Or In a Discussion of the Hiatus Since 1998, Grant Foster Presents Trends from 1970 to 2010, Go Figure!
Guest Post by Bob Tisdale
Statistician Grant Foster (a.k.a. blogger Tamino, who also likes to call himself Hansen’s Bulldog) is back to his one of his old debate tactics again: redirection. Or maybe a squirrel passed by and, like Dug the talking dog from Pixar’s Up, Hansen’s Bulldog simply lost track of the topic at hand.
For some reason, Grant Foster wants to keep drawing attention to the fact that the night marine air temperature data that NOAA used as a reference do not support the changes NOAA made to their sea surface temperature data…and I am more than happy to discuss this topic yet another time.
BACKSTORY – THE EXCHANGE
Grant Foster didn’t like my descriptions of the new NOAA ERSST.v4-based global surface temperature products in my post Both NOAA and GISS Have Switched to NOAA’s Overcooked “Pause-Busting” Sea Surface Temperature Data for Their Global Temperature Products. So he complained about them in his post New GISS data. His rant began:
Of course, deniers are frothing at the mouth about the change. The “hit man” for WUWT, Bob Tisdale has been insulting it as much as he can. He keeps saying things like “Overcooked “Pause-Busting” Sea Surface Temperature Data” and “unjustifiable, overcooked adjustments presented in Karl et al. (2015)” and “magically warmed data.”
And Grant Foster didn’t like that I presented the revised UAH lower troposphere data in a positive light.
I responded to Grant Foster’s complaints (a.k.a. Hansen’s Bulldog’s whines) with the post Fundamental Differences between the NOAA and UAH Global Temperature Updates. The bottom line of it was:
The changes to the UAH dataset can obviously be justified, while the changes to the NOAA data obviously cannot be.
I even reminded readers that the topic of discussion was the slowdown in global surface warming, or the hiatus.
Refering to another topic in Tamino’s post, I wonder if Tamino would prefer the term “hiatus busting” instead of “pause busting”, considering that Karl et al (2015) used the term hiatus, not pause, in the title of their paper Possible artifacts of data biases in the recent global surface warming hiatus. Mmm, probably not, because Tamino uses the same misdirection as NOAA did in Karl et al.
THAT LEADS US TO THE TOPIC OF THIS POST
Obviously, Grant Foster missed that paragraph about the hiatus, the pause, the slowdown, whatever you want to call it…or Hansen’s Bulldog got sidetracked by a squirrel, because he replied with the post Fundamental Differences between Bob Tisdale and Reality.
Grant Foster started with my comparison graph of the new ERSST.v4 data and the HADNMAT2 data, which served as a reference for the ERSST.v4 data. See Figure 1.
Figure 1
The data clearly show that NOAA cannot justify the excessive warming rate during the global warming slowdown because the warming rate of the NOAA data is far higher than the dataset they used as reference. Yet Grant Foster included that graph in his post.
Note: If you’re wondering why the data in the graph ends in 2010, that’s the last year of the HADNMAT2 data at the KNMI Climate Explorer. We’ll address the start year of 1998 in a moment. [End note.]
Foster did not dispute my trend presentation; he simply replicated my graph (without the trends) in the first of his three graphs, which I’ve included as the top cell of my Figure 2. Then Grant Foster switched topics (timeframes) and presented two graphs that began in 1970, which I’ve included as Cells B & C of Figure 2.
Figure 2
About his 2nd and 3rd graphs (Cells B & C), Grant Foster writes (my boldface):
That certainly destroys the impression from Bob’s cherry-picked graph. But wait — is the NMAT trend estimate “much lower” and the ERSSTv4 trend estimate “much higher”? Well, that from NMAT is 0.0116 deg.C/yr, from ERSSTv4 it’s 0.0117 deg.C/yr. [sarcasm] Big difference! [\sarcasm]
“Cherry-picked?” How silly can Grant Foster get?!!! The topic at hand is the hiatus as described by Karl et al., not the trends starting in 1970. Only Grant (and his followers) are interested in the trends from 1970 to 2010.
