Guest essay by Brendan Godwin
Background
I worked for Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology – BOM for 2 years from 1973 to 1975. I was trained in weather observation and general meteorology. I spent 1 year observing Australia’s weather and 1 year observing the weather at Australia’s Antarctic station at Mawson.
As part of it’s Antarctic program, Australia drills ice cores at Law Dome near it’s Casey station. On our return journey in 1975 we repatriated a large number of ice cores for scientific analysis. The globe’s weather and climate records are stored in these ice cores for the past 1 million years approximately.
Australia’s Antarctic program went by the name of Australian National Antarctic Research Expedition or ANARE for short. This is now known as Australian Antarctic Division or AAD. Returned expeditions formed a club called the ANARE Club of which I have been a member since 1975. Members have many functions and reunions and they have a reunion dinner every year. At this dinner there has always been guest speakers from Australia’s Antarctic Division. These guest speakers are usually someone of the caliber of the Divisions Chief Scientist or the Operations Manager and the talks are designed to keep members updated on the Antarctic scientific program.
The annual dinner is also a place where members keep in touch with each other and network and this communication continues throughout the year via email.
The International Panel on Climate Change – IPCC
The IPCC was created by and is a joint 50/50 partnership between the World Meteorological Organisation – WMO and United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). It has extremely narrow terms of reference in that it’s role is to determine that humans are causing global warming. In that regard it is only looking at human induced forcings over the past 150 years, just to make sure it reaches that result. That makes it a political body with a political agenda.
World Meteorological Organisation – WMO
The WMO has structurally changed since 1974. Today it is headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland. When I went through training with the BOM, the WMO had a shared global headquarters between Melbourne, New York, Moscow and London. I don’t know when this structure changed. Australia had a leading role in the WMO and was a dissemination point for weather data.
Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology – BOM
BOM’s headquarters are in Melbourne. Australia has claim to 5.9 million square kilometres, about 42% of Antarctica. That claim is on hold while the Antarctic Treaty is in place. On the Antarctic continent Australia has 3 full time stations, Mawson, Davis and Casey, as well as a 4th, Macquarie Is., in the Southern Ocean. BOM has a full time presence on all these stations. Weather data is collected throughout the day and night at all these stations. At Mawson in 1974, we collected not only our own data but all the weather data from Davis, the Japanese station at Syowa and the Russian station at Molodezhnaya. Mawson sent all this data to the Overseas Telecommunications Commission – OTC in Sydney where it was forwarded on to BOM in Melbourne. A second Russian station, Mirny, was collected by Casey and forwarded on the BOM Melbourne via OTC.
BOM used this data, in conjunction with all the observational data obtained from all the weather stations and observational points throughout Australia, as part of Australia’s weather maps and forecasting. Additionally, Melbourne was the WMO distribution point for all weather data in our region. BOM Melbourne collected and collated all this data and forwarded it on to the WMO.
Temperature Data and IPCC’s Climate Change
In 2013 I attended an ANARE Midwinter Dinner – MWD. Australian Antarctic Division – AAD’s Acting Chief Scientist Dr Martin Riddle was our guest speaker at this function. I met with him over canapes before the dinner and spoke with him for about 20 minutes. I tried to get a sneak preview what his talk was going to be about. He said he was Australia’s lead scientist on the IPCC and, aside from giving us an update on the scientific program in the Antarctic, he was going to talk about climate and global warming. I asked him, were we not in an interglacial warm period in the 100,000 year Milankovitch Cycle and wasn’t all this current warming natural? His jaw dropped and was aghast. Our discussion ended there and he raced off not looking too happy. I couldn’t help but getting the feeling that I wasn’t supposed to know anything about the Milankovitch Cycles. It seemed like no one was supposed to know this.
It seems apparent that we all are just supposed to listen to what the IPCC are telling us and don’t ask questions. So what are the IPCC telling us?
The IPCC have produced 102 climate models to predict our future climate. The world’s meteorological organizations use weather models to forecast and predict weather and have been for many years. They have proved to be very accurate over 4 days and reasonably accurate over a week. The IPCC’s climate models are notoriously inaccurate. We’ve had these models now for some 30 years and we now have 30 years of data to compare them against. They are not even close to accurate.
Dr Roy Spencer is a meteorologist, Principal Research Scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, and the U.S. Science Team leader for the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer on NASA’s Aqua satellite. At an International Conference on Climate Change in his presentation he said referring to the IPCC models below.
Climate models are not even forecasting. Those curves on the chart are hindcasts.¹ They already knew what the answer was but still can’t get them right.
In spite of this, the IPCC seem adamant that there is nothing wrong with their models and it must be the data that is not right. Roy Spencer said: There’s no comparison. The IPCC are now hinting, maybe we shouldn’t trust the observations, let’s just trust the models.
