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/
I hope the reporters don’t let go of this story and keep it in the public eye. Heads should roll, jobs should go, exposure should happen – and the whole should spread to other fraudulent practises and organizations.
Re recent changes to this site. I like the format, but please get rid of the comment nesting. The discussion that follows an article is more important and informative to me than the article itself. When there are a hundred or more comments, I simply cannot find the added nested ones every day or every hour. It spoils the dialogue for me and forces me to abandon reading ANY article for days or weeks until all comments are done! Replies can be given as they always have, with reference to the comment or a copy and paste.
I’m in here hourly and been with you for years, please don’t force me to read only the old news discussions.
Mosher says djustments make little difference to the overall trend, yet Mosher spends enormous amounts of time adjusting them. Sound logic.
Tilo says: In any case, a move should reflect as a step change, not as a trend change. So there should be a step correction, not a trend correction. If the homogenization algorithm is responsible for turning a step correction into a trend correction, the algorithm introduces more error than it removes.”
This is what I can’t understand either.
Maybe something in the account is not being clearly explained but I don’t see any correction for a supposed step change. This is just the latest excuse that BOM have produced, hoping to blag the journalist who raised the question, who probably is not very informed about the details of what is going on.
Clearly the AlGoreithm is NOT adjusting for a one or two step changes. In fact it’s totally unclear what it is doing since AFAIK (despite claims that this is “peer reviewed”) they have not published there methods nor thier code.
They claim it is a “peer revewed” process but this appears to be chat with “peers” over coffee at BOM rather than the method having been published in PR literature in sufficient detail to reproduce the results.
Peer review was by a panel of three: NOAA, NZ and Canada
scientistshttp://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/07/04/the-australian-bureau-of-meteorology-gets-it-wrong/
Dr. Jennifer Marohasy,
¡Yes!
John
Dr. Jennifer Marohasy,
Please persist to bring the dialog to global media.
John
question
Does the Austrian data change daily like the American data sets? If you looked at a station’s records for a date in, say, 1965 would you see the same thing next week?
I sent yesterday to a mate in Tasmania
heres HIS reply to me..
Oh yes I know where one of their “new” weather station locations was.
Think I mentioned it to you some time ago.
They place a temp/weather recording unit against a cutting right next to a four lane highway called the eastern outlet from hobart. They even put up a sign saying what it was.
It was right at the top of the hill where all the passing vehicles engines would be at their greatest temperature.
Pretty obvious.
Recently travelled down from Orleans ( just south of Paris ) to Millau in the south of France. I noticed several weather stations within a few metres of the four lane ‘autoroute’.
These are presumably for information on traffic safety conditions but it got me wondering whether they were part of the french reporting network.
I’m working on adjusting the outlier NBA stats of the 1950’s and 1960’s. We all know some of those stats are wrong because the stats around them do not agree. I found a major outlier in 1962 as some guy named Wilt Chamberlain is credited with averaging 50 points per game over the course of an entire 82 game schedule. That is downright laughable so I homogenized his data with players around him and his new adjusted total is 23 points per game.
And as Nick Stokes so clearly pointed out with his August 26, 2014 at 10:55 pm post. 1962 was a long time ago so eye witnesses can not claim Wilt averaged 50 ppg. Also it’s doubtful anyone that claims they remember the 50 ppg average went to all 82 games so there again they are sketchy witnesses. That means my adjusted 23 ppg is correct and anyone saying I’m wrong is deceitful.
I heard some guy named Michael Jordan has some outlier stats. He’s my next target for getting correct data for. Witnesses, who needs witnesses when I can brush them off like Nick Stokes did. His algorithm is more powerful than a eye witness. So long Michael Jordan you were a fabrication of incorrect data that my algorithm will correct.
I’m still amazed that Stokes discredited someone that worked there.
Steven Mosher analogies,
I would be mighty surprised to find my house measured in feet back in the early part of the century had suddenly become smaller when now measured in meters.
NikFromNYC
August 26, 2014
“If the real data didn’t show a lot of warming, homogenization adjustments would not be able to lead to such trend up-adjustments at unresponsive adjacent stations that are outliers.”
