…PLUS AN OBVIOUS ERROR IN THE NEW NOAA ERSST.V4 PAPER
Guest Post by Bob Tisdale
We’ve discussed NOAA’s new ERSST.v4 “pauses-buster” sea surface temperature reconstruction in a number of posts this year. They are linked at the end of this post. We can add yet another curiosity to the list…this time relating to the global ERSST.v4 data during the first half of the 20th Century. Additionally, there is an error in a new paper about the NOAA ERSST.v4 that I want to discuss as well.
This post was prompted by a paragraph in NOAA’s recent paper about the uncertainties of their ERSST.v4 sea surface temperature reconstruction. That paper is Huang et al. (2015b) Further Exploring and Quantifying Uncertainties for Extended Reconstructed Sea Surface Temperature (ERSST) Version 4 (v4), which is presently available (paywalled) as an Early Online Release. Two things in the following paragraph caught my eye (my boldface):
A recent study (Karl et al. 2015) indicated that the trend of globally averaged SST in ERSST.v4 in the most recent decades (0.99°C century-1; 2000-2014) is as large as in the longer period of 1951-2012 (0.88°C century-1). Figure 6b shows the histogram of the trend during the longer period. The trend ranges from 0.7°C to 1.0°C century-1, which is higher than the long term trend shown in Figure 6a, indicating stronger oceanic warming since the middle of the 20th Century. Factor analyses indicate that the major contributor to this trend uncertainty is the ship-buoy adjustment (the 9th parameter; Fig. 7b).
FIRST, THE ERROR IN THE NEW HUANG ET AL. (2015b) PAPER
For the period of 1951-2012, Karl et al. (2015) listed the trend of 0.088 deg C/decade (0.88 deg C/century) for their “old” ERSST.v3b data, not the “new” ERSST.v4 data. The 1951-2012 trend for the “new” ERSST.v4 data shown in Table S1 from the Supplementary materials for Karl et al. (2015) is listed as 0.100 deg C/decade (1.00 deg C/century). Their Table S1 is included as my Table 1. NOAA repeated that “typo” throughout Huang et al. (2015b).
Table 1
Looks like the peer reviewers missed an obvious mistake.
In Figure 1, I’ve added vertical red lines to Figure 6 (SSTa trend uncertainty histograms) from Huang et al. to show the data trends listed in Karl et al. (2015) for the periods of 1951 to 2012 and 2000 to 2014. (Refer again to Karl et al. Table S1, my Table 1.) I’ve also shown the 0.88 deg C/Century trend that was erroneously listed in Huang et al. (2015b) for the period of 1951 to 2012.
Figure 1
Curiously, but not surprisingly, the actual sea surface temperature data trends align with, or are near to, the extreme high end trends in the uncertainty histograms.
And if you’re wondering about the ERSST.v4 data trend for the period of 1901 to 2014 (Cell a in Figure 6 from Huang et al. 2015b), the data for the latitudes of 60S-60N (global excluding the polar oceans) present a linear trend of 0.073 deg C/decade (0.73 deg C/century)….once again toward the high end of the histogram. (Data available through the KNMI Climate Explorer.)
SO THE WARMING RATE FOR 1951-2012 IS HIGHER THAN THE RATE FOR 1901-2012
The above quote from Huang et al. (2015b) included (my brackets):
The trend ranges from 0.7°C to 1.0°C century-1 [for the period of 1951-2012], which is higher than the long term trend shown in Figure 6a [for the period of 1901-2014], indicating stronger oceanic warming since the middle of the 20th Century.
There’s nothing unusual about global sea surface temperatures since 1951 having a higher warming rate than the data since 1901. All sea surface temperature and night marine air temperature datasets (end products) available from the KNMI Climate Explorer show that simple relationship. See Figure 2. The difference between the shorter-term (1951-2012) and the longer-term (1901-2012) trends depends on the dataset.
Figure 2 (Typo Corrected in ERSST.v3b Graph)
Figure 2 (and Figures 3 through 5) include global (60S-60N) ocean surface temperature anomalies referenced to the period of 1971-2000, from top to bottom:
- NOAA’s ERSST.v4 Sea Surface Temperature (NOAA’s new “Pauses-Buster” data)
- NOAA’s ERSST.v3b Sea Surface Temperature (NOAA’s “old” data)
- UKMO’s HadNMAT2 Night Marine Air Temperature (Which NOAA uses to adjust their ERSST.v4 data to account for ship-based temperature biases, from buckets and ship inlets)
- UKMO’s HADSST3 Sea Surface Temperature (An uninterpolated product used in the UKMO HadCRUT4 global land+ocean surface temperature product), and
- UKMO’s HadISST Sea Surface Temperature (the most-often-used sea surface temperature dataset used in scientific studies, even though it has the lowest warming rates.)
Huang et al. included trends for the periods of 1901-2014 and 1951-2012, using two different end years. For ease of illustration, I ended the data for both periods in 2012. That also agrees with the periods shown in Table 2.5 from Chapter 2 of the IPCC’s 5th Assessment Report. The exception to the 2012 end year is the HadNMAT2 data, which run through 2010 because the dataset ends then.
The data suppliers account for sea ice differently…thus the use of the latitudes of 60S-60N.
In the quote above, Huang et al. (2015b) are suggesting that global warming is accelerating. But Huang et al. (2015b) failed to note something important.
THE WARMING RATE FOR 1901-1950 IS ALSO HIGHER THAN THE RATE FOR 1901-2012
Figure 3 includes trend comparisons for the five ocean surface temperature products, but this time comparing the warming rates for 1901-1950 and 1901-2012.
Figure 3 (Corrected typo on HADSST3 graph)
The “ew” “new” and “old” NOAA sea surface temperature products show slightly higher warming rates for 1901-1950 than they do for 1901-2012. On the other hand, the UKMO’s HadNMAT2, HADSST3 and HadISST show noticeably higher warming trends for the early period of 1901-1950.
ONLY THE NOAA “PAUSES-BUSTER” DATA SHOW A LOWER WARMING RATE IN THE FIRST HALF OF THE 20TH CENTURY
Figure 4 compares the warming rates for 1901-1950 and 1951-2012 for the 5 ocean surface temperature products.
Figure 4 (Corrected typo on HADSST3 graph)
With the “old” NOAA ERSST.v3b data, the warming rates for the early (1901-1950) period are comparable to those for the later period (1951-2012). The early period has a slightly higher warming rate than the later period in the HadNMAT2 and HadISST datasets…though it could be argued that they’re comparable. The HADSST3 data have a noticeably higher warming rate in the early period.
The exception is NOAA’s new ERSST.v4 “pauses buster” data, which show a noticeably lower warming rate in the first half of the 20th Century.
DIVIDED INTO TWO EQUAL-LENGTH (50-YEAR) PERIODS
Someone is bound to note that we’re not comparing periods of equal length. So, for Figure 5, I ended the later period in 2000, breaking the 20th Century in two.
Figure 5 (Corrected typos in ERSST.v4 and HADSST3 graphs.)
THE DATASET USED BY NOAA FOR SHIP-BASED BIAS ADJUSTMENTS DOES NOT SUPPORT THE LOWER WARMING RATE IN THE FIRST HALF OF THE 20TH CENTURY
Figure 6 compares the warming rates for the periods of 1901-1950 and 1951-2010 using the global (60S-60N) HadNMAT2 and the new NOAA ERSST.v4 “pauses-buster” sea surface temperature data. NOAA adjusts their ERSST.v4 sea surface temperature data using HadNMAT2 night marine air temperature data to account for ship-based temperature measurement biases (buckets of various types and ship inlets).
Figure 6
Curiously, NOAA’s ERSST.v4 data have a noticeably lower warming rate than the reference HadNMAT2 data during the first half of the 20th Century (and a noticeably higher warming rate from 1951-2010). Those additional tweaks are the reasons why the NOAA ERSST.v4 are the outlier, showing a lower warming rate in the first half of the 20th Century than for the period from 1951-2012.
CLOSING
Did NOAA adjustment (modify, tweak, manipulate, etc.) their ERSST.v4 “pauses-buster” sea surface temperature data during the first half of the 20th Century so that the ocean surfaces showed a slight acceleration in global sea surface warming for 1951-2012? The other ocean surface temperature datasets don’t show the same disparity over those two time periods. If fact, the UKMO’s HADSST3 dataset (which like ERSST.v4 is also adjusted for bucket, ship inlet and buoy biases) shows a noticeably higher warming rate for 1901-1950 than for 1951-2012.
ADDITIONAL POSTS ABOUT NOAA’S NEW ERSST.v4 “PAUSES-BUSTER” SEA SURFACE TEMPERATURE DATA
In previous posts at WattsUpWithThat and at my blog ClimateObservations, I’ve discussed the new NOAA “pause-buster” sea surface temperature dataset (ERSST.v4) a number of times since the publication of Karl et al. (2015)—latest to earliest:
- Busting (or not) the mid-20th century global-warming hiatus
- Pause Buster SST Data: Has NOAA Adjusted Away a Relationship between NMAT and SST that the Consensus of CMIP5 Climate Models Indicate Should Exist?
- Open Letter to Tom Karl of NOAA/NCEI Regarding “Hiatus Busting” Paper
- More Curiosities about NOAA’s New “Pause Busting” Sea Surface Temperature Dataset
- NOAA/NCDC’s new ‘pause-buster’ paper: a laughable attempt to create warming by adjusting past data
UPDATE
Many thanks to those readers on the cross post at WattsUpWithThat who found all of the typos. My apologies.
With regular data metamorphosis in no time we’ll have a 45 degree inclination line, so no trend lines will be required.
data metamorphosis … great term that well describes crimatological statatistics.
BTW It’s snowing here!
That’s nothing, it’s snowing in New Mexico.
And it explains a lot.
After data metamorphosis, the data flaps its wings and causes Global Warming!
MarkW
I’ve just seen a news item from Texas and New Mexico, hm,,,global warming, more like onset of a new ice age.
I’d favor “data spawning” over “data metamorphosis”.
New Mexico is quite a bit above sea level on average, something like 6000ft. From memory, with each 1000ft increase in altitude there is a 1 degree C drop in temperature. Isn’t New Mexico where many of the high altitude telescopes situated?
Neither term brings to mind the actual process behind the ‘adjustments’.
It is still data corruption forced into unnatural relations that go far beyond incestuous.
So… Data sodomization then?
I am in Alamogordo, in south-central NM, near the White Sands Desert, at about 4000 ft. and it is snowing. That’s not that unusual, but that’s the point, isn’t it?
There’s a bell-shaped curve of actual weather events around the central tendency of all climate averages. Even “rare” things will happen once in a while in a normal climate.
The key point of Bob Tisdale’s post is that even with their best presentation of their data, whether or not there has been biased manipulation, there is precious little difference in the rate of “global” warming between the first half of the 20th century (ie, pre-CO2 forcing) and the next 65 years (post-CO2 forcing).
The hypothesis that this data best supports is that CO2 is, at most, a weak forcer of climate change.
My wife’s relatives report that it snowed in El Paso, TX this weekend. That’s right on the Mexican border.
