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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Frank says:
July 5, 2014 at 10:16 am
I have heard that breakpoint techniques, like BEST’s scalpel, have the effect of amplifying whatever the trend in the dataset. And since surface temperatures have been warming since the LIA, more warming is what you will get.
richard verney says:
July 5, 2014 at 10:57 am
Thanks, Richard. Can do, but it might take a while. Things are kinda crazy around here, and getting busier. I’m speaking next week at the ICCC-9 climate conference, and I have no idea what I’ll say …
You’re looking a two very different measurements, emissions per capita and emissions per square metre. From memory, population density in Europe is an order of magnitude above that of the US.
First, you’ve misinterpreted what I said. I didn’t say that where humans are is the ONLY source of CO2, there are obviously others.
Second, Australia has about half the population of California spread over an area the size of the US. Nowhere are there significant concentrations of people compared to say eastern China …
I’ll likely write up a post on this … but I have an unsolved problem with their data. It is said to be in units of g/m2/day, with a global average of 0.026. Multiplying this by 5.11E14 (square metres of earth surface), dividing by 10^15 (grams to gigatonnes), and multiplying by 365.25 (days/year) gives us 4.8 gigatonnes of carbon emitted per year… which is about half the conventional estimate.
Of course, that may just be the inaccuracy in the UBUKI data, and it may be because there’s only one year of data but I want to look into it a bit further. And I want to do a country-by-country analysis, but that’s gonna take some code writing … could be a while. So many drummers … so little time.
My best to you,
w.
<a href="http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/07/04/practicing-the-dark-art-of-temperature-trend-adjustment/#comment-1676385"D. Cohen, the reason you don’t read about “possible errors in the temperature-adjustment process” is climate scientists assume the central limit theory applies to the systematic error in the global temperature measurements. So, they spend a lot of time trying to estimate an average bias. When that bias is subtracted, it’s assumed the residual error is normally distributed around zero, and so averages to near zero.
There’s no substantial basis for that assumption, and it’s never discussed in any detail at all in the literature. But once in awhile one reads an author saying that ‘systematic error is as often positive as negative, and so tends to zero,’ or something to that effect. It’s a very convenient hand-waving argument, it’s widely accepted in the field, it’s never been tested or demonstrated, and it lets workers in the field go on to do superficially quantitative but substantively meaningless work.
Eventually that body of work, and the portentous conclusion-mongering it has allowed, will be put apart from science as a recognized elaboration of nonsense, and become a prime object of sociological study about how culture and its pressures can cause scientists themselves (not all, fortunately) to set aside the plain and obvious methods of science and nevertheless call their work science.
@sunshinehours1 at 6:45 am
I’ll give NOAA credit for something. Their new webpage allows graphing Min/Max and Avg. And it goes back to 1895
I beg to differ. The panel: Options: “Display Base Period” and “Display Trend”, each with inputs for years, is very deceptive. The result, regardless of inputs is the Trend from 1895 to 2014.
Input Average Temperatures for the period 1998 to 2010, and use these years also for the options.
The plotted trend is clearly counter to the plotted data. What is shown is NOT wrong — the legend says in the fine print that it is 1895-2014. But neither is it what you asked for using input parameters THEY PROVIDED. That makes it deceptive.
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cag/time-series/us/110/00/tmin/1/07/1895-2014?base_prd=true&firstbaseyear=1901&lastbaseyear=2000
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cag/time-series/us/110/00/tmin/1/07/1895-2014?base_prd=true&firstbaseyear=1998&lastbaseyear=2010
Changing the parameters in the URL doesn’t make any difference.
Richard, the FOIA link to your email, as provided in your submission, no longer works. Your email can be found at: http://di2.nu/foia/1069630979.txt
Pat Frank:
Thankyou for the information in your post at July 5, 2014 at 12:32 pm which says
However, the Parliamentary Submission is a Hansard record so is permanent, the Submission says the email is part of the Climategate leak, and the email is included as Appendix A of the Submission.
