Guest essay by Michael Bastasch
A new study found adjustments made to global surface temperature readings by scientists in recent years “are totally inconsistent with published and credible U.S. and other temperature data.”
“Thus, it is impossible to conclude from the three published GAST data sets that recent years have been the warmest ever – despite current claims of record setting warming,” according to a study published June 27 by two scientists and a veteran statistician.
The peer-reviewed study tried to validate current surface temperature datasets managed by NASA, NOAA and the UK’s Met Office, all of which make adjustments to raw thermometer readings. Skeptics of man-made global warming have criticized the adjustments.
Climate scientists often apply adjustments to surface temperature thermometers to account for “biases” in the data. The new study doesn’t question the adjustments themselves but notes nearly all of them increase the warming trend.
Basically, “cyclical pattern in the earlier reported data has very nearly been ‘adjusted’ out” of temperature readings taken from weather stations, buoys, ships and other sources.
In fact, almost all the surface temperature warming adjustments cool past temperatures and warm more current records, increasing the warming trend, according to the study’s authors.
“Nearly all of the warming they are now showing are in the adjustments,” Meteorologist Joe D’Aleo, a study co-author, told The Daily Caller News Foundation in an interview. “Each dataset pushed down the 1940s warming and pushed up the current warming.”
“You would think that when you make adjustments you’d sometimes get warming and sometimes get cooling. That’s almost never happened,” said D’Aleo, who co-authored the study with statistician James Wallace and Cato Institute climate scientist Craig Idso.
Their study found measurements “nearly always exhibited a steeper warming linear trend over its entire history,” which was “nearly always accomplished by systematically removing the previously existing cyclical temperature pattern.”
“The conclusive findings of this research are that the three [global average surface temperature] data sets are not a valid representation of reality,” the study found. “In fact, the magnitude of their historical data adjustments, that removed their cyclical temperature patterns, are totally inconsistent with published and credible U.S. and other temperature data.”
Based on these results, the study’s authors claim the science underpinning the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) authority to regulate greenhouse gases “is invalidated.”
The new study will be included in petitions by conservative groups to the EPA to reconsider the 2009 endangerment finding, which gave the agency its legal authority to regulate carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.
Sam Kazman, an attorney with the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), said the study added an “important new piece of evidence to this debate” over whether to reopen the endangerment finding. CEI petitioned EPA to reopen the endangerment finding in February.
“I think this adds a very strong new element to it,” Kazman told TheDCNF. “It’s enough reason to open things formally and open public comment on the charges we make.”
Since President Donald Trump ordered EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt to review the Clean Power Plan, there’s been speculation the administration would reopen the endangerment finding to new scrutiny.
The Obama-era document used three lines of evidence to claim such emissions from vehicles “endanger both the public health and the public welfare of current and future generations.”
D’Aleo and Wallace filed a petition with EPA on behalf of their group, the Concerned Household Electricity Consumers Council (CHECC). They relied on past their past research, which found one of EPA’s lines of evidence “simply does not exist in the real world.”
Their 2016 study “failed to find that the steadily rising atmospheric CO2 concentrations have had a statistically significant impact on any of the 13 critically important temperature time series data analyzed.”
“In sum, all three of the lines of evidence relied upon by EPA to attribute warming to human GHG emissions are invalid,” reads CHCC’s petition. “The Endangerment Finding itself is therefore invalid and should be reconsidered”.
Pruitt’s largely been silent on whether or not he would reopen the endangerment finding, but the administrator did say he was spearheading a red team exercise to tackle climate science.
Secretary of Energy Rick Perry also came out in favor of red-blue team exercises, which are used by the military and intelligence agencies to expose any vulnerabilities to systems or strategies.
Environmental activists and climate scientists largely panned the idea, with some even arguing it would be “dangerous” to elevate minority scientific opinions.
“Such calls for special teams of investigators are not about honest scientific debate,” wrote climate scientist Ben Santer and Kerry Emanuel and historian and activist Naomi Oreskes.
“They are dangerous attempts to elevate the status of minority opinions, and to undercut the legitimacy, objectivity and transparency of existing climate science,” the three wrote in a recent Washington Post op-ed.
“Frankly, I think you could do a red-blue team exercise as part of reviewing the endangerment finding,” Kazman said.
Though Kazman did warn a red team exercise could be a double-edged sword if not done correctly. He worries some scientists not supportive of the idea could undermine the process from the inside and use it to grandstand.
Originally published at The Daily Caller, republished here under their content license.
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I am altering the data. Pray I don’t alter it any further.
