Guest essay by Rud Istvan
The disclosures by Dr. Bates concerning Karl’s ‘Pausebuster’ NOAA NCEI paper have created quite the climate kerfuffle, with Rep. Smith even renewing his NOAA email subpoena demands. Yet the Karl paper actually is fairly innocuous by comparison to other NOAA shenanigans. It barely removed the pause, and still shows the CMIP5 models running hot by comparison. Its importance was mainly political talking point pause-busting in the run up to Paris.
Here is an example of something more egregious but less noticed. It is excerpted from much longer essay When Data Isn’t in ebook Blowing Smoke. It is not global, concerning only the continental United States (CONUS). But it is eye opening and irrefutable.
NOAA’s USHCN stations are used to create the US portion of GHCN. They are also used to create state-by-state temperature histories accessible on the NOAA website. A 2011 paper[1] announced that NOAA would be transitioning to updated and improved CONUS software around the end of 2013. The program used until the upgrade was called Drd964x. The upgrade was launched from late 2013 into 2014 in two tranches. Late in 2013 came the new graphical interfaces, which are an improvement. Then about February 2014 came the new data output, which includes revised station selection, homogenization, and gridding. The new version is called nClimDiv.
Here are three states. First is Maine, with the before/after data both shown in the new graphical format.
Second is Michigan, showing the graphical difference from old to new software.
And finally, California.
In each state, zero or very slight warming was converted to pronounced warming.
One natural question might be whether upgraded homogenization (among other things ‘removing’ urban heat island (UHI) effects) is responsible? No from first principles, because the NOAA/NASA UHI policy is to warm the past so that current temperatures correspond to current thermometers (illustrated using NASA GISS Tokyo in the much longer book essay). This might be appropriate in California, whose population more than doubled from 1960 to 2010 (138%) with current density ~91 people/km2. Maine represents a similar ocean/mountain state, but is much more rural. Maine’s population grew by only a third (34%) from 1960 to 2010, and its current population density is just 16.5 people/km2. Maine should not have the same need for, or degree of, homogenization adjustment. Without the newest version of the US portion of GHCN, Maine would have no warming; its ‘AGW’ was manufactured by nClimDiv.
It is possible albeit tiresome to analyze all 48 CONUS states concerning the transition from Drd964x to nClimDiv. NOAA gave 40 out of 48 states ‘new’ AGW. The Drd964x decadal CONUS warming rate from 1895 to 2012 was 0.088F/decade. The new nClimDiv rate from 1895 to 2014 is 0.135F/decade, almost double. Definitely anthropogenic, but perhaps not actual warming.
[1] Fennimore et. al., Transitioning…, NOAA/NEDIS/NCDC (2011) available at ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/cmb/GrDD-Transition.pdf
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And yet NOAA’s “national temperature index” shows very little warming since 1895. The US Climate Reference Network shows none since it began in 2005. Something is fishy.
If you can’t or won’t provide complete unfiltered data (NOAA) that support your conclusions then you aren’t credible scientists and your stuff is crap . If you follow the scientific method really what have you got to hide ? OK loss of funding understood .
The question is who is leading the lying ? A. Scientists , B. Corporate self interest ,
C. Political operatives and politicians ?
Is there any doubt it is C followed by B and C . There is an assumption that tax payers are cotton heads and should pay for the scam . Wrong the jig is up and the climate mascot Polar Bears will be just fine if not shot . That’s there real threat . Scientist should be an honored profession when they follow the scientific method and are not bullied into supporting a con game .
Many scientists are ardent disciples of “environmentalists” ideology and believe in a greater social cause. The end justifies the means follows… and noble cause bias breathes life into corrupted souls. GK
The Trump Administration transition teams are discovering they are in the middle of a Vietnam-Style Guerrilla War with Obama Regime holdovers who want and demand scorched Earth.
The Fraud of the NOAA paper belies the years and decades of Fraud in the President’s Office of Science and Technology, CDC, DoA, DoC, DoI, NIH, NASA and NSF.
Every employee under the Obama Regime is an IED, Improvised Explosive Device, who will gladly die for the cause as long as at least 10-others (Trump Administration employees) die with the IED.
I would recommend to the President the mass firing of ALL Federal Employees and denial of benefits and pensions hired prior to January 20, 2017.