Snow in New Mexico and El Paso, right on the border? Take the train a few hours south to the home of the dogs, Chihuahua, in “Old” Mexico. Ten inches of snow in the city, and zero degrees in the hills.
http://mexiconewsdaily.com/news/winter-hits-chihuahua-with-25cm-of-snow/
http://news.yahoo.com/biggest-snow-storm-decades-hits-north-mexico-191315527.html
http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/slideshows/nation-world/chihuahua-state-in-mexico-receives-heaviest-snowfall-in-55-years/mountain-of-snow-in-chihuahua-state-mexico/slideshow/50365371.cms
en espanol, here’s some more pictures
http://www.eluniversal.com.mx/articulo/estados/2015/12/28/pega-tormenta-invernal-en-el-norte-del-pais
and a nice weather map forecast at
http://www.eluniversal.com.mx/articulo/estados/2015/12/28/sigue-potencial-para-nevadas-en-chihuahua-y-coahuila
and -15C (+5F) in Durango, Mexico:
http://www.eluniversal.com.mx/articulo/estados/2015/12/28/durango-registra-el-dia-mas-frio-de-la-temporada-llega-15-grados
Actually, it’s not all that odd, especially in recent years…
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/03/01/a-cold-day-in-mexico%e2%80%99s-icebox/
It’s fun to see how global warming is cooling Mexico, too.
Snow in New Mexico and El Paso, right on the border? Take the train a few hours south to the home of the dogs, Chihuahua, in “Old” Mexico. Ten inches of snow in the city, and zero degrees in the hills.
http://mexiconewsdaily.com/news/winter-hits-chihuahua-with-25cm-of-snow/
http://news.yahoo.com/biggest-snow-storm-decades-hits-north-mexico-191315527.html
http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/slideshows/nation-world/chihuahua-state-in-mexico-receives-heaviest-snowfall-in-55-years/mountain-of-snow-in-chihuahua-state-mexico/slideshow/50365371.cms
en espanol, here’s some nice photos of the snow and -17C (+2F) at La Rosilla, Mexico
http://www.eluniversal.com.mx/articulo/estados/2015/12/29/continua-onda-gelida-hasta-menos-17-grados-en-chihuahua
Actually, it’s not all that odd, especially in recent years…
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/03/01/a-cold-day-in-mexico%e2%80%99s-icebox/
Well Bob’s graphs do make his point, but they also make some other points.
1/ Climate, or at least SST doesn’t know anything about calendars or centuries.
Move that 1951 date to circa 1970 and you get a whole lot different picture.
Bob’s graphs, point out the folly of talking about trends in “scientific” data.
The data is what the data is, and there is no reason to believe there is any trend to do anything.
2/ With the large number of totally new “discoveries” about fumaroles, and other unprecedented discoveries of climate effects as announced in various press releases just this year (therefore of such importance as to bring to the public attention rather than just the science community) it is quite apparent that the statement: “The science is settled.” is a complete falsehood.
How many totally new and previously undiscovered variables that are of major importance to earth’s climate were announced in peer reviewed science papers in 2015 from eminent university groups, that were such show stoppers that they needed to be press released even though the science papers are all pay-walled from public view.
So we can declare that “The science is settled” is the total BS statement of 2015.
So how many climate variables do we now have that compete with CO2 for being the prime cause of climate change ??
g
Yes, this obsession with “trends” is one of the most misleading ways of summarising complex data from a complex system. There is always the never spoken but implied “if this trend continues” , with the unspoken assumption that this is the most likely thing that one can expect to happen. Of course it never does happen. You just get a new “trend”.
Karl et al:
This is another favourite con-job perpetrated by people who certainly DO know better. It is another form cosine acceleration or giving the impression of acceleration where none exists. Everyone knows that a continuous cosine is not going either up or down … unless you pick cherries carefully:
http://climategrog.files.wordpress.com/2013/04/warming-cosine.png
Here we see the same principal in action on N. Atlantic SST
http://climategrog.files.wordpress.com/2014/07/amo_trends.png
So Karl et al’s ficticous “acceleration” is just a trick of the light.
kwinterkorn:
Randy Moss (vikings receiver) said it best ‘Its a once in a lifetime thing that happens every once in a while”
Mike,
One way to mitigate the temptation to cherry-pick trend endpoints is to choose several time scales and plot them continuously over the entire data set:
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-_MCooUyKbnk/VoMKn879Q_I/AAAAAAAAAh4/C1k5XttCSIg/s1600/SST%2BTrends.png
All four plots above show positive linear slopes for all four SST data series across their entire respective intervals. A positive linear trend over a 1st derivative plot indicates acceleration.
I fully agree with Mike. In fact I raising this issue on several forums and as well with the government of India. When you select a truncayed data series of a cyclic variation data series, based on the part you select give either increasing or decreasing trend. This is exactly what a Minister informed Indian parliament saying that Indian rainfall is decreasing as this part relates the decreasing segment of 60-year cycle segment. Truncated data always give misleading inferences.
In the global average temperature and as well in the global average SST temperature 60-year cycle is existing. So, if we wants know the exact trend, first we mist eliminate the cyclic part through moving average technique.
Dr. S. Jeevananda Reddy
“All four plots above show positive linear slopes for all four SST data series across their entire respective intervals. A positive linear trend over a 1st derivative plot indicates acceleration.”
You’re using the word acceleration as it is used when referring to a positive linear trend plotted with only 1 derivative. Such a trend (with one derivative) can only indicate ONE thing, and in your charts, that one thing is that temperatures show an acceleration. A positive linear trend plotted with only one derivative (temperature change trend over time) cannot address changes in velocity because to do that, one would have to add another derivative.
Mike isn’t using the word “acceleration” the same way you are. He’s using the word “acceleration” in relation to the change in VELOCITY of warming between two trends. He’s talking about at least TWO derivatives-acceleration AND velocity.
Karl et al is talking about two DIFFERENT trends A- one between the period 1951-2012 (a 51 year trend) and B-one between 1901-2014 (a 113 year trend). They are claiming that the rate of warming in trend A is higher than the rate of warming shown in trend B, and thus indicates “stronger oceanic warming” or an acceleration in the VELOCITY of the warming that has occurred since the middle of the 20th Century.
Aphan,
I understand that a positive or negative 3rd derivative indicates a non-constant acceleration. It’s not clear to me that’s what Mike is arguing. What I got from his post is that because 51 years is less than the period of AMO, it only looks like the 2nd derivative is positive.
The purpose of my plot was to remove choice of endpoint from the analysis. My conclusion is similar to Karl (2015) even when I don’t use their data — rate of warming is increasing.
Yes, and that looks to be an argument about whether the ERSST v4 adjustments are valid, or the basis of motivated data manipulation.
Bond Gates — The issue here is not the length of the data series but the question is what period of the cyclic variation the data series is covering [truncated data] the cycle. In the longer data series it covered symmetrical pattern and in the second [shorter data] the data presented asymetrical and more data in the below the average and less data in the above average. Naturally the trend will be more [angle].
Dr. S. Jeevananda Reddy
If I’m not mistaken (it happens) the absolute highest altitude golf course in the USA is in New Mexico, at somewhere around 9,000 feet.
So wake me, when it isn’t snowing in New Mexico.
g
See I was wrong; I was right; I was mistaken and Leadville Colorado at 9700 feet is highest in US. Highest in NM is only 9200 ft. See I got that part right.
g
I wonder if I could add 20 yards to my drives at the golf course. These lessons are getting very expensive.
Fairplay, CO….9953 ft.
Sorry…..disregard my comment please.
I believe last Saturday a college game ( football game called the Sun Bowl was played and I believe it in New Mexico I could be wrong but I think it was El Paso? some one help me here) But it was in a driving snow storm.
El Paso is in TEXAS, not New Mexico.
“If I’m not mistaken (it happens) the absolute highest altitude golf course in the USA is in New Mexico, at somewhere around 9,000 feet”
Sorry, you are mistaken.
The highest altitude golf course in the U.S. is in Lake county outside of Leadville, Co at 10,025 ft.
I have zero confidence in the data set to accurately represent global sea surface temperatures in the first place, so the extra issues with adjustments to it or papers about them is, to me, totally irrelevant.
What is the most ludicrous part is how the uncertainty is still the same. For the 1951-2010 “trend” they give ERSST v3 and v4 as :
new 1.00 +/- 0.017
old 0.88 +/- 0.017
Hand on, they have just added 0.2 to something that was supposed to be accurate to +/-0.017 , so they have out and out admitted that their earlier uncertainty estimations were WAY off the mark. They are now claiming the same ludicrously improbable uncertanty range for the new improved, ultra-white, brighter-than-white-finish data.
Oddly have made massive adjustments they still have _exactly_ the same uncertainty range. But if they’ve improved the data and removed biases, shouldn’t the uncertainty range now be smaller? Unless, of course, the whole way they are estimating the uncertainty is utter horse-shit anyway.
agreed wwfan. mathturbation of fiction practiced by an increasing amount of mathturbators.
You should set up a website where people can take a Pepsi-challenge style quiz. Break each graph into a 1901-1950 piece and a 1951-2000 piece, then randomly color code them either red or blue then superimpose them.
The quiz is simply to select the line color that is natural, or is a fossil-fueled Global Warming catastophe.
Let them try to guess each of the 4 or 5 different datasets, then give them a score at the end. Fun and educational.
I did post something of the kind for the N. Atlantic SST on another blog
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/AMOq1.gif
with comment:
If the ~100 year long initial section of the N. A. SST data is moved forward by about 65 years, it can be clearly seen that two sections are nearly identical (R^2 >0.7, statistically significant) with a single uplift of about 0.2C.
Anyone is welcome to any conclusion, but it is crystal clear to me that 0.2 C one off (single) uplift in temperature is absolutely nothing to do with the increase in the CO2 concentration”
vukcevic:
Thanks!
Your post, without converting temperatures to anomalies, makes it quite clear that the trend is most likely natural variance. Especially as we are warming since the little ice age.
If you do a regression of blue data alone from 1857 to 2014 and blue continued orange in first figure to get 1857 to 2014, you get clearly the difference in the trend. Please try and show this.
Dr. S. Jeevananda Reddy
Cooling the past and heating up the present via changing the data: this is the true ‘global warming’ that is going on.
…and, it’s anthropogenic.
The trend for 1951-2000 in the first chart of Figure 5 is mislabeled.
Thanks, Basil. Fixed it.
I’s all very clear to me, the 40 year warming trend up until around 1940 was all natural, but the slightly less steep warming trend from circa 1960 to 2000 was all caused by the activities of man.
The other thing which is clear is that using temperatures taken from buckets of sea water, or water from ships’ engine intake pipes, as opposed to the highly accurate ARGO buoys, is an essential part of proving runaway global temperatures.
Only in ‘climate science’ would these types of arguments rapidly morph into sacred truths.
Only in ‘climate science’ would these types of arguments rapidly morph into sacred truths.
Amen brother, amen.
Or global runway temperatures, which are nothing to do with climate.
g
With all of the many tens of billions of dollars thrown at the global warming scare, think of how simple it would be to spend 10+ million dollars on constructing a high performance ship’s bucket for taking accurate temps. The initial measurement should be inside the bucket, while the bucket is submerged. Out of interest, they could then haul the bucket up and take a second reading on board. The second reading alongside with the new method would give them a good method of reanalyzing older ship’s bucket data.