Temperature Adjustments – Homogenization
One has to be excused for being skeptical here but it does look prima facie like the IPCC has asked their 50% partner, the WMO, to give them some temperature data that more closely matches their models. At least 3 of the WMO’s senior partners, BOM – Australia, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration – NOAA – America and Met Office – UK are adjusting their temperature data to something that has a much more closer resemblance to the IPCC’s models. There is no evidence that Hydrometeorological Centre of Russia – (Roshydromet), is involved with these adjustments.
They are taking this:
And turning it into this:
An Australian scientist, Jennifer Marohasy, has been taking a close interest in the adjustments BOM are making.² She produces weather forecasting models and has a grave concern about these adjustments. One of the data inputs to weather forecasting models in temperature. It appears that the temperature is not correct/accurate now.None of these organizations will say or explain what they are doing or are being vague when asked. Raw data is being removed from public scrutiny and no one knows if it is actually being destroyed. Officially they are providing no scientific basis for making these adjustments. The adjustments they are making are complex. The 1940/41 and 1998 El Ninos have been wiped from these records.
But they haven’t just lowered and raised the temperatures in one hit, they’ve slowly incriminated the adjustments so that it all looks natural. If they’d lowered and raised them in one hit you’d have a chart that looks like this.
At one of our recent MWD reunions I caught up with and spoke to a colleague who spent many years working at the BOM as a weather observer and forecaster both in Antarctica and Australia. This person is outside of the realm of politics and wishes to remain anonymous. The person’s last job was working on these temperature adjustments. The job of this person’s team was to adjust the temperatures upwards so has been working on adjustments from 1990 until the present.
I asked, why was BOM making these adjustments and it was explained to me this way.
When there are temperature observational points located in the CBD area of large cities where there are tall buildings, it has been well known to BOM and generally, that these temperatures would be half to one and a half degrees C cooler if the tall building and the city wasn’t there. It is a phenomenon known as “the island effect”. It is the same as when, on a cold day, the hairs on your arm stand up and that insulates a warm layer of air close to the skin. Tall buildings do the same thing. Additionally, these tall buildings are heated and air conditioned and every time people walk in and out of the building, hot or cold air blows out altering the ambient street temperatures.
But the anomaly in what this person is saying here is that this person’s team is adjusting country temperatures upwards by half to one and a half degrees C so that they match the city temperatures. That’s creating about a degree C of warming when if they had adjusted the city temperatures down half to one and a half degrees C, they’d be creating approximately a half a degree of cooling.
Jennifer Marohasy’s charts for Rutherglen in country Victoria show this quite clearly. Note these are truncated to 1910.
Conclusion
The Australian Climate Observations Reference Network–Surface Air Temperature (ACORN-SAT) Technical Advisory Forum released a report in 2015 confirming that the Surface Air Temperatures were being adjusted, confirming the process is called Homogenization, confirming that other weather monitoring institutions around the world are making these same adjustments and purporting to justify why the adjustments are being made. Observing practices change, thermometers change, stations move from one location to another and new weather stations are installed. They refused to release their complex mathematical formula used to make the adjustments. They claim that homogenisation is essential in eliminating artificial non-climate systematic errors in temperature observations. non-climate related factors include:
- the replacement of thermometers;
- changes in observing practices;
- expansion of the network into remote locations;
- changes in infrastructure surrounding a weather station;
- relocation of weather stations.
The only reason on that list that really makes any sense is changes in infrastructure surrounding a weather station. You can’t calibrate a thermometer used 100 years ago with one used today. When reviewing Jennifer Marohasy’s paper on Rutherglen, just as one example, none of the above apply yet Rutherglen’s temperatures were still adjusted. In her report Jennifer wrote:
In a special advisory issued by the Bureau in September 2014, it is claimed that the adjustments – which create the artificial warming trend in the homogenised temperature minima – were necessary to make the Rutherglen series consistent with the trends measured at neighbouring weather stations. However, it is apparent that in this advisory, annual raw minima values from Rutherglen are compared with data from neighbouring sites that have already been homogenised. This approach, which may once have been considered fraudulent, is now consistent with the postmodernist epistemology that underpins homogenisation as practiced by the Bureau . . .
Jennifer has requested of BOM why Rutherglen was adjusted when none of the BOM’s homogenization criteria applied and received no response.
