About two weeks ago, on Saturday, August 4, Canadian blogger Steve McIntyre sent an email to the Goddard Institute for Space Studies at NASA (NASA GISS) drawing their attention to an anomaly in the temperature records for the US. The action taken, according to Gavin Schmidt at RealClimate who works at NASA GISS, was as follows:
On Monday, the people who work on the temperature analysis (not me), looked into it and found that this coincided with the switch between two sources of US temperature data. There had been a faulty assumption that these two sources matched, but that turned out not to be the case. There were in fact a number of small offsets (of both sign) between the same stations in the two different data sets. The obvious fix was to make an adjustment based on a period of overlap so that these offsets disappear.
This was duly done by Tuesday, an email thanking McIntyre was sent and the data analysis (which had been due in any case for the processing of the July numbers) was updated accordingly along with an acknowledgment to McIntyre and update of the methodology.
The net effect of the change was to reduce mean US anomalies by about 0.15 ºC for the years 2000-2006. There were some very minor knock on effects in earlier years due to the GISTEMP adjustments for rural vs. urban trends. In the global or hemispheric mean, the differences were imperceptible (since the US is only a small fraction of the global area).(Emphasis added)
So the global implications of this data change amount to zero, nothing, nix!
The US is less than 2% of the earth’s surface. But even on that postage stamp the trend graph went from this:
to this:
Spot the difference? If you want help check it out at Deltoid.
Meanwhile the global trend is this:
No need for two graphs because it hasn’t changed.
Along the way the 1998 anomaly went from 1.24 ºC to 1.23ºC and 1934 went from 1.23ºC to 1.25ºC, a turn around of just 0.03ºC. According to a 2001 paper by Hansen et al (he’s the boss at GISS):
In comparing temperatures of years separated by 60 or 70 years the uncertainties in various adjustments (urban warming, station history adjustments, etc.) lead to an uncertainty of at least 0.1°C.
According to my primitive mathematics that means that the change would have had to be 3.5 times larger to mean anything, so in terms of meaning the ranking has gone from dead even to dead even.
Furthermore, trend is usually measured by the 5-year mean. In these terms 1998-2002 tops 2002-2006 and both still top 1930-1934 – the largest value in the early part of the century.
I thought it best to establish the facts before looking at what Michael Duffy made of them. Honestly, I think he takes a swing at NASA GISS and knocks himself out.
In the first paragraph he has 1998 being displaced by 1934 as the hottest year ever and the 1930s displacing the 1990s as the hottest decade. No mention that we are talking about the US rather than the world. He only introduces this towards the end of Page 2. His second last paragraph is;
Whatever the scientific implications of McIntyre’s revelation, the rhetorical one is huge. America is the centre of the global debate on climate change. No longer will Americans or anyone else be able to say the hottest year on record in their great nation was 1998. Looking at the new top 10, it’s hard to see any signs of global warming. The ranking, starting from the hottest year, goes: 1934, 1998, 1921, 2006, 1931, 1999, 1953, 1990, 1938, 1939.
What Duffy should be telling us is why the trend in the 5-year mean from 1984 onwards in the data is nothing to worry about.
Duffy’s second tactic, and you can see it right through the thread at RealClimate (well, as far as I got in the 482 comments) is to cast doubt on the usefulness of the data full stop, or to say that if the US data is the best (the Europeans don’t exist, apparently) then the whole exercise is hopeless. Then there is a complaint that the scientists don’t share their tools and methodologies. Gavin Schmidt’s response is that no-one who works with real data is blind to the problems, that they do share, and William Connolley points out that people other than GISS measure temperature.
Duffy’s other main gripe is to give the hockey stick another whack. Wikipedia has a comprehensive entry with a multitude of links. You might like to check out what Hans van Storch said about McIntyre’s contribution at the end.
I think perhaps too much energy has been spent on the hockey stick. Very simply the further back you go the less confidence you can have in the data. But Duffy and mates don’t seem to comprehend that injecting huge quantities of carbon into the atmosphere by humans in such a small space of time has not happened before and the effects of this are being felt when the data is really quite good. So natural fluctuations from earlier times have very limited relevance to the anthropogenic global warming story.