Agree100% with wickedfan above its pointless because the data is NOT credible. I would use only the 4 Radisonde balloon sets and 2 satellite sets as the only reliable temp data as they ALL concur. It shows nothing, basically flat for the past 20 years. Everything else is NOT credible> BTW legal proceedings have been commenced against NOAA for cooking the books (Judicial Watch ect.
I disagree, mildly, Eliza. Demonstrating that even IF one accepts the highly questionable data the claims are mere puffery has value, I feel. Laying the evidence of such puffery out so clearly as Mr. Tisdale has done here, helps to “debunk” claims (made or insinuated) of superior expertise being the reason climate alarmism has been elevated to “settled science” by the reigning Sciants gods, it seems to me.
Factor analyses indicate …
… we sat around in the pub brainstorming excuses
Why the spike in the 1940’s?
That little yellow ball that rises in the morning and sets in the evening.
Tom Graney, the spike during World War 2 originates in marine air temperature data.
The UKMO suppresses it by using daytime readings from 1942 to 1946 in their night marine air temperature data HadNMAT2:
It carries over to the NOAA ERSST.v4 data because NOAA adjusts source sea surface temperatures to mimic the UKMO HadNMAT2 night marine air temperature data.
It also stands out in the NOAA ERSST.v4 data because NOAA did not account for the “discontinuity” (unjustifiable drop-off) in 1945.
See the previous post about the ERSST.v4 data for more info:
https://bobtisdale.wordpress.com/2015/12/21/busting-or-not-the-mid-20th-century-global-warming-hiatus/
Cheers
Bob, what is the justification for UKMO using the daytime temps to adjust the nighttime temps?
Duncan,
“Factor analyses“
What is the hypothetical mechanism for the spike in nighttime marine air temperatures during WW2? I haven’t seen a mechanism discussion yet…
Peter,
Sorry I can’t find the exact comment right now but that very matter was explained here recently.
From memory, the spike has something to do with the significant proportional increase in warships over that period reporting their temp measurements.
(Larger ships = bigger engines = higher intake temperatures) x the increased proportion of warships = ‘the spike’ over WW2.
Makes sense.
Also that it drops off just as quickly after the war.
If you have interest and the patience, I’d recommend a search through the recent posts on this topic as I’m sure there were other contributions to the spike as well.
The most common explanation is that the relative percentages of ships sampling water using buckets as opposed to cooling intakes changed during the war. The spike is not seen in the land record.
Not forgetting, of course, the huge buildup of ships in the Western Pacific and Mediterranean.
A larger preponderance of higher temperatures data sources.
I think it was called WW-II
There’s tons of graphs and figures… what’s not to believe?
I was wondering about the recent divergence between HADSST and CRUTEM (version 3, as there is no HADSST 4 yet) which was not seen before cca 1980 (except for volcano induced coolings, which obviously affected land temps more than sea surface temps). Any ideas?
Referring to Table S1, I think there is another story that could be (already) told. Look at the adjustments as the time interval gets to the modern era, some ‘new’ values are ~triple the ‘old’ values, whereas earlier intervals less or nonexistent. Adjustments increase exponentially, like a hokey shtick.
It’s “hokey pokey”.
Can you give us an explicit equation for that ” exponential ” increase, you are talking about ??
Hello. Could someone explain why the HADSST and CRUTEM (land only) temperatures started diverging around 1980 (with land temps rising faster than sea surface temps)? it has not been so until around that time. http://woodfortrees.org/plot/hadsst3gl/from:1960/plot/crutem4vgl/from:1960
Perhaps this— “It [CRUTEM] has been developed and maintained by the Climatic Research Unit since the early 1980s”
https://crudata.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/crutem/ge/
What point could possibly require 29 separate graphs to be proven?
Why is there no summary?
Does anyone read the entire thing, puzzle it all out?
Mr. Tisdale, at some point you need to tell us why you have labored mightily to create this fine post. What is your POINT???
Alas, Many have made this criticism before, to no avail. Bob has very good analysis and points to make but he’s far too long winded.
There should be an executive summary at the top and a conclusion at the bottom.
Millennials didn’t invent TL;DR, they just renamed the problem…
Pete
Don’t listen to these nay Sayers Bob, It is a fine post and clear to those following along.
Michael Moon- Read the following slowly-
(from first paragraph)
“We’ve discussed NOAA’s new ERSST.v4 “pauses-buster” sea surface temperature reconstruction in a number of posts this year….We can add yet another curiosity to the list…this time relating to the global ERSST.v4 data during the first half of the 20th Century. Additionally, there is an error in a new paper about the NOAA ERSST.v4 that I want to discuss as well.”
Translation-this post is about the new ERSSTv4 paper. I found another curious thing about that paper, as well as an error in a new paper regarding the ERSSTv4 paper, and I’d like to discuss them both.
Insert evidence showing error in new paper. Then add evidence demonstrating the “new curiosity” found in the ERSSTv4 paper. THEN summarize your thoughts at the end under the title “CLOSING”-
(from paragraph that follows the word CLOSING)
“Did NOAA adjustment (modify, tweak, manipulate, etc.) their ERSST.v4 “pauses-buster” sea surface temperature data during the first half of the 20th Century so that the ocean surfaces showed a slight acceleration in global sea surface warming for 1951-2012? The other ocean surface temperature datasets don’t show the same disparity over those two time periods. If fact, the UKMO’s HADSST3 dataset (which like ERSST.v4 is also adjusted for bucket, ship inlet and buoy biases) shows a noticeably higher warming rate for 1901-1950 than for 1951-2012.”
Bob’s Point (in case you don’t see it even now after I made it easy for you to see)-He wants to talk about something that he finds curious and something he finds erroneous. Based on the evidence he provided, does anyone else find this curious and erroneous as well?
MY POINT- We all know Bob’s posts are LONG. Why is that? Because they contain A LOT OF EVIDENCE. But I learned to read what he says to introduce his posts and decide if that topic is interesting to me or not. If it is, I’ll read on. If it’s NOT, I don’t read it. BUT….if in the future, I NEED both the argument AND the data that Bob worked so hard to present here, all I have to do is come back and read Bob’s post, and if I agree with it, link to it instead of having to do all that research AND present it myself.
Aphan,
I don’t read anything slowly thank you very much. Many other commenters echo my request. I have offered to help Bob with these posts, as technical writing is included in my skill set.
Keep it classy…
Michael Moon-
“Many other commenters echo my request”.
“Many-a large number, a majority, numerous, a great/good deal of, a lot of, plenty of, countless, innumerable, scores of, crowds of, droves of, an army of, a horde of, a multitude of, a multiplicity of, multitudinous, multiple, untold”
I count three in this thread. Not many compared to the number of commenters overall.
“I have offered to help Bob with these posts, as technical writing is included in my skill set.”
Well that’s nice, if Bob wants your help. But if he doesn’t want, or hasn’t accepted your offer, then I see nothing “classy” in continuing to berate him. I think the “classy” thing would be to let the man do what he likes and just not read them yourself. But maybe we understand the word “classy” as differently as we do the word “many”.
MM:
Classy? While you call out derision towards Bob Tisdale’s, his research and his articles?
Bob may be verbose, but he tries not to overlook anything. Compare that to all other ‘climate science’ research articles, especially those multiple speak opaque CAGW articles.
Are you offering your services to all climate scientists? Why don’t you take a test rewrite of Bob’s work here to demonstrate your skills?
Remember, it’s bad manners and bad business to insult and demean another’s efforts and writings; even if you have something to offer. The old put up or shut up position.
Odd that you and sable peter bring up the ever so classy, ‘others have the same complaint’, defensive argument as if that justifies your disdain and bad manners.
Classy… Riight, you sure keep it classy.
A the K,
There was no derision in my comment. I would do a rewrite of one of Bob’s posts if I could find his lead! If he was trying to point out errors made by Karl, he sure took the long way to do this. It is as if he is trying to repeat himself by endlessly subdividing the Pacific Ocean with all these charts. Any engineer would be frustrated with this.
Mr. Tisdale could help put the AGW meme away permanently, if he could put a stake through Karl’s heart. He may be able to do this. What he appears to be trying to do, instead, is bury Karl with a mound of charts, simply ineffective communication.
Michael Moon,
“Does anyone read the entire thing, puzzle it all out?
I did . . but I had to read kinda slowly ; )
I appreciate the work behind Mr. Tisdale’s posts and commend him for it. But a couple of introductory paragraphs that tip the reader off to what he should be looking for in the post’s body would go a long way to reducing the number of regular Watts up with That readers who, like me, ordinarily skip over Mr. Tisdale’s posts.
The reason I personally skip them in most cases is that doping out what Mr. Tisdale’s point is too often takes more time than I prefer to dedicate to the effort. In this case the best I could come up with was something like the following.
If one were to accept Karl’s “pause-buster” data set, the argument could be made that the temperature trend has increased in recent decades. Even if one does accept those data, though, the increasing-temperature-trend conclusion is not one that can validly be drawn from the Huang et al. paper’s observation that the trend in the NOAA “pause-buster” data for the period since 1901 is exceeded by that of the sub-period since 1951. To draw such a conclusion from that observation would be to ignore the perhaps-counter-intuitive fact that trends for both halves of a time series can exceed the trend for the time series as a whole–a fact that the pause-buster data set in fact exemplifies: just as the later sub-period’s trend does, the early sub-period’s trend exceeds the trend of the overall period. So a later-sub-period trend’s being higher than the whole-period trend does not necessarily mean that the trend is increasing.
It’s true that in the case of the pause-buster data the later sub-record’s trend exceeds not only that of the record as a whole but also that of the early sub-period. One might therefore argue that the “pause-buster” set does indeed tend to support temperature acceleration. But for most data other sets the reverse it true: for the sub-period that Huang et al. chose, it is the portion of the record preceding that sub-period whose trend is greater: if any conclusion is to be drawn from those other data sets based on that record division, it is that the trend is falling.
If the post had started with an introduction something along those lines (with promises to back up its assertions, as the head post did), the reader might have had an easier time knowing why he was reading what the post contained. That’s why in freshman comp they say of expository writing, You tell the reader what you’re going to say, you say it, and then you tell the reader what you said.
Of course, one can cherry-pick sub-periods to arrive at whatever conclusion he wants: http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/gistemp/plot/gistemp/from:1901/to:1957/trend/plot/gistemp/from:1958/to:2014/trend/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1901/to:2014/trend. But I take the point to be that, whatever one may think about whether sea-surface-temperature increase is accelerating, the comparison Huang et al. made is not a valid criterion on which to base that determination.
Or I may have missed the point entirely.
If you really want to argue relevance, then skip all SST measurements for one singular reason: we do not live on the ocean, we live on land.
Actually a large percentage of the population lives close enough to the ocean that SST dominates.
Also SST is 70% of the planet’s surface. the oceans in general has an order of magnitude more heat capacity than the atmosphere. This means to me there’s no statistically significant delta in the heat storage of the planet earth due to C02 increases. Just look at the graphs above (the last on e in particular). It’s not even visible to the eyeball, let alone any fancy statistical munging. (compare 1900-1950 and 1950-2000+, the latter when most of the C02 has been emitted.
Peter
I’d argue that the ocean measurements are important for showing human CO2 impact on global temperatures. If CO2 is well mixed (area for debate?), any effect it has on the global climate can be measured at the surface of the oceans. There, you also have a lower noise floor (no urban height, minimal changes in vegetation/land use, etc). The identification of other forcing effects should be easier as well (again, less noise).