Why do I want to put a CNN logo on Darth’s face?
Data Quality 101. The more versions you have of the past, the lower the data quality. Each new adjustment degrades, not improves data quality. Until finally if you adjust the data enough, no one will believe it.
The average person on the street has zero clue about any adjustments.
And if the only info we had came from those doing the adjusting…none of us here would know anything about them either.
Well no sh*t.
Not as in I’m surprised. As in I knew.
What is the average voltage of the circuit board inside my TV? What is the average current in the overhead wires of the national Grid? What is the average number of calories in the middle meal of the day across the whole world? Can you see the point I am getting at. Some averages are meaningless, some global averages particularly so.
We have a rock which not only rotates on axis (hence daily temperature changes) but also swivels about and orbits the heat source (hence seasons and equitorial/polar differences). And these differences are massive, several TENS of degrees. The whole initial concept of there being any validity to the invention of a “Global Average Temperature” is fundamentally flawed. It was contrived surely to simply satisfy the need to have an “input” for some spurious Stefan-Boltzmann-esque shenanigans. The idea is nonsensical. You cannot average temperature over day/night seasons and latitude. It takes me only one day watching my outside thermometer to see that it can vary in less than a quarter of an hour.
Arguing about the validity or otherwise of data adjustments is pointless when the whole concept of Global Average Temperature is scientifically absurd. Instead of calling it BS like it is you are running your fingers through it and pontificating upon whether it has a stickyness factor of 0.47 or 0.46.
It’s still BS – don’t touch the poop!
“Can you see the point I am getting at? ”
…
Nope, why don’t you explain.
…
Make it a good explanation, so that an actuary can understand.
Before we consider something as big and complicated as the whole Earth and it’s gaseous blanket lets take a simple and smaller example. I have at the bottom of my garden a outside lavatory, it is constructed of brick with a little roof. It’s like a small house. Sometimes when you sit in it you feel cold and sometimes hot. As an academic excercise I have asked my gardener to tell me what the BSH Average Temperature is. Mellors is not the sharpest tool in the woodshed so I had to explain that by “Average” I meant across the whole year, averaged across the day (can be cold in the morning but hot at 2pm the same day), averaged across all parts of the structure (bricks by foundation take longer to warm up on a hot day than the roof tiles),and I want him to do it properly with actual thermometers. He wanted about 3,000 thermometers, one for each brick and one for each roof tile but I had to tell him that was stupid. He’s only getting 3 and he is NOT allowed to attach any of them to the bricks or tiles or any other part of the structure, he can only measure the temperature of the air near to something. Also he can only take one measurement a day (but he can vary the time), he can miss a few days out if he feels lazy or he can get his one-eyed brother to do a few readings. Although he did look a bit confused he didn’t call it BS until I told him the result must be scientifically accurate to +/- 0.1 degrees.
Have you measured your own temperature recently Reverend? If so did it reveal anything useful?
tony mcleod:
You ask The Reverend Badger
I respond that long ago I and others assessed the various compilations of global temperature and we informed the ‘climate industry’ of our findings which revealed that the ‘climate industry’ already knew their compilations are complete bollocks. See this. Indeed, as the link explains, one of the emails from me that was leaked in ‘climategate’ directly addresses this.
Richard
Ok I’ll ask you Richard.
Have you taken your own temperature recently? If so what was it? Was the number meaningful? What if there was an 8 sigma anomaly in one of your vital signs. Would that make you concerned?
InB4 – Oh look he’s replied to his own comment so he must be D**g.
Actually I just had another thought, lets have some audience participation. Would anyone like to tell us, properly and scientifically, in (say) not more than 100 words what exactly are we measuring when we take a reading of 21 degrees C from the thermometer in our weather station at 0930 hrs on July 9th 2017.
LOL @ur momisugly Forrest Gardener: “because numbers are released in numerical order”
…
Nope
10:32 am, area code 786 issues 347-4961
….
10:33 am, area code 407 issues 622-4431
Badger, the point is that the warmistas are just making stuff up.
People with the truth on their side do not make stuff up.
People who fudge numbers and people who do not are exactly like the difference between T. Rowe Price and Bernie Madoff.
That is really all anyone needs to know.
The sense of humor is always the first thing to go, Forrest.
And everyone sees it but the humorless ones themselves.
