WUWT readers may recall: Upside-Side Down Mann and the “peerreviewedliterature” at Climate Audit. Steve McIntyre wrote then:
“…there isn’t a shred of doubt that Mann et al 2008 used these proxies upside down from the Tiljander interpretation. “
It seems the use of “upside down data interpretation” has leaked into a White House official report. WUWT reader “Jimmy” says in Tips and Notes: Check out the interesting temperature graph on this economic post from the White House today, “Deviation from Normal Temperature”.
Excerpt:
3. The first quarter of 2014 was marked by unusually severe winter weather, including record cold temperatures and snowstorms, which explains part of the difference in GDP growth relative to previous quarters. The left chart shows the quarterly deviation in heating degree days from its average for the same quarter over the previous five years. By this measure, the first quarter of 2014 was the third most unusually cold quarter over the last sixty years, behind only the first quarter of 1978 and the fourth quarter of 1976. In addition, there were four storms in the first quarter that rated on the Northeast Snowfall Impact Scale (NESIS). The right chart shows that no quarter going back to 1956 had more than three such storms.
Yes, while technically correct, showing heating degree days, it is upside down to the normal human interpretation of temperature, especially when the title says “Deviation from Normal Temperatures” while presenting degree days rather than a temperature plot. The other two largest positive spikes are the brutal winters of 1977 and 1978.
Source: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2014/05/29/second-estimate-gdp-first-quarter-2014
UPDATE: here is how I would have presented this graph. Simply changing the title removes the inverted thinking about “Deviation from Normal Temperatures” and leaves it technically correct without unnecessarily confusing the reader.
Most people looking at that graph don’t have a clue what a heating or cooling degree day is. In case you don’t, here is a definition from NOAA/NWS
Q: What are degree days?
Heating engineers who wanted a way to relate each day’s temperatures to the demand for fuel to heat buildings developed the concept of heating degree days.
To calculate the heating degree days for a particular day, find the day’s average temperature by adding the day’s high and low temperatures and dividing by two. If the number is above 65, there are no heating degree days that day. If the number is less than 65, subtract it from 65 to find the number of heating degree days.
For example, if the day’s high temperature is 60 and the low is 40, the average temperature is 50 degrees. 65 minus 50 is 15 heating degree days.
Cooling degree days are also based on the day’s average minus 65. They relate the day’s temperature to the energy demands of air conditioning. For example, if the day’s high is 90 and the day’s low is 70, the day’s average is 80. 80 minus 65 is 15 cooling degree days.
Heating and cooling degree days can be used to relate how much more or less you might spend on heating or air conditioning if you move from one part of the country to another. Of course you’d have to take into account how well insulated your new home will be in comparison to your old one and the different costs of electricity, gas or heating oil. You could also use records of past heating degree days to see if the money you’ve spent on insulation, or a newer furnace or air conditioner is paying off. To do this, you’d also need records of past energy use.
The heating degree season begins July 1st and the cooling degree day season begins January 1st.
Source: http://www.erh.noaa.gov/cle/climate/info/degreedays.html
But also of interest in the same report is this graph and summary, which does make sense. It seems the winter of 2013/2014 set a new record for snowstorms.
4. Within the first quarter, several key indicators were lower in January and/or February before rebounding strongly in March, suggesting that the severe weather had a disruptive effect that only began to abate at the end of the quarter. Light vehicle sales, average weekly hours, core retail and food service sales, and core capital goods shipments dipped starting in December and/or January before bouncing back in March, and so were left little changed for the quarter as a whole. One outside group has estimated that the elevated snowfall in the first quarter slowed the annual rate of GDP growth by 1.4 percentage points, with all of that lost activity to be made up in the second quarter.
With this severe winter behind us, I have to wonder if any similar WH economic report (or any U.S. government report) exists that shows anything close to “slowed the annual rate of GDP growth by 1.4 percentage points” for a warmer than normal period. The summer of 2010 would be a good candidate for such a report.
If readers know of one, leave a note in comments.
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Why is it upside down?
