Zeke is upset that I made this statement in a story at Fox news:
Is history malleable? Can temperature data of the past be molded to fit a purpose? It certainly seems to be the case here, where the temperature for July 1936 reported … changes with the moment. In the business and trading world, people go to jail for such manipulations of data.
he says:
In the spirit of civility, I would ask Anthony to retract his remarks. He may well disagree with NCDC’s approach and results, but accusing them of fraud is one step too far.
I’d point out that Zeke has his interpretation but nowhere did I say “fraud”. He’s mad, and people don’t often think clearly when they are mad. That’s OK.
Without getting into semantics, I’d like to ask Zeke these simple questions:
- What is the CONUS average temperature for July 1936 today?
- What was it a year ago?
- What was it ten years ago? Twenty years ago?
- What was it in late 1936, when all the data had been first compiled?
We already know the answers to questions 1 and 2 from my posting here, and they are 76.43°F and 77.4°F respectively, so Zeke really only needs to answer questions 3 and 4.
The answers to these questions will be telling, and I welcome them. We don’t need broad analyses or justifications for processes, just the simple numbers in Fahrenheit will do.
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
“These stations also used liquid-in-glass thermometers which produce notably higher maximum temperature readings than modern electronic instruments. ” This absolutely ridiculous. In this case you have no conclusion because YOU HAVE NO DATA! Making corrections based on how you think that thermometer was reading and how the reader was reading it become totally bogus. If this is the excuse for all of these corrections, then it’s time to give up claiming ANY knowledge of where the climate is going until we have a couple of hundred years of REAL DATA!
[Anthony:] In the business and trading world, people go to jail for such manipulations of data. [Zeke:] but accusing [NCDC] of fraud is one step too far.
My take on the argument.
Going 76 mph on I-10 in rural portions of Texas won’t get you stopped for speeding.
Going 76 mph on I-10 in downtown, Houston, will eventually result in, “May I see your license and insurance, please?”
Going 76 mph in a 20 mph school zone could quickly result in: “KEEP YOUR HANDS IN SIGHT, Step out of the car, hands on the hood, and SPREAD ‘EM!”
Whether crimes are committed by an action depend upon the circumstances.
Furthermore, actions don’t have to rise to criminal level to be wrong.
Liquid-in-glass thermometers CAN read a little high at the lower end of their range. This is because the ones that read up to 100 C are calibrated in boiling water, and the heat makes the glass a little longer, distorting its reading when the glass is cooler. This certainly does not mean that WEATHER thermometers do this. Once again, these people only need a plausible excuse to pull their dirty tricks, it does not have to be TRUE.
Mr. Moderator, typing in this box can be a real ordeal, can’t it be fixed?
[Reply: Sorry, that is controlled by WordPress. You could try a different browser, see if that helps. — mod.]
Even the most developed nations in the world can’t keep accurate/complete temperature records. There are two Environment Canada weather stations at the Calgary Alberta Canada international airport, located, according to the Environment Canada web site, 760 metres (just under half a mile) apart. The average temperature (as shown at 12:45PM local time today) for December 2012 (Tmax) was -4.5C at one and -5.7C at the other. Both are missing data for at least one day in computing the Tmax average. For November it was 1.9C and 0.8C, October 6.8 and 7.6 … . I don’t know which or if both or neither get fed into the calculation for global temperature datasets … but I can tell you that I have no confidence at all that anyone can compute a global average temperature within 1/100th of a degree C, F, or K.
And, yes, Anthony, semantics aside, restating prior years’ temperatures may not be fraud, but the alternative is incompetence. Neither generates confidence in the ability to rely on the data.
The statement,
Liquid in glass thermometers produce higher maximums than modern electronic sensors,
is verified where?
Data please, who ran this experiment?
Where is the process described?
Which electronic sensors were used?
Which brings me back to electronic sensors, these are accurate in what temperature range?
-40 to 20C is what Environment Canada apparently uses, which would cast doubt on their ability to measure winter lows or summer highs with any certainty.
This is not even good enough for government, standards.
