Did Federal Climate Scientists Fudge Temperature Data to Make It Warmer?
Ronald Bailey of Reason Magazine writes:
The NCDC also notes that all the changes to the record have gone through peer review and have been published in reputable journals. The skeptics, in turn, claim that a pro-warming confirmation bias is widespread among orthodox climate scientists, tainting the peer review process. Via email, Anthony Watts—proprietor of Watts Up With That, a website popular with climate change skeptics—tells me that he does not think that NCDC researchers are intentionally distorting the record.
But he believes that the researchers have likely succumbed to this confirmation bias in their temperature analyses. In other words, he thinks the NCDC’s scientists do not question the results of their adjustment procedures because they report the trend the researches expect to find. Watts wants the center’s algorithms, computer coding, temperature records, and so forth to be checked by researchers outside the climate science establishment.
Clearly, replication by independent researchers would add confidence to the NCDC results. In the meantime, if Heller episode proves nothing else, it is that we can continue to expect confirmation bias to pervade nearly every aspect of the climate change debate.
Read it all here: http://reason.com/archives/2014/07/03/did-federal-climate-scientists-fudge-tem
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The warm is turning…
“The NCDC also notes that all the changes to the record have gone through peer review and have been published in reputable journals. ”
The one paper I tried to check was behind a pay wall.
There used to be 9000+ reporting stations in the global network. Then the Soviet Union collapsed, economies flattened, priorities changed, and now the network is on the order of 3000 stations.
Those stations retained are disproportionately sited where lots of people live (cities, airports, etc) and they are disproportionately affected by Urban Heat Island issues. Many high latitude and high altitude stations (generally colder) disappeared from the network.
No amount of averaging, gridding, massaging, extrapolating, or “in-filling missing data” can negate these network changes.
The network is trending warmer because the reporting stations are in warmer locations than in the past.
And the historical high temperatures are still from the 1930s-1940s
NASA-NOAA-HADCRUT-GHCN adjusted data are inherently biased.
why don’t they just come right out and say it…..
15 years ago when they said they knew what they were doing, it was accurate….
..they were lying through their teeth
I wonder how many reporting stations are located in Antarctica?
An audit would seen to be in order …
“Anthony Watts—proprietor of Watts Up With That, a website popular with climate change skeptics—tells me that he does not think that NCDC researchers are intentionally distorting the record”
What is exactly the evidence for this claim? If the adjustments are going on permanently and they always cool the past and warm the present, it seems that the null hypothesis should be that they are doing this on purpose. Especially when we have in mind the Climate-gate correspondence and their open deliberations how to “eliminate the blip” of 1940. It seems that they are not only eliminating the warming blip 1920-1940, but also the cooling blip of 1940-1970 as well.
“…if Heller episode proves nothing else, it is that we can continue to expect confirmation bias to pervade nearly every aspect of the climate change debate…”as framed by government sponsored researchers and spokesmen.
————-
fixed
Why do I never, ever hear or read anything about possible errors in the temperature-adjustment process or the parameters used in the temperature-adjustment process? Always it sounds as if this adjustment is “infinitely accurate”. In other science and engineering fields where there is data that is significantly contaminated by both random error and biases, adjusting the data to eliminate the biases is usually a bad idea because the error that comes from not knowing to infinite accuracy the bias, when added to the overall error budget for the data, ends up making the adjusted data less rather than more accurate.
he does not think that NCDC researchers are intentionally distorting the record”…
In other words…no one noticed?
You have to notice…..by the time someone gets a paper published using today’s data…..the data’s changed….when they go back to check it….their paper is wrong….by the time they re-write….go back and check….it’s changed again
wash…rinse….repeat……their paper would never be right
How can the time of observation change the temperature for a day?
Seems to me that a correct way to see if the Earth is warming or cooling would be to just record the raw data of rural stations.
It’s worse than just confirmation bias. The reviewers who disagree with the AGW POV know better than open their mouths. At best, they will say they have no opinion.
Latitude:
Your post at July 4, 2014 at 1:02 pm says in total
And that is precisely how our paper discussing the ‘adjustments’ was prevented from publication; see here.
Richard
“Via email, Berkeley Earth researcher Zeke Hausfather notes that Berkeley Earth’s breakpoint method finds “U.S. temperature records nearly identical to the NCDC ones (and quite different from the raw data), despite using different methodologies and many more station records with no infilling or dropouts in recent years.” ”
Ah, how the supreme genius of warmist scientists reveals the true nature of things, undeterred by the attempts of raw data to misguide them! Let it be told; the Earth is warming while your thermometer lies to you, human!