Duffy’s piece appeared on Saturday 18 August. By that time comprehensive debunkings had appeared on 10 August at at RealClimate, on the same day at Deltoid with a follow-up post on 12 August. We gave it as much attention as it deserved before Duffy’s boosterism and distortion in the comments thread of this post.
The Guardian provided a better example of how the MSM might deal with such a story.
Duffy had plenty of opportunity to see this story in it’s proper light, but he has his head stuck firmly in an anti-AGW paradigm. One might say that it is a prime example of confirmation bias.
Confirmation bias refers to a type of selective thinking whereby one tends to notice and to look for what confirms one’s beliefs, and to ignore, not look for, or undervalue the relevance of what contradicts one’s beliefs.
Elsewhere, Penguin Unearthed has a neat post, while Nexus 6 has once again exercised his cartoon skills.
Excellent post, Brian. May I do you the courtesy of asking whether you’d be happy for me to include the link to it in my PowerPoint slides for my UQ and Griffith lectures this week and the next on global warming?
Bolt, Blair, Duffy, Devine et al have been in raptures about this for weeks, but it amounts to absolutely bugger all. Mind you, these are the same people who will tell you the world has been cooling since 1998, and even supposed scientists like Bob Carter echo the same drivel.
Meanwhile back the real world…
Which is just plain depressing. Why didn’t Duffy mention this?
Happy, surprised and flattered, Paul! No probs!
(I notice your gravatar has taken off again. Mine is completely fickle!)
Nice to see the global warming skeptics are continuing their love affair with a postmodernistic approach to science.
carbonsink, I was reading a paper by Hansen and 47 of his mates Dangerous human-made interference with climate: a GISS modelE study (pdf).
They say that an ice-free Arctic Ocean in summer and fall may hasten the melting of Greenland which
On the positive side they think that Arctic warming may be able to be slowed by eliminating pollutants other than CO2.
But the overall implication is that it is part of the reason why they say that we need to limit further global temperature rise to 1C above now, which is less than Hansen’s previous recommendation of less the 2C above pre-industrial levels. When you consider that there is probably a further 0.5C to come without further climate forcing we don’t have a big margin to work with. It’s only 2-3 decades of warming at current rates.
Surely Duffy et al can see that we can’t just hang around and wait to see what happens!
Given the relative quality of Michael Duffy’s contributions to science vs those of climate scientists, I’d take the latter’s over Michael’s anyday.
While it is technically correct to say that because the US represents only 2% of the earth’s surface then these figures mean little on a global scale, it is nevertheless worth noting that the US has a much more sophisticated system of temperature data gathering than many countries with bigger land area and thus higher weighting in terms of world temperature averages.
In other words, if these kind of mistakes can be made with the US data, what of data received from countries like China, Indonesia and Brazil where Mr McIntyre says: “Many of the stations…are in urban areas.”?
The discovery of the US mistake and the likelihood that such mistakes are not unique to the US must, at the very least, call into question the accuracy of the world model on which so much client science relies.
Tony, the techniques of gathering temperature data is a technical matter that I’m not well-equipped to critique. I’d be astonished, however, if the scientists involved are not aware of the problems. Especially when they say they are. I’d also be astonished if it made a whole lot of difference to the shape of the world trend line from say 1970 onwards.
I found a recent European study on heat waves interesting for what it found, but interesting for what it said about temperature data at what were described as “54 high-quality recording locations”. It seems that the tendency is for older temperatures to be too high, as recorded.
So last year when The Netherlands said they had a whole autumn that was 3C above the long-term average and recordings higher than any on record which goes back 300 years, you don’t quite know what that means because you don’t know the quality of the data and what adjustments have been made. Given the size of the anomaly, however, it would be brave indeed to say that it was all just an issue of data recording in the face of the fact that the problems of data are well-known to those working in the area.
No, baseless insinuations are not science nor a compelling argument. Anyway, the US mistake ended up being statistically insignificant. The mistake is that many people assume that there is only one set of data. As Brian points out there are multiple data points from which to infer trends.
