In a new article just published in the Journal of Geophysical Research-Atmospheres, Pat Michaels and I have concluded that the manipulations for the steep post-1980 period are inadequate, and the global temperature graph showing warming is an exaggeration, at least in the past few decades. Along the way I have also found that the UN agency promoting the global temperature graph has made false claims about the quality of their data. The graph comes from data collected in weather stations around the world. Other graphs come from weather satellites and from networks of weather balloons that monitor layers of the atmosphere. These other graphs didn’t show as much warming as the weather station data, even though they measure at heights where there is supposed to be even more greenhouse gas-induced warming than at the surface. The discrepancy is especially clear in the tropics.
The surface-measured data has many well-known problems. Over the post-war era, equipment has changed, station sites have been moved, and the time of day at which the data are collected has changed. Many long-term weather records come from in or near cities, which have gotten warmer as they grow. Many poor countries have sparse weather station records, and few resources to ensure data quality. Fewer than one-third of the weather stations operating in the 1970s remain in operation. When the Soviet Union collapsed in the early 1990s, more than half the world’s weather stations were closed in a four year span, which means that we can’t really compare today’s average to that from the 1980s. Read a background summary here and a technical paper published in the JGR December 2007 here.
The Abstract states:
Local land surface modification and variations in data quality affect temperature trends in
surface-measured data. Such effects are considered extraneous for the purpose of
measuring climate change, and providers of climate data must develop adjustments to
filter them out. If done correctly, temperature trends in climate data should be
uncorrelated with socioeconomic variables that determine these extraneous factors. This
hypothesis can be tested, which is the main aim of this paper. Using a new data base for
all available land-based grid cells around the world we test the null hypothesis that the
spatial pattern of temperature trends in a widely-used gridded climate data set is
independent of socioeconomic determinants of surface processes and data
inhomogeneities. The hypothesis is strongly rejected (P= 14 7.1 10− × ), indicating that
extraneous (nonclimatic) signals contaminate gridded climate data. The patterns of
contamination are detectable in both rich and poor countries, and are relatively stronger in
countries where real income is growing. We apply a battery of model specification tests to
rule out spurious correlations and endogeneity bias. We conclude that the data
contamination likely leads to an overstatement of actual trends over land. Using the
regression model to filter the extraneous, nonclimatic effects reduces the estimated 1980-
2002 global average temperature trend over land by about half.
Jennifer Marohasy BSc PhD is a critical thinker with expertise in the scientific method.
Hello, nice site 🙂
You must be on drugs Brin.
If Michaels was an author why bother even reading it?
Straight for the ad hom.
More peer reviewed evidence of the non-climatic influences on global average surface temperature.
Yup. I wonder if Luke can make any non-fallacious criticisms of the paper?
Yea but Michaels – surely Paul even you must have some issues (yechy). It’s against my religion. (free kick for gimps with that one)
I’ll await Arnost, my ideology advisor, to tell me what it means and if it’s kosher.
Paul – “Using a new data base for
all available land-based grid cells around the world we test the null hypothesis that the
spatial pattern of temperature trends in a widely-used gridded climate data set is
independent of socioeconomic determinants of surface processes and data
inhomogeneities. ”
So what database did they use???
I don’t have a problem with Michaels or McKitrick, especially when their stuff is peer reviewed.
Read the paper and background summary!
I see now they are continuing to use the MSU data:
“TROP is the time trend of Microwave Sounding Unit (MSU)-derived temperatures in the lower
troposphere in the same grid cell as i
q over the same time interval, based on Spencer and Christy
(1990) and published by the Global Hydrology and Climate Centre at the University of Alabama
(GHCC 2005). Our interpretation assumes the Spencer-Christy data are substantially free of
extraneous biases due to surface conditions,”
So they are deriving all this while leaving out one huge data set. How did this pass peer review?
Luke it just keeps getting better and better – get a load of this:
“We measure the abundance of human capital using data on international educational attainment.
McKitrick and Michaels (2004) used national literacy rates as an indicator of the ease of
maintaining a staff of trained meteorological technicians to operate weather stations.”
ROTFL
“The IPCC has a monopoly on scientific advising to
governments concerning climate change.” No, governments such as Australia make sure their own scientific bodies, which are independent of the IPCC, produce their own scientific reports.
So what are they claiming about Australia, that it’s actually warmer than the IPCC claims?
So Paul, I peeked whilst awaiting the advice of my new blog cultural attache Arnost.
It seems, and correct me if I’m wrong, that these good old boys have regressed temperature against everything they could think of in the CIA handbook and World Almanac and found some correlations.
And as blog devotees and gimps are convinced, correlation equalling cause and effect, it is therefore, assumed to be true and voila. There you have it. It is done. QED.
I think one would have to surrender one’s commission and sword on the strength of such an attack.
