From Jo Nova: BOM finally explains! Cooling changed to warming trends because stations “might” have moved!
It’s the news you’ve been waiting years to hear! Finally we find out the exact details of why the BOM changed two of their best long term sites from cooling trends to warming trends. The massive inexplicable adjustments like these have been discussed on blogs for years. But it was only when Graham Lloyd advised the BOM he would be reporting on this that they finally found time to write three paragraphs on specific stations.
![875141-a5eda3f6-2a03-11e4-80fd-d0db9517e116[1]](http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2014/08/875141-a5eda3f6-2a03-11e4-80fd-d0db9517e1161.jpg?quality=83)
Who knew it would be so hard to get answers. We put in a Senate request for an audit of the BOM datasets in 2011. Ken Stewart, Geoff Sherrington, Des Moore, Bill Johnston, and Jennifer Marohasy have also separately been asking the BOM for details about adjustments on specific BOM sites. (I bet Warwick Hughes has too).
The BOM has ignored or circumvented all these, refusing to explain why individual stations were adjusted in detail. The two provocative articles Lloyd put together last week were Heat is on over weather bureau and Bureau of Meteorology ‘altering climate figures, which I covered here. This is the power of the press at its best.
more here: http://joannenova.com.au/2014/08/bom-finally-explains-cooling-changed-to-warming-trends-because-stations-might-have-moved/
When climate zones shift around some places within a single geographical region become less cloudy and warmer whilst others become more cloudy and cooler.
There might still be an underlying background trend overall from warmer to cooler or cooler to warmer but if one applies a homogenisation process becausae one erroneously thinks that all locations should have the same sign of response to shifting climate zones then the underlying background trend would be lost, obscured or completely reversed.
That is what has happened here.
Those apparently contradictory changes in trend from one place to another within a single region were actually valuable diagnostic information as to how the climate zones overhead were shifting and having different effects in different locations.
They have destroyed that diagnostic information through ignorance.
There should be some penalty for such dozy and unprofessional acticity.
How much of this is applicable to the US and other nations? We know it was done in New Zealand also. Where else? The Climate of Corruption is just one aspect of the CO2 social madness.
In a nutshell, the BOM claims that a possible thermometer shift of only metres, can cause an incorrect reading of 2C. They can determine this by consulting thermometer trends hundreds of kilometers away.
The lack of intelligence of some working in this field is mindboggling.
Again as I keep saying…All hand waving until Federal Police intervene and SEIZE/IMPOUND ALL BOM records for investigation of FRAUD. The culprits doing this need to account. (most likely its a very FEW people in the organization).ie same applies to US USHCN NDCD ect
NikFromNYC
August 26, 2014 at 12:43 am
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“You don’t even have a missing person here yet you are loudly claiming an organization to be murderers, essentially crying wolf as far as that crucial demographic is concerned, the one that still figures skepticism is indeed just another right wing attack on science.”
Your statements are very, very telling. “another right wing attack on science”?! Was there another? The only instance I can recall of conservatives being accused of attacking science is the global warming hoax, and then only because it became the preferred stalking horse of the Professional Left who perceived any attack on their “last great hope” to be politically rather than scientifically motivated. Sceptics have a wide range of political opinions, what they have in common is a desire to defend the scientific method from the inanity of politics.
That is why you lost. If you don’t know who you are fighting, you can’t win.
And your attempts at gentle steering? That sceptics should fear over reaching and looking foolish? Alinsky methods fail on the interwebs. Trying to tell sceptics to be quisling little lukewarmers and avoid calling fraud as fraud for fear of looking foolish? Fail.
You don’t get to tell Australians who have endured years of snivelling propaganda from BoM what to say.
The record is clear, from the endless propaganda, the Climategate emails from those faithful to the cause claiming BoM was overdoing it, Darwin Zero (H/T Willis), the temporal bias to warming and cooling adjustments in the HQ record, the squealing retreat from HQ to ACORN when court challenge loomed, the evidence of data clipping in ACORN (Tmin exceeding Tmax in multiple records) and now this “might” filth. Adjustments without supporting metadata? There will be no forgiveness.
BoM have acted like scum. There is no if. There is no but. There is no maybe. This sorry hoax is collapsing. There will be no “warming but less than we thought” soft landing. When the Australian public demand answers they will be given the name “D. Jones (BoM)” before many, many others.
The low-level text is too gray and lacks serifs. It was OK yesterday, but it’s been changed back.
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@KenS: Jo’s site is working as of now.
Maybe they should homonize the rain gauges also. This would help those that have been flooded in a particular area eliminate their local flooding by a simple elimination of the rain that fell. That would work really well to eliminate tornadoes and hurricane centers/eye walls.
BOMshell game is up…
If you go the BOM site you can find details of the Amberley weather station here
This gives the site number which is 040004 and the date since records were kept – 1941.
If you then hit the pdf basic site summary link you get this information
There is nothing to indicate that the site has been changed.
If you then go to Google Maps and put in the co-ordinates you will find out where the observation station is located on the airfield.
