Posted on 08/14/2007 9:34:47 AM PDT by ricks_place
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It is important for everyone to understand that besides this 0.15C error in the US temperature data series, Hansen and NASA(GISS) have “adjusted” the raw data by a further 0.5C.
These “adjustments” (including the ones done to the global temperature series as well as the US) account for 0.7C of the total 0.8C of warming since 1880.
When magazines and climate scientists were talking about the coming ice age in the mid-1970s, it was because the Hansens’ of the world had not started adjusting the data yet. The world really did cool off considerably between 1940 and 1975.
Since the “adjustments” started being carried out, the warming of the 1920s and 1930s has been written out of the record.
Some of the “adjustments” appear valid (such as the bias created because weather observers measured temperature at a convienent times of the day rather than maximum and minimum for example) but noone really knows how these “adjustments” were really carried out nor how much they really add up to.
I’ve been backtracking these adjustments as much as possible for personal interest reasons and they DO add up to 0.7C. I can’t tell you how they were done however.
Noone can.
Excellent, that’s a bonafide archival keeper!
You’re too good to us...
“Am I missing something?” They moved (continental drift).
Nevertheless, millions of years ago, the earth has been both quite a bit hotter and quite a bit colder. It also had a lot more CO2 in the air in the triassic. All that carbon sequestration is what became oil, gas and coal.
NASA used the USHCN weather stations as the USA data set for the Hansen Global Temperature analysis. The USHCN consists of over 1200 US weather stations. A resident of Maryland, I looked at Maryland:
Hi Dave, can you add me to your global warming ping list (although xcamel’s list is great too)? I don’t want to miss one of these junk science articles...
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.
Come on. Let's give them some credit. They don't just take these reading and throw them into the hopper. There must be some adjustment when a North Dakota has 3 climate stations and a New Mexico has 17. Or is there?
(Those North Dakota and New Mexico numbers are imaginary. I have no idea what the reality is)
We both know the answer. NASA is full of greenies and money grubbers these days. Money grubbers always politicking for more more more Federal funding. Being in the global warming business gets them more money. A new bureaucratic empire within the NASA empire. More jobs for squishy green climate scientists and their ideological friends
Not quite true. If you had a lot of properly sited and calibrated stations with the same equipment generating the same error, you may be able to make valid statistical statements about the mean or median of all of those observations, to an accuracy, depending on the data, of less than the error of one individual station.
I'm a "denier." But the mere fact of +-1 degree measurement error in individual instruments does not necessarily get you to invalidating more precise statements about the change in the mean of all of them.
By whom? ;-)
In this article, Freeman Dyson gives a brief description of Thomas Golds theory on the non-biological orign of oil, and recent results that tend to back up that possiblity.
One of the things they do is to use "grid squares". Different groups use different sized grid squares. 5 degrees by 5 degrees and 2*2 degrees are most common. One issue is that some places don't have any stations, or have just one in their grid square. The areas above IIRC 60N have two stations total, one east and one west.
But, as we have seen with the newly published pix of station sites, this was not the case. There appears to not be any effort to document over the years any compromises to station readings. Indeed the entire bureaucracy seems to be brain-dead to what was going on in their own parking lots.
As I have written several times about a station near me, their instrument hutch was located at the airport in the SW corner of where two large black asphalt ramp areas came together, so that when the wind was coming from any direction except the SW, it would have to pass over as much as several hundred yards of ramp. It is just silly in the extreme to disallow that this compromises these readings for the purpose of trying to see minute trends in the temperature data.
At the very least, I doubt that people using data from this station also factored the wind direction into their model. They would have to see a picture of the station from several angles to know is a factor, and there is no documention about changes in the ramp size over the years, or when various portions were repaved or resealed, changes which would affect it thermal characteristics over time, changes which certainly would affect the downwind temperature readings when the wind was from certain directions but not from others.
“properly sited and calibrated”?? In withdrawing information about these sites from the internet and changing their policy about photographing them, the bureaucrats who are entrusted with gathering and preserving this data have documented that they are ashamed at the shoddy way in which the data were collected, and they are attempting to cover up attempts to discover just how compromised it is.
As I said, this would not pass the test for a high school Science Fair project.
The error also has to be symetrical and random.
The original problem was a switch between the U.S. Historical Climate Network (USHCN) and the Global Historical Climate Network (GHCN). This caused the change that led to the minor adjustment to the U.S. temperature record. I suspect that many of the "shut down" stations were USHCN but not GHCN.
NO wonder surface temperatures are not tracking mid-atmosphere temperatures.
On the contrary, the Remote Sensing Systems analysis of MSU lower tropospheric temperatures matches the GLOBAL surface temperature rise in virtually complete agreement with atmospheric/climate models. (Spencer/Christy at UA-Huntsville is lower, but they always have been.) Remember that the GLOBAL surface temperature increase is calculated for 30% Land, 70% Ocean. The minor change to the U.S. temperatures did not substantially affect the global temperatures. Furthermore, the increase in lower tropospheric temperatures and the cooling of both the stratosphere (and more importantly, the mesosphere) are consequences of global warming that are essentially unexplainable by any other mechanism(s).
Thus, though it may be a good idea to improve surface station records and the surface temperature record, it is massively unlikely that the warming signal is going to go away. If it did, then a host of interconnected, observed phenomena in the global climate and biospheric systems would suddenly be searching for causality.
I'm going to attempt to write a short essay explaining this interconnectedness -- it's somewhat like plate tectonics. If you suddenly thought you had data indicating that the continents don't move, everything which fits together showing that they do would be cast adrift. In both cases (plate tectonics and climate change), this is not going to happen.
See post 77.
Yes. This point is made somewhere in the comments and responses in the RealClimate thread "1934 and all that."
Also, the Earth has NEVER been static. It has been in two states, cooling or warming.
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