Since Luke asked so nicely…
First thoughts after a skim read – and since I usually like to read a paper more than once and follow up claims and bits and pieces – I reserve the right to change my mind…
M&M start of with the premise that temperature records used for climate modeling are “supposedly” adjusted/modeled to eliminate all [non-natural] noise – i.e. “yielding an estimate of the air temperature … [as if] there never [had] been any human settlement there”.
OK – no real problem with that… Sounds like that is what should happen.
What M&M then suggest is that it follows that the (modeled) temperature record is biased if it can be shown that there is a correlation with socioeconomic trends:
“If this assumption is true, then the spatial pattern of gridcell temperature trends should be uncorrelated with variables like Gross Domestic Product, population density, average income, and other local, nonclimatic factors.”
They then show that there is a correlation… Haven’t really got into this in detail.
Structurally, the paper seems quite robust. The immediate potential flaws that I saw were addressed – for example:
(1) Correlation is not necessarily causation – so though the above sounds logical, it does not necessarily follow. For example if the trend in wealth, population etc growth is the same as the trend in real temperature growth, the fact that there is a correlation does not necessarily mean that the (modeled) temperature is biased. M&M identify endogeneity bias as a weakness and address it in section 4.4 & 4.5 of the paper. How well this is done, I have to think a bit more on…
(2) The socioeconomic trend may be set by a few (in their own right biased) samples so giving a spurious result. M&M identify this as a weakness and test for the role of influential outliers in section 4.2 of the paper – seems fine.
(3) The limited number of samples – i.e. “there were 440 observations in the final data set. Of these, 348 (79 percent) were from the Northern Hemisphere and 92 were from the Southern Hemisphere”. These were then assigned to countries and the correlations with GDP and population growth etc were made. The selection process is justified (sort of), but what is missing is the validation that doing this analysis on a “country/national” scale is justifiable. So for me this is the one BIG unsatisfactory item in the paper – and I don’t think that it would have been difficult to pick one or more city with a boom/bust/boom economy where the modeled temperature follows the fluctuating economy (and thus justify the country/national scale analysis).
Bottom line, I’m not sure that the paper “Halves the Global Average Surface Temperature Trend” as Paul emphasizes in the lead post title. Though M&M say that “half of measured post-1980 land-based “global warming” MAY be attributable to CONTAMINATION of the basic data” – I think that this is still playing with semantics a bit.
I think the real point of the paper can be summarised with the following line from the paper “We can reject the hypothesis that adjustments to climatic data are successful in removing the extraneous influences of socioeconomic conditions in the regions of origin.”
That is the real take out and something with which I would pretty much well agree.
cheers
Arnost
I needed a headline!
The point is that the IPCC have failed to adequately adjust for the non-climatic influences on the surface temperature data.
Arnost!
Many thanks for a useful comment.
Luke – “It seems, and correct me if I’m wrong, that these good old boys have regressed temperature against everything they could think of in the CIA handbook and World Almanac and found some correlations.”
Not quite. They didn’t take away the number they first thought of and add their birthdays.:-)
Paul – slight problem – the IPCC do not do this research as you well know – they are reviewing the state of knowledge on a subject particularly as expressed in the science literature.
So this paper has only just emerged – have you yourself come to grips with the detail? Has there been any time for a reaction or perhaps even rebuttal from the science community.
We might also say that hitherto, Paul Biggs has also failed to adequately adjust for the non-climatic influences on the surface temperature data.
Your comment is a try-on.
Perhaps we might try an alternative title ” The IPCC wisely fails to swing at wide balls thrown up by the denialist movement”.
or more corrrectly
“Failure of cyrstal ball policy: The IPCC fails to address research papers before they are written”.
This paper will be get booted out of the arena as an ill-conceived statistical drift netting operation that make a priori conclusions and lacks any mechanistic explanation.
“I needed a headline!”
Paul, do you really think that is a viable excuse for misrepresentation?
Paul on one page the authors claimed to have used the MSU2lt data from September 2005 and in another place this data came from June 2005. This is critical (ignoring all the other errors in the paper) because Mears and Wentz 2005 http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/reprint/1114772v1.pdf identified a major error in the MSU data in mid August 2005.
IF the paper did not use the corrected data it should not see the light of day. That the authors give two different dates is very odd, to say the least.
On reading the paper trolling, multiplicity, causality all come to mind. One irony, though, is that if the paper is “right” then the MSU is indeed warming much faster than the surface and then Pat will have to withdraw his previous comments that the warming is not due to AGW…
Paul on one page the authors claimed to have used the MSU2lt data from September 2005 and in another place this data came from June 2005. This is critical (ignoring all the other errors in the paper) because Mears and Wentz 2005 http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/reprint/1114772v1.pdf identified a major error in the MSU data in mid August 2005.
IF the paper did not use the corrected data it should not see the light of day. That the authors give two different dates is very odd, to say the least.
On reading the paper trolling, multiplicity, causality all come to mind. One irony, though, is that if the paper is “right” then the MSU is indeed warming much faster than the surface and then Pat will have to withdraw his previous comments that the warming is not due to AGW…
I suspect you did not read the paper carefully David. I quote from page 15 end of 1st paragraph:
“We use MSU version 5.2, released September 2005, reflecting corrections for all known errors due to orbital drift, instrument heating and diurnal averaging.”
That should clarify that…
By the way, as a self confessed anti-AGW tragic, if I was to cite any MSU lower troposphere temps right now, I would cite RSS – as the downward temp trend over the last couple of months is a LOT higher than that of UAH.
http://www.junkscience.com/MSU_Temps/MSUvsRSS.html
(And I can’t be bothered recreating the above graph from the sources in the title of the graph so that I can be “politically correct” – data is data).
I would like to know, if anyone is kind enough to help.
What is supposed to be the significance of Australia and the US being mostly green, and Europe being Red?
Arnost – err La Nina. Wiggle watcher.
“Wait for it !”
Luke – as they say in the business, “the trend is your friend”.
In the same way that the current down-tick is attributable to the La Nina, the up-tick in temps over the last six or so years can be attributable to a predominantly El Nino regime.
This La Nina has a lot of parallels with the 1950-52 La Nina – 1967 is now out of the picure. On the current climo it is going to be cold-neutral into 2009. This is of course unless something like this (which may have contributed to the 2009-07 Nino) occurs:
http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2007/12/04/undersea-volcano.html
(I’m not disguising my bias for an undersea volcanic activity link to ENSO in the least… am I?) 🙂
The monthly HadCRU linear trend from Jan 2001 is going to be negative when the November 2007 numbers come out. Only 2 years and one month to go to get a statistically significant ten year trend – woo hoo!
2008 is going to be a really fun year to be an AGW skeptic.
Pretty good volcano – makes quasi-periodic phenomena that seem to break down in the austral autumn and it can even work in reverse to produce a La Nina. Wow.
Arnost they also say don’t extrapolate beyond the realm of your data sets. Look how noisy your data time series is before you become a wiggle watcher.
Paul, I think you should add this op-ed by McKitrick in the National Post on the above paper as an update:
http://www.nationalpost.com/opinion/story.html?id=145245
It refers to previous work they completed on contaminated temp. data in 2004 as well as to the work of de Laat and Maurellis 2006 who similar arrived at the same conclusion, namely, that “geographical patterns of warming trends over land are strongly correlated with geographical patterns of industrial and socioeconomic development, implying that urbanization and related land surface changes have caused much of the observed warming”.
I particularly like this point:
“They [the IPCC] conceded the evidence of contamination, but in a stunning admission, said: “The locations of socioeconomic development happen to have coincided with maximum warming, not for the reason given by McKitrick and Mihaels [sic] (2004), but because of the strengthening of the Arctic Oscillation and the greater sensitivity of land than ocean to greenhouse forcing, owing to the smaller thermal capacity of land.” Note the irony: Confronted with published evidence of an anthropogenic (but non-greenhouse) explanation for warming, they dismissed it with an unproven conjecture of natural causes. Who’s the “denialist” now?”
It’s well worth the read.
Arnost that doesn’t clarify things. In the references they have…
Global Hydrology and Climate Center (GHCC) (2005) Web site
http://wwwghcc.msfc.nasa.gov/temperature/. Global temperature anomalies. Accessed June
2005. Data are now archived at http://www.nsstc.uah.edu/data/msu/t2lt/.
If you use a suspect tropospheric trend then all your results are meaningless.
The correction was applied to the MSU2lt data in August 7 2005 and increased the trend by close to 40%. Either they used the OK data (ignoring the fact that the MSU2lt data still has stratospheric contamination) or they used the pre Mears & Wentz data which is wrong by 40%.
Haven’t you heard, David? The UHA MSU2LT is like mother’s milk.
Lighten up Steve – I haven’t misrepresented anything – I’ve paraphrased the last sentence of the abstract for a title. What do you want? The whole abstract in the title box!
There’s a bigger fish to fry over misrepresentation – the IPCC.
Thanks Proteus.
David,
Sorry I can’t answer without actually replicating using the pre-adjusted and adjusted datasets, but I’m GUESSING the reference is sloppy. However you are right that attention to detail is critical and this should be confirmed. This paper now has a thread on CA, and I’ve asked the question there http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=2494#comment-172461. It looks like McIntyre looked over the numbers and McKittrick will certainly browse these threads – so one of the two will probably answer.
By the way, you are being rather draconian in your judgement… i.e. “IF the paper did not use the corrected data it should not see the light of day” and “If you use a suspect tropospheric trend then all your results are meaningless”. Would you say the same for Mann et al 2007 given their network is based on the identical MBH98 network – warts and all, including the incorrect PC series, as criticized by both the NAS Panel and Wegman. Given it used the suspect series – should it also not have seen the light of day?
cheers
Arnost
Arnost – irrelevant debating point as a diversion.
Arnost, have you not learned yet that there is one law for the lion and another law for the lamb?
