The Climate of Gavin: How GISS Have Changed The Temperature Record Since 2008
Guest post by Paul Homewood
I ran a post yesterday, showing how the latest version of GISSTEMP had changed from using Hadley/Reynolds to ERSST for ocean temperatures, with the result that about 0.03C had been added to recent warming.
However, this is not the only change they have made to the historical temperature record in recent years. Climate4You, fortunately, archived the GISS data in May 2008. Comparing this dataset with today’s version, we can see that about 0.10C of warming, or more, has been added to temperatures in the last decade, compared to data up to about 1950.
Alterations to temperature record 1881-2008
It must be remembered that these are only changes made by GISS since 2008. As I pointed out, prior to 2008, other adjustments of about 0.03C had already been added to the numbers originally declared just a few years earlier. These adjustments must, therefore, also be added on to the adjustments made since.
An adjustment of 0.10C or so may not seem a lot, but the latest GISS anomaly, against the baseline of 1951-80, is 0.44C. These adjustments make up about a quarter of this figure.
I have also done some digging on the original numbers GISS declared for 1998, which seem much different to what they now show. News on this later.
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It is very difficult to challenge the US Govt if the US Govt doesn’t want to be challenged. To sue you need their permission. If the media began questioning the discrepancies then we might have a chance. Yeah, and I’m going to win the big lottery. Writing your Congress critters is just about the only thing that you can do and that’s pretty damn pathetic. We’re doing Chicago Politics now.
HB says:
January 18, 2013 at 3:46 pm
That offset is apparent just looking at the three series, though. It’s a little of apples and oranges, as the satellite measurements are for tropospheric temperatures, and GISS is for the surface.
The important thing is the proportionality factor. That is the term which creates the curvature in the accumulated CO2 graph, which matches the observations to a degree which confirms that there is no room for human inputs to be appreciably affecting the overall concentration.
HB says:
January 18, 2013 at 3:42 pm
I just noticed your comment here. You don’t have to use the same affine parameters for each data set. As long as all the data sets are more or less affinely related, you can get a match using the free parameters.
Which one is “right”? Who knows? It doesn’t affect the conclusion because scaling to match the variability also matches the overall slope for all the data sets. And, the integral of the temperature, affinely scaled to match the CO2 derivative, will always integrate out, starting from the initial condition, to be approximately equal to the CO2 measurements – that being more or less a tautology.
The key thing here is that the variability and the slope of the overall trend are always in roughly the same proportion across all the data sets. That is what gives us the smoking gun to convict temperature as the driving force in CO2 concentration.
Bart says:
January 18, 2013 at 5:01 pm
“That is the term which creates the curvature in the accumulated CO2 graph, which matches the observations to a degree which confirms that there is no room for human inputs to be appreciably affecting the overall concentration.”
I don’t want to be cryptic about this. The reason for this is that the incremental human inputs also have an upward trend. Thus, attempting to add them in will result in additional curvature. To get the curvature back so that it meshes with CO2 measurements, we have to scale back the temperature component. But, then the variability in the CO2 derivative and the temperature do not match. Hence, there is no room for significant human inputs.
No. There is not.
Clearly you have not seen and will want to read this
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200910/cmselect/cmsctech/memo/climatedata/uc0102.htm
Richard
———————-
Thanks for your good attempts Richard. I guess WUWT and other like blogs will have to suffice to do the job instead, sooner or later the deception will be outed..
The data get “adjusted” at several steps. GIStemp makes their view of things via a strange and wonderful process that I’ve detailed at great length. (And which, IMHO, “has issues”).
BUT, it is based on a merge of GHCN and USHCN, so any ‘adjusting’ in them gets double dipped into GIStemp results.
I’d started with GIStemp, and then realized that it was only 1/2 the problem as it was a double-stack of “little here, a little there”…
So one salami slice happens in station selection. Another in “Quality Control” adjustments. Several in various stages of “homogenizing”. etc. etc.
On “archiving”:
The data are in constant flux. There is no ‘checkpoint / archive’ that I’ve found at any level. At the End Of Life of one variation of the base data (GHCN / USHCN) there MAY be a final checkpoint taken for a while.
I have saved copies of GHCN v1, and v2 along with a vintage USHCN. Mostly from about 2009 when I was working on it more actively. One of my complaints at the time was that various station data shows up ‘whenever’ and sometimes months after a given date. ( I called those “Zombie” thermometers… suddenly coming back to life after significant absence…) So to ‘properly’ archive the data you would need to take daily snapshots. It is possible that a monthly snapshot would do for many uses. Then, on top of that, GIStemp can run at any time. As it runs, it does a ‘remix’ on the thermometer data.
Several steps ‘select’ which station data to use to adjust which other station data. For that reason, any added station data or changed station data can reach (1200 km at a time, three times in cascaded steps) far and wide in changing things.
For that reason, to ‘archive’ GISS ‘data’, you need to grab a copy every time you run it on any changed GHCN / USHCN input (which is any time GISS gets a new copy of the input data, so could be every time it is run, or ‘monthly’, depending on what procedures are used.)
