Guest essay by Neil Catto
The CET record started in 1659 close to the minimum of the little ice age. As such, it is with no surprise that last year (2014) was the warmest on record. It would appear to be a natural recovery. The monthly mean temperature of 8.87 Deg C in 1659 has increased to 10.95 Deg C in 2014; which equates to 0.06 Deg C/decade.
I used the CET mean monthly data 1659-2014: Downloaded 6th Jan 2015 http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadcet/data/download.html
My main interest in this data set is to gain better understanding between natural variation and AGW. I consider the CET as a reasonable representation of Northern Hemisphere trends. In 1739 Mount Tarumae in Japan erupted with a VEI force 5. The mean monthly CET temperature in 1739 was 9.21 Deg C, in 1740 there was a significant drop to 6.84 Deg C à and in 1741 a recovery to 9.32 Deg C. This natural occurrence had the equivalent drop in temperature of -23.5 Deg C/decade and recovery of 24.6 Deg C/decade. With a natural variation of this magnitude I never understand the alarm about 2.0 deg C/decade, human life survived and exponentially grew in numbers.
The last time I downloaded CET data was 22nd May 2013. Out of interest I thought I would compare the two data sets. The results were interesting to say the least.
Fig 1 anomalies between CET downloaded in May 2013 with CET downloaded in Jan 2015 (data to Dec 2014)
It is noticeable that nearly every adjustment is positive, with no negative changes. The whole data set shows an average increase of 0.03 Deg C in 20 months or equivalent to 0.18 Deg C/decade.
Discussion:
What is the reason for these data adjustments?
How often and by how much are these data adjusted?
Is this anthropogenic warming caused by man-made adjustments?
Remember in school, how horrible we were told the Soviet Union was, how the country was evil because Stalin had rewritten history. At least Baghdad Bob was entertaining.
There is not a dataset which has not seen “adjustments.” It has become increasingly impossible to have faith in any of them. Thankfully, RSS data appears to be holding true.
RSS data “adjustments” can be checked here:
http://www.climate4you.com/
There isn’t a lot of difference between RSS and UAH, or the other datasets for that matter. We are only talking about a few tenths or hundreths of a degree. And no two data sets agree exactly.
The problem for the alarmist crowd is that global warming essentially stopped — quite a few years ago. That fact contradicts a raft of wild-eyed predictions. ALL of the alarmist predictions were wrong, and not one of their models predicted that warming would stop. But it did.
Why should we still believe anything they tell us?
All “data sets” containing the same data must “agree exactly”. However, once the data are “adjusted”, becoming “un-data” or “non-data” in the process, they would only “agree exactly” if they were adjusted using the exact same methods.
The numbers used to produce the various temperature anomaly products are the producers’ estimates of what the data might have been, had they been collected timely from properly selected, calibrated, installed and maintained sensors; and, in some cases, what they might have been had they been collected at all..
The calculated anomalies rely on the assumption that, despite the inaccuracies of the data, the condition of the sensors and their surroundings have not changed over the measurement period.
A couple of years ago I reconstructed CET from its end point of 1659 back to 1538.
http://judithcurry.com/2011/12/01/the-long-slow-thaw/
I am currently working on pushing back that date to between1200 to 1400AD in order to try to discern the descent from the MWP to the LIA..
Anyone reading the article will see in detail how Manley constructed CET and in carrying out the reconstruction I also compared the ones carried out by Hubert Lamb-first director of CRU-and Dr Michael Mann.
Firstly, in any historic temperature reconstruction we ought to follow Lambs maxim that we can understand the tendency (of the trend) but not the precision (of each data point)
There is far too much certainty in almost any historic record and the idea, for example, that we know to tenths of a degree a global temperature or NH temperature back to say 1400 (or even 1880) is nonsensical, as is the idea that we have an accurate idea of global SST’s back to 1850.
CET -a monthly record-was carefully assembled by Gordon Manley and has been much scrutinised. David Parker of the Met office then carried out the work to calculate a daily index which commences 1772 when sufficient detailed daily information was available. I met him last year at the Met Office to discuss CET and my own work.
A number of adjustments to CET are made in peer reviewed papers detailing the reasons for the changes. Due to the evolving circumstances of the stations used they are sometimes substituted for others. In this regards, in recent decades it was felt that CET was running ‘too warm’ and replacement stations used that might better reflect previous readings.
CET makes an allowance for UHI. Personally I suspect it is not enough as Britain is the size of New York state and has been described as one large heat island, that effect becoming worse as the population escalated and energy consumption rose during the 19th century. Many readings were from previously rural areas that subsequently became urbanised, to which can be added the complication of pollution which encouraged famous artists to visit Britain to marvel at the atmospheric conditions that caused brilliant sunsets. it seems impossible to believe that this didn’t impact on temperatures.
As far as I can see the low point of CET was the 1690 decade. It made such a remarkable recovery in the 1730’s decade that Phil Jones studied the period in 2006 and confirmed that natural variability was much greater than he had hitherto realised, as that decade came to a bone chilling halt with the winter of 1740.
There has been a steady upwards trend since the 1690 low point, albeit with ups and downs, which can be seen in CET and the extended version of BEST.
From 1690, the temperature trends up to the 1538 point (albeit with peaks and troughs) I reached, which appears to me to contain some 4 or 5 of the warmest years in the record around that date.
The LIA was episodic, not one long deep freeze and there were many warm as well as cold periods within it which I hope to explore further in my next article ‘tranquillity, transition and turbulence’ exploring the 1200 to 1400 period.
So, is CET a faithful record of every month accurate to tenths of a degree? No.
Is it a good indicator of the ups, downs and general trends of historic climate? Yes.
Incidentally, anyone reading my article will see that there are many scientists and organisations that believe CET to be a good (but not perfect) proxy for the global or NH record, which includes the Met Office themselves. As such it is a especially invaluable record as studying it is likely to yield much broader lessons on likely climate states elsewhere in the world.
tonyb
climatereason January 9, 2015 at 6:26 am wrote
Could your comment be read as a justification for GISS’s ongoing program of editing the historical record?
Met Office corrected a long standing error in calculating annual data from daily and monthly daily temperatures data compilation. I alerted them to the error in early August 2014 and suggested method of recalculation which they appear to have adopted and corrected the annual values.
For more see:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/01/08/anthropogenic-warming-in-the-cet-record/#comment-1831927
amateur hour at the CET datacaretaker?
as the globe warms, past temperature will necessarily rise. history will get warmer and warmer due to increased CO2 in the atmosphere.
Well, the warmista tactic is to cool the past.
Pretty sure the warming is really due to increased hot air. Retire and gag a few politicians and we could be in for a serious glacial episode.
The observations must be wrong – CO2 was lower in the pre-industrial age.
/sarc
They must have had very accurate thermometers in 1659, despite the lack of Stephenson Screens, which weren’t invented until 200 years later. No wonder the data needs ‘adjusting’!
They probably were quite accurate. Each one hand made and calibrated.
No wonder the data needs adjusting – since 2013?
Not only did they lack Stephenson screens, prior to 1720 or so, they lacked Mercury thermometers with uniform, fine graduations. And it seems they probably lacked a uniform method of calibration. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Gabriel_Fahrenheit. Not that it would have been utterly impossible to make precise measurements in the seventeenth century that could be translated to degrees Celsius. But it wouldn’t have been easy. I’d like to see some serious estimates of the observation errors in CET temps prior to the mid-eighteenth century before I buy into any analysis based on CET.
True , but how lucky do you have to be that all the ‘adjustments’ that need to be done are done in such a way to also favour the narrative that your pushing which is one that offers both personal and professional benefits to those making these ‘adjustments’
If a Fox had to build a hen house , do you think they would build it so it was easy or hard for a fox to get into ?
