Yesterday we posted on BoM’s bomb on station temperature trend fiddling. where BoM claimed the trend difference was a result of a station move. Apparently, BoM can’t even keep track of their own station histories! Today, Dr. Jennifer Marohasy writes: Who’s going to be sacked for making-up global warming at Rutherglen?
She writes: HEADS need to start rolling at the Australian Bureau of Meteorology. The senior management have tried to cover-up serious tampering that has occurred with the temperatures at an experimental farm near Rutherglen in Victoria. Retired scientist Dr Bill Johnston used to run experiments there. He, and many others, can vouch for the fact that the weather station at Rutherglen, providing data to the Bureau of Meteorology since November 1912, has never been moved. Senior management at the Bureau are claiming the weather station could have been moved in 1966 and/or 1974 and that this could be a justification for artificially dropping the temperatures by 1.8 degree Celsius back in 1913.
Surely its time for heads to roll!
…
The unhomogenized/raw mean annual minimum temperature trend for Rutherglen for the 100-year period from January 1913 through to December 2013 shows a slight cooling trend of 0.35 degree C per 100 years. After homogenization there is a warming trend of 1.73 degree C per 100 years. This warming trend is essentially achieved by progressively dropping down the temperatures from 1973 back through to 1913. For the year of 1913 the difference between the raw temperature and the ACORN-SAT temperature is a massive 1.8 degree C.
…
The Bureau has tried to justify all of this to Graham Lloyd at The Australian newspaper by stating that there must have been a site move, its flagging the years 1966 and 1974. But the biggest adjustment was made in 1913! In fact as Bill Johnston explains in today’s newspaper, the site never has moved.
Surely someone should be sacked for this blatant corruption of what was a perfectly good temperature record.
more here: http://jennifermarohasy.com/2014/08/whos-going-to-be-sacked-for-making-up-global-warming-at-rutherglen/
Steven Mosher,
I know. Won’t it be ironic if AGW is actually occurring and yet those among the adherents who don’t actually believe that it is occurring but wish to motivate action regardless are caught misbehaving often enough to discredit the whole thing?
I’d chuckle some.
You’re right, it changes nothing. The guys who did this probably want to motivate action and probably don’t really think AGW is happening, but with respect to the scientific truth it changes absolutely nothing.
For those complaining about Steven Mosher not seeing data before 1965, the Australian BOM site has daily temperature records online. That data shows a break of a few years at that point. I suspect that BEST has picked up the data after the break (from 1965) only, or has the data before the break (upto 1960) under a different station code.
http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/data/?ref=ftr
Select Temperature (max or min), select Rutherglen for the location, and then select the Rutherglen Research station (Station 082039). The graph at the bottom shows the data completeness for each year, and there’s a definite break of about five years in what’s available online.
Not when you’re measuring something that only happens once, even if the occurrence is daily or in a pattern. Source data is something that is measured or observed by a tool, instrument, or scale. The data can’t be “wrong.” The tool, instrument, or scale can only be faulty or broken. And you can only know that contemporaneously. You can’t intuit it 100 years later, otherwise you’re trying to pass off the menu as the meal.
Anyone who believes these temperature “adjustments” in multiple databases are legitimate is seriously naive. The ‘environmentalists’ have already stated that lies are more important than truth when it comes to supporting the “cause” so no one should be surprised. But everyone should be mad.
Hate to burst your bubble Mosher, but yet again you suffer from analogy fail: interest/inflation today does not change that your house was $300k in the past, it changes what it will be worth tomorrow.
What do we call a Racehorse sidekick?
Mark
If you break the data into 3 sections, with the break points where the assumed changes were, do any of the 3 series show a distinct warming/cooling trend?
NikFromNYC…August 26, 2014 at 6:37 pm…. Where is the fraud in these adjustments?!
So you’re playing ‘find the pea under the cup’ again. You don’t seem to realize that changing historical reference data is taboo. If you don’t like past data start your own.
Nobody is changing standard reference data, you blind baffoon. The raw data is still published as raw data. Everybody knows this. So do you!
And Mosher’s inflation analogy is perfectly apt if you define temperature as how many grams of gold or of diamonds you had to pay for a house versus today when inflating dollar amounts skew the real comparison. You guys are just playing word games in order to avoid cold hard logic and reason, with such flippancy that no wonder skepticism is so successfully ridiculed by activists! I have a sneaking suspicion about a false flag operation being coordinated lately along with how Steve Goddard hosts as his top commenters a few utter lunatics and even a convicted child rapist. Nary a word from skeptics about this! Ugh.
But what’s your frame of reference for blessing these adjustments?
