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."
Thanks, I should have kept reading. For fun, stick the Baltimore coordinates into Google maps, zoom in, and then switch to the satellite view.
Oil mainly comes from dead single cell plants in the oceans. Coal is made of land plants. Animals make almost none of either. The oil from dinosaurs thing was a marketing gimmick.
Yes - Pangaea
Millions and millions of years ago there was only one Continent ('supercontinent'). The North pole wasn't at the North Pole, ditto the South Pole. Then it broke up and the continents drifted apart.
Google Pangaea and Plate Tectonics. You'll find maps at the various stages of the drift with approximate time lines.
This is simple experiment design, and quality control principles. As a matter of fact, I would love to see what the Royal Statistical Society or the American Society for Quality Control would have to say about attempting to use this dataset, once the facts as we know them now are laid out.
I just shudder to think that we have people who hold far more in the way of credentials than do I, taking this data seriously, and scolding us for doubting their results.
We could ask a whole series of questions about the thermometers themselves, and I would venture that few of the answers will move us to having more confidence in the data and more of the answers will add to the doubt we already have.
But most important, will any researcher at some distant university who is attempting to study the raw dataset, also have access to the calibration logs, or even when the instrumentation hut was changed, moved, repainted, repaved, rebuilt, or any other of the many events that can introduce bias? I doubt it, and based on how rabid some of these people are, I doubt that some even care.
LOL!!
John Kerry is the cartoonist’s/wag’s/satirist’s dream. As much as I detest him, I must admit that he has given me much pleasant diversion and mirth.
It would bias the data by magnifying the relevance of any 'heat island' effect.
One really has to be concerned about bias with respect to any large amount of collected data. For example, long term temperature readings of deep ocean water will be affected more by solar radiation input and the release of internal heat from the earth. Terrestrial temperature readings will be affected more by atmospheric effects and the effects of man made 'heat islands' (city-states).
Michelle Malkin » Hot news: NASA quietly fixes flawed temperature ...
He had to reverse engineer the process by comparing the raw data and the ... So Steve McIntyre, who lives in Toronto, began to investigate the data and the ... michellemalkin.com/.../ - 189k - [ More results from michellemalkin.com ] |
It would bias the data by magnifying the relevance of any 'heat island' effect.
Plus these lazybones/fraudsters have many climate monitoring station on or near hot asphalt and air conditioner exhausts
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1880214/posts
Good enough for gov work.
I would also submit that while the addition of many new station sites over the years can be hawked as more refinement (more data = more refinement when calculating an average), I would wonder if the assignment of those new collection stations is evenly distributed-
If the added stations were more likely to be distributed in the south and southwest (or toward the equator in the case of the global system), the additional data would tend to skew rather than refine the result.
-Bruce
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To further my point, I wonder how many reporting stations are offsetting Maine's stations? How many stations are reporting from Florida as an example? How many stations in Montana as compared to Arizona? If the Northern Tier States are under represented, that would surely throw the whole thing off by a mile.
I am not yet ready to assume a conspiracy, but if this bungling attempt at data collection (as rep'd here and on other threads) represents the norm in American science, then it brings one to question their findings in all subjects across the board.
-Bruce
So NASA is claiming half the data stations are active (data is good somehow?), but the station itself is shutdown?
NO wonder surface temperatures are not tracking mid-atmosphere temperatures.
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