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."
That and precipitation.
This is not necessarily true. At one time, fossils were discovered adjacent to coal deposits, which gave us the misnomer "fossil fuels." However, it has been observed that some abandoned oil fields have refilled. Some speculate that the heat and pressure within the earth's crust is capable of reforming inorganic carbon into hydrocarbons.
Bumpity bump, thanks for the information. Good digging.
One would think “precipitation” would be the first item in any “climate” model?
The U.S. Historical Climatology Network 1,239 stations measure precipitation and temperature. In Maryland, 7 of the 17 stations stopped operating in the 1990s and 2 of 17 stopped operating in the early 2000s.
Reacting yesterday to word that certain European governments and officials are suddenly trying to abandon their costly “global warming” policies, Royal Astronomical Society fellow Benny Peiser, of the science faculty at Liverpool John Moores University in Great Britain, recalls the teachings of the Roman emperor/philosopher Marcus Aurelius: “The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane.”
Just keep on telling the truth.
A long face at NASA.
The histrionics were on high this morning on CNN when they were talking about the U.S. sending up Coast Guard and scientists to scout the Arctic Ocean to see if the U.S. has any rights to land up there after Russia went up there and planted their flag.
What does this have to do with this thread?
CNN says the Arctic Ocean will melt by 2050 and the U.S. wants to get in there now and grab as much oil as possible.
YIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIKES. LOL
Congress would never allow oil exploration in the pristine Arctic Ocean /sarc.
No. Of course not. Did you hear John F Kennedy was assassinated?
That is a fringe theory, definitely not a valid one among the GW acolyte crowd, which the previous poster is addressing.
Of course, the current NASA changes are only for data collected in the United States. But available surface temperature readings cover only half the planet even today. Before the Second World War, they covered less than a quarter. So U.S. readings for a period that goes as far back as 1880 are among the most reliable there are.
From this article:
Well now, this inconvenient truth is gonna have ALGORE digging out his slide rule again.
Within the last few days someone on FR kindly posted the link to the NIST document on thermometer calibration standards. There it is, in simple terms that any high school math or chemistry class student can understand: PLUS/MINUS 1 DEGREE F.
You cannot get more accuracy out of a system than the system already has. You cannot get data to the 1/10th of a degree from PLUS/MINUS 1 DEGREE equipment, especially when there are no controls on station siting.
One station I am familiar with, at the Columbia Regional Airport (KCOU) located the instrument hutch on the grass a few yards to the southwest of where two large, black asphalt ramp areas met. A reading taken when the wind was blowing from the SW would be representative of actual conditions. One taken when the wind was from the NE would have the air moving over hundreds of yards of asphalt before hitting the thermometer.
To say this instrumentation and the readings from them are “unsound” is a quaint understatement based on the photos of hutch locations posted recently.
All this does not negate any sound science, but in my opinion, the amount of sound science we can rest upon in trying to understand climate change is FAR LESS today than it was when the MSM started to slam people who deny Global Warming.
Given what we know now, any “science” based on the readings of thermometers located in hutches next to airport ramp areas and behind air conditioners in parking lots would not even pass the judges at a high school science fair, let alone be worthy of any government grants.
I wonder if the decomissioning of RURAL sites in favor of URBAN sites will affect temperatures.
(perhaps all the death vally thermometers are still active)
How fast do plates move? I think the current leader is the one smashing into Southern Asia at about 7cm a year.
BUMP!
which ones are decommissioned? The closest one to me is Westminster; I was thinking about going out there to take pictures of it.
Yes! I'm glad to see someone saying this.
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