SEE UPDATE 2 AT END OF POST
Guest Post by Bob Tisdale
GISS released its August 2014 global surface temperature data today. As I was preparing the graphs for the August 2014 surface and lower troposphere temperature update, I noticed a sizeable jump in the short-term trend in the GISS data. (I’ll try to post the full update this evening.) The August GISS LOTI value is higher than July, but it should not have had that much of an effect on the trend for the period of January 1998 to present. Not too surprisingly, much of the increase in trend was caused by adjustments to data from 2000 to 2013.
Figure 1 compares the short-term annual trend of two recent versions of the GISS global surface temperature data, from 1998 to 2013. The version as of August 7, 2014 (through June 2014) is available through the Wayback Machine here, and the August 2014 update is available through the GISS website here.
Figure 1
Now keep in mind that we’re not looking at the 2014 data so any variations this year do not impact these trends. In June 2014, the 1998-2013 trend was 0.062 deg C/decade, and a few months later, it jumped up to 0.066 deg C/decade.
The old short-term trend must not have been high enough. GISS must not like it that the UKMO’s HADCRUT4 data is catching up with them during this period. Can’t have that.
It has been said before. It will be said again. The adjustments always seem to add to global warming.
PS: Yes, I realize we’re discussing a trends presented in thousandths of a deg C/decade. But these small changes keep coming and they add up.
UPDATE (September 15, 2014): Sorry, I should’ve included a graph with the year-to-date (January to June) 2014 data to also show the impacts of the tweaks on this year. See Figure 2.
Figure 2
With the adjustments, 2014 has a better chance of matching or breaking records.
That explains it.
# # #
UPDATE 2 (September 16, 2014): Animation 1 compares GISS trend maps. One was downloaded on June 12, 2014. The second was downloaded yesterday June 15, 2014. To complicate the comparison, GISS recently revised their Robinson projection maps. On their Updates to Analysis webpage, they write:
September 15, 2014: Color maps using the Robinson projection are now presented without contour smoothing, since that process occasionally results in skipping some color bands.
It appears, however, that there is new data in the Arctic, north of eastern Siberia. GISS must’ve found an island in the Arctic Ocean with some data so they could infill that region with missing data.
Animation 1
It used to be done with white-out and a straight edge. Now all you have to do is delete and re-enter the value you want, hit print and voilà! Global Warming!
Emails between top Environmental Protection Agency officials reveal they saw their fight against global warming as putting them at “forefront of progressive national policy.”
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2014/09/15/emails-epa-rules-part-progressive-agenda/
Internal emails: EPA rules part of ‘progressive’ agenda
http://www.foxnews.com
‘This is not about climate’
The only form of man made global warming that is actually occurring is the sort that involves keyboards, computer programs and changing historical records.
Actually, the BIG PICTURE just hit me….if the adjustments and data measurement errors are nearly as big as the actual warming, then common sense says the warming simply is not a problem.
Of course I’ve read peer reviewed research that says global warming is killing 160,000 people a year. I’m slightly doubtful of that considering the warming has been roughly the same as what happens when you don’t paint the Stevenson shelter.
Mary – do have a link to the research which claims 160,000 people a year are victims of global warming? That’s totally preposterous! Climate happens over decades and centuries. There’s NO way to attribute short term events to long term climate change.
Study came out in 2002 or 2003. Recently I had a guy tell me “It’s much worse now”. I don’t have the link handy to the actual science…but here is Reuters writeup from 2003…Considering they thought it would “double by 2020”, we should be killing 250,000 a year now.
I think we should pass an emergency “Stevenson Screen Paint Bill”. If we immediately paint all the Stevenson Screens in the world, it would lower the global temperatures enough to eliminate all these unnecessary deaths.
……………………………………………………..
Global Warming Deaths on the Rise
Reuters Email 09.30.03
MOSCOW — About 160,000 people die every year from side effects of global warming ranging from malaria to malnutrition and the numbers could almost double by 2020, a group of scientists said Tuesday.
The study, by scientists at the World Health Organization and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, said children in developing nations seemed most vulnerable.
“We estimate that climate change may already be causing in the region of 160,000 deaths … a year,” Professor Andrew Haines of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine told a climate change conference in Moscow.
“The disease burden caused by climate change could almost double by 2020,” he added, even taking account of factors like improvements in health care. He said the estimates had not been previously published.
This seemed to be such an amazing finding that I added it to Dr. Haines Wikipedia page. We will see if it stays there.
“We estimate that climate change may already be causing in the region of 160,000 deaths … a year,” Professor Andrew Haines of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine told a climate change conference in Moscow.