My observation of all of this is that these so called reasons for making these adjustments are not reasons but excuses. If any adjustments are to be made, city/urban temperatures should be adjusted down to match what the temperature would be without tall buildings. Adjusting country/regional temperatures upwards to match the city is a fabrication to suit an hypothesis or agenda and the reasons are just an excuse. If there was any real reason for an adjustment, aside from the island effect in cities, it would be for where there is a Stevenson Screen out in the middle of an asphalt car park. That temperature should be adjusted down. Yet all these adjustments are both up and down, depending on the time period, with the end result a temperature chart that resembles catastrophic warming. And that is coincidentally exactly what the IPCC are looking for.
That makes these adjustments political not scientific.
- It is reasonable to make certain adjustments that are intended to improve accuracy.
- Adjustments should be rare.
- Adjustments should not be to suit a political purpose and there should be no mechanism that allows to even make this possible.
- As a scientific practice, the reporting agencies should ALWAYS maintain and report the original raw data. It should be publicly available for download. It should be easy to find and not buried under numerous web pages making it impossible to find.
Once you start introducing reasons to make adjustments then it becomes too easy to use them as an excuse to adjust everything to suit a purpose. It becomes easy to allow for political interference. Political interference should be impossible.
1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ExgKJpJyDXQ
2 Temperature Change at Rutherglen in South-East Australia
Brendan Godwin was a Radio Technical and Officer Weather Observer Bureau of Meteorology for Mawson Station in the Antarctic 1974
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It’s not called man-made global warming for nothing.
The decision by BOM to homogenise Rutherglen, a grape growing area, with Hillston, part of the Australian arid zone, was for me, the final nail in the coffin.
I just can’t believe the BOM models.
Then they themselves discovered that the models do not predict climate change in Continental Australia.
So neither do they believe their Australian models.
Unless they still believe that the dams will all dry, a la Professor Flannery and children will not know what snow is like.,
All climate data has to be publicly available and beta tested.
We are paying for it.
Don’t argue its a defence issue.
Even India now has a satellite that can predict our cropping yields.
China has our metadata anyway, they just hacked it.
As a nation and scientists, we just look stupid pumping out unreliable homogenisations and expecting the models to come up with reliable useful predictions so economically viable plans may be made.
Just as an aside the BOM station in Melbourne was closed after showing a flat trend line.
Why?
“Just as an aside the BOM station in Melbourne was closed after showing a flat trend line.
Why?”
Well, it’s what WUWT wanted. But it isn’t closed, just moved.
I suggest everybody takes a breather.
Rutherglen data are as useless as any other Australian site for tracking climate warming (or not). While comments are useful, few actually hunt down information. I have and It’s easy to dispel the myth that data are in anyway sound. The first part of the Rutherglen record is ‘compiled’ from somewhere else. The mid-part has many missing data and there are at least two site moves. Up to 1995 data are manually observed thermometers in a large Stevenson screen. Data after 1996 are reported by an automatic weather station high-frequency (1/sec) PRT probe in a small screen and are processed (filtered to remove spikes) in Melbourne. (I don’t think I can post a picture; but if I could, I would.)
Taking extraneous factors (site and instrument changes) into account, the null hypothesis, which is that trend is zero, can’t be disproved.
It is as fictitious to focus on selected contradictory evidence, as it is to homogenise data that don’t agree with models.
For both raw and homogenised data, key issues that are are evaded/ignored are tarted-up as science. At Sydney Observatory for example, aerial photographs show Stevenson screens moved around 1950 and that site-ambience materially changed in ~1972 due to building of a brick wall. Both changes are disregarded by homogenisation. People chatting about this stuff rarely do the hard-yards to find out what actually happened.
At both Rutherglen and Sydney Observatory (which is one of the longest continuous series in the Southern Hemisphere); Wagga Wagga, Broome, Geraldton, Alice Springs, Adelaide Airport, Cape Bruny, Townsville,Laverton, Ceduna and Cape Leeuwin; data are too coarse. Thus there is no possibility of showing a climate related trend exists.
Cheers,
Dr Bill
If you think there is, than show us your evidence.
Scientists that worked at Rutherglen for many years and workers at and near the site dispute the moving of the screen so do you know someone that can refute this .
Between 1960 and 1964, temperature and evaporation readings ceased. But rainfall was still reported. It sounds like something happened.
A grammatical mistake:
Those apostrophes need to go away, because the posessive of it is “its”, not “it’s”. “It’s” is the contraction of “it is”.
Indeed. It’s really annoying when people make simple mistakes like this.
“It’s” can also be the contraction of “It[ ha]s”, as in “It’s been a long time since we could trust Climate ‘Science’!”
There’s a simple trick for getting that right: just memorize this: “NEVER POSSESSIVE!”
We are talking about a temperature range between zero and one degree, right ?
Dumb questions:
(1) What is the margin of error of an official temperature-measuring thermometer?
(2) How does this error propagate in the averaging process?
(3) What percentage is the final error in this temperature range between zero and one degree?
