It seems Jim Hansen of NASA and his manipulated temperature data would not be recognized in a court of law in the United States. It seems this means the theory that man is causing global warming is invalid, and any laws, or legal actions based upon it must be negated. Any lawyers out there who can comment on this?
Peter
from: http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=1891#more-1891
Will Richardson says:
August 11th, 2007 at 7:17 pm
Re: 2&3 Bigcitylib.
No. The point is that substantial and material adjustments are being made to the temperature “record” relied on by climate scientists, the adjustments support the hypothesis of AGW, and the adjuster (Jim Hansen of NASA) refuses to disclose the data and calculations which he assures the public justify his adjustments.
In law, this would not be allowed. Let me quote from Florida Rule of Evidence 90.705 (actually Section 90.705, Florida Statutes):
90.705 Disclosure of facts or data underlying expert opinion.–
(1) Unless otherwise required by the court, an expert may testify in terms of opinion or inferences and give reasons without prior disclosure of the underlying facts or data. On cross-examination the expert shall be required to specify the facts or data.
(2) Prior to the witness giving the opinion, a party against whom the opinion or inference is offered may conduct a voir dire examination of the witness directed to the underlying facts or data for the witness’s opinion. If the party establishes prima facie evidence that the expert does not have a sufficient basis for the opinion, the opinions and inferences of the expert are inadmissible unless the party offering the testimony establishes the underlying facts or data.
The Federal Rule is similar. In other words, Hansen’s “adjusted” temperature “record” would be inadmissible in a court of law almost anywhere in the United States, as would any evidence based on his temperature “record”.
Showing posts with label temperature data. Show all posts
Showing posts with label temperature data. Show all posts
Sunday, October 7, 2007
Friday, September 14, 2007
NASA Interfering In Study Of Climate Data
Here is a brief summary of the unfolding saga of Jim Hansen of NASA and the recording and interpretation of temperature data as it relates to the theory of man-caused global warming.
Peter
from:
GCB Stokes
Message #109/14/07 02:10 PM
http://www.townhall.com/columnists/AmandaCarpenter/2007/08/17/nasa_blocked_climate_change_blogger_from_data?page=full&comments=true
Despite the fact that NASA tried to block him from accessing U.S. temperature data, persistent efforts by a climate change blogger forced the government to amend U.S. temperature data. Because of the blogger’s efforts, NASA now recognizes 1934 as the hottest year in U.S. history, not 1998. Steven McIntyre, a former mineral exploration executive and policy analyst for the governments of Ontario and Canada who blogs at ClimateAudit.org, wrote to NASA on August 4. He had found miscalculations in the NASA’s U.S. temperature recordings made after January 2000. “For Detroit Lakes, Minnesota,” McIntyre wrote “this introduced an error of 0.8 **** C.” NASA responded on August 7 to tell McIntyre data was “changed correspondingly with an acknowledgement of your contribution.”
Without any fanfare, the changes were made on the NASA website. The recalculations resulted in an overall decrease in U.S. temperatures since 2000 by 0.15 degrees centigrade. In a phone interview McIntyre said, “That doesn’t necessarily seem that much, but when the entire increase in temperature in the United States had been previously reported to be about half a degree, this .15 degree is not a small number when you are measuring half degree numbers.”
Now, the ten hottest years on record in the U.S., beginning with the hottest year, are: 1934, 1998, 1921, 2006, 1931, 1999, 1953, 1990, 1938 and 1939. Before the revision, that list read: 1998, 1934, 2006, 1921, 1931, 1999, 1953, 2001, 1990 and 1938. The re-ranking completely knocked 2001 off the top 10 list.
This U.S. temperature revision could cause problems for former Vice President Al Gore. Assisted by Hansen, Gore asserted in his global warming film “An Inconvenient Truth” that nine of the ten hottest years in U.S. history occurred since 1995.