Brian, you may be interested in surfacestations.org who are undertaking a survey of climate stations in the US and eventually elsewhere throughout the world.
Have a look at some of the Odd and irregular observing sites. They ask the question: “Looking at some of these observing sites you have to wonder: ‘what were they thinking?’”
And these are in the US. It does make you wonder about the rest of the world.
You can’t tell anything about the quality of data from looking at photos of the installation. Surfacestations.org assumes scientists are too stupid to figure out how to calibrate their instruments properly. It also assumes that the people who swallow that kind of crap are stupid.
Bullshit.
Tony, how are the observations of melting sea ice (see carbonsink’s comment) affected by this egregious error in the US temperature measurements?
Tony, if temperature measurement in the US is dubious, why are all the climate change skeptics trumpeting this 0.03 C change as proof of no warming? They can’t have it both ways – either the temperature record is bogus and this 0.03 change is irrelevant, or the 0.03 change is relevant and surfacestations.org is bogus.
SG – “you can’t have it both ways” is an unnecessarily constrictive condition to place on science. Just another part of the so-called “consensus” that prevents us all from seeing the reality in front of our face – AGW is a hoax made up by baby-eating ivory tower tenured academics who want us all to go back to hunting and gathering.
You would assume scientists would be too clever to make basic errors, wouldn’t you? But as Reto A Reudy confesses in his reply to Steve McIntyre (the very topic of this post): “I agree with you that this simple procedure creates an artificial step if some new corrections were applied to the newest data, rather than bringing the older data in sync with the latest measurements – as I naively assumed.”
Not really the evidence based response I was expecting.
Not the point I am trying to make at all.
SG, my point is this: The temperature record on which the original global warming theory was based (the US part of it at least) has been proven to be fallible, so any work Steve McIntyre and surfacestations.org can do to verify the accuracy and consistency of the data, along with the climate stations recording such data, can only be a good thing for the science of climate change. As for what this will mean: let the cards fall where they will.
Tony of South Yarra:
Actually, I thought Zarquon was succinct and to the point, and an appropriate response to fruitloops who quote McIntyre. Now go away.
Carbonsink, instead of calling me a breakfast cereal (I prefer cocopops by the way) and instructing me to go away, why not try a reasoned rebuttal of any of my points?
You use quote-mining and invented “facts” that take no account of physics, and we’re supposed to respond with reasoned arguments? Yeah, right.
One thing that has not been noted in all of this is that the data is for the mainland US. As I understand it, that doesn’t include Alaska (it certainly doesn’t include Hawaii, but that’s probably too small to make much difference).
Alaska has seen some of the fastest warming of the globe in recent years. If you add it in I’d bet that 1998 was the hottest year the US has experienced.
I should remind people at this stage of the comments policy and ad hominem comments. But in a sense fruitloops is but a metaphor for silly and there are worse things you can be called.
Via Crikey, I’ve just had a look at what James Hansen thinks of the whole affair (pdf). He says the contrarians are not stupid, in fact they are clever people with mal-intent. They wilfully deceive in order to sow confusion, create doubt and delay any effective mitigating action.
But he thinks they are but court jesters in the grander scheme of things. The real problem is with the rich and powerful who prefer to eat our futures. He reasonably asks, I think, why the conservatives don’t stand up for
Our responsibility to future generations he holds, after Jefferson, to be self-evident.
The article contains some neat diagrams and maps and explains what “usufruct” means. He was angry when he wrote it, but like my wife, when he becomes angry his reason and logic become even sharper.
Regarding the adjustment of meteorological data.
This time, by pointing out an error, which originated in the management of the observed data, not the original observations themselves, McIntyre has done a service (for which he was thanked). In the history of observation and collation of climate data, hundreds of scientists have pointed out such problems and continued to find both observational and management related issues with the data. They don’t write a letter to the editor of the local paper, take out full pages ads or trumpet their achievements in the blogosphere.
