific method in accepting, and even actively peddling, a hypothesis so clearly lacking in supporting data. Worse yet, it’s becoming more and more obvious that many of them are even prepared to manipulate the available data to produce a biased outcome.
What on Earth is happening to us? ….
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
MONEY, POWER and POLITICS in action.
Money: Gore pocketed a tidy $18 million from now defunct Chicago Climate Exchange.
Remember the outcome of all this is Kyoto & Agenda 21 If you have paid attention to what has been happening recently the fourteen year old outline at the bottom of this comment by a VP of Shell Oil should seem very familiar. Isn’t it nice the OIL COMPANIES have decided to take such an interest in “governing us”? (/sarc)
These snippets from the first Climategate e-mails show the “Team” is with the agenda (21) and were actually asked to vet it.
So what is “The Cause”? The complete restructuring of the world politically and economically from the currently available evidence.
Think about it. Economically the US, EU, Canada, Australia and the rest of the First World is a “mature” market. We HAVE our plumbing and houses and cars and computers and TVs. The middle men (corporations), banks and governments make their profits from commerce that is buying/selling transactions. Every time there is a transaction all three groups take their slice which is tacked onto what the consumer pays. The third world is a “Young market” with lots more transactions available for milking in the future so grabbing money from the first world to jump start India, China and others makes sense to the movers and shakers who run the world. Also wiping out the first world’s prosperity as was done to Europe during WWI & WWII allows a reset to a “younger market” To some extent this is done using zoning and regulations but “Sustainable Development”/ “Smart Growth” is equivalent to a lost war, the complete make over of our countries and cultures.
This is why you see the unholy alliance between Bankers, Corporations, Government officials and socialist groups like Greenpeace and the Universities. The only ones left out are Joe and Suzy homemaker, the ones who are paying for it.
(Thanks to NoTricksZone 129 Climate Scandals for links)
This is the KEY Climategate e-mail sent to over 40 people including Greenpeace, the World Bank government officials and universities professors. This is what Anthony and the rest of us are trying to stop.
More on Ged Davis Shell Oil VP and recent head of the World Business Council for Sustainable Development’s (WBCSD) Scenario Project team responsible for producing work on sustainable development aka Agenda 21. He is the guy who wrote the attachment below.
Without a motive behind it, I understand the resistance to the idea that a temperature monitoring site should only be influenced by, well, temperature. Not heat from a nearby solid that “overheats” but just the “uninfluenced” air.
We I work one of the things we do is measure turbidity. We use a turbidity meter. With no sample in the chamber, the meter usually reads about 0.025 NTUs. (Nessler Turbidity Units) We could legitimately subtract that amount from any of our readings. We could also put an empty cuvet in the chamber and subtract whatever NTU’s the cuvet itself adds to the sample put in it. (Each individual cuvet may give a different reading.) Honest, legitimate adjustments to determine what the NTU of the actual water is.
If we’re to base the world’s economy (let alone my family’s) on the theory of Human CO2 induced Global Warming, don’t you think it’d be worth spending a few bucks per site to ensure accuracy before spending trillions per country just to be sure first?
The paper should serve to turn the stampede to ruin.
OOPS!
Typo. “I understand the resistence” should be “I DON’T understand the resistence”.
(See. Even people that aren’t writing papers make typos.8-)
Bill Tuttle says:
July 31, 2012 at 1:49 am
Phillip boccuto says:
July 30, 2012 at 10:43 pm
Remember the laws of thermodynamics Carbon dioxide traps heat , where do you think it goes.
“Which laws did you have in mind when you wrote that?”
That would be the 19th Law of Quantum Thermodynamics. It holds that the trapped heat goes where the observer thinks that it goes. The Stones had a song about it in the mid-Sixties. It was a huge hit.
Phillip boccuto says:
July 30, 2012 at 10:43 pm
Remember the laws of thermodynamics Carbon dioxide traps heat , where do you think it goes.
