Posted on 08/14/2007 9:34:47 AM PDT by ricks_place
Agency roasted after Toronto blogger spots `hot years' data fumble
In the United States, the calendar year 1998 ranked as the hottest of them all until someone checked the math.
After a Toronto skeptic tipped NASA this month to one flaw in its climate calculations, the U.S. agency ordered a full data review.
Days later, it put out a revised list of all-time hottest years. The Dust Bowl year of 1934 now ranks as hottest ever in the U.S. not 1998.
More significantly, the agency reduced the mean U.S. "temperature anomalies" for the years 2000 to 2006 by 0.15 degrees Celsius.
NASA officials have dismissed the changes as trivial. Even the Canadian who spotted the original flaw says the revisions are "not necessarily material to climate policy."
But the revisions have been seized on by conservative Americans, including firebrand radio host Rush Limbaugh, as evidence that climate change science is unsound.
Said Limbaugh last Thursday: "What do we have here? We have proof of man-made global warming. The man-made global warming is inside NASA ... is in the scientific community with false data."
However Stephen McIntyre, who set off the uproar, described his finding as a "a micro-change. But it was kind of fun."
A former mining executive who runs the blog ClimateAudit.org, McIntyre, 59, earned attention in 2003 when he put out data challenging the so-called "hockey stick" graph depicting a spike in global temperatures.
This time, he sifted NASA's use of temperature anomalies, which measure how much warmer or colder a place is at a given time compared with its 30-year average.
Puzzled by a bizarre "jump" in the U.S. anomalies from 1999 to 2000, McIntyre discovered the data after 1999 wasn't being fractionally adjusted to allow for the times of day that readings were taken or the locations of the monitoring stations.
McIntyre emailed his finding to NASA's Goddard Institute, triggering the data review.
"They moved pretty fast on this," McIntyre said. "There must have been some long faces."
Well there are Reds at NASA in the global warming scare, but it goes to their core, not just their faces.
Making an adjustment error is one thing . . . . pulling numbers out of thin air (or even less savory places) is data falsification.
Wow!
"There must have been some long faces."
review.
That’s one long, orange face.
they should offer him a job at NASA.
This is the one I referred to in my prior post to you; thanks for pinging me!
Well, help us out here. Help us sight a cite on decommissioned sites.
Plate techtonics can account for some - some regions drifted from warmer to cooler climates.
But climate also was much warmer at times globally in the distant past - to where the polar regions were warm enough for much more plant and animal growth. Just don't tell AlGore.
This is just how they crunched the numbers.
The article and DBM is NOT discussing the microclimates of the thermometer locations!
Exactly! What is the source data after a site is decommissioned?
The US source sites were taken from surfacestations.org and the site status was found at NOAA Satellite and Information Service. The Maryland temperature data source sites are listed in the table below with the decommissioned sites crossed out. Seven stations stopped reporting in the 1990s!
COOP# | SITE | Post Office Dist Dir | STATE | LAT | LONG |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
180470 | 0.5 SE | MD | 39.28 | -76.62 | |
181385 | 0.4 W | MD | 38.57 | -76.07 | |
181750 | CHESTERTOWN | 0.6 NE | MD | 39.22 | -76.07 |
181995 | 0.7 N | MD | 38.98 | -76.95 | |
182282 | CUMBERLAND | 2 1.4 S | MD | 39.63 | -78.75 |
182523 | 1.6 E | MD | 38.88 | -75.8 | |
183675 | GLENN DALE BELL STN | 1.5 SE | MD | 38.97 | -76.8 |
185111 | LAUREL 3W | 2.8 W | MD | 39.1 | -76.9 |
185985 | 1 SE | MD | 39.27 | -75.87 | |
186620 | OAKLAND 1SE | 1 SE | MD | 39.4 | -79.4 |
186770 | 3.9 SW | MD | 38.68 | -76.67 | |
186915 | 0.5 N | MD | 38.33 | -76.42 | |
187330 | PRINCESS ANNE | 1 NE | MD | 38.22 | -75.68 |
187806 | ROYAL OAK 2SSW | 2 SSW | MD | 38.72 | -76.18 |
188000 | SALISBURY | 0.6 E | MD | 38.37 | -75.58 |
189440 | 3 SE | MD | 39.55 | -76.97 | |
189750 | 1 NE | MD | 39.33 | -76.87 |
Thank You. Claimed facts should be verifiable. Follow the links in post 17. The sites are listed in surfacestations.org and are reproduced at the post. The site status can be checked at the NOAA link. Login using guest; search by COOP #. Please verify my assertion.
I would pose the question at climateaudit.org and see what they say.
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