The controversy built around such a small temperature range and its associated margin of error, itself, seems more of a concern to me than the methods by which officially agreed-upon figures are agreed upon within such a narrow range. It seems like two fleas contesting over whose grain of sand is a molecule bigger or smaller.
(1) about a degree
(2) it depends on many things. The assumption is that errors can be averaged for increased accuracy. I’m not entirely sure so don’t read much into this, but I believe they tend to fail in one direction. Most equipment is like this.
(3) Not entirely sure what you’re asking there. The measurement error alone according to Hadley is about +/-.15C. Yes, this means that many of those “the hottest year ever” claims over the year are from the start, unknowable (.3C is a substantial portion of the total warming)
The problem with homogenization is this. As stations are moved and maintained, the data makes a step change. The homogenization routine stitches these together by aligning them…moved out of a city, temperature drops, *Poof* the past in the city is cooled.
Now on the surface this seems reasonable..and I believe up until the specific problem was identified, it was an honest error. HOWEVER, when you think about what is actually happening, you get a series of slowly warming trends (from UHI, screens getting darker as the pain ages), followed by a drop. In an imaginary test world in which temperatures are flat outside of UHI impacts, this would result in a saw-tooth temperature output as stations were moved…unfortunately the homogenization routine would stitch this together, making all of those slow increases accumulate.
BTW, the final minus raw is very misleading. There are a lot of changes that have some real justification. The accumulating errors I described above only add a small amount to the trend. But the world is already at such an observably low rate of warming that it’s pretty clear that the best course of action is to do nothing. If those small errors do anything to lower the already low trend, its just that much more of a non-issue
However, there’s another issue. You see, part of the whole point of some of the many adjustments is to help eliminate the impacts of UHI (urban heat island) but then basically the automated homogenization routines just go ahead and put much of it right back when they adjust for those station moves. So the “final minus raw”…is actually “final minus UHI polluted raw”…and we’re back to square one on the UHI problem.
Well presented analysis. Please send a please explain to Minister for Environment & Energy Josh Frydenberg with copy to Senator Roberts.
Thanks, Brendan. Good post.
Cheers.
+1
Thank you Dr Brendon Godwin Background for this illuminating article!
Agenda driven science is everywhere.
What a boring sequence of ancient past, Stonehenge-like “thoughts” on climate!
I literally feel thrown back to WUWT’s early times. Inbetween, a number of intelligent persons have published here interesting head posts on climate.
This is such a poor post! Inimaginable.
Brendan Godwin never and never has read anything on homogenisation, UHI adjustmenst and the like.
He is simply repeating what you can read everywhere on ultraskeptic web sites, all I consider be nio more than the inverse of this religious “Skeptical Science” corner.
– Did he ever design and implement software able to compare GHCN station datasets?
– Did he ever really compare surface, radiosonde and satellite data?
His graphs presented here are no more than simple copy and paste!
“the brave new post truth world you live in. Some of us have been left behind in the days when data was what was actually measured and recorded not hidden and destroyed.”
That is the post truth world. I can point out endlessly that data people claim is destroyed is perfectly accessible, on the web, and always has been. Nope, we’re post-truth now. It is being hidden and destroyed.
And yet we see many cases where people have asked for the real data and been told either that it was ‘lost’, or we won’t give it to people that don’t truly believe.
What on earth use is such a comment. If you have something to say, then say what you are talking about. It bears no relation to met data which is clearly visible, on-line, now.
Rutherglen is very close to where I live and I first learned about this from Jennifer Marohasy on her website a few years ago .
I did write a letter to a polly and received pages of the usual line of crap by way of explanation , but just parroted from what the BOM had already espoused .
The explanation that surrounding sites were measuring different values so they had to homogenise was a cracker when you consider the distance between the sites and the totally different climates and topography.
I have also came across some flood level data that had been ” homogenised ” by our BOM and queried my local polly but received the same response in email form about two or three pages long.
I did send a message to Jennifer Marohasy asking if she was aware that BOM had adjusted flood levels and she was surprised and asked for the link which I sent on .
I have also spoke to someone who lived quite close to the Rutherglen research station and had some dealings with station on the agriculture side and he was adamant that the Stevenson screen had never moved while he was there .
Would be great to ask him a bit more of his recollections of his time at Rutherglen but unfortunately his funeral is on Friday .
You are deluding yourself Robert. Do some research.
You can look at the current Ruthenglen site on Google Earth: Latitude -36.1047, longitude 146.5094; I could send you a photo taken in November 2016. I had work there too.
The present site is 1/2 a mile from the office. Do you truly think in the olden days some poor sod kept a horse handy so that every 4-hours he/it went there to read thermometers? You could track-down aerial photographs that show unequivocally the site moved. Instead of lambasting and blogging-on you could do some research yourself and add value to the conversation instead of noise. Do some yards at your expense; then post a considered view.