__________________________________
And water vapor traps a Heck of a lot more, all you have to do is look at the IR bands. See this Graph (Also note that both CO2 and H2O block incoming solar energy so it is not one sided)
Water is 4 percent of the atmosphere while CO2 is less than 400 parts per million. On top of that the Relative Humidity has DROPPED. That is the amount of water in the atmosphere has DROPPED since 1948. See this Graph
If you really want to get into it. A large chunk of the high energy solar radiation ends up in the oceans that cover 70% of the earth’s surface, see this Graph and penetrates and is absorbed, see Graph 1and Graph 2. And the heat capacity of the ocean is much greater than the atmosphere link
Earthshine is low energy and spread out. See Graph and this is the IR energy you want me to consider the “Control Knob” of the Earth’s Climate? Just look at what happens during a solar eclipse link
TSI shows as much as 2Wm2 variation see Graph But that is not where the big variation is. See NASA Link1 and NASA Link2 Also see Article or this Article
At this point I do not thing we really have a good handle on what controls climate, but after 40 years of looking we have not managed to prove it is CO2. All that has been proven to me is scientists will lie and cheat when there is grant money involved and when bucking the “Consensus” means you lose your job. I am not alone in this opinionPaper 1and paper 2 and Paper 3
I’m not sure it’s even on-topic, but I have a problem with the graph presented above. It shows approximately the shape(s) I would expect, until I look at the dates along the x-axis. What happened to 1998? “Adjusted”? When I look at the dates, this just looks “wrong”. What am I missing?
Frank Kotler says:
July 31, 2012 at 8:26 pm
I’m not sure it’s even on-topic, but I have a problem with the graph presented above. It shows approximately the shape(s) I would expect, until I look at the dates along the x-axis. What happened to 1998? “Adjusted”? When I look at the dates, this just looks “wrong”. What am I missing?
1998 is there, Frank, but it sorta “blends” if you’re using a laptop. Go for the hi-rez version.
Theo Goodwin says:
July 31, 2012 at 6:40 pm
Bill Tuttle says:
July 31, 2012 at 1:49 am :“Which laws did you have in mind when you wrote that?”
That would be the 19th Law of Quantum Thermodynamics. It holds that the trapped heat goes where the observer thinks that it goes. The Stones had a song about it in the mid-Sixties. It was a huge hit.
You’re right — first cut on the “Beggar’s Banquet” album.
Howinell could I forget that one?
Gail Combs says:
July 31, 2012 at 6:52 pm
All that has been proven to me is scientists will lie and cheat when there is grant money involved and when bucking the “Consensus” means you lose your job. I am not alone in this opinionPaper 1and paper 2 and Paper 3.
From Paper 3: More than half (53%) of the faked research papers had been written by a first author who was a “repeat offender.” This was the case in only one in five (18%) of the erroneous papers.
Which renders the criterion of judging an author by the volume of his *submitted* work rather suspect.
Gail, you wrote, “All that has been proven to me is scientists will lie and cheat when there is grant money involved and when bucking the “Consensus” means you lose your job.”
Very true Gail. This is something I’ve been fighting against and trying to explain to people for years. See:
http://www.jacobgrier.com/blog/archives/2210.html
and read my comments there for a pristine example of researchers promising to produce the “desired” results if they’re given the half million dollars in research money. I was fortunate that with a bit of digging I was able to come up with the grant proposal that included this:
“We believe that this research will provide public health officials and tobacco control advocates with information that can help shape adoption and implementation of CIA policies, and prevent their repeal. The proposed study … will contribute to MPAAT’s overall mission by providing information that enables adoption and successful implementation of policies to protect employees and the general public from secondhand smoke exposure.”
And of course, just as with the Global Warming studies, you’ll see how the researchers manipulated the data to provide the answers showing that there’s “no economic harm” from implementing the granting agency’s agenda.
The problem is that this approach to research has been enshrined in antismoking grants for the last 30 years. It’s now a completely accepted practice and has spilled over to those pushing the global warming science. You need to do what I did and dig out their grant proposals and show how they promise results BEFORE they do the research! That’s a simple enough argument that you can make it quickly and clearly to the public so that the casual “passersby” will absorb it and realize that maybe, just possibly, conceivably, you all aren’t just a bunch of “denialists” after all.