New fashion warming tuned to belief algorithm?
So, after adjustments, the warming in the CET amounts to about 0.06 Deg C/decade. But adjustments have added about 0.18 Deg C/decade of warming. That means without adjustments we would see about 0.12 Deg C/decade of cooling in the CET record. That can’t be right. What did I do wrong?
Am I misreading this? Does the OP say that there’s been +.03C adjustments made since he last looked at the dataset in 2013? Or compared to raw data?
“What did I do wrong?”
The sign.
The CET data was not gathered by a national organisation like the UKMO but by a few rich people with time on their hands. The data is very sparse and not taken at set times by trained personel but by the nearest servant willing to brave the cold. So this data set should be viewed with care.
An equally likely scenario is that any such duties were assigned to individuals fully trained and personally motivated to perform their tasks with best efforts.
Still, your point remains. The technology and data collection methods were not evolved and were sketchy, at best.
They seemed to be pretty good scientists back then : 1887 Ethernet experiment :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelson–Morley_experiment
“…1887 Ethernet experiment”
Ethernet in 1887? I thought that was more of a 1970’s thingy?
So, they are now teaching the younger generations that the “telegraph” is/was an Ethernet.
To wit, excerpted from: http://www.nws.noaa.gov/pa/history/signal.php
And the majority of those field stations were located east of the Mississippi River.
garymount
January 9, 2015 at 4:27 am
You need to use a sarc tag there. Otherwise folks are going to think you’re serious.
Hard to see how this can be explained away as a ‘natural recovery’.
The first year that CET recorded an annual average temperature above 10.0C was in 1686. That record wasn’t broken for 47 years, until 1733. The 1733 record wasn’t broken for a further 101 years, until 1834. The 1834 record then stood for 115 years, finally being broken in 1949.
However, in just the past 25 years the CET warmest annual record has been broken three times: 1990, 2006 and now 2014. That’s not evidence of a ‘natural recovery’; it’s evidence of an exceptional period of warming late in the record.
Before or after adjustments?
No one questioned the adjustment process in 2013 when temperatures appeared to be falling. Maybe they were adjusting them downwards?
lol @ur momisugly your logic…
Evidence of an exceptional period of warming in which it warmed by a tiny fraction of a degree.
Now give me the evidence that $1bn a DAY of anti carbon spending did anything to prevent this.
The trend from 1688 to about 1730 is similar to the two periods in the 20th century, the first that couldn’t be attributed to fossil fuel use and the second that possibly could. The LIA was supposed to have ended at the end of the 19th century.
You could have made a similar claim in 1737, 1834 and 1950. How did that prediction in 1737 of 2°C per century work out? Is it 4°C warmer than the early 18th century?
Ooops. pasted the blockquote in the wrong spot. ” marks the end of the quote.
What’s so great about an annual average temperature below 10°C?! That’s cold!
@David R
Weather forecasts in the UK regularly predict night time temperatures to be up to 3 and even 4 Deg C colder outside the urban centres where UHI distorts recorded temperature.
Last time I looked CRU at UEA were adjusting urban temperatures down for UHI by some 1.5 deg C – as opposed to the actual 3 + deg C – small wonder then that the CET shows ‘warming’ as the adjustments are less than the true difference.
There is also a powerful argument that CET temperatures prior to the late 1950s should all be adjusted Up quite significantly to compensate for the artificially low winter temperatures caused by smog and smoke blocking out sunlight for the preceding 200 years or more.
The effect of that would be to significantly reduce the claimed record years you refer to to being nothing unusual at all – so it is highly unlikely that CRU will ever make the truly valid adjustments it should to for the ending of fog and smog in the late 1950s in the UK.
It seems that global temperature data sets have been being adjusted with ever increasing frequency, and particularly so in recent years, as the lack of any increase in global temperaures has persisted for some 18-20 years.
