Thread: Any doubts about Climate Change?

The fiddling with temperature data is the biggest science scandal ever

New data shows that the “vanishing” of polar ice is not the result of runaway global warming

Following my last article, Homewood checked a swathe of other South American weather stations around the original three. In each case he found the same suspicious one-way “adjustments”. First these were made by the US government’s Global Historical Climate Network (GHCN). They were then amplified by two of the main official surface records, the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (Giss) and the National Climate Data Center (NCDC), which use the warming trends to estimate temperatures across the vast regions of the Earth where no measurements are taken. Yet these are the very records on which scientists and politicians rely for their belief in “global warming”.

The fiddling with temperature data is the biggest science scandal ever - Telegraph

It just gets worse for the Climate-istas:

Meteorologist Anthony Watts on ‘adjusted’ U.S. temperature data: ‘In the business and trading world, people go to jail for such manipulations of data’

Watts: 'Is history malleable? Can temperature data of the past be molded to fit a purpose? It certainly seems to be the case here, where the temperature for July 1936 reported ... changes with the moment'

Updated Feb. 8, 2015: ‘BREATHTAKING’ ADJUSTMENTS TO ARCTIC TEMPERATURE RECORD. IS THERE ANY ‘GLOBAL WARMING’ WE CAN TRUST?

Satellites: Warming pause continues & 2014 not the hottest

UK Telegraph on new climategate: ‘Fiddling with temperature data is the biggest science scandal ever’

Rewriting Their Own Temperature Past At The National Academy Of Sciences: ‘Massively altered temp history since their 1975 report. They have eliminated most of the 1940-1970 cooling’

- ‘If they didn’t tamper with the data, there is no global warming since 1940.’ - In 1978, NOAA reported 0.5C global cooling from 1960-1965. NAS has almost completely erased that.



More damning evidence of fraud here:

Flashback: Meteorologist Anthony Watts on ?adjusted? U.S. temperature data: ?In the business and trading world, people go to jail for such manipulations of data? | Climate Depot

Do we have to go through this every year?

Temperature data is not “the biggest scientific scandal ever”

Over the weekend, another editor pointed me to this piece in The Telegraph in which columnist Christopher Booker calls scientists' handling of the temperature data "the biggest science scandal ever." The same piece also appeared in a discussion today and was sent in via the reader-feedback form. So, it seemed worth looking into.

Doing so caused a bit of a flashback—to January 2013, specifically. That was the last time that the previous year had been declared the warmest on record, an event that apparently prompts some people to question whether we can trust the temperature records at all.

The culprit that time was Fox News, but the issue was the same: the raw data from temperature measurements around the world aren't just dumped into global temperature reconstructions as-is. Instead, they're processed first. To the more conspiracy minded, you can replace "processed" with "fraudulently manipulated to make it look warmer."

Why do they have to be processed at all? Because almost none of the records are continuous. Weather stations have moved, they've changed the time of day where the temperature-of-record is taken, and they've replaced old thermometers with more modern equipment. All of these events create discontinuities in the record of each location, and the processing is used to get things into alignment, creating a single, unified record.

Does it work? The team behind the Berkeley Earth project performed a different analysis in which they didn't process to create a single record and instead treated the discontinuities as breaks that defined separate temperature records. Their results were indistinguishable from the normal analysis.

We knew this already; we knew it two years ago when Fox published its misguided piece. But our knowledge hasn't stopped Booker from writing two columns using hyped terms like "scandal" and claiming the public's being "tricked by flawed data on global warming.” All of this based on a few posts by a blogger who has gone around cherry picking a handful of temperature stations and claiming the adjustments have led to a warming bias.

Why would Booker latch on to this without first talking to someone with actual expertise in temperature records? A quick look at his Wikipedia entry shows that he has a lot of issues with science in general, claiming that things like asbestos and second-hand smoke are harmless, and arguing against evolution. So, this sort of immunity to well-established evidence seems to be a recurring theme in his writing.

But the whole thing demonstrates two annoying aspects of the climate debate. The first is that, when people don't like the records that the human-driven warming is setting, they start to argue the record keeping is invalid. Booker has decided to repeat an attack on the temperature data that underlies it, but others have attacked the statistical analysis of those temperatures, suggesting the scientists were hiding something. One of those scientists, Gavin Schmidt, helpfully pointed out that they hid the statistics so well that they were visualized in a slide used at the press conference announcing the record.

The second aspect is that people like Booker (and the blogger whose work he's promoting) repeatedly try to take advantage of the public's limited attention to this topic. I happen to be aware of things like Berkeley Earth and the same arguments surfacing in 2013 simply because I covered them at the time and therefore read up on them in detail. The public won't have that knowledge, so Booker's claims can sound like a damaging revelation—and completely new.

They're not. But I'll bet that if 2015 sets a temperature record, I'll be able to rerun this story with little more than the names changed.