It’s an uphill battle though when the media is solidly against you. On the plus side however you’ve managed to gather together an excellent group of very scientifically literate critics here — and I’m guessing there are other similar gatherings as well that I’m not familiar with.
– MJM
Bill Tuttle says:
August 1, 2012 at 2:11 am
Frank Kotler says:
July 31, 2012 at 8:26 pm
I’m not sure it’s even on-topic, but I have a problem with the graph presented above. It shows approximately the shape(s) I would expect, until I look at the dates along the x-axis. What happened to 1998? “Adjusted”? When I look at the dates, this just looks “wrong”. What am I missing?
1998 is there, Frank, but it sorta “blends” if you’re using a laptop. Go for the hi-rez version.
————————————————————-
Heh! Not a laptop – practically in a wooden box with the crank on the side. 🙂
Yeah, 1998 is there but it’s a great gaping Grand Canyon of a thing. The peak I expect to see in 1998 appears to be shifted up to 2000-2001. I thought maybe it was an artifact of the “12 month trailing average” but it seems like too much. Maybe it’s just me… Thanks for the reply!
I’m laughing at your very apt “They still refuse to get out of the office, to examine firsthand..” and will suggest why they won’t.
– they’d have to acknowledge reality more strongly, including to themselves
– politically-driven organizations are inward-focused, the reward-risk system depends on politics (government departments are at much higher risk of that, due to who they work for and the lack of market feedback that private businesses have)
– if you aren’t dedicated to the job, and aren’t outdoors oriented, why bother going to the sites?
– bureaucratic procedures impede appropriate effort by getting in the way of new approaches.
– bureaucratic procedures often restricting travel. (Travel is a favourite budget-trimming target.)
– computers and satellites are fancy and obvious thus can be easier to justify than slogging
– grandiose “initiatives” with catchy names are started but never amount to much (perhaps the NCDC’s surface stations program is one of those)
– analysis seems easier than getting the bureaucracy to support data collection (site visits in this case, test rigs in the case of structural design for example)
– bureaucracies move very slowly (“Gary” on July 30 at 6:57 pm effectively says that).
Stories of avoiding getting into the field, to illustrate:
I once worked for an ex-Navy person who avoided going north of Edmonton AB to deal with equipment problems in High Arctic operations. He hurt his reputation by that maneuver. (I did go north to try to help, got almost as far as Eureka though didn’t stay there as I was with the airplane.)
I once worked for a company that refused to send the person coordinating test software to Singapore to visit the developers there. When the software arrived in Seattle it was found to be of mixed quality among the modules and not well enough coordinated between the modules. It was not used, a local team started from scratch to do the job right.
“Paul K2”: be specific about which sites from which databases Watts and Menne used. Until then I ignore your claim.
“Gary” on July 30 at 6:57 pm:
Aren’t you overlooking that the changes you list are regional, whereas for example Antarctica is not warming? When glaciers were shrinking in BC they were growing in Norway and NZ. Winter weather has been brutal in Mongolia in some recent years, worst in several decades. The challenge is global temperature, anecdotes aren’t good data.
Is anyone claiming there is zero warning? Certainly not Anthony Watts in his new paper, though there are unanswered questions about other errors in the temperature databases.
The real issue is of course not warming or cooling, it is the cause. Muller’s latest effort uses a claimed correlation to support his claim that humans are to blame for warming. But correlation is not causation – for example, two correlated phenomenon may have a common cause. Muller assumes CO2 increase causes temperature increase, but it may be the opposite – I doubt the data will ever be good enough to show which leads which, as there is too much scatter in too little data (poor coverage of measurement locations around the earth).
And I’m rolling on the floor at laughing at “Phillip boccuto”’s drive-by shooting about CO2 trapping heat. He doesn’t understand step one of the physics of the atmosphere and temperature, let alone the complexity of absorption and emission from various elements of the atmosphere and surface. Too little knowledge can be dangerous – to his reputation in this case. (And some people seem to confuse H2O vapour with CO2 gas.)