The CO2 Problem in Six Easy Steps
If you're uncertain about the basics of the issue, this is a great place to start.
A few postings, notably #105, #111, #112, and #114, touch on the GISS adjustment.
RealClimate? Those guys are as biased as they come regarding human-caused global warming. And they wasted no time downplaying the GISS adjustment. What other problems are lurking in the data? A sane, unbiased scientist, upon discovering one major problem in their datasets, would proceed to examine all other inputs for similar problems, instead of treating the problem data set as an outlier.
But that's what bias does to a scientist. It removes their objectivity. And science without objectivity is little more than propaganda.
The argument is with those who claim we are the cause and we are all doomed unless we go vegan and walk to work in dirty cloths.
August 9th 2007 marked the death of the Global Warming Conspiracy.
Those men intimately involved, and every single one of the “scientists” and “researchers” who co-authored papers with the inner group of criminal conspirators MUST be brought up on charges, and must be stripped of their credentials.
This could be the greatest and longest lasting achievement of the Bush administration.
The fraud has been apparent for a decade, it’s time for the charlatans to pay the piper.
Thanks for the link. Climate and prediction has so many not always well understood variables. For example when no planes flew the three days after 9/11, scientists discovered there was an increase in the rate of evaporation from test pans in the farm belt. Evaporation is not caused by heat, but by photons striking the water. Without airplane pollution, more photons were hitting the test water.
There was also a link discovered between climate and drought in northern Africa after Europe began cutting its air pollution, which was blowing south over Africa. And since our hurricane precursors originate in Africa, what has the reduction of European air pollution done to our hurricane patterns?
Science is so complicated and interactive that I wish individual disciplines would not be so territorial and dogmatic, and that non scientists would not pop off with so much ill considered and silly/hostile commentary.
The GISS problem is merely a clear example of how long very basic errors sit around because despite claims of widespread peer-review, they've never really been examined...and hundreds of papers cite them, and other networks gain credibility by matching them...just as with the Mann MHB98/99 papers.
Mann claimed his papers were not just read, but actively peer-reviewed by THOUSANDS of scientists; the TAR heavily relied on his work (in part because the IPCC made him a chapter author, which he took full advantage of)...and yet it took 8 years and congressional pressure before the math was thoroughly checked and found "not skillful".
The GISS calculations are widely cited, and a great deal of faith is placed upon Hansen's team performing adjustments for which they are not required to really explain what they are doing in any examinable detail.
Mr. McIntyre, did not find the error by himself - he lacks the resources to set up an alternate climate reference network - but the adverserial process narrowed down the error which had been overlooked for 7-1/2 years.
In May, Mr. Watts noticed that his local USHCN station (labelled as "high quality" by the NOAA) was both severly outside of NOAA standards for environment and adjacent to several features that have been demonstrated to induce a measurement error in the 5C range; this was concurrent with his finding that just the change in paint type on Stevenson shelters was enough to alter station readings.
Mr. Watts then went to another local USHCN site, and found lesser, but substantial problems.
Mr. Watts then set up an internet site and began recruiting volunteers to systematically record other sites in an attempt to get a complete census of the USHCN network, and evaluate whether the network is consistant with the NOAA claims.
This survey is still ongoing (with approx 270 out of 1200 surveys completed), and results from it are suggestive in nature only, however while there are some sites which appear pristine (as the network is represented) - at least as regards a consistant environment - even if all further sites surveyed turn out to be proper, the numbers of sites outside of parameters seems enough to overwhelm the signal purported to be selected out of it.
One thing that appears to have happened systematically, is that sites were commonly moved adjacent to buildings apparently so as to allow the migration to MMTS sensors with a commonly used cable length. This occurred gradually in the 1980s and 1990s.
Generally the most extreme warming trends have been associated with the most absurd site placement, such as the site sitting IN the parking lot.
The claim has been made that the various semi-documented adjustment procedures account for the ill-placement. To date, it appears as though many of the most ill-sited sites have been adjusted down....and pristine sites adjusted upwards(or more properly, adjusted downwards in the past more than recently). Again, the survey is incomplete, and the adjustment methods are not clearly stated.
One of the sites photographed was the site in MN, which it was discovered had a large jump, and two large AC compressors placed absurdly close;
some associates of Mr. Watts assumed that the relocation of air conditioning compressors next to the sensors were responsible for a sudden jump in site records; this was countered that the jump did not exactly match (though there does seem to be a signal as well) the relocation by Mr. Rabbet and his AGW associates; Mr. McIntyre then dug about attempting to match other records, and discovered that for some reason that a semi-adjusted record which had been replaced some time ago, suddenly replaced the more adjusted records beginning in Jan 2000, without being normalized.
GISSs attempts to correct the programming error that caused that use further non-public adjustments, and though the programming error only directly affected data since Jan 2000, apparently the data was used to adjust data prior to that time as well. These source for these "corrections" are unknown as well...which is the real problem.
Many prominent studies which use the USHCN network don't identify exactly which sites they used - even upon explicit request - which again, blocks review. Others such as the "light1 = urban/light0 = rural" have been shown to have not merely flawed assumptions, but downright silly...and have been relied upon by other studies for use to derive controls.
I agree with you that interpretation of the finding of the error is in some ways overblown, but the real point is that there ARE systemic problems with the data; the scientists don't know "nothing" but are far more confident than their data would objectively suggest they should be; peer-review is much less than it is represented as, at least as regards the upper levels of climate science; and widespread refusal of prominent climate scientists to make their data and methods open for review of reproducibility is allowing errors such as the GISS one to continue undetected for absurdly long periods of time...and then there's the widespread reference-kiting.
You undoubtedly will receive a lot of abuse here, but as for me, thank you...even if I disagree on a lot of points.
For later.
Your 1st graph is BS, it's showing 2002 was as warm as 1998 and 2004 was nearly a whole .1 higher than 1998, which is news to me, someone is playing with the numbers there. Not to mention they always clip the end off the 5 year moving average at 2003 so you don't see the leveling off at the end.
MY SHORT SUMMARY: The warm temperatures of the 1930s were extremely unusual in the United States. This has been known for quite awhile.
Translation: Anything that embarrassingly contradicts global warming we will just dismiss and chalk it up to being unusual or an anomaly, this way we can still keep our religion and continue to push for world socialism
The adjustments to the United States temperature record do not significantly change the current climate understanding
The hell it doesn't. Back in that time period the United States was pretty much the only country keeping accurate temperature records on a consistent basis(i.e. How many weather stations were there in China, Africa, South America, Antarctica, etc. consistently taking accurate temperature readings in the 1930's). If they can't get the United States right, why should we believe the rest of the world is without error?
I don't really want to be attacked for my political motivations for posting this, because I don't have any.
You post from and believe every word without question from Realclimate.org, which is hosted by Al Gore's very own campaign manager and you have no political agenda, suuurrre.
Coyote blog has some informative posts on the subject:
This explains the issue of ‘adjustments’:
http://www.coyoteblog.com/coyote_blog/2007/07/an-interesting-.html
suspicious adjustment factors and quality of temp sites:
http://www.coyoteblog.com/coyote_blog/2007/06/signal_to_noise.html
temperature numbers revised:
http://www.coyoteblog.com/coyote_blog/2007/08/official-us-cli.html
What REALLY gets me is that while 1934 was clearly a peak in U.S. temps, it was a little bit of a valley in the global temps!