McIntyre said he began looking at the data because he questioned the reliability of NASA’s U.S. weather stations that recorded temperature data. He said, “Some of them were in places they weren’t supposed to be….one of them was in a parking lot and the trend for the station in a parking lot was way up and a nearby station that was in a proper location in a rural area was relatively flat.” Chris Horner, author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to Global Warming and Environmentalism, said McIntyre was able to catch the mistake because he “knew that our surface measuring stations are suspect.”
Horner said the polling stations could be affected by things like the construction nearby asphalt parking lots, tar roofs, AC vents, chimneys, or even a grill restaurant. McIntyre said, “Defenders of the weather station system argued that NASA had software that could fix that data…And, so I wrote to NASA in May and asked them for the source code for the adjustment software that they used to fix these stations and they refused to provide it.”
But, “the adjustments are not small,” McIntyre said. “The adjustments that they make are fully equal the total amount of warming in the United States the past century.” According to McIntyre, when he began downloading data from NASA’s website to compare the adjusted and the raw data from the polling stations, “this led to a bit of a fight with NASA in May. As I started downloading the data in sequence they cut off my access to the data.” “They blocked my IP address,” McIntyre said.
When contacted by phone to verify the computer block NASA spokeswoman Leslie McCarthy said, “This is the first I’ve heard of this.” McCarthy had not yet responded to the full transcript at the time of publication.
“After I was blocked and I explained myself they still didn’t want to let me have access to the data,” McIntyre lamented. He continued: “They just said go look at the original data. And I said no, I want to see the data you used. I know what the original data looks like. I want to see the data that you used. But one of the nice things about having a blog that gets a million and half hits a month is that I then was able to publicize this block in real-time and they very quickly withdrew their position and allowed me to have access.” When he got the data, McIntyre then compared the raw and adjusted data sets for all 1200 U.S. weather stations. “Probably 75 percent of the stations had jumps of at least a quarter degree in the year 2000,” he said. Conservative media personalities like talk radio host Rush Limbaugh and blogger Michelle Malkin blasted the revision that was made quietly.
The Director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies James Hansen responded to the critics on the left-wing blog DailyKos. He said that U.S. temperature data change is inconsequential to overall global climate data.. He wrote a diary on their site on August 11 that said, “The effect on global temperature was of order one-thousandth of a degree, so the corrected and uncorrected curves [on global data] are indistinguishable.”
Jeff Kuerter, president of the George C. Marshall Institute, said NASA’s mistake cast doubt on all global climate data because the United States was considered the best at taking analyzing temperatures. “If the U.S. doesn’t get this right what might be happening in other places and why did this error persist so long?” he said. In an August 13 Newsweek cover story, “The Truth About Denial,” Kuerter’s organization was labeled as part of the “denial machine” in cahoots with Exxon Mobil and the American Petroleum Institute. Exxon Mobil spokesman Gantt Walton said Exxon had no comment regarding NASA’s climate change revisions.
Even though the data has been corrected, McIntyre is not satisfied. “They claim that they’re adjustment methodology was capable of fixing bad data, I mean, that’s the point I want people to take home from this,” he said. “What they’ve done now is inserted a patch into an error that I identified for them but they haven’t established that the rest of their adjustment methodology is any good.” He recommended that NASA begin archiving the codes they use to make calculations and subject data to public scrutiny or peer-review.
This isn’t the first time McIntyre has caused a stir by questioning global warming data. The Toronto-based McIntyre joined forces with Canadian economist Ross McKitrick to refute data put forth by United Nations in 2001 that said use of fossil fuels was causing global warming. Included in the report was a graphic that showed 20th century temperatures sharply rising as time went on in the form of a hockey stick, which later became the name of the graph. McIntyre and McKitrick found an error in the mathematical calculation used to construct the “hockey stick.” Their findings led to a congressional investigation led by then-chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee Rep. Joe Barton (R.-Tex.).