Michael says:
January 24, 2013 at 11:52 am
“Even the most developed nations in the world can’t keep accurate/complete temperature records. There are two Environment Canada weather stations at the Calgary Alberta Canada international airport, located, according to the Environment Canada web site, 760 metres (just under half a mile) apart.”
As part of the work I did with the NCDC data set, for each graph I made, I also make a google maps file with station locations as listed in the station metadata. You can find the graphs with a google maps link here:
http://www.science20.com/virtual_worlds/blog/updated_temperature_charts-86742
Note Google maps only allows you to put so many thumbtacks per page, some of the maps have dozens of pages (they’re at the bottom of the station list on each page).
One of the things I have in mind is enhancing the data on each thumbtack, for now it’s a minimal set of data.
richardscourtney:
I think it’s pretty clear what’s happening: CO2 emissions are cooling our past.
That’s why Hansen is so worried — if this continues, our grandparents will have died in an Ice Age and we’ll never be born.
Now, spending $14T makes perfect sense…
talldave2:
Thanks! I enjoyed that. 😉
But I would prefer to not contribute to the $14T yet, if you don’t mind. Selfish, huh?
Richard
Let me offer this in clarification of some of the issues.
1. Temperature is an intensive property of matter, which means it doesn’t necessarily change with the amount of stuff you measure. Temperature is also not conserved. This means that there is no “right” way to average it. Instead, there are a number of ways, each of them with different advantages and disadvantages. This makes it hard to say what the average temperature of the US “is” today, much less what it “was” in 1936.
2. We are dealing with a fragmented, scattered, corrupted dataset of surface temperature. Yes, it is valuable to look at the raw data. It is also valuable to remove what errors we can reliably identify, and see what the result looks like.
3. When we remove any given error in actual temperature data (not anomalies), such as a spurious step change, we are left with a problem—when we adjust the data to remove the error, do we move the recent post-step data in one direction to correct the error, or do we move the older, pre-step data the opposite direction? The consensus is to adjust the older data, although either way works. We could just as easily move recent data down as to move older data up, or vice versa. (One problem with adjusting recent data is that you have to add in the adjustments when adding today’s temperature to a dataset, which may be why older data is usually adjusted.)
4. As a result of the consensus being to adjust the older data when errors are removed, which keeps the most recent data in agreement with the current thermometer readings, the historical temperature data will change depending on what errors we have removed from the raw data. (We could keep historical temperatures the same, but then current temperatures would be changing depending on the errors removed, and that’s even more confusing.)
5. As long as there is a clear audit trail, which as far as I know BEST has provided, I don’t think anyone either would or should go to jail for doing any of that, whether in business or out of business. The only problem comes up when you claim adjusted data is raw data, or you hide your adjustments, or the like. I don’t see that Zeke or BEST have done any of that.
Finally, thanks to Anthony and Zeke for discussing it.
w.
Rilfeld, I completely agree, The trees, wheat, vinyards and even the River Thames all agree that 2012 WAS NOT the WARMEST EVER! The Greenland glaciers (with ice core documentation cited in today’s top posting) would LOL (if they could) if told 2012 was the warmest ever. I posed my question concerning pre-1850 data (which was scrubbed by GISS soon after M. Crichtons “State of Fear” was published) to show how ALL the DATA from CRU has been cherry picked! 70% (roughly) of the warming trend from 1850 to 1996 would be erased by using a data set beginning in 1775. “Every EKG looks like a hockey stick if you only observe one heart beat” is my real point. That is why 1936 is not a big deal to me, but Anthony’s core point of the changing historical temps every month by CRU/GISS constituting FRAUD (my word, not his) is VALID… and Zeke has no coherent argument against this FACT. Thanks to all who have replied… I AM OUT!
Willis Eschenbach:
I write to ask a clarification.
At January 24, 2013 at 1:01 pm you say
I think that can be agreed. But it also begs the question which Zeke Hausfather has avoided despite it being put to him in various forms.
