A question for Zeke Hausfather

What is it about climate scientists that they alone think it is normal scientific practise to manipulate pre-validated data. I don’t know how many times I have said this BUT UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES IS IT RIGHT TO MANIPULATE VALIDATED DATA. You can call it manipulation if you wish but it appear, to all intents and purposes, to be fraud.
AND what the [snip . . no need . . mod] is the problem with Mosher? Is he looking for work in NASA GISS.?

Zeke posted the GISS link that explains their methodology for surface temp analysis:http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/abs_temp.html
But, this paragraph raises some questions and eyebrows at what they’re implying:
‘Q. If the reported SATs are not the true SATs, why are they still useful ?
A. The reported temperature is truly meaningful only to a person who happens to visit the weather station at the precise moment when the reported temperature is measured, in other words, to nobody. However, in addition to the SAT the reports usually also mention whether the current temperature is unusually high or unusually low, how much it differs from the normal temperature, and that information (the anomaly) is meaningful for the whole region. Also, if we hear a temperature (say 70°F), we instinctively translate it into hot or cold, but our translation key depends on the season and region, the same temperature may be ‘hot’ in winter and ‘cold’ in July, since by ‘hot’ we always mean ‘hotter than normal’, i.e. we all translate absolute temperatures automatically into anomalies whether we are aware of it or not.’
I’m trying to understand their explanation how on one hand the SAT is meaningful to nobody, but the anomalies
are extremely meaningful, esp in light of the admitted inaccuracies of local measurements. And so even though or because the SAT’s are meaningless, they use an average of anomalies and suddenly meaningless data is meaningful. And they admit that public perception of anomalies is an easily manipulated thing. I only have a year of college statistics, but something here just isn’t passing the smell test. And how can making changes to past SAT’s that are meaningless which result in new anomalies that are meaningful, esp to public perception, possibly result in an honest and actually meaningful conclusion? Perhaps I’m missing something very obvious. If so, my apologies.

Chinook, it doesn’t pass your or anybody’s smell test [ except the AGW clique ] as it is a pile of steaming BS.
And the people promoting and accepting such BS as gold standard have the nerve to be offended if someone names what they are doing. For them, it seems like their activity is not wrong but the act of naming it truthfully is wrong.

Zeke Hausfather:
Half of the science of the global-warmers is meant to obliterate knowledge that has been obtained by past studies. That is what Michael Mann’s hockey stick was meant to do- eradicate the MWP.
The adulteration of data that is seen at the NOAA, by Hansen and GISS, is more of the same.
It is certain that if such adulterated data were used to promote investment schemes, that the promoters would face prison terms. What sort of person defends such pratices? Well, you for one.

“Zeke Hausfather says:
January 23, 2013 at 4:19 pm
Anthony,
There is a good reason why all the major groups (NCDC, GISS, UAH, RSS, Hadley) primarily report anomalies. Absolute temperatures are tricky things, at least when you aren’t able to sample the full field.
GISS has a rather good explanation: http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/abs_temp.html”
We skeptics agree absolute temperatures are tricky things, which is why we have little faith in databases that continue to adjust them. However Zeke, if you don’t know what the absolute temperature is for a station, you can’t calculate its anomaly.
I know you are trying to calculate the trend in anomolies, but without faith in the accuracy of the measurements and adjustments there is no faith in the accuracy of the trend. Sure you can measure a change in the trend with your methodology. What you can not do is determine if that trend is the result of several factors not related to global warming or actual temperature trends. So you are comparing an anomoly trend, but the anomolies are caused by trends in UHI, station siting, land use changes, station moves, cherry picking of stations, and trends in climate scientist adjustments to the data base.
You claim it is hard to know the absolute temperatures from 1936, but without knowing that then the trend data is pretty worthless. And pronouncements that such and such month or year was the hottest ever are absolute garbage out and not of any scientific value.
We know temperature was measured differently in 1936 and that it may require some adjustment to compare directly to todays stations. However, there is little faith that those adjustments are accurate, based on hard measurements of the difference in measuring tools, that they use appropriate statistical techniques, and a host of other reasons the data is considered untrustworthy.
This is further confirmed when the temperature (and thus the anomaly trend based upon it) changes from year to year and version to version. The equipment used in 1936 has not changed between 2011 and 2012, or 1998. Yet each time a new database is produced, those years are adjusted downward to exagerate the anomaly trend. What new information discovered between 2011 and 2012 caused you to adjust 1936 by 1 degree? If you can’t point that out, then how can we trust that it was not just fudged to make sure the trend is moving in the direction that CAGW proponents want it to move?
“Zeke Hausfather says:
January 23, 2013 at 3:45 pm
Hi Anthony,
Unfortunately, calculating the absolute temperature for the entire contiguous U.S. in July of 1936 is a non-trivial matter. I could download the raw absolute average temperatures from all stations available July of 1936. However, many of those stations were located on the rooftops of city buildings (this was the pre-airport age, after all). These stations also used liquid-in-glass thermometers which produce notably higher maximum temperature readings than modern electronic instruments. All of these things mean that a simple average of instruments available at that time would tell us something interesting about the conditions at the locations of those instruments, but not necessarily produce an unbiased estimate of CONUS temperatures.
“