All and any adjustments, if they are be believable, must have a full justification and methodology published. Any changes ever made should be accompanied, not just by that information, but also include the original raw data alongside the adjusted data.
In the meantime keep making regular downloads of the latest record set and archive them for comparison.
Maybe someone could assemble those and make them available to anyone interested in studying them.
CET is recorded from very few sites and UHI is accounted for in the quality controlled data. The method is explained here [pdf]: http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadcet/ParkerHorton_CET_IJOC_2005.pdf
If you disagree with that, or you have some firm evidence that UHI is being systematically underestimated, then there’s nothing to prevent you from highlighting this via the normal process.
There is only one way around the adjustment problem – rigorously weed out all weather stations that are subject to UHI biases. That is, only use data from correctly located stations. Yes, I know that would decimate the available data but at least it would be remotely believable, which is more than can be said for the adjusted data the AGW religion prefers. If such a filtering process left no data intact then so be it, we’d just have to honestly admit we haven’t a clue as to what has happened over those 350 years and start again with a properly instrumented planet.
Never really understood the basis for the term ’natural recovery’. ‘Recovery’ to the planet’s ‘natural’ temperature? Is this a Law of Nature that states that when the temperature goes down a bit, it must ‘recover’?
What if the global temperature goes up (note record high recorded surface temperature for 2014)? Does this Law mean that temperatures must soon undergo a ‘natural relapse’ to get back to what they’re ‘supposed’ to be?.
No, natural recovery would go in fits and starts. Nothing in nature is as smooth as you expect.
Have you ever seen a sine wave?
Yes, but only in very high winds.
Kids around here shoot ’em full of holes so the they don’t wave in the wind
David R: I think you are attributing far too much importance to ‘records’ which are only after all fraction of a degree changes.
Annual average temperatures above 10C aren’t a rare event in the CET. I note your comment that in the past 25 years the CET warmest annual record was broken three times – but the 10C record was also broken three times in the 1820s: during 1822,1826,and 1828!
In the real world, what difference does it make if it’s 9C or 10C in the record? These averages tell us nothing about the weather conditions for a given year.
We’re told that the pre-industrial (before 1750) CO2 level in the atmosphere was 280ppm. Now it’s 400ppm.
That’s a 43% increase in C02, yet the CET temperatures show changes which are in my view negligible.
Very good evidence for a lack of any disastrous changes due to CO2 – in my view at least.
David R,
Yes, there was some anomalous warming recently. But it has remained within long term parameters, which have held since the LIA. Note that in the late 1800’s, well before any significant CO2 emissions, global T shot up even more than it did recently. Is your contention that the 1800’s warming was natural, but the recent, less extreme warming is not??
The ‘predictions’ of the alarmist cult were that we would experience man-made runaway global warming. That has not happened; every alarming prediction has failed. Objective people will look at that record of failure and conclude that the alarmists are wrong.
Here is another view showing that everything being observed remains within the parameters of natural climate variability. The planet is warming from an anomalous cooling, the LIA — the second coldest episode of the entire 10,000+ year long Holocene.
The alarmist crowd keeps trying to make human emissions the villain. But where is the proof? So far, there is none at all.
Yes it does, unfortunately, and as someone who lives in the Central England region and has done for many years I can confirm that 2014 has been a particularly warm year.
“…2014 has been a particularly warm year.”
Yes. I’ve really enjoyed it and thermageddon has still failed to appear.
Personally, i love it when it’s warm as I can go scuba diving more often.
This is an absolute scandal. I cannot understand how the scientific establishment permits this chicanery! Those who would attempt to defraud the public depend on the evidence being destroyed. They will likely claim that you are wrong, and your numbers were corrupted, while theirs are correct. There should be NO adjustments whatsoever, unless presented alongside the original, unadjusted data.
Wholeheartedly agree.
Because a large part of the scientific establishment RELIES on this chicanery.
