From the “But, but, wait! Our algorithms can adjust for that!” department comes this tale of alarmist woe. Greenland’s all-time record temperature wasn’t a record at all, and it never got above freezing there.
First, the wailing from news media:
NYT: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/02/climate/european-heatwave-climate-change.html
Climate Progress: https://thinkprogress.org/greenland-hits-record-75-f-sets-melt-record-as-globe-aims-at-hottest-year-e34e534e533e/
Polar Portal: http://polarportal.dk/en/news/news/record-high-temperature-for-june-in-greenland/
Now from the Danish Meteorological Institute (DMI), via the news website The Local, the cooler reality:
Danish climate body wrongly reported Greenland heat record
The Danish Meteorological Institute, which has a key role in monitoring Greenland’s climate, last week reported a shocking August temperature of between 2.7C and 4.7C at the Summit weather station, which is located 3,202m above sea level at the the centre of the Greenland ice sheet, generating a spate of global headlines.
But on Wednesday it posted a tweet saying that a closer look had shown that monitoring equipment had been giving erroneous results.
“Was there record-level warmth on the inland ice on Friday?” it said. “No! A quality check has confirmed out suspicion that the measurement was too high.”
…
By combining measurements with observations from other weather stations, the DMI has now estimated that the temperature was closer to -2C.
The record temperature ever recorded at Summit is 2.2C, which was reached in both 2012 and 2017. But -2C is still unusual at the station.
Shoot out the headlines first, ask questions later.
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The guy checking the instrument that day accidentally flicked his hot cigarette ashes on the equipment and didn’t realize it. Don’t you hate when that happens?
CBS radio reported today that Greenlanders were euthanizing their sled dogs because winters were too short to use them. The message was that one should ask populations impacted by climate change rather than just report data.
Yes, the study was conducted with Greenlanders living north of the Arctic Circle (there are not a lot of them), and the report stated that Greenland was a North American country, which should be some surprise to the Greenlanders and the Danes.
Don’t know about Greenland, but communities in northern Canada that I visited in the last 15 years had conspicuously fewer sled dogs than when I first saw them in the 1970s. Basically, almost everyone now has a snowmobile. Or two, or three. They don’t need feeding or watering, or any kind of attention. Just mixed gasoline.
There’s also a conspicuous absence of what used to be large populations of stray dogs around the same communities, because they have these dog days, when any dog that doesn’t belong to someone (i.e. isn’t tied up outside their house) is shot. That policy derives from the same sorts of animal protection policies that have essentially eliminated stray-dog populations in urbanized countries. I don’t know if they have the same thing in Greenland, but it would be surprising if they didn’t. I seem to recall that they do it in Alaska too.
Any visitor witnessing a dog-shooting day, and conflating that with the progressive replacement of sled dogs by snowmobiles would have no trouble in fabricating a climate-change scare story, if such was their mission in life. And, just like the extreme-temperature story, once it’s out there, no one (almost no one) notices the debunking by people who study the facts.
Too bad there isn’t a Fake News Shooting Day, when all unsubstantiated social media circulated blogs, stories, legends, and myths would be rounded up, and if unclaimed in 24 hours by someone with facts, taken out and shot. (Or overwritten with all ‘1’s, and made absolutely ‘true’, in the purest boolean sense.)
Faulty or mislocated monitoring equipment giving erroneous results is the bread and butter of Climate Alarmism and Global Warming and it is ably backed up by homogenised or ‘adjusted’ weather temperature data to give the desired headline.
DMI have checked the monitoring equipment (ME). The error was caused by too much snow around the ME. The distance between the ME and the ground was too small which reduces air circulation and results in too high temperature readings.
https://www.dr.dk/nyheder/indland/dmi-afviser-varmerekord-i-gronland
quote:
“Observationer fra andre vejrstationer har vist, at temperaturen i stedet lå på minus to grader.
Ifølge meteorologen skyldes fejlmålingen, at der ikke har været den korrekte afstand mellem måler og overflade på grund af sne.
– Den manglende afstand til isen har givet en dårlig ventilation, og det er også afgørende for, hvad en måler viser, siger Herdis Damberg.*”
The cool thing is that DMI checked the instrument.
you cannot do that with past records.
you cannot do that with newspaper clippings.
so for past records the best we can do is check for CONSISTENCY with other stations.
of course, daily records are not that important.
except for rhetoric;; Hottest day, coldest day.
miss me with that.
