Guest essay by Ross McKitrick University of Guelph
June 4, 2015
UPDATED June 8 2015: Some changes and corrections noted in red. Also added MAT records and Kent figure 18
Background
The idea that there has been a hiatus in global warming since the late 1990s comes from examination of several different data sets:
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HadCRUT(land surface + ocean) |
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HadSST(ocean surface only) |
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NCDC(land surface + ocean) |
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GISS(land surface + ocean) |
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RSS(lower troposphere) |
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UAH(lower troposphere) |
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Ocean Heat Content (0-2000m)Argo floats (black line)NOAA SST est’s (red solid and dashed lines) |
(Added Fig 14 above) Marine Air Temperatures by latitude band
Black: HadNMAT2
Red: HadMAT1
Green: MOHMAT4
Blue: HadSST3
Light blue: C20R
Sources: all data accessed through http://www.climate4you.com/GlobalTemperatures.htm except last one, taken from http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/v5/n3/full/nclimate2513.html.
The IPCC’s recent report identified this hiatus and commented as follows (Working Group I, Chapter 9, Box 9.2):
The observed global-mean surface temperature (GMST) has shown a much smaller increasing linear trend over the past 15 years than over the past 30 to 60 years… Depending on the observational data set, the GMST trend over 1998–2012 is estimated to be around one-third to one-half of the trend over 1951–2012.
K15 New Estimates
Karl et al. (2015, which I’ll call K15) have struck a very different note, saying that the post-1998 trend is much higher than previously thought, and is in fact about the same as that of the post-1951 interval. Their trend estimate revisions are as follows:
The big source of the change is an upward revision (+0.06 oC /decade) to the global post-1998 Sea Surface Temperature (SST) trend, with only a small change to the land trend:
LAND OCEAN
So what changed in the SST records? Bear in mind that there are very relatively few records of air temperatures over the oceans, especially outside of shipping lanes and prior to 1950. So to get long term climate estimates, scientists use SST (i.e. water temperature) data, which have been collected since the 1800s by ships. The long term SST records were never collected for climate analysis and they are notoriously difficult to work with. Many judgments need to be made to yield a final record, and as the K15article shows, changes in some of those assumptions yield major changes in the final results.
A Primer on SST Data
There is a large literature on methods to derive a consistent climate record from the SST archives. The contribution of K15 is to take one such record, called the Extended Reconstructed Sea Surface Temperature version 4 (ERSSTv4), and use it to compute a new global climate record. The difference in recent trends they report is due to the changes between ERSST versions 3b and 4.
Almost all historical SST products are derived from the International Comprehensive Ocean-Atmosphere Data Set (ICOADS, http://icoads.noaa.gov/) or one of its predecessors. ICOADS combines about 125 million SST records from ship logs and a further 60 million readings from buoys and other sources.[1] A large contributor to the ICOADS archive is the UK Marine Data Bank. Other historical sources include navies, merchant marines, container shipping firms, buoy networks, etc.
SST data have historically been collected using different methods:[2]
· Wooden buckets were thrown over the side, filled with seawater and hauled on deck, then a thermometer was placed in the water;
· Same, using canvas buckets;
· Same, using insulated buckets;
· Automated temperature readings of Engine Room Intake (ERI) water drawn in to cool the ship engines;
· Ship hull temperature sensors;
· Drifting and moored buoys.
In addition, there are archives of Marine Air Temperature (MAT) taken by ships that have meteorological equipment on deck.
Here are some of the problems that scientists have to grapple with to construct consistent temperature records from these collections:
· Ships mainly travel in shipping lanes, and vast areas of the oceans (especially in the Southern Hemisphere) have never[3] been monitored;
· Sailors are not inclined to take bucket readings during storms or perilous conditions;
· Readings were not necessarily taken at the same time each day;
· During the process of hauling the water up to the deck the temperature of the sample may change;
· The change will be different depending on how tall the ship is, whether the bucket is wood or canvas, whether it is insulated, and how quickly the reading is taken;
· The ERI intake may be just below the surface in a small ship or as much as 15 m below the surface in a large ship;
· Similarly the hull sensors may be at widely-varying depths and may be subject to temperature effects over time as the engines heat up the hull;
· MAT readings are taken at the height of the deck, and modern ships are much taller than older ones, so the instruments are not at the same height above sea level;
· Buoys tend to provide readings closer to the water surface than ERI data;
· There were not many surface buoys in the world’s oceans prior to the 1970s, but there are many more now being averaged in to the mix.
Now add to these challenges that when data is placed in the archive, in about half the cases people did not record which method was used to take the sample (Hirahari et al. 2014). In some cases they noted that, for example, ERI readings were obtained but they not indicate the depth. Or they might not record the height of the ship when the MAT reading is taken. And so forth.
Ships and buoys are referred to as in situ measurements. Since in situ data have never covered the entire ocean, most groups use satellite records, which are available after 1978, to interpolate over unmonitored regions. Infrared data from the Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) system can measure SST accurately but need to be calibrated to existing SST records, and can be unreliable in the presence of low cloud cover or heavy aerosol levels. In the past few years, new satellite platforms (Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission or TRMM, and the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer or AMSR-E) have enabled more accurate data collection through cloud and aerosol conditions.
Hadley, GISS and Hirahara et al. (2014)[4] all use satellite data to improve interpolation estimates over data-sparse regions. The ERSST team (i.e. K15) did prior to version 3b but doesn’t anymore, due to their concerns about its accuracy.
The Three Main ERSSTv4 Adjustments
The measurement problems mentioned above all well-known. A great deal of work has been done in recent decades both to try and recover some of the metadata for in situ temperature readings, and also to estimate corrections in order to overcome biases that affect the raw data. K15 have made some relatively minor changes to the bias correction methods, and the result is a large increase in the post-1998 trend.
A. They added 0.12 oC to readings collected by buoys, ostensibly to make them comparable to readings collected by ships. As the authors note, buoy readings represent a rising fraction of observations over recent decades, so this boosts the apparent warming trend.
B. They also gave buoy data extra weight in the computations.
C. They also made adjustments to post-1941 data collected from ships, in particular a large cooling adjustment applied to readings over 1998-2000.
Taken together these changes largely explain the enhanced trend over the past 15 years. So now everybody needs to decide if they think these adjustments are valid.
Perhaps they are. The main problem for us observers is that other teams have looked at the same issues and come to different conclusions. And the post-1998 K15 data don’t match that from other independent sources, including weather satellites.
A. Looking at the first adjustment, K15 take the buoy data and add 0.12 oC to each observation. They computed that number by looking at places where both buoy data and ship data were collected in the same places, and they found the ship data on average was warmer by 0.12 oC. So they added that to the buoy data. This is similar to the amount estimate found by another teams, though the bias is usually attributed to ships rather than buoys:
Recent SST observations are conducted primarily by drifting buoys deployed in the global oceans (Figs. 1, 2). The buoys measure SST directly without moving seawater onto deck or to the inside of a ship. Therefore, buoy observations are thought to be more accurate than either bucket or ERI data… In the present study, we regard this difference as a bias in the ERI measurements, and no biases in drifting buoy observations are assumed. The mean ERI bias of +0.13 oC is obtained and is within the range for the global region listed in Table 5 of
Kennedy et al. (2011).
(quote from Hirahari et al. 2014 p. 61)
That quote refers to a paper by Kennedy et al. (2011 Table 5)[5] which reports a mean bias of +0.12 oC. However, Kennedy et al. also note that the estimate estimated bias in each location is very uncertain: it is 0.12 
oC ! Also In other words, the bias varies quite a bit by region. This is a key difference between the method of K15 and that of others. K15 added 0.12 oC to all buoy data, but the Hadley group and the Hirahari group use region-specific adjustments while the Hirahari group modify the bias adjustment for the estimated time-varying fraction of insulated versus uninsulated buckets.
B. There is not much detail about this step. K15 simply say that because the buoy data are believed to be more reliable, they were given more weight in the statistical procedure, and “This resulted in more warming.” Steps A + B accounted for just under half of the additional warming.
C. It has been noted by others previously that SST data from ships shows a more rapid warming trend than nearby air temperature collected by buoys (Christy et al. 2001).[6] K15 compute an adjustment to SST data based on comparisons to Nighttime MAT (NMAT) records from a data set called HadNMAT2. This step entailed making a large cooling adjustment to the ship records in the years 1998-2000. K15 say that this accounts for about half the new warming in their data set. They defended it by saying that it brought the ship records in line with the NMAT data. However, this particular step has been considered before by Kennedy et al. and Hirahara et al., who opted for alternative methods that did not rely exclusively on NMAT, instead making use of more complete metadata, perhaps in part because, as Kennedy et al. and others have pointed out, the NMAT data have their own “pervasive systematic errors”,[7] some of which were mentioned above. So rather than using a mechanical formula based solely on NMAT data, other teams have gone into great detail to look at available metadata for each measurement type and have made corrections based on the specific systems and sites involved.
Numerical Example
Here is a simple numerical example to show how these assumptions can cause important changes to the results. Suppose we have SST data from two sources: ships and buoys. Suppose also that ships always overestimate temperature by exactly 1 degree C and buoys always underestimate it by exactly 1 degree C. We have one set of readings every 10 years, and we are not sure what fraction is from ships versus buoys. Both ships and buoys accurately measure the underlying trend, which is a warming of 0.1 oC /decade from 1900 to 1990 then no trend thereafter.
The Table below shows the simulated numbers. Suppose the true fraction of ships in the sample starts at 95% in 1900 and goes down by 8% every decade, ending at 7% in 2010.
| Year | Buoy | Ship | True Ship % | True Avg |
| 1900 | 2.00 | 4.00 | 0.95 | 3.00 |
| 1910 | 2.10 | 4.10 | 0.87 | 3.10 |
| 1920 | 2.20 | 4.20 | 0.79 | 3.20 |
| 1930 | 2.30 | 4.30 | 0.71 | 3.30 |
| 1940 | 2.40 | 4.40 | 0.63 | 3.40 |
| 1950 | 2.50 | 4.50 | 0.55 | 3.50 |
| 1960 | 2.60 | 4.60 | 0.47 | 3.60 |
| 1970 | 2.70 | 4.70 | 0.39 | 3.70 |
| 1980 | 2.80 | 4.80 | 0.31 | 3.80 |
| 1990 | 2.90 | 4.90 | 0.23 | 3.90 |
| 2000 | 2.90 | 4.90 | 0.15 | 3.90 |
| 2010 | 2.90 | 4.90 | 0.07 | 3.90 |
The true average is calculated using the weight in the True Ship % column, adding 1 oC to the buoy data and subtracting 1 oC from the ship data. The result is shown in the graph:
The thin black and gray lines are the ship (top) and buoy (bottom) data, while the thick black line in the middle is the true average.
But now suppose we don’t know what the correct adjustment is for the buoy data or the ship data, and we don’t know the True Ship % figures either. We will estimate the global average as follows:
· Adjust the buoy data up by +2 oC every year (a bit too much)
· Adjust the ship data down by 1 oC every year (the right amount)
· After 1940 we will also apply a cooling adjustment to the ship data that starts at -0.25 oC and goes up by that amount every decade
· We further cool the ship data by 1 oC in 1990 and 2000 only
· We estimate the ship %, starting it at 99% in 1900 (a bit high) and reducing that by 7% every decade (a bit too little) up to 1990, at which point we observe the True Ship % and follow it exactly thereafter.
Before looking at the results, ask yourself if you think these adjustments will make much difference.
| Year | Buoy | Buoy adj | Ship | Ship Adj | True Ship% | True Avg | Est Ship % | Est Avg |
| 1900 | 2.00 | 2.00 | 4.00 | -1.00 | 0.95 | 3.00 | 0.99 | 3.01 |
| 1910 | 2.10 | 2.00 | 4.10 | -1.00 | 0.87 | 3.10 | 0.92 | 3.18 |
| 1920 | 2.20 | 2.00 | 4.20 | -1.00 | 0.79 | 3.20 | 0.85 | 3.35 |
| 1930 | 2.30 | 2.00 | 4.30 | -1.00 | 0.71 | 3.30 | 0.78 | 3.52 |
| 1940 | 2.40 | 2.00 | 4.40 | -1.25 | 0.63 | 3.40 | 0.71 | 3.51 |
| 1950 | 2.50 | 2.00 | 4.50 | -1.50 | 0.55 | 3.50 | 0.64 | 3.54 |
| 1960 | 2.60 | 2.00 | 4.60 | -1.75 | 0.47 | 3.60 | 0.57 | 3.60 |
| 1970 | 2.70 | 2.00 | 4.70 | -2.00 | 0.39 | 3.70 | 0.50 | 3.70 |
| 1980 | 2.80 | 2.00 | 4.80 | -2.25 | 0.31 | 3.80 | 0.43 | 3.83 |
| 1990 | 2.90 | 2.00 | 4.90 | -3.50 | 0.23 | 3.90 | 0.23 | 4.10 |
| 2000 | 2.90 | 2.00 | 4.90 | -3.75 | 0.15 | 3.90 | 0.15 | 4.34 |
| 2010 | 2.90 | 2.00 | 4.90 | -3.00 | 0.07 | 3.90 | 0.07 | 4.69 |
The new estimated average is the red dashed line.
The fit is not bad up to 1990, but the accumulated effect of all the small mistakes is the artificial trend introduced at the end of the series. At this point we would hope to have some independent data on the post-1990 trend to compare the result to in order to decide if our methods and assumptions were reasonable.
This example proves nothing about K15, of course, except that small changes in assumptions about how to deal with uncertainties in the data can have a large effect on the final results. But that was already clear because the K15 themselves explain that their new assumptions—not new observations—are what introduced the warming trend at the end of their data set.
Conclusion
Are the new K15 adjustments correct? Obviously it is not for me to say – this is something that needs to be debated by specialists in the field. But I make the following observations:
· All the underlying data (NMAT, ship, buoy, etc) have inherent problems and many teams have struggled with how to work with them over the years
· The HadNMAT2 data are sparse and incomplete. K15 take the position that forcing the ship data to line up with this dataset makes them more reliable. This is not a position other teams have adopted, including the group that developed the HadNMAT2 data itself. BTW, if you are interested, the global HadNMAT2 temperature anomaly is the black line in the figure below. The data series ends in 2010.
(Added above)(Kent, et al (2013), Global analysis of night marine air temperature and its uncertainty since 1835 1880: The HadNMAT2 data set, J. Geophys. Res. Atmos., 118, 1281–1298, 1836 doi:10.1002/jgrd.50152)
· It is very odd that a cooling adjustment to SST records in 1998-2000 should have such a big effect on the global trend, namely wiping out a hiatus that is seen in so many other data sets, especially since other teams have not found reason to make such an adjustment.
· The outlier results in the K15 data might mean everyone else is missing something, or it might simply mean that the new K15 adjustments are invalid.
It will be interesting to watch the specialists in the field sort this question out in the coming months.
Ross McKitrick
Department of Economics
University of Guelph
rossmckitrick.com
[1] Woodruff, S.D., H. F. Diaz, S. J. Worley, R. W. Reynolds, and S. J. Lubker, (2005). “Early ship observational data and ICOADS.” Climatic Change, 73, 169–194.
[2] See http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadsst3/Kennedy_2013_submitted.pdf for a review.
[3] Rayner, N. A., D. E. Parker, E. B. Horton, C. K. Folland, L. V. Alexander, D. P. Rowell, E. C. Kent, and A. Kaplan, (2003): Global analyses of sea surface temperature, sea ice, and night marine air temperature since the late nineteenth century. Journal of Geophysical Research, 108(D14), 4407, doi:10.1029/2002JD002670.
[4] Hirahara, S. et al. Centennial-Scale Sea Surface Temperature Analysis and Its Uncertainty, Journal of Climate Vol 27 DOI: 10.1175/JCLI-D-12-00837.1
[5] http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadsst3/part_2_figinline.pdf
[6] Christy, John R., David E. Parker, Simon J. Brown, et al. 2001 Differential trends in tropical sea surface and atmospheric temperatures since 1979. Geophysical Research Letters 28, no. 1
[7] http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadsst3/Kennedy_2013_submitted.pdf page 28.
Ross The hiatus in global warming is provable, a fact but that is not enough for the doom and gloom crowd. After all if it is this is the case, they will have to get real jobs and no more exotic travel junkets!
They are more a domesday and suicide sect?
Hmmm, all the big guns, releasing papers at nearly the same time, right after a paper was released by Karl. I guess they all knew in advance, had time to prepare rebuttals, and were waiting for starting gun to go off. Something is a bit contrived about this whole thing. I mean, obviously, I’m tempted to assume that all the big guns on my side of the argument are correct, but it feels like saying “my dad can beat up your dad”.
Interesting observation. All this argument about “the temperature” is a sign that there really isn’t much to talk about.
Well put Jpatrick.
I think the term they filed to use in their critique is “mental masturbation.”
This was all explained by Anthony over the last 2 days. I’m surprised you missed it, especially since you commented on several of the articles.
In spite of your profession: ” I’m tempted to assume that all the big guns on my side of the argument are correct, but…” regarding this and recent past statements-
Somehow, Viking Explorer, you are always a subtle purveyor of doubt about THIS side of the debate. Why is that?
Alan, I’m skeptical of everything. Shouldn’t every good scientist be skeptical? Otherwise, one is just a me-too yes man, and what is more disgusting than that? However, I’m 100% convinced that AGW is false, theoretically plausible in the abstract, but too small to measure.
I’m also willing to argue against an irrational argument against AGW. For example, if someone said that CO2 doesn’t exist, or that it doesn’t absorb IR. The most important thing is intellectual integrity, following evidence where it leads, and not having an a-priori agenda.
Someone who picks a side, right or wrong, is just like the Orthodox people from 1984. Someone issues a post in Big Brother fashion, and what follows is more like a two minutes of hate than it is like a rational discussion. This kind of thing has been very prevalent on sites like RealClimate and many others from the beginning. The whole culture of calling people “deniers” is a great example of mindless reactionary thinking.
It now seems to be spreading to anti-AGW sites, and it makes me a bit sad.
K15 added 0.12 oC to all buoy data … K15 simply say that because the buoy data are believed to be more reliable, they were given more weight in the statistical procedure,
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if buoys are more reliable, why were they adjusted?
Alan, I’m skeptical of everything.
==========
even of being skeptical?
VE, you claim to be skeptical of everything, yet you time and again profess faith in the gods of your peculiar religion. This most recent post being a perfect example.
MarkW, you are playing the role of a 1984 spy perfectly. You’re always looking for signs of unorthodoxy, and trying to denounce me to Big Brother. For you, there is no reason, there is only our side (oceania) and their side (Eurasia), and ridicule (death) to anyone who thinks instead of demonstrating mindless dedication to the cause.
VE, could you be more nonsensical if you tried?
I point out your slavish devotion to your ideology, and you come back with a claim that I want to kill anyone who disagrees with me.
Sorry, dude, but that’s the tactic employed by your masters.
Bears repeating:
ferd berple
June 4, 2015 at 2:46 pm
K15 added 0.12 oC to all buoy data … K15 simply say that because the buoy data are believed to be more reliable, they were given more weight in the statistical procedure,
=============
if buoys are more reliable, why were they adjusted?
Exactly!
They changed yhevbouy data, raising all the values (my, what a surprise)that were actual measurements near sea level by calibrated modern instruments.
Then they declared these numbers to be more reliable and gave them more weight!
Since the ocean is the vast majority of the Earth’s surface, this tactic was sure to give them their desired result.
And it is a blatent contrivance, with validity that is not questionable or dubious…it is preposterous.
To toss in such adjustments and weighting reassignments, and then just skip past any justification with barely a sentence of explanation, is as unscientific and counter to logic as anything I have ever heard.
In short, this is not science, it is sophistry.
It is the equivalent of the quickly spoken disclaimers at the end of a radio car advertisement, or the tiny fine print on a TV screen that negates everything that was said in the ad.
It reminds me of the old Steve Martin bit, in which he tells the audience he had discovered the secret to getting rich: ” First, get a million dollars, then…”
I agree with ferd’s point:
if buoys are more reliable, why were they adjusted?
I’m having trouble getting around that simple statement. Under what logic framework does this make sense? One could accept everything else about the paper and still would have to conclude it was junk because of this.
@VikingExplorer
Term ‘deniers’ was first used 100 years ago and scientists called so the people who (despite of lots of proofs) were denying the fact that diseases are caused by bacteria.
If someone says that CO2 doesn’t exist, or that it doesn’t absorb IR he should be called denier.
It’s also very well proven that if no feedbacks existed average temperature on earth surface would rise 1.1 Celcius degree per CO2 doubling – so someone who doesn’t accept that fact is denier too.
Judith Currie said “JC’s initial reactions
I received this several days ago, from an (international) journalist asking for comments, my quick initial reactions provided below:”
So, yes, the “big guns” knew in advance. I don’t see the problem.
See Jpatrick’s comment
In addition to what I wrote above, I am also curious about whether the ERSSTv4 tropical trends are now high enough to exceed the LT trends. The tiny ERSSTv3 trends were crucial for Santer et al. 2008 to be able to claim that even with very low tropical LT warming rates, positive amplification with altitude was still being observed. Ironically they relied especially heavily on RSS – ERSSTv3 being a positive number. Now RSS is small and ERSSTv4 is large.
Very good point. That has the potential to tie the whole theoretical basis of AGW into a knot.
But proceed with caution, you are on the verge of discovering the Mid-Troposphere Cold Spot and Anthropogenic Global Cooling.
Ross,
Your observation is common to problem of lying about complex events. Trying to maintain consistency across time and complexity becomes impossible when the first lie is told. Law enforcement and prosecutors deal with this from criminals and biased witnesses all the time in their prosecutions/investigations. When one lie is use to cover up an inconsistency, inevitably other inconsistencies arise that then must be lied for again. And the process snowballs into areas unanticipated by the liars. It is inevitable with lies. And K15 is a Big Lie.
I’ve watched time and again a big, hyped, paper come out to answer some trenchant skeptical criticism and see in blown up in days if not hours by the likes of JeanS, Steve McIntyre, Nic Lewis, Bob Tisdale, Ross McKittrick, and so many others. This has been a recent, but crescendoing, phenomenon, with the time to blow up a paper shortening, almost to infinitesimal with this one. It should soon be possible to predict the next alarmist apologia even before it is written and blow it up then.
This is a measure of the cognitive dissonance facing the alarmists as it becomes ever more obvious that any dangers have been exaggerated, and alarm with attendant fear, is counterproductive.
The Boy Who Cried Wolf had a few bad, sadly confused, moments, too.
===============
@Ross and @Ferd berple.
I am struggling to understand why, if the buoy data are considered more reliable, these are adjusted to math the ship data. Surely this should be the other way round?
I’m struggling to understand how their error bars can possibly be as small as they claim. But, what really amazes me is that the data collected more recently has MUCH larger error bars. Is this because they assigned an error to their adjustment? Or because they are simply taking the square root of the number of measurements and the longer time frame has a lot more measurements?
Paul Mackey: “I am struggling to understand why, if the buoy data are considered more reliable, these are adjusted to math the ship data. Surely this should be the other way round?”
Ah, but as this is “climate science”, it’s all done back asswards, innit?
From the article: “It will be interesting to watch the specialists in the field sort this question out in the coming months.”
Not so interesting, but the outcome is predictable. My logic goes something like this:
1. Climate scientists are pretty much all treehuggers with rare exception. This is because only treehugger mentality sees a need for climate science, few others are even aware of the field.
2. Treehugger ideology is to get rid of fossil fuels, and to prevent anything with an engine from desecrating the public wilderness holy ground. Treehuggers universally see climate science as a means to an end.
3. The only thing the specialist treehuggers will sort out is how to disappear the pause.
4. The non-treehugger specialists will sort things out logically, but will not be heard because they are an endangered species.
The treehugger is a pest that can do serious damage if not contained. One effective method is to use Spotted Owl calls and snail slime to attract and trap them.
Mr. Average,
You said:
“Climate scientists are pretty much all treehuggers with rare exception. This is because only treehugger mentality sees a need for climate science, few others are even aware of the field.”
I consider myself a climate scientist, although I have never been employed in such a capacity.
And although I have built and run a plant nursery, and am currently in the planning stages of a commercial tree farm, I can state that, with the exception of the times where I needed to support myself while high on a ladder and pruning a tree (like yesterday while trimming my favorite mango), I have never done a lot of “hugging”.
I am very much what used to be called a naturalist, and an environmentalist (although not so much mental as a observer of my environs, unlike many these days who favor the “environmentalist” appellation) and, since I also strive to be a practical and pragmatic sort, and a solver of problems rather that a whiner, I think that the current direction of what may be regarded as the Green Movement is very far from having any rational and coherent vision of ecological stewardship.
For my entire life (I can recall before even being in Kindergarten quizzing my mom about the particulars of rain and raindrops) I have studied such things as the weather, geology, astronomy, ecology, and basically all of the natural sciences. It was not until college that I learned enough to realize how much there was to know, and that one must have a broad understanding of physical chemistry, and hence of physics and of chemistry, to even begin to make sense of the intricate details such areas of study as geology, physical geography, and biology.
An outgrowth of this was a realization that the Earth encompasses the interactions of so many different things, in so many different ways, that one must really broaden one’s fields of study or one’s insight will hit a wall.
If, for example, one tries to understand the process by which a cooling pluton differentiates, and ways and reasons by which various minerals crystalize out of the melt, without first having studied quite a bit of chemistry, the understanding of the process will be limited.
Some people just want to understand the world and the universe, and so study the physical aspects of the Earth and the sky.
I can tell you though, back in the 80’s, there were not a lot of people taking classes in meteorology and/or climatology. And people would look at you funny if you started talking about the weather at a party, or really anytime, except when walking out the door and having it hit you in the face.
People I knew who were studying literature would ask me what I could possibly find interesting about the weather, while they worked to write the four billion, nine hundred and thirty-seven million, four hundred and sixty-three thousand, two hundred and twenty-third critique ever written on the subject of Romeo and Juliet!
Oh, hell, I do not know…something about living in the real world, and understanding real things, that have a real affect, on real lives….Reality?
If they are lowering ship temperatures by comparing to NMAT, then doesn’t that mean they shouldn’t be moving the buoy temps up to match the ships?
My thoughts exactly.
Point 1 – They think that buoy data should be adjusted to match ship data. Thus they think ship data is more useful or more true.
Point 2 – They think that buoy data is more reliable than ship data. Therefore, they think that buoy data is closer to truth.
So…
Point 3 – This paper is concerned with propagating what is useful, which is not what is true.
So what do they think is useful?
It is useful because Karl’s boss needed the result. They are obviously getting hurt by the pause. He doesn’t care that the fact that he raised all the buoy data by .12degC, coupled to the fact that the number of buoy datapoints is increasing compared to the intake data, MUST induce a warming trend.
Then there’s the use of the .10 probability for test of hypothesis. Even jimmying the data like they did couldn’t get it to .05.
This paper is everything that is wrong with climate studies (at the .10 level it no longer merits the word “science”).
This is the same guy who was perfectly fine using models that were worse than random numbers in the first National Assessment. The reason I know that he knew that is that he sent me their own test, which verified what I found in my review.
This the same guy who said, with 95% confidence, in a post-1998 paper, that the 1998 El Nino induced what he called a “change point” in the warming trajectory and that from then on it would take place at a much GREATER rate.
The truth does not matter to Obama Administration scientists.
That fact is that Obama is also the President of Drones. If that hypocrisy of monstrous consequences is acceptable by him and acolytes then, what is not?
pat michaels
Actually, it is worse than you thought.
You say
True, and there cannot be a valid application of such a post hoc adjustment. This is because as Ross McKitrick says in his above essay
The “adjustment” is within the error estimate of the existing value. Thus, the most that can be validly altered is the uncertainty (i.e. the error range) of the existing value and not the value itself.
Add to that the comment of Ross McKitrick in this thread here and K15 is an especially problematic paper even for its potential supporters.
Richard
I think the authors of this paper have forfeited the right to call themselves scientists.
Even “apologists ” is too kind.
History will note such shenanigans, the who and the why and the “for how much”.
And how some responded to being shown to have backed a mistaken hypothesis by lying, cheating, and commuting blatent fraud and malfeasance. Even to the point of contradicting themselves, without batting an eyelash or expressing any reservation about the original and falsified hypothesis.
If it can be shown that such scientific malfeasance was materially contributory to costing some people their lives, and livelihoods, and/or substantially damaging our economy, then they have attached their names to such very plainly.
They do us a favor to be so clear about what sort of person and what sort of a ” scientist” each of them be.
See my comment at 12:19 on the paper “NOAA’s deperate paper”.
Thanks, Ross. Great overview and presentation.
Cheers.
I second this. Clearly presented, so even this layman may understand it. And it is nice to see some science again on WUWT. I am getting bored with all the political, as opposed to specifically science, posts. However, I do see the increased political posts as more a commentary on where the science is going and not really a criticism of Anthony. Thanks.
The politics is all fluff. A big, fluffy tail. Science is the dog. The tail will ultimately go where the dog goes.
The question of AGW started in the scientific community and will end there. Politics cannot answer the question.
evanmjones
You misunderstand.
The ‘science’ is the dog. Politics owns the dog and has from the start of the global warming scare.
This has been the case since Thatcher started the global warming scare in the early 1980s. Indeed, she created the Hadley Center to undertake the ‘science’ needed to promote the scare.
Politicians require that science should always be on tap and not on top.
The ‘dog’ of global warming pseudoscience will bark until its political owners ‘put it down’. As realists and supporters of science our task is to get the ‘dog’ to bite its political owners so they ‘put it down’.
Richard
“Clearly presented, so even this layman may understand it. And it is nice to see some science again on WUWT. I am getting bored with all the political, as opposed to specifically science, posts.”
Amen. Dr. McKitrick is an oasis of clarity and logic. If he writes it, I’ll read it.
evanmjones “The politics is all fluff. A big, fluffy tail. Science is the dog. The tail will ultimately go where the dog goes. The question of AGW started in the scientific community and will end there. Politics cannot answer the question.”
Evan, since you are on this site, there is some hope that you are actually trying to learn some facts and that you probably are not be a troll. Read a little more, try to understand that the “science” exists only to support the objectives of the global left. The scientists and political leaders know that what they promote is false. It is a means to an end and a rather unhappy end for most of humanity. Take some time to learn and apply your critical thinking skills. When you finally have the eureka moment, like I had some years ago, it is frightening and sad. You will start to question everything anyone in a position of power (what should be responsibility) tells you. You’ll start to question and sometimes see their motives.
Good luck in your search for the truth,
Eric
If the CAGW meme was merely one of scientific curiosity, like whether or not the expansion of the universe is accelerating, then purely scientific discussions would be called for.
It is the political, and hence the real world policy, implications that are what everyone should be very concerned about.
These people(the warmistas) have begun to speak and behave in a very troubling manner.
We have moved well out of the realm of scientific curiosity, or philosophical musing.
We are talking about people’s lives, jobs, how our children are being (mis) educated…this ain’t a freakin’ game of Chinese checkers!
Beyond basic curiosity, I would not be spending any time on this, it’s their thinly veiled attempts at turning the world into a hippy commune complete with windmills for power from their 60’s childhood that has me invested in the outcome for my grandchildren.