To David R: are those statistics using the “corrected” numbers or the original numbers?
and don’t forget Urban Warming. Central England is practically one big city now.
Sorry Steven, but that’s just not accurate. I live within the triangle that is the CET. Vast amounts of that triangle are farmland. Admittedly, it includes a part of London, Birmingham, and Bristol. But all the rest is small towns, villages, and vast areas of green land.
For Jim and Steven – both of those things will cause a warming signal – the Urban Heat Island obviously and well agreed upon, but, also the farmers. They bust their proverbial guts trying to warm up their land (to extend the growing and or harvesting season) and do it very simply by using The Plough to create large areas of ground with low albedo at times of the year when the sun is almost at its strongest. They have to do that because what’s left of the fertile soil on planet earth is at high latitudes where glaciers/ice sheets recently ploughed it, mashed it up and exposed fresh rock for the plants to get teeth into.
With ‘spring sown’ arable this was obviously in April, May and early June until the seeds had germinated and grown sufficiently so as to cover/shield the bare soil.
Could not The Pause be in part explained by the wholesale move to autumn sown crops that go into springtime covering the soil and raising the albedo, and also the trend to ‘no-till’ or ‘low till’ that leaves high albedo trash on the surface. Also, all that trash (straw) was historically burned which produced huge quantities of smoke/soot with yet more albedo reducing properties.
Personally I’ve thought for a long time not to trust the CET record just because it is THE most intensively farmed piece of ground almost anywhere on the planet.
Pete, you are correct. Temps around both tilled farmland and UHIs are higher than other areas.
Eh!?
Just what crops are they sowing in the fall? Winter wheat? Winter Rye? Perhaps some of the brassica family?
A farmer tills the soil to prepare the ground, not for albedo effects. Often when a farmer tills the soil during the fall, winter and summer seasons it is to kill weeds.
Winter ground cover crops are sown to get a jump on the next season aiming for multiple harvests. Extension of harvest season, which I expect means delaying frost kills, is negligible.
No. Perhaps better said as Hell No!.
Ice age glaciers did not ever cover as much of the Earth as you suppose. Crops are grown down to the equator.
I have no idea what you think is the relationship between plants, rocks and teeth…
Arable is a primarily British word, (courtesy Merriam-Webster), meaning land able to be plowed.
Land able to be effectively utilized for crops is anywhere where sufficient water is available for the crops desired.
Mankind has commercialized the use of hydroponic farming for providing many of the ‘fresh’ vegetables during ‘winter’. No soil needed.
High albedo trash? What color are those dead plant stalks, or perhaps better phrased as ‘what color is straw?” and is that high or low albedo?
But that’s a nit pick. Farmers still work the land to ‘remove’ trash into additional harvests, animal feed or compost and to prepare the land for the next crop.
Just leaving crop detritus on the land invites trouble as that indicates the owner is not trying to control pests or disease. Clearing the surface of dead vegetation whether by removal or turning over the soil are control methods for insects and diseases.
Says someone who lives where exactly? It’s not one big city or even close.
The author is right: the key problem for warmists is to demonstrate that 1.5 or so warming per century is catastrophic in. System tht handles much larger seasons changes and, where I live, can manage sometimes 20C in half an hour.
Not sure what you meant. Is the 2014 vs 2013 data graph the differences of the two?
The graph refers to the anomaly between the two ie. the difference.
Has there been any research on thermometers, its manufacturing, calibration and rules of temperature measurement of that time? If not, any adjustment of date is something like a shot in the dark, i suppose.
correct: “data”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermometer. Those guys would have been very careful. The scientific method was developed by them. They probably didn’t calibrate just once.
One possible way of checking the accuracy of thermometers 100 or 200 yrs ago might be to look at the temperatures reported in the literature of the time , or better the lab notebooks if they exist, for well- known physical data such as the boiling point of pure alcohol, the melting point of a pure fat or organic chemical or the freezing point of a salt/water solution of accurately known composition. Compare them with modern values.
