People send me stuff. Today, alert reader Clay Ablitt sends this:
I have been keeping a record of a lot of the different data sets that are put out by RSS and UAH because i believe they are a more reliable data set than NASA or NOAA data.
I noticed in the latest monthly update that added the September data, the historic temperatures were adjusted without any notes or version change.
I have attached the data from August and the newly adjusted data from September for your consideration. This will have an impact on all RSS data sets that include the ocean temperatures such as the global RSS TLT data which has continued to show a pause since February 1997.
He also attached an Excel spreadsheet with two pages, one for each month, a link to which is available here: rss-temperature-trend-sep-oct-2016 (.xlxs)
I checked out the worksheet, and he appears to be correct. There is an unannounced change to the Remote Sensing Systems data. The last change note I am aware of is this one: http://www.remss.com/node/5166
There seem to be no other mentions on the remss.com website that explain this change as observed in the flip chart below:
(click image if it doesn’t animate for you while reading this)
I asked UAH scientist Dr. Roy Spencer about it today, showing him the data and he replied:
We suspected they have a revised LT in the works, after they came up with a new MT.
“MT” refers to Middle Troposphere data, and “LT” refers to Lower Troposphere data. Last March, WUWT covered their adjustment to the MT data, making the trend warmer.
Of course, the unannounced LT adjustment discovered by Ablitt also makes the trend warmer, some thing that isn’t entirely unexpected given the remarks last year by RSS chief scientist Carl Mears:
I wrote last March in The ‘Karlization’ of global temperature continues – this time RSS makes a massive upwards adjustment:
All that is about to change. Readers may recall a video produced by the execrable “Climate Crock of the Week” activist Peter Sinclair that we covered here where the basic premise was that the “satellites are lying“. It seems to me based on his recent comments that Dr. Mears has gotten fed up with people using his RSS data set to suggest that the world isn’t warming as he expects it should. From the video Mears states:
They just wanted to know, you know, they wanted to fine-tune their statement about, you know, whether , you know, the surface temperatures are more accurate or the satellite temperatures are more accurate, and initially they wanted to say something like “But you really shouldn’t trust the satellite temperatures, you should go with these surface temperatures”, and I said, “Well, what I would like to emphasize, you’d really want to look at all the different datasets, so you don’t want to trust only the satellite temperatures, you want to look at the surface temperatures, and – and that sort of thing.
On his website, Mears makes this statement:
Recently, a number of articles in the mainstream press have pointed out that there appears to have been little or no change in globally averaged temperature over the last two decades. Because of this, we are getting a lot of questions along the lines of “I saw this plot on a denialist web site. Is this really your data?” While some of these reports have “cherry-picked” their end points to make their evidence seem even stronger, there is not much doubt that the rate of warming since the late 1990’s is less than that predicted by most of the IPCC AR5 simulations of historical climate. This can be seen in the RSS data, as well as most other temperature datasets. For example, the figure below is a plot of the temperature anomaly (departure from normal) of the lower troposphere over the past 35 years from the RSS “Temperature Lower Troposphere” (TLT) dataset. For this plot we have averaged over almost the entire globe, from 80S to 80N, and used the entire TLT dataset, starting from 1979. (The denialists really like to fit trends starting in 1997, so that the huge 1997-98 ENSO event is at the start of their time series, resulting in a linear fit with the smallest possible slope.)
Source: http://www.remss.com/blog/recent-slowing-rise-global-temperatures Archived here: http://www.webcitation.org/6fiS2rI7k
Mears uses the term “denialist” so there goes his objectivity when he feels the need to label people like that.
It’s as simple as it is depressing.
The data are politically incorrect.
So let’s change them.
Then wrap ourselves in a blanket of self righteousness and call anyone who questions us a den1er.
Pretty average day at the office for an establishment climate scientist.
One thing Dr. Mears says that rouses me to actual anger. That bit about the 1997 start point.
If he had said, say, March 1998, he would have a point. But 1997 is a perfectly fine start point, coming as it does just before the 1998 El Nino and the 1999 – 2000 La Nina, which cancels it out.