“The disease burden caused by climate change could almost double by 2020,” he added, even taking account of factors like improvements in health care. He said the estimates had not been previously published.
You are right on point. There is zero proof of the effects of climate change on human life expectancy in the next 5 decades. The life span of ALL HUMANS in all countries are being extended.This silliness is not new:
Climate is what we expect, weather is what we get.
Mark Twain
Oh…one more thing…when Vladamir Putin was told of the “160,000 deaths a year ” presented at the 2003 Moscow conference he suggested in jest that global warming could benefit countries like Russia as people “would spend less money on fur coats and other warm things.”
It’s a sad world when crazy dictators make more sense than London epidemiologists.
Mary Brown
September 16, 2014 at 7:59 am
…..
Global Warming Deaths on the Rise
Reuters Email 09.30.03
MOSCOW — About 160,000 people die every year from side effects of global warming ranging from malaria to malnutrition
…..
I call BS. Malaria extend has nothing to do with global warming.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anopheles
“Although malaria is nowadays limited to tropical areas, most notoriously the regions of sub-Saharan Africa, many Anopheles species live in colder latitudes (see this map from the CDC). Indeed, malaria outbreaks have, in the past, occurred in colder climates , for example during the construction of the Rideau Canal in Canada during the 1820s.[11] Since then, the Plasmodium parasite (not the Anopheles mosquito) has been eliminated from first world countries.”
And btw… guess what eliminated it from the first world countries territories?
next point malnutrition…
Now with world food production on the rise if we would not burn the food instead of diesel, if we would not destroy greeenforests for palm oil…
http://www.rationaloptimist.com/blog/bioenergy-versus-the-planet.aspx
The planet got greener due to more CO2 and these guys want to say in overall malnutrition is due to more CO2? Now really….
Good link thank you for sharing.
Thinking more about painting Stevenson screens and data homogenization….I have no idea how often a obs box is painted or how much the temperature changes…but Imagine this scenario….
You place a brand new instrument shelter in service. The average temperature is 50 deg in 1900. This creeps up to 51 deg by 1920 when you realize the thing is brown and needs new paint. You paint it and temp drops back to 50 deg. This happens every 20years.
“Data Homogenization” does not notice the slow warming as the box decays from white to brown. No adjustment is made.
When the box is painted, a long period of slow accuracy decay is fixed. The station shows an instant drop in temp which is detected by the “Data Homogenization”.
Magic. Global warming. The slow warming from shelter decay is retained while the fix, which produces cooling, is eliminated.
Same thing happens with Urban Heat Islands……
An obs location gradually gets compromised by a growing UHI. This produces artificial warming. No adjustment is made. Then, the obs site is relocated to eliminate the UHI problem. The data shows an immediate cooling. Data Homogenization algos pick up on the discontinuity and adjust the old data cooler.
More Magic. Global warming.
I understand… Adjustments are needed. The problems are difficult to get a clean data set. Many people are doing their best to fix this. But the problem is, the rabbits are guarding the cabbage patch. Adjustments that create warming are enthusiastically embraced and adjustments that don’t are ignored or explained away.
You can see in these examples that the warming bias happens slowly and can be hidden or ignored. The cooling happens instantly when sites are fixed. These get eliminated. The result is a slow contamination of the overall data.
I don’t know about the globe but it’s been a bit chilly here the last few days.
Maybe after they burn enough grant $ greenl reality will actually warm up?
I suppose part of the the problem is that the grant money isn’t really “burned’. It ends up up in somebody’s pocket.
“Palo Alto Ken says:
September 15, 2014 at 2:20 pm Government spending has been part of GDP/GNA since those statistics were first issued. Any claim to the contrary is simply wrong. Whether the contribution of government to GDP should be valued at the price of the inputs is another matter.”
I knew they were, my point was that they should not be.
cmarrou says: September 15, 2014 at 2:48 pm
“Jim- I think you are aware that the US Air Force was established based on the theory that wars can be won from the air, and if people admit we can’t win a war without ground troops, then there’s no reason for a separate Air Force, and where are we then, with all those generals out of work? ;)”
Ground troops should not be sent in until rules of engagement are modified to allow us to win and our guys to protect themselves, we are willing to stay until we win decisively and under no conditions should we give any faction over there any weapons.
You have to wonder how many people think that scientists just take the temperature of the Earth and it is going up. Not that simple, is it?
The region of “uncertainty” in the Southern Pacific also takes a hit – I guess if you tweak it so that the weather stations they DO have encompass more area, you can get rid of ALL the uncertainties…. 😉