“you cannot do that with newspaper clippings.”
Lefties hate those old newspaper clippings. Wouldn’t be at all surprised if that is why Google made it much harder to search those old newspaper clippings that they digitized.
Tony Heller does a great job on YouTube of ridiculing CAGW with old newspaper reports showing modern temperatures are nothing out of the ordinary.
Graeme: Yes he does, which is undoubtedly why Mosher included that remark. Mosh and Mr. Stokes are great fans of adjusted “data”, and Heller takes their lunch money whenever. So Mosher takes a potshot is my take. They can’t have the global temp warmer in the ’30s, so they keep busy telling us our eyes are lying, especially when we visit Heller’s site.
The problem with checking with other stations is you have to make a leap of faith the other stations were right. You may be making the problem worse … there can be procedural errors, training errors and instrument manufacture errors and the reading you are throwing out was the only correct one. You are playing science on a wing and a prayer which is probably okay for an English Lit grad but not a scientist.
If you can’t specifically identify and check an error then leave the data alone .. it is what it is.
Steven … can we tell how long did the instrument malfunction?
No, but probably for a fairly long time, that snow certainly didn’t accumulate in July which has been clear and sunny in Greenland.
Correct Mr Mosher,
You can’t check the veracity of instruments on prior measurement records. You also can’t check the veracity of neighboring instruents which may have delivered warmer measurement records. You can only make adjustments to prior data to induce an artificial warming signal by adjusting prior data of colder measurements to match neighboring sites with warmer prior measurements.
Steven,
Are you the Steven Mosher who wrote on the atrocities of the one child policy of China while a graduate student at Stanford?
I read an article that mentioned the name recently and recognized the name from climate sites.
If you are not that Steven Mosher, my apologies. If you are that Steven Mosher, I applaud you. Recent writings completely vindicate your works.
Don’t know if this will show up … but temps above 80 N latitude is below average, it;s on the WUWT sea ice page:
http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/plots/meanTarchive/meanT_2019.png
JPP
I bet if the opposite had happened (record cold temperatures), the DMI would have spent considerable time investigating why the temperature isn’t meeting expectations.
To be fair to BBC, they showed the roos in NSW in the snowy fields … BBC World : The presenter though said it was “wild” weather …??? If Johannesburg gets snow every winter, it’s wild climate????? (Yes I mean the biggest city in South Africa…)
Record temperatures would be meaningful if we had accurate records before 1950 anywhere to compare current temperatures with. We still don’t have an accurate and credible ground based global temperature monitoring system.
In fact, weather stations are being decommissioned all over the world at a significant rate. Many pathetically bad stations are left in operation.
It’s very curious that there is no effort to establish and maintain a credible global monitoring system. What with global temperatures being the existential threat to all living creatures and all.
If there really was a serious problem, real scientists would push for the acquisition of good solid data going forward at far higher resolution than a 1 degree grid provides. Going on 30 years of CAGW…and ground data is still inaccurate and unreliable.
They have already included this in their propaganda.
This kind of error is untypical for DMI which is normally one of the most reliable and objective weather agencies. ‘Though it is significant that they did correct the error.
Hasn’t wailing by the news media been banned yet as a barbaric practice?
So much for the “Greenland will melt” scare. But wait, this false information along with a lot of other disproven gunk served as the basis for billions of dollars in expenses that have been made in order to remediate a problem that does not exist. Should we keep those who have produced the fake data in the first place liable? Seeing some taking some real-world consequences for the junk they produce would likely lit up standards.
Ok, if Greenland melts then we can tell future generations that they are welcome for all of the new land we opened up. 🙂
Why are two of the linked articles from 2016 when the data in question is from August 2019?
The NYT article is from August 2nd 2019 but doesn’t mention the erroneous data. It mentions rate of ice melt which doesn’t use the erroneous data in it’s calculation (according to your linked article from the DMI). And that’s not because the article was changed, I checked the archive.
The last article doesn’t seem relevant at all.
Let me know what I’m missing!
french LCI press wrote that WUWT has all wrong against this article, thread !
https://www.lci.fr/planete/les-records-de-chaleur-au-groenland-remis-en-cause-par-des-climatosceptiques-en-quoi-ils-se-trompent-2129437.html
LCI press tries to discredit WUWT ( a sceptical site )