And what was one of the years that Karl et al. used for the start of the slowdown in global surface warming?
Grant Foster failed to tell his readers that Karl et al. used 1998 as the start year for many of their trend comparisons. I’ve circled them on Figure 1 from Karl et al., which is included as my Figure 3. For the oceans, Karl et al. compared their “new” ERSST.v4 data to their “old” ERSST.v3b data.
Figure 3
Also see the note at the bottom of Figure 3. One of the bases for the following two posts was the failure of Karl et al. to include trend comparisons of their new (overcooked) sea surface temperature dataset and the night marine air temperature dataset they used as a reference for their changes:
- More Curiosities about NOAA’s New “Pause Busting” Sea Surface Temperature Dataset, and,
- Open Letter to Tom Karl of NOAA/NCEI Regarding “Hiatus Busting” Paper
And I introduced Figure 1 in the latter of those two posts.
CLOSING
Hansen’s Bulldog (Grant Foster, a.k.a. Tamino) chooses to mislead his readers by ignoring the fact that Karl et al. used the start year of 1998 for many of their short-term trend comparisons, thereby making him look foolish when he claims that I’ve cherry-picked 1998 as the start year for my comparison. Anyone who read and understood Karl et al. (2015) can see the obvious failure in Tamino’s silly attempt at redirection.
Grant Foster did not dispute the trends listed on my Figure 1, which he included in his post.
Those trends showed, for the period of 1998 (a start year used by Karl et al. for trend comparisons) to 2010 (the end year of the HADNMAT2 data), that NOAA’s new ERSST.v4 sea surface temperature dataset had a much higher warming rate than the HADNMAT2 data, which NOAA used as reference for their adjustments.
In other words, NOAA overcooked the adjustments to their new ERSST.v4 data, which serve as the ocean component of the GISS and NCEI (formerly NCDC) global land+ocean surface temperature products.
Once again I have to thank Grant Foster (a.k.a. Tamino and Hansen’s Bulldog) for yet another opportunity to show that NOAA cannot justify the relatively high warming rate of their new ERSST.v4 sea surface temperature data during the hiatus, because it far exceeds the trend of the HadNMAT2 data that NOAA used as a reference.
[Side Note to Tom Karl/NOAA: Think of all of the web traffic that WattsUpWithThat gets. It dwarfs other global-warming blogs. You can blame Grant Foster for the last two posts about your overcooked ERSST.v4 data. Have a nice day.]
@William Howard Astley, July 21, 2015 at 4:50 pm
Thank you for an excellent summary William. The lapse rate is a concept that I am trying to understand better. You have helped me.
Doug
Why does the author think that the trends in SST and NMAT should be the same over any period?
There’s nothing in the detailed procedures outlined in the papers describing ERSSTv4 (and the source documents they references) that suggest that.
the bottom line is AGW has been reduced to a squabble over a manipulated squiggly line measuring in the hundreths of a degree. conclusio:- its not about the science anymore its about being right or wrong i expect a majority of the flock will begin to fall away whilst the diehards like Hansens lapdog to cling on until the bitter end.
The bottom line mate, is this.
One could completely exclude
all ocean surface temp data from consideration and there would still
be overwhelming evidence of , not just
warming, but specicifically AGW.
There is not just one stream of evidence.
Right on global warming, though it’s paused;
Wrong on attribution, don’t know how it’s caused.
==================
There’s that ‘overwhelming evidence’ again. I still haven’t seen it. Specifically AGW? I don’t think so.
Put up or the other thing.
Mate.
I’m sure the IPCC would love to hear from you, as they’ve not managed to locate this ‘overwhelming evidence’ after decades of trying. They really could do with it to support their ever-more-certain certainties.
Li D, an assertion without substance.
Yet through time, and continues changing of the past, they will reach their “warmest ever” objective, all the while ignoring that both satellite data sets, calibrated to the most accurate thermometers , immune to UHI changing stations, homogenization, scarcity of measurements, etc., show that 1998 was the warmest by a factor about 1,000 PERCENT larger then the “warmest year ever” nonsense they manufacture.