All “spurious” step changes have been adjusted once a temperature time series has been compiled. There is no obvious reason to make additional adjustments when new data is added to the end of the time series unless and until the additional data adds an additional “spurious” step change.
But each of the temperature time series (GISS, HadCRUTn, etc.) alters past data several times a year. Why?
Richard
“So what Zeke is telling us (and defending, I might add) is that the various temperature datasets are actually MODELS of the temperature.”
Exactly. And if people treat these values as model outputs or statistics rather than data then we can start to have meaningful discussions about what they actually represent. Trying to pass them off as data is patently ridiculous.
Don Monfort: Matt, can you cite the criminal code that prohibits manipulation of 1936 temp data? Is it called fraud? Is jail time a possible penalty? Is their a statute of limitations with regard to the age of the data?
Is there a point there? My comment was directed toward Anthony Watts’ language. It was his language that implied criminal activity.
In the business and trading world, people go to jail for such manipulations of data.
Perhaps Zeke will ask some jurors to decide whether that constitutes libel or slander (when spoken on tv and then written in a blog, I don’t know which word applies.) Or if, as with “torturing the data” the phrase “got to jail for such manipulations of data” is within the bounds of permissible hyperbole when directed at a “public figure” like Zeke.
There are few areas of science where retrospective readjustments of data that always seem to have the same bias would be tolerated, ZH is upset because he knows this himself.
The proof of the bias is the long term trends are not usually affected only the comparisons of different periods in the temperature record.
Only one ‘side’ would one spend (waste) time on the 1936 US temperature record or harmonise Hadcrut with GIStemp post 1998
History may judge this frantic effort to keep re-presenting temperature records as a very cynical attempt at manipulation for it is not obvious if it tells us about the temperature record or the climate ( of climate science)
Matthew R Marler:
At January 24, 2013 at 2:09 pm you write
The statement is not libel, not slander and not hyperbole.
The statement is merely a legal fact.
Richard
As far as I’m concerned this is indeed a truly fascinating post and thread, made more so by Zeke and others prepared to answer their case. I’m not qualified to determine the rights and wrongs of the particular scientific argument and so, like most of the CAGW debate I’ve had to rely on my own BS meter to come to a view.
I like chinook’s (January 24, 2013 at 3:05 am) summary of his own take on the argument which sums up my own thoughts – like him I thought maybe I had missed something as the whole process didn’t look as “scientific” as I imagined it should. Richard Courtney’s response was quite reassuring! Ian W (January 23, 2013 at 5:11 pm) also hit the nail on the head as well regarding the uncertainty demonstrated on the thread by Zeke versus the certainty of the same report when announced to the world at large! I’d be interested to know if Zeke agreed with this level of published certainty on a personal level or if he was overruled by a majority view (consensus perhaps)?
I retired from a career in UK Banking in 2000 and some 8 years later was appalled and embarrassed by what was coming out of the woodwork from these glorified “betting shops” run by the spivs who had grabbed the reins. I avoided telling anyone what I did for a living after that. I suppose I should be grateful I wasn’t a “Climate Scientist”.
Many thanks to Anthony for this excellent site and for all who post here from both sides of the argument.
The best of intentions often lead to the worst crimes. It is Orwellian and in any free thinking world should be a crime as green policies – led by the adjustments telling us to panic and fear and fear and panic (rinse & repeat) – are destroying lives by artificially inflating fuel and food prices.
The reference to Madoff is not far off the mark in that context. Really to think scientists are any less likely to resort to fraud etc than any other profession is as absurd as CAGW frying the world. We hardly shower ourselves in glory as a species – do scientists have a gene that makes them immune?
I am reminded of a comment by Tallbloke some months ago.
“Metrics should be maintained and calibrated by impartial bodies whose principle remit is the custodianship of data, not its application. Allowing the definition and calibration of the metrics to be in the same hands as those writing new theory is a recipe for bias. We should not repeat the mistakes of the past so quickly.”
Richard S. Courtney: The statement is merely a legal fact.