I have no issue if they want to live like that, I greatly resent them wanting to force me to live like that. And I suspect they don’t even plan on that sort of life, they’re special, they just want everyone else to live like that. Europe is already like this, look at the high cost of auto fuel, what “normal” working people drive, and what the politicians and the well to do drive.
Me I want the world of the Jetson’s from my 60’s childhood.
Good Post Nicholas!
If science is the dog, it is being led around by the nose…… politicians (including politicized scientists) have the dog’s snout in a harness and lead it where they want to go….
Step B makes no sense. If the buoy data is considered more reliable, why was the buoy data adjusted to match the ERI data?
MarkW, it’s six of one, half a dozen of the other, but with a twist. The engine room inlet data extends for a much longer time period, so it’s easier to adjust the buoy data.
It would be, if we were adjusting datasets by hand, rather than by computer.
The cynic in me ponders if all the other adjustments to cool the past data, meant that cooling past data again makes it so out of line with actual weather events and measurement data of the time, they couldn’t keep a straight face and do that. They already have dichotomies of such events as fast shrinking glaciers and retreated sea ice during some of the coldest years on record (according to their adjusted history). Some past years are already adjusted outside their past error bars of the original data and this would only make it worse. They simply risk creating too ridiculous a history by cooling the past even further. Better to heat the recent data, where the other adjustments are less. I could be off base, but it is looking more like desperation than actual science at this point. Doubly so with their probabilities.
Brandon, from the hesitant nature of your comments, I am thinking you are the least cynical person I have ever heard comment on a climate blog.
Yeah. That one jumped right out at me, too, and has been pointed out by others above. The authors have some ‘splainin’ to to. I’ll be interested to hear it.
“The authors have some ‘splainin’ to to. I’ll be interested to hear it.”
Maybe it wasn’t their own idea to make those adjustments? I’ve learned that the boss is always right, even when he (or she) is wrong.
As I recall from above, they did cool a few years at the beginning of the pause, thus also helping the argument that there was no pause or it was not worth calling a pause.
This is excellent news. Every report using these discredited data series previously will now be withdrawn. The ENTIRE case for CAGW will have to retreat, rerun their models and then get the new results published through a gauntlet of past peer review now freshly chastized for having passed bad studies from these very same researchers.
Hey! I can dream.
Courtesy of JoNova yesterday on Argo.
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2006JC003825/full
Additional comments from Jonova site
http://joannenova.com.au/2015/06/study-shows-argo-ocean-robots-uncertainty-was-up-to-100-times-larger-than-advertised/
I have couple of rules of thumb when it comes to these types of studies.
If the adjustments that you make are an order of magnitude greater than the signal that you believe you have found, then you are on dangerous ground.
If the margin of error is an order of magnitude greater than the signal you believe you have found, than your data is worthless.
If both are true, you are dealing with junk science.
Lucky then that we have better data for this period. It is strange the satellite data has heralded a new age in collecting data in many areas yet it is almost completely ignored with global average temp.
Yes, so who are the real science deniers then?
I have my own rule of thumb. if you adjust data, but can’t apply the adjusted data in a practical application that objectively shows that the adjustments improved the data set, then you’re just making up data.
I believe that is covered by my first rule of thumb.
No, slightly different. My rule of thumb is that adjustments to data are meaningless unless you have some check to verify the quantitative accuracy of the adjustments. Let’s say I filter a video signal in a way I hypothesize will reduce noise around the signal. I can run a video with and without the filter to see whether it really does improve the quality of the picture. But now lets assume that I think that the temperature data recorded by thermometers has some biases, and I come up with some theoretical statistical manipulation to the temperature record to “correct” for the biases. There is no check for the quantitative accuracy of the adjustments because there is no real-world application for which the data is used as an input that can be readily discerned to either work better or not work better. Such an adjustment process is, quite literally, fabricating data. It may not be deceitful in that the process is open, but it is still just making numbers up via the adjustment procedure selected. (For this same reason, climate modeling is just another example of data fabrication).
Your rule of thumb would have said that the adjustments would have been just fine if they were small enough to be dwarfed by the trend, while my rule of thumb wouldn’t care. Even if the effect were insignificant, it still would be fabricating new data to replace the old data.
Let me see if I understand this correctly. First they adjusted the most accurate measurements to ‘fit’ the least accurate measurements. Then they adjusted the least accurate measurement, but only and specifically in the range of years that are a problem for the AGW theory. They then find that this disagrees with independent and even more accurate measurements, and…
Therefore, this is valid science performed properly that passed a review of thinking peers.
Does that sum it up correctly?
Yes. That sums it up, but you misspelled a few words.
” …passed a review of thankful pals.”
There, fixed it for ya.
You see how the FIFA scam is unravelling. They are all turning on each other to save their themselves from prison. Well that’s how the AGW scam will end, I HOPE. These scam all end eventually and very often in super quick time. Like a cascade.
I do not think taking a huge grant and using it to publish such blatant chicanery will save anyone from whatever they have coming.
I think when one has painted oneself into a corner, it is not a wise idea to apply a second coat.
Good article, to the point and clear.
Engine rooms are generally warm. The ERT sensors will be affected by heat conducted through the structure of the sensor from the ER space. Depending on the location of the sensor it could also be boosted by pump heat. Seawater pumps are often big because the interior heat sources are big so pump heat should not be ignored. Changing buoy data to match ship data doesn’t sound like a good idea if accuracy is the goal.
Some Navy sonars have temperature sensors. The Navy runs their sonars and related equipment just about everywhere and often. I don;t know whether this data is kept. Has anybody asked?. Perhaps they have and the Navy wont give it up.
As I said elsewhere, if the sea water temperature on a merchant ship is taken at the main engine cooling water intake valve which is right at the skin of the ship, there will be little or no thermal contamination of the temperature. However not many of the thermometers were very accurate.
Also this would not be a surface temperature but the temperature lower down.
What kind of thermometer was used? Gas/vapor with a capillary connection? What about fouling at the inlet from accumulated sea critters?
When we’re taking tenths of a degree, though, it doesn’t take much contamination to affect the results.
D J:
Marked glass tube with liquid inside, with the bulb in the water.
Ross McKitrick you are a scholar and a gentleman. K15 is what? excuse #75? for the ‘hiatus’: there is none. These cuckoos are going scream about global ‘warming/change/disruption’ (TM) through the icicles hanging out of their frostbitten nostrils.
I intend to enjoy the rest of the Holocene as long as it lasts and these maroons are not going to spoil it!
Too late
‘Slow-down’ in climate change never happened, says major review’
http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change/slowdown-in-climate-change-never-happened-says-major-review-10298328.html
http://s30.postimg.org/cn778p2v5/Global_Temps.png
We have always been at war with Oceania.
I find it interesting that the authors of K15 would adjust upwards bouy data to match ERI data, then at the same time introduce a downward adjustment for the ERI data. I think the authors are overwhelmed by the data they are working with. Overwhelmed by the inconsistencies in those data sets and overwhelmed by how for correct for them.
Or, they could just be working for The Team in trying to remove or reduce the impact that “The Pause” has had on the psyche of the believers and non-believers alike.
Of course the record reflects continued warming, just add fudge.
Karl et al wanted their 15 minutes of fame. And they got it.
The end.
K wanted his 15 and he got it with K15.
Have I got this right? 0.12±1.7°C?? And that’s not a typo?
So the total error of 3.4°C is way over an order of magnitude greater than the signal?
LOL! Only in “climate science”!
And we’re still supposed to take these crazy government sponsored BS artists with their “homogenisations” and “adjustments” seriously and close down half our industry in favour of China and India, to say nothing to depriving around a billion people of electric light and clean cooking facilities, condemning them to an early death from respiratory disorders!
It would be funny if it wasn’t so tragic.
That’s like when getting an estimate of how much to replace a wiper blade, the mechanic tells you $12, give or take $170.
” the mechanic tells you $12, give or take $170.”
And completely “forgets ” to tell you how effective RainX is, and instead hides it on the bottom shelf.
I knew it I knew it I knew it.
They used Kennedy et. al. 2011. A horrendous paper that reached its conclusions by using a Norwegian anecdote from 1954 as established scientific fact buried with a double reference so no reviewer would see that they were using an anecdote.
“It is likely that many ships that are listed as using buckets actually used the ERI method (see end Section 3.2).”
What does end section 3.2 say?
“It is probable that some observations recorded as being from buckets were made by the ERI method. The Norwegian contribution to WMO Tech note 2 (Amot [1954]) states that the ERI method was preferred owing to the dangers involved in deploying a bucket”
What does Amot 1954 say? Who knows good luck finding it. But even then its just an anecdote passed off as established scientific fact.
And this anecdote is used to overrule official data.
Sure the data says its bucket adjustments but if we take this anecdote from 1954 as fact we can conclude that many of the readings that claim to be buckets are actually ERI.
We will then assume that half of the unknown are ERI even though the standard practice is to assume that the unknown has the same distribution as the known unless there is significant and compelling otherwise.
Total Horseshite.
Tom T: “Total Horseshite.”
Not even that good Tom.
At least horseshite is good for fertilising roses.
That claptrap on the other hand…
Yeah, but catseazle666 –
Horseshite, after being shat, shows a cooling trend.
/grin
Given that their sole source is an anecdote in a 1954 paper just imagine how many papers Kennedy et. al. scoured looking for something … anything … that they could use to keep the bucket adjustment after Kent proved beyond any doubt that the hypothesis, and that is all it ever was a hypothesis, that the bucket adjustment and with it 0.3-0.5C of the warming trend was a false assumption.
This is monstrously perverse inquiry. What, in Gaia’s name, made them think this was scientific rather than politically useful information? I shudder to think they ignored that calculus in their deliberations. How much madness and evil can this discipline, and the policy it has misbegotten, stand?
====================
I have it. Do you want it? Where to?
As one of the many people who actually took these readings of seawater temperature I can quietly and confidently say that K15 is a complete and utter load of unadulterated crap.
What are the error bars on that conclusion?
The error bar is plus or minus a bucket of pissing and moaning.
We all know this simply a continuation of the process to adjust the temperature trend higher and higher to postpone the day of reckoning and having to face self-introspection.
We should just quit using any of the data series and start using the lower troposphere satellite temperatures and actual physical evidence such as sea ice extents; first frost and snow melt dates; and vegetation limits etc.
Even NOAA admits that their “global” surface temps are UHI/homogenized. This has been known for a long time. See http://climateaudit.org/2007/08/04/1859/
Another WUWT thread here http://tinyurl.com/ylrzy54
Plus many secondary blogs have been tracking the various “averages” being falsified over time.
Reliable surface temperature data on a global basis do not exist. The few scientifically reliable stations show zero warming. Antarctica data show zero warming. Satellite data are not surface data, but show no statistically significant warming. Eg. the curent UAH value is within 0.2 degrees of zero. Temps today are no different from 1980.
There is no point in even discussing global warming until a reliable long term quantitative metric is established.
The Tobacco Institute would be proud of this work product.
The data was tortured until they got the answer they wanted. Proof that torture doesn’t work.
Water boarded.
Why are y’all fighting this? You care about less than 0.1 degrees per decade because why?
Let ’em have it. The nice thing about 0.1 degrees/decade is that it’ll be a long, long time before the trend varies statistically from that and that trend is likely beneficial to the vast majority of North Americans.
The problem isn’t that there is or is not 0.1 degrees in any direction. Rather:
1) Assume that the satellites are valid, then this study is not and tells us nothing. It is disproven before it was published and is not, ergo, science.
2) Assume that this paper is valid, then the satellites are not. Then we are stating that our best technology is incapable of producing a valid thermometer. But if we cannot produce a valid thermometer, then the paper has no valid thermometer to base either of its measurements or adjustments on. And so the paper refutes itself and it not, ergo, science.
Sure, I agree with both 1 and 2, but the purpose of the paper is not science – it’s political. Ultimately, the political claim is 0.1. The political refutation is, “yeah, so what? 0.1 is a nice trend.”
Fair ’nuff.
I Agree Bret. The problem is really political and tactical. A decade ago on CA, three things I argued vehemently were a) concentrate on science, not countering a bad logical argument gosh it’s hot, let’s violate rights, b) forget the surface temps, satellites are much better and c) forget air temps, oceans will show warming or cooling.
Instead, skeptics accepted the premise of the argument gosh it’s hot, focused on surface temps and ignored the oceans. In other words, they let them set the tone, and allowed them to play their game.
Continuing to accept their false premise, skeptics have placed an awful lot of faith in the argument no warming for 18 years. It reminds me of when IBM was pushing OS/2. Their only argument was “32 bit is here now”. I reacted by thinking “that’s their only argument? In that case, I’ll wait for MS”.
I assert that based on science, there is no AGW, regardless of whether the average temperature is up a few tenths of a degree. I assert that natural variability is +/- 2C. I would also stipulate that global warming from some cause other than human CO2 could still be happening, even if the average temperature remained flat for 18 years, or even if it went down. As long as a temperature change is within natural variability, it’s not dispositive.
Apparently, the main line skeptics’ only or best argument is gosh it’s cool, therefore let’s keep our rights. I’m not willing to skate on such thin ice.
“skeptics have placed an awful lot of faith in the argument no warming for 18 years.” Because the satellite temperature records show just that. They can fiddle with super uncertain ground based measurements but they can’t fiddle the satellite data. We don’t “place an awful to of faith.” We just read the numbers and calculate the trends. NOAA and NASA ignore the most precise state-of-the-art data set. That is very odd … Okay, maybe not. Witch doctors and faith healers have no faith in modern medical imaging technology.
Thomas, it seems like you don’t understand what I just wrote. Do you understand that a huge and obvious logic flaw is that correlation = causation? If I claimed that wet sidewalks caused rain, and presented a compelling correlation based argument, it would be a very weak or non-existent case.
If you responded with another correlation based argument, then your counter argument would be logically weak and/or non-existent. That’s the situation we’re in:
AGW: gosh it’s hot, let’s violate rights
Skeptics: gosh it’s cool, let’s keep our rights just a little bit longer
AGW: no, it’s a tiny bit warmer, let’s violate rights
Skeptics: no, that was just boat exhaust, it’s cool, let’s keep our rights just a little bit longer
All I’m saying (for a decade) is: let’s either show scientifically that rain causes wet sidewalks or that wet sidewalks causes rain.
Warming temperatures cannot make an impossible idea a reality.
All I am saying is Give Science a chance…
” All I am saying is Give Science a chance.”
Yeah, because twenty seven years of failed predictions, fudged and faked “data”, selective attention, confirmation bias, cognitive dissonance, untold billions of wasted taxpayer dollars (including st least $29 billion, in the past year and in this country alone!), lies, insults, bullying, and all the rest of it…are not really enough to be considered ” giving science a chance”.
At the rate Climate Science is moving the world ahead, we will not have any such thing as actual science, or much of an economy, for much longer.
Once obvious lies, collusion, and made up gobbledygook pass muster among the press and the scientific establishment, why or how can anyone have any confidence in the pronouncements of either institution regarding anything important?
>> not really enough to be considered ” giving science a chance”.
menicholas, I agree that it’s all been mostly a waste, but it wasn’t really spent on science. It was spent on political marketing with a thin scientific veneer. The actual number of academics involved in pushing the AGW hoax has always been quite small. Even the small part that was somewhat technical has been about math. When people are throwing out trees that don’t support the a-priori conclusion, and people are adjusting data to support their a-priori conclusion, it’s not about science. It’s about political manipulation.
Btw, the fact that in your comment, you have conflated science with the AGW political-pseudoscience establishment means that you have accepted one of their lies. That’s exactly the result they wanted.
VE
I would give science a chance except by the time science proves out the I’ll be a serf.
Viking Explorer,
Note the capital letters with the term climate science.
I was commenting on a phone while on a short break, or I would have used quotation marks.
I agree that one should avoid giving an inch or letting the fraudsters control the tone of the conversation.
But I think we all slip up in the process of trying to make our points be heard, when time is so short and there is so much to say.
In short, I agree with you on this completely.
But I am unclear as to what path you see to getting back to actually employing the rigorous version of the scientific method?
The establishment has been bought and paid for. Much, if not most, of academia, and seemingly all of the high muckety-mucks of the various scientific organizations, are signed on and doubling down on the meme.
I see a few cracks in the façade, but little wholesale back-pedaling.
How can they claim “the science is settled” when their constant adjustments to the numbers climate science is based on clearly show they know that it is not?
Winston, it is undeniable that the chocolate ration has been increased from 30 grams to 20 grams this week.
from The Guardian of Truth …
http://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-oCQDMnFncDQ/VXEJ69BJwTI/AAAAAAAAAnw/AHRvciyKwYI/s800/chocolate%252520ration.png
Jquip & Khwarizmi,
Awesome ! Thanks for that.
So, I’m confused. If this paper is correct, doesn’t this mean that Trenberth and Co. were flat wrong about the heat being “missing” at all, and thus wrong about deep ocean warming? Wouldn’t it make a laughing stock of the entire climate science A Team because it was laying on the surface of the ocean all along and they’ve bent themselves into pretzels trying to explain something that never existed? Doesn’t it mean skeptics are free to apply random adjustments that cool the trend if they see fit? How on Earth does NASA think this makes them look like anything except idiots?
No, it would make it worserer. This is surface and the missing heat went into
the deep ocean. That’s my take, anyway.
Wow, so this one study invalidates “the heat is hiding deep in the ocean” explanation and the many papers that purported to explain the pause by mainstream climate scientists, and it does it all by increasing the more accurate buoy measurements to match the far less accurate bucket measurements. Ain’t gubmint science wunnerful!
Ross McKitrick,
Thank you for providing a nice, clear description of the paper and the issues without taking sides. Refreshing.
Yes, thank you Mike M. In politics there are “sides”. In science, there should not be.
Yes, they really like to make the ARGO data readily available and easily graphed so we can all see what’s what. Maybe they are capable of learning after all.
I’m not sure free-floating Argos are that great.
Consider an alternative. Anchored temp / depth recorders, Maybe 1000-3000 places, including coastal, offshore, and open ocean, Pacific, Atlantic,Indian, Southern.
Three nearby anchorage points per “ovation”.. Each anchorage point has up to five monitors, one ranging from 0-100 meters depth, the second from 100 m to 500 m, the third from 500 to 1000 meters, the fourth from 1000 m to 3000 m, the fifth from 3000m to ocean bottom. With three-monitor sets, per location, it’s easy to find malfunctioning monitors, and repair/replace them.
This monitoring system could cost tens of billion dollars, but divided among the US, EU, China, Russia, India, and South America, not that much. It would allow us to understand the oceans’ storage of heat, instead of guessing. We could understand whether the oceans are warming, if so, how much, or if they are not.
Why not spend $30 billion to measure temps, before spending $30 trillion dollars adopting Paris? It will only take 10 years to find out whether catastrophic warming is really on the horizon, or not. If the atmosphere is not warming, much and if oceans are not warming, much,we don’t have a serious problem requiring massive UN “solution”.
Schoolsie, you have made the same simple mistake I made for years. There is no interest in finding or promoting the truth. Once you understand that single point, the rest starts to fall in place.
Cheers!
Schoolsie, the vast volume of the ocean, the continuous motion in three dimensions of every part of it, the ceaselessly varying temperature over scales of millimeters and miles, the huge range of variation between the very top and very bottom, and the inherent difficulty of integrating such factors as the above with the varying heat content of water of varying salinity and temperature, makes it absolutely ludicrous to think we can measure the heat content of the ocean to a degree of accuracy which would be meaningful.
You must be a bureaucrat of longstanding tenure to casually speak of spending THIRTY BILLION DOLLARS on such a pointless and futile effort!
We should not be wasting any money on such things unless and until it can be agreed we have both money to waste, and some logical rationale for wasting on this!
And what makes you think those other countries are going to march our spending on any such thing, at any time, and for any reason? They are laughing at us into their sleeves, content to agree to let us be lunatics, while persuing goals and policies that make sense to them.
China had been given a pass and told we are cutting back to preindustrial levels of output, which I am sure makes them as happy as they are privately scornful, and Russia profits handsomely when we cut back on fossil fuel production, being that they are a net exporter with a huge need for the cash higher prices will bring.
And finally, anyone who needs ten more years of convincing that CAGW is a hoax is either too dizzy or empty headed for facts to make a difference.
Er, sorry about all the typos.
And also: water surface temperature is not air temperature, go to the beach in Holland on a summer day.
Or to the beach in Florida on a winter day.
K15 added 0.12 oC to all buoy data … K15 simply say that because the buoy data are believed to be more reliable, they were given more weight in the statistical procedure,
=============
if buoys are more reliable, why were they adjusted?
Nice catch. Also worth noting that correcting the buoys make them ‘less reliable’ by definition. Giving them more weight thereafter simply magnifies the problem.
Aphan, yes it means there is much less missing heat. It also means that going forward, further justification of adjustments will be harder to ‘splain.
The use of a formula that changes the weighting of buoys going forward is notable. As time passes, the buoys will be given more and more weight and have a fixed Adjustment. So even without any warming at all the calculated temperature will continue rising.
This is a novel way to create global warming! Very ‘clevah’.
A downside is that the warmer ‘surface’ further undermines the claim to have miraculously detected the missing Hot Spot. They found just a pinch of Hot Spot and now this K15 disappears it. Oh well.
What now do we do with all the carefully calibrated proxies with their little fiddles to support the CO2 vs Temp meme? It appears the AGW faithful have given up on the Mann and settled for the Buoy.
Nice one Crispin. The chuckles I have already had at the expense of this particular lapdog’s dinner – both here and with the Bishop – golf charlie is outdoing himself over there. Very funny.
“Federal scientists say…”
Well, at least they make it clear they are not Actual Scientists, but that wacky federal kind.
Woosp!
“Federal scientists say there never was any global warming “pause” – Washington Post
&w=1484
This is the graphic we should be focussing on..(captioned here is a figure to drive home the point)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2015/06/04/federal-scientists-say-there-never-was-any-global-warming-slowdown/?utm_content=buffer33ac0&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer
Barry – look who you are dealing with there – he is the original Looney. Feral scientists indeed. Oh, and Oreskes; ‘seepage’ and uncle Tom Cobley and all.
I agree the infographic is mental but it will get spewed out for ever.
Federal Scientists. Top Men!
Notice how in the text of the WaPo article, it mentions the buoy data being “reconciled” with the buckets and the intakes.
It seems the author took care not to mention the specifics, especially that the more accurate data was adjust way up to match the slop from the other measurements. Even a casual low information type would see right through the whole thing if this was described in detail.
The writer seems also to seek to actively dissuade anyone from having a look at the original article, first by not clearly labeling the link to the original article, and also tucking it in well below the headline. And then opining that the details of the adjustments “quickly get complicated”.
But the real whitewash is contained here:
“Noting that “buoy data have been proven to be more accurate than ship data,” the new study applies a new “bias correction” to address the difference between them.”
Note how this sentence implies that the more accurate buoy data was used to correct other data, rather than simply stating the embarrassing truth…that the data said to be more accurate was adjusted upwards by a massive 0.12 degrees. Sort of like using a rusty sundial to correct a Swiss watch.
No, he left that part out, alright.
And I doubt the false implication was some sort of coincidence. I will be looking at other MSM write-ups to see if this is how they all spin it.
And if they do, the fingerprint of collusion to deceive will be all over this noise.
Knew it would be “Looney Mooney” at WaPo. He can pen back to back articles that completely contradict one another and not bat an eye. Dead fish roll their eyes back when wrapped in his “journalism”.
All the more reason to look at RSS and UAH ONLY, all the rest is manipulation, adjusting and homogenizing so as to keep the faith in their ” religion “. Counter their fraud in the MSM to the extent you / we can !
Until all climate data is sourced through completely observable means and no longer relies on any form of statistical magick, proxies, extrapolations, etc., the debate will never end. Probably not even then.
Agreed. All this tells me they don’t know what the temperature is.
If folks are interested, here is how the new Karl et al global record compares to there other surface temperature records during the pre-“hiatus” (1951-1997) and “hiatus” (1998-2014) periods: http://s17.postimg.org/ggmd032un/temperature_trends_comparison.png
Why are the uncertainty ranges so much greater for recent estimates than for the earlier period?
The timeframe is shorter. The longer a timeframe you are looking at (assuming homoscedasticity), the smaller the confidence intervals will be for trend estimates.
Good point! We got worse as measurments and methodology got better?
WUWT
Ah, yes. The measurements were perfect. It’s only the math that requires error adjustments. 😉
Still, I appreciate the point made by the trend graph.
How long is the timeframe that these adjustments have been considered to have validity?
Not long, and are therefore highly uncertain, by this same logic.
Ross: Given satellite coverage, don’t we have one homogeneous source of SST data for since 1980 that doesn’t require adjustment. Doesn’t it show slower warming since 1998 than before?
Due to all of the changes in measurement methodology for the oceans, we don’t really have a reliable GLOBAL or SST temperature record for the last 150 or 100 years. With all the variables that can be adjusted, the old data (and new data of the same type) can probably be adjusted to say just about anything. Even worse, one can pick and chose from among all of the adjusted records to reach almost any conclusion one wants about phenomena like lapse rate, which rely on two different records.
Then they have the audacity to say climate science is “settled”. Their conclusions are settled and the data says whatever they want it to say. If the hiatus can disappear by tweaking some adjustments, the main conclusion should have been that climate science has placed too much confidence in all of their results!
A real SCIENTIST who wanted to improve the SST temperature record would get his a$$ out from behind his computer and into the laboratory – by sailing around the world for a year or more measuring SST and MAT with a variety of current and historic methods. Then maybe we would have a scientific basis for combining a variety of incompatible records and calculating the uncertainty inherent in that process.
You know what’s interesting? There seems to be no limit to the amount of temperature adjusting to various sources of manual temperature recording shipboard or land based. But as near as I can tell, manual records of sea level from tide gauges hasn’t been touched. I wonder if there is any sort of an assault on those records by people who wish they said something other than what they do. I know that the sea level data from satellites is regularly adjusted.
At tmsny tide gages there are actual physical benchmarks. Hard to move those.
Plus structures which have been in place, physical high water marks, photographic records…
I would like to see who the first person to come out and question the long term reliability of an actual marked post anchored in the water.
At many tide gauges…
Thanks, Ross.
Another way of correcting global temperatures
Is this what the real ‘global temperature’ – blue line – could look like
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/CRUTEM4-F.gif
I used a variable high pass filter and varied its 6dB down cut-off in steps of 25 years.
I searched for longest period of coincidence between filter in and out without any alteration to the scale.
It was found to be at 450 years.
All periodicities below 200 years are virtually intact.
‘New’ data available on request.
(/sarc)
I see this as a political issue, and I know the most decisions are made by powerful elites. So I downloaded the Hadcrut anomaly data I got here in Google Earth for the 20 most powerful cities in the world, and I plotted them, plus the average for all twenty cities. Interestingly, that data shows the temperature stopped climbing around 1998 in those cities (as shown by Google Earth in the 2013 data set). So if we look at this as a purely political debate, then we can understand why nothing much really happens. The most powerful folk aren´t seeing much impact, they seem to be worried about other issues, which means there´s a need to heat up their cities if we want our taxes raised.
My analysis is here:
http://21stcenturysocialcritic.blogspot.com.es/2015/06/temperature-anomaly-of-20-most-powerful.html
(Please ignore the bird and the other material)
Atmospheric CO2 has been identified as a possible climate change forcing. Forcings, according to the ‘consensus’ and the IPCC, have units of Joules /sec/m^2. Energy, in units Joules/m^2, divided by the effective thermal capacitance (Joules/K/m^2) equals average global temperature (AGT) change (K). Thus (in consistent units) the time-integral of the atmospheric CO2 level (or some function thereof) times a scale factor equals the AGT change. When this is applied to multiple corroborated paleo (as far back as 542 million years ago) estimates of CO2 and average global temperature, the only thing that consistently works is if the effect of CO2 is negligible and something else is causing the temperature change.
CO2 has no influence on climate and the solar cycle is on the down-slope. The only way to make it appear that it is still warming is to change some numbers.
See what does cause climate change (explains 97+% average global temperatures since before 1900) at .http://agwunveiled.blogspot.com
I have been recording ‘SURFACE’ sea temps for a while now and can unequivocally state that the skin is always the same or cooler than the water just below the surface and that the water temperature changes rapidly within centimeters of the surface depending on the time of day (sunlight) and wind conditions.
Deeper water as in ship inlet temperature can be much colder than surface temperature.
But the big thing is that water temps tend to stratify and bands of water at different temps tend to persist, unless broken up by wind, waves and current.
I can almost always get an accurate range of temperature readings of more than 5˚C in the top meter of the ocean surface, often much more. Merely depending on the depth of the temperature reading.
There desperately needs to be a definition of what exactly the ‘Surface’ is.
Sorry, in climate science definitions are in critically short supply. You can’t have one.
In other words the ‘Global” temperature ‘data’ is fundamentally bipolar so to speak. The land based data uses more or less the same instrument at a known locationover a certain period of time but the sea based data is all over the place and has been advjusted and adjusted and adjusted. So on what possible basis is the aggregate data set robust and reliable to the degree of accuracy required especially compared to the satellite data? On what basis is then the ‘science settled’?
Rort, boondoggle, fraud or just junk science matters little.
What have we done? The Pause is dead, and we skeptics bear at least some responsibility. We had the Pause with the “missing/hidden heat”, which we lambasted cruelly and mercilessly. We should have been more accepting of the missing heat idea, perhaps helping them look for it, because at least then we still had the Pause. Now it is gone, and we have only ourselves to blame.
Alas and alack! Great Pause, we hardly knew thee. R.I.P.
Rents garments. Sackcloth and ashes.
[Mods need to know rental rate for garments (sans ashes). Per week? Per day? .mod]
I’m starting to think that ALL man-made global warming is in the adjustments.
DAS: “I’m starting to think that ALL man-made global warming is in the adjustments.”
That’s why it’s called Mann Made Global Warming.
I’ve just turned Lead into Gold.
Think of it as a leading indicator.
Data fiddling is never justified. Too much potential for bias confirmation. If the data is not suited for purpose, get new data. We have plenty of time.
But we don’t have plenty of data. I keep the fiddling to a minimum by dropping the bad stations, yeah, but that’s the data- and metadata-rich USHCN. But what about Outer Mongolia?
I’ll be chiming in with some adjustments of my own, too: Microsite Adjustment. CRS adjustment. They’ll be big, too.
MMTS adjustment? For what? That stuff is on the level. It’s the CRS units that need the adjusting. The dang things carry around their own Tmax heat sink. NOAA is adjusting the wrong thing. We do it the way NOAA does it because it matters not to our trends. But what about the all-CRS record going back to 1880? Can’t be replaced. Must be adjusted for equipment (and that’s an adjustment they don’t make).
NEWSFASH!!
MISSING HEAT FOUND ALIVE !
Hidden in data uncertainty, instrumental inaccuracy, and uncertain location. Condition stable and apparently settled but on life support at the IPCC emergency palace.
I know exactly where the missing heat is. It’s wherever it can’t be observed. And what if we do? It just moves along to someplace that hasn’t been yet. It keeps its bags packed.
