From NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
By Paul Homewood
https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadcet/data/download.html
Last year the Met Office made some changes to the CET record. I did not pay too much attention at the time, as the changes appeared to be minor.
However, when I was writing my review of 2022, I noticed that whereas the summer of 1995 had been 0.1C warmer than 2018’s in the original Version 1, they had changed places in Version 2. To be precise, the summer of 1995 had been cooled by 0.07C, whilst 2018’s had been warmed by 0.13C.
I have now got around to analysing the full dataset, and the chart below shows the annual adjustments made:
Positive numbers are where V2 temperatures are higher than V1.
As you can see, for most of the record up to 1970, the adjustments are small and with no obvious pattern, ups and downs offsetting each other.
Then quite suddenly the years from 1970 to 2003 have been cooled quite markedly. Then just as abruptly the temperatures have been consistently adjusted up again.
No doubt the Met Office will gloss over this with some excuse, but unfortunately it is part of a much wider tampering with temperatures globally – and the tampering is always one way,cooling the past and heating the present.
Apart from the subtle changes to overall trends, this tampering changes the comparison with recent temperatures and those in the 1970s, 80s and 90’s. The summers of 1995 and 2018 are a classic example. With 1995’s summer cooled by 0.07C, it now only ties with last summer, instead of being hotter.
And although we don’t have a V1 for last summer, it is safe to assume that V2 temperatures were inflated in a similar way to 2018, which was adjusted upwards by 0.13C.
This all rather puts the Met Office in a bad light.
The CET is not a constant location. The stations in the mix change, and an adjustment is needed for that. That is the likely reason for that particular interval.
In fact HADCET describes the changes here
The top table shows the change in stations chosen, with V2 in the right column. The lower table shows what difference it made
Why adjust anything prior to 1853?
Quite. What reason do we have in 2023 to question the observations someone recorded in (eg) 1726? And they appear to have changed the observations, or made changes which alter the annual mean of them, in just about every year. What is going on?
Quite likely, they just have found (eg weather data project) more data.
The changes are small.
So you don’t know. If they found data why not say so?
The anomalies are small too. So a small percentage change in the absolute temp can make a much larger percentage change in the anomalies.
If I understand this correctly, 1959-2004 there were no station changes. So why are they making changes to the readings for any of those years, now in 2023?
It makes no sense. The observations are what they were.
Actually it appears that the data sources from 1959 to present do have one alteration. In the later part 2004 to present Malvern is dropped in favor of Pershore College. Are the Pershore measurements statistically warmer than Malvern thereby warming the record?
But that doesn’t explain why they are changing the readings from 1959 to 2004, does it? Those were from the same sites, assuming Nick’s table is correct.
Nick, your Table 2 indicates that the time-weighted average mean difference from Jan 1974 to Dec 2005 was negative .071 C whereas the mean difference from 2006 to 2021 was positive .036 C, for a cumulative increase of 0.107 C over this time interval.
This only serves to confirm the whole point of the above article.
And given that you tabulated a total of only two station changes (dropping Malvern post-Oct 2004, and adding Pershore College for Nov 2005 to Dec 2005) over this interval, there is just zero credibility to your sophomoric speculation in your preceding post above :
Yes. We have several hundred years of mean annual temps. The underlying observations have been changed so that almost all (all?) or them are altered either up or down.
Nick explains this by changes in the stations. And then gives a table showing the changes in the stations which makes it clear that this cannot be the explanation, since there are only a handful of station changes, but there are hundred of years in which the annual temps have been changed.
This is once more intellectual dishonesty and an attempt not to grapple with the underlying problem. Which is, why are we changing observations at all? Why especially are we changing observations made decades or centuries ago?
There is no good explanation of this. Its scientific malpractice. The fact that the method is allowed at all destroys the credibility of the organisation.
The temperature databases should have remained pure. No adjustments. If someone doing a study of that pure data wanted to “adjust” the values for the purpose of the study they were doing then the adjustments should have been clearly explained in the study.
Now we have adulterated data in databases that are basically of no use for anyone, the data no longer is fit for purpose.
All in the name of “long records”. If someone wanted to stitch the data together to create a long record then they should have done it independently.
“This is once more intellectual dishonesty and an attempt not to grapple with the underlying problem.”
Yep!
Lies, damned lies and statistics. Why is it that all the adjustments warm the present? In fact, why make these adjustments in the first place if they remain within the uncertainty estimate? Is it solely made to support current climate policy? Over the years it seems the studies, changes and information from your Met Office is to be meant to convince, not inform.