Very true Peter. [At my latitude of 27.4 deg (S) ]: Towns on the coast easily fit within the influence of the ocean’s temperature. Roughly speaking, every 2 km you go inland, the temperature drops 1C (or the influence lessens by 1C). So at 10km inland, the ocean has little influence on night time temperatures. 10km is the approximate limit of influence (from my own experience only and estimated roughly). Obviously hills and prevailing winds throw this simple metric out the window.
Gas can’t heat a liquid, so the whole SST effort is a chimera. There is NOTHING man can do overtly or inadvertently to warm the ocean. Too big, too vast and too great a heat capacity.
All the climatology around SST only proves it’s the sun.
Well if you did and do skip Bob’s posts; as you say you did/do, then it is for certain that you missed his point, which he only makes in his posts.
The point is that the data doesn’t match the populist narrative.
Usually, the data tells what is happening. The narrative is just (uninformed) conjecture; aka bull s***.
I’m at + 37 deg, 22.046 minutes latitude. Well at least the western edge of the end of my driveway is. Well more correctly, that’s where the middle of the dashboard of my car sitting on the street at the west edge of my driveway is. And my altitude is + 21 meters.
Actually the center of my dash could be anywhere within 0.3 meters of that spot. That’s the result of averaging 10,000 GPS measurements.
Somewhere around 122 deg West.
Any quad-copter drones will be shot down.
Bob is who he is. And he did just fine in this post introducing his topic(s) and closing his remarks (see my above response to Michael Moon). You seem to have missed those.
I personally skip over a lot of articles posted on WUWT simply because they don’t interest me, no matter who wrote them. Since it’s obvious that many readers at WUWT do read them, DO understand them enough to engage Mr. Tisdale in a discussion, or outright enjoy them, might I suggest that WUWT readers that “skip over Bob Tisdale’s posts” are missing out. But that’s THEIR choice, not Bob’s problem.
Agreed, far too long winded and are far too many graphs. I got bored somewhere near the 4th or 5th panel in fig 2.
Bob really needs to cut some of the superfluous detail and get to the point. An abstract paragraph that tells us what the key point is in no more than 5 lines would let the reader know whether it is worth the effort of ploughing through the rest.
Why not just give a single Temperature number for the whole earth for the whole year and cut out all of that detail crap ??
Perhaps you can ask Josh to summarize all of Bob’s posts in one nifty little cartoon panel for readers that desire to be both entertained and enlightened with as little effort as possible on their part?
A typo in final sentence of Closing paragraph:
” If fact, the UKMO’s HADSST3 dataset (which like ERSST.v4 is also adjusted for bucket, ”
Is it “If in fact…”? or “In fact…”?
/sarc on
Suggested edit:
” Looks like the
peerpal reviewers missed an obvious mistake.”/sarc off
The whole Tom Karl, Huang NOAA/NCEI “Pause Buster” exercise is a classic example of Sir Walter Scott’s:
Oh what a tangled web we weave,
When first we practice to deceive.
Thanks Bob for continuing to pull on the threads of Mr. Karl’s tangled web.
Joel,
Talk about the tangle web woven by NOAA. See Bob’s comments in the thread at Climate etc. on Craig Loehle’s recent post: http://judithcurry.com/2015/12/28/global-temperature-trends-after-detrending-with-the-amo/#comment-754714
Thanks for finding the typo, Joel. It should have read and now reads, “In Fact…”
Bob Tisdale:
Based on your analysis do you find that NOAA did or did not “adjust” or otherwise muck around with the data?
If yes, you need to write a synopsis ASAP summarizing the evidence in terms a politician can understand and send it to the Senate Committee that has a subpoena out on the NOAA internal docs, etc. regarding the Karl et. al. paper.
The adjustments are not a secret. There is even a paper about them. What is needed is another emailgate. What water cooler discussions took place that would indicate bias in the effort to reconstruct the temperature series? The only source of culpable evidence would be email discussions and internal memos. Bob would not have knowledge of those.
Ditto what Pamela said. These adjustments are no secret. NOAA usually announces the changes it has made, or will be making on their own website. Problem is, they also provide excuses for why they did so that are very convincing to some people, including politicians.
An organization that claims +/- 0.1 degree C. accuracy, for average temperature data going back to the 1800s, and issues press releases declaring 2014 to be the ‘warmest year on record’ … by two hundredths of a degree C. … CAN NOT BE TRUSTED.
It is very curious how the “adjustments” usually create a steeper warming trend, and a “better” correlation of CO2 levels and average temperature.
Only a very gullible person would trust the official surface temperature data after all the “adjustments” by gooberment bureaucrats whose jobs depend on having a “crisis” to study.
Only a fool would believe predictions of the climate (or anything else) 100 years into the future.
Climate “science” appears to be the only branch of science where the FUTURE climate seems to be known with great certainty (runaway warming) … while the PAST climate is always changing from “adjustments”, “re-adjustments”, and “re-re-re- adjustments” !
If the PAST climate requires so many “adjustments” to get it “right”, how can the same people be trusted to make good predictions of the FUTURE climate?
Leftists may be too dumb to see what’s going on, but sensible people can see only ONE political party with an agenda drives the global warming scaremongering … their goals are greater control over the economy, new taxes on corporate energy use, and re-distribution of income from poor to rich nations.
Wild guesses of the future climate from scientists on government payrolls, and global climate models, are merely tools used to achieve political goals.
I know that Karl et, al has been X-rayed by several observers and was not suggesting that Bob would have knowledge of anything other than his in-depth analysis.
The point is that any pertinent additional information/insights that can be cross referenced with whatever docs NOAA is ever so reluctantly providing to Congress might help flush out more relevant “water cooler” info that’s being held back.
In order to pull the hen’s teeth you first have to locate them and the more reference points the better..
The NOAA ERSST v3b ( first green graph ) has a typo..It says ” trend = 1951 – 2012 ” twice..One of them should be ” trend = 1900 – 2012 ” ..i think ???
Not the same one that Basil mentioned..
Thanks for finding the typo, Marcus. 1901-2012 corresponded with 0.071 deg C/decade.
Cheers.
So except for the suspicious WWII spike, we have over 100 years of steadily increasing SST; where’s the AGW footprint?
Quite, but then again, perhaps this is not surprising since it would appear that DWLWIR cannot warm the oceans.
Bottom line are we actually in a position to take these measurements in a scientifically meaningful way, which includes precision and range, or are we once making great claims based on a ‘guess’ ?
Bob,
All of the blue graphs (HADSST3) have a text/numerical error. 1901-1950 should read 0.104 deg C/decade not 1.04 deg C/decade.
Thank you, Jan, for finding the typo.
[So, is a crowded review more efficient, more effective than a peered review? 8<) .mod]
Hmmmm. The data sets show a mix of pulses of short term warming during periods that allow subsurface heat to rapidly rise to the surface instead of staying mixed, with overall warming one would expect with a long term warming heat-release regime that followed a long term cooling heat-retention regime. If those spikes measured during a short term El Nino spike condition were removed (if that were possible), one could easily see that there is simply long term warming at the surface with no difference between one shorter period and the next. Note: I think the short term and long term SST heat trend is forced by the same overall mechanisms that gurgle along with occasional stronger pulses during warm regimes.
All that is to say that eventually, the ocean will stop releasing heat to the surface because there is no more to give to maintain that condition. It will either pause, or begin to decline. What little heat anthropogenic CO2 imparts into the vast ocean would not in any way be able to continue that upward trend. Back of the envelope calculation of the W/m2 available in JUST the anthropogenic portion of CO2 excludes it, and the fairly steady state of solar radiance measured at the top of the atmosphere also excludes it as the source of this trend. What is left as a potential source of this trend? Whatever lies between the ocean surface and the top of the atmosphere. That would include wind and clouds. Why would I look there? These entities are known to vary a great deal and have the chops to vary deflection of solar radiance and vary heat release from ocean surfaces in measurable and mechanistically reasonable amounts.
You should re-write this comment to make it easier to understand.
That should result in getting comments in reply, if that interests you.
To me it appears to be rambling speculation on the causes of climate change — If so, your words “Back of the envelope” do not inspire reader confidence.
You say “The data sets show a mix of pulses of short-term warming …”
I would like to remind you that you may be observing nothing more than measurement errors, or random variations, and mistaking them for meaningful “pulses”.
Richard,
You said, “I would like to remind you that you may be observing nothing more than measurement errors, or random variations, and mistaking them for meaningful ‘pulses’.” I think that it is unlikely that the entire global network in both hemispheres is simultaneously making positive measurement errors. If they are truly “random variations,” then I would expect approximately an equal number of negative pulses. As to whether or not they are meaningful, that is really the crux of the problem. Until such time as we can explain abrupt excursions away from the average or trend, we need to make note of them and try to understand how they come about. They may be meaningful, but at the moment we can’t be sure.
Very interesting post, Bob, thank you.
Bob
In your earlier post Busting (or not) the mid-20th century global-warming hiatus I pointed out the significance of the Karl et al plot, and the fact that it showed that the rate of warming between 1900 to 1950, was greater than the rate during the more recent warming. At the time, you did not wish to engage on that subject, so I am pleased to see that you are now picking up on this, and have posted an article on it.
It is extremely material to note that at a time when even the IPCC accepts that manmade CO2 was not driving temperatures (ie., prior to 1950) that the rate of warming in the first half of the century is greater than the rate of warming in the second half of the century. It appears that manmade CO2 emissions post 1950 have done nothing to increase the rate of warming.
Since the rate of warming has not increased, this begs the question, what does CO2 do?
Until one can satisfactorily explain what drove the warming in the first half of the 20th century, ie., identify each and every forcing that drove that warming and to assess the upper and lower bounds of every constituent forcing involved, one cannot begin to speculate whether CO2 played any role at all in the warming that was observed in the second half of the 20th century.
There is nothing to suggest that whatever caused the warming in the first half of the century, did not also fully account for the warming seen in the second part of the 20th century.
GWPF Report 13, “A Sensitive Matter”, says “The high-quality observationally-based estimates for
climate sensitivity discussed in this report assume that virtually all the measured warming (not just since 1950, but over the last 100–150 years) is due to
humans.” (Judith Curry wrote the foreword.) That’s a report arguing that the best estimates for ECS are substantially lower than the IPCC said in AR4&5 and that the IPCC knew this.
I was a bit staggered by this statement.
Letting *CO2* off the hook doesn’t let *humans* off the hook. I computed the correlation between Central England Temperatures and log(global population) for a sample of years from 1850 to the present as 0.81. So obviously it is human sin that is causing Hell to approach thus warming the Earth. Of course that doesn’t explain the Pause, but the answer to that is also evident. The annual COP rituals and the New Flagellants (a.k.a. climate marchers) are expiating our eco-sins just as the old ones took care of the Black Death. /sarc (as if the use of correlation coefficients weren’t enough of a joke warning sign)
Even if one believed the hokey data, the uncertainties of fitted parameters should be shown. Without doing the actual calculations, I would bet that the line slopes plus confidence limits would be something like. 0.07 +/- 0.05 C per decade. Then it becomes a different question whether 0.09 +/- 0.06 is really a different result. Noisy data just generates wide confidence limits and these should be shown.