Anyway, whose funeral is Friday?
Cheers,
Dr Bill
Great post, written so my eyes didn’t glaze over which is often the case.
But, and by the way, the sea level by satellite guys are doing pretty much the same thing. Since 1992 the rate of sea level rise has been bumped up nearly a millimeter per year. This can be easily verified by taking your Excel spread sheet on a trip to the Internet Archives WayBack Machine and comparing Data from 2004 with the current data.
Raw data MUST be kept in future. No erasing or adjusting and then binning it whatsoever, on pain of imprisonment. It’s government-taxpayer intellectual property. The stakes (ie cost of government policies) are too high.
“Raw data MUST be kept in future.”
Raw data is always kept, and published. No-one here seems to want to kn ow about it. GHCN Daily, the original min/max readings, are here. In the US, at least, you can get the original, mostly handwritten pages <a href="here“>here.
Um, I believe he is talking about the BOM data…
“Um, I believe he is talking about the BOM data…”
The Australian data in GHCN is BoM data. Where else do you think they get it from?
But if you want to get the same data, direct from BoM, it’s here. You can download a complete zip file of daily (unadjusted) information for each station – and that includes far more than the 110 or so in Acorn.
At first I thought that you meant to use the word “incremented” but on second thought “incriminated” is appropriate.
thank you for picking up on that typo.
And here’s me thinking it was just some sort of inadvertent or mathematical overweighting of the UHI affected data, sort of a convenient error or just some klutzy, mathematically ignorant mis-use of the kriging methods, to coarse a data set etc. No, its a deliberate, straight out fraud. Instead of filtering out or truly homogenising the data by giving the true representative weighting to UHI affected data ( i.e. based on the area of the UHI in each case) you distort all the unaffected data to fit the affected data.
Hallelujah!! I’m now a fully fledged denier! (and ashamed to be an Australian).
Thankyou Brendan Godwin.
Hmm, one dimension of the cook-up I hadn’t thought of until reading this is that they likely deliberately and unnecessarily made some station moves to give cause for adjustment. How about the Rutherglen and Darwin?
The Rutherglen pre- and post-homogenisation data demonstrate clearly that those who did the measurements back then were STUPID! The guys or women in 1910 were so stupid as to measure a whopping full degree too little, imagine that! But there’s something very CLEVER about their STUPIDITY: you see the ones in 1910 were over a degree off, the ones in 1920 slightly less off, then in 1930 still off but a little bit less again, and so on. Until in the year 2000 they finally got it right. Or are they in danger of overshooting in 2020, who knows?
Anybody who takes that “homogenisation” seriously will also believe that pigs can fly.
Jennifer Marohasy presented at the 2014 ICCC on the homogenization of temperature data that changed high quality temperature data from a cooling trend to a warming trend (increase of 2C).. She discusses a twitter conversation with Gavin Smidt of GISS on the homogenization. The video is available at:
https://youtu.be/OK6k3w21EFQ
The fact that there are so many models is evidence that a lot of guess work has been involved. Only one model can possible be the correct model. Unitl the IPCC decides which model is the correct one, their entire modeling effort cannot be taken seriously becsuse it involves guess work. Hence the results of all efforts using these models must also be disregarded. If the temperature data needs to be adjusted then the data is wrong and needs to be thrown out. Adjusting the data turns it into fiction and all work based on data that is either wrong or fictious needs to be thrown out.
According to the AGW conjecture, the surface of the Earth is 33 degrees C warmer because of the action of so called greenhouse gases that provide a radiant greenhouse effect. At one time it was felt that a greenhouse stayed warm because of the action of LWIR absorbing greenhouse gases. But through experimentation that was found to be false. A real greenhouse stays warm because the glass reduces cooling by convection. It is a convective greenhouse effect. There is no radiant greenhouse effect associated with a real greenhouse. So to on Earth. As derived from first principals, the surface on the Earth is on average 33 degrees C warmer then it would be without an atmosphere because gravity limits cooling by convection. It is a convective greenhouse effect. The 33 degrees C is what is calculated from first principals and the 33 degrees C is what has been observed. There is no room for an additional radiant greenhouse effect. The radiant greenhouse effect has not been observed anywhere in the solar system. The radiant greenhouse effect is hence fiction and because the AGW conjecture is based on a ficticious radiant greenhouse effect, the AGW conjecture must also be fiction. If CO2 really affected climate then the change in CO2 over the past 30 years should have caused at least a measureable change in the dry lapse rate in the troposphere but such has not happened. There is no real evidence that CO2 has any effect on climate.