davidmhoffer wrote:
“I’ve challenged several scientists to take their precious temperature data, convert it to w/m2, THEN average it and THEN trend it. If we;re trying to detect a change in w/m2 at surface due to increases in CO2, then why the BLEEP are we not measuring changes in w/m2 at surface?”
Thanks David, that had not occurred to me, you are absolutely right. The answer is of course not willful misdirection, but the fact that no one is driving the AGW bus. Clearly climate scientists should be formally pursuing whether W/m2 is tracking CO2. I’m adding this to my list of explicit predictions made by AGW theory that no one is really pursuing in any formal manner, such as polar amplification and the mid-troposphere hot spot. The fact that these cats won’t herd means that we are unlikely to see any of the specific, non-trivial AGW predictions (the true yardstick of “settled science” being the number of non-trivial and non-obvious predictions conclusively shown to be true) resolved in the near future.

Couple of points.
I’ve been studying how much of the days temp rise is lost that night, think of it as a Daily anomaly. then averaging that across all stations, since the temps used are from the same station in the same 24 hr period it seems to me to more immune to station errors. I further filter stations out that don’t provide records over most of the year, I’ve used anywhere from 240 days/year to 365 days/year with no significant difference in results. That result is there’s no loss of the ability to cool the days temps, when the daily averages are looked at by latitude range, you can see the effect of the change in length of day.
I’ve also recently gotten a IR thermometer, looking for some reflection of IR off the atm overhead. While gives an interesting result, it either reads below scale (-40F which is ir out to ~12.5u), or it reads max scale (608F), the interesting part is that it seems to read 608 in the opposite direction of the Sun as well as when near the Sun, as if Solar IR (<~5u) is being reflected by the atm. All of this was on a 35F day with clear skys. There is no other IR signal coming from the atm. On the other hand it will read clouds just fine.
Lastly, there's no government agency I've ever worked with, that doesn't calibrate their instruments on a regular basis. They always use calibrated standards traceable to some other calibrated instrument. Are we suppose to believe that the NWS neglected this important step for decades, yet were so interested in the data, it was recorded and saved for decades?

_Jim
Better yet, how about measuring the LWIR radiated back into space? Or both?
BUT WAIT … we have something comparable: UAH and RSS sat msmts …
>>>>>>>>
I thought so at one time as well. Turns out not. They measure a specific frequency of a specific isotope of something or other (I forget) which is directly proportional to temperature. So even THEY are measuring temperature. Of course, they are measuring it at millions of points in time and space and they COULD turn it into w/m2 before averaging it… but they don’t.
Then there is ERBE which actually DOES measure what we’re after Earth Radiation Budget Experiment, but they don’t publish the data or trends in any useful manner. I started looking at their raw data download once and gave up in short order.