Put in the co-ordinates exactly as in in this format:
-27.63, 152.71
Note when the position appears on the map it will be in degrees, seconds and minutes not decimal.
Cheers.
and this series of adjustmens happened under? a KRudd JULiar govt run..didnt it:-)
so govvy bom wanting to keep their jobs- n bosses happy had a fair bit to do with it Id be guessing…same as abc pushing maurice newman out to get a greener shade of boss in the big chair.very evident now with strident squeals over the new govts cutting carbon cons and looking to remove the RET as well.
So let us step back and take stock. So far, we have documented temperature fiddling (not supposition, not conjecture, DOCUMENTED) from:
Canada (Steven Goddard)
The United States of America (Paul Homewood, Steven Goddard)
The British Isles (Paul Homewood)
Australia (Jennifer Marohasy, Joanne Nova)
New Zealand (Joanne Nova)
Iceland (the whole country)
Russia (ditto above)
So I have to ask the question – is there ANY land areas that have had NATURAL warming (natural as defined by unadjusted raw temperature trends that are positive)?
NikFromNYC, think that Steve Goddard’s and others claim of fraud when it comes to land based temperature data is over the top?
If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck … it’s a duck.
The BOM statement points out that there are stations where the homogenised data have a stronger negative trend than the unhomogenised data.
Citing Mackay in particular, they say “the trend in minimum temperatures is +0.40 C/decade in the raw data but only +0.18 C/decade in the adjusted data.”
Furthermore, BOM claims that from 1950 to the present “homogeneity adjustments have little impact on national trends and changes in temperature extremes.”
Just wondering if anyone has checked this, and if so, what exactly is the difference between the adjusted and unadjusted trends? If BOM is lying about this, then it’s a lie that should be relatively easy to expose.
The BoM got this one right. The need for the adjustment is very clear from neighboring stations. I’ve done the analysis here. The change happened in August 1980, and I calculated the adjustment at 2.8°C.
Slowly but surely, EVERYTHING we have said they are doing to the data is being proven. Can’t wait for GISS to eventually be debunked.
NIKfromNYC,
That almost all of these “adjustments” results in warming was proven long, long ago.
Nick Stokes August 26, 2014 at 5:30 am
Oops, mixed up a number there. The adjustment is 1.4 C; the change to trend is 2.8°C/century.
There are so very many sad things about this. One is that if you really have no dog in this race, and are simply humanly or scientifically curious about what the climate is really doing, the further they bury the actual data, and the more they continue to present the data, adjusted, with no error analysis showing the before and after error (where the “after” error cannot really decrease because you cannot squeeze blood from a turnip or information from sparse, possibly corrupt, past data) the more difficult it gets to assess either reality or our state of knowledge or ignorance relative to it. If one looks at patterns of in the weather, they look like they correspond to times in the past when the average temperature was (allegedly) somewhat cooler and actually cooling — if our knowledge of the weather THEN isn’t sufficiently suspect that any such comparison is statistically impossible.
But the really, really sad thing is this. Start with the past data. It, processed straight up at face value, shows some trend — it doesn’t matter what that trend is, warming, cooling, neutral — but when you put the data straight through the statistical mill, you get some trend. You look at the trend and say “That can’t be right! I’m pretty sure (because I am an unregistered scientific psychic) that it has really been trending at thus and such a rate. I will therefore build a model that corrects the data in such a way that its trend corresponds with my psychic predictions, by finding some way to increase the statistical weight of stations that have the right answer and decreasing the statistical weight of stations that have the wrong answer. Between kriging, PCA, and other exotic tools, I’m pretty sure I can fix the data with some model I discover/invent, even if I have to write my own “special” PCA to accomplish it a la Mann.”
After a fair bit of work, you discover an algorithm that, using tools and methods in Real Statistics Books, build a model (which, because it is a statistical model based on Bayesian prior assumptions that have only a basically unknown probability of being themselves correct) works by adding a well-hidden uncertainty associated with the priors to the inherent statistical uncertainty in the original data. You ignore this — in fact, you ignore error analysis altogether — and use the model to basically rewrite the original data. Because the original data was obviously incorrect, you may even overwrite the original data with your corrected version so that it becomes the “official” history of the time even though not one single number is the result of actual measurement made by an actual human. This makes it, of course, considerably more difficult for future generations to question my insight and wisdom and psychic abilities. Think this doesn’t happen? Talk to Lief about what has happened to parts of the sunspot record. Getting to raw, original data is more difficult than one might think, and in the computer age it is actually becoming more difficult, not less, because one can still read paper written in manuscript by 12th century writers, but one cannot read a 5.25″ floppy written in 1985, or the data you had carefully stored on your desktop computer in 1994 before the hard disk crashed with no backup.
All of this (except for actually overwriting/losing the original data) is even a perfectly reasonable thing to do, part of the data exploration process. It shows, among other things, that there exists a set of assumptions that — if true — would confirm your psychic impressions of the past, and if one is honest about those Bayesian priors and the extent of the data manipulations required to get the answer to come out “right”, might even give one a way of estimating the probability that you are in fact correct.