If you read de Laat and Maurellis 2006, you’ll find that their findings substantially agree with McKitrick and Michaels 2007, and that the former use a combination of surface, as well as MSU (UAH and RSS), temperature records. The clarification regarding the MSU UAH data is essentially the diversion required to avoid the substance of the findings found in 2004 and again 2007 and the similar findings of de Laat and Maurellis in 2004 and 2006.
Proteus you are wrong. This paper smacks of a statistical troll. BUT lets ignore the fact that the temperature predictors don’t pass the giggle test.
Question is. If the surface trend is the same as the satellite trend then what is the point of the paper?
I am all for scientific debate, but let’s not deny the basic fact that the surface trend=satellite trend=radiosonde trend.
David, I look forward to your subsequent critique of both the above paper as well as de Laat and Maurellis 2007 in the peer-reviewed literature.
I’m more than happy that these discussions take place on blogs, but like Luke, I think criticisms of published papers should also take place in the above. What’s good for the goose is good for the gander.
But let me say, if their paper is no more than a piece of “statistical trolling” why does the IPCCs criticism of it appear so feeble and why does their “statistical trolling” achieve such a high correlation with the pattern of geographical warming:
“We showed that the spatial pattern of warming trends is so tightly correlated with indicators of economic activity that the probability they are unrelated is less than one in 14 trillion. We applied a string of statistical tests to show that the correlation is not a fluke or the result of biased or inconsistent statistical modelling. We showed that the contamination patterns are largest in regions experiencing real economic growth.”
Regarding your question, because the paper isn’t really concerned with the difference between the two methods, but rather with non-GHG anthropogenic effects on temperature, like urban heat islands, as well as the geographical distribution of the purported warming, which has some bearing on values like global or hemispheric temp. But that’s just the result of some skim reading while I’m doing other things.
Returning though to the de Laat and Maurellis 2007 paper, these few sentences from the Summary and Conclusion are particularly good, and there are others like it:
“Our analysis of climate model simulations of GHG warming confirms our earlier results (Paper I), namely, that they do not show any kind of CO2 emission–temperature trend correlation. In fact, the modeled temperature trends are quite insensitive to the magnitude of the industrial CO2 emissions. It is possible that the response of the climate system to enhanced GHG radiative forcing is much more localized than expected in that it occurs only in specific regions and mainly in the lower troposphere, although this runs contrary to the current understanding of GHG-related processes (cf Hansen et al., 1997; IPCC, 2001; Hansen et al., 2005; Santer et al., 2005).”
Apologies, de Laat and Maurellis 2006.
So correlation is now cause and effect.
Funny that the combination of forcings explains the temperature trend, and curious that the upper stratosphere is cooling.
Curious that a bloody big thermal signature has penetrated all the oceans
Science 8 July 2005:
Vol. 309. no. 5732, pp. 284 – 287
Penetration of Human-Induced Warming into the World’s Oceans
Tim P. Barnett,1* David W. Pierce,1 Krishna M. AchutaRao,2 Peter J. Gleckler,2 Benjamin D. Santer,2 Jonathan M. Gregory,3 Warren M. Washington4
A warming signal has penetrated into the world’s oceans over the past 40 years. The signal is complex, with a vertical structure that varies widely by ocean; it cannot be explained by natural internal climate variability or solar and volcanic forcing, but is well simulated by two anthropogenically forced climate models. We conclude that it is of human origin, a conclusion robust to observational sampling and model differences. Changes in advection combine with surface forcing to give the overall warming pattern. The implications of this study suggest that society needs to seriously consider model predictions of future climate change.
and
Volume 16, Issue 3 (February 2003)
Journal of Climate
Solar and Greenhouse Gas Forcing and Climate Response in the Twentieth Century
Gerald A. Meehl, Warren M. Washington, T. M. L. Wigley, Julie M. Arblaster, and Aiguo Dai
National Center for Atmospheric Research, Boulder, Colorado
Ensemble experiments with a global coupled climate model are performed for the twentieth century with time-evolving solar, greenhouse gas, sulfate aerosol (direct effect), and ozone (tropospheric and stratospheric) forcing. Observed global warming in the twentieth century occurred in two periods, one in the early twentieth century from about the early 1900s to the 1940s, and one later in the century from, roughly, the late 1960s to the end of the century. The model’s response requires the combination of solar and anthropogenic forcing to approximate the early twentieth-century warming, while the radiative forcing from increasing greenhouse gases is dominant for the response in the late twentieth century, confirming previous studies. Of particular interest here is the model’s amplification of solar forcing when this acts in combination with anthropogenic forcing. This difference is traced to the fact that solar forcing is more spatially heterogeneous (i.e., acting most strongly in areas where sunlight reaches the surface) while greenhouse gas forcing is more spatially uniform. Consequently, solar forcing is subject to coupled regional feedbacks involving the combination of temperature gradients, circulation regimes, and clouds. The magnitude of these feedbacks depends on the climate’s base state. Over relatively cloud-free oceanic regions in the subtropics, the enhanced solar forcing produces greater evaporation. More moisture then converges into the precipitation convergence zones, intensifying the regional monsoon and Hadley and Walker circulations, causing cloud reductions over the subtropical ocean regions, and, hence, more solar input. An additional response to solar forcing in northern summer is an enhancement of the meridional temperature gradients due to greater solar forcing over land regions that contribute to stronger West African and South Asian monsoons. Since the greenhouse gases are more spatially uniform, such regional circulation feedbacks are not as strong. These regional responses are most evident when the solar forcing occurs in concert with increased greenhouse gas forcing. The net effect of enhanced solar forcing in the early twentieth century is to produce larger solar-induced increases of tropical precipitation when calculated as a residual than for early century solar-only forcing, even though the size of the imposed solar forcing is the same. As a consequence, overall precipitation increases in the early twentieth century in the Asian monsoon regions are greater than late century increases, qualitatively consistent with observed trends in all-India rainfall. Similar effects occur in West Africa, the tropical Pacific, and the Southern Ocean tropical convergence zones.