A most important task for the IPCC is to establish the climate sensivity of CO2. In their first report the IPCC published a wede range of guesses for what they considered to be the possible values for the climate sensivity of CO2. Only one value can be correct. In their last report eh IPCC published the exact same range for their guesses as to the value of the climate sensivity of CO2. So after more than two decades of effort the IPCC has learned nothing that would allow then to narrow the range of their guesses one iota. Theri efforts to date have been totally useless. An orginazation like the IPCC, that deals in wrong models, ficiticious and wrong data, and makes no progress, should have their funding cut.
Can’t argue with cutting the funding of the IPCC, but then the IPCC never should have received any funding to begin with – it was an organization that started with its conclusion and worked its way backward trying to justify the pre-conceived conclusion.
Can you provide more information, or links, regarding the first principal derivation of the convective limitation on cooling? I’ve long been skeptical of the “radiant greenhouse effect” since it is based on experiments conducted in a sealed container of fixed size, not open to the vacuum of space, and not subject to any atmospheric processes, in other words, NOTHING like the Earth’s atmosphere (and therefore, the results cannot be reasonably extrapolated to what will occur IN the Earth’s atmosphere).
Try doing a search on “The convective greenhouse effect” and look at articles appearing on “They Hockey Schtick”. They in turn reference work by James Clerk Maxwell. I myself wanted to use AGW as another reason for us to conserve on the use of fossil fuels but AGW is based on only partial science and is hence only science fiction. I canot defend it. Most of the postulates of the AGW conjecture turn out not to be true.
The fact that there are so many models is evidence that a lot of guess work has been involved. Only one model can possible be the correct model.
I don’t think you understand how climate modelling works. Quoting Trenberth:
So you are saying tht I am being overly optimistic in saying that one madel may be correct. I can agree with that.
@ur momisugly willhaas You got it 🙂
Gday Brendan
Congratulations on your post, and welcome to the club! There are a number of us who have been digging into BOM and Acorn for nearly 5 years. If I may be a little immodest, I brought this to light in 2012 https://kenskingdom.wordpress.com/2012/05/14/acorn-sat-a-preliminary-assessment/
(and HQ before that in 2010), including Rutherglen. Several follow ups since then. Acorn is complete rubbish. The adjustments cannot be replicated as no daily data is publicly available for most stations before 1957 – that’s the most glaring of many problems. Drop me a comment at kenskingdom.wordpress.com (any post will do) if you would like more info. I’d certainly like to see what else you’ve found.
Cheers
Ken Stewart
“The adjustments cannot be replicated as no daily data is publicly available for most stations before 1957”
That’s not true if you go to BoM direct, as here. I looked up your favorite Rutherglen, which goes back to 1913, when it started (max and min T). Or Cape Otway, back to 1864.
Nick; are data allegedly measured at Rutherglen Research before1925 actually measured there; or are you just projecting and having yourself on?
Cheers,
Dr Bill
Bill,
The metadata file for Rutherglen is here. It describes the equipment installed in 1913. I have no rason to doubt that the readings are from there. Do you?
There you go- sometime in the last 12 months daily data for Acorn sites has been digitised on Climate Data Online. This was missing from a very large number of sites until at least October 2015- that’s three and a half years after Acorn was released. I admit I took my eye off Acorn sites because I was so disgusted with the missing data, the errors, the adjustments which made Acorn less comparable with neighbours… I can see I will have to go back and have another look, but I don’t know if I have the stomach for it.
Thank you for sharing all this with us, it’s extremely insightful and unfortunately comfirms my fears. We can see that local warming which is a direct effect of urbanization (uhi), is being transformed into global warming by homogenization of the rural stations so that they match the warming trends of the cities.
Unfortunately, when your weather station records the temperature in a city growing from 100 thousand to 1 million people over a few decades, what you are measuring is a growing heat island which is directly proportional to urbanization…
The correct science to clean up the urban stations temperature records from the local warming interference, would be to subtract the uhi value from the station record. Then remains only the global trend component. But then unfortunately, the warming trend doesn’t look very threatening anymore and doesn’t require immediate action to shift energy production or use electric cars anymore. I can understand that this result would go strongly against the agenda of the people who are planning to make money from the energy transition.
So much wrong with this article.
” were we not in an interglacial warm period in the 100,000 year Milankovitch Cycle and wasn’t all this current warming natural?” There is a reason why his draw dropped. Milankovitch Cycles act over tens to hundreds of thousands of years. Warming of the last 100 years is not related to Milankovitch cycles.
“The IPCC have produced 102 climate models”. Shows the author doesn’t understand what the IPCC does, they synthesise existing research. As they say, IPCC “does not conduct any research nor does it monitor climate related data or parameters.”
