The National Climate Assessment report denies that siting and adjustments to the national temperature record has anything to do with increasing temperature trends. Note the newest hockey stick below.
h/t to Steve Milloy
Source: http://nca2014.globalchange.gov/system/files_force/downloads/low/NCA3_Climate_Change_Impacts_in_the_United%20States_LowRes.pdf?download=1
Yet as this simple comparison between raw and adjusted USHCN data makes clear…
…adjustments to the temperature record are increasing – dramatically. The present is getting warmer, the past is getting cooler, and it has nothing to do with real temperature data – only adjustments to temperature data. The climate reality our government is living in is little more than a self-serving construct.
Our findings show that trend is indeed affected, not only by siting, but also by adjustments:
The conclusions from the graph above (from Watts et al 2012 draft) still hold true today, though the numbers have changed a bit since we took all the previous criticisms to heart and worked through them. It has been a long, detailed rework, but now that the NCA has made this statement, it’s go time. (Note to Mosher, Zeke, and Stokes – please make your most outrageous comments below so we can point to them later and note them with some satisfaction.).
Regarding Mosher’s questions, let me answer by saying we will be doing the exact opposite of this famous quote from CRU’s Phil Jones:
“Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it?”
We plan a very extensive SI with the paper, so that people can replicate the work. If it isn’t replicable, it isn’t science. I feel pretty good about all of this, though I’m sure there will be some people who will try to pull fast ones, but there will be others that will follow through without playing games and see how this long and painstaking work has paid off.
Latitude @ur momisugly 6:56
It looks as if whoever constructed that graph omitted to ensure that the base lines are the same, because they seem to be comparing these two series without adjusting the offset,
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/gistemp/from:1998/plot/rss/from:1998
because that is what the page links to.
What a coincidence! I’ve played wargames! 🙂
May I ask which titles you’ve worked on?
Ever play Blue Vs Gray? #B^)
Scott Wilmot Bennett says:
May 6, 2014 at 6:41 pm (Edit)
They should use the whole dang USHCN as a study group.
evanmjones @ur momisugly 6:25 pm
So are you saying that the satellite records have a warming bias? Has Dr Spencer commented on this?
Wasn’t this mentioned in an article/comment at WUWT?
I have mentioned it, but I can’t say exactly where.
So are you saying that the satellite records have a warming bias? Has Dr Spencer commented on this?
No, they measure Lower Troposphere (more or less) correctly, as designed. Surface trends should be 20%+ lower than LT. Therefore it is not the satellite trends, but the surface station trends which are too high.
So, how did the attempt to bait Steven Mosher work out for you guys?
“I know you’re not wild about Mosh. But you have to understand that the questions he is asking are just the sort of ones I would ask, myself. It is part and parcel to the scientific method that our data, means, and methods be fully and easily available, and that there must be ability to replicate the results.
When we publish, all of that material will be made fully available.”
How much did you expect him to be able to say without the missing information Anthony?
jimmi_the_dalek says:
May 6, 2014 at 7:32 pm
Latitude @ur momisugly 6:56
It looks as if whoever constructed that graph omitted to ensure that the base lines are the same, because they seem to be comparing these two series without adjusting the offset,
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/gistemp/from:1998/plot/rss/from:1998
because that is what the page links to.
====================================
Laditudes 6:56 link was to US surface T chart. This was oringinally accepted by Hansen.
I think you are referring to this…
The agreement between RSS and the surface record was reasonable. Lately the divergence is increasing rapidly, at a rate greater then the warming rate.
http://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2013/05/10/giss-rapidly-diverging-from-rss/
I do not read it as a baseline chart. It is showing how much the two metrics have separated from each other since 1998, where they start at that distance from each other, and the mean separation is increasing.
Indeed as pointed out, in absolute terms the surface is warming faster then the RSS reading, the opposite of what is suppose to happen per here…
Evanjones
“No, they measure Lower Troposphere (more or less) correctly, as designed. Surface trends should be 20%+ lower than LT. Therefore it is not the satellite trends, but the surface station trends which are too high” and here…
“Dr. Christy (a co-author in this) had previously calculated that LT trends must, necessarily, be 20% higher than surface trends (1.2 amplification), and up to 40% higher (1.4 amplification), heading towards the equator. He was perplexed that this did not show up in the record.”
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/05/06/ive-been-waiting-for-this-statement-and-the-national-climate-assessment-has-helpfully-provided-it/#comment-1630471
Evan, I’ve played it. Old time wargamers unite!
““Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it?””