If you start in 2001, you get every bit as low a trend as when starting from 1997.
It is impossible that Dr. Mears does not know this. Impossible.
What Dr. Mears obviously wants is to start the series during 1999 or 2000, which is a whopping big La Nina cherrypick.
Okay, I see that this was pointed out, above. (And rightly so.)
P.S., I looked back at the early 2016 link and sure enough, they are trying to start in 1999. What a crock!
Evan Jones,
I know that is the era when total bull s… Trumps data but the rubbish above is particularly egregious nonsense. You complain about a Mear’s cherry-pick , now where I come from that is called chutzpah.
The following should indicate why. This a graph showing the RSS v3 TLT trend as a function of the starting data until September 2016 see-
Notice you can get virtually any number you like (within reason) by a suitable choice of a starting date. Starting with 1997 giving a value of 0.06 degrees per annum while Mear’s data starts from 1999 giving a value of just under 0.011 degrees per annum. Is 1997 a better choice than 1999? Clearly there is no way to decide.
The actual issue is that cherry picked dates after about mid 1992 (see the red line) provide trends with little or no statistical significance see- http://www.ysbl.york.ac.uk/~cowtan/applets/trend/trend.html or alternatively https://moyhu.blogspot.com.au/p/temperature-trend-viewer.html.
In contrast, for starting dates before mid 1992 the trend becomes significant and increasingly so for dates close to the start of the data set.
This is why a cherry pick using the minimum trend ,back in the good old days of 2015 when it was negative, was the backbone of the pausenik movement. The RSS data was then the gold standard and Lord Monckton made his monthly pronouncements about the pause . He seems to have gone very silent since then.
Here’s a WoodForTrees graph with three linear trendlines plotted. All three end 1/2016, so they include about half of the just-ended 2015-2016 El Niño. The green one starts 1/1997 (before the 1997-98 El Niño & 1999-2000 La Niña), the blue one starts 1/1999 (the Mears cherrypick), and the purple one starts 1/2001 (after the 1997-98 El Niño & 1999-2000 La Niña).
http://woodfortrees.org/plot/rss/from:1997/to:2016/plot/rss/from:1997/to:2016/trend/plot/rss/from:1999/to:2016/trend/plot/rss/from:2001/to:2016/trend
As you can see, the blue trendline (starting 1/1999) is much steeper than the other two. That’s because it is chosen to include the 1999-2000 La Nina but omit the preceding 1997-1998 El Nino.
El Ninos and La Ninas usually come in pairs: first an El Nino, then a La Nina. If you choose to start your linear trend calculation between them, it is a cherry-pick which low-biases the starting point.
To get the maximum apparent trend, you can start and end at such points: right at the end of an El Nino. That means the left end begins with a La Nina (cool period), and the right end ends with an El Nino (warm period). That makes 1/1999 thru mid-2016 a near perfect pair of cherry-picks for exaggerating the warming trend.
The only thing better for exaggerating the warming trend would be to start with 1979:
http://www.sealevel.info/fig1x_1999_highres_fig6_from_paper4_27pct_1979circled.png
Oh, who cares, daveburton? The IPCC climate models are obviously wrong. That means all the “physics” and “math” they jam into them is wrong. The world does not agree with the IPCC on any time frame. I don’t like people who deny facts. And, yes, facts are not speculation.
Here’s the graph:
http://www.sealevel.info/RSS_trends_to_2016_from_1997_1999_2001.png
Who cares? By any measure, global temperatures have not materially changed in over 20 years.
My God, no change in almost a quarter century! People need to get a grip.
Even if the world continues to warm slowly, why would not our progeny be able to handle any side effects? Will they be stupid? Will technology advancement stop?
Do you know what the hell you are talking about? Speculation is just that. Modelturbation incenses me.
Daveburton,
This is starting to get silly.
I could have chosen any starting month of the 164 months prior to mid 1992 to get close to the maximum trend. These are statistically significant trends . Did you look at the sites that calculate statistical significance for a trend. I assume not.