Richard
@Willis Eschenbach at 3:08 am
Is there an easy way to make the plot with 0 deg Longitude as the center?
If the connection of CO2 to population is being made, the putting the populace portion of Eurasia on the edge of the plot is not as good as rotating it 180 degrees toward the center.
Stephen Rasey … the NOAA panel works. Unfortunately the panel ignores the settings saved in URL’s.. So you have to manually change the panel even if the URL has the panel settings.
I see some of the MSM here in the uk are are now running with the story now
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2681829/Global-warming-latest-Amount-Antarctic-sea-ice-hits-new-record-high.html
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2681812/Its-politics-not-science-driving-climate-change-mania-UN-predictions-subject-ridicule-stunning-failure.html
Willis Eschenbach says:
July 5, 2014 at 12:10 pm
////////////////////////
Willis
Thanks. Please take your time.
I am not suggesting that your conclusion is wrong, and I am extremely sceptical that Terri Jackson’s assertion is correct. That would seem a stretch to me, and I would certainly wish to see something extremely compelling before being led towards his conclusion.
I consider that it would make an interesting article and you could shed a lot of light on it, depending upon the quality of the data. Obviously you raise a legitimate issue, but estimates can often be widely wrong, but that wrong…?
If you can get a proper handle on the data, perhaps this could be linked with IR data (ie., the data on DWR and OLR) to see whether there is any correlation between ‘hot’ and ‘cold’ spots of CO2 and DWR and/or OLR. It will also cast light on to what extent CO2 is a well mixed gas, although that to some extent is a matter of subjective interpretation depending upon one’s own views as to what one considers by the term well mixed.
PS. I recall that you posted an article (probably this year) on DWR and OLR data, and your take on this so much of the ground work for such a comparison has probably been done.
PPS. A long time ago, you uploaded an index on your articles. I don’t think that it has been updated (although I may be wrong on that), and given that you have written so many articles, which I suspect many would like to revisit from time to time, as and when related isssues arise, it would be good to have an updated index. I would suggest that that is sorted into 3 different classes, subject matter, alphabetical and chronological. Having three index citations would make it easy for people to track down what they are looking for.
As you are a main contributor in recent years to WUWT, I consider that it would be extremely useful if WUWT had your articles easily referenced and searchable, since they are a valuable source of information (especially since you have developed a tendancy to link your data).
“Willis Eschenbach says:
July 5, 2014 at 10:01 am
peter azlac says:
July 5, 2014 at 6:16 am
Willis
Can you present your Ibuki data in the same map format as that given by JAXA so that we can see the European values more clearly.
http://global.jaxa.jp/projects/sat/gosat/topics.html#topics1840
Not sure what you mean by “in the same manner”, Peter.”
Willis, note that I did not use the word manner but map format of which there are many:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_map_projections
Your map is great if you do not live in Europe, but for those of us who do your use of what looks like a Lambert cyclindrical equal area projection has the effect of compressing Europe such that it is not possible to see which countries are the main emitters and is it related to latitude. In addition, the view you have chosen cuts Europe in half, which is no doubt fine for your purpose. The reference I gave to the JAXA map shows all regions clearly as would the use of Robinson, Natural Earth or Van der Grinden projections.
This is not a criticism just a request for clarity for us in Europe since the EU is leading the charge on ´climate reparations´to our cost – the Ibuki data for the EU may well by now be obsolete as they have so far succeeded in moving a large part of our CO2 emitting industry to the USA (Texas) as wellas India and China for steel and aluminium!. However, I see from your post today that you give the source of your code so we can now make our own maps. One comment on today´s post – how much do you think the emissions of CO2 from the oceans has affected the measurements at Mon Loa and in the Arctic area, if you can compute that from the JAXA data.
“PS. How does one make past data more precise? Precision and accuracy are pretty much determined at the times of construction and measurement.”
Bob Greene has said it all. If you need better data, get a better instrument. There is just no other way. “Zombie stations,” are you kidding me?
This is all politics now. Senator Inhofe, where are you? How about a Senate hearing where he gets Morano to quiz these clowns on C-SPAN…