Since the UAH RSS data does not conform to the idea that the “pause” never existed, this invalidates the methods used to change the answers in the surface data set. I have heard the nonsense from warmers that measuring lower tropospheric temperatures is not a valid comparison to surface data. This is also malarkey and just another attempt to “disconnect” the data sets and free these con artists to change the surface records as they please to validate their failed theories.
Lower tropospheric temperatures and surface data are not separate in what they indicate. The lower troposphere is connected to the surface by the adiabatic lapse rate, meaning the temperature values of the troposphere will be lower than the surface, reduced only by the gravitational potential energy envelope. But any heating of the surface will, most certainly be reflected in the lower troposphere by convection. That is how it works.
Combine this with the vulnerability of the changes to being assailed as scientifically flawed as McKitrick points out above and we have nothing new here except for more of the same. Another cheap and dishonest attempt to change and fake the history of the climate so as to save these shameless scientists from the throttling they deserve in helping the government steal from the public and enrich themselves in the continued taking.
Chuck Wiese
Meteorologist
The T rise from circa 1917 to about 1944 was most likely little influenced by CO2 and more by changes in advection. It looks as if the rise from about 1976 till 2001 likewise to a large extent can be explained the same way. It behooves us to stop quarrelling and sit still and wait for another 20-30 years to see what happens before we do anything to stop a possible man-made global warming.
Agreed, though with the AMO due to flip and a continuing -PDO this could run and run until the next warm cycle.
All the real Data is here,check it out.
http://www.astrotheme.com/transits_ephemerides_chart.php
The only data that matters is data that is not agenda driven which is satellite data. End of story.
Sorry to disappoint you but the True Data is here,
http://www.astrotheme.com/transits_ephemerides_chart.php
(Sarc)
Twisting the knobs and torturing the data until they get the pre-selected answer.
Is this as big a fiddle as the Hockeyschtik? Basically the same device, data manipulation, to achieve the same end, get rid of an inconvenient historical record.
The best explanation is that pre ARGO the SST data was not fit to yield a global aggregate figure other than to say 0.5 or 1.0˚C say. Using it for identifying the sorts of variations and trends being sought is fundamentally flawed and so obviously so that in all honesty it should not have been attempted let alone relied on in any way. Using as a basis for policy is therefore utterly lunatic and you might be better off reading sheep’s entrails.
Is this as big a fiddle as the Hockeyschtik?
No. It doesn’t even affect trend since 1950, the dawn of the CO2 era. And if it doesn’t do that, it doesn’t do much. They are sacrificing themselves on the altar of pause removal. A dog eating its own tail. And the pause can be explained away easily by PDO flux, anyway.
This is so agenda driven and does not deserve discussion. Their adjustments of the data are a fabrication of the truth and as far as I am concern are a non issue. Many reliable sources from Weatherbell Inc., to satellite data, to radiosonde data paint an entirely different correct truthful picture in contrast to the BS of the AGW agenda supporters.
on every level, it’s what is known as a psyops:
4 June: Breitbart: Steve Milloy: Harvard, Syracuse Researchers Caught Lying to Boost Obama Climate Rules
http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2015/06/04/harvard-syracuse-researchers-caught-lying-to-boost-obama-climate-rules/
Ross McKitrick (University of Guelph),
You have given a clear and impartial analysis / discussion of Karl (of NOAA) et al. (2015).
The interesting development would be if, in the next couple of months, someone at NASA GISS makes a similar move as NOAA’s Karl.
John
John, keep in mind that GISS currently uses the ERSST.v3b data. It will soon be replaced by the ERSST.v4 data. The question is, will GISS buy into the new NOAA data with all of its peculiarities, especially in the 1930s and 40s?
Of course they will, Gavin has already endorsed the new Karl et al. 2015 paper publicly.
Bob Tisdale on June 5, 2015 at 7:05 am
– – – – – –
Bob Tisdale,
Thanks of the background on data used by NASA GISS.
John
Anthony Watts on June 5, 2015 at 7:22 am
– – – – – – –
Anthony,
Yeah.
& I would think NASA GISS would want their own peer reviewed published paper independent of NOAA’s efforts on revising the temperature record with a warming outcome.
John
Ross
“So what changed in the SST records? Bear in mind that there are very few records of air temperatures over the oceans, especially prior to 1950. So to get long term climate estimates, scientists use SST (i.e. water temperature) data, which have been collected since the 1800s by ships.”
WRONG
Check the source material ICOADS
http://icoads.noaa.gov/advances/parker3.pdf
There are 8 million records for air temps prior to 1900.
Steven, in context of comparison with air temp records over land, would you rank the air/sea temps comparatively many, or comparatively few?
The issue is Ross’s error and whether or not he will correct it.
ICOADS records typically come with bot an SST measurement and a MAT measurement.
Comparing MAT records with SAT records simply by number is a foolish thing to do.
1. MAT is highly correlated with SST.
2. SST is more homogenous than the land.
consequently you dont need as many MAT measurements.
Everybody knows that 8,000,000 is a very large number and could never constitute “very few”.
Each roving reading represented the temperature of 820,000 square kilometres of ocean air, if only one reading was taken per day.
Probably, more readings were recorded daily and probably there was an overlap of meteorological readings and ship of war entries.
Can a ratio of two large numbers result in “very few” or would that be WRONG?
mebbe
June 4, 2015 at 8:45 pm
“Everybody knows that 8,000,000 is a very large number and could never constitute “very few”.”
—————————
In light of my question to Steven, your statement comes off as disingenuous and I think you know that.. Are you satisfied that your calculated sample rate would yield accurate result? Assumptive modifiers such as “probably” don’t cut it. How is Dr. McKitrick’s assertion that “Bear in mind that there are very few records of air temperatures over the oceans, especially prior to 1950.” inconsistent with your calculated historical sample rate of 1 reading/day/820,000 square kilometers? Many would conclude that such granularity is only minimally useful and then only with caveats underscoring the data inadequacy for making pronouncements of precision to 100ths of a degree.
Alan,
It might be true that sarcasm without a declaration of sarcasm is disingenuous, so I’ll admit to the charge.
In case I’m still being too oblique; no, I don’t think 8,000,000 log entries over half a century is a lot.
See what happens when I hit WUWT and comment before the morning’s first cup o’ java? Cranky old **** dude doesn’t begin to cover it.
How many of those records were taken at the same place over time? And were equally, spatially dispersed across the ocean\globe?
I suggest none.
Quantity does not equate to quality.
This issue is Ross’ error and whether or not he will correct it.
1. The records need not be taken at the same place and time. That said you will find that ships tend to follow the same routes.
2. Quantity will definately help you. With ICOADS this is definately the case.
However, if you guys want just raw data.. then the raw data shows MORE WARMING.
“MORE warming” … well, it’s still below CMIP5 business-as-usual scenario ensemble averaged outputs. The models still fail, regardless of any contrived evaporation of the “hiatus.”
The political appt’d managers at NOAA must understand the obvious outcome is that this only buys them some time before the model failures become apparent again, ie. global cooling with a strong La Nina in 2016 going into 2017. Nature doesn’t care about man-contrived data adjustments. This is a political result. That NOAA should help affirm what the administration it works for wants, should come as no surprise.
The real surprise is how dubious the methodology employed in this paper is for Science. That speaks volumes to how deeply the politicized corruption has gone into the AAAS and the editors at Science.
Steven Mosher;
However, if you guys want just raw data.. then the raw data shows MORE WARMING.
The issue is not if adjustments in general are warranted. The question is are these adjustments on top of the existing adjustments warranted? They seem rather dubious at best.
Steven Mosher, you are once again using misdirection in this discussion. We are not discussing the changes due to the “Folland adjustments” back in the 1930s and 40s, which increased the long-term SST trend. We are discussing the changes in trend during the hiatus. I corrected you on this on another thread yesterday. I’m not sure why it’s so hard for you to comprehend, Steven.
There are 8 million records for air temps prior to 1900.
From the slides you linked to, emphasis mine:
Undigitized marine observations for 1851-1900UK national archives
Given that they are not digitized, their existence is moot. They are of no value until they are, no matter their number.
dmh
You have pointed out that the real issue is the error by Steven Mosher and whether or not he will correct it.
It is not acceptable to point out errors of Steven Mosher. If you don’t believe me then ask him.
Richard
Steven,
You haven’t talked about your life. You’re a young guy, so you had the opportunity to take AP calc BC. Did you take it, and did you score a 5? You should have been able to take Physics C (Mech). Did you take it and score a 5? Did you take AP Chem and score a 5?
So,at northwestern, did you take honors calc and honors physics? Did you take PChem? If so,what were your grades?
Put down your credentials. “I didn’t study math and science because it was too easy.” Riight.
Air temps were taken at the same time as sea temps, i.e. 0600, Noon, 1800 and Midnight.
Air temps were not taken at the sea surface, though; usually a Stevenson Screen on the weather side bridge wing, so could be 20 to 60 feet above sea level.
Ross does point out above that there are ~185 million total measurements in ICOADS. 8 million is less than 5% of the total. Maybe that’s what he means by very few?
OK, rephrase it to say “For most of the world’s oceans there are very few records of air temperatures…” The source you cite also shows that 55% of those records are from the North Atlantic and Mediterranean, and a further 12% from the South Atlantic. There’s little AT data from the Pacific and Indian oceans. After all, if there was good comprehensive AT data then we wouldn’t need SST as a proxy.
Ross, I continue to find it amazing that NOAA used NMAT data as a reference for SST data adjustments, when the NMAT data have always been considered an inferior dataset.
Bob,
It is not “amazing” when it helps the “cause” to kill the “pause”.
Today’s politically-motivated left have abandoned all notions of shame for lying.
Basically for the Progressive Left in America it boils down to: “If you aren’t lying, you aren’t trying.” That includes Climate Science handled by US government climate scientists. We’ve known that for years. We’ve seen that in action. K15 is just one more egregious example of lying to support the cause. And Ross McKitrick was trying to be too polite.
Ross is amazingly polite, both in print and in person. I do not know how he does it, given the magnitude of the bull$hit he is documenting.
Copy available on Ross’ website
http://www.rossmckitrick.com/uploads/4/8/0/8/4808045/mckitrick_comments_on_karl2015.pdf
so no need to copy/paste/ fixup etc, thanks.
Unbelievable that Karl et al should use the old old measurements at sea problem. Highlighted years ago by Daly and others. Or maybe not so unbelievable. Time to recycle. Next thing will be adjusting the post-USSR demise temperatures back down and homogenising to replace all the old stations that disappeared. Smearing the arctic land temperatures over the ocean is a more recent trick that they revisit. There’s been a recent revisit of the hockey stick so that one will have to lie fallow for a while.
Must be 15 years since I read Daley’s comments on the measurements at sea, and had the chance to check them out with a couple of ex-mariners. The response to asking how the process was conducted was laughter. “I would be very surprised if the job was ever done properly anywhere …. punishment job for a misdemeanour, like cleaning out the heads … no way you’d even be allowed to try it in a storm … “.
That AAAS and Science Mag would publish such an arguably piece of garbage, confirmation-biased result of K15 speaks volumes to the levels of political corruption that has invaded the AAAS.
I read through the K15 paper this morning before going online to any website critique. That bit about using the ship data to correct the buoy SST data, and then calling the buoy data more accurate was obvious cherry picking and confirmation bias driven.
The K15 paper is garbage and the AAAS will one day be ashamed of having published it.
Thanks, Dr. McKitrick. Good explanation.
Karl et al. is trying to rewrite the climate records to revive a dead parrot, so to speak.
Propaganda in Action?
Should anyone wonder how the mainstream media will respond to this new paper they needn’t go any further than the AustralianScienceMediaCentre. This site coordinates pre-prepared responses from a range of selected scientists. Remarkably these all give credibility to the warmist cause. (Goebbels would be proud of what amounts to a scientific propaganda filtering for journalists.) This organisation has been duplicated in other countries so performs a global propaganda purpose which appears to be strongly influenced by the UN and left. I recommend anyone who cares about freedom of scientific thought and the media goes to this site now and see for themselves how this operates.
http://www.smc.org.au/expert-reaction-global-warming-slowdown-an-illusion-created-by-bad-data-science/#more-16619
Here are the expert reactions and I apologise for taking up so much space but they may disappear so it is good to circulate them before this happens.
Professor Matthew England is Chief Investigator at the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science at UNSW
“There’s nothing all that new in this paper and nothing that surprises me. The bottom line is that multiple data sets and multiple lines of evidence have shown that global warming hasn’t stalled at all. This is another paper adding to this evidence. All that’s happened is that after 2000 the global average surface warming has been slower than that seen during the 1980s and 1990s. This has been unequivocally linked to natural decadal climate variability. Projections for this century reveal that regardless of this variability, catastrophic warming will result without action on reducing greenhouse gas emissions”.
———–
UK expert comments:
Dr Ed Hawkins, climate scientist at NCAS, University of Reading, said:
“Observations of temperature over the past 150 years were made with a wide variety of instruments. Because measurement techniques have improved over time, corrections have been made to ensure the past temperature data is consistent and accurate.
“The process is never finished. Climate scientists continue to refine our understanding of past temperature changes. This update to one of the major global temperature datasets uses new information on measurement type to produce improved corrections which act to increase the global temperature trends over the past 15 years.
“This suggests that the much-discussed recent slowdown in global temperatures is far less pronounced than previously thought. In addition, estimates of climate sensitivity constrained by past observations may need a slight upwards revision, increasing the risk of negative consequences from our warming climate in future.”
———–
Prof Mark Maslin, Professor of Climatology at University College London, said:
“This study is important and makes a significant step forward to the analysis presented in the IPCC (2013) report as it addresses three key areas of uncertainty.
“First, the study analyses and corrects for the different temperature measurements between floating buoy and ship data, as ship data is systematically warmer than buoy data. Globally this is a difference of 0.12˚C. They also corrected the ship data. Prior to the Second world war there was a shift from bucket to engine intake thermometers, this was assumed to be a universal shift but recent analysis shows that some ships even today use bucket observations, which are always cooler due to evaporation.
“Second, the study makes use of the new data produced by the International Surface Temperature Initiative http://www.surfacetemperatures.org This project started in 2010 to provide the very best data on surface temperatures. In five years they have double the number of stations available globally and ensured all the data in their data base is corrected for changes in station location, instrument changes, observing practice and urbanization. This data is a significant improvement on the data used in studies reported in the IPCC 2013 report. Third the authors took account of the incomplete data in the Arctic region, which has underestimated the warming in that region.
“The result of this study is that warming rates both of the short and long term are much more similar than previously suggested. The period 1880 to 1940 was not as cold as previously reported and that the warming trend from 1950-1999 was 0.113°C per decade, while from 2000-2014 it was 0.116°C per decade. This important reanalysis suggests there never was a global warming hiatus; if anything, temperatures are warming faster in the last 15 years than in the last 65 years.
“A whole cottage industry has been built by climate skeptics on the false premise that there is currently a hiatus in global warming. This is despite climate data showing continued warming of the Earth surface. Much of the media have latched on to this supposed slow-down as it continues the ‘for and against’ climate change debate. The weight of evidence for anthropogenic climate change is overwhelming and this new study shows that the global warming hiatus was just wishful thinking.”
———–
Prof Sir Brian Hoskins, Chair of the Grantham Institute, Imperial College London, said:
“This reassessment of global temperatures, which gives that there has been no pause or slowdown in surface warming since 1998, is very important as it comes from an extremely well regarded group at a US Government laboratory.
“It has been known that the storage of the excess heat caused by increased greenhouse gases has continued, and it had been thought that the reduction in surface warming must be due to natural variation in the heat exchanged between the atmosphere and ocean. Now it appears that any such exchange of heat between the atmosphere and ocean has not been large enough to obscure the global warming trend, even in the relatively short period we have so far had in the 21st century. It also suggests that some of the lower estimates of warming that depend on the low trend in recent temperatures may no longer be credible.”
———–
Prof Tim Osborn, Professor of Climate Science at the University of East Anglia, said:
“This is an important update to the NOAA global temperature dataset, one of a handful of such global temperature records that are used to monitor ongoing climate change. These records have to combine information from many types of measurement, and inevitably these have differences and biases that must be taken into account when calculating how the global temperature has changed over the last 150 years – and over recent decades too. Previous work has addressed many of the biases already, but more refinement can always be achieved as new data become available and as our understanding of the limitations of our measuring systems improves.
“More observations over land, especially in the high latitudes, and better corrections for biases in sea surface temperatures as the measuring systems have gradually changing from ship-based measurements to drifting buoys. Interestingly, similar improvements were already introduced to our global temperature record (the HadCRUT4 record, a joint endeavour of the Climatic Research Unit and the University of East Anglia and the UK Met Office) in 2012, though they did not make such a dramatic difference as they appear to do in the NOAA dataset. Understanding why this difference arises will need detailed analysis in the coming months.
“The long-term warming since 1880 is hardly affected by these updates, but estimates of warming trends over shorter periods are affected. The IPCC cautioned against drawing firm conclusions from short-term trends, but they did highlight that the warming over the 15 years from 1998 to 2012 may have been slower than the average warming rate since 1951 – and therefore it is interesting to understand this difference and its possible implications for our understanding of the climate system and our projections of future climate.
“This new study suggests that the slowdown in the rate of warming may be much less pronounced than in the global temperature records that were available for the IPCC to assess. The IPCC’s assessment wasn’t wrong, but perhaps the emphasis would be slightly different if the assessment were carried out afresh with the new studies since 2013 that could now be considered. One of the problems with the IPCC having 6-year assessment cycle is that it takes time for new findings to feed through to the assessments that inform decision makers and policy makers.
“Nevertheless, I would caution against dismissing the slowdown in surface warming on the basis of this study, nor to downplay the role of natural decadal variability for short-term trends in climate. There are other datasets that still support a slowdown over some recent period of time, and there are intriguing geographical patterns such as cooling in large parts of the Pacific Ocean that were used to support explanations for the warming slowdown. It will be interesting to see if these patterns are still present in the revised NOAA dataset (the new paper shows only the global average temperature). Furthermore, a key feature of the apparent slowdown in surface warming was that it left the observed warming close to the bottom of the range of climate model projections of warming during the last few years at least. The newly revised NOAA data can be used to update that comparison, though it’s not likely to resolve that issue.”
———–
Dr Peter Stott, Head of Climate Monitoring and Attribution at the Met Office Hadley Centre, said:
“This is an interesting study which confirms that uncertainties in the global temperature record are one part of understanding the recent slowdown in warming. The slowdown hasn’t gone away, however – the results of this study still show the warming trend over the past 15 years has been slower than previous 15 year periods. While the Earth continues to accumulate energy as a result of increasing man-made greenhouse gas emissions these results also confirm that global temperatures have not increased smoothly. This means natural variability in the climate system or other external factors have still had an influence and it’s important we continue research to fully understand all the processes at work.
“Overall this study demonstrates the importance of further work in narrowing down uncertainties in global temperature datasets and in better understanding climate variability. These are areas the Met Office has been working on for a number of years. The numbers in this study are within the uncertainty ranges calculated in our own global temperature dataset and we’re in the midst of a long-term project to further improve and narrow down our understanding of uncertainties. Understanding variability in the rate of global average surface warming is an ongoing and active research topic.”
———–
Prof Richard Allan, Professor of Climate Science at the University of Reading, said:
“This study highlights the care that is required in turning measurements into a credible climate record.
“The most important new adjustment the authors make is to account for the changing coverage of ships and floating buoys which differ slightly in their temperature readings. Accounting for this discrepancy increases the temperature trend for the most recent period (since 1998) over the oceans and makes the recent global warming trends indistinguishable from those over the earlier 1950-1999 period.
“It remains a surprise that surface warming over the past 15 years is not larger than the 1950-1999 period which experienced quite slow global warming before the 1980s, in part due to a cooling effect from aerosol pollution and volcanic eruptions that counteracted the warming influences of greenhouse gas emissions.
“Warming was rapid in the 1980s and 1990s and it is curious that a comparison with these decades was not included in this new study. The past 15 years has undoubtedly been climatically unusual with atmospheric and oceanic circulation patterns unprecedented in the observational record.
“The authors importantly note that focus on understanding how climate varies from one decade to the next, motivated by unexpected and unusual changes in the oceans and atmosphere, is welcome and has advanced scientific understanding of our complex climate system.”
———–
Prof Piers Forster, Professor of Climate Change at the University of Leeds, said:
“Getting data on global temperature for climate is always hard as these observations were always designed for monitoring weather and don’t necessarily have long-term stability. Despite this, long-term trends in global temperature are very similar between the 4 more or less independent datasets that exist. Even the corrections talked about in this study make very little difference to the long-term trend. (The 1951-2012 period on left hand side of their fig. 1). So they are not grossly flawed but remarkably robust. They are more flawed when looking at shorter-term changes in datasets.
“Does this mean there has never been a hiatus? It depends how you look at it. Even with the corrections in this study, the observed warming has not been as large as predicted by models. Other global datasets, even when corrected for missing Arctic data, still show a decreased trend since 1998. I strongly dispute that the IPCC report got it wrong on the hiatus, and I think this is where the study really misrepresents the IPCC. The IPCC made a very cautious and preliminary assessment of the hiatus acknowledging that the change wasn’t significant. Further, I would still expect other observed datasets to have a clear hiatus. As the IPCC report bases its assessment on more than one set of observations, I would expect its conclusions to still hold up today.
“Generally the IPCC reports try to capture an evolving science. This is challenging but important work and policy makers need the most up-to-date information possible to make informed judgments.
“The study makes the important point that we need to look really carefully at data quality and issues of instrumental change. Yet there are several legitimate judgment calls made when combining datasets to make a global mean-time series. I still don’t think this study will be the last word on this complex subject.”
———–
Prof Jeffrey Kargel, Glaciologist at the University of Arizona, said:
“The results and conclusions reached by Thomas Karl and others are certainly in accord with what we are seeing amongst the world’s glaciers, where melting – retreat or thinning – is taking place very widely.
“The results are also consistent with broader disruptions in the global climate system that the world’s people are feeling. The idea being pushed blindly by some with vested interests that somehow the planet is not responding to continued emissions of greenhouse gases doesn’t make sense from a simple physics viewpoint; but the climate-change denialism also doesn’t sit well with people who can read the newspaper and watch the TV news about climate change in action and who can recognize the effects in their own experiences.”
———–
Prof Peter Wadhams, Professor of Ocean Physics at the University of Cambridge, said:
“This is a careful and persuasive analysis, and I think shows clearly that the so-called ‘hiatus’ does not exist and that global warming has continued over the past few years at the same rate as in earlier years.”
Posted on June 5, 2015 at 4:30 am, filed under Expert Reaction, Hot Topics and tagged Climate change, Environment, IPCC
The Climate Liars love that word “slowdown”, which they use instead of “pause” or “hiatus”.
You did good work, for the record.
For The Record:
Tagged And Bagged. The record of this is now preserved.
The SST data sets are a hodge podge of collection methods and standard.. How can anyone take them seriously? They are worse than the data sets from Stevenson Screens. Watts needs yet another project/paper: The incredulity of the SST record.
NOAA since the Federal reorganization that culminated in October 1972 has grown to become a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant Religious Institution (mostly Male) of the Federal Government.
As such, NOAA should allow their sexual aspirations to live, and not be given to restraint that can lead to psychological paralysis.
I encourage NOAA to release a Press Statement saying that the Earth has warmed more than 100 degrees C since 1950 and that the warming has caused the death of more than 300 Billion human beings.
How would NOAA explain this.
NOAA Representative: “Its a Miracle God Bless.”
Ha ha ja ja
It is of course unabashed data buggering. The only question is whether these people believe their own manipulations or are they out and out liars.
A look inside NOAA today. Ah.. 😉
Are subsequent measurements from the same thermometer not identified as such?
For land based surface stations each measurement is associated to a single station, from this is is easy to calculate a day to day change regardless of the magnitude of the temp, you can get an accurate trend. This the main process I use. It eliminates the whole trying to adjust the magnitude to obtain alignment. It is my belief this is the most accurate method of obtaining a trend.
Then any station with a full years trend can be compared. I believe this is the only accurate surface data.
If sst data is like wise associated to specific sources ,the same process can be used without any alignment adjustments. programmatic adjustments to large volumes of data,even with exceptional accuracy, there can be significant amounts of error, 10% errors on 1,000,000 measurements is 100,000 created errors that didn’t exist prior to trying to “fix” the data. Worse still is there’s no way to identify the bad data from the good.
The real takeaway from this paper isn’t whether or not the hiatus is real or not.
The real takeaway is that the folks at NOAA et al can use and abuse statistics to make the numbers say virtually anything. The could even tweet the numbers to make AGE go away.
The behavior of a politicized executive branch agency under the Obama Administration is by now to be expected. The Obama Admin mantra is firmly in the “If you aren’t lying, you aren’t rying” realm.
No, the real takeaway for me is that credibility of the AAAS is on hiatus, and possibly may fall fatally off the cliff in a few years when the fraud of this pseudoscience is exposed.
“If you aren’t lying you aren’t trying”
First chuckle of the day (-:
To claim that the Obama has politicized NOAA is just silly. NOAA (and NASA) are agencies now filled with the graduates of schools where AGW has been taught as fact for the past 30 years. Instead, NOAA and NASA have convinced Obama and the politicians of the Left that there’s a disaster looming. Maybe Raphi Cruz or Jebbers Bush could “clean house” if they came into office. But who would they put in there instead?
The moderate Left of 21st Century politics tends to take scientists’ statements at face value (yes, I call Obama a moderate — compared to my political creed, Obama is moderate Republican in the Eisenhower mold). Anyway, moderate Lefties implicitly trust that climate scientists are giving them an accurate assessments of the facts — because they worship science as being an infallible temple of pure thought (and forget that scientists are humans who are not immune to faults of humans). Most politicians are not grounded in the sciences. It would never occur to the current crop of Lefty politicians to look at the actual data, let alone pick it apart. And seriously, how can you expect politicians (who are not scientifically trained) NOT to take all the dire global warming warnings of the experts seriously? All they hear is that experts are screaming that the end is near. The fact that the experts may be distorting the facts never occurs to the politicians on the Left side of the political spectrum.
Whereas the moderate Left of the 21st Century are worshipful science and scientists , the radicalized Right of the 21st Century is manifestly anti-science. Probably half of the passengers riding in the Republican presidential clown car believe that the world was created 4004 BC. And the other half would claim they believed in the Biblical creation story (even if they didn’t), just to pander to the religious right. It would never occur to the radicalized Right to actually look at the actual data. These are the same guys that think a woman can shut down the viability of sperm if she were REALLY AND TRULY raped.
I love the give an take of the SCIENTIFIC discussion on WUWT. But the political snarking is just plain silly. Politicians are politicians. Take the politics elsewhere. Cheers!
beowulf888
Cleverly phrased, but dead wrong. NO republican candidate for president believes that, and very, very few “religious right” (as you exaggerate their conservative voters) believe that meme. It’s used – by the left and in their publicity for their propaganda and in their universities and in their parties.
But, no, fewer “right wing” “believes” that the world was created 6000 years ago than do the left wing that Bush brought down the World Trade Center.
I’ve been diagnosed with early stage AGE. My doctor says it’s inoperable and incurable. : )
Were any of the ships named “Yamal?”
Gavin Schmidt — I Got The Data In Me
(most sorry Kiki Dee)
I got no troubles at NASA
I’m a rocket nothing can stop
Survival’s always the first law
And I’m in with those at the top
I heat up
I cool down
A site I don’t like I discard it
The high and the mighty can frown
So say what they want they reward it
Man is the measure
Or all things that be
The Progressive Alliance
And its New Age Science
Say I got the data in me
I work in the mists and the fogs
By methods that none can review
To hide like a fox from the dogs
The premise of all that I do
The thermometers all want skilling
If their readings are not alarming
As the early one all need chilling
So the later ones all need warming
Man is the measure
Of all things that be!
What Portagoras said
Onto Nietzche led
So I got the data in me
The truth’s a consensus of thought
We agree to agree about
A joy for so long we have sought
Our minds ever free of all doubt
We are born uncertain of heart
And live in fear of things unknown
Consensus is truly the start
Of our souls becoming our own
Man is the measure
Of all things that be
To Progressive drums
The Superman comes
And I got the data in me
I heat up
I cool down
A site I don’t like I discard it
The high and the mighty can frown
So say what they want they reward it
Eugene WR Gallun
Spot on, once again!
INTERVIEW WITH TOM KARL. BBC’S ROLAND PEASE SOUNDS VERY ANNOYED. SAYS HE HAS LOADS OF PAPERS EXPLAINING THE PAUSE AND NOW THIS. THE INTERVIEW ENDS AT 8 MINS PLUS.
LISTEN FROM 7 MINS IN:
AUDIO: 4 June: BBC Science in Action with Roland Pease: No slow down in Global Warming
Evidence Against the Global Warming Pause
An analysis using updated global surface temperature data disputes the existence of a previously reported 21st century global warming slowdown. The new analysis suggests that there has been no discernible decrease in the rate of warming between the second half of the 20th century up to the present day. This period has been dubbed a global warming “hiatus.” This new analysis is sure to cause more controversy and debate…
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p02sbqd3
FOLLOWING IS WORTH LISTENING TO IN ISOLATION:
AUDIO: 47 secs: 4 June: BBC Science in Action: No global Warming Pause?
Professor Tom Karl, the director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Centres for Environmental Information (NCEI) explains to Roland Pease about how his analysis using updated global surface temperature data disputes the existence of a previously reported 21st century global warming slowdown or pause. The new analysis suggests that there has been no discernible decrease in the rate of warming between the second half of the 20th century up to the present day. This new analysis is sure to cause more controversy and debate.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p02sx3gs
BBC’s annoyance seems to show with the related links at the bottom of this Helen Briggs’ piece!
4 June: BBC: Helen Briggs: US scientists: Global warming pause ‘no longer valid’
“The IPCC’s statement of two years ago – that the global surface temperature ‘has shown a much smaller increasing linear trend over the past 15 years than over the past 30 to 60 years’ – is no longer valid,” said Dr Karl, the director of Noaa’s National Climatic Data Center.
More on this story
Global warming slowdown ‘could last another decade’
21 August 2014
Global warming pause ‘central’ to IPCC climate report
23 September 2013
Why has global warming stalled?
22 July 2013
http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-33006179
“The IPCC’s statement of two years ago – that the global surface temperature ‘has shown a much smaller increasing linear trend over the past 15 years than over the past 30 to 60 years’ – is no longer valid,” said Dr Karl, the director of Noaa’s National Climatic Data Center.
Is Dr Karl calling ALL OTHER DATASETS INVALID!?!? RSS, UAH, Hadcrut, etc?
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1998/mean:3/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1998/mean:3/trend/plot/gistemp/from:1998/mean:3/plot/rss/from:1998/mean:3/plot/rss/from:1998/trend
That is an absurd claim. The paper took a bad set of data with known problems, tried to patch it up with a whole bunch of adjustments of dubious merit, ans so bad data with dubious adjustment is now the best dataset ever? And is now being used to discredit far more consistent and reliable datasts, namely the RSS and UAH satellite measurements, etc.
And is it true or not true that rate of land warming was bigger in 80s and 90s than in 00s and 01s?
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/crutem3vgl/from:1980/mean:12
Is this a dumb question?