Bob:
Check me on this: The ENSO sequence is characterized by a large “above average” warm region of water in the west pacific basin south of the Equator, that then “moves east” (washes ?) across the Pacific to become a “warm region” off the usually cold Peruvian coast during the El Nino positive part of the cycle, right? I understand that during a negative phase (normal temperatures) the warm region slides back west and stays there.
But the usual surface currents in the south Pacific create a reverse flow, don’t they? Cold water arcing up from the Antarctic circulating current that flow north along the Chilean and Peruvian coasts, then swings to the west below the equator and warming as it flow towards the western pacific islands.
If the currents dominate surface water flow, then does an El Nino event represent a static (not moving) region of “overly warm water” in the east Pacific (of off the Peruvian coast) that stays in one place – even though the water in the region gets constantly replaced by colder water from the pole?
If so, then are the southern waters coming north warmer than usual during an El Nino phase, and thus contribute to usual melting of the Antarctic sea ice before/during/after an El Nino cycle? The reason I ask is that there were massive sudden drops in the Antarctic sea ice in both 2010 and 2015 – which seem to match those two El Nino positive phases.
But earlier? Since 1979, what are the generally accepted El Nino “positive” pulses start and stop dates?
If correct, this could be a clear interpretation of events.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/12/17/weather-two-months-from-now/#comment-2100883
curtsey of arnoarrak
arnoarrak
Totally unsubstantiated bunk. This is the whole idea behind calling all these natural phenomena “oscillations”: the totally unsubstantiated assumption that it invites in the mind of the reader. The idea of some kind of net zero, pendulum swing “oscillation”.
The basic idea of an oscillation is energy being converted from one form to another. Like the pendulum case from kenetic to gravitational potential and back again. This is a net zero oscillation.
However, ENSO is a _throughput_ of energy. La Nino is the absorption of solar energy into the ocean heat content. El Nino is the transfer of OHC to the atmosphere and ultimately out to space. There is absolutley NO reason to assume the two phases of this process have exactly equal and opposite effects on SST or OHC until someone demonstrates that is the case.
Just _calling_ it an “oscillation” does not cut it in science. Science requires proof, not supposition.
isarnoarrak a dame; or why wouldn’t he just bow ??
Re: ‘isarnoarrak ….’
Hi. Mr Smith, that made me laugh, No, I don’t think so. Fortunately or not, my browser has a spell check attached, it keeps correcting as I write. Occasionally it does something I don’t notice, if the input is misspelt. As you may have realised it was meant to say ‘courtesy’, but god knows what I typed initially.
Apologies to arnoarrak and yourself too.
Thanks Mike, I have taken a note of your comment.
Thankfully, the spelling checker/corrector in my brain just read right by that…
RACookPE1978, during an El Nino, westerly wind bursts causes “pulses” of warm subsurface waters to be transported eastward along the west-to-east flowing Cromwell current (a subsurface current) and the westerly wind bursts also cause an increase in the strength of the Pacific Equatorial Countercurrent (a surface current).
Also during an El Nino, the trade winds slow due to the decrease in the temperature difference between eastern and western tropical Pacific, which in turn would cause the North and South Equatorial Currents (surface currents) to slow. That should also slow the currents that make up the North and South Pacific gyres.
But I don’t recall ever reading about currents becoming static during an El Nino.
Regarding the impacts of El Ninos on Antarctica, there are a number of papers that discuss the teleconnections between the tropical Pacific and Antarctica during an El Nino. Your answer about sea ice might lie there.
I think your last graph has a typo – the ERSSTT temp should be 0.1degC/decade, not 1degC/decade
When dat are adjusted is an explicit reason given for every change made? If not, why on earth should anyone trust the adjustments? Since government policies on “climate change” have such an influence on the economies of many countries shouldn’t governments insist that the scientists who maintain the temperature records should not make any adjustments that have not been justified in a detailed, rigorous manner that is published freely on the Internet so that anyone can check the reasoning.
There’s no reason or excuse to adjust data. Adjusted “data” is just made up junk.
There can be good reason to adjust data , such has the finding of a fault with the means of measurement.
However, and its is big however , three things should happen , the reason for the adjustment is clear , how the adjustment is made should be made clear and most importantly the original unadjusted data should be maintained.
What we often see in climate ‘science’ is not only one or more of these things go missing , but that adjustment are made then they are ‘denied’ has being made or ‘hidden’ by the liberal application of smoke and mirrors which is such a hallmark of this area.
It gets further complicated by the fact that often those making these ‘adjustments’ often have good professional , such has funding , or personal , such has political beliefs that mean the nature of adjustments can have a net positive or negative effect on them. And with no one policing these , it is not hard to see how the ‘right’ adjustments , rather than the correct ones , can be attractive.
In short if you got to decided for others how effect snake oil was ,as a snake oil salesman, what would you say ?
[In short, if you, as a snake oil salesman, were able to decide for others how effective snake oil was going to be, what would you say ? As a punishment for that structure, you are sentenced to diagram those phrases. 8<) .mod]
If the data is defective, which it is if there is ” a fault with the means of measurement ” as you put it, you go and do the experiment again. If the data is defective, it does not contain the necessary information to correct it. If it did, it wouldn’t be defective.
As Lord Rutherford said: “If you have to use statistics, you should have done a better experiment. ”
If defective “data” can be “corrected”, then why bother gathering data; just correct zero to get the right value.
Data “correction” is plain and simple fraud.
g
OED says that science is ”
” 1.the intellectual and practical activity encompassing the systematic study of the structure and behavior of the physical and natural world through observation and experiment: ”
It is NOT fudging faulty data.
If the data is faulty, then it does not contain the information required to correct it.
if faulty data is correctable; why take data ??
Just adjust zero to the right value.
If you need to adjust data, then what you need is new data.
Unfortunately, when your data pertain to the past, you CAN’T get new data. We cannot replay the 19th century (but this time with satellites and ARGO).
Also, if the instruments you are using (ice cores, tree rings) are for some reason systematically wrong, then new data of the same kind will also be systematically wrong.
I actually have empirical proof of the existence of time travellers. I have five years’ worth of data on adverse reactions to medical treatments. And that data set includes reports sent in before the treatment happened, people reacting before treatment, and so on. Time travellers! (Or perhaps more plausibly, people transposing month and day fields in dates…) What am I to do? Correct those records? That’s an adjustment. Throw them out? *That* is an adjustment too. Get more data? That’s impossible. (Disease prevalence, treatment preferences, and above all, drug availability — the point of the data collection is to decide which drugs should be dropped — have all changed.)
If you know a way to get new 19th century temperature or CO2 measurements, other than consulting my time travellers, we’d all be thrilled to hear about it.
This is a report about official US Government data and pronouncements, so why should we not trust what they say?
After all, the US Gov’t. printed some $trillions of new $USD last year and did it in such a way that there was no inflation. They told us so. Employment figures are regularly splashed across front pages and tell us that unemployment has dropped and is insignificant. So what if the inevitable “corrections” are only found buried in the back pages, if at all?
Who are the people calling the shots and shouldn’t we trust what they tell us, because they have our best interests at heart?
If the Tisdale data were ever posted on an “honest chart” showing a normal temperature range, perhaps from from -20 degrees F. to +120 degrees F. like an ordinary thermometer, I believe all of the charts would look almost like straight lines … and no one would care about them.
When showing temperature changes of tenths of a degree C. spread over decades, THE MOST IMPORTANT DISCUSSION must be on the accuracy of the source data, and likely margins of error.
Where is that discussion?
Failure to challenge data quality is bad science.
If the quality of the source temperature data are unknown, and the margin of error is just a wild guess, then the ONLY reason to “adjust” the data must be political, not scientific.
After “adjustments” there are no data left — they are converted to estimates / wild guesses of what the data should have been !
Our planet is always warming or cooling.
People like warming.
Plants like more CO2 in the air.
That means warming and more CO2 since the 1700s are good news, not bad news!
There is no relationship between average temperature and CO2 levels during the first 4.5 billion years of Earth’s climate history — and no explanation of how that natural variation could have suddenly ended in the 1970’s, and CO2 became the “climate controller” (it didn’t, except in over-active leftist imaginations) .
If the average temperature had been declining in the past few decades, the leftists would have been trying to scare people with tall tales of a coming global cooling catastrophe …. wait a minute … I recall some leftists did just that in the mid-1970’s!
I had a pleasant dream recently that all leftists were locked up in prisons for a year so the rest of us could enjoy the improving climate (probably the best climate in at least 500 years) without their incessant bellowing that “life on Earth will end as we know it — the science is settled — 97% of scientists agree — you are a climate change denier”.
WITH ALL THE LEFTISTS IN PRISONS, I wonder what we ‘skeptical deniers’ would talk about for a whole year?
Would we talk about the climate at all?
I would visit the leftists in their prisons every day just to walk past their cells banging my steel coffee cup on the bars (to pay them back for needlessly annoying me about global warming for decades).
Climate change blog for non-scientists
No ads
No charge
No money for me
A public service
And a climate centerfold each month too:
http://www.elOnionBloggle.Blogspot.com
I just read the submissions on your blog. I want my time back. Your articles are filled with spin and opinion, not to mention a TON of uncited quotes. By the time kids get to the 5th grade, they know about citing their evidence. Go back to grade school.
Pamela, I thank you on behalf of the readers of WUWT for sacrificing your own time to investigate and report back to us so we don’t have to. 🙂
My climate blog is a summary of reading about climate change from many other websites, starting in the late 1990s, simplified and formatted for easy reading by non-scientists.
The “science” of climate change is mainly questions, with few answers.
The data are very rough, and there are no real-time measurements for 99.999% of Earth’s history.
The data are also frequently “adjusted” by people with a financial interest in “proving” a global warming crisis is coming.
The data are frequently presented on charts that make 0.1 degree C. variations look very important, when they are not.
For every scientist with one theory, there is a scientist with another theory.
They all seem to think they are right.
The “right” answer is the climate has barely changed in the past 20 years and the change in the past 150 years is no small there is no reason to think it is anything but a natural variation.
There were some very cool decades with low CO2 levels in the 1700s.
It’s slightly warmer now and green plants grow faster.
So where is the bad news?
I do not do any original climate research, therefore I rely on the work of others. Many of the scientists have PhDs, and some have written excellent books, including Mr. Tisdale.
Do you have a book on climate that I should be summarizing in my blog?
If you find any statement about the climate in my blog that you believe is wrong, and can refute, I welcome that feedback — I am trying to rely on the work of scientists, and other writers I trust — but if they have made mistakes, then my summary of their work could include the same mistakes.
I do present opinions about why leftists try to scare people about the climate for political gains.
I think it would be obvious to most people, perhaps not to you, which sentences on my blog are about climate politics, and which are about climate science — there are no numbers in the political sentences.
It is my strong opinion that “climate change” is 99% politics, and 1% science, so ignoring the politics of climate change would be a mistake.
If you are a leftist and vote for Democrats, I can understand why you might get hostile reading someone who thinks the demonization of CO2 is wrong.
Perhaps not as wrong as the demonization of DDT in the 1960’s, that cost millions of lives to malaria … for which environmentalists never apologized, and few even admitted they were wrong!