Now if all of this sounds “Just SOooo wrong!”, that was the experience I had when I figure out what they were doing. There just IS NOT any STABLE real data in GISS. Ever. It’s a wobbly bowl of inflating Jello Data changing with each GHCN / USHCN update, reload, adjustment, QA run, etc. etc. etc. (Even with the addition of historical data found ‘somewhere’ or with older readings from the 1800 removed for ‘quality questions’)
It is that ‘never the same result twice’ nature that caused me to assert it is not possible to do science using this ‘product’, as you can never have the same result twice so it can never be tested nor falsified. It just ‘re-imagines’ the data each time it is run…
There is now a “New ‘improved’ GHCN v3!!!” and I did a comparison of it to v1 here:
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/v1vsv3/
That page has many links. One, to the ‘summary report’, includes:
It is after that 0.75 C of added ‘trend’ that GISS ‘does what they do’ and add more trend.
At that point, having a finer ‘grain’ on the archive is interesting, but doesn’t add much to understanding…
Jan P Perlwitz says:
January 18, 2013 at 1:41 pm
Once more, Mr. Watts posts an article on his blog, which insinuates that GISS scientists committed fraud, i.e., they are being accused of doing not scientifically legitimate manipulations of the data for the purpose to deceive, by making the anthropogenic influence on climate larger than it was. The “skeptic” crowd in the forum understands the cue and transforms the insinuation into open accusation. ………….
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Please see my post above.
Gunga Din says:
January 18, 2013 at 8:05 am
Again, I don’t know what these may have to do with GISS, but can you explain to me why these record highs have been changed?
PS I haven’t compared the record lows yet. I wonder what I’ll find?
Jan P Perlwitz,
I would be delighted if you could explain to me how thousands of dedicated thermometer readers who wrote down in plain english their readings could have been so wrong.
Perhaps they were dyslexic or plain stupid, that the real data from the past is altered in any way shape or form when people are looking for a trend is just plain fraud. Looking for a trend is different to looking for an absolute. Fraud fraud fraud.
Jan P Perlwitz,
Perhaps then you can explain why such big adjustments have been made to Icelandic data?
In October, I asked NOAA to provide the calculations GHCN had made for one station in Iceland for homogenisation. Bryant Korzeniewski at NOAA told me this would not be a problem. Yet 3 months later, I still have no reply, despite chasing several times.
I realise you work for GISS, but I am sure in the interests of transparency, you could use your influence at NOAA to expedite this.
But it gets worse! On top of GHCN adjustments, GISS have substantially INCREASED the warming trend at Reykjavik for UHI, instead of REDUCING it. The Iceland Met confirm there have been no station changes etc that would justify this. But when I challenged Reto Ruedy, he was unable to explain it either.
Then you wonder why we don’t trust your data!
Jan P Perlwitz says: January 18, 2013 at 1:
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Your comment justifies GISS data tampering that adulterates the temperature record while impugning the motives of the critics of such adulteration. GISS is notorious, and you pretend that nothing is wrong with it. Your lack of balance in this question is remarkable, even unconscionable.
What amazes me is that any “unusual” period of weather such as a hot OR a cold summer, or a hot OR a cold winter, or dry weather OR wet weather, can apparently always be explained by the man-made global warming experts with yet another modification to their theories to suit the prevailing weather patterns at the time. If they are so certain that they understand global warming and its effects why can they not predict the weather more accurately in the near or distant future? It is because the climate is, and always has been, variable and unpredictable. It is just as likely that tomorrow will begin an unusual period of colder global weather as it is to get hotter.
Dear Mr. Perlwitz,
Have you heard of the Duck Principle?
If it walks like a duck
And talks like a duck
Then what the f**k (is this insinuations … no evidence …understands the cue …)?
It’s a duck!
Mr J Moore says:
January 19, 2013 at 11:18 am
What amazes me is that any “unusual” period of weather such as a hot OR a cold summer, or a hot OR a cold winter, or dry weather OR wet weather, can apparently always be explained by the man-made global warming experts with yet another modification to their theories to suit the prevailing weather patterns at the time. If they are so certain that they understand global warming and its effects why can they not predict the weather more accurately in the near or distant future? It is because the climate is, and always has been, variable and unpredictable. It is just as likely that tomorrow will begin an unusual period of colder global weather as it is to get hotter.
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Amid all the discussions about how much this or that may or may not effect this or that, it is easy to miss the main point. Man ain’t to blame.
But those out for control or just to make a buck have latched onto CAGW. (Though many like AlGore are beginning to bail out.) CAGW is what stuck against the wall.
Reblogged this on Climate Ponderings.
Jan P Perlwitz (January 18, 2013 at 1:41 pm ):
Do me a favour, will you? Ask around at GISS why the early temperature record for Teigarhorn, Iceland, has been depressed by 0.9C and the later record bumped up by 0.8C.
One specific illustration: Jan 1900. Before +0.7C. After -0.2C. (Before and after GISS’s tweaking of the historical record in Dec 2011, that is.)
For more info on what seems to be the creation of a spurious warming trend see http://endisnighnot.blogspot.co.uk/2012/03/giss-strange-anomalies.html
The custodians or curators or whatever of the climate data archive are the very people implicated in its destruction. They can do whatever they like to the data and are accountable to nobody. This is reminiscent of false prophets (pardon the tautology) such as Nongqawuse or Bernadette of Lourdes who claimed to be the only ones allowed to see and speak with the sacred apparations. Perhaps the most scandalous was the “accidental” erasure of the hockey stick data and the miraculous lack of backups. Pull the other one, it’s got bells on it…
Wow. How do you get so many comments lol. I don’t even fully understand the whole giss thing, let alone know enough to post the kind of comments you get lol.