Actually that is untrue. It depends on the algorithms used, how selectively they are used, how consistent they are with each other, how selectively they are applied, the periods for which they are deemed necessary and several other factors.
Set the right target and provided with sufficient raw data a skilled operative could, on request, construct a rising or a falling trend from “homogenised” data.
Just looked at the UAH satellite data for Australia, available in the last column here: http://vortex.nsstc.uah.edu/data/msu/t2lt/uahncdc_lt_5.6.txt
The trend for Australia from 1979 to the present in the satellite data is 0.16 C/decade warming (see bottom cell in the AUST column). That’s a total warming of around 0.6 C in Australia since late 1978.
That seems fairly consistent with the BOM estimated warming of around 0.9 C since 1950. It looks like the BOM adjusted data are in pretty good agreement with the satellite record.
True. Except that we’re talking trends since 1910 (1913 in this case) which is when the BOM arbitrarily starts its climate analysis. Most adjustments in Acorn were well before 1978.
DavidR, essentially you are saying that BOM claims 0.3 degrees warming between 1950 and 1979, when the period in question was a time of cooling in the general temperature record.
That suggests the adjustments during that time were significant, greater than 0.1 degrees per decade, not that there is “pretty good” agreement at all. In fact, that the data is consistent with the satellite record but significantly adjusted prior to this is in agreement with the claims of Dr Marohasy.
should say adjusted to meters.
If we take the Raw temperatures from all Australian stations, why would there need to be homogenization? Wouldn’t all the station moves just average out.
What is the theoretical maximum change as a result of the TOBs issue. My understanding is that it is a very small number. It certainly does not provide for a 1.5C gradual change going back to 1900. The systematic nature through time of these adjustments shows they are untrustworthy.
Let’s just go back to the Raw records and throw out ALL these adjustments. Sack the adjustments since it is clear they have gone way too far.
Bill, TOBS only applied to USHCN data, since the rest of the world obviously read their thermometers precisely at midnight every night for over a century!
TOBS is a necessary correction – that can be easily shown using available hourly data for a given location. But one of the problems is that we really don’t know the magnitude of the correction since we don’t have reliable records of what the real weather was for a given USHCN location on a given date, so a model is used to get TOBS estimates (yes, the TOBS correction is a model…).
I learnt something new today.
A slow cooling trend turned into a 1.85c per century warming trend.
And it changes nothing.
Ok then.
Bill Illis August 27, 2014 at 5:11 am
“If we take the Raw temperatures from all Australian stations, why would there need to be homogenization? Wouldn’t all the station moves just average out.”
Probably. I run a program called TempLS, which uses GHCN unadjusted for a global temp index. Using adjusted makes very little difference.
But you don’t know. Station moves could have a bias; there is no way of knowing without identifying them. Whereas homogenisation can introduce false positives, but the scheme can be tested to be free of bias.
“What is the theoretical maximum change as a result of the TOBs issue.”
It’s shown here. It can be 1°C. There’s no pure theoretical value; it depends on the temp cycle. But TOBS probably isn’t the issue at Amberley. Maybe Rutherglen.
mosher and zeke would do well to listen to this http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b04f9r4k
Every day the newspapers carry stories of new scientific findings. There are 15 million scientists worldwide all trying to get their research published. But a disturbing fact appears if you look closely: as time goes by, many scientific findings seem to become less true than we thought. It’s called the “decline effect” – and some findings even dwindle away to zero.
A highly influential paper by Dr John Ioannidis at Stanford University called “Why most published research findings are false” argues that fewer than half of scientific papers can be believed, and that the hotter a scientific field (with more scientific teams involved), the less likely the research findings are to be true. He even showed that of the 49 most highly cited medical papers, only 34 had been retested and of them 41 per cent had been convincingly shown to be wrong. And yet they were still being cited.
Again and again, researchers are finding the same things, whether it’s with observational studies, or even the “gold standard” Randomised Controlled Studies, whether it’s medicine or economics. Nobody bothers to try to replicate most studies, and when they do try, the majority of findings don’t stack up. The awkward truth is that, taken as a whole, the scientific literature is full of falsehoods.