See my post at
Gary Pearse
January 9, 2015 at 5:19 am
To wit, excerpted from: History of Vintage Outdoor Thermometers
What is the correct interpretation here? The commentary seems to suggest that the yearly anomalies accumulate while the natural interpretation of the anomaly graph is that the whole record was adjusted upwards a very slight amount (about .03 C), leaving the trend nearly unchanged. Without seeing the underlying data the reader can’t verify what is being depicted but if the difference between the records was growing over time then shouldn’t that be what is shown in the anomaly graph?
Seconded.
Hi Mr Rawls
I alerted them to the error in early August 2014 and suggested method of recalculation which they appear to have adopted and corrected the annual values.For more see:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/01/08/anthropogenic-warming-in-the-cet-record/#comment-1831927
“Is this anthropogenic warming caused by man-made adjustments?”
________________________
There weren’t too many people here a couple of years ago questioning the CET record when it was showing a short term cooling trend. In fact, David Archibald was forecasting alarming cooling based on his ‘solar model’ (as usual with DA’s predictions, it didn’t materialise): http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/06/03/cet-cooling-in-line-with-solar-model-prediction/
Now that CET has returned to warming there’s suddenly a question about the adjustments. No one was questioning the adjustment process when the record showed cooling.
‘ No one was questioning the adjustment process when the record showed cooling.’
So you admit the ‘adjustments’?
Would you prefer them to use data that wasn’t adjusted to reflect UHI, for instance?
Adjusting more contemporary measurements for increasing UHI effects would lower present day adjusted readings, not increase them.
I’ve lost trust in any of the records. If the IRS/ Tax department was auditing those records, then I believe most of the ‘fiddlers’ would be in prison now.
David R
It does not matter who questions the “adjustments” to the data, why they question, or when they question.
It only matters if the unadjusted data are retained and that the “adjustments” are explained and justified.
Please address the issues which matter (i.e. have some importance) and desist from making posts about trivia.
Richard
I wonder if part of this may be that there has been a growing realisation that the “official” records are being fudged, and that these records are being verified more carefully. Just a suggestion.
David R is just doing his job, defending the meme that last year was the hottest ever.
I second your comment Richardscourtney!
As an ex database keeper/feeder I am horrified that records are ‘adjusted’.
All records should be kept in a pristine state.
Any ‘adjustments’ are explicitly identified, verified, justified in detail, dated with ownership of the adjuster identified.
No records are ‘changed’ in place. Error? Document it and enter an ‘adjustment’ under a proper metadata label.
Users should be able to pull reports from the pristine originally kept data along with adjustments to prepare or compile reports. All reports should explicitly define what is being shown in the report; e.g. “figures include quarterly and annual adjustments”.
Ideally everyone reading that report understands exactly what the adjustments described mean!
“It’s too much trouble”, cry the climatologists.
A cry, that I just don’t understand coming from a finance with some industrial background. Try keeping complete pay records for a million employees, including all corrections and adjustments. Any employee at any time is entitled to request and promptly receive explicit details for their entire record with any ‘corrections’ or ‘adjustments’, who applied when applied and why applied.
Since pay is dependent on work, all information about the employee’s activity is also retained usually by detailed records by less than a minute intervals.
Or tracking a machine’s action on product at 35,000 pieces per hour; every piece, when produced, batch, who is running the machine, Supervisor of operation, time run, date run, QC…
All this information is live! Available now in full complete data form!
Instead the climatalogers are thrilled to boast about their ‘most powerful computer’, but their data keeping standards are bogus. (Is that bogus at full mannian meaning?)
Processing mass adjustments by program?
Keeping data only in the adjusted state?
Making it difficult or impossible to pull pristine un-retouched data?
Adjustments sorely lack detail and/or metadata?