This IS Civil War and we will do well just to survive it.
Rud Istvan,
A very interesting and useful analysis!
Thank You (!) for all of your thoughtful contributions….
i will second that j mac . thanks rud.
The general public (well, half of it that is) is so ignorant that they thought Trump was out to destroy the data on the left.
graphs are too small to read. Do you have larger ones or a link to the originals?
Sure. Buy the original ebook. Then you can enlarge and link at large. Your choice i Books, Amazon Kindle, knobooks,…whatever in any format where ever. You want me to breach my publisher agreements to make you happy? Get real.
Why are we debating a paper that doesn’t exist?
Per the author’s own admissions cannot be replicated. It should be withdrawn by the author(s) if they have any integrity or by the editor. Reproducibility is at the core of the scientific method. When we abandon it, we are somewhere between Roddenberry and L Ron Hubbard.
That the author’s refuse to withdraw is why we are discussing it.
So, it’s up to the editor.
Notice how alarmist refuseniks look to dismiss ALL David Rose’s evidence out of hand. ‘David Rose – he’s a denier’. ‘The Daily Mail is a filthy rag’. ‘The NOAA guy didn’t work on the project’, and so on. What they NEVER do is acknowledge that yes, there’s a big data problem and yes, there’s some explaining to do. Such complete bias exposes their positions as being alarmist-driven activists rather than seekers of truth.
Dear Rud,
“Welcome to the ADJUSTOCENE” …
You just won’t know what temperature is !
WL
I think we should stop using the term ‘homogenization’ and use the term ‘pasteurization’ instead.
It more accurately describes the process of adding heat to destroy any data that would cause spoilage to the story line.
There is no such thing as absolute Global Temperature and never has been. The best we can do is determine relative changes in temperature at specific locations over short periods using identical tools and process. Over longer periods it is problematic since too much can change if not everything changes. This lack of consistency tools and process then requires data to be “adjusted”.
Lets look at the most simplistic case, missing field measurements. Someone puts a thermometer in two separate fields 1000 miles a part, and measure for awhile. Eventually one thermometer is hit by lightening, so NOAA decides to estimate/model the temperature for the missing thermometer. We end up comparing two actual series of measurements with one actual and one fabricated. How does this even pass the smell test?
The milk is curdled, it went bad, throw it away. Or at best just consider it proxy data not measurements. Satellite measurements provide the best chance at consistency and even that has challenges in maintaining consistent process over time.
I once (almost) won over a non-skeptic, at least to looking at things a bit differently, when I asked him what the temperature of Canada was yesterday, compared to today.
He’s a smart guy, actually a statistician with modelling experience. We hashed out things such as how you would get an average for an entire nation, and importantly, how it could actually be relevant as it really wouldn’t tell you much.
Great, I said, now extrapolate those issues in getting a planet average, then try to extrapolate that even further to find a trend over two days, then extrapolate further over decades, then three (to get “climate”), THEN once you have all that done…start in on precipitation, etc. THEN you MIGHT have some sense of climate change.
We both gave up trying to convince each other, which might have to do more to the Guinness than anything.
I would asked him to compare his Guinness to data in Africa, given him an empty glass and told him to take a sip of the imaginary Guinness then asked him to estimate how much he had drunk. When he said you’re crazy, say exactly.
And I’d offer to pay for the African Guinness every time it was my round…
Experiment you can do at home:
1) Open excel.
2) Use a random number generator to create random “high” temperatures for an imaginary weather station over a period of 100 years. Something like 90 to 100 degrees for the high.
3) Graphed the data and put a linear trend line on it.
My very first run of the trend line shows that the temperature is increasing at that imaginary weather station using random data by 2 degrees over century! Clear evidence of global warming!
Go ahead – run this at home. It is pretty simple with a few excel skills. What you will find is that plenty of your fake weather stations will produce trends in the data showing warming or cooling. And YOU KNOW the data is random, and the trends are meaningless.
Random data produces random trends.
As a scientist I learned that when a random number generator can replicate your results, there is typically something very wrong with your study.
The problem is the trend, if it actually exists, is very, very small. 1/10th of a degree per decade. Such tiny variations are susceptible to random measurement error, program changes, instrument error.