They will ignore that the satellite demonstrate that 1998 was considerably and easily and statistically significantly warmer then 2010, 2014 and 2015. They will ignore that the troposphere was supposed to warm FASTER then the surface. They will ignore the increase in global sea ice now enhanced by increasing ice in the NH. They will ignore the flat and very minor sea level trend. They will ignore that even their manufactured warming is far below the IPCC computer model mean on which the predicted harms of CAGW are based. They will ignore the slight increase in NH snow. They will ignore record ice on the great lakes. They will ignore that all the harms of CAGW are failing to manifest, while the benefits, saving massive amounts of fresh water and massive acreage of land are feeding close to one billion people every year.
(That is a lot of ignoring)
instead they will manufacture a tiny bit of warming, encourage “warmest year ever” nonsense headlines all over the world while crying doom for humanity, all they while padding their wallets and take home pay while shamelessly preventing real problems from being addressed.
(That is evil)
overwhelming evidence of , not just
warming, but specicifically AGW
==================
the is evidence that the earth has been warming for 300 years, after 500 years of cooling. No one knows the cause.
It’s an argument between those pointing out that there has been no significant warming for ~20 years despite a significant increase in cumulative CO2 emissions and well below IPCC climate model predictions for ‘business as usual’ and others whose only comeback for headline purposes is that ‘it is the hottest year/month on record’ (maybe by a few hundredths of a degree).
Also “reference” does not mean what Tisdale thinks it means. The Smith and Reynolds 2002 paper describes the process in detail. As I understand it they look at gridded monthly data where there are pairs of ship SST and NMAT2 readings and map and smooth these differences over time and space. Then using the climatology of the NMAT2 readings they identify areas in time and space where the SST differences are more or less than expected, and thus identify regions of instrumental bias in ship SST readings. Then they calculate the bias adjustments to SSTs.
There’s nothing in this that assumes the trends in SST and NMAT are the same over time. In fact difference in trends have been widely documented; as early as 1998 John Christy of U of Alabama Huntsville showed that night marine air temperatures have a less positive trend than SST for the period studied.
Unless I’ve misunderstood David Sanger’s post, I’m intrigued as to how a systematic bias could creep into ship SST readings, which are measured by a multitude of different devices in a multitude of different ways, but only in certain regions???
I am curious to know how such a random methodology could be more accurate then argo.
Because the methodology has systematically changed over time, which is why the HADNMAT2 data is used to eliminate that bias for ship readings only. Since the period that Tisdale focusses on only consists of about 10% ship data and the rest buoys, the influence of HADNMAT2 over that period is rather small, a fact that Tisdale appears to have missed. It’s certainly not correct to assert, as Tisdale does: ” the HADNMAT2 data, which served as a reference for the ERSST.v4 data
The changes to the UAH dataset can obviously be justified, while the changes to the NOAA data obviously cannot be.
I’d be interested in learning what Tisdale’s justification for UAH changing from a product compatible with RSS TLT to a different product compatible with RSS TTT is? Why did they want to add a greater contribution from the stratosphere?
That is not cogent to argo. I believe the point was and is that the continues adjusting upwards of the trend by hundredths of a degree here and there is non sense, not justified at all by the error margins. Throwing in a fudge factor for ships readings is nothing more then a confirmation biased “wag” They upward adjustments to the trend never stop, yet clearly UAH and RSS do not support them at all, by a factor one thousand percent larger. Tell us about these adjustments…from Bill Illis comment
“Here are the changes made to GISS temperatures on just one day this February. Yellow is the new temperature assumption and strikeout is the previous number. Almost every single monthly temperature record from 1880 to 1950 was adjusted down by 0.01C.
I mean every freaking month is history suddenly got 0.01C colder. What the heck changed that made the records in 1880 0.01C colder”
http://s2.postimg.org/eclux0yl5/GISS_Global_Adjustments_Feb_14_2015.png
Back in the day before he was so well known I enjoyed making jokes about him seeing through a glass, darkly.