You could have cut and pasted at least ONE sentence from my blog in your post, and then tried to refute it — perhaps you could have done that with as little as one sentence of your own … but I guess that would require thinking (your vicious character attacks required no thinking) ?
If you don’t like my climate blog, then just stop reading after 15 seconds, and don’t go back.
15 seconds of reading something one does not agree with should not cause exteme anger – I seriously recommend that you consider anger management therapy.
Below is a link to my climate blog that so excited Ms. Gray — hers is the most excited response I have ever had to a harmless climate blog — a blog that does not predict the future climate, and does not try to scare people about the climate.
Read a short post or two and see if you agree with Ms. Gray.:
http://www.elOnionBloggle.Blogspot.com
You quote without citations. Bad form. I wouldn’t refute a single thing you have written, not without links to the source of the quote. Your blog deserves an F without properly providing citations and links to those you quote.
One more thing. There are people who vote on the left side of middle who do not believe in human-driven climate change. Your use of stereotypical jargon (“leftists” -which appears to be used by you as an all-inclusive epitaph in your writing) is at the same base level as the hyper-catastrophic scientists who use derogatory terms like “denier” in their public statements.
In my opinion, your blog scores a point for the other side of this debate and does nothing to intellectually further the more skeptical and properly cited reasoned side of this discussion displayed in posted articles on this blog.
Richard Greene,
After a cursory perusal of your blog, I’d say it’s fair enough, but I’ll agree with Pamela when you get to lefty-bashing.
What is it with you people, that you can’t help but hurl gratuitous invective at political specters that haven’t uttered so much as one “Boo!”?
I know you and your like-thinking pals don’t get this but it’s tiresome to be bombarded with banal proclamations about the idiocy or depravity of those that vote differently from random internet dude.
Obama does the same thing; he insults 50% of his populace in his haste to ingratiate himself with the other 50%.
An awful lot of people do not see themselves as lefty or righty and are put off by the strident tones of all this simplistic ranting. This is why we address issues incrementally and with decorum; because we know that there is no portmanteau ideology that is consistently believable.
Pamela Gray,
Sorry! I just kinda repeated what you said.
You are quick to ridicule, insult and character attack.
Yet you refuse to, or are unable to, refute even ONE SENTENCE in my climate blog.
You pretend to be highly offended by my blog because I don’t include footnotes.
I’ve got news for you: Footnotes don’t make a sentence correct.
My climate blog attempts to simplify and summarize work whose authors I trust, and is aimed at people who find this website too complicated and “scientific” for them to easily understand.
My latest blog post was inspired by the (free) press release for Ian Plimer’s new book.
A prior post was inspired by a (free) recent Non-Governmental Climate Change Report
A prior post was inspired by a chapter of the (free) E-book from Bob Tisdale
A prior post was inspired by (free) Congressional testimony by Patrick Moore
I try to summarize information I receive for free.
The current climate change scare is one in a long series of false environmental scares, starting with the demonization of DDT, which ended up killing millions of people, and followed by acid rain, the hole in the ozone layer, global cooling, and many others.
These scares are used by “environmentalists” to gain political power, government subsidies, and government grants “for further study”.
The scares are supported almost entirely by leftists, socialists, and Democrats — people who will get very upset reading my climate blog because I do not leave out the politics of climate change.
An indirect way toward Big Government socialism, with its chronic slow economic growth and high unemployment, is claiming an environmental catastrophe is on the way … so more central government power is mandatory to save the Earth.
But, the truth is Earth’s climate in 2015 is perfectly normal.
The changes in the past 150 years are harmless natural variations.
And predictions of the future climate are meaningless computer games.
I am very happy that you have character-attacked my climate blog, and are unable to refute any statements of science there — if the blog did not make leftists like you mad, then I’d know I was not doing a good job !
“WITH ALL THE LEFTISTS IN PRISONS, I wonder what we ‘skeptical deniers’ would talk about for a whole year?”
What an odd question to ask at WUWT. Seems to be based upon the premise that you know of, and belong to, some group of people that you call “we ‘skeptical deniers'” that only talks about climate because leftists are allowed to run loose like everyone else. Perhaps you should pose that question TO that actual group of people instead of here?
Odd comment for sure. I am a skeptic. Maybe a denier, too. But they never say exactly what we’re supposed to be denying.
It’s humor … followed by a hypothetical question.
I apologize if the question was too confusing.
Many of the articles here are IN RESPONSE to studies, reports, and “adjusted” data coming from leftists — so the responses are usually trying to refute them.
If those leftists STOPPED PUBLISHING for a year, I wondered what people who call themselves climate “skeptics” would WANT to write and talk about here?
The politics of climate change requires a continuous flow of new scary climate reports, climate predictions, and data “adjustments” … these keep the climate scare alive.
The leftists set the agenda with their continuous flow of scary reports, which keep the skeptics “playing defense”.
Would the climate agenda be different if “warmunists” were silent for a year?
Would this website be different with no climate scaremongering to respond to for a year?
Would some people lose interest in this website without the excitement of a continuous battle between “warmunists” and “skeptics”?
You seem to be under the impression we are only interested by shiny things and if the shiny things go a way we would lose interest. Actually, even boring topics are of interest to me. I would want to talk about weather and climate. Or solar studies. Or ENSO predictions. Or other science-based topics. Methods of statistical analysis also intrigues me.
I am currently interested in battles (American Revolution and Civil war) carried out near the Missouri and Mississippi flood plains. Documents include mentions of weather-related floods, some quite immense. Therefore, any current mention of “historic record-setting” floods can be called into question.
What would you be interested in if the shiny thing went away?
Pamela Gray
May I recommend you expand your “Missouri River/Mississippi River floodplain research topic juuuust a little bit.
Think about the Indian mounds as “emergency shelters” above the flooded flat plains for placing the village and all of its food and weapons as they wait out the flood waters for two weeks or four weeks. As the village becomes more important, as the local “king” / ruler /chief / tribal priest tries to become more important, “he” makes a bigger and bigger “platform for himself. But, the original purpose (an emergency platform) is shoved further and further back in the tribe’s conscious memory as their immediate lives progress between floods.
Darwin’s Law comes into effect as well: Make your tribal platform big enough to survive a “one hundred year flood” … and you can survive five or six “ten year floods”. Fail to survive a 200 year flood, and your tribal history, your entire tribe dies.
They still work: When the levees broke south of Memphis all the way towards Lousiana in the Great 1927 Mississippi Floods, entire cities ran to the Indian mounds to wait out the flood water: Indians, black farmers, white farmers, and white city dwellers were all crowded on top.
Actually, since the only information conveyed by “Temperature” is the associated rate of black body radiative cooling that would be one factor determining climate; then the appropriate Temperature scale to use is the kelvin scale.
Totally agree with Richard Greene on this, “Failure to challenge data quality is bad science”.
If you ‘Investigate’ where the source Data comes from and then delve into the accuracy of their measuring instruments you may be supprised at what you discover.
Here is a link to Sea Surface Temperature (SST) measuring from Remote Sensing Systems (RSS)
http://www.remss.com/measurements/sea-surface-temperature
I always envision some half drunk sailor throwing a wooden bucket over the side of his ship, and then sticking a thermometer in the water to estimating the temperature to the nearest degree or two with his blurry eyes.
That’s real science baby!
While the accuracy of any one measurement may be no better than +/- 0.5 degrees C., just from rounding the temperature to the nearest degree, thermometers from the 1800s also tended to read low, so I don’t see how the accuracy could be better than +/- 1 degree C.
If that +/- one degree C. margin of error is more reasonable than NASA’s unbelievable claim of a +/- 0.1 degree C. margin of error, then it’s possible we’ve had NO average temperature change since the 1880s … or the change could have been as much as +2 degrees C., (which we all “know” means we are doomed) !
I totally agree with your reply to my reply, a person throwing a bucket overboard and ‘Clim-astrologists’ assuming they can calculate water temperature to +/- 0.01F degrees from wayback is absurd.
This is what I did for 2.5 years. Threw a sea-bucket overboard to measure SST (amongst other things ofcourse – hydrographic surveying). The bucket we used had increments of 0.5 C so not very useful for precise measurements and we therefore used another instrument called a digibar which measures in 0.1 increments. The sea bucket was what measured sea temps before the digibar so you could expect a fairly large error measure. All of our data was sent away to the Australian Oceanographic Data Centre. I think they are called DODC now? This organisation will have the evidence for warming or lack thereof.
If there was warming in the oceans caused from CO2 in the atmosphere ie. ‘climate change’, wouldn’t the warming occur only at the surface? Does convection not occur in the ocean? Therefore, shouldn’t we only be focusing on surface temps because the thermohaline would be more influenced by seafloor tectonics?
As an aside, I had to collate data and determine what the temp change was at 2 different waypoints during one trip with data gathered from 8 years worth of trips. Both waypoints showed cooling.
Pramela Grey — Text books contain several theoreries of general in nature and known to meteorologists/oceanographers in general. We rarely cite the reference as it is fundamentally know to most of them. Also, there are some issues we get through simple logic for such there is no need to present a citation. Also, if some researcherproved what is generally talked, need to necessary to give citation but to prove their point, they cite them.
When we talk of greenhouse effect we rarely cite the first publication on this.
Dr. S. Jeevananda Reddy
According to Mike Van Biezen, a physicist, the Royal Dutch Meteorological Institute has original, unadjusted weather station data from over 7000 weather stations from around the world in its KNMI database. Perhaps that data should be copied before it too is adjusted.
The Most Comprehensive Assault On ‘Global Warming’ Ever
http://www.dailywire.com/news/2071/most-comprehensive-assault-global-warming-ever-mike-van-biezen
For the first several years of my research I relied on the climate data banks of NASA and GISS, two of the most prestigious scientific bodies of our country. After years of painstaking gathering of data, and relentless graphing of that data, I discovered that I was not looking at the originally gathered data, but data that had been “adjusted” for what was deemed “scientific reasons.” Unadjusted data is simply not available from these data banks. Fortunately I was able to find the original weather station data from over 7000 weather stations from around the world in the KNMI database. (Royal Dutch Meteorological Institute). There I was able to review both the adjusted and unadjusted data as well as the breakout of the daytime and nighttime data. The results were astounding. I found that data from many stations around the world had been systematically “adjusted” to make it seem that global warming was happening when, in fact, for many places around the world the opposite was true.
Everyone’s deforming in the presence of the swarming of the bee of the bird of the moth. Protozoa, snakes, and horses have enlisted in the forces of the bee of the bird of the moth. All are irresistibly directed by the suction of a hypnotizing tractor beam presenting a production of the sleep of reason corporation in association with the bee of the bird of the moth.
WTF ????
[Well, the mods can’t figure that one out either. .mod]
Dear mods…LOL…
It’s easy. We all know what a bee is. We all know what a bird is. And, we all know what a moth is. So, what’s so difficult about a bee of a bird of a ….
Never mind.
That’s one mighty weird song.
Mod – well said! And thanks for a mostly thankless job. WUWT is a treasure.
(knock knock whisper, , “open up it’s me dave” “Dave isn’t here” …..
This is the result of our failure to rein in Steven Mosher’s abuse of civilized punctuation, combined with the impressionable mind of an inchoate lepidopterist/ornithologist.
By simply inserting appropriate diacritical marks, the meaning becomes clear. And it is profound:
Ev’erÿo-ne sde fo, rmin ginthepr; æn ceof ……….