Did Steven ever say that or anything with the same meaning here? Seems pretty weak to drag other peoples statements into it while talking about Steven. Why not just stick to things he actually said?
lol, did saying Steven Mosher put my previous post in the moderation list?
Indeed, over the U.S. the agreement between satellite and surface records is quite good
The point being that the agreement between LT and surface trend should not be “quite good”.
LT trend should be 20% or more higher than surface trend.
Evan, I’ve played it. Old time wargamers unite!
Holy Cow. Well, I designed and developed that one. And researched/wrote all the historical script. If you’ve got any rules (or strategy) questions, just ask. Any friend of BvG is a friend of mine. BTW, that game is a top-down model, and I storyboarded it from 1st Bull Run to Appomattox, down to the last card pick, step loss, and die roll.
I have a few helpful comments for climate scientists who imagine they can “model” the Eastern Front — using Advanced Squad Leader rules . . . (Are you MAD? What are you THINKING? And downhill from there.)
O.K. now is when skepticism has gone off the rails. I was called crazy on Goddard’s site for merely asking him to finally offer confirmation that this sudden hockey stick of claimed 2014 adjustments was real instead of either an artifact of his personal software or an artifact of how different station data arrives over the year etc., by offering a dirt simple raw vs. adjusted plot. The expectation would be since, no, there *is* no sudden FULL DEGREE jump in any final plots I can find, which would of course be highly suspicious and an obvious sign of a glitch, then the real hockey stick would have to be an upside down one in the *raw* data, and in a great public relations breakthrough, skeptics could claim yet another Hide The Decline event. Yet even so, such sudden glitches have in the past simply led to discovery of an error somewhere and its correction, such as Hansen’s Y2K bug.
So where are those plots of monthly or weekly raw/final data extending into 2014? Anybody with current graphing software out there?! I only had good software set up several years, alas.
Whatever happened to the civil tradition of sending a letter to the organization about a sudden glitch? Without that, skeptics are effectively implying motive for a surreal and nearly unbelievably sudden adjustment glitch, and instead of enjoying a PR coup that could gain headlines, skeptics will be seen as crackpots since it’s all just the personal software of one blogger. Goddard has released the data extraction code, written in C++, so has anybody actually checked it? I am not qualified. That I was attacked for even asking makes me highly suspicious, akin to alarmist blog experiences.
It would probably help if you threw out some one liners about corrupt scientists and the propagation of a great hoax on the world by people who want to make us all communists, or something like that so that people can tell for certain which side you are on 😛
blergh… now I’m being a smartarse.. sorry.
David Riser: Suggesting commenter Steve is a troll for trying to help out by offering a sense of layperson perspective and then asking him to do general homework instead suggests groupthink.
Steve nails it, perfectly, asking simply for clear supporting evidence, rather than a naked plot:
“I can’t forward this story to anyone because it is so spectacular anyone I send it to will surely ask me “Where did he get that, show me the data, I don’t see it in his links” and I wouldn’t be able to tell them.”
Steve, you have to click on the hockey stick graph itself, and that leads to an anonymous blog by one “Steven Goddard” who regularly posts conspiracy theories about Obama killing school kids in arranged shooting events in order to enact anti-gun laws, and regularly posts Holocaust imagery too, to the delight of his small army of cheerleaders, so using his site as your reference will scare away any normal everyday person, probably for good. One of his top commenters is a notorious Net spammer of a crackpot iron sun theory who happens to be a convicted son/daughter rapist, who is banned here. His site is a PR disaster since organized AGW enthusiasts are well aware of his failings and leverage it quite often to successfully stereotype all skeptics.
evanmjones says: May 6, 2014 at 2:17 pm
“What is left is not even pea soup. All trace of the true signal has been eliminated. They have made complete pap out of their data. It is a travesty.”
Mr. Jones,
Did you really just compare their efforts to homeopathy, as their homogenization has watered down the meaningful stuff until there is only a memory of it? This deserves a new name coined, though climateopathy seems too obvious and hides the homeo issue. Homeoclimatopathy seems quite the mouthful, as well. Hmmmm.
BTW, I live in Beijing, where taking pictures of things as simple as weather stations can get a visa terminated (at best) if the wrong people are annoyed (and one reason I use both a psuedonym and a VPN to post things that could theoretically be taken the wrong way), but if you need better close ups of Beijing area weather stations, I could make this effort if you can get me the location information of those where Google Earth isn’t adequate. Yes, that is permission to email me under the assumption that Anthony has the access to my non-public address.
You would be British or Australian, then?
NikFromNYC says:
May 6, 2014 at 10:10 pm
stevengoddard says:
May 7, 2014 at 2:46 am
it is the numerical average of all final monthly minus raw monthly temperatures published by USHCN
ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/ushcn/v2.5/ushcn.tavg.latest.FLs.52i.tar.gz
ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/ushcn/v2.5/ushcn.tavg.latest.raw.tar.gz
Evan: IIRC, TOBS-bias was not discovered until the 1950s. It’s a nasty error, and I did not really understand it until I blocked out an example.
Actually this subject has been up for discussion since the 1890’s. There’s a good, short article in The Monthly Weather Review, October 1934, pp 375-376, by W.F. Rumbaugh, titled The Effect of Time of Observation on Mean Temperature. A footnote by the Review editor calls attention to earlier discussions in the Monthly Weather Review of September 1934 and November 1919, as well as an 1891 Publication by McAdie titled Mean Temperatures and Their Correction in the United States, and another by Hahn in Der Lehrbuch der Meteorologie, undated. I have no idea how to get hold of these last two, but the Monthly Review articles are easy to get at the AMS site.
I had an exchange with brother Stokes on an earlier thread about the possibility of corrections for elevated temperatures of urban stations during this period; you may have seen it. I am impressed/depressed about how little the subject of discussion has changed in a hundred + years.
There is another possible correction that I have not seen discussed, and I’d be interested in anything you may have seen about it. During an extended period in the second half of the 19th century, Signal Corps/Weather Bureau doctrine was to get the thermometer as high as possible off the ground. The weatherstations gallery has a number of pictures showing stations on the roofs of multi-storied buildings. I came across a good one when I was looking in the history of San Luis Obispo. I’d put a link in here, but the site is down for maintenance at the moment. Anyway, at some point this policy was changed, and it seems to me that the effect might have been as regular and significant as the more recent change from CRS to MMTS instruments. Has anyone done a study of this?
John Slayton
I wrote about these problems here;
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/05/23/little-ice-age-thermometers-%E2%80%93-history-and-reliability-2/
I suspect the Hann book you seek is one of the first links
tonyb
evanmjones says (May 6, 2014 at 7:34 pm): “Ever play Blue Vs Gray? #B^)”
No.
http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/89/blue-vs-gray
The last Civil War game I played was “The Civil War” by Victory Games:
http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/2081/the-civil-war
To Mosher, Zeke and any others who support the corrections shown at the top of the post, please address the following questions:
1. Please explain the physical problem or process associated with the temperature measurements that requires a systematic and increasing correction to the data.
2. Given that a possible UHI correction would be expected to be a systematic and increasingly negative adjustment with time to present, what physical processes are affecting the temperature measurements such that the cumulative corrections are positive and larger than the expected UHI corrections
3. Given the problem of boundary conditions and temperature inversion at night, why is the average of Tmin and Tmax used, rather than just Tmax?
Answer me those questions clearly with good physical reasoning and I might start to take these corrections seriously.
Zeke Hausfather (May 6, 2014 at 3:02 pm) “If I throw out every USHCN station with a documented inhomogenity there would be no USHCN stations”
Do you keep Norfolk? It has bad micro-siting: http://shpud.com/weather/main.php?g2_itemId=48 It has urbanized in spurts up to the present: http://shpud.com/weather/main.php?g2_itemId=142 To show that garbage sites like Norfolk can be used for any purpose requires showing that there is no deleterious affect from the inclusion of the data. That applies equally to 100 or more other sites but it can’t be demonstrated with any kind of bulk analysis. One must show (1) that Norfolk has been properly adjusted and (2) that using Norfolk in regional averages did not result in improper adjustments to any neighboring sites. I am quite frankly very tired of reading bulk analyses like this: ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/ushcn/v2/monthly/algorithm-uncertainty/williams-menne-thorne-2012.pdf which does not answer my questions.
NikFromNYC (May 6, 2014 at 10:10 pm) “One of his top commenters is a notorious Net spammer of a crackpot iron sun theory who happens to be a convicted son/daughter rapist, who is banned here”
My understanding is that the charges were dropped. There are valid reasons to exclude people from these discussions, but the dredging up of old personal attacks, no matter how justified they may seem in any particular case, is not a valid reason.
@NikFromNYC
“Steve Goddard” has many many failings so his claims have to be read very sceptically. On the other hand I would suggest your attempt to link him to a crackpot by virtue of the fact that a crackpot has posted comments on his site, is itself indicative of your credibility.