If I was indeed silly enough to use non statistically significant trends then I could choose from 2003 onward to try and find a maximum trend. For instance the trend from exactly ten years ago until the present is 0.028 degrees per annum and for 5 years again it is 0.093 degrees per annum. This is all nonsense because these trends over short terms and are subject, as you quite rightly point out, to the vagaries of EL-Nino/La Nina
For the lowest trends in the period 1997-2001 you have to be ultra-selective for you cherry picks , if you are out by a month or two the numbers will vary greatly . If you look at 1999 (0.011 degree per annum) compared to 1998 (0.044 degrees per annum) the difference in trends is over a factor of 2 greater.
This is not true for the longer periods prior to mid 1992. The slopes are quite stable ( fluctuating by 10 to20% at most over the 13 years) and it matters little if you change the starting month by a month or even a year. This why the length of the period is crucial. It has to be long enough (about 23 years) to take cherry picking out of the equation. For further elaboration read Werner Broszek’s contribution at this site and his comment at https://wattsupwiththat.com/2016/08/08/will-2016-set-satellite-records-now-includes-june-and-july-data/#comment-2273615 .
I could add there has been no statistically significant increases, decrease or pause in the past 23 years. All you can say with any confidence is that there has been statistically warming trends for periods longer than 23 years ago. The best estimate is that there has been a warming trend of 0.0135 plus or minus 0.0063 (the value could be between 0.0072 to 0.0198 degrees per annum) from 1979 until the present.
No, MikeR, you are the silly one.
No matter surface, especially SST by basin, or atmospheric, the world has not warmed in the manner projected by IPCC climate models in almost 20 years. Dick around all you want with the data, that is the fact.
On all other climate metrics, precipitation, drought, ice, monsoons, what have you, IPCC climate models are also bunk. That is the only fact that matters in the CAGW argument.
Excuse me, MikeR. I agree with your overall assessment. But with the satellite and radiosonde data, nothing happened for almost 20 years. Who knows what will happen post 2015-16 El Nino?
By the way the figure of 23 years I quote above is for the RSS (and UAH) data. For the surface data the period is around 17 to 18 years. This is due to the smaller effects of El-Nino/La Nina on the surface temperatures as compared to the satellite derived temperatures
MikeR wrote, “I could have chosen any starting month of the 164 months prior to mid 1992 to get close to the maximum trend.”
Yes, there was a statistically significant warming trend through the 1980s and into the early 1990s. Has anyone here disputed that?
What is in dispute is whether there’s been a significant warming trend more recently.
The only way to find a statistically significant warming trend since then is by picking one or both endpoints right after an El Nino, so that the graph starts with a La Nina (temporary cool period), and/or finishes with an El Nino (temporary warm period).
Using such an finishing point is defensible, at the moment, because that’s where we happen to be, right now, since the big 2015-2016 El Nino just ended, though using it without mentioning the distorting effect of that El Nino is deceptive.
Picking such an starting point, however, is nothing but a blatant cherry-pick, used to exaggerate the warming trend.
When the unvarnished truth is insufficiently supportive of a person’s position, so that he resorts to such artifice, it indicates that his position is based more on politics than science.
Dave,
Sorry I am not sure what you are trying to say exactly. Did you mean selecting the start and end points that are at exactly the same time of the ENSO cycle? That might make sense, but as the shapes of the present El Nino is quite different from 1997/98 El-Nino, this is fraught with difficulties and also ignores the other smaller ENSO signals, between these dates.
If you want to know the trend until the present by definition, the end point is fixed (i.e. now) and obviously the only variable is the starting date issue. Starting at any point close to an El-Nino is problematic as this is when the temperature is changing most rapidly (and this leads to the largest changes in trend for a small change in starting date.
I agree it is the same issue for the same with the end date, but you are kind of stuck with this if you are interested in the trend up till today.
his all just illustrates that calculating trends from data for periods shorter than 23 years for the satellite data is unwise. To confirm this, the RSS value for the current trend from 1997 is 0.049 C per decade (plus or minus 0.170C !!!).