“Anthony Watts—proprietor of Watts Up With That, a website popular with climate change skeptics—tells me that he does not think that NCDC researchers are intentionally distorting the record”
I agree with Anthony. I think he change-point algorithms were accepted due to ignorance of natural climate cycles like the Pacific Decadal Oscillation that was just named recently in 1997, so the adjusted data fed their confirmation bias and prompting researchers’ failure to critically analyze the gross distortions that lowered most of the high temperatures in the 30s and 40s as discussed here http://landscapesandcycles.net/why-unwarranted-temperature-adjustments-.html
Consider each station is covering 20 square miles; with earth being 196,939,000 square miles, those stations are covering 0.03% of the surface…now that’s some coverage. NOT!Satellite data can be “adjusted” as well.
“Anthony Watts—proprietor of Watts Up With That, a website popular with climate change skeptics—tells me that he does not think that NCDC researchers are intentionally distorting the record”
I agree with regards to the NCDC. I am very reluctant to attribute something to malevolence when incompetence would explain it just as well.
It is either fraud or incompetance.
Either way they should be fired / dismissed and have to look for new employment elsewhere.
richardscourtney says:
July 4, 2014 at 1:11 pm
====
Richard…..exactly
Say we’ve been going out every year ..for 30 years…counting manatees….
…and every year, we count more manatees
but every year someone was jiggling with the numbers making the first few years numbers bigger…making the trend look like there’s less manatees each year
someone would definitely notice!…………….we did, that’s a true story
Did Federal Climate Scientists Fudge Temperature Data to Make It Warmer?
…absolutely
It is really extraordinary how given the UHI effect the adjustments in temperature always seem to raise the temperature of the present compared to the past, on average, when one expects precisely the opposite to be the dominant trend.
A second thing to note is that statistical angels fear to tread the long, dark path to data adjustment and infilling, because it always presumes knowledge that, in fact, you almost certainly do not have. Furthermore, all of the adjustments you make come with a substantial cost in the probable error of the “improved” estimate. Of course this never matters in climate science because the uncertainty in the “anomaly” computed is almost never presented, in part because it would then have to be added to the uncertainty in the actual global average temperature that the anomaly is supposedly referenced to. The noise, in fact, exceeds the signal by more than a factor of two everywhere but the satellite era.
There are other “interesting” things — just about exactly half of the state high temperature records were set in a single decade, and it wasn’t the last ten years. Guess which decade it was?
rgb
Anthony, please apolagise to NCDC immediately.
Your mate STEVE McINTYRE confirms NCDC’s TOB algorithm is working correctly and you are all wrong.
He has advises Paul homewood to retract his work.
See
http://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2014/07/01/temperature-adjustments-in-alabama-2/#comment-26224
REPLY: But I’m not disputing the TOBs adjustment, but rather a lot of the infilling data from surrounding stations that have been compromised. And to be precise Steve hasn’t actually checked the code that is running in NCDC’s computers. He’s done his own calculation, probably in R, but that isn’t the same as the code that runs at NCDC. That’s what I’d like to see evaluated by an external review. – Anthony
Dale Hartz,
“How can the time of observation change the temperature for a day?”
If recordings are made at the time of day when temperatures are highest (mid-afternoon), daily highs can be “double-counted”, biasing averages higher.
Consider the following example. A thermometer shows 3 things… the current temp, the max high and the max low since the thermometer was last reset.
An observer records all three at 3pm on Monday. Max = 80F, Min = 65F, Current = 75F. He resets the max and min, and returns the next day at 3pm. Tuesday was cooler, a high of only 70F, but the max since the last reading was 75F from when the thermometer was last reset on Monday. The average of the two days Tmax readings is 77.5F, when it should be 75F.
If temperatures were measured at 9am instead, around the middle of the day’s temperature range, there would be much less likelihood of double-counting, and the high-bias would be reduced.
” Russ R. says:
July 4, 2014 at 1:55 pm
An observer records all three at 3pm on Monday. Max = 80F, Min = 65F, Current = 75F. He resets the max and min, and returns the next day at 3pm. Tuesday was cooler, a high of only 70F, but the max since the last reading was 75F from when the thermometer was last reset on Monday. The average of the two days Tmax readings is 77.5F, when it should be 75F.
If temperatures were measured at 9am instead, around the middle of the day’s temperature range, there would be much less likelihood of double-counting, and the high-bias would be reduced.”
There’s only one BIG problem with that idea…that ASSumes that EVERY observer is not properly resetting the equipment after every observation. And that also assumes every thermometer is the same type.
In other words, it is just one big mass of assumptions all leaning towards the incompetence of the person making the observations.