At one time the USHCN had their own time plot that showed the sum of the adjustments vs raw temps, which showed clearly the cooling of past data, with warming of data since about 1980, but I can’t find the exact link at this time. But the adjustments have been known for a long time
https://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/data-tampering-at-ushcngiss/
Nick Stokes July 6, 2017 at 1:40 pm
Nick, anyone with a modicum of knowledge of energy measurement in the atmosphere knows that temperature is the incorrect metric to quantify energy content of the atmosphere. An HVAC engineer with only a GED has more knowledge of energy measurement in air than all your PhD climate ‘scientists’. Temperature is completely the wrong metric it is like averaging speedometer readings of all vehicles to asses fuel consumption.
The conclusions that can be drawn is either that climate ‘scientists’ including those at NOAA and NASA are fundamentally ignorant of the effects of atmospheric enthalpy and the correct metrics for energy content -or- there is significant malfeasance in these government agencies and academia.
Both conclusions support the immediate defunding of every climate ‘science’ department in NOAA, NASA and academia.
——————————————————-
Ian said the above. I couldn’t agree more. In point of fact, I’ve been ASKING for years for someone with
a goodly amount of computer skill to try to integrate the 70 years of radiosone measurements, using the RH with altitude to try to calculate a “atmospheric energy content” metric. Funny thing, no one has an interest in doing that.
I’m with those puzzled from the start by the concept of averaging temperatures (even anomalies).
I could take the temperature of the tip of the flame of my Bic lighter and average it with the temperature of my bath tub full of hot water.
What possible significance is the resulting number? and by extension the topic of this post.
My first year physics from 50 years ago suggests that if a scientist needed to determine “if the earth is getting warmer” that scientist would have to find a way to measure heat content (energy) and average that.
The satellites were intended to do that by direct measurement, and back around 20 years ago NASA said they were the only reliable way to know what was happening.
But a funny thing happened…the satellites were not cooperating with the warmista program.
So at some point, I think about 15 or so years ago…the satellites and their data were disowned by NASA.
And we started hearing stuff like “Well, no one lives in the troposphere”!
Funny how no one says “Well, no one lives in the middle of the oceans”, huh?
You have to forget a lot to be a warmista.
People who keep it all straight are skeptics.
The idea is that if Mother Nature does not agree with the models, do not change the models but change Mother Nature. Making such changes makes those making the adjustments, unbelevalble.
Based upon model results and data that has not been tampered with, the climate change we are experiencing today is caused by the sun and the oceans over which Mankind has no control. There is no real evidence that CO2 has any effect on climate and plenty of scientific rational to support the idea that the climate sensivity of CO2 is zero. If CO2 really affected climate then the increase in CO2 over the past 30 years should have caused at least a measureable increase in the dry lapse rate in the tropopshere but such has not happened. As it turns out the convective greenhouse effect which is a function of gravity, the heat capacity of the atmosphere, and the depth of the troposphere accounts for all 33 degrees C that the surface of the Earth on average is because on the atmosphere. An additional radiant greenhouse effect has not been observed anywhere in the Solar Sytem including the Earth. The radiant greenhouse is science fiction as must be the AGW conjecture.
Climate study stopped being a real science when the CAGW meme was born.
It is now much more about politics and religion than the actual atmosphere.
Just like environmentalism use to be about the state of the environment.
Those days are gone.
The BOM in OZ has found a way around “running out of excuses to adjust the raw data” they are now adjusting the raw data before it gets officially recorded
The gnomes of NOAA have been putting their grubby fingers on the scale of raw data for years.
Future scientists will curse the lying US government bureaucrat bastards of the CACA era.
All their “raw data” will have to be adjusted downwards!
Man-made global cooling is coming!
You actually get the same answer by using data NOT FROM NOAA.
that was one of the tests a couple of us did to put that conspiracy to bed
Mosh,
What did you to the “data” before torturing it to confess?
Very good….
They are painted way into a corner.
No way to walk it back.
“The Undersigned Agree with the Conclusions of this Report”
That’s better than peer review can offer.
Swamp a bad word now.
Even if published in the ‘peer reviewed literature’, would there be any better peer reviewers than the persons who agree with its content?
From the paper:
No statisticians? Interesting, since many of the mistakes in climate science are of a statistical nature.
True, if the difference between the original and adjusted forecasts are greater outside the confidence limits of the original forecasts then something is wrong.
Similarly if 50 time series are different, at least 49 of them are wrong. There is no reason to believe that the average of these series has an more significant meaning than any of the individual series.
The average time shown on 100 broken clocks is still only the right time twice a day.
Being right by accident every now and then is a far better record that the warmistas have with their predictions.
A drunken chimp throwing darts at a weather map would do better.
Walt: Once a day if it’s digital and set to military time (24 hr).
The constant alterations, adjustments and readjustments by activist agencies have been known to Climatologist for some time. This is a good first step to make it public knowledge.
I propose that “climatology” be redefined as a new branch of ciminology that scientifically studies the crime and criminals of climate science during the “anthropocene” (aka “adjustocene”).
How is this a bombshell? It’s been sitting there transparent as daylight for years.
As ever the surface temperature anomaly data set is a a scientific i.e. hypothetical, data set. Interesting as an exercise but that’s it.
Why do we have a scientific data set rather than an engineering one? Because an engineering one would have much larger uncertainty rendering it useless for climatology.
Did people read Pat Frank’s work on data uncertainty? Even though it was obvious to anyone who’s had to justify measurements it was still great work.
Too many people love taking the Hypothesis drug.
OK Nick Stokes, what caused the warming from 1880 to 1940?
Its about 50% natural and 50% anthro..
One knows that how?
Perhaps you can help me with the Southern Hemisphere Mr Mosher? Port Arthur tide gauge in Tasmania Australia shows 13.5 cm sea level rise between 1841 and 2000, an average rise of 0.85mm/yr. Hallett Cove geology in South Australia can show a rise of 130M between 15000 years ago to 7000 years ago, an annual average rise of 16.25mm/yr. How do you work out the anthropogenic CO2 signal in the last century and half given it’s only one nineteenth of natural warming for around 8000 years?
I am assuming here of course that sea level rise is the one overarching temperature proxy that rules them all-
https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/news/what-are-proxy-data
Mosh demonstrates ‘making it up as they go’.
Steve, if you want me to be persuaded by your SWAG, it would help if you could ascend Mount Sinai and come back down carrying your statistical hypothesis carved on some stone tablets. ha ha ha, just kidding, of course…. love your work.
Has anyone done an actual Climate Experiment (recently)?
Or spent how much time, it’s not difficult to make some sort of unadjusted guess, admiring their own Magically Thought out reflections in a computer screen?
How many people really do think that looking themselves in a computer and then telling the RoW how to live their lives is an actual way to live. It is the present-day Appeal To Authority.
Shall we ask the residents, what’s left of them, namely the uncinderised ones, of Grenfell Tower?
Magical Thinking and computers burned that tower and have put 10’s of millions people more in similar and very real danger.
I did an experiment. In a Cheltenham. Posh place is Cheltenham. The cost of public car-parking spaces tell you all you need to know.
Just a JOANI I went on, Journey Of Absolutely No Importance. Should I have gone to Kyoto, or Paris maybe?
My climate experiment happened quite by accident, like Willis’ grass cutting and in fact, also involved grass.
They spend, in Cheltenham, some of the extortions coming from car-park-bandits, on a sizeable public park.
alright alright, I <b<know 4 acres is a postage stamp to some people but for the UK, it is fairly presentable.
So, 2 hours before sunset after a perfect clear blue sky summers day. Looking at Wunderground, that little corner of England was actually THE warmest at about 25 or 26 degC last Saturday.
I’d been walking a lot, my feet were hot so off came the sandies and I went barefoot across the park.
The green grass, cut, mown & manicured to perfection was cool to walk on, almost cold in fact.
There are many asphalt (service) roads around the park and they were passably warm. At solar noon would have been roasting, but 2 hrs before sunset, the blacktop was not very warm.
Around the various ‘features’ of statues, seating benches, kids playpit, Pétanque court (how posh it that?) were/are concrete paving stones. We call them flags round here.
The concrete flagstones were very warm to the touch, a lot warmer than the asphalt and positively baking-hot compared to the very short-cut grass.
There were also ponds, a fountain and a small creek in the park. (I’m not good with water and unlike M Mann, cannot walk on the stuff)
I say that that park was, in miniature, what humans are doing around the planet. Not ALL the planet but the parts where they live, work and grow food and hence, Where They Put Their Thermometers.
So,
1. What was the average temperature of that park?
2. How much energy had been stored there during the day-time?
3. How fast was energy leaving the park in the evening/night-time?
How big a task measure it all and to work it all out, just for that 4 acre park?
Remember, at the speed the sun moves across the sky, the incoming energy in Watt/sqm changes, every 5 seconds, by more than the entire purported effect from CO2 greenhouse gas. There’s your clock, your expected accuracy/resolution. Can you do that?
Do you maybe see know how Climate Scientists are so deluding themselves, and their paymasters, by imagining they can do that calculation for The Entire Planet?