What you cannot then do, no matter how much you want to, is to turn around and use the modified data to prove that this model, or any other models that your psychic beliefs agrees with, are right!
Suppose that I really believe that “If wishes were horses, then beggars would ride”. I conduct a survey and find that in the general population, most people who wish to ride horses do. Indeed, I construct the joint probability of wishing to ride horses and actually riding horses, and find that it is reasonably high. I then sample the small subpopulation consisting of beggars and little girls from poor families and discover that this population has a much lower joint probability of wishing to ride horses (or ponies) and actually riding them. This data confounds my expectation that the mere act of wishing for a horse to ride will probably produce one, somehow, so I note that there are comparatively few beggars in the general population, and that they are often surrounded by the wealthy they beg from who have a very high joint probability. I then can use a variety of perfectly legitimate (well, not really all that legitimate) data manipulation techniques to adjust my raw data. I can assume that the beggars are some sort of statistical outlier, sampling error, and simply throw them out of the data set. I can use the data from their surroundings to “correct” the survey data — if the five people who live spatially closest to the streetcorner where we encountered the beggar are all wishful horse riders, surely the beggar is too. I can “krige” the data — there are vast parts of the countryside where I didn’t take any data, but I did go stay at expensive bohemian castles belonging to horse-owners here and there who denied the very existence of beggars in their midst but who assured you that if there were any, surely they would ride, so I can use this sparse data to fill in huge areas that are marked “unknown P(w,H) and P(b,w) and P(b) and P(w)”. Eventually I find a way of manipulating the data that shows that in well over 98% of the world, wishful beggars indeed ride. I sigh and tell myself that this model is probably right because it is in accord with my democratic and religious vision of the Universe. God provides horses to wishful beggars despite any claims to the contrary by skeptical individuals who might doubt it. This sort of self-serving manipulation of data is perfectly natural and we all do it all of the time on issues ranging from religion to who usually ends up taking out the garbage at home, and sometimes it even works and gives you the right answer. Maybe even most of the time, who knows?
If anything, it exemplifies how the human brain is partially broken. We are greedy pattern matching engines and can easily see fluffy sheep in the clouds if we become convinced that they are there.
What one cannot, or should not, ever do, however, is to then take the model to congress and use it to pass a bill requiring all wishful beggars to register and pay a horse tax, because the model itself proves the assumptions that went in to building the model, at least after the data was successfully “adjusted”.
If I think a set of data “has to be” exponential, find the best exponential fit to the data plus an estimate of the noise/error relative to this fit, and then adjust the data to improve the fit/reduce the noise, I cannot reasonably turn around and use the adjusted data to prove that the data is, in fact, exponential in character.
rgb
Nick,
I love the way you assume that if a station doesn’t show what you believe it should show, it must be adjusted.
Make no effort to determine which station is accurate and which are being polluted. Just find the one station that doesn’t show what you want it to show, assume that it, not the others are in error, and just blindly adjust.
It’s better than actually studying the situation and determining the cause, isn’t it.
I hope the Aussies pull hard on this thread, to see what else unravels. Eventually, if it is shown that the BOM there doesn’t have clean hands, governments in other countries would be pressured to instigate audits of their own record-keeping agencies. If those too have had their thumb on the scale it would taint the rest of climatology badly, because such bias and unscrupulousness wouldn’t likely have been confined only to one of its sectors.
MarkW August 26, 2014 at 5:39 am
“Nick,
I love the way you assume that if a station doesn’t show what you believe it should show, it must be adjusted.”
The thing is, it should be adjusted. You want the best estimate of the temperature. If the data shows a sudden change that is outside the expected variation, taking account of the history and neighbors, then it is very likely to be due to a move or other event.
Moves happen. Sometimes an adjustment is wrongly made. But if the policy is right more often that it is wrong, then it should be followed. It’s better than doing nothing. And people like Menne do the statistics.
In this case the graphs alone show that the adjustment is getting it right.
rgbatduke August 26, 2014 at 5:37 am
Have you looked at the graphs that I showed? The need for the adjustment is obvious.
If one is adjusting stations based on the adjusted trends of other stations, then you are just adjusting based on previous adjustments.
A self-reinforcing continual upward adjustment. It never really ends. You just keep adding and adding.
They need to use the Raw temperatures only in these adjustment algorithms but once you start down the road of saying XY station’s raw records contain an error and must be replaced, then you have already started down the road of a sel-reinforcing continual upward adjustment. Which they are quite happy to implement.
The claim is that the station was moved in 1980 and resulted in a lower minimum temperature being recorded since then, would it not be more accurate to add a constant term to the minimum temperatures since 1980 and leave the past temperatures alone,I don’t think this would have altered the trend because there has been almost no change in the graph since 1980.
I live in a town in the mid US that has two weather stations located about 8 miles apart, they are at about the same elevation. The temperatures at these two stations almost always differ by one or two degrees F. I thought this was normal. As far as I know they don’t adjust one temperature to match the other.