Dr Roy’s graph, presented “At an International Conference on Climate Change in his presentation”… failed to mention it was the Heartland Institute conference with a clearly stated political view rather than a scientific conference. Why does the graph end in 2013? What data is “Real World”? Why do “Real World” measurements start below model runs? There are updates of the graph available, for example Nick Stokes recent update, why not use them?
The figures aren’t labeled, but on homogenisation “They are taking this: And turning it into this:” is comparing global temperature (Hadley) with land only (GISS)… no wonder they are different!
“they’ve slowly incriminated the adjustments so that it all looks natural.” The adjustments are being incriminated? How unjust! Does he mean incremented? Why choose a single site at Rutherglen? When the entire Australian record is assessed, it shows homogenisation has in fact had the effect of reducing the apparent extreme temperature trends across Australia.
Better quality articles please.
“Dr Roy’s graph, presented “At an International Conference on Climate Change in his presentation”… failed to mention it was the Heartland Institute conference with a clearly stated political view rather than a scientific conference. Why does the graph end in 2013? What data is “Real World”? Why do “Real World” measurements start below model runs? There are updates of the graph available, for example Nick Stokes recent update, why not use them?”
You realize that the Climategate emails revealed that Gavin Schmidt’s (now head of NASA GISS) Real Climate site was set up for political (propaganda) reasons not scientific ones. They even had a code name for this: “The Cause”. Furthermore Gavin maintained this site on company (taxpayer’s) dime.
Dr. Spencer appeared on the the Charlie Rose and was happy to debate Gavin, but the coward refused to even appear on the same set as Dr. Spencer.
Regarding NIck Stokes graph: it’s clear he is using recently adjusted temp data as the there is no evidence of the eighteen pause. He also disingenuously excludes the UAH sattelite data which was included in Dr. Spencer’s original graph.
” He also disingenuously excludes the UAH sattelite data which was included in Dr. Spencer’s original graph.”
No, the original inclusion was dishonest. The CMIP 5 data shown was surface. They compared with measurements in a different place (LT). It’s like showing Fed plots of US inflation forecasts, and saying they failed because they didn’t match Japan’s data.
“No, the original inclusion was dishonest. The CMIP 5 data shown was surface.”
And the surface temperature data only covers approximately 25% of the the Earth’s surface — the rest is made up. So what is your point exactly — that the models agree with some fabricated and adjusted data set? And are therefore somehow close to being accurate?
How does this even remotely resemble actual science?
Nick
Not quite so since isn’t AGW a top down effect? The surface warms in response to a warming atmosphere such that one would expect to see the first signs of AGW in the LT measurements.
“would expect to see the first signs of AGW in the LT measurements”
One might. And one might be disappointed. The point is that they are not the same. If you want to check a prediction, check against the measure of what was predicted. If you want to test a theory about where AGW might appear first, that is something else.
Inter alia, LT actually includes some of stratosphere, which is expected to cool (and in fact has).
Reason why the graph ended in 2013 is because the Youtube video of Dr Roy Spencer was published in 2014. He presented earlier this month in Washington, DC (At the Crossroads III: Energy, Climate and Policy Summit). The you tube link is here:
https://youtu.be/gpCaTs_8QCo?t=3729
Videos of the complete summit are here:
http://www.texaspolicy.com/content/page/crossroads-2016
The body in New Zealand which has taken on itself the responsibility of maintaining climate records is the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA). It has a very close relationship with the Australian Bureau Of Meteorology (BOM), as you will see below. NIWA maintains a temperature series (7SS), a composite of records from seven stations scattered through New Zealand which it is very careful to point out is not an “official” temperature record but which has acquired de facto status as such.
Like the record maintained by the BOM it has been “homogenised” to the extent that the record, since 1910, shows a linear trend approaching 1ºC per century. Earlier versions of the series on NIWA’s web site stated that the adjustments to the record had been made according to a methodology of Rhoades and Salinger published in 1993. In 2015 De Freitas, Dedekind, and Brill published a paper (peer reviewed) which (re)calculated adjustments to the 7SS using the methodology described by Rhoades and Salinger 1993. They found the adjusted series to show a linear temperature increase less than half that shown by the adjusted 7SS. Subsequently NIWA revealed that it did not use the Rhoades and Salinger methodology at all, but they have, to the best of my knowledge, steadfastly refused to divulge the methodology. It also claimed that the methodology it used was peer reviewed by the BOM, but has refused to divulge the contents of that review.
I have no problem with accurate and appropriate adjustment of a temperature series to account for, and correct, changes to the location of stations and instrumentation. For example, the station at Hokitika, New Zealand, was shifted from beside the estuary of the Hokitika River, at sea level, to the bench on which the airport is located, a height change of something like 30-40m. But why would NIWA want to keep the methodology secret?