Jolyon Jenkins reports on the factors that lie behind this. How researchers who are obliged for career reasons to produce studies that have “impact”; of small teams who produce headline-grabbing studies that are too statistically underpowered to produce meaningful results; of the way that scientists are under pressure to spin their findings and pretend that things they discovered by chance are what they were looking for in the first place. It’s not exactly fraud, but it’s not completely honest either. And he reports on new initiatives to go through the literature systematically trying to reproduce published findings, and of the bitter and personalised battles that can occur as a result.
at the moment sceptics think they are wrong, in years to come we will know they were wrong.
Suggestion:
Sack all scientists who are Gen X, Y or Z and thus contaminated by a post modernist college education thus inducing an ‘Ioannidis Effect’ – or is that the Jenkins Effect?
Retain all scientists who are Gen VW or earlier (regardless of whether they confess to having inhaled). Hey, it worked for the Apollo Mission and the Mars Rovers!
“What can we do…..?”
It is frustrating to see the scope of the forces supporting CAGW, and all of the regulatory apparatus, and fund siphoning that has followed it. If you are among those who believe that the proponents of CAGW are well-meaning but mistaken, you are frustrated. If, however, you believe fraud is involved, you are likely an order of magnitude more frustrated. Arming up to shoot a zealot during one of this winter’s power interruptions is, however, a bit anti social even if justified based on the damage done.
Seriously, though, what can one do?
Well, here we are at WUWT. There is a tip jar (for surfacestations). AW is discrete about tooting his own horn too loudly — BUT PUT YOUR MONEY WHERE YOUR MOUTH IS!.
Other sites where the arguments are clear, and HONESTLY MODERATED allowing both sides to debate are also fundworthy.
And, beyond the web….how about “each one teach one”. A Young person came to my door recently in campaign mode, “saving the polar bears” (an oversimplification). On a very hot day, a glass of iced tea in exchange for a few minutes of listening rocked his world. Some of the cult members are too far gone to reprogram easily, but we can at least sow doubt and try to convince them the everything they know is wrong.
I find Jo Nova’s sceptics guide very useful for conversions and deprogramming. It is simple, and reduces the clutter of a brain that has a thousand factoids and no data.
Another technique that is fun if you catch someone who has avoided the new math and thus can actually do their sums, is to imaginarially but numerically build a wind industry ( or solar). At the point of maximum enthusiasm ask what happens when the wind doesn’t blow or the sun doesn’t shine. The argument deteriorates. Then reason by analogy. Say they want a car. We’re going to make them buy a car with a lot of operating restrictions, and a backup. The argument continues. I’ve actually had a light turn on in perhaps one of ten Sierra clubbers, though I’m not yet claiming any true conversions.
We know that the fantasy will fail on a number of fronts, perhaps catastrophically. Reality is in harmony with itself, not the faculty lounge. What we can do is have the truth available as an alternative when people see their dreams die…..so then come home to a system that function well rather than flitting from one cult to another.
Some people are capable of great things. Most of us, I think, just plod along doing the best we can. But think of an avalanche and its power, even though each snowflake doesn’t carry much weight. But our opinion carry no weight at all if we only talk to ourselves.
Richard,
No need to SHOUT….
I contribute to a number of conservative (USA) 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.
I also take opportunities to teach, point out logical fallacies, and challenge people to think for themselves rather than accepting the spoon fed ‘science’. Thanks for your thoughts and response,
Mac
Thinking of this, there must be methodology papers out there, and some sort of consensus approach, or two, for homogenization.
I am familiar with such consensus strategies being discussed and developed in other areas of research, such as developing bootstrap estimates, doing probability-matching between two data sets where there is no one data element to link a person in one set to the other set, and so on.
There should be a general method for identifying a station that needs to be homogenized, then for deciding its neighbors that will homogenize it, and so on.
If a site reading is bad, homogenization corrects it by adjusting the bad reading; why adjust the bad reading by some amount determined by the good local stations? Why not just use the good nearby local stations to fabricate a temp for the bad site? If the adjacent local sites can indicate what the temp was at the bad site, then just do that. What role should the bad-site temp play?
If I could read some methodology paper or papers, I could see the logic and then see how the logic translates into how to select bad station, how to select the good stations to correct it, and how the actual correction will be done.