The science contributing to this has been published in Technical documents provided by the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) which go back many decades. All those who want to investigate met records need to be familiar with these techniques because they contribute to the error bars of national, hemispherical and global time series of temperature and rainfall published in the international literature. Globally, the WMO have stations of high quality distributed globally, including in the developing world. They provide the core of the global networks. These are punctuated by stations of second and third order (largely in airports, research stations etc). There are many stations of lesser quality.
Efforts have been made to first ensure that the WMO network is homogenous by removing artefacts of measurement, recording and station exposure and are ongoing. The Bureau of Meteorology in Oz has a high quality network of temperature and rainfall and has recently added dewpoint, solar radiation and pan evaporation to name a few. Trends cannot be correctly analysed until such adjustments are made. Recent published trends in pan evaporation, where statistically significant trends were attributed to time series that contained large inhomogeneities are a case in point.
The substantial issue with much of the high profile criticism of such efforts, is that McIntyre’s motives are not solely to see the science improved, emphasised by his comment:
Unfortunately, the error post 2000 was 0.15°C in the US surface temperature record, just lower than the 0.18 – 0.19°C emphasised by McIntyre himself. With respect to mean US surface air temp this figure was important, but not significant in magnitude, and WRT global temperature not important at all.
With such arguments and those being put forward by surfacestations.org (that McIntyre endorses), opponents of AGW theory are trading on the natural scepticism of those who are unaware or unheeding of these scientific efforts briefly described above.
No-one will argue that the global record of terrestrial climate is perfect but nor is it true that it contains errors that could overturn any of the major conclusions of the IPCC or any of the important observational science that has been reported in the IPCC.
In fact the largest risk faced by such efforts is that during a time of change, many stations are being closed down, large amounts of older records have not been digitised and technology changes are being implemented without sufficient overlap between old and new. Malicious criticism also bleeds scientific and technical staff away from areas where they are most needed. I don’t think anyone agrees that climate risks, whether attributed to humans or occurring naturally, should be managed in the absence of data of quality.
I am very suspicious of criticisms made of the historical climate record made without proper regard to the body of science that undeniably exists, the need to have proper records and where the critic is essentially dog-whistling to a chorus who have no regard for what the science says at all.
What can you call them? They take offence if you call them denialists. Quiggin has taken to calling them delusionists. I call them fruitloops.
Tony of South Yarra: If there was a one in a billion chance of you taking anything on board through “reasoned argument” I might attempt it, but we both know it will be a fruitless exercise.
I have noticed that when people can not defend an argument, they fall back into name calling.
The fact is that Hansen (2001) used data from the US surface stations. His methodology was to use satellite imaging to determine whether stations were urban or rural. There are a couple of problems with Hansen’s methodology which surfacestations.org is bringing to light. Namely, that many of the ‘rural’ stations are not rural due to asphalt, concrete, and equipment being present. Further, many stations are shown to be not sited in accordance with NOAA or WMO standards. While warmest are currently saying this does not matter, Hansen himself in the 2001 work said:
The GISS urban adjustment is dependent upon the accuracy of the temperature records of the unlit stations, so if the station history records and homogeneity adjustments for these stations are inaccurate or incomplete, this could alter the inferred urban warming.
Now, the trend by those that support CO2 AGW is to make the claim that the US is only 2 percent of the surface of the world, but what they are ignoring is that the US network is 50 percent of the world and is the one that GISS uses to determine the Urban Heat Island off-set. If the UHI off-set is wrong, then how does that change the trends for the rest of the world? I do not know, and neither does anyone else.
That is the issue here. The warmers, whether scientists or not, want to deny that there is a problem with the CO2 theory. The fact remains that this latest incident calls into question the quality of the work being done. The fact that GISS still refuses to release the code that shows how they are implementing the processes and procedures raises the question of what else did they do wrong and not want seen?
How much of the studies done in the last seven years have used the bad data supplied by GISS?
Carbonsink: Would you call Steve McIntyre delusional?
Call him a statistician or ex mining engineer or climate blogger but why delusiomal?
The errors in the data(as Roger Jones explained above) have to be adjusted.And it is the method of adjustment that is in dispute.
1934 is now the warmest year in the U.S.