Open your hearts and minds and punctuate to create your own TRuth.
Tell Donald Trump.
He’ll fix it.
Of course he will! He’ll just get the best – the very best – bee of the bird, and the best; no, better than best, bird of the moth. And, he’ll get the very best people – and, I mean the very best people – and he’ll put them to work building the best bee of the bird of the moth. After all, he’s a builder, you know. And, it’ll be not just the best, or even the very best, but also the very best – and, most beautifully – built bee of the bird of the moth you’ve ever seen. And, he’ll get Mexico to pay for it.
It’s okay Tom. Just sit down and take deep breaths…..
Glenn999 ,
You say “Tom, sit down…”
I say “Tom, take a bow”. That was better than the original. Though, you did have inspiration from talldave.
Bob Tisdale: It it my understanding that anomalies are used commonly in climate ‘science’ to adjust for systemic biases in water sampling methods, or microclimate differences on land. Something that is unclear to me and you can, hopefully, clear up, is how the SST anomalies are calculated. Are the engine intake temperature anomalies calculated independently from bucket temperature anomalies, or is the average of both used to calculate anomalies. The point of my question is that it seems to me that trends are what anomalies are supposed to show. If the engine intake temperatures are running hot compared to buoys, what difference does it make? It seems that only if absolute temperatures are converted to anomalies with a common base-period-temperature that there would be an correction needed.
Clyde, with the exception of the UKMO HADSST3 data, all ocean surface temperature (sea surface, marine air, and night marine air) datasets are available in absolute form. We present them as anomalies because they’re easier to deal with in that form.
When adjusting the data for bucket, ship inlet and buoy biases, the data suppliers (NOAA and UKMO) are using absolute values for the corrections, not anomalies.
The reason for the bias adjustments is that the percentages of buckets (multiple types with their own biases), ship inlets, and buoys change with time. In the early part of the record, buckets were used. Then there was a transition to ship inlet measurements. More recently, buoys are the primary source of sea surface temperature data. So the biases change with time.
Bob, thank you for the response. Do you know if anyone has gone to the trouble to calculate anomalies separately for each data source? If the individual data-source anomaly trends were the same, but the anomalies obtained from the concatenated or averaged absolute-temperatures were different, it would be good evidence that the NOAA adjustments were done improperly.
I’d like to add to Bob’s description just to give you an idea of how the numbers are produced and how you can produce the numbers yourself if you’re so inclined, or perhaps even decide to shift the baseline for your own reasons.
The number presented as anomalies are in fact what we statisticians refer to as a “Z” or “Zed” Score. To produce a Zed score, the arithmetic mean of a group of observations is calculated using the well understood sum/count method. Once the mean (or average) value for the sample is calculated, it’s subtracted from each observation to give the positive or negative distance that observation is from the mean; this is the Z Score for that observation. It’s also referred to as “normalizing” the data, but that’s misleading since the procedure doesn’t cause the data to become normal. If it is normally distributed though, a simple histogram of the results (Z scores) will show it clearly. Conversely, it will also be very obvious the data is abnormally distributed by looking at the histogram if it is abnormal.
Choice of the mean is important in time series data that may contain cycles or rhythms. For this reason, should you suspect a data set has been “cherry picked” you may have cause to recalculate the mean of a different region of the series and reproduce the Z scores.
Bartleby,
I’m familiar with the procedure for calculating temperature anomalies. Although, what I am familiar with calling a Z-score is obtained by dividing the mean-differences by the standard deviation, and the Z-scores are only valid for the ‘group’ used to calculate the mean and SD. If you apply the normalization to data not originally sampled, the results will be invalid because there will be a different mean and SD for the new data. Although, if one were to determine the number of standard deviations from the mean for the entire data set, an upward temperature trend should show increasing positive Z-values. But, I’m not sure what that buys that the raw data or simple differences don’t already provide.
In any event, i think you missed my point, which was a suggested test to try to determine if NOAA incorrectly adjusted the SST data when trying to account for instrumental bias. if all sensors show the same trends (albeit different absolute temps), but the NOAA adjusted trend is different, that is prima facie evidence that the adjustment was done incorrectly;.
We have “extreme heat across the country” in oz according to the meeja (spoon fed by the BOM).
Sydney: mid 20s. At night, the suburbs are 2-blanket weather at 11C.
Brisbane: high 20s.
Even Perth 30.
Xmas day was low 20s in Sydney. But no doubt we will hear about the hottest evah Dec and the angry summer. Like we did when the BoM made up the original “hot angry summer” even though UAH showed it to be below trend.
With only one day of this year remaining, this year was cooler then last year at my home location (data from my own personal WS, un-adjusted of coarse);
Summary for 2014
Temperature (°C):
Mean (1 minute) 19.3
Mean (min+max) 20.3
Mean Minimum 14.4
Mean Maximum 26.1
Minimum 4.1 day 06/08
Maximum 41.7 day 14/11
Highest Minimum 22.4 day 19/02
Lowest Maximum 15.5 day 19/07
Air frosts 0
Summary for 2015
Temperature (°C):
Mean (1 minute) 18.9
Mean (min+max) 19.5
Mean Minimum 14.6
Mean Maximum 24.5
Minimum 3.5 day 04/07
Maximum 41.0 day 26/11
Highest Minimum 26.2 day 20/12
Lowest Maximum 13.1 day 12/07
Air frosts 0
Location is near Newcastle, approx 160km north of Sydney.
Un-adjusted? Ye gods man! Amateurs should not look at un-adjusted data, it can lead to dangerous ideas! That is why we have Gavin and the federal minions here in the USA to adjust the temperatures long before the unwashed masses see it. I am sure you have
crooksclimate experts in your country to cook the books before you get any crazy notions that CAGW is just a delusion.Say 10 “Hail Marys” and get the machine adjusted. Or at least site it near a heat exhaust.
Mark, I am sure if I sent these figures to our BoM, they would not look anything like that when returned. 😉
The Warmistas and their allied vassal organizations like NOAA have long ago lost interest in science when they saw that it was not producing the results that they required and was in need of continual adjustment to keep it running smoothly. Nowadays, like COP21 it is all politics and propaganda. All the evidence that they need can be manufactured at the kitchen table and fed out to the faithful, who are maintained by their religious fervour.
Claims of +/- 0.1 degree C. accuracy for temperature data from the 1800s, and press releases declaring 2015 to be the ‘Warmest Year ever’ by .01 degree C are all part of the new catechism which is avidly learned by heart by the flock.
Their most accurate work is shown 100 years in the future, which is forecast is known with great certainty, and by which time they hope that no one will remember or will be dead. The past however is continually changing to enhance the narrative.
The goal is to keep the faithful in a continuing state of fervant terror with constant scaremongering to ensure greater control over the economy, more income from taxes on energy use, and re-distributed income from the Poor to Rich.
NASA become irrelevant to science the day that Obama told them that their main objective was to make muslims feel good about themselves !!!
BECAME…ARRRrrrrgggggg
Not to be pedantic, Marcus, but I noticed that you misspelled ARRRrrrrgggggg. Became, become, whatever; I got your meaning from the context. However, misspelling ARRRrrrrgggggg is unforgivable ;o)
[The mods must quickly ask if a pirate is 3.14159 individual ratings of a single misspelled Arrgh! .mod]
Dear H.R. Please demonstrate to this lowly, uneducated peon, how to properly spell…” ARRRrrrrgggggg “…Your help in this endeavor of learning is greatly appreciated !!
P.S. LOL
Not to be pedantic? My internal reading voice was nearly gagged by that gaggle of ‘g’s . . Two and maybe a case could be made for letting it slide . .
Well I have oceans all around me as I sit here in central Florida. The temperature as I write this is 82 degrees F and the sun has been down a while now. This is Great. The heat has not come on in 10 days or so! Thanks to everyone who has been out there driving SUVs to help a poor fellow out by warming the area.
On the other hand, it is often warm this time of year just like it is now and it is often cold this time of year in other years. Mother Nature can be fickle, no?
I hate to break this news to you, but the last time I saw the surface temperature data for the 48 contiguous US states (earlier this year) 2015 was colder than 2005 !
By now, however, this “unfortunate” fact has probably been “adjusted” away.
The temperature data will confess to anything if you torture it long enough !
Lucky you, at least you were not as unfortunate as these poor souls.
https://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2015/12/25/alices-restaurant/
Bob Tisdale,
Thank you for your production of this and previous compilations.
I would not take much notice of those looking for the easy read. When the topic might be headed for Courts, it is prudent to include detail that might be questioned.
But, apart from that, science is not a pop conversation. It is a treatment of observations and measurements and deductions.
Geoff
+ 100
> “Looks like the peer reviewers missed an obvious mistake.”
This is a good thing as science culls the wrong and promotes the right. These peers will never again be allowed to review documents for publication.
The warming oceans is the greatest evidence against the AGW theory. CO2 and IR between 13µ and 18µ can’t warm the oceans. The atmosphere as a whole can’t warm the oceans, there is 1,000x the heat in the oceans as the atmosphere. There are no experiments that demonstrate that IR between 13µ and 18µ can’t warm the oceans. If you can’t explain why the oceans are warming, You can’t explain why the atmosphere is warming. It makes no logical sense why there would be two mechanisms, one that warms the oceans, but not the atmosphere, and one that warms that atmosphere and not the oceans. Most likely what is warming the oceans is also warming the atmosphere.
I wonder if you will ever take the blinders off. Back radiation slows the cooling of the ocean (and land).
The compelling evidence that CO2 has no effect on climate is that evolution has taken place.
The applicable ramification of photosynthesis is that CO2 is necessary for the initial step for all life on the planet and always has been. For life on land as we know it to have evolved there had to have been substantial CO2 in the atmosphere for more than 542 million years. If CO2 made the planet warmer it would have been doing it cumulatively for 542 million years. But average global temperature (AGT) has gone up AND DOWN over the eon. The only way this could consistently result is if CO2 has no effect on temperature and temperature change is caused by something else.
Further discussion of the compelling evidence CO2 has no effect on AGT and identification of what has caused AGT change for at least the last 400 years are at http://agwunveiled.blogspot.com Only one input is needed or used and it is publicly available. The match is better than 97% since before 1900.
Dan, the paper you refer to lacks an amplification mechanism. Changes in TSI due to changes in SSN are known. Changes in W/m2 at the top of the atmosphere from changes in SSN-driven TSI are known. Without an amplification device there is not enough W/m2 variation to drive a temperature trend outside of the noise/error bars.
Here is the Svensmark 2000 paper. Its conclusions are based on Lockwood’s 1999 paper which uses now-debunked solar reconstructions. Because of that, the entire solar mechanism for low cloud formation is debunked. Lockwood admits to solar reconstruction issues used in older papers.
http://arxiv.org/pdf/physics/0005072v2.pdf
Pamela, I don’t understand your dismissal of a paper describing the relationship between the integration of direct insolation on AGT based on one describing the influence of cosmic rays on cloud formation? Superficially they only appear related by reference to the sun? The mechanism of warming/cooling hypothesized seem to be independent.
Clearly, Pangburn’s paper discusses the influence of backradiation on AGT as does he in his comment above; how is this not a “amplification device”?