Who cares what CET currently shows? As the CET anomaly graph demonstrates, adjusted data especially mysteriously adjusted data can not be trusted.
Whether the trend is positive or negative, adjusted positive or negative, the data foundation is untrustworthy and the keepers of that data should be embarrassed to claim ownership.
Two questions should destroy any public presentation of climatology data; “Is that data adjusted?”, “Please explain every adjustment right here and right now with full justification?
Climatalogers should be shunned, not humored. Are many of them already in Coventry?
@David R. I think everybody here would question any adjustments up or down as bad science, unless the reasons are good and the methods are published and open to scrutiny. Your comment is vacuous since the post describes finding the adjustment and reports it for the first time. Yet you seem surprised to find that no-one mentioned this prior to this post.
I do hope all these data warehouses are keeping the original measurements prior to adjustments on record. Destroying the source material would be unforgiveable if not bordering on criminal. Given existing, published data is adjusted upwards, with no explaination nor reason, the author poses reasonable questions.
re data warehousing of records
well
one way to hide such, used in aus by Bom is to store it in files the average pc cant handle
as I found when looking.
you might …eventually find where they moved it to
but you cant access it anyway
The currently cited Official Temperature Record from 1880 to present had its humble beginning post-1960 with the majority of the included temperature values being either interpolated or extrapolated ….. and thus any present day “adjustments” to the aforesaid “values” have no meaning whatsoever to the already highly questionable status of said Official Temperature Record.
Lysenkoist vandalism.
Can you compare the rise 1659-1940 and 1940-2014? My cellphone is very disabling,but id love to see how small the difference is
Please define CET for a curious non-scientist.
Central England Temperature
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_England_temperature
Old Ranga
I think this brief explanation is what you want.
Richard
Alex and Richard: Muchas gracias. Information now filed.
The modern world drives me crazy. It seems everyone uses acronyms for nearly everything. Probably because of Twitter & phone texting. Maybe they think it makes them look smart.
I did know what CET meant, but I certainly understand why someone wouldn’t have had a clue.
Very sloppy written. What did the author mean????
“Fig 1 anomalies between CET downloaded in May 2013 with CET downloaded in Jan 2015 (data to Dec 2014)”
What has been extracted from what? What does the graph show? 2013 – 2015 or 2015-2013???
“It is noticeable that nearly every adjustment is positive, with no negative changes.”
So what? There is apparently no trend in the “adjustment”. The graph is flat. Who cares if somebody adds a constant?
” The whole data set shows an average increase of 0.03 Deg C in 20 months or equivalent to 0.18 Deg C/decade.”
What does show the trend? Which one “the whole data set”? 2013 or 2015 or the adjustment?
The alleged “adjustment” does not show any trend evidently.
Thus, if “The whole data set shows” a trend, then it is real and is not due to any “adjustment”.
WUWT should strengthen their quality control before publishing such confusing – and probably wrong – articles.
alex
Please rewrite your complaint in more clear and more restrained language. Someone who cites wicki needs to be much more careful.
Richard
There is an alex and a Alex. Different side of the fence. Please don’t confuse the two. I refer to wiki in non-contreversial subjects.
Alex
I apologise for any confusion.
Richard
More proof that skeptics are not well funded.
The way I read it was that the Author downloaded two data sets. One in May 2013 and one in January 2015. The data should be the same. It wasn’t and there was no explanation as to why. Is English your second language? Whether the author miscalculated or not could be another question.
Richard
No problem
Excuse me alex, what do you mean?
Where you should ask in detail you use pronouns (it, what)
You claim the adjustment trend is flat, but you didn’t calculate it. Instead you just assumed even though the author explains the adjustment trend.
Perhaps you should work on your reading comprehension and social skills before demeaning other’s work and quality?
Agreed.
David R
January 8, 2015 at 11:23 pm
No one questioned the adjustment process in 2013 when temperatures appeared to be falling. Maybe they were adjusting them downwards?