So where is Tweedledee ?? His Mom’s going to be jealous that Tweedledum got some pseudo-intellectual sounding sh!t in for HIS Mom:
http://www.alice-in-wonderland.net/alicepic/disney-movie/tweedledee-tweedledum-3.jpg
Wouldn’t one expect the residuals on the homogenized data to have a lower variance than the residuals of the raw data? It sure doesn’t look that way to me though. Can anyone confirm if they should be lower?
-Scott
If an act is indistinguishable from a crime then for a time it does not matter if a crime has occurred – it is bad enough that it looks like a crime has occurred. If an act remains indistinguishable from a crime then for all practical purposes a crime has been committed and even a court of law cannot reverse public opinion. Or as the imperial president might say, don’t do stupid stuff.
One word reminder: Chappaquiddick.
Further – if an act remains indistinguishable from a crime then the precautionary principle says treat it as a crime in your personal life.
Steve Mosher @ur momisugly 5.56pm
“… no objective tested validated criteria for a good station.”
“… there is no data that hasn’t been adjusted.
“I bought a house in 1995 for 300k.” etc., etc.
This is all distraction.
There are two simple and related issues: credibility and methodology.
Steve has not in any way addressed the credibility issue because the only way to do that is to provide a simple, easily accessible database that compares the raw data (as recorded) with the current ‘adjusted’ number for EVERY station. The second part he has also not addressed which is to describe exactly what ‘adjustments’ were then made to get from raw to adjusted and for what data points. That also needs to be done for every station.
“Trust me” (or “trust others”) protestations don’t work once credibility is eroded and especially when it appears data is being hidden.
There’s fraud in claiming the station near Rutherglen had moved when it hadn’t, and in presuming that other stations had moved without doing a little digging to see if that was really the case.
These instances of thumbs on the scale indicate bias and underhandedness at the BOM.
It’s therefore unlikely that these sore-thumb instances are the only ones.
How much further that underhandedness has gone needs to be audited in full, ideally by an official inquiry.
What can the readers, commenters, and contributors to WUWT do, individually and/or collectively, to apply pressures sufficiently vigorous and effective to guarantee that this data crime is thoroughly vetted and the perpetrators sacked at the least and incarcerated if possible?
What can we do? We can do a better job with our votes. We are getting the services we vote for.
A.nthony, I have notices the importance shift weighted to a closer look at the adjustments that are so evident and I for one sincerely appreciate it, most important.
I’m having a hard time with people believing what has happened, they just won’t believe that scientists, many with doctorates, would just sit by idle with a graph of the upward adjustments mirroring the upward trend in the temperature records since the temperature records have so many up and down wiggles it is hard to see until you have viewed many hundreds of local graphs which most will not take the time to do or on a spreadsheet roughly remove the global adjustments from one of the public global temperature graphs. It is going to be hard to get the average Joe to visualize this, how they did it, but once they do, there is no turning back… they have become skeptical of what is going on in the climate fiasco.
Thanks again.
Mac the Knife…..August 26, 2014 at 8:27 pm
What can the readers, commenters, and contributors to WUWT do, individually and/or collectively, to apply pressures sufficiently vigorous and effective to guarantee that this data crime is thoroughly vetted and the perpetrators sacked at the least and incarcerated if possible?
I wrote my house representative. I vote. Australia has already let their votes count.
mark l,
I do similarly. And contribute to a number of conservative candidates campaigns (labor and $$$) in each election cycle, as well as some tip jar support to this site and others. I was curious to find out how many others here at WUWT take any action beyond this site. This query generated very few responses over several days so I tentatively conclude that most here are content with commenting on a blog.
Mac
Is Mosher real or just a model (complete with adjustment algorithm)?
I’m afraid that the only heads that are going roll are the skeptics (deniers) that point out the truth – raw data or whatever they you want to call it. Just ask your local Main Stream Media reporter…
Mark T
August 26, 2014 at 7:26 pm.
I was going to give a similar reply to Steven Mosher’s inflation analogy but you’ve beaten me to it. It might have been a Freudian slip on his part.
Inflation components are adjusted in such a way as to keep inflation lower than it would be otherwise. This allows the government to reduce their expenditures through inflation indexing.
Temperatures are adjusted in such a way as to keep current temperatures higher than in the past then it would be otherwise. This will allow them to increase their income through carbon taxes
So adjustments to lower their expenses and adjustments to raise their income. It’s nothing more than theft from the people..
I’m now waiting for the official government statement “Let them eat cake”.
rogerknights August 26, 2014 at 8:17 pm
“There’s frαud in claiming the station near Rutherglen had moved when it hadn’t, and in presuming that other stations had moved without doing a little digging to see if that was really the case.”
Do we really know that? Bill J has told us that there were indeed two Stevenson Screens, one up, one down. He says that he worked there at times (what years?), and knows (how?) that only one ever supplied figures to the record. This all remembered 45 years later. That’s sketchy evidence to be claiming frαud.