Pam – The 97% match demonstrates that an amplification factor exists and that the sunspot number data set is a proxy for it. The sensitivity of AGT to clouds is shown at http://lowaltitudeclouds.blogspot.com which is Ref 5 in the agwunveiled paper.
All of the sunspot data sets that I know of, including V2 and Svalgaard’s favorite, produce about 97% match with reported measured (of course the coefficients change).
Sometimes people get so mired in the minutia that the prevailing process is overlooked.
The basis of the paper Pangburn uses to state his claim has been debunked. The paper refers to Lockwood’s paper as the suggested basis for the mechanism in the conclusion, be it the starter or the amplifier. Lockwood’s paper uses out of date solar data that Lockwood himself now understands. The connection is debunked.
From Svensmark’s summary: “Based on observations, Lockwood et al. have shown that since 1964 the strength of the solar magnetic flux, shielding the Earth from GCR, has increased by 41% while GCR has decreased by 3.7% [28]. Further, they claim that the solar magnetic flux has more than doubled over the last century. Based on this doubling and assuming a GCR – Low cloud mechanism exists, a crude estimate for the century trend in low cloud radiative forcing is a warming of 1.4 Wm−2 [29]. Thus, if there is a systematic variation in low cloud properties caused by solar variability it could have important implications for the evolution of Earth’s climate.”
Lockwood’s conclusions can no longer be made and he himself concedes the point.
Svensmark’s work builds on Lockwood’s work during the 1990-1999 period of Lockwood’s investigation which is summarized in the immediate following link in one of the key papers of that decade: http://centaur.reading.ac.uk/38746/1/174_Lockwoodetal_1999.pdf
However, work ongoing to reconstruct solar data (which has many different methods thus many different data sets) is unveiling the possibility that there has been no significant trend in solar parameters. See page 66 for the full summary but note the inclusion of Lockwood’s newer research.
http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1407/1407.3231.pdf
“Now, except for the highest recorded cycle (19), the maxima of highest cycles of the past centuries are essentially the same as the recent maxima of the late 20th century. We note that recent independent reconstructions of the Sun’s open magnetic field, based on the geomagnetic record, also show a very limited difference of the highest peak 11-year amplitudes occurring in the 19th and 20th centuries over the available 1840-2010 interval (see Figure 30 in Lockwood 2013).”
Therefore the solar mechanism and its associated amplifier underlying Pangburn’s comment is out of date and replaced with solar reconstructions that probably exclude solar mechanisms in the Averaged Global Temperature trend measured during the past century.
Dan, you will have to provide a link to research to your comment that modern reconstructions produce a 95% correlation.
Dan, you might be interested in this grey paper by Leif on his view of climate change and its causes/drivers.
http://www.leif.org/research/Climate-Change-My-View.pdf
Pam – Thanks for your comments. I understand, and welcome, challenges to my findings.
I am familiar with Leif’s ‘grey paper’ in fact, downloaded it a couple weeks ago. About the only strong disagreement with it that I have is I see compelling evidence that CO2 has no effect on climate (see above). By extension, I believe that ghg which do not condense have no effect on climate. The only ghg that has a significant effect on climate is water vapor. Besides the common sense aspect (evolution happened) is the computational mandate that, if CO2 is a forcing, its effect on temperature would have to be as a time-integral of some math function of CO2 for 542 million years. That clearly could not consistently result in today’s AGT.
As to other’s research, I don’t know of any peer reviewed that used my method (time-integral of sunspot number anomalies combined with an estimation of the net effect of all ocean cycles) although a couple ‘grey papers’ came close. This one used the sunspot number integral and a specified combination of ocean cycles: http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.com/2010/01/climate-modeling-ocean-oscillations.html
If you study and understand my method, it uses accepted available data sets in an equation resulting from applying conservation of energy to the planet as a single unit. The fact that the method produces a near-perfect 97% match with measured temperatures is quite compelling. The match uses sunspot numbers. The Svensmark explanation appears rational but I don’t disagree that it may still be somewhat controversial. The sunspot number anomaly time-integral + ocean oscillation vs reported temperature is solid, however.
Several different combinations are summarized in Table 1 in the agwunveiled paper. The projection from 1990 essentially overlayed the projection using data through 2012 with the projected trends for 2020 only 0.01 k. apart.
The surface-measuring folks changing the data to corroborate an agenda presents a new challenge but Mother Nature will eventually prevail.
Provide a link to the data you used (or a table of the data) so that others can attempt to duplicate your findings and even apply it to other calculation methods to test its robustness. Provide the calculations and/or computer code you used so that others can examine it. Otherwise you are just bloviating about something you have found, which could be a fairy dancing on the head of a pin that you have called “science”.
I want to congratulate Ms. Pamela Gray*** for setting a new record at this website — eight separate comments posted in reply to one comment by Mr. Pangburn.
I will add my own (one) comment to Mr. Pangburn:
– Perhaps CO2s effect on the temperature is significant for the first 100 ppmv in the air, and insignificant above 300 or 400 ppmv ?
– That might explain why CO2 has been important as a greenhouse gas … but is no longer important at current levels … and has never caused runaway warming in the past, even when in concentrations MUCH higher than today (according to geologists and other scientists who study climate history, not computer gamers on the public dole, using their unproven ‘CO2 controls the climate’ theory to wild guess the future climate.)
*** Ms. Gray also holds the record as the reader MOST EXCITED by my climate blog for non-scientists:
http://www.elOnionBloggle.Blogspot.com
Richard, your comment is silly. Challenging debate with back and forth well-cited arguments is an important component of science. Grow up.
+10
But Huang et al. (2015b) failed to note something important.
THE WARMING RATE FOR 1901-1950 IS ALSO HIGHER THAN THE RATE FOR 1901-2012
Bazinga
Bazinga properly indicates facetiousness (IE to inform of kidding or joking, not correctness or stating a fact). It is urban vernacular that has been around a while. Would you like to borrow my “The Big Bang Theory” compendium?
On another note: Why do people see that show as a comedy? Is it not a dramatized documentary?
For a while now, Paul Vaughan has been claiming to have hard evidence of NOAA malfeasance over the 1940’s T, esp. SST. records. He blogs on Tallbloke, and seems to know what he’s talking about. Brett
Snow in New Mexico and El Paso, right on the border? Take the train a few hours south to the home of the dogs, Chihuahua, in “Old” Mexico. Ten inches of snow in the city, and zero degrees in the hills.
http://mexiconewsdaily.com/news/winter-hits-chihuahua-with-25cm-of-snow/
http://news.yahoo.com/biggest-snow-storm-decades-hits-north-mexico-191315527.html
http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/slideshows/nation-world/chihuahua-state-in-mexico-receives-heaviest-snowfall-in-55-years/mountain-of-snow-in-chihuahua-state-mexico/slideshow/50365371.cms
en espanol, here’s some nice photos of the snow and -17C (+2F) at La Rosilla, Mexico
http://www.eluniversal.com.mx/articulo/estados/2015/12/29/continua-onda-gelida-hasta-menos-17-grados-en-chihuahua
Actually, it’s not all that odd, especially in recent years…
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/03/01/a-cold-day-in-mexico%e2%80%99s-icebox/
Too bad the plots don’t show the uncertainties in the raw data.
Looking for tiny, sub-Centigrade trends based on smoothing when the uncertainties in the raw data is HUNDREDS of times larger is meaningless.
Furthermore, what we are seeing is consistent with recovery from the Little Ice age. Arguing about ‘angels on pinheads’ but missing the Big Picture (uncertainties that dwarf ‘trends’ and observed long-term climate variability correlated with solar magnetic activity) is just silly.
Synopsis:
Just when the science had settled on a pause in global warming, Karl & cohorts frantically stirred the pot.
How do we get a average global SST every year that is accurate within 0.5 C ? The first step towards truth requires the solution to this problem , surely? Talking within 0.1 C is just clutching straws. Who can take any data prior to 1960 seriously? Would we happily anesthetise a patient with the ‘correct’ dosage based on the same probabilities as that of SST data, prior to say 1980?
Perhaps Dr. Jekyl would, my guess is there wouldn’t be a line outside his office.
You’re absolutely correct. Climate “science” almost uniformly walks all over the idea that science is based on measurement and the comparison of prediction to observation. There are a few exceptions, but all of them are skeptics and under threat of ostracism, arrest, or in some cases even murder for voicing their opinions.
It goes from laughable to outrageous when we have these fools present paleo reconstructions in discussions of the potential effect of a 1 degree C change in AGT on climate over the course of 100 years, or the effect of a 500 ppmv change in atmospheric CO2. None of the “proxy” measures presented are precise within an order of magnitude of those numbers.
I would say that no data is worthy of study prior to ARGO.
And as soon as ARGO was rolled out, it showed that the oceans were cooling. Since this contradicted the consensus view that the globe is warming, it was immediately thought that the data was wrong.
No checks were made for instrument error or mis-calibration etc. Instead, the solution was to simply delete from the record those buoys that were showing the greatest trend in cooling. This has forever sullied the ARGO record, since we do not know whether there was any fault and hence whether the data that was deleted was in fact correct.
The correct approach would have been to take a random sample from the buoys that showed the greatest trend in cooling, and a similar random sample from the buoys that showed the greatest trend in warming and to return these buoys to the laboratory for testing and evaluation. But this was never done!
See:
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/OceanCooling/page1.php
I was just going to raise a fuss at the low 1950 startpoint and the lack of 1900 – 1950 trend — but then I read further. Good.
Linear trend is statistical porn. Evocative, but easy to abuse.
How do we get a average global SST every year that is accurate within 0.5 C ?
Question is, really, what is the variance — what is the accuracy of the trend? Theoretically, offset can be off, but trend correct. Or not.
Go to MODTRAN and run the numbers. The oceans cover 70% of the earth. The air immediately above the oceans is extremely humid. Make the adjustments to MODTRAN to measure the change in W/M^2 when you alter CO2 in a humid atmosphere. It literally changes by 0.00 W/M^2. H2O completely negates the marginal impact of CO2. It is literally irrelevant. I’m irritating them over at Rogues and Scholars with that example.
http://scholarsandrogues.com/2013/05/09/csfe-heat-capacity-air-ocean/#comment-266058
http://vertassets.blob.core.windows.net/image/a00144f9/a00144f9-a82e-407d-b796-de18fb307166/vapourdensity.jpg
But the theory is that increased CO2 does not directly increase W/m2. You need an amplifier. More CO2 related downwelling longwave infrared will increase evaporation at the surface thus adding more water vapor to the atmosphere which then leads to more warming, especially under the condition of a thick CO2 “blanket” preventing that extra evaporation and heat from fully escaping the atmosphere.
That means that you need to increase water vapor in your model in order to show a CO2-driven increase in W/m2.
I know. It is twisted logic but it is what it is.
Caveat: Measured water vapor has not been playing along with the script. Primarily because it has such a large variation, any noteworthy trend has not been revealed.
And good luck using NASA’s data product which is barely a decade long, not meeting “their” definition of climate change of at least 16 to 30 years in order to say anything -cough-hack-gag- “robustly confident” about a trend.
http://modis-atmos.gsfc.nasa.gov/MOD05_L2/qa.html
For the few bold enough to go where no decent scientist should tread but where climate scientists can either be found pounding their head against the data file or seductively massaging it:
http://modis-atmos.gsfc.nasa.gov/MOD05_L2/validation.html