“Yes, while technically correct, showing heating and cooling degree days,”
Chart is showing the heating degree day anomalies, does not have cooling degree days. The large negative spike in 2012? just shows that the temperature was less cold then in previous quarters. The title of the chart is wrong and using anomalies instead of just plotting the heating degree days directly makes it more complex then it needs to be.
REPLY: Yes, noted and updated thanks. The title is also at issue. – Anthony
Just re-read the caption, it is not a straight anomaly bashed on a constant base period, or the whole period shown, but based on the previous 5 quarters, so some sort of rolling anomaly, hard to compare more then just a couple of winters against each other, long term treads are nonsense they way it is plotted.
Anthony, I think this was done in innocence. I didn’t have any problem with it and did not think it inverted. After all it was showing heating and cooling degree days. If I’d been asked to prepare such a chart without any coaching I would have done the same thing, as I suspect would have most engineers who deal with these things.
I do see that it could be confusing and for the reasons you suggest, but I see no agenda in the form. None.
That is the most shameful and simultaneously shameless bit of data presentation that I have ever seen. Altering the graph to spike high on the coldest quarter in 50 years!
Wow….just…wow.
I watched the US Science committee hearing at 1am Australian time today then later again on the archive here at http://science.house.gov/hearing/full-committee-hearing-examining-un-intergovernmental-panel-climate-change-process
But, so far today, no one else seems to think it worthy of reporting except Judith Curry. What’s up doc? My take-away was that the science is far from settled and that there is a bunch of crooked American politicians and scientists out there that want to claim climate science as their own and use it to fleece Joe and Jill public to feather their own nests/power base. This accords with the Labor Party and Greens push in Australia; that is, until the public finally voted the Labor Party and The Greens out of government. We now have the Abbot led conservative government trying to clean up the budget devastation and also the psychological and social damage to the country of the leftist doomsayers. As our upper house which is the legislating body,doesn’t change at the same time as the House of Reps (people’s house) PM Abbott’s ability to clear the deck of all the unnecessary green legislation and funding commitments is limited. What are your views on the implications for the Whitehouse? And by the way congratulations on the article posted in the Washington post . It was mentioned in the committee hearing.
Strange, because according to the heavily adjusted NCDC figures, Jan -March this year was only the 41st coldest!
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cag/
This looks like a classic own goal.
Not only does it appear duplicitous since there are darned few people in the US (or elsewhere) who do not realise that the past winter was brutally cold but it does not make any case for an alarming warming trend. Over the last 50 years the averaged value seems pretty stable with short term warming and cooling cycles. It also shows that extreme cold events are more disruptive than heat waves.
Okay, so they determined that 65 degrees is the “Normal Temperature”?
Wallace Vaughn (@Wally6262) says:
May 30, 2014 at 4:27 am
> Just re-read the caption, it is not a straight anomaly bashed on a constant base period, or the whole period shown, but based on the previous 5 quarters,
Very important point! So the graph seems to show that quarter showed the greatest Q1 cooling of the last five years.
Including each quarter seems to me to muddy the graph – the “summer” (JAS) quarter has very different characteristics than winter.
This chart should have been labeled “Some crappy graph we made to try and confuse the issue”.
In this day of instant graphmaking ability with any data a person chooses, people tend to forget that unless the graph maker puts a lot of thought and effort into making his parameters and presentation understandable to the average viewer, the resulting graph is pretty much total garbage. The numbers will be right, but if they’re not presented in a useful format they are little more than gibberish. Sure, you can decipher it. You can decipher esperanto if you want, that doesn’t mean it’s a good idea to put that in your presentation.
gaelansclark says:
May 30, 2014 at 5:04 am
> Okay, so they determined that 65 degrees is the “Normal Temperature”?
Not normal, it’s just the chosen average daily temperature when people typically heat their house.
See http://www.erh.noaa.gov/cle/climate/info/degreedays.html . I don’t know if the threshholds are codified in some document from a standards body. Any HVAC people here?
Perhaps we should push the fact that GDP collapse due to unusually cold weather, is an excuse to justify a faltering economy. Does that mean that global warming will improve the economy?
Store this for future use as a sceptics talking point!