The entirety of this submission to the UK Parliament Science and Technology Committee in 2009 by Dr. Don Keiller (Cambridge graduate and doctorate) about manipulation of temperature data and the abuse of UHI makes very interesting and highly informative reading.
https://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200910/cmselect/cmsctech/memo/climatedata/uc0023.pdf
It is All worth reading and I commend the summary at the start, Page 3 for Temperature adjustments and P 4 for UHI
In relation to UHI the following statement can be found on the Berkeley Earth site in relation to temperature adjustments:- “There are also significant positive minimum temperature biases from urban heat islands that add a trend bias up to 0.2 C nationwide to raw readings.”
( see below 2nd graph in section “Why Adjust Temperatures” http://berkeleyearth.org/understanding-adjustments-temperature-data/ )
Compare that to the section on UHI in the Dr. Keiller paper which references a number of published studies – it seems that a very significant amount of 20th century ‘heating’ is a false positive due to using an artificially low number for UHI.
Nothing new in that and many articles have been written here about it – but it may be of interest to some who haven’t seen either of these two articles.
Why are the adjustments documented – why, what methodology was used, where is the raw data, who did, who checked it, when was it adjusted? I cant think of a dataset I work with that doesn’t have traceability.
Obviously you are not working in the field of climate science.
Sorry “aren’t”
Who is voting for colder winters?
Who wants to make crop yields around the world more difficult?
Who wants to deny the third world cheap, dispatchable power?
Who loves the electric rate crisis in Australia?
Who etc….
Absent the furor over carbon dioxide, the world has centuries of supply of fossil fuels, and the
emissions of all the stuff we know is harmful from burning them continue to be reduced.
The progress of application engineering suggests that a century will suffice to invent and engineer our way to a still more efficient future.
IF climate effects are real and take a century, I look back and see the adaptation and replacement rate of
technology and our entire physical stock of assets preceeds on a 3o odd year cycle.
We’ll turn our “stuff” over three times in the hundred year ‘crisis predicted’ period, adapting to any climate change as well without the need for international wealth transfers nor shrouding ourselves in technical sackcloth and ashes.
We spend too much time in the models — reality has moved on.
I live in a town on the ocean. There isn’t much, if anything, in the hurricane flood plain that was there 100 years ago. If the pattern is different a 100 years from now? we’re gonna rebuild everything anyway…so if the water comes in or goes out, for the land lifts or subsides, we’ll adapt over time.
Against the real progress of civilization, I have trouble seeing warmists as anything but Luddites, rather than the futureists they claim to be.
It’s all dueling statistics. Any time you take extremely varied numbers and pound them into a straight line going in the direction of your choosing, there is little to no reality left in the output. Perhaps if we stopped using a sledgehammer on the data and looked at the pattern through various statistical evaluations, there would be more accurate conclusions. Right now, one picks one’s base period, data set, statistical method and voila! Whatever answer you want. It’s completely useless.
I don’t know why anyone would trust a movement that continually change data and history.
In human history, the people/movements which have done this have always provided a terrible outcome for human society.
This post is extraordinarily educational. My head started to explode about halfway through the comments, and so I had to take a break to focus on one point that seems pretty important, namely the relationship between humidity, temperature, and heat, which Ian W pointed out. … I had not considered this seemingly most basic relationship before.
It makes sense that more water in the atmosphere would hold more heat in the atmosphere, and that temperature alone might not reflect heat content. Even though meteorologists measure this sort of thing, no doubt, still how this knowledge is APPLIED in our understanding of heat content does not seem to be transparent in discussions by those who extend meteorologists’ measures of humidity to climate change.
This makes me wonder about all the stations in the world measuring temperature. Now besides all the other problems with many of these stations, I see a problem of different stations measuring temperatures at a different humidity. A group of stations can meet every recommended requirement of location, positioning, height, equipment maintenance, competent use, etc., … but then they are all measuring temperatures at different humidities. This seems like a pretty big oversight in discussing heat, right?
Again, the effect of water appears to be underplayed. Why aren’t humidity readings being associated with all the station temperature readings? It seems like critical parts of the data puzzle are being ignored.
Excellent point.
I want to say Lindzen, or some other big wig in climate noted this very thing regarding increased irrigation on temperature on farmlands created in previously arid areas.
Nick Stokes auto-reflex to show up at WUWT when ever an article debunking/changing past temperatures belies his own lack of trust in the Russian practice of changing the past.
The Prime Directive:
Being on the politically correct side of an issue where those defining which side is correct also control one’s career path and salary is foremost in considerations in any bureaucracy, be it a corporate, educational or governmental organization. This is the prime directive (thank you Mr. Spock) I discovered in my 50+ years of observing these goings on. Believe it!