Bill Illis
“Sack the adjustments since it is clear they have gone way too far.”
Should we also sack the satellite data, which since 1979 appears to be in much better agreement with the adjusted than the unadjusted surface data in Australia?
It is curious that the big adjustments occur before the satellite records began.
A most curious algorithm indeed.
You are only looking at satellite data for the proper latitudes in the SH, right? No? Try again.
As I recall, according to theory accepted by both CAGW alarmists and CAGW skeptics, the satellite data should not agree.with the surface data. If there has been warming, it should be “amplified” in the upper troposphere, should it not? I’m straining my memory again, but isn’t the amplification factor supposed be about 1.2?
Is there any comprehensive record of all adjustments to data? Is there a trend in the adjustments?
If the satellites weren’t watching they would have warmed the present.
M Courtney
“It is curious that the big adjustments occur before the satellite records began.”
Irrespective of adjustments prior to the satellite era, satellite observations of temperature trends in the lower troposphere over Australia appear to be in good agreement with the adjusted surface temperature record: around 0.16 C/dec warming since 1979. Australia has warmed by about 0.6 C in total since 1979.
DavidR
OK, so there were small “adjustments” in the satellite era and surface data and satellite data agree.
Does that suggest there should have been only small “adjustments” prior to the satellite era and if not then why not?
Richard
richardscourtney
The adjustments made by BOM are guided by a set methodology, as published in the peer reviewed literature, which is applied to the ‘whole’ data set.
Raw data are available online; anyone can download it, apply the published BOM methodology, and uncover any discrepancy between adjustments post and pre 1979.
I’m not aware of any such discrepancy having been identified.
DavidR
Your reply to me is a good body swerve. It answers two questions I did not ask and ignores the question I asked.
What has been identified is not relevant to my question. I refer you to a post of rgbatduke at August 27, 2014 at 10:50 am on the other thread addressing this issue. You can use this link to jump to it.
Richard
DavidR
August 27, 2014 at 10:44 am
Are you unable to read?
What do you think The author of the original article Dr. Jennifer Marohasy, Kens Kingdom, Steve Goddard, Paul Homewood, Sunshine Hours and Walter Dnes –
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/08/23/ushcn-monthly-temperature-adjustments/
have been doing.
I suggest you try it for yourself, first read that the adjustments should only change values by a small amount not whole degrees C.
richardscourtney
Your question was:
“Does that suggest there should have been only small “adjustments” prior to the satellite era and if not then why not?”
My answer was that BOM claim the same adjustment process is applied to the entire data set; both pre and post the satellite era (1979). There is not a separate process applied to data from different eras. That ‘does’ answer your question.
A C Osborn
The sources you mention focus on a small number of stations. BOM state (my emphasis):
“… from 1950 to present… homogeneity adjustments have little impact on *national trends* and changes in temperature extremes.”
This statement could easily be disproved, since raw and adjusted data for ACORN stations are available online. So far, no one has suggested BOM is wrong about the effect of adjustments on the national trend.
I do hope that there are original unaltered copies of the data ready to be restored once humankind casts away its current foolishness.
@jared 8/26 3:56 pm, 8/27 12:48 am, 8/27 4:11 am
All good comments.
On the issue of adjusting outliers, perhaps we should adjust their grant monies. After all, adjustments won’t make a difference.
Any raw station temperature data that uses the reliable instruments for measuring temperature recommended by the WMO, should never be adjusted. Any other means is FRAUD and is changing data to suit confirmation bias for maybe financial gain. The only idea I get that not changing one or two station makes little difference apparently because most of the rural stations have already been changed to match the urban ones? It is now the recent trick in temperature data, if the present doesn’t warm, slowly cool history over time hoping people won’t notice. I also believe satellites are keeping them more honest recently or further adjusted warming would have been implemented. Raw data should never be homogenized because it hides secrets that may become noticeable many years in future.
HADCRUT4 and GISS don’t support the required evidence for need for recent changes and neither does the raw data. Historic data of many decades ago have no scientific support for changing them all the time, only thing i see is FRAUD.
What’s the difference between correcting “wrong” data and just making up your own facts?