Peter
from:
GCB Stokes
Message #109/14/07 02:10 PM
http://www.townhall.com/columnists/AmandaCarpenter/2007/08/17/nasa_blocked_climate_change_blogger_from_data?page=full&comments=true
Despite the fact that NASA tried to block him from accessing U.S. temperature data, persistent efforts by a climate change blogger forced the government to amend U.S. temperature data. Because of the blogger’s efforts, NASA now recognizes 1934 as the hottest year in U.S. history, not 1998. Steven McIntyre, a former mineral exploration executive and policy analyst for the governments of Ontario and Canada who blogs at ClimateAudit.org, wrote to NASA on August 4. He had found miscalculations in the NASA’s U.S. temperature recordings made after January 2000. “For Detroit Lakes, Minnesota,” McIntyre wrote “this introduced an error of 0.8 **** C.” NASA responded on August 7 to tell McIntyre data was “changed correspondingly with an acknowledgement of your contribution.”
Without any fanfare, the changes were made on the NASA website. The recalculations resulted in an overall decrease in U.S. temperatures since 2000 by 0.15 degrees centigrade. In a phone interview McIntyre said, “That doesn’t necessarily seem that much, but when the entire increase in temperature in the United States had been previously reported to be about half a degree, this .15 degree is not a small number when you are measuring half degree numbers.”
Now, the ten hottest years on record in the U.S., beginning with the hottest year, are: 1934, 1998, 1921, 2006, 1931, 1999, 1953, 1990, 1938 and 1939. Before the revision, that list read: 1998, 1934, 2006, 1921, 1931, 1999, 1953, 2001, 1990 and 1938. The re-ranking completely knocked 2001 off the top 10 list.
This U.S. temperature revision could cause problems for former Vice President Al Gore. Assisted by Hansen, Gore asserted in his global warming film “An Inconvenient Truth” that nine of the ten hottest years in U.S. history occurred since 1995.
McIntyre said he began looking at the data because he questioned the reliability of NASA’s U.S. weather stations that recorded temperature data. He said, “Some of them were in places they weren’t supposed to be….one of them was in a parking lot and the trend for the station in a parking lot was way up and a nearby station that was in a proper location in a rural area was relatively flat.” Chris Horner, author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to Global Warming and Environmentalism, said McIntyre was able to catch the mistake because he “knew that our surface measuring stations are suspect.”
Horner said the polling stations could be affected by things like the construction nearby asphalt parking lots, tar roofs, AC vents, chimneys, or even a grill restaurant. McIntyre said, “Defenders of the weather station system argued that NASA had software that could fix that data…And, so I wrote to NASA in May and asked them for the source code for the adjustment software that they used to fix these stations and they refused to provide it.”
But, “the adjustments are not small,” McIntyre said. “The adjustments that they make are fully equal the total amount of warming in the United States the past century.” According to McIntyre, when he began downloading data from NASA’s website to compare the adjusted and the raw data from the polling stations, “this led to a bit of a fight with NASA in May. As I started downloading the data in sequence they cut off my access to the data.” “They blocked my IP address,” McIntyre said.
When contacted by phone to verify the computer block NASA spokeswoman Leslie McCarthy said, “This is the first I’ve heard of this.” McCarthy had not yet responded to the full transcript at the time of publication.
“After I was blocked and I explained myself they still didn’t want to let me have access to the data,” McIntyre lamented. He continued: “They just said go look at the original data. And I said no, I want to see the data you used. I know what the original data looks like. I want to see the data that you used. But one of the nice things about having a blog that gets a million and half hits a month is that I then was able to publicize this block in real-time and they very quickly withdrew their position and allowed me to have access.” When he got the data, McIntyre then compared the raw and adjusted data sets for all 1200 U.S. weather stations. “Probably 75 percent of the stations had jumps of at least a quarter degree in the year 2000,” he said. Conservative media personalities like talk radio host Rush Limbaugh and blogger Michelle Malkin blasted the revision that was made quietly.
The Director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies James Hansen responded to the critics on the left-wing blog DailyKos. He said that U.S. temperature data change is inconsequential to overall global climate data.. He wrote a diary on their site on August 11 that said, “The effect on global temperature was of order one-thousandth of a degree, so the corrected and uncorrected curves [on global data] are indistinguishable.”
Jeff Kuerter, president of the George C. Marshall Institute, said NASA’s mistake cast doubt on all global climate data because the United States was considered the best at taking analