I invite readers to list all the things wrong with this bit of agitprop by Ed Hawkins (a lead author in AR6; perhaps this foreshadows the tone of the report). It’s going viral on the Left.
“Warming stripes” at Climate Lab Book.
‘A new set of climate visualisations, communicating the long term rise in temperatures for particular locations as a changing set of colours from blue to red. Each stripe represents the temperature of a single year, ordered from the earliest available data to now.”
Here shows graphics for Central England, continental US, Toronto, and (below) “Annual global temperatures from 1850-2017. The colour scale represents the change in global temperatures covering 1.35°C.”
His Tweet: https://twitter.com/ed_hawkins/status/999242147135188993
The inevitable fawning articles in the media: “This Has Got to Be One of The Most Beautiful And Powerful Climate Change Visuals We’ve Ever Seen” at Science Alert — “We are headed into the red.” The author is listed (with unintentional irony) at “Staff – Science as Fact.”
h/t to Larry Kummer
No scale or “crossover” point identified, not enough colors used, no mention that the beginning of the series started at the end of the little ice age. When combined with the baseless predictions of temperature, cause-effect, and the doom and gloom ramifications, this is a deliberately misleading cure.
Of course we know that the alarmists are pushing a “solution” desperately in search of a problem—a global world government and hair shirts for all the people (not politically connected).
I see this piece of art as a representation of the amount of alarmist hype the public square is exposed to over time.
Hansen introduced an “adjustment” in 2000 to change his US temperature chart compared to the 1999 version. The difference between the two was striking and was supposedly due to the “TOD” adjustment. Result was cooling of the 1930’s-40’s and warming of the 1980’s-2000! Deviations of up to 1.5 DegC are quite evident. Point 1) you never change historic data unless a measurement instrumentation change produces different results. Point 2) never denigrate well trained meteorologists and military personnel from the 30’s and 40’s by implying they couldn’t make and record accurate measurements! To do so is suspect at best!
Stephen Mosher, your task, should you have any integrity at all, is to get those two Hansen charts (’99 & ’00), post them here, and explain why and how the 30’s/40’s miraculously cooled and the 80’s/90’s warmed, thus drastically changing the slope of the curve! I would hold my breath for you post!
All of those TOD adjutants are proper and necessary. Judith Curry knows this. BEST proved that they were proper, and they proved that rural temps were increasing at the same rate and urban rates.
https://judithcurry.com/2014/07/07/understanding-adjustments-to-temperature-data/
Besides, using raw values produces a steeper warming curve because of the large adjustments to ocean temps in the early 1900s.
Scott Koontz,
Ocean temps should not be conflated with land air temps. The thermodynamic properties of water are quite different from soil, vegetation, and air. Also, the water cools itself through evaporation, and buffers temperature changes in the air above. Thus, water behaves as a smoothed temperature being averaged with unsmoothed surface air temperatures. There is information in both land and ocean temperatures, but the information is corrupted when the two are added together. They should be analyzed separately!
I think that you are being generous to claim that BEST “proved” that urban and rural rates were increasing at the same rates. The land masses are stationary, but the air masses that move over them are not. Thus, only upwind rural temperatures should have been used for comparison. It is well known that city heat and pollution can have an impact on weather (temperatures!) well downwind from from the cities.
Could we create a similar depiction of the taxpayer money wasted on wind and solar subsidies?
Mostly already covered but two major problems:
1. No perspective of scale. Dark blue to dark red is what? I know one thiung it’s much less than implied by the color choices.
2. Spectral choice. The proper way to show something like this is to use a spectrum rather than just two colors varying in shade (and perhaps a distortion in when the colors change) If it’s blue to red, use purples to show the change, even better would be to use the entire red-indigo spectrum and set the extremes to realm temperature extremes (of course then the stripes are all just shades of yellow).
Between blue and red is a whole color spectrum. This image jumps straight from blue to red, a supposed synonym for heat, while forgetting Biv’s middle and last Names. As in Roy G Biv.
Slick trick. I went to this ‘artist’s’ website and actually did something most of his fawning disciples would never do. I actually counted the lines (yes, I have way too much time on my hands).
For instance he has a colorful faux barcode ‘artwork’ for Central England temperatures from 1772-2017. Since that works out to 246 years and I actually counted 246 colored bars I think I’m on the right path.
The caption states that the temps go from 7.6C (dark blue) to 10.8C (dark red). And, right off the bat, that’s misleading. Why? Because over 246 years I counted exactly one year, and one year alone, with a temp at 7.6 degrees. The caption communicates a kind of urgency in depicting a 3.2 degree centigrade temp spread. But, in reality that’s not quite the case. Continuing; I count just one year that’s a bit up from 7.6, and possibly four years (I’m starting to go blind doing this) a bit warmer than those two. So, I think we can agree that the practical spread in temperatures isn’t quite as great as it’s (perhaps deliberately?) made out to be.