They computed that number by looking at places where both buoy data and ship data were collected in the same places, and they found the ship data on average was warmer by 0.12 oC. So they added that to the buoy data.
and
During the process of hauling the water up to the deck the temperature of the sample may change;
and
They computed that number by looking at places where both buoy data and ship data were collected in the same places, and they found the ship data on average was warmer by 0.12 oC. So they added that to the buoy data.
Surely they should have reduced the ship data which is acknowledged to be less reliable in the paper?
Here in Britain, there isn’t a huge reporting of this nonsense paper. The usual suspects are at it, of course, like the BBC, Guardian, and Independent, but it seems to be small beer up against Chinese hacking, FIFA, and the dragging onnnnnnnnnn of a possible Greek exit from the Euro. I think it may of been better if we all had ignored it – just my opinion. I don’t see it as a serious scientific study, one that should make anyone with a brain from thinking that the increase in warming hasn’t stalled. It has stalled, and we should be worried about ocean circulation patterns cooling the planet over the next few decades. The BBC, Guardian, and Independent can just go an hang themselves on their own agenda.
But junk science should be opposed anyway.
We shouldn’t let such bad practice survive. It looks harmless but eventually you end up with anti-vaccine activists spreading measles and anti-GM activists starving the poor.
This paper needs to be retracted. The inconsistency in the treatment of buoy and ship data alone invalidates this junk science.
I really do think that by fighting stuff like this we are wasting our time, and I seriously don’t think we should be drawing attention to this paper. We have to accept that there is junk science (most of it in the field of climatology). We can fight ignorance, like Prince Charles’ ramblings, and anti-MMR nutters, but climate science has a wealth of nonsense papers, and this is just another. There is no way they will retract it, and even if they did, I’m willing to actually bet money on it that the BBC, the Guardian, and the Independent wouldn’t report that it has been retracted. So by wailing about this paper we are just banging our heads against a wall. Let’s leave it to any honest scientists out there to protest against it – we should just be laughing at it. We’re wasting our time trying to get warmists (or those on the fence) to see that this paper is absurd anti-science. Let Jo Nova get at it. Frankly, I would have like to have seen Mr McKitrick call it out. I’m thankful for his contribution here, but would have liked to have seen him actually state that this is anti-science. Those in the field really need to see where their profession is heading when papers like this get past peer-review.
I’m with you Ghost.
The planet will do what the planet will do, and if there is significant cooling (with Arctic ice increasing), no matter what adjustments the warmists like to make to the data sets, or what excuses they put forward for the missing/hiding heat, they will lose traction.
Joe public will be influenced by how cold the winters are and how much extra they are having to pay for their energy usage. This is what will determing this faux science, especially if brown outs occur.
It is just unfortunate that all science will be tarnished by this debacle. The father sets the price, but it is the son that picks up and pays the bill. Future generations will lose out because of this.
The hiatus is a phenomenon of the last third / quarter of the satellite record.
Satellites measure both sea and land temperatures, globally, better than surface measurements.
So why are they talking about ships and buckets?
Did CAGW just kick the bucket?
If one looks at the satellite record, there are two ‘pauses’
The first is between 1979 and the run up to the Super El Nino of 1998, say between 1979 and 1996/7. During this period temperatures were flat, at any rate there was no statistically significant warming.
The second is post the 1998 Super El Nino to date, say between 1998 and 2015. Once again, during this period temperatures were flat, at any rate there was no statistically significant warming.
In the satellite record, there is only a one off isolated warming that of and occasioned by the 1998 Supe El nino that resulted in a step change in temperatures of about 0.15/0,2degC. A natural phenomena, not manmade warming.
As you observe, the satellite record is very much influenced by ocean temperatures. This is not surprising since it has the best global coverage and oceans make up about 65% of the globe.
What the satellite is telling us is that there was no dramatic change in ocean surface temperatures between launch and about 1996/7, and again no change in ocean surface temperatures between about 1998/9 and to date, but there has been a release of temperature on about 0.15/0.2degC into the atmosphere in and around the Super El Nino of 1998.
We know from ARGO (which is of sparse duration) and from the satellite data (which like all the data sets has its own issues) that there has been no rise in ocean surface temperature durining the period of the ‘hiatus’/’pause’
Oceans cover almost 71% of the planet, about 61% in the NH and 81% in the SH.
Speaking of K15 reminds me of this ill-fated nautical venture:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMS_K15
sturgishooper June 5, 2015 at 6:47 am
The figure I suggested was a ball park guestimate since the satellite does not sample the extremely high latitude oceans.
Let’s see these “high” temperatures in the eastern Pacific.
http://oi59.tinypic.com/2mcfwp5.jpg
http://www.ospo.noaa.gov/data/sst/contour/global_small.fc.gif
If the historical surface record data is so bad that is continually requires all manner of adjustment – the extent where the adjustment now accounts for such a large part of the claimed trend – why isn’t it jettisoned completely for the purposes of monitoring ongoing climate change?
We now have perfectly good more reliable satellite data with a good track record. Surely that is all that is needed now, except for when you want to look at pre-industrial trends.
Thanks Ross for a good and informative article.
Summary of 2008 Atlantic Tropical Cyclone Activity and Verification of Author’s Seasonal and Monthly Forecasts (Philip J. Klotzbach and William M. Gray, Department of Atmospheric Science Colorado State University, Nov. 2008) [http://tropical.atmos.colostate.edu/Forecasts/2008/nov2008/nov2008.pdf]: “The global warming arguments have been given much attention by many media references to recent papers claiming to show such a linkage. Despite the global warming of the sea surface that has taken place over the last 3 decades, the global numbers of hurricanes and their intensity have not shown increases in recent years except for the Atlantic. The Atlantic has seen a very large increase in major hurricanes during the 14-year period of 1995-2008 (average 3.9 per year) in comparison to the prior 25-year period of 1970-1994 (average 1.5 per year). This large increase in Atlantic major hurricanes is primarily a result of the multi-decadal increase in the Atlantic Ocean thermohaline circulation (THC) that is not directly related to global sea surface temperatures or CO2 gas increases. Changes in ocean salinity are believed to be the driving mechanism. These multi-decadal changes have also been termed the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO).”
http://woodfortrees.org/graph/esrl-amo/from:1950/to:1980/trend/plot/esrl-amo/from:1980/to:2010/trend/plot/esrl-amo/from:2010/trend/plot/esrl-amo/from:1950
http://appinsys.com/globalwarming/amo.htm
How gentle, cautious, and “respectful” we are with those who rob us at the gunpoint.
Science? What science? Do little green-eyed obamas of this world care about science?
Data? Adjust it as needed. Facts? When did politicians bothered to look at facts?
Blatant falsification of data is what it is, to make us pay for the global green fascism.
It is a fundamental error to show respect for criminals.
They will only laugh harder all the way to the bank.
Well said Alexander. Obama says this is war. I say yes. Bring on the battle. Truth must win.
We have seen this before. “We have to get rid of the mediaeval warm period”. Torture data. Voila. No mediaeval warm period. Deliver to TAR. Now we have to get rid of the hiatus. Torture data. Voila. No hiatus. Deliver to Paris.
I wonder where the border lies between tortured data and fraud and will the maintainers of GISTEMP be the first to be investigated for defrauding the government for grant money.
Rhetorically, you ask what is the borderline between tortured data and fraud?
This immediately requires the follow up question to be answered; what is the difference between a subsidy and a bribe, particularly where the subsidy is garnnished by using tortured data to claim that we face imminent disaster if CO2 emissions are not cut back and a subsidy is required to cut those emissions?
Isn’t the wind industry founded upon such?
If the FBI truly have cojones, there would be many who would have sleepless nights.
So let me get this straight: the 17 year ‘pause’ is being ‘revoked’ by taking the least reliable data source known to man (SSTs), carrying out all kinds of arbitrary ‘corrections’ to that data to generate the data most agreeable to the warmist cabal, and then we are all told we have to bow down before them and say ‘Oh Holy Father, please will you forgive my sins of scientific correctness, I truly repent and will carry out the penances of working as your lowly research assistant for the next ten years until the warming religion has been spread to all far-flung corners of the world, at which point all the Warming High Priests will live in mansions, be paid $250,000 a year plus a fairly limitless expense account and will never admit error and never express regret’.
Is that it??
I personally would prefer to ditch the older, less reliable records and base policy on the newer more accurate ones using satellites.
This is of course anti-scientific as you should always throw away accurate consistent records in favour of less accurate, more inconsistent ones.
Shouldn’t you??
Rtj1211
“the 17 year ‘pause’ is being ‘revoked’ by taking the least reliable data source known to man (SSTs), carrying out all kinds of arbitrary ‘corrections’ ”
Not really. They agreed that the cooler data set made with one set of instruments was valid before. The higher data set made with a different set was more recently valid, they said.
So what to do? Start with a weighted sample of the lower temp data set and progressively factor in the higher set reducing the influence of the cooler data set a little more each year.
The result is an upward trend that can continue for a limited time as eventually the hotter data set dominates the whole result after enough time. If there is no warming at all, the calculated value as the data shifts from the cooler to the higher measurement produces an ‘upward trend’. It s a mathematical artefact, not really warmer. If a cooling kicks in they will claim it is a pause.
They have needed to make skeptic politicians who speak of “no warming for X years” as wrong. They need the narrative of constant warming to show ‘it keeps getting worse’.
“So let me get this straight: the 17 year ‘pause’ is being ‘revoked’ by taking the least reliable data source known to man (SSTs), carrying out all kinds of arbitrary ‘corrections’ to that data to generate the data most agreeable to the warmist cabal,..”
Yes: Bad data + bad adjustments + bad (political messaging) intentions = GIGO science that will be called “good”.
The abstract should have read: “Torture data enough and it confesses to anything. Here, we torture the data to confess to having no pause….”
if you dont want to mess with buckets, then just us UAH or RSS. Prof Curry made a good point that the data is just gotten really good globally its not the last 20 years that needs adjustments, and prior years, well, and adjustments are speculative and will introduce as much potential error as they may erase. (eg, the error of using a simply global adjustment instead of by region seems prone to error-propagation).
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/crutem3vgl/from:1980/mean:13
The basic conclusion of this paper is that if you change the data, you can change the trend. Its hard to argue with that.
Mpaul
That is indeed the main conclusion I draw from the exercise.
I have been trying to think of a suitable analogy to highlight “the buoys trick”. This is my best shot so far:
Task: Calculate the average height of a group mountain peaks.
Those who arrived first were 20 km away and produced their measurements first. Some walked closer and produced measurements from the closest vantage point 10 km away. The second set of measurements were slightly higher than the first.
Both sets of teams continued to make measurements but additional teams took up positions at 10 km. A look through any data set shows the mountain peaks were, for a time, increasing in elevation but the growth stopped about 20 years ago. Everyone agrees on the trends. Tectonics is the principle assumed contributor.
A team of scientists determines to make it appear that the mountain peaks are still increasing in elevation. (Why, is not clear because they are not, but that is their desire.)
They examine the methods made at a distance of 20 km and conclude that those groups were slightly over-estimating the heights and produce a set of corrected results based on their interpretation of the methods applied.
They also note that the number of teams working at the 20 km distance has reduced to nearly none and the number of teams working at 10 km has increased.
The authors of Karl et al produced an ‘elevation report’ that uses their “corrected” 20km measurements and average them with a few of the 10 km numbers from the same starting date. For more recent dates, the number of 20 km measurements is the same but more of the higher 10 km numbers are included. For even more recent dates the weighting of 10 km measurements is increased more and more. This is done through the period where it is generally agreed there was no increase in height, when the tectonic movement evidently ceased.
But the output numbers of Karl’s team continue to show an increase as they are averaging two data sets giving increasing weight to the higher set with the passage of time. Eventually of course the output will be indistinguishable from the 10km data set.
The claim is the problem. No one will dispute that performing this processing of the data will produce a rising final value as the 10km measurements are consistently higher than the 20 km measurements. The claim is that the height of the mountains has continued to rise! No! The height of the mountains is known! All Karl et al have done is to produce a list of numbers that have an upward trend. This newly calculated list of numbers does not represent anyone’s set of measurements, nor is it the average of the 10 or 20km data sets. It is just a set of numbers created by selecting and weighting the data set values in a manner that varies with time.
No bystander would conclude that the list of resulting numbers represents the height of the mountain peaks. The authors claim that it does, and further, that the mountains are still increasing in height. The method applied is clearly described and the main claim is therefore patently untrue. The ‘rise’ is just an artefact of the evolving averaging procedure.
In the same vein as “Mike’s Nature trick” we should call this “the Buoys Trick” as it uses the data from the buoys to produce a list of numbers that rise from two sets of numbers that do not (referring to the period of the ‘pause’).
One might apply the “Buoys trick” to divergent temperature data sets for the mid-troposphere to produce ‘the hot spot’ where none exists, provided the data sets are consistently different in value and the ‘right’ amount of selective weighting is applied. If the goal is to generate a list of numbers of increasing value all you need is two data sets with a consistent difference.
The charts produced by McKitrick show the result of using the Buoys Trick on the global temperature data sets: a rise in numbers where there is no temperature rise. Karl et al did not produce a plot of temperatures, we already had the temperatures. They produced a plot of calculated numbers then claimed, erroneously, that the numbers represent the global temperature, which we already have and which differ from their numbers. The numbers do not represent the global temperature.
The paper can stand as a number generating algorithm because methods and data are provided. The main claim cannot, however, because it is untrue.
?Is there a dataset for temps. EXCLUSIVELY reported from buoys. It seems to be the real effect of Karl et al’s adjustments is to reduce massively the importance of non-buoy reporting. If buoys-only shows the same trend, it would be some support for the chosen adjustments to the total dataset, though it might raise other questions. Lazy I am: I haven’t read the K15 paper, so maybe this is already covered by the authors….
NOOA is well known amongst the climate science community for cooking the data books like a Thanksgiving turkey. They should be investigated like FIFA for decades of fraud and corruption.
The decrease in solar activity and AMO will significantly reduce the temperature of the North Atlantic. Already this winter it was very visible.
http://oi61.tinypic.com/rqx9gl.jpg
I made the following post at carbonbrief.org ( http://www.carbonbrief.org/blog/2015/06/no-slowdown-in-global-surface-temperatures-after-all/ )
This morning it has been removed. I have followed it up with a message for them:
I do not expect that to survive long either. I made a similar post (less the final sentence) here:
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/early/2015/06/03/science.aaa5632.full
I do not expect it to be published. However, if they find themselves inundated with similar comments it surely will send a message.
Update:
Evidently I shamed them at Carbon Brief:
https://disqus.com/home/discussion/carbonbrief/no_slowdown_in_global_surface_temperatures_after_all_new_study_finds_carbon_brief/#comment-2063291880
“accidental”? You judge.
“Science” like this is a few rungs below Phrenology, but it doesn’t matter. The MSM are already running with its press release.
https://thepointman.wordpress.com/2013/07/05/the-pause/
Pointman
This story is being touted Large on the BBC with a lady blatantly misrepresenting the research, claiming the ‘group of highly respected scientists’ have adjusted some data, taken some data and added land data and some ‘new data’ and shown that the hiatus is not there, the current rate of warming is almost the equal of the rate in the last century. And she really said ‘It’s worse than we thought’! I could not believe my ears.
She didn’t dare mention ‘deniers’ but left the impression she wanted to, very much. She lied about there being no warming in the 21st century saying instead that it had continued at a lower rate ‘giving the impression that there was almost a slight pause’.
This indicates they know very well there has been a dead stop and they were losing the argument about GHG’s and temperature. She went on about ‘we know we are pumping out GHG’s and that most of the temperature rise has been caused by human emissions.’
So everything has been fixed up then. The warming is back on track. I presume that the warming will ‘continue’ then. Let’s watch and see.
Got a link, Crispin?