I disagree, but I’d be willing to go along with a jury decision after a legal proceeding. It looks to me like an accusation of illegal behavior, but there are disagreements among language users about the true meanings of phrases like “such manipulations”.
talldave2 says:
January 24, 2013 at 12:36 pm
richardscourtney:
I think it’s pretty clear what’s happening: CO2 emissions are cooling our past.
That’s why Hansen is so worried — if this continues, our grandparents will have died in an Ice Age and we’ll never be born.
Now, spending $14T makes perfect sense…
===================================================================
Bet I could find an old DeLorean for a lot less.
(If only Hansen was as smart as Doc Brown …)
Zeke’s explanations seem heartfelt, but I think the niggling question is if 1936 was one thing in 1980, something else in 1987 and something else again in more recent times – are we done with it now or does it remain malleable as Anthony complains. Personally, I think Zeke is as honest as the next guy, but you know, if one believes in CAGW, then it is human nature to err in the desired direction, correct in the desired direction, round-off in the desired direction…I see it all the time with theweathernetwork in Canada who in their forecasts tend to overestimate the temperature more often than not. I think an honest man who believes in a theory, would be attracted to those parts of the record for “homogenization” that don’t fit the theory very well and probably don’t give a damn about 1926 or 1946. I think fraud may be in the picture when a new “high” isn’t quite as high as that pesky 1936 and needs a little nudge. Surely we can all agree that (say) if the IPCC has a choice, they will go for the higher temp, the higher rainfall amount etc.etc – like our weather forecaster above. It is high time that weather records and corrections should be in the hands of disinterested statisticians. Anything else is Colonel Sanders looking after our chickens.
If CAGW is going to happen, it wouldn’t matter if the record was not perfect. If CAGW is of a significant magnitude, it shouldn’t need little helping hands of hundredths of degrees C. Leave it all alone. Lets, by all means make improvements in equipment, distribution, etc and rely on the newer stuff to tell us. I think the advent of satellite measurements has constrained adjustments to the more recent temps and all there is is to adjust are the pre- 1979 record downwards if indeed there is an effort to put a thumb on the scale. Egad’s we shouldn’t be adjusting 1936 down some fraction of a degree to make July 2012 a new record, we should chop off 2 or 3 degrees. A psychologist might say this type of activity shows a certain desperation on the part of those shoring up an ailing theory.
Billion$ ride upon the implications.
Couldn’t we manufacture a bunch of thermometers as used in the old days, and site them as in the old days, then examine the degree of agreement between the old style and the new style?
How many variations of the old style would we need to provide an answer in the face of a few likely scenarios (i.e., mercury purity was either this or that value, so we make two sets of thermometers)?
I can go on the web and buy all sorts of thermometers. These data (note: plural) would be ready for a year’s worth of analysis within a year.
Mathew Marler, the statement was directed at NOAA/NCDC and they are Government Organisations with multimillion dollar budgets and staff. If they feel it is libellious, let them take it up. This was not directed at Zeke.
As per what Zeke posted here, there’s no way to know what was the CONUS temperature absolute average in 1936. So what NOAA/NCDC stated was false in announcing that 2012 was the warmest year ever. So what did Zeke do? Did he pull them up? Did he make a post about their statement? No, he goes after Anthony for an interview comment Anthony gave about NOAA/NCDC. Did Zeke at anytime write posts about the language Kevin Trenberth of NOAA/NCDC, James Hansen of NASA/GISS and other taxpayer funded and salaried pro-AGW scientists used about skeptics and Anthony? Is Zeke an employee or legal representative of NOAA/NCDC? So why’s he their mouthpiece? He’s condoning their act and deciding what Anthony should say about what their statement meant to Anthony. He says that it can be termed as an ” unethical act but not in terms Anthony used. Bloody hypocritical of him to do so.
To hell with it. Who’s Zeke to decide what language Anthony should use to express his personal opinion about the behaviour of a taxpayer funded Government Organisation, especially when they indulge in deliberate malfeasance? Who’s Zeke to decide that ” unethical ” is a good word and other words are not. What kind of a weird world do you all inhibit?