A couple of charts for you deniers

Originally Posted by S Landreth

Originally Posted by S Landreth

Another record broken

Sea level hits highest on record in 2014

Global sea level time series

Originally Posted by Jesus Jones

The fiddling with temperature data is the biggest science scandal ever

New data shows that the “vanishing” of polar ice is not the result of runaway global warming

Following my last article, Homewood checked a swathe of other South American weather stations around the original three. In each case he found the same suspicious one-way “adjustments”. First these were made by the US government’s Global Historical Climate Network (GHCN). They were then amplified by two of the main official surface records, the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (Giss) and the National Climate Data Center (NCDC), which use the warming trends to estimate temperatures across the vast regions of the Earth where no measurements are taken. Yet these are the very records on which scientists and politicians rely for their belief in “global warming”.

The fiddling with temperature data is the biggest science scandal ever - Telegraph

Originally Posted by Boon Mee

Originally Posted by blue

The fiddling with temperature data is the biggest science scandal ever

New data shows that the “vanishing” of polar ice is not the result of runaway global warming

When future generations look back on the global-warming scare of the past 30 years, nothing will shock them more than the extent to which the official temperature records – on which the entire panic ultimately rested – were systematically “adjusted” to show the Earth as having warmed much more than the actual data justified........................................





By Christopher Booker

The fiddling with temperature data is the biggest science scandal ever - Telegraph

No worries, there'll be a climate-ista along real soon with another pretty colored graph attempting to show how the end is near!

Christopher Booker



Christopher Booker is best known as a journalist for The Sunday Telegraph newspaper, but has also published a plethora of books critical of the EU, regulation, and scientific scares.

He has a history of causing controversy around prominent scientific issues, such as BSE about which he says there "is still no proof that BSE causes CJD in humans", and the theory of evolution, stating that Darwinists "rest their case on nothing more than blind faith and unexamined a priori assumptions”.

More recently, he has entered the world of climate change scepticism, and proudly announced that 2008 was “the year that man-made global warming was disproved”, calling the scientific consensus on climate change “a politically engineered artefact”. A vociferous critic of the government’s Climate Change Act, he bemoans the cost of road tax on highly polluting vehicles and carbon emissions audits for the highest consuming users.

In 2009 he released a book called The Real Global Warming Disaster, the front of which carried a quote by atmospheric physicist John Haughton, which turned out to be totally made up.

A complaint to the Press Complaints Commission in 2009 following claims by Booker that sea levels around the island of Tuvalu had dropped, that sea level data used by the IPCC had been unfairly altered and that there were no sea level experts contributing to their Fourth Assessment Report was upheld.

His misrepresentation of climate science irked The Guardian’s George Monbiot and James Randerson; so much so that Monbiot was inspired to create a satirical competition for inaccurate climate change journalism: The Christopher Booker Prize.

His claims scrutinised: The Guardian's Philip Ball reviews his book, saying he's "talking bunk". George Monbiot has compiled a list of his "howlers", asking "How much longer can Christopher Booker go on misleading readers?"

And then there’s physics,……….

This is a guest post from Steven Mosher, who is part of the Berkeley Earth (BEST) team. It’s motivated largely by the recent resurgence of claims of tampering with the temperature records, that I’ve discussed earlier. I won’t say anymore, and Steven’s post starts now:

Christopher Booker win’s the irony of the year award with his piece on adjustments to the temperature record. That’s quite a feat considering it’s only February. His complaint overlooks the clear historical fact that skeptics, above all others, have made the loudest case for the need to adjust the temperature series. Over the years, it’s been skeptics, who have made a vocal case for adjustments . More disturbing is the claim that these adjustments are somehow criminal. We dealt with these type of claims before and completely debunked them.

What is an adjustment? Let’s use a simple example: Social Security COLA. In 2015 the payments people receive from social security will be adjusted to account for the effect of inflation.

“The purpose of the COLA is to ensure that the purchasing power of Social Security and Supplemental Security Income (SSI) benefits is not eroded by inflation. It is based on the percentage increase in the Consumer Price Index for Urban Wage Earners and Clerical Workers (CPI-W) from the third quarter of the last year a COLA was determined to the third quarter of the current year. If there is no increase, there can be no COLA.”

The amount of money you expect to receive will be adjusted upward based on the inflation rate to correct for the distortion that inflation would produce in your purchasing power.

Closer to science we have other examples of adjustments and corrections. Here I select an example from Reagan’s StarWars: Adaptive optics. In 1991 this technology was declassified– thanks to colonel Worden –and today these technologies, like corrections for wavefront distortion, are used to find exo-planets. Ironically, one of the methods used to correct for distortion was developed by climate science skeptics Will Happer and Dyson.

And even a more pedestrian example would be eyeglasses, where we actually distort the “raw data” that enters our eye in order to compensate for and correct our bad vision. Adjustments help us see things clearly.

Adjustments aim at correcting measured data, raw data, in order to improve its quality. In the context of temperature series for land we can break the problem down logically. A temperature observation consists of a temperature measured by a sensor at time and a location. The skeptical concern over the years has been focused on bias or distortion corrupting this raw data: Bias in sensors , bias in observation time and biases that arise due to location.