In contrast the surface data, because it less sensitive to El-Nino/La Nina, the relevant period required for statistical significance is very much shorter and the confidence interval are much narrower..
So if you want to know whether the surface of the earth has warmed since 1997, the current values are for GISS ,0.171 C per decade (plus or minus 0.106C) , for HadCrut 4 0.135 C decade (plus or minus 0.104 C) and for NOAA (0.159 C plus or minus 0.097 C) . These are the values from Kevin Cowtan at. http://www.ysbl.york.ac.uk/~cowtan/applets/trend/trend.html .
If you have issues with the size of uncertainties in trends then dig out Excel and do the linear regression yourself (I suggest either the LINEST function or the Regression from the Data Analysis Add-in) to extract the uncertainties. Unfortunately you would then need to add additional corrections for serial correlation in the data. If you manage to calculate uncertainties that disagree markedly with those given by Cowtan let us all know.
To reinforce the message I am afraid, if you use the satellite data only as the basis for your conclusion, you will have to wait another 5 years for a conclusive statement about pauses etc.
However the good news is, if you have the patience to wait this long, it will also give you 5 years to learn how to play the fiddle.
I LOVE MikeR! One of the few people who can have sense, and a sense of humor.
I do have a quibble, though, with “surface temperature.” It amalgamates near-surface land air temperatures (LAT) with sea surface temperatures (SST). I am aware of how the providers of the estimated data do this, but I am uncomfortable with combining measurements for two such dissimilar physical properties, then attempting to present a coherent reflection of a changing global climate. It would seem to “smear over” some important climate metrics.
LATs and precipitation by climate region would indicate what is going on “where we live.” SSTs by ocean sub-basin would show some of the drivers of LAT and precipitation.
Global combined land and ocean temperature estimates simply show a varying, slowly rising trend from the Little Ice Age. Not much help.
I’ve been expecting to see the satellite data going the way of every surface data.
When the US can’t even prosecute the Clintons for their crimes – but instead lets them run for president – it seems the only way you guys will stop this is to have Trump.
Almost all of difference between satellite and ground is due to amsu. Aligning amsu to Msu is non trivial. You’d know that if you read code more and commented less.
I wonder if some expert is aligning his MSU onto your AMSU at this moment, Mr. Mosher? You really should read Spencer in addition to Mears.
Code be damned! Grab em by the molecules and their shivering frequencies! Make em sweat and give up their increasing energy trend. AGW demands it!
Funny how their “adjustments” are always in favor of Warmism. Quite remarkable really. Must be coincidence. Right Nick?
Karl lowers the long term trend.
Hansen 2010 lowered the trend.
Again, they sacrificed a small part of the long term trend to “eradicate” the hiatus. Ugly people.
[snip]
Hee, Hee, Hee:
And Hee:
Hee, again:
Oh, why not just read the whole thing:
https://bobtisdale.wordpress.com/2016/01/27/on-the-monumental-differences-in-warming-rates-between-global-sea-surface-temperature-datasets-during-the-noaa-picked-global-warming-hiatus-period-of-2000-to-2014/
I have noticed this minor data changes issue before and asked about it here. On a number of occasions when I have gone back to the monthly TLT data to get the next month’s update the previous months have changed a little. I’m not sure about older ones. It was confusing me and I thought it was something to do with the process and asked here but it wasn’t picked up by anyone. However, reading Roy Spencer’s explanation above would seem to answer it for me. The extra data point is being used to re-calibrate the existing models – presumably some sort of Bayesian methodology is being used for this.
Has this data and the changes been validated by the Radiosonde measurements, if no one has replicated the measurements it’s not science, just statistical fudging.
Radiosonds? There are too few. They are heavily adjusted.
Radiosondes? Oh, heavens! The data could be wrong? Or even adjusted?
Find me another Weed Patch, says Mr. Mosher! I’m a paid alarmist!
Charlie Skeptic
here is a good point to check charlie.