Two changes since 2004.3 since 1959. 😉
https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadcet/releases/HadCET_v2_guidance_notes.pdf
Table 1
As Roseanne Roseannadanna used to say “it’s always something”.
And the adjustments made here and in Australia and the US might all be justified. But they are adjustments and as you have a right to believe they are legitimate, I have a right to be increasingly dismissive of those adjustments. I also have a right to scoff at the assumed baseline global temperatures in the 1850-1900 period. With 12% land coverage in the SH pre 1900, and the millions of square miles of ocean without direct constant monitoring pre 1900, it’s all become a joke.
Everywhere I turn, I turn up reasons to be cautious. The literature, in almost every area of research, does a credible job of trying to address uncertainty. But they are still estimates, and there are assumptions with those estimates. There are too many people in this field who have conflated thinking we have knowledge when all we really have is a belief we have knowledge.
I have become more prone in the last few years after reading reasons for accepting the establishment narrative to just say to myself “Yeah….right”
Looks like Nick is suggesting they got their desired effect by changing stations, instead of just torturing the data.
The change reduces the warming.
Nick, the change very clearly introduces a spurious warming trend from the 1970s forward, by adjusting down temperatures between the 70s and 90s, and adjusting them up post-90s to present.
You are a liar.
Yep, Nick being disingenuous, as always!
no, you are being disingenuous, Nick is an outright liar. 🙂
I would go so far as to say a blatant and outright liar; by his comments he knows he’s lying for the climate enthusiasts and he’s complicit in that fraud.
#Nickknew.
Like any good marxist, Stokes is fully prepared to use any means necessary to meet the end of keeping the GAT hoax alive.
This week’s nitpick was sponsored by the WEF
lol! – very good
An interesting idea, but it might be more realistic to question whether the Met Office is accepting sponsorship for adjustments. It could be a nice earner. x pounds for one downward 0.01C between 1970 and 2003, then an increasing amount for an upward 0.01C from 2004 onwards. Then in the interest of even-handedness, any of those adjustments can be reversed for 10x the amount. It could pay all the Met Office’s costs and pay for staff holidays in South America as well (travel only by private jet, of course).
Realistically, though, the Met Office senior management should all be sacked. Is any organisation able to take up the CET and present it honestly? They could call it CERTIFY – Central England Real Temperature Index (with the last two words aimed at the Met Office).
That ridiculous lie did not fool anyone ten years ago, and it is still not fooling anyone after being repeated ad nauseum for all this time.
Actually, it doesn’t.
If these are using proper calibrated thermometers, there is no reason to suspect the temperatures are incorrectly being recorded. That leaves one to wonder why adjustments are needed!
There can be only one reason, to CREATE a long record that can be used to foster incorrect propaganda that you can trust this record because it has been used forever.
I’ll renew my prescription, that when microclimates change due to changes in equipment, including location, that the record stops and a new one created. Creating new information of the clear blue sky is not scientific. I know of no other scientific endeavor that allows changing of past data. Climate science should not do it either.
Proper calibration and record keeping is essential to performing proper measurement analysis. NO ONE goes back later and changes calibration records. It throws traceabilty of measurement accuracy to standards out the window. It is fraud and conversion to do so and instant disqualification of ISO 9000 and A2LA certifications. Any certified metrology laboratory that does so is OUT OF BUSINESS.
That said, the results of measurements using properly calibrated equipment are just that, the results. Going back later and adjusting data can no longer be considered data as it is no longer traceable to any calibration standard accuracy chain.
“is not a constant location”
So it is erratic, and everything HAS to be “adjusted” and “manipulated”, by the climate warders…
… rendering it untrustworthy.
Thanks Nick. 🙂
Just for Nick-pic’s education. (which seem very lacking)
For “climate” you need to use a constant system,
Not one that has ever-changing location of sites, and sites that are affected by every-changing local vagaries such as aircraft, sheds, air-conditioners, trees etc
There is absolutely no way in which you can make REALISTIC adjustments in a system when you have no idea what else is affecting the temperature reading at any particular place or time.
The whole surface “data” fabrications, any of them (except maybe USCRN) is mathematically and scientifically, just MEANINGLESS NONSENSE
He just waves his hands and declares: “All Errors Cancel!”
Radiosondes, UAH6 and ARGO … anything else is garbage unfit for scientific analyses.
I can’t speak to radiosondes but for Argo, the measurement uncertainty is +/- 0.5C. That is far higher than the differences they are trying to identify – meaning they don’t have a clue as to what the differences in the average actually is over time. I believe UAH probably has a similar uncertainty when it is used as a proxy for the surface temp since it doesn’t actually measure surface temp.