Sensor Bias:

Climate science skeptics have challenged the legitimacy of sensors in several ways. One example, interesting for historical purposes, is Anthony Watts concern over the changing protocol for painting sensor enclosures . His concern was that changing paints from whitewash to latex may have introduced a bias in the temperature record. It’s picked up by Steve Mcintyre here. And again here, and here. As always the comments are interesting, and here we see a concern that relates to a shift in temperatures that introduce a cooling bias: the switch to the MMTS sensors.

One last example of the skeptics pointing out the need for corrections or adjustments is found here at climate audit (here). In this particular case the issue would appear to be skeptics complaining that an adjustment hasn’t been made.

The case is fairly clear. Skeptics have been raising issues about the biases caused by changing sensors for quite some time. It follows, of course, that a blanket recommendation to ‘just use the raw data” would not be supported by the very arguments skeptics have raised over the years. Skeptics demonstrate that blindly trusting raw data can lead you to use data that is biased high, or data that is biased low.

Time of Observation Bias:

A sensor reading is taken at particular times during the day. Some sites collect temperature data at very short intervals, seconds in some cases. Other sites collect data on the minute; some on the hour; some 4 times a day, and still others only once a day. Changing the time of observation is a potential source of bias. This bias is well documented in the literature. However, here I want to focus on the skeptics awareness of the problem. A post on climate audit was dedicated to this problem here. More importantly as I found out at that time, commenter JerryB had done a study for the late great skeptic John Daly. His study, circa 2005, is found here. JerryB’s approach was to actually look at the data.

JerryB’s study clearly demonstrated that changing the time of observation will distort the record. Skeptics who have downloaded the actual data have confirmed this for themselves. Finally Nick Stokes has written on this issue here.

Location Changes:

A measurement is taken at a time and place. If you change the place or location, then basic principles suggest that you need to examine or control for changes in the location. This is no news to skeptics who have argued that changes in location may be biasing the record. In fact the entire surface stations project is dedicated to the idea that location matters. It matters when a station moves. It matters when the features of the location change around the sensor. As Watts argues here:

According to NCDC’s MMS database, the Lampasas climate station has been at this location since 10-01-2000. Previous location was an observer residence, which appears to have been a park-like location according to MMS location map. The sensor was apparently converted to the MMTS style seen in the photo in 1986, so the move did not include an equipment change. See the complete survey album here.

But the big surprise of just how bad this location is came from the GISS plot of temperature. It clearly showed the results of the move to this location, causing a jump in temperature almost off the current graph scale. Note that before the move, the temperature trend of Lampasas was nearly flat from 1980-2000.

Summary:

In both science and everyday life, we routinely identify and correct distortions in data. Over the years, in the climate debate, skeptics (and scientists themselves) have pointed out several potential sources of bias and distortion in the temperature record that demand correction. In temperature series, one example of how to start to go about this is detailed by a noteworthy skeptic:

The idea behind the homogenization technique is to identify points in time in each station’s record at which a change of some sort occurred. These are called segment break points. A single station may have a number of segment break points so that its entire record becomes a set of segments each of which requires some adjustment to make a homogeneous time series. Initially, segment break points were identified in every case when one of the following situations occurred: (i) a station move, (ii) a change in time of observation, and (iii) a clear indication of instrument change.

That skeptic was John Christy. He essentially describes the first step of the Berkeley Earth adjustment process.

Given that both skeptics and the mainstream scientists agree that changes in sensors, changes in time of observation and changes in location can bias the record, the question is. What do you do?

Attempt to adjust the data.
Only use “good” data.
Use the raw data only.

Before we even debate that decision, however, we can start by looking at whether the question really matters. Here, for example, is a comparison of BerkeleyEarth with No adjustments, BerkeleyEarth with metadata adjustments only, and BerkeleyEarth will all adjustments

Originally Posted by Boon Mee

Paul Homewood, an accountant

It is one of the reasons why the satellite data (which, however, go back only to 1979) are so important: they have not been corrupted.

does the accountant mean satellite data like this (not land or sea)?

From the same site you deniers told us the warming was levelling off or not increasing or whatever, but now you see the full chart and not just a cherry picked part of it.

NASA climate study warns of unprecedented North American drought

California is in the midst of its worst drought in over 1,200 years, exacerbated by record hot temperatures. A new study led by Benjamin Cook at Nasa GISS examines how drought intensity in North America will change in a hotter world, and finds that things will only get worse.

Originally Posted by MrG

Originally Posted by S Landreth

From the same site you deniers told us the warming was levelling off or not increasing or whatever, but now you see the full chart and not just a cherry picked part of it.

Just one more example of why the drooling trolls are not worth talking to and the nonsense they write not worth the time to respond (though I thank those that do for the information). The deniers believe accountants with curiousity about climate change and belittle legitimate science around the world. Hard to figure, unless they just want to boost their post count.

I think all of our merchants of doubt have all run off with their tails between their legs.