What about those sizzling 10.8 degree temperatures? Just like above I counted just one, about 69 years ago: 1948. Of course there were a few more almost as ominous, and demonically red bars after that; about 6 in the last 28 years.
Needless to say (although I’m saying it anyway) most of the red, redder, and reddest bars cozy up together (except for a single, lonely light blue bar interrupting the show) on the right of that bar code style graph. Ed Hawkins would be defeating his elite advocacy if they didn’t.
What I’d suggest is to squint down when you look at that graph. It will show you groupings of temperatures in a more pronounced manner. However, for Mr. Hawkins that muddles the plot a little bit.
There’s other time worn tricks in these barcodes from hell. Why use red for a warm color? A truly hot flame isn’t orange and never red. It’s blue isn’t it? Same with light. Is red used because it projects forward in vision while cool colors, such as blue, bashfully recede? Notice a three dimensional effect to all his graphs and also notice the prominence (due to the light/dark value change) to those dreaded warm years.
Finally, ask yourself if they actually could measure temperatures to fractions of a degree at a time when the medical profession was still using leeches to bleed sick people back to health.
Glad you had the time.
PR vs SR.
Public Relations vs Scientific Research.
SR dissecting the PR is a good thing…even if it’s not as colorful.
Wow! diffracted light – big deal…
OK, tradition is: blue is cold and red is hot
What is the traditional color for made up data? For reliable measurement?
Is there a color expressing “we got robust data by averaging 3 measurements only after we got to throw away 17 outliers or obviously incorrect measurements”?
Oh, boy! Another thing we can pick on! Thanks, Anthony, for telling us we are supposed to dream up reasons to hate it – we might not have known to do so on our own.
I don’t give a dam about the visual or what’s behind it, it’s the presentation that is sickening. This site is not about learning and discussing and forming one’s own opinion, it’s about spreading hate and distrust and ridicule and division. It’ politics and opinion more than science or fact.
No, the picture in question is politics and opinion more than science or fact.
The scientific fact is that the portion os color spectrum used in representaton should be proportional to the portion of the observed temperature range being represented. Correct representation would result in the almost imperceptible shades of the same color.
Science is on the side of sceptics, politics and opinion are on your side.
Either Kristi is right or this, from the drop-down menu above, is also “agitprop”.
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/map/images/fnl/500z_90b.fnl.gif
See, all it does is reveal a pattern, the problem is not the graphic but the fact it clashes with your world-view.
That’s enough here to label it “agitprop”.
Kristi Silber May 27, 2018 at 8:44 pm
“I don’t give a dam about the visual or what’s behind it, it’s the presentation that is sickening. This site is not about learning and discussing and forming one’s own opinion, it’s about spreading hate and distrust and ridicule and division. It’ politics and opinion more than science or fact.”
Excellent example of projection, Kristi:
“I don’t give a dam about the visual or what’s behind it,”
If you don’t have a problem with that chart pretending to be scientific, then you are on the side of “politics and opinion more than science or fact.”
SR
+1
QED
What is most wrong is that both historical and engineering analysis show there is a cyclic element of around three hundred and fifty years. Any period less than two cycles is misleading and unusable as a source of honest science.
Maybe someone could do one going from dessert color to green to show the global greening over the same period
Now, I have my answer.
So we are supposed to be 1.35K higher than in 1850. And Hell on Earth is unleashed if we get 0.65K more. Or even 0.15, as the goalpost for thermogeddon seems to be moving from +2 to +1.5.
Interesting.
This picture waste the vertical axis (it could be used to display some information, like, the reliability or the geographic extend of the data; but it doesn’t).
Or, said otherwise, add a useless dimension just for a fancy color show
What a metaphor of the CAGW unscientific crap.
The main problem with the chart is that giving a different shade of color to just 0.1 c resolution is meaningless. Why not give a different color to each 0.01 c because it’s also meaningless as well. A temperature change of 0.1 c is not detectable in any circumstances to life on planet Earth and to indicate otherwise is just being plain dishonest.
When it comes to the emission spectrum of colored light, blue has actually a much hotter temperature than red. This graph actually represents a cooling of over 3000 k in the real world.
The actual change in temperature rise has also been exaggerated as well being the alarmists goal. Cooling the past or inconvenient previous El Nino’s and warming the present significant contributes to this.
HADCRUT4 has continued with the warming bias, but the peak of the recent strong El Nino does not indicate the trend. It will also be deliberately cooled in future when it becomes part of the past. It still only shows a warming of around 0.5 c since 1979 leading to an overall warming now of 0.9 c. Where does the other 0.45 c come from?
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1979/plot/uah6/from:1979
There has only been a 0.4 c warming from 1850 until 1979.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4gl/to:1979/plot/uah6/from:1979
Where does the other 0.95 c warming come from since 1979?
You gotta remember, the target audience responds to shiny objects.