There are a ton of hidden variances from the averages inside the UAH. Some can be calculated from the data archive, but others can’t. The ones I’ve been able to extract are all a lot larger than 0.5K.
The surface temperature record are a mishmash of adjustments and estimates. Why are you even defending the surface temperature as it is still useful? Once a station moves or the land around it changes, the whole dataset. You can’t adjust it because a station just miles away can record different temperatures than the original location.
Hey Stokes—if as you claim, (here’s that little word again), over and over, that errors all cancel, why are any “adjustments” needed?
Anyone who defends such obvious shenanigans is a shill, plainly.
Isn’t it amazing how hard the CET works to find excuses that justify changing the data to better support the narrative.
I think we know that the likely reason is for falsifying temperature records.
More likely they are using the moves to justify jimmying the numbers. The result is too alarmist to be likely.
Hahahaha! What a plonker you are.
A bad light!
Stott was on BBC R4 Inside Science with Bob Ward…
“We can’t adapt our way out of the climate crisis….”
The Met Office was captured a long time ago – like most public institutions. Still, it does have an enviable record on hurricanes and barbecue summers – not
Thanks, strativarius. All of the adaption versus mitigation cost analysis comparisons I have seen show the adaption cost is half the mitigation cost, both presuming the CAGW theory is correct, which it mostly isn’t. There was an analysis yesterday that said the current green agenda, supposed mitigation, is nearly a trillion dollars a year. Think what that money could do if applied to actual human benefit.
I’ve never heard a more unscientific plea for cutting emissions
In this paradigm we are, apparently, a plague on the Earth, Ron.
Spot on ! In a nutshell, this isn’t about benefiting mankind, it is about the destruction of the middle-classes and the increased wealth of the WEF oligarchs. On that account stokes will find himself and family on the wrong side of history … a useful idiot.
The trillions benefit the already wealthy humans into whose pockets it flows.
Shouty Bob.
Still trotting out ‘the scientific Consensus’.
And of course his pièce de résistance – “Every scientific institution agrees…..” (just not the membership).
Government is trying to make sure we can’t adapt by trashing the economy so we can’t afford to do so.
No legitimate adjustment process should produce a pattern like that.
It is also suspicious that it is exactly the same pattern as produced by adjusting other data sets.
They always increase recent temperatures and reduce older temperatures.
The switch to electronic devices is also misleading because they capture short term blips that would not previously have entered the record.
If anything there should be a downward adjustment to eliminate those.
There is also no adequate downward adjustment for UHI effects.
The reality is that we really have no accurate idea of any current underlying trend from the surface record.
The entire thing is crazy. When you change measurement stations you should start a NEW RECORD. There is absolute uncertainty – systematic uncertainty – associated with each measuring station. The systematic uncertainty is unknown and will be different for each station. There is no way to adjust for that in the past, calibration drift of each station during the past is unknown and unknowable.
Trying to stitch measurements from different stations together to create some kind of “long record” is a fools errand. It requires *guessing* at adjustments and “guessing” is a subjective choice.
This issue has been known publicly for decades when the MET office Head Phil Jones admitted to not having original data on file.
Unfortunately Phil Jones was at CRU at the University of East Anglia, not the Met Office
It is called temperature harmonisation, or simply, ‘make this year warmer than last year’.
All above ‘broad’ so to speak and inline with The Science is Settled facts about climate change/warming.
The mantra for the CAGW disciples.
Simply, it’s not science so there is nothing to “settle”. Climate Scientology, nothing less
Nice post . . . especially since you seem to be “clear” in your last sentence. 😉
Probably depends on the “broad”.
Story tip:
“The device they have come up with is the size of a thumbnail, one-fifth the width of a human hair, and capable of generating roughly one microwatt – enough to light a single pixel on a large LED screen.
So what would it take to power the rest of the screen, or indeed a whole house? “
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2023/jul/02/it-was-an-accident-the-scientists-who-have-turned-humid-air-into-renewable-power
And how long before the air is no longer humid? What could possibly go wrong?
They might discover static electricity – that’s what
They may get a haha shock.
It is the principle of charge separation as happens inside thunderclouds so, to keep their device producing, it needs a ‘draught’ or movement of air.
Therefore, why not just use a windmill?
Such things work off draughts, are well proven, widely used and very successfully too, cheap, secure, reliable, dependable, dispatch-able etc….
Wanna be careful, those ‘nanowires’ will become the New Asbestos before anyone knows it.