No warming in over 70 years
So what effect did the extra 80 parts per million of co2 have?
Yes.
That’s one of the funniest things I’ve read in a long time.
carbonsink, I was just pre-emptively reminding people that there was a comments policy. No big deal.
Roger, thanks for your contribution.
Vernon, Roger said:
You can google and check Roger’s qualifications. Furthermore, I’ve read some of his work, he has been a regular commenter at Quiggin’s and I trust him. When he, or someone with similar qualifications and integrity says there is a serious problem with the data, I’ll give him my full attention.
Meanwhile, Michael Duffy had another go at the topic at hand on Counterpoint today. So he got his most reliable ‘expert’ to comment, one Bob Carter. Carter reckons there have been about half a dozen torpedoes hit the good ship AGW in the last month, including the ‘Hansen error’. It’s funny, the things that he said mattered most about the changes were the things that Hansen said mattered least in the piece I linked to earlier (pdf).
Brian,
So the fact that problems with the US surface station network are coming to light and the US data was used by Hansen to determine the UHI off-set raises no flags with you? Even though Hansen himself in the 2001 paper says that if the data is wrong then the UHI off-set would not be correct?
The question is not what does anyone think but what does reality show. The IPCC says that we have low or very low scientific understanding of aerosols, black carbons, clouds, solar, etc. We know that the temperature proxies do not show the accelerating warming that is shown by direct instrumented readings. The errors made by GISS and the problems with the surface stations, hence, a possibly bad UHI off-set would go a long way to explaining why there is a divergence. Namely, that the UHI is not as small as some climatologist propose and that what is being taken as a warming trend is really an urbanization trend.
Standard negative PR tactics employed by people employed by some big businesses to protect their perceived interests.
We saw it with tobacco, we still see it with Japanse whaling and old growth logging industries, now they are undoubtedly employed by some of the fossil fuel companies too. [link]
There are also some that believe the misinformation and/or revel in it – I would call them conspiracy theorists, but fruitloops seems appropriate to me too.
Vernon, I’m not a scientist so I try to use common sense, which is another way of saying there must be coherence and no important cognitive dissonance in the major elements of the web of knowledge. That’s the way I experience reading the literature.
Sure there are questions, gaps and some parts I don’t understand too well, but on the whole the AGW story is very coherent.
I am on the lookout for findings that might upset the AGW paradigm. Sometimes something comes along, but then, usually in a matter of weeks, I read something that puts the matter to rest.
I’d prefer a direct quote with citation on that. Is that exactly how they represented it? Then bear in mind that the caravan has moved on since the IPCC drew a line on what it could include and some advances have been made. None that I have seen seriously disturb the AGW paradigm.
Really?
What are you going to mitigate? A theory that has no empirical evidence to support it? Can anyone show me where CO2 has caused any warming, any where? CO2 has steadily increased but in the area we have the best surface station system, there is no trend. For 70 percent of the world we have no surface stations and no measurements or history.
The proxies indicate that we are not having accelerating warming. It is not fruitloops to want to know the truth before we waste trillions on fixing a problem that we are not sure exists.
Peterc, have you read Monbiot’s Heat? He has a chapter on The Denial Industry. From memory, he says the AGW denialist industry was developed in the US initially by a PR firm that was tasked to destroy the case for harm from passive smoking. They decided to set up a ‘real science’ front organisation that was ostensibly crusading against the errors of mainstream science. Just to give a context to their cynical game.
The bloody thing seems to be still working and is sucking in journalists for sure, but also people who are themselves more innocent.
Briffa et al, (2001)http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/pubs/briffa2001/briffa2001.html
Plate 3 clearly shows that the proxies peak prior to the end of the century and the instrumented readings ‘diverge’.
IPCC 4th SPM http://ipcc-wg1.ucar.edu/wg1/Report/AR4WG1_Pub_SPM-v2.pdf
See Figure SPM.2. which clearly shows that we know little about much of the climate drivers.
IPCC 4th Chpt 6. http://ipcc-wg1.ucar.edu/wg1/wg1-report.html
Can current climate model forcings explain the spatial and temporal signatures of decadal OLR variations? (2002) Allan and Slingo GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH LETTERS, VOL. 29, NO. 7, 10.1029/2001GL014620, 2002 which can be found here:
http://www.atmos.ucla.edu/csrl/publications/pub_exchange/Allan_Slingo_2002.pdf
Which pretty much says that the models are not handling the forcings we do not understand that well since something must make the models wrong. The IPCC says that we have low or very low scientific understanding of almost everything but GHGs.
How about a citation or study to back up your conspiracy theories?
This from a paper on the urban heat island effect (UHI):
Vernon, I don’t waste time studying the denialist industry, but I’ve already given you the reference to the chapter in Monbiot’s book. I’ve also linked twice to Hansen’s recent paper on the specific issue of this post where he talks about the concerted push in the US to discredit the AGW science and delay mitigation efforts.
Here, Clive Hamilton’s Scorcher also has a chapter on the denialists (I haven’t yet read it) but he goes into the Lavoisier Group in Australia, set up by someone working for the CEO of a major mining company, among other things.
From Hamilton (p128):
From Monbiot about TASSC (p32):
The author of this strategy was APCO a PR firm engaged by Philip Morris. One of the ‘contributers’ of course was EXXON.
Hamiton as well as Guy Pearce in his book High and Dry go into the ‘greenhouse mafia’ in Australia and other organised efforts to debunk climate change.
So peer reviewed papers mean nothing to you. Hansen’s peer reviewed paper which is the basis for most the current work on CO2 AGW does not matter to you. Why not just post that this is a propaganda site and not a discussion site?
It is like this from over on RC.
It appears that alarmist do not want to follow the scientific method. If you do not get what is wrong with what gavin said, I will explain it. Basically, he is saying that just because Hansen states that his study, the one that is used as the basis for the UHI off-set, states that it only works if the data is accurate does not mean that now that we know that there are issues that the alarmist have to find out if they were right. It is up to others to redo the work and find out what the real answer is and till then, we will ignore any problems with the data.
To make it clear, TASSC was of course American. Monbiot quotes a document where APCO schools its operatives to lie about the connection between Philip Morris and TASSC.
Brian,
It seems you have produced a text-book example of the ‘motive fallacy’.
There is a ‘denialist industry’ as you put it, operating from a position of self-interest, working to discredit the science of climate change. But just because they have their own motives for wishing to debunk the science, does that make their work any less correct if and whenever they happen to achieve what they set out to do?
Even in this post you have demonstrated a lack of interest in the science, choosing instead to base your response around philosophical writings by the likes of Monbiot, Hamilton and Pearce.
Tony, in talking about the denial industry, we are talking about a social phenomenon. No-one documents his writing more thorougly than Monbiot. Pearce and Hamilton are also copiously referenced.
Brian,
Fair enough if we are talking about the denialist industry, but wasn’t this thread about the discrepencies found in the US temperature record?
Yes it was. I’m going to work now. While there I’ll meditate whether I want to devote further time to this interchange, which may seem a copout, but it’s truly unlikely that after another 300 comments much will have been achieved.
Exactly, and once they start ranting about urban heat islands and temperature proxies you know its time to stop giving them oxygen. They’ll get bored after a while and crawl back to timblair.net or ClimateAudit and their rich fantasy world.
Lavartus Prodeo is not a science site as such although some of our group have science backgrounds. The heading Climate change is a sub-category of Policy in our classification scheme, not of Science, which, I think, reflects our orientation.
The notion that this is a propaganda site is offensive.
I’m an interested layperson. I try to report on the science, and like anyone in that position, I try to get information from reliable sources. Of necessity I make judgements about these. Of course I’m interested in peer-reviewed papers.
In the course of this thread, I’ve seen reference to temperature series by GISS, by the NOAA, by CRU and the Brits. I’d be astonished if the Germans and the French didn’t do their own thing also. All of them would need to make some adjustments to the data, including for urban heat islands, and I’m sure they all do their best.
If you want to have a scientific stoush, the RealClimate thread with 541 comments already is still open. So are both threads at Deltoid. This thread is closed.