I agree with Nick. The metadata is crappy just about everywhere (which is partly why it has taken us so long to get out a new paper, getting the metadata right is a huge job) though BoM should have known better before trying to pass off homogenization bias as a station move.
Homogenization is where the real issue is at.
“That’s sketchy evidence to be claiming frαud.” ~ Stokes
Perhaps it is, but there is no evidence to justify changing the raw data now is there?
The fact that a longtime good station was showing cooling and the BOM changed that to alarming warming by looking at chicken entrails would be enough evidence to convince me to vote guilty if I were on the jury.
You’re right–I learned that only after I made my comment. Still, it was a reckless thing for the BOM to do, and the recklessness was motivated by bias. The underhandedness is proved by the BOM’s stonewalling on this topic for years.
Its still better evidence then that which claims they had moved which seems to consist of ‘we think so ‘
I have no issues with demanding a high standard of evidence, especially when great claims are being based on it , but if you go down that route what would be left of climate ‘science’ ?
Can anyone confirm if they should be lower?
Yes. In my travels, homogenized data has always showed lower error bars than non-homogenized. Confirmed.
It would, wouldn’t it? You have reeducated all your outliers, haven’t you? They are all Good Citizens, now. Everybody loves Big Brother. The little boxes on the hillside have all come out the same. See my error bar. See how teeny-weeny it is. Cocktails, all ’round, boyz.
The only problem arises when you discover that the majority of Good Citizens turned out to be Bad Citizens . . .
USHCN metadata is hugely improved. Someone in NCDC made a good hire.
anthony had a thread on the following on 21 Aug and now, just when we are praising the Murdoch media in Australia for publishing details of the BOM data scam, the Murdoch media publishes this, complete with big, glam pics (?). why oh why?
27 Aug: News Ltd: Charis Chang: Scientists reveal how they feel about climate change in handwritten letters and photos
SCIENTISTS can be a practical bunch, they deal with facts, data, hard evidence. But even scientists can lose their s*** sometimes and now they are revealing how they really feel…
One of the founders of the site, photographer Nick Bowers said the project was a labour of love that came about after conversations with two fellow creatives copywriter Rachel Guest and art director Celine Faledam.
“We were interested in environmental issues and discussed this constantly among ourselves, we all have young kids,” Bowers said.
“We wanted to try and bring authenticity and humanity to this issue.”
He said the scientists were photographed while they were being interviewed. This includes many prominent names such as mammologist and palaeontologist Tim Flannery…
While some critics have suggested climate scientists are motivated by grant money, Bowers said he got the sense that they just wanted the debate to move on so they could do other science.
“They want to get on with doing other stuff, they are sick of trying to spruik this stuff themselves.”…
http://www.news.com.au/technology/science/scientists-reveal-how-they-feel-about-climate-change-in-handwritten-letters-and-photos/story-fn5fsgyc-1227038781108
Has any technical reason been suggested as to why temperatures in the past need to be adjusted downward to be validly compared with modern measurements? Thermometer housing allowing excessive direct sunlight exposure? Thermometer construction then versus now producing a consistent positive bias in measurements in the past? etc. In the absence of any reasonable theory backed by some concrete evidence that past temperatures were reading consistently too high then I believe that, as many have said here, the adjustments should as often be to raise past temperatures as lower them. Locational adjustments alone should not produce a consistent lowering of raw data unless a specific reason is shown that could justify it. In the absence of such reasons the consistent lowering of past temperatures must be indicative of bias of the scientist kind which is all too well known about in science and has been battled against for centuries sometimes successfully and sometimes not.
Adjusting the past downward makes the present appear warmer which if your looking to promote AGW as an ideology or ride the gravy train of funding it has created is a ‘good idea’ which needs no technical reason .
But it remains a good and unanswered , expect by the catch all term homogenized.
But I remain amazed these people work in climate ‘science’ in the first place with the luck they have , and how else can you explain how homogenizing data ‘always ‘ work in their favour, you would have thought they been spending their time in Las Vegas where they could be making their fortune.
The only thing we KNOW about the temperature at a particular location, on a particular date, at a particular time is the temperature recorded at that location, date and time. That is true whether the date is today or multiple years ago. We could estimate what that temperature would be (or would have been) at some other location, or on some other date, or at some other time; however, we do not KNOW that estimate is correct.
If we check the calibration of an instrument and discover that it is inaccurate, we know only that it is inaccurate now. If the instrument had been calibrated previously, we KNOW the extent of the measurement error at the time of the recalibration. However, we do not KNOW how or when the measurement error began, or how it progressed, though we can estimate it based on the characteristics of the instrument. In such circumstances, we certainly do not KNOW the anomaly to 2 decimal places.