We really gonna destroy the village, using tanks with square wheels and powered by Phlogiston..
btw: The Emperor wants to ‘watch his back’ – he may get a Community Protection Notice slapped upon his person.
everybody is doing wrong – according to everybody else
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/07/01/how-community-protection-notices-ruining-peoples-lives/
That’s what you get when you let what we used to call Little Old Ladies in Tennis Shoes dictate the standards of your society. I guess you can lump them all into the term Leftist, now.
And voila! A hockey stick.
karlomonte,
Here is yet another hockey stick graph. This one is plausible. (Thanks to the graph author whom I have been unable to identify.)
Geoff S
Hah! Thanks Geoff.
I took a look at the data myself. I differenced not only the annual data but the monthly data between the two versions. The result is best illustrated by this colour coded chart of the changes. Click for larger version. There are a number of oddities in need of explanation. Why do we get changes in annual temperatures when there is no change in any of the contributing monthly data? Why is there a pronounced seasonal pattern to recent changes? Why do significant changes only affect the recent record from 1974 onwards?
Ideas welcome.
My idea, admittedly not original: follow the money (and the garnered publicity from the current meme).
Exactly – ‘hottest June evah’ currently by fudging the details and moving the goalposts to ensure a headline. Then adjusting the annual data to guarantee another headline of ‘2023 temperatures x hottest, all temperatures since 2000 in the warmest on record’. It’s a complete con.
Perhaps we should used this in the same way as the colour coded hockey stick is by the warmists?
“Why do we get changes in annual temperatures when there is no change in any of the contributing monthly data?”
I would have thought that was obvious – they don’t know by how much they need to adjust the temperature record by until the end of the year and everybody else’s datasets are out.
Although I’m 99.9% certain of the correct scientific/mathematical answer, I’ll ask the question anyway:
“Have the CET temperature data sets been corrected (not “adjusted”) for the ever-growing issue of urban heat island (UHI) poisoning of the land-area-average temperatures that are being reported?”
They say they have been. They apply an unscientific estimate increase to the temperatures to account for UHI. Yep – they have publicly stated that they adjust the temperature data upwards to offset the added temperature increase from UHI. It’s bonkers.
Here’s another way of looking at the annual differences: cumulate them so that periods of persistent change in on direction or the other show up more clearly, along with the timing of any switch.
We have a little oscillation in the late 17th/early 18th century. Clearly the loss of teh Americas resulted in cooling, offset by warming following Trafalgar. Every Met Man must do his duty! A period of great stability once Victoria comes to the throne. Just jiggling about semi-randomly. But come 1974 (was it joining the EEC?) we get a nosedive of remarkable linearity with very little oscillation around the trend. But then a U-turn after 2004. Why?
Since the changes, and indeed every anomaly, from record beginning to today, is much smaller than the possibility of making an accurate reading, this is all on the order of fine distinctions in the most obscure of religious doctrines.
How many angels can dance on the head of a pin. The climate scientists know!
Should I believe the experts who will no doubt claim that this year is the ‘hottest year evah!!’, or should I wait a few years until this year’s temperatures get adjusted/corrected to find out how hot it really is?
This ‘settled science’ thing is so confusing.
It would be a little bit funny if politicians around the world weren’t doing their best to reshape/ruin the world on the basis of these measurements.
Sadly, the only thing made clear here is there is no longer a Western metorlogy/climate data base that is any way reflecting truth.
Even more sad is that the only thing made clear here is there is no longer a defining Western ethic of Enlightenment science and reason.
The stampede into politics über alles is as spectacular as it has been institutionally universal.
“This all rather puts the Met Office in a bad light.”
What kind of a light had they been in before this?
Here is the question about all “adjustments”:
How do we know that they got it right this time?
How do we know that the latest adjustment is correct, instead of the previous ones?
This makes the most likely conclusion that they do not really know about any of the data – IE: it is all unreliable.
thanks
JK
PS: see: https://wattsupwiththat.com/2023/06/29/the-verdict-of-instrumental-methods/
Get rid of the MET and start over, the management at the MET can’t be rehired or hold any government job.
The MET is actually the London Metropolitan Police Force – your statements are equally true for them, but we’re actually discussing the Met Office Hadley Centre, a different beast entirely.
I’ve said it many times. If cancer researchers adjusted data like this they would be in jail. When “climate scientists” do it they are given tenure.
At last we have definitive evidence of man made warming!
After 40+ years of scaremongering and data manipulation, the cult now realises that it has to correct their (upward) corrections from the past, otherwise their new (upward) corrections for the present will have to be way too obvious.
Lies, Damn Lies and settled science