=================
Haiku (5,7,5)
Tamino is very bad
petard himself many times
shaped by consensus
Quatrain(?)
There was a great petard,
who was hoisted by a defier
and ended up in the frier,
alarmists came and gave lots of laude.
Regards
Climate Heretic
I’ve always enjoyed ‘Hoist by his own retard’. I used that once over at Climate Audit and all those eagle eyes over there misread it and responded as if I’d written it with a ‘p’ instead of an ‘r’.
====================
Adjustments re-cooked,
overdone to distress us.
Confidence declines.
Adjustments re-cooked,
overdone to distress us.
Very distasteful.
Exercise judgement
before you post your poem.
Avoid embarassment.
The damage is done, our MSM reported 2015 can become the hottest year based on the NOAA data, our KNMI didn’t deny and stated that was an average temperature and more extremes can be expected.
The real question is what do the Chinese and the Indian Governments think of these hundredths of a degree adjustments to a fantasy record. I imagine that they don’t give a tinkers cuss and as they are the ones who will say yea or nay on Global emissions for the next 30 or 40 years I suggest we just get the deck chairs out, give the music to the Orchestra and relax. My guess is that we will still be wearing the same winter clothes but with an extra layer. I am not investing in SunBloc.
Thanks Bob.
Tamino’s vision is tunnelled to such an extent that his head can barely get down it.
Statistics is the art of sampling. It is not the art of averaging. It is definitely not the art of adjusting.
Statistically there is no need to adjust any temperature data. The earth’s average temperature can be calculated much more reliably from the raw data than the adjusted data.
Firstly, the raw data tells you the standard error. The adjusted data cannot, because the variance is artificial. Thus, you have no way to accurately determine the error in the adjusted data.
Secondly, averaging stations geographically using a grid is a nonsense technique, because your stations are not constant. Stations are being added and removed all the time, and the land around the stations is changing largely due to human activity.
Thirdly, your time series data is highly unlikely to be normally distributed, so you cannot use standard statistics to draw a meaningful result.
What makes much more sense is to randomly sample the raw data, using an equal area grid to minimize the effects of station density. Perform this sampling (via computers) thousands of times and a pattern will emerge. The pattern will be the normal distribution.
From this random sampling, the central limit theorem tells us you have transformed the original distribution into a normal distribution. You now know the mean, standard deviation and standard error, None of which were reliably available using the current climate science approach of averaging.
Perhaps you can persuade Tamino of the pause by using the decadal trends to 2014. He used the same technique in his attempt to show why Houston and Dean were wrong in their claim of no acceleration in sea level rise. Note that H&D subsequently shot down this line of reasoning as it easily results from cyclical behaviour.
“Perhaps you can persuade Tamino ”
He will never be persuaded. The task is not to persuade him, it is to persuade his followers who have been subjected to his incorrect analyses. Or better still, vote for Trump, then it won’t matter.
What you do NOT state is that the unfortunate bulldog NOW, with its’ mutated neck, has been caused by much IN-BREEDING over many decades. Take a look at illustrations of the same type of dog of one hundred years ago: it’s nothing like today’s unfortunate critter.
Catastrophic in-breeding: you know … the result of a brother or a father inseminating a sister or daughter. (Don’t try this at home folks !).
Keep in mind that Tamino has deleted multiple posts which if left untouched put him in a very bad light. Those who’ve followed his antics for the last several years know what I’m referring to.
http://climateaudit.org/2008/09/08/ian-jolliffe-comments-at-tamino/
Thanks for that link. Well worth reading + comments. Nothing has changed since 2008, which reflects on Foster’s honesty vs honest belief.
Alarmism requires continual alarm. Tamino just keeps ringing the bell. All he knows.
The question is framed thus:
Was there a Hiatus between STARTDATE and ENDDATE. That is all. There is no point in showing the data before STARTDATE in answering that question. That would be another question: Did the Hiatus begin before STARTDATE.
I do not know why Tamino does not understand this simple point.
Funniest post ever.
Amongst some real good competition i
might add.