***************
Okay, it is just me, or is this batshit insane
(I was going to just say crazy – but if I understand what this poster said correctly – it’s way over that line).
“””””….. I consider the CET as a reasonable representation of Northern Hemisphere trends. …….”””””
Well there’s your problem right there.
I consider CET as a reasonable representation of Central England Temperature.
I don’t consider CET as a reasonable representation of anything else; it isn’t.
But I also abhor the adjustments; for any reason.
g
Indeed, we (in England) very often get very different ‘weather’ to another place on the same latitude (due, they say, to the Gulf Stream). It’s often much milder than tourists imagine. This weather becomes climate, so is not indicative of the NH. The only thing you can say is that the data would have been meticulously recorded – we have many anal people here who are anally insistent on something being noted down to the tenth digital place. Having said that, earliest recordings are simply worthless, as the ‘thermometer’ (in its early days) wasn’t calibrated against anything.
Thermometers were calibrated against freezing point and boiling point of water and also against the body heat of a humans (remarkably consistent). 0-100 C would have been quite accurate, with excursions either side. Gentlemen scientists who would have traveled the length and breadth of europe for scientific debates and comparison of equipment. I think those gentlemen were quite thorough because they had to face their peers. They got many things wrong but most were ‘man’ enough to face it. This is not the case today.
Don’t take away the effort of these ‘early guys’. The principle of the thermometer goes back two thousand years.
London is 51.5072° N, Calgary is 51.0500° N. I can assure you that our climate are almost as far apart as can be imagined. For example, I’m looking at -20C right now, yesterday it was +4, and any time during December, January or February we can encounter anything from below -40C to above +25C. So yeah, guaranteed there is no connection whatsoever.
Sorry Alex, I can’t agree with that. Given all that I’ve read in the past, and the musings in this post
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/01/22/the-metrology-of-thermometers/
The fact remains that historic data cannot be trusted for many reasons, not just calibration (maybe I should have said).
Sorry ghost
I frankly don’t know what happened in 1659. In reality I don’t know the quality of calibration at that time. People seem to think that the temperature records in those times are valuable. I don’t know if they are or not. It is the time that thermometers were being developed. My understanding from various things I read was that those people were very careful with the latest technology at that time.
That is not my real point.
The data obtained at that time should be unchanged. If there is some subsequent finding that the instrumentation was not ‘up to par’ then it should be noted and not changed to fit some political agenda.
Agree totally
One reason would be a change in the properties of water led to an adjustment of the Celsius scale somewhere between 2013 and 2015. /sarc because that wouldn’t explain different adjustment values over time.
There’s a lot more CO2 in the water now.
Haven’t you noticed how fizzy the water out of your tap has become ?
Your ‘tap water’ is now sparkling mineral water? Wonderful!
George: Good point. However, substitute Bristlecone Pines tree rings for ‘CET’ and the point is still well made.
As usual, georgesmith sifts the wheat from the chaff.
I agree with George e. Smith. The statement by Mr. Catto that “I consider the CET as a reasonable representation of Northern Hemisphere trends” is illogical and needs explaining. The trend in Central England represents the northern half of the globe? Does climate science really accept that the temperature trend in one small region, like New York, is the same as the temp trend for San Diego….or the entire northern half of the globe? Maybe i read it wrong. Maybe I’m learning something new. It may not be particularly key to the point Mr. Catto is making about adjustments, but I have yet, with all the garbage data in, been able to understand why good climate skeptics, in making a point, seem to concede points unnecessarily that are either a small or large part of the reason for all the skepticism in the first place. I can give examples of why its so problematic to concede such points, but that’s for another time. I just need to understand Mr. Catto’s basis for accepting this significantly illogical, at least on its face, extrapolation for now.
The future is inevitable, as long as one can make adjustments to it.
I don`t think any adjustments can accurately account for the massive UHI effect in this heavily industrialized region.