I wonder how much of what we are seeing is actually deliberate, or based on expectations. “My temperature data isn’t showing a increasing trend!” “You must be doing something wrong – tweak the formula, because WE KNOW that temperatures are increasing.” “Ah, there, that’s got it. I just found a justification to discard all the data flattening the trend.” I see this all the time in science – people adjusting data to fit the model, or what we “know” to be true.
Tenn on February 8, 2017 at 12:08 pm
Interesting indeed. But… how do so many people manage to achieve such a correlation in their measurements, if all that is nothing else than random based data?
http://fs5.directupload.net/images/170209/f3wdwhgf.jpg
Would satellite and surface measurements not be more interspersed in that case?
The met data is recorded [rounded off] to 1st place of decimal and we are talking the changes in second and third place of decimals. Do such results have any meaning?
Dr. S. Jeevananda Reddy
I’m not sure if anybody has noticed the hiatus in arctic sea ice now for 13 years, and a rising trend in sea ice extend the last 10 years.
Here’s the link to the above graph:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/nsidc-seaice-n/from:2000/plot/nsidc-seaice-n/last:156/trend/plot/nsidc-seaice-n/last:120/trend
This shows that there is no long-term heating up in the arctic. You see melting / decline only in short term captions, not in the annual average long term trend.
And as already known, a steady rising trend in the arctic now for 38 years:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/nsidc-seaice-s/plot/nsidc-seaice-s/trend
Sorry, a steady rising trend in the ANTARCTIC now for 38 years
February 9, 2017 at 12:12 pm
Sometime life is one step forward, 2 or more back.
Waiting for this story to grow another arm and a leg.
As said what we want in life to happen often takes a back seat to reality. We get our hopes built up only for the last minute fail.
There are two sorts of global records, adjustable ones and unadjustable ones.
Land and sea fall into the first one and satellite and balloons into the second.
By adjustable I mean records that are adjusted continually and never stay the same as when originally listed.
Zeke explained years ago that the land records are continuously adjusted downwards in the past.
I am not aware that this happens with the other data sets.
It means that running comparisons like Karl did are only ever valid for the date and list of past temps on the day that data was run.
If you run the same programme a month or year later the data in is different .
Hence the only way this study could ever be replicated is for a complete data set to be archived for that study.
Bates is right this was not done.
People talking about the raw data still being available do not understand that it cannot be run the the wringer and give that date again.
Nor can the current data as the past data has been modified away from that Karl used.
Turning back to the video. I bag your pardon for my bad English and lack of American knowledge since I live in Italy.
When I watched to the video and a Senator (?) put the big pile of files saying: “Here are …..”, in my mind came the exact scene many, many years ago. Galileo being in front of the Inquisitors and one of them showing the entire bibliography about the claim that “the Earth if flat”.
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/02/how-culture-clash-noaa-led-flap-over-high-profile-warming-pause-study
“Tuesday, in an interview with E&E News, Bates himself downplayed any suggestion of misconduct. “The issue here is not an issue of tampering with data, but rather really of timing of a release of a paper that had not properly disclosed everything it was,” he told reporter Scott Waldman. And Bates told ScienceInsider that he is wary of his critique becoming a talking point for those skeptical of human-caused climate change. But it was important for this conversation about data integrity to happen, he says. “That’s where I came down after a lot of soul searching. I knew people would misuse this. But you can’t control other people,” he says.”
LOL
When is somebody on this site going to cover the fact that John Bates has clarified his statement and confirms that there has been no manipulation of figures in Karl.
“Bates accused former colleagues of rushing their research to publication, in defiance of agency protocol. He specified that he did not believe that they manipulated the data upon which the research relied in any way.”
“He specified that he did not believe that they manipulated the data upon which the research relied in any way.”
Aussie,
He said/she said is irrelevant. The data is manipulated. Anyone who looks at what’s being presented can see that.
Andrew
it is manipulated in many ways. The WMO flag up that pretty much the whole of Africa is estimated temps, or the equivalent of China, The US, India, Mexico, Peru, France, Spain, Papua New Guniea, Sweden, Japan, Germany, Norway, Italy, New Zealand, United Kingdom, Nepal, Bangladesh and Greece put together. That is some estimated temp data.