No I saw it live on BBC World. When they ran is a second time I gagged and switched to the pap served on CNBC.
Something I have noticed is how much better stock traders are at interpreting charts than climate ‘scientists’.
Please see my new long comment above on the Buoys Trick with, hopefully, a helpful analogy.
JustfiyGlobalWarmingPanic:
BEGIN
For case in all data sets DO
IF (Uncertainty Of Case high) THEN
method=SelectMethodThatGivesWarmingTrend
ADJUST case USING method
ENDIF
ENDDO
END
When will this obfuscation of data end? As a scientist myself I am utterly appalled by this adjustment of observations to fit a prior hypothesis. FIFA have more integrity than this cabal of so called scientists.
Maybe it wasn’t their idea to disappear the Pause? The boss is always right, even when wrong.
IMHO, the unintended consequences of this move will be more beneficial than the Pause itself.
The sea surface and marine air temps were taken at 0000/0600/1200/1800 GMT every day that a Mobile maritime reporting station was at sea. As the ships were moving at up to 400 miles per day through the time zones there was no knowing what the local times were. The data was used for marine forecasting so a fixed GMT time of obs was important. The data, taken to the nearest half degree, was taken with different instruments, by different methods, by different people. When the sea temp thermometers got broken they were thrown and a new one used. Some ships used sea inlets. In ballast they would be 15ft below the surface and loaded, 45 feet below the surface. Most ships operated on the coasts and did not report. Most deep sea ships operated in the North Atlantic, Gulf routes and China Hong Kong Routes. Virtually no one ventured into the southern oceans or South Pacific. Stevenson screens were often above Black or red rubber compound decks. Some on the monkey island, were 50 feet above the ocean one way and 25feet high going the other way. It is such a complete farce to be using these figures for anything other than their original purpose, local weather forecasting, that it is sufficient to self mock these stuffed up academics who would not recognise a door to the outside unless it had exit written on it, let alone understand the conditions that prevailed at sea on a hundred thousand different ships over 65 years. My advice to them is get over yourselves. You just make yourselves look more stupid every day. The list of Phd’s pontificating about sea temps that they have no knowledge or comprehension of shows them for what they are. Dumbasses
To remove the hiatus and turn it into a rising trend, the “adjustment amount” has to change over time.
As -0.3C in the past and +0.3C in the most recent years.
What is the rationale for the changes over time. Does Doctor “line-going-up” Karl show the changes through time in his paper.
Bring on the clowns…
The NCDC is really saying that all the thermometre manufacturers and users in the past somehow screwed up this very simple calibration that even 8 year olds seem to understand with little problem.
http://www.physicsclassroom.com/Class/thermalP/u18l1b3.gif
Perhaps, Karl et al could save us trillions of dollars and fiddle a bit more and make all signs of AGW disappear
That is a good idea. If the method is valid it can equally be applied to produce a declining list of numbers from the very same set of data sets Karl et al used.
Yes indeed, this will give the CLimate Liar’s term “slowdown” traction and respectability, appearing more nuanced and reasonable by comparison. A slowdown is way easier to explain away, without resorting to “hidden heat”.
There was no global warming hiatus………………just like there was no “Dust Bowl” with record heat during the decade of the 1930’s or “Little Ice Age” or “Medieval Warm Period” (-:
Those were all recorded at a time when humans were completely incompetent and unable to accurately represent weather and climate………………so we need to go back and adjust the records to fix their exaggerated observations.
http://a-sceptical-mind.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/Comparison-charts.jpg
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._state_temperature_extremes
If the buoy data is the best then what trend does it show by itself? If that data by itself shows the pause then clearly the claims from Karl et al are wrong. Has anyone looked at this data separated from the ship data?
It seems that the latest alarmist strategy for misleading the public is to blame on man all extreme climate events , even if they are only slightly bigger than the one they have personal knowledge of. They claim that the extra rainfall, floods, storms, heat waves, cold waves, hurricanes, sea level changes, snowfall, etc., are all due to man induced global warming or climate change. Now they are proposing to change the figures to do away with the pause in global temperature increases.
Yet according to the US government’s own climate data, the observable data does not support this claim. Why not? Very simple, there is little global warming happening in North America during the last 10 years. NOAA own climate data shows that for 34 out of 48 sates or 70 % of the states in Contiguous US, the trend of annual temperature anomalies is declining at 0.69F/decade . Only 8 Pacific coast states, including the Northwest, West and Southwest and 6 Northeast states show warming. A similar pattern appears in Canada where 7 out of 11 climate regions show declining annual temperature departures since 1998, one is flat and 3 show warming from the 1961-1990 base. In other words 73 % of Canadian climate regions are also not experiencing global warming. Only the Pacific and Atlantic and the High Arctic regions show warming in North America and this is because they are being moderated by the oceans or ENSO events. Even in the Canadian far north including Tundra, Fiords and Mountains there has been a 6 degree drop in temperatures since 2010
So this fabricated notion that somehow this falsely reported warming climate of North American continent is caused by man and that this is somehow making more extreme weather events and making them worse is pure nonsense espoused by those who cannot explain temperature pause or that increased carbon dioxide levels have only a very minor impact on our North American climate, which is completely opposite to the AGW flawed theory
This is exactly what the surface data shows, the warming was due to changes in where the oceans stored it’s collection of warm water, altering the jet stream, which changed the daily minimum temp surface temps where most of the surface stations are, then when you add the ~18F daily temp increase, it got warmer than it did previously, and now we’re in the process of it switching back.
On average then, Canada is cooling. Waterloo hasn’t warmed in one hundred years.
Some (very basic) questions:
1. If a bucket is tossed overboard then brought back and the temperature of the water measured, the temperature being measured is presumably at or close to the surface. How much difference in temperature is there between surface temperature and the temperature at the inlet for cooling water for the engine(s)?
2. Has anyone ever measured how much difference in temperature there is between the water in the bucket and the temperature where the bucket collected its sample?
3. What is the precision of the thermometers inserted into the buckets? of the thermometers at the cooling-water inlets?
Ian M
I think other comments touched on your question, Ian.
What time of day was it? The profile of the near surface waters changes at night.
Was the air cooler or hotter than the water, and by how much? If we do not know the air temp, we cannot guess how much and how quickly the water will change temp in the bucket.
These measurements are so haphazard they are worthless for estimating global temperature.
There are known and unknown sources of error. Massaging such data in some carefully contrived way can obviously give any result one might wish to achieve.
I see not one hint that the method given in this new paper is in any way empirical.
In fact, it seems to be a particularly ham-handed effort to decide what he result needs to be, and then doing what it takes to get that result.
Finally……A massage with a happy ending! 😉
Can I just interject the loathing of this paper (and rightful loathing it is too) with a bit of realism? The FACT is that warming IS continuing, it is! It’s just nothing, nothing at all like we were told it would be. I know Moncky boy likes to use RSS, but if you choose HadCRUt4, the warming IS continuing.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1998/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1998/trend:1998
Until that warming stops, and it actually starts cooling (which I think it will), then we don’t have much of a case. And we are in danger of pissing on our own chips if asked to justify the ‘pause’. 21st century warming is still on an upward trajectory. UAH shows this too.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/uah/from:1998/plot/uah/from:1998/trend:1998
We are missing a trick here. PLEASE, people, we should be banging on about the IPCC’s projections, and how far out they were/are. We should be arguing that spending trillions is unnecessary and futile – howsoever the warming is caused.
WHEN, and only when, the 21st century shows a downward trend, then we should set up a fund to pay for full-page advertisements in all the big global dailys, with a simple graph and a footnote, telling the public that they are being conned by their own governments, and by silent scientists. But I say again, the FACT is that warming IS continuing…it simply is. Deal with it. Let’s just wait, and watch.
Oh what fun! I just love to play games with an online etch- a- sketch. See what I’ve made? I looked at RSS for the past decade and blew your conjecture out of the lower troposphere (or did I?)
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/rss/from:2005/plot/rss/from:2005/trend:2005
Here are some more pretty RSS graphs, clearly showing cooling at a increasing rate since 1997.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/rss/from:1997/trend/plot/rss/from:1990/plot/rss/from:2001/trend
Incidentally, your UAH data is out of date, the latest release is much closer to RSS.
http://www.drroyspencer.com/2015/04/version-6-0-of-the-uah-temperature-dataset-released-new-lt-trend-0-11-cdecade/
Did you have anything besides ad hom, cherry-picking, shouting and handwaving?
Thought not.
I am running some of the historical temperatures since 1900, and I’m coming up with a much different answer. First of all, I added more weight to the 1900s era thermometers that were in hot springs in Yellowstone, then in the 2000s data I added more weight to the thermometers in Alaska. The results are shocking.
The planet went from an average temperature of 89C (unlivable, imo) in 1900 to -15C in 2014 (also unlivable). If this cooling trend keeps up, we’re all gonna die!
I think it pretty clear that Karl and his team started with the result, and worked backwards from there. This is science at its very worst.
Frankly, I do NOT trust NOAA to give us the truth because as a government agency, they are now forced to advance government policy rather than be an honest broker. Bear in mind, the shrillness of climate alarmists is increasing as we approach a Paris climate treaty meeting and they realize it is likely to be another failure.
I find it peculiar that NOAA also wants to take on the IPCC which is what climate skeptics do.
Somehow, this doesn’t pass the smell test, but I could be wrong.
During 1993-1996, I was New Jersey State Sea Grant Director. NOAA’s Marine Fisheries Services (NMFS- Now NOAA Fisheries) was housed in the building next door. During their off-hours, NMFS scientists were involved with the activist movement promoting certain pro-environmental issues. When speaking publicly, they identified themselves as NMFS Scientists (giving the impression NIMFS supported that particular environmental agenda item), which at the time was contrary to policy that allowed government employees to speak as citizens but not as representatives of their employer/agency
If we look at the chart AMO, it is seen that the temperature difference exceeds 0.5 degree. At minimum of the sun the temperature drops even lower. Europe and Northeast US should be to prepare for 30 years a significant cool down.
http://woodfortrees.org/graph/esrl-amo/from:1950/to:1980/trend/plot/esrl-amo/from:1980/to:2010/trend/plot/esrl-amo/from:2010/trend/plot/esrl-amo/from:1950
“Looking at the first adjustment, K15 take the buoy data and add 0.12 oC to each observation. They computed that number by looking at places where both buoy data and ship data were collected in the same places, and they found the ship data on average was warmer by 0.12 oC. So they added that to the buoy data. This is similar to the amount estimate found by another teams, though the bias is usually attributed to ships rather than buoys:”
‘places where both buoy data and ship data were collected in the same places,”
Don’t tell me there is another spaghetti graph involved which may hide the decline.
I wonder if (Un)Real Climate will be brazen enough to have a puff-piece about this wonderful paper?
0.1 deg.C./Decade (period of 60 years) = 0.00167 deg.C./year = 0.00000456 deg.C./day = 0 deg.C for each day of the last 60 years, on average.
Congratulations Karl, you have just shown that there has been no measurable change, on average, in global temperature for the last 60 years on a daily basis. What an accomplishment!
Surely you are discussing with your NOAA supervisor a plan for you to retire and return to your office the next day by becoming a consultant with a $250,000 yearly salary plus your retirement money, paid in bi-weekly increments.
Ha ha
‘- this is something that needs to be debated by specialists in the field.’
____
reminds on banks specialists manipulating the libor:
Libor – “London Inter-Bank Offer Rate” – but there are also the EU’s Euribor, China’s Shibor and Japan’s Tibor.
____
in the case of libor there where huge fines on concerned banks.
In Climate Science seemingly anything goes / is allowed.
Regards – Hans
atmosphere is comprised 0.04% CO2 from all causes- man’s contribution is 3.4% of that 0.04%- meaning the content of CO2 I nthe atmosphere from man is just 0.00137% of the atmosphere- Can someone pelase explain to me how just 0.00137% of our atmosphere can be ‘almost entirely responsible for climate change’? How can 0.00137% of our atmosphere possibly capture enough ir molecules to back radiate them to cause global climate change? What % of that 0.00137% even actually gets back radiated I nthe ‘right’ direction back to earth? As I understand it, absorbed heat molecules get radiate out in ALL directions, meaning that only a fractio nof that is captured even makes it way back in the ‘right’ direction to earth
Ross writes:”That quote refers to a paper by Kennedy et al. (2011 Table 5)[5] which reports a mean bias of +0.12 C. However, Kennedy et al. also note that the estimate is very uncertain: it is 0.12 +/- 1.7C ! ”
Here Ross is referring to the standard deviation of the individual values, but what we’re interested in is the error of the sample mean. Per Kennedy et al’s Table 5 the standard error of the mean is +/- 0.02C.
It should also be noted that whether one decreases engine intake values or increases buoy data the trend result is the same.
Ross also states that the Hirahari group used region-specific adjustments; this is incorrect. Hirahari et al specifically say: “The biases appear to vary regionally and seasonally with large biases in the Central North Pacific and the southern oceans. However, sampling data are insufficient to attribute the features to the ERI bias. Thus, only the global mean bias is used. So though they note regional variability, they used the global mean.
I also find it troubling that Ross can quote Hirahari to cast aspersions on the use of NMAT data, when Hirahari says – IN THE SENTENCE IMMEDIATELY FOLLOWING THE PORTION ROSS QUOTED – “The use of NMAT to adjust SST data is, to an extent, unavoidable as the heat loss from a bucket does depend on the air-sea temperature difference.
Being polite is not a substitute for being correct. This post has too many errors to be of any real use.
Your quote about use of NMAT being unavoidable is not in Hirahari at all, much less IN! THE! SENTENCE! IMMEDIATELY! FOLLOWING!!!!!!!! it is in Kennedy et al. In any case I wasn’t trying to cast aspersions on NMAT, I was pointing out that other teams use metadata rather than relying exclusively on a mechanical NMAT-based adjustment. As for the error bar, the uncertainty of site-specific adjustments are indicated by the SD, not the SE of the mean.
When the history of the 20th century is written, the names Tom Karl and Sepp Blatter will be mentioned in the same sentence as examples of the same contemporary phenomenon, the workings of organisations that were untouchable political totems “too big to fail”, blindly trusted until discovered to be riddled to the core by corruption and dishonesty. Ten million dollars was the going rate for a world cup, and is probaby also about the price on a result-U-like paper like Karl et al. 2015, served up as an hors d’oevre for the Paris carve up of political and tax-raising power.
“The IPCC’s statement of two years ago – that the global surface temperature ‘has shown a much smaller increasing linear trend over the past 15 years than over the past 30 to 60 years’ – is no longer valid,” said Dr Karl, the director of Noaa’s National Climatic Data Center.
This all looks and smells like a political contrivance, as opposed to science. In fact it looks and smells very similar to a well-known situation from many years ago. When “stories” woven by the Nixon White House relative to the Watergate break-in began to unravel, reporters started to bore in to the White House spokesman, Ronald Ziegler. His response became quite famous.
To Quote from the NYT:
… on April 17, 1973, Nixon stunned reporters by saying that he had conducted an investigation that raised the prospect of involvement by White House officials.
Mr. Ziegler told a puzzled press corps that this was now the ”operative statement,” repeating the word operative six times. Finally, R. W. Apple Jr. of The New York Times asked, ”Would it be fair for us to infer, since what the president said today is now considered the operative statement, to quote you, that the other statement is no longer operative, that it is now inoperative?”
Eventually Mr. Ziegler replied: ”The president refers to the fact that there is new material; therefore, this is the operative statement. The others are inoperative.
From The Nation; The Nondenial Denier
By TODD S. PURDUM
Published in the NYT, February 16, 2003
Fortunately, the IPCC had very high confidence in the science then, and Karl has very high confidence now. So even if the story changes again tomorrow we can all sleep well knowing that the confidence level will always be high;)