Coincidentally, last year I wrote an essay on the relationship between carbon dioxide and temperature, confining it to data pertinent to New Zealand only. My primary reason was to show that contrary to the popularly promoted hypothesis, for changes over consecutive periods of 25 years in the New Zealand data, there is no obvious relation between an ever increasing carbon dioxide composition and temperature as shown by the 7SS. It is a very simple analysis which requires no knowledge of, or application of statistical theory. Anyone with access to the data can look at it for themselves. The data is publicly available on the NIWA and other web sites. The essay was published on the NZ Climate Science Coalition website. There was some criticism levelled from a variety of sources that it was too simple, and the data was “cherry-picked”. Well, I did use the “official” information so it is hard to accept that I cherry-picked the data!
We often seem to forget, when debating the fine points of data representation and adjustments, that the point of difference between those who support the hypothesis of anthropogenic global warming is not that climate is changing, but the extent to which carbon dioxide contributes to temperature increase. We often forget that no experimentation has determined a relationship between increasing temperature and increasing carbon dioxide. Those who promote the hypothesis and who brand sceptics (like me) “deniers” forget, or refuse to acknowledge, that we do not deny that climate is changing. We know it is! But we do not agree with the hypothesis they promote.
I have been reviewing that essay, particularly as to the number of years over which the changes in temperature and carbon dioxide are taken. I have placed a slightly updated version of the essay on my web site at http://kerkin.co.nz/climate/nz_data.php. It contains references to the information I have cited above and on the last line contains a link to a supplementary page which looks at the data in more detail and which provides further links to pages which allow exploration of the end points of the temperature series and variation in the number of years chosen for a comparison between temperature and carbon dioxide changes.
I worked for NIWA as a contractor so I am not entirely confident about the accuracy of ther work based on what I know about how they collect data. But NIWA’s 7SS “record” has become the defacto standard for alarmists.
Excellent Gary thanks
Up until a few years ago it was possible to view long term (Tmax, Tmin) trends for any site in the BOM’s database, but it’s unfortunately no longer available.
There were quite a few rural sites with raw data collected since early or mid 1900’s that exhibited no long term warming trend, nor any significant trend post 1970.
The BOM does concede that UHI impacts city temperatures, and Sydney Observatory Hill is one such site that’s always significantly warmer than surrounding sites, particularly when the wind is blowing from certain directions, and the same applies to Sydney Airport, but a few years ago when both stations recorded their highest ever temperatures, the BOM validated both of them.
I’m not sure that those stations are included in the ACORN data, but they still create temperature records that are added to the greater dataset from which statistics show that record high temperatures are increasing faster than record low temperatures. I’m sure that this is common practice around the world, so whether the world is heating or not from CO2, UHI is still contaminating data that’s being used as evidence for enhanced GHE.
And of course, the Left media along with relevant agencies including the BOM make a huge amount of noise when these records tumble, even though they know that the data is very UHI contaminated.
For the record, the state’s highest temperature was recorded in a remote area
I think that the two biggest surprises to me about average temperatures in oz are .
1- I was taught that to average something like temperatures for say one month you add up all the temps for the month then divide by the number of days in the month , no they model the average now .
2- when we hear on TV news/weather that it was the hottest day on record I always thought this would mean for 100 or so years but discovered it may only mean as little as 10 years but normally 20 years depending on which channel you’re watching .
So much wrong with this article.”
Yep indeed Mat L – and further to your critique of the MC comment …….
“I asked him, were we not in an interglacial warm period in the 100,000 year Milankovitch Cycle and wasn’t all this current warming natural? His jaw dropped and was aghast. Our discussion ended there and he raced off not looking too happy. I couldn’t help but getting the feeling that I wasn’t supposed to know anything about the Milankovitch Cycles. It seemed like no one was supposed to know this.”
Actually, Milankovitch cycles (apart from being irrelevant on human time-scales) tell us the we are at the base of a trough in a cooling trend…..
So, a tad fanciful that an IPCC climate scientist would a) not know about them and b) that it was actually far from a warming upturn.
Toneb,
The IPCC climate scientist know about the Milankovitch Cycles alright. He was aghast that I knew, I was the one who was not supposed to know.
Brendon, he was most likely aghast that you could make such an elementary error. Milankovitch cycles act over mellinnia not centuries.
The problem for the climate establishment is subtle.
If every heating change in a human life time is theoretically caused by man, then there is no room to discuss anything else.
By doing that you were not on message.
So when was Martin promoted to “IPCC climate scientist”? Until his recent retirement, he managed expeditioners to the Antarctic. He was in the dim and distant a biologist specialising in benthic foraminifera.