It seems incredible to me (as unqualified in this area) that, rather than relying on dubious post hoc adjustments to temperature data (for the urban heat island effect etc.), no international protocol exists as to the positioning of stations from which temperature data will be acceptable.
As expected. Who asserted that correlation was cause and effect? No one. More diversionary nonsense.
And the abstracts indicate still more diversions.
Apparently, an ensemble of models now establishes both cause and effect.
How about simply addressing the substance of their papers? Isn’t that simple courtesy? I mean, they’ve gone to the effort of submitting their work to peer-review and been published in JGR-Atmos – a respected journal.
BTW, I, like Arnost, am piqued by Svalgaard’s indirect suggestions that the current solar forcing may be too low. I’m curious how this will effect the amplitude of natural internal variability, and how this will effect the GCMs simulation of climate.
Happy to see how things turn out though. We live in interesting times.
Well chrisgo – it’s called the passage of time.
And you need long continuous runs of climate data – not a few years.
Who would have thought Cairo suburbs would have expanded out to the Pyramids. Many out of town areas were not part of the suburbs 50 years ago but are now.
Rationalisation – PMG became Australia post and met stations got moved to airports in some cases.
Budgets – many rainfall stations are run by volunteers – some are very very good. Some so so.
Many stations were not read on weekends – no budget to pay observors unless volunteer.
Basically nobody in 1910 would envisioned that global warming would become the issue it has and require standardisation on the scale needed. most people were happy to find out how hot it was in the nightly news. Now we want to know whether the planet has warmed by 0.3478357834 C (approx).
And this blog hangs on every little wiggle.
So this is why BoM now are installing very expensive automatic systems. Strangely teh Australian reference network is probably one of the best in the world, having weeded stations back to the best available.
So has the world learnt its lesson. Are inadequate stations being given the boot !
Let’s face it, even the Australian temperature record is a mess, let alone that of Russia, China etc. Most stations are in urban growth areas and as illustrated on sites like Climate Audit – very dodgy.
Last time I looked, even the Met station in Exhibition Street Melbourne was still listed as a measurement site.
The temperature record is paramount.
It’s not merely further evidence of anthropogenic global warming, it is the foundation on which the AGW hypothesis is built.
Utter tripe.
BoM’s RCS network is quite good and your station IS NOT in it !
http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/averages/tables/cw_086071.shtml
So – it’s the stats for that station. So what? Aren’t people entitled to know the temperature in the city?
Perhaps there are climate stations in steel smelters too – the workers might like to know the inside temperature.
All depends how you use the data for what purpose? And if you do indeed use it at all.
In the event it was included what incremental addition to the national error do you think it would add?
Is it included or isn’t it?
If not, when was it excluded?
chrisgo it is not include. Of course, any climatologist with half a brain (I like to think I have two halves 😉 ) would know not to use an urban site for detecting AGW. That said, urban sites are important because the inhabitants feel the combination of urban heat island warming and AGW. That’s why you can now grow tropical and subtropical fruit in parts of Melbourne with a bit or work.
As it turns out (and as is obvious from the MSU data, radiosonde data, sea surface temperature data etc.) you can use all the data – good and bad and you get exactly the same results because cities cover a tiny percentage of the globe. In Australia the all temperature average warming trend is essentially the same as the rural high quality station only trend. This has been known for two decades, but some people are slow to catch on and pretend over fitted non-physical pattern matching lacking any semblence of causation provides an alternative perspective.
The AGW hypothesis is based on a temperature record collected from sites throughout the world over the past 100 years.
David, you write that no climatologist “with half a brain” would rely on data from an urban site.
Well where, pray tell, has the data been collected from?
If the data from central Melbourne is not now included, when was it excluded?
We are discussing a fractional rise over 100 years aren’t we?
I’m sorry, but unless the data is totally reliable (and I doubt if it can be), it’s meaningless.
What utter idiocy chrisgo – what do you mean “when was it excluded” – answer any time you feel like an analysis. David has just told you it it is not in the reference network which we have now been through only about a bazillion times on this blog before.
It is not in that analysis. David has also told you if you then throw everything in the mix it doesn’t make any difference. Capeesh ?
Chrisgo – by definition there are no totally reliable data in most of the sciences. You need to know what the error levels might be.
And for heavens sake – don’t do the old “you wouldn’t notice that difference on any day you looked”. Yes – but it’s not a single day – it’s a whole population of sites and time series. The sorts of trends you are looking at are most significant.
I mean chrisgo these differences are noticed by farmers and also evidenced by the movement of some species, times of breeding etc.
If you do want to keep going the way you are – stop arguing as we might as well say it’s cooled over the last 100 years or maybe it warmed. i.e. we know nothing.
Interesting post re the underwater eruption. But the reported volumes are inconsistent. the 22 million m3 is only 22 cubic hectares which is a lot less than 13,670 cubic miles. I wonder which is the correct volume?
The Bureau’s high quality temperature data set dates back to Torok and Nicholls 1996. Melbourne (86071) is a HQ station in terms of its record and instrument exposure, but not suitable for AGW analysis as it’s got a very substantial urban heat island signal. The temperature changes that it measures are very real, but largely Melbourne CBD specific.
At no time has the HQ datasets produced by BoM and available through http://www.bom.gov.au/climate used 86071 for monitoring climate change.
BTW a 1C warming as Australia has experienced since 1950 is the equivalent of moving isotherms (around) 150 to 200km equatorward. This is a MASSIVE change, and one that continues with Australia on track for one of its warmest years on record (again) and southern Australia set to break all previous records by a substantial margin.
Wasted on these tossers David. Far too factual. You’re dealing with blog idiots who can’t even see what’s happening in in their own backyard.
chrisgo – “Let’s face it, even the Australian temperature record is a mess, let alone that of Russia, China etc. Most stations are in urban growth areas and as illustrated on sites like Climate Audit – very dodgy.”
The Australia network is actually very good. Do you happen to fly light aircraft? I don’t however I am researching how to get my glider license and the extent of weather data that is made available to pilots is extensive. Hundreds of thousands of lives depend on accurate weather data that is collected under international standards all over the world for air navigation. This is why I regard the claim that the Russian and Chinese networks as a mess as false. Here is a list of records for the Northern Hemisphere:
http://www1.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/documentlibrary/tddoc/td9645.pdf
I cannot see on Page 16, which is the number of stations for the Northern Hemisphere, a massive drop when the Soviet Union collapsed and where the great data loss was supposed to happen. Perhaps someone could provide the reference to some data that shows this huge loss of data.
If the weather system was as bad as you say pilots of the world would be talking about it and doing something as their safety depends on it. Perhaps you could also supply a reference to data that shows that air navigation is compromised by the lack of weather information that you claim is prevalent in China and Russia. We do actually know what goes on in China and Russia as they have to conform to international standards so that international flights are allowed into their country. I am sure that if anything prevented the flow of tourism dollars like sub standard weather information then we would know all about it. Again we would need solid references not blog entries from economists and mining engineers.
“BTW a 1C warming as Australia has experienced since 1950” _ well it’s a little less than that, shall we say 0.8℃ and about the same over the past 100 years.
I’m not trying to prove or disprove anything, but the BoM climate change timeseries must have included data from the central Melbourne (and other urban sites) at some stage.
Over time, stations have been dropped and other stations added, the dates of the establishment and/or closure of reference climate stations were available on the BoM site a couple of months ago but now appear to have been dropped.
If that is so, interested taxpayers like myself, may like to know why.
http://www.nationalpost.com/opinion/story.html?id=145245
Movement in a some stations is far from exceptional. Why don’t you ring them or email them and ask instead of proposing conspiracies. If you don’t attempt to find out – you’re obviously not seriously interested and are just a time waster.
David has told you that the said stations is NOT included and if it was the all-in averages numbers make no difference to interpretation. You can either accept his word or not, or check it all yourself.
The link you have posted is irrelevant to the issue.
The matter has now become most stupid. If you’re happy to entertain nonsensical notions go ahead – I’m not saying anymore as this is totally tedious and the analyses self-evident.
“Over time, stations have been dropped and other stations added, the dates of the establishment and/or closure of reference climate stations were available on the BoM site a couple of months ago but now appear to have been dropped.
If that is so, interested taxpayers like myself, may like to know why.”
Interesting logic there. Based on what you what acknowledge is an entirely unsupported guess, you want action.
SJT – he doesn’t really what to know. BoM get it all the time – supposed “users” who are really just itinerant tyre kickers having a sook. They’re made their mind up before they even read the page and are usually totally uninformed in the first place. It’s the old “maybe it’s this” or “maybe it’s that”….