What does charlie know.
Radiosond… adjustments?
https://climateaudit.org/2008/05/27/leopold-in-the-sky-with-diamonds/
“Radiosonde adjusters take adjustment to extremes not contemplated in the surface record – ultimately even changing the sign of the trend. Sort of like Hansen on steroids.”
And that boys and girls is charlies lesson for the day
1. he doesnt know the science
2. he doesnt even know THE BEST of skeptical challenges.
he just blathers.. kinda troll like
“1. he doesnt [sic] know the science,” Mr. Mosher? But, could he know humor? Could he know the difference between the significant and the merely trivial? Could he know when people try to distract one from fundamental truths? Could he possibly even know things Mr. Mosher doesn’t?
Since college, the last Weed Wandering I did was when participating in the successful effort to screw the U.S. taxpayer out of $1.5 billion. I know that is chump change to a CAGWer like yourself, but I still think it was significant weed patch.
I do not do “science” anymore. I do not grub through data weed patches to tease out the latest minutia. I aggregate readily available information and draw reasonable conclusions. To whit:
1. Torture the data all you want, but all it ever shows is a slowly varying climate, with a slight warming trend since the end of the little ice age.
2. IPCC climate models are bunk. We are wasting trillions of dollars on “watermelon” wet dreams.
3. Mr. Mosher is a paid alarmist.
So sayeth Charlie Skeptic
The science is settled — only the data is uncertain.
Eugene WR Gallun
Here is one comment I made in January 2016:
Carl Mears is Vice President / Senior Research Scientist at RSS
Here is a quote by Carl Mears»:
“(The denialists really like to fit trends starting in 1997, so that the huge 1997-98 ENSO event is at the start of their time series, resulting in a linear fit with the smallest possible slope.)»
It is remarkable that he uses the term «denialists». A term which can be regarded as nothing else than name calling. ref: The Recent Slowing in the Rise of Global Temperatures
Wikipedia: “Name calling is abusive or insulting language referring to a person or group, a verbal abuse. This phenomenon is studied by a variety of academic disciplines from anthropology, to child psychology, to politics. It is also studied by rhetoricians, and a variety of other disciplines that study propagandatechniques and their causes and effects. The technique is most frequently employed within political discourse and school systems, in an attempt to negatively impact their opponent.”
“Whoever is careless with the truth in small matters cannot be trusted with important matters.”
– Albert Einstein
Carl Mears is involved in this current project:
“Improved and Extended Atmospheric Temperature Measurements from Microwave Sounders. The purpose of this project is to completely redo the current MSU and AMSU atmospheric data records using more advanced and consistent methods. This project is funded by the NASA Earth Sciences Directorate.”
As a Vice Precident I imagine that Carl Mears is quite influential in that project.
My guess is that we will soon see dramatic changes in the RSS temperature data series.
I will be greatly surprised if these changes will show a tendency of more cooling.
In my profession I would be put behind bars if I corrected measurements without well documented proof for the correction.
‘NASA Earth Sciences…..Directorate”. Has a nice ring to it, no?
The “warmists” call people who don’t believe their twisty numbers “denialists”; they can’t stand that the English language requires that the name opposite to theirs is: “coolist”.
[snip]
Could it be that the assumed math is not the reality? Math works only when it describes reality. Mathurbation is just that.
Marcus, I encourage you! As long as the Moderators are not snipping off your important stuff/junk, go for it!
No don’t encourage him, he already wastes a good portion of my day deciding whether his one liners meet site policy or not.
I’m sorry, Anthony. I didn’t think about the amount of time you must spend on this unpaid endeavour. Thanks for all you do.
Dave Fair
Well, Marcus. I have to reverse myself and encourage Anthony to snip your junk.
My take-home message from all of the above? Nobody, especially Mr. Mosher, knows what the hell they are talking about. Models, adjusted data, whatnot are not REAL.
UAH models temperature. Thank you. they are not real.
Your realize of course that the best science and technology requires adjusted data?
Question.. do you wear glasses?