Governmental wrangling with data when they don’t know how to wrangle. I’ve seen it many times. Like trying to convince me that a linear trend line can justifiably be derived from subtracting the first data point from the last data point in the series and then dividing by the number of time units. With noisy data. Filled with multiple variables. That is used to make important decisions. FUBAR.
I tend to agree with a lot of what is published here but there seems to be a lot of misunderstanding among commentors regarding this report. It’s an economic report. Cold winters cause spikes in energy comsumption and energy cost. It’s not misleading in any way, shape, or form. BTW I’m a Mechanical Engineer working primarily in HVAC and energy engineering for over 30 years. This particular post is much ado about nothing.
Team Obama is grasping at straws to explain away his economic failures,
Why not blame CO2 for that, and why not use phonied up Mann-style stats to do it?
Someplace I just saw a headline that 2014 is shaping up to be the warmest year ever. Does this graph, confusing as it is, throw a monkey wrench into that projection?
Seems like an unfounded gripe to me. It’s clearly labelled “HEATING degree days”, not “degree days and also carries annotations indicating “colder than normal” / “warmer than normal” in appropriate blue and red.
The sense of comparison is not affected w.r.t. 1950s.
The confusing is in this article which asks : “Q: What are degree days?” when that is not the quantity in discussion. This is almost wilful mislabelling to create a problem to moan about.
I see nothing misleading in the White House document.
In fact it’s informative: look at the trend since 1998 Heating requirements have been steadily rising !! I’d say this will be a useful graph to refer to next time someone pretends “global warming is happening now” etc.
I’m saving a copy.
hunter says:
May 30, 2014 at 5:45 am
May 30, 2014 at 5:53 am
Which IS EXACTLY the point of the “upside down” (COLDER WEATHER across the US for the winter means a “SPIKE” in the plot!) by the White House.
Economic LOSS for the entire nation for the entire quarter-year means a SPIKE in the plot!
MORE ENERGY “lost” (used by the people for survival in COLD WEATHER) means a SPIKE in the plot!
It is exactly the same as when they showed plots a SPIKE in food stamps and welfare as a “growth” in the economy, and claimed that MORE welfare means a healthier economy. When they claimed that LESS government spending means the economy will fail.
And their captive ABCNNBCBS TV news media wll repeat this. Have repeated this in the past, Will continue to repeat it in the future to protect their liberal politicians. This is a politically-driven plot to excuse the first quarter loss, and will be used as long as it is convenient to use. Then it will be changed, and “economic growth” will be plotted to show “economic growth between the first quarter and the second quarter” just in time for the election in November. NOT to prove that economic growth is better in warm weather.
Ric Werme –
65*F is an arbitrary baseline number that represents the outdoor ambient temperature below which we expect people to use heating and above which we expect people to use cooling. 65*F hasn’t been a useful number for heating since the 70’s reaction to the oil crisis and it hasn’t been useful for cooling since the advent of the personal computer. It’s just a standard for comparison.
HDD are normally used only for estimating monthly/annual heating energy costs by lazy engineers. Some energy codes, including ASHRAE 90.1 use it for determining required U-values for facility features.
Sooooo …. This week the White House uses one of the three Coldest Winters EVAH ™ to excuse the administration’s continued mismanagement of the nation’s economy.
Then Obama will turn right around on Monday and use “Global Warming” to justify his cap and trade tax plan.
It’s surreal. Orwell has nothing on these clowns.
We now plot the weather in quarters like GDP? IMO the unpredictable nature of weather nullifies the effectiveness of the endeavor.
Surely it is this article that has it upside down, not the diagram being complained about?
See comment by Brian at 5:31.
A “heating degree day” = ” a day you have to turn the heating on” i.e a cold day – the graph is correctly labelled and the right way round
@ur momisugly Brian, May 30, 2014 at 5:31 am
“… there seems to be a lot of misunderstanding among commenters regarding this report.”
Precisely! You, as an engineer with over 30 years experience in the field, understand it. How many politicians, unelected decision makers, reporters, talking heads or infotainment consumers will get it? Very few!
So yes, there is a lot of misunderstanding, but not from the commenters. I, for one, understand it very well.
The elite Wasingtonians might be advised to insulate their tony homes for a possible chill late this fall.