David,
Ross McKitrick has answered my question on CA (http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=2494#comment-173082). Quote:
“- 26: Arnost, I checked my programs. I had downloaded the data in June 2005, then replaced it in Sept 2005 when I saw a new edition out. So I used the Sept 2005 version. I doubt it matters much.”
Short of replication – that’s about the answer best you will get.
cheers
Arnost
So David and the BoM are at it again. ‘1c temp rise since 1950’ Not true. ‘Massive’ Not true.
In reality temps have rise about .7c to .8c since the 1880’s. (about when the LIA finally thawed out). And from the 1940’s to the 1970’s temp. actualy dropped by over .5c, befor rising again.
The problem with the BoM is that it can no longer be regarded as an accurate and unbiased provider of factual information. The Bureau has actually become an active advocate of AGW, and is now quite fully engaged in the promotion of the ideology of ‘global warming’.
That a government agency, funded by taxpayers, should do, so is a matter that should be debated in the parliament and also the media, but there is not much chance of that happening.
The problem for the BoM and similar advocates of AGW, is that rising temperatures started to run out of puff after 1998, the “hottest year on record”. In fact 1998 started to become an embarrasment to them as temps started to fall. They needed another hottest year on record and the BoM started to work on 2005 as ‘it’. In Jan. 2006 they announced with great triumph that ‘2005 was the hottest year on record in Australia’
Clearly it was not. Not where we live; and not in most other areas of the country either.
In fact the NASA GISS temperature records for Australia show that 2005 was no where near the hottest. These temp. graphs can be seen at their website, or via Warick Hughes, at.
warickhughes.com.cool/cool15.htm..
So now they are at it again. Looks like 2007 is about to become “the hottest year on record”.
Try again,
http://www.warwickhughes.com/cool/cool15.htm
Here’s the big shonky quoting 1880s temperatures which he knows have different meassurement standards. Another Sid porky. How bloody blatant is this for a try-on punters !
The trouble with Sid is that like his accusations he can’t be relied on for accurate information. What a old coot.
Suppose the NASA GISS data is inaccurate. Maybe it hasn’t been played around with enough like the BoM data. Hasn’t been ‘modelled’ enough.
I am not a scientist and I do not understand many of your comments. I am, however, a trial lawyer (retired). When confronted with scientific “experts” as witnesses in the courtroom, experienced trial lawyers can sense when an opinion doesn’t sound right. With preparation the lawyer will cross-examine the expert probing the underlying bases for the opinion. I established in cross-examination that several scientific “experts” had made erroneous assumptions, extrapolated conclusions from incomplete data, and even fudged facts to fit an pre-determined conclusion. And yes, some scientists are deeply invested in protecting their erroneous conclusions, to save their reputations as well as their careers built on their incorrect findings.
When I first heard about man-caused global warming, the argument just didn’t make sense. How could humans generate so much co2 to cause the entire globe to so heat up into a catastrophe, causing oceans to flood major coastal cities, islands to disappear, and the Arctic sea ice to melt away forever. In my amateur’s mind I knew that ice ages had occurred, melted away, and then reappeared. This activity happened long before the appearance of man. Why wasn’t the current global warming caused by similar natural phenomena?
Then I read that all scientists, except for cranks and kooks, accepted man-caused global warming as predicted by computer models. Putting “all scientists” together with “computer models” sounded the alarm for me that these claims needed rigorous, independent examination.
It is a probably a fantasy, but it would be informative and revealing if global-warming “experts” could be submitted to cross-examination where they would be sworn to tell the truth (under fear of perjury) and would be compelled to answer questions directly and completely.
All these comments are reminiscent of the “Six Wise Men of Hindustan” who went to see the elephant though all of them were blind. Their analyses of the elephant, and their arguments in support of their positions, were irrelevant because they didn’t comprehend the essence of the beast.
The subject at hand, Earth, has had constantly changing climate. It has been warmer, it has been colder. Atmospheric CO2 at times has been multiples above present levels. This current warming trend began a century before significant increases in CO2. So did current glacier shortening and sea level rise.
It was warmer during the Holocene Optimum of only 5,000 years ago, and warmer during the Medieval Warm Period of less than 1,000 years ago. Sea levels have risen over 400 feet in less than 20,000 years (since the Ice Age), an average of over two feet a century. Civilization made great progress during these previous warm periods, and regressed during cold periods such as the Dark Ages and the Little Ice Age. These cold periods were characterized by influenza, bubonic plague, and cholera pandemics. Storms were more violent and numerous. Crop yields fell and famine spread, while human bodies shrank and their skeletons showed malnutrition and disease.
In contrast, warmer periods exhibited population growth, progress in arts, science and civil development, and humans living longer, healthier lives.
In the face of all this, voluminous and detailed arguments about the correction of readings from weather stations and satellites covering a period of less than three decades seems futile and frivolous. What will it all mean when the Earth completes its passage through this current natural interglacial period, and enters the next glacial one?
Less than 20,000 years ago, an ice sheet a mile thick covered Chicago. No actions of man caused it.
10,000 years ago that ice sheet was gone and sea levels had risen about 300 feet. No actions of man caused it.
Many now are like the wise who debated the elephant, saying it is like a tree, a spear, a wall, a rope, a snake, a fan. When tired of that debate, they argued about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, when those who knew angels know they would rather watch football than dance.
In the anthropogenic global warming debate I detect the use of outstanding methods to achieve mediocre results. If the warming is not caused by man, it can’t be stopped. If it is caused by man, it is still unstoppable even if mankind assents to reentering the eighteenth century.
Given these inevitabilities, the best we can do is adapt to the changes, whatever they may be, making the best use of our limited resources, rather than squandering them in vain efforts to turn back the tide. Then once we get adjusted to doing what mankind does best – adapting to change – we can start planning to adjust to the real climate change challenge, when we enter the inevitable next glacial phase.
Adjusting to warm is nothing compared to adjusting to cold.
Thank you, Major Mike. You said it well. The frivolity of the “scientific” debate on this blog and on so many others ignores the broad existential facts you highlight. Individuals too often self-promote their narrow expertise and desperately extend it to a grand theory of everything, rather than accepting their unique but nevertheless subordinate fit within a greater body of knowledge and probable causality.
Here is another facet, and I submit it cautiously for comment: Frequently you hear the AGW accusation that there are contrarians who deliberately bend science to fit an industry-manipulated agenda. I accept their logic, for it is no stunning concession that corruption exists. But I assert more profoundly that there are those who deliberately bend science to fit a socio-political agenda, too. AGW proponents need consider the implications of this point.
There is an inherent and existential difference between these two varieties of corruption. While the industry-funded manipulators once unmasked typically concede their power and influence to regulation by civil and free market mechanisms, the socio-political manipulators instead seek to confound the civil and free market mechanisms themselves, striving to cement their power into something that can only be termed a centrally planned autocracy of their own liking. To wit, there certainly is small-time corruption, but then there is a big-time variety, too.
Neither camp of suspect agendas views the scientific debate as particularly relevant, nor views the scientists themselves as more than synchophants pawns. Their core value is that they generate quotable hyperbole. Because of a general level of public respect for scientists (and an inability to distinguish the ordinary from the exceptional), the scientists’ publicized passions effectively help create a malleable public policy-herding environment.
Consider: The AGW policy environment is one of urgency and emergency. Rather than elaborate the point I’ll cut to the chase: Who benefits from a declaration of global emergency? I submit that it is those who aspire to exert control over people and nations, not those who just want to make money.
Consider, too, that when you read the AGW literature and blogs, they exude religio-political zeal – not dispassionate science. The ICPP report itself is vulnerable to this accusation. You don’t have to scratch too deep before you find anti-capitalist sentiment. Curious about this phenomena, I scratched further and encountered those who advocate “temporary global dictatorship” to impose the changes “demanded” by the global emergency.
Is there a massive conspiracy? I don’t even have to assert that there is for the question to rise on its own. It is certainly likely that various miscreants sense opportunity. On my own I have encountered only amateurs but for this fact: The one, globally recognized individual at the lead of the AGW juggernaut is himself a documented aspirant for powerful political office. In fact, for THE most powerful political office on the planet, that of US President.
How much more enticing might it be to progress beyond nation state aspirations to a vision for a new, meta-national office? What better platform for creating that non-existent office than by bestirring a global environmental emergency, one that transcends national boundaries and begs for a prize-winning savior? Such a one doesn’t have to submit again to a messy democratic process of debate, election, and possible embarrassing rejection.
I’m not given to conspiracy theory, but the circumstantial elements are intriguing.
As a layperson who has attempted to learn a bit about the scientific and political basis of AGW and climate change, I have considered the same arguments put forth by 1observer. However, I can’t find any broad based proof of ideological zeal or political bias behind AGW science. I do find those who wish to color it thus, perhaps due to their own political biases.
The simplest argument against the “politicization of science” proponents, is that I very much doubt that most climate scientists predicated their work and it’s outcome on a quest for political power. The protractor and slide rule set I’ve encountered are mostly dispassionate viewers of politics. They are primarily immersed in the intricacies of their area of study.
As a political person, and a social liberal, I find it extremely unlikely that a world conspiracy has arisen, riding the “horse” of AGW and climate change to greater political power and control. In fact, I wish the skeptic/denialists were correct and that AGW weren’t occurring. For world resources would be much better utilized absent such a future.
Authoritarian governments don’t emerge through world scientific consensus. They typically emerge through violence, famine, disease, wars, economic crisis, and conflicts. All the things that are likely to occur if AGW isn’t addressed. To address AGW (as determined by unbiased science) is to work to reduce the likelihood of future repressive governments. Fighting climate change does not create conditions for authoritarianism to rise. Addressing AGW prevents the failure of democracy and the emergence of authoritarianism.
necessarily scattered through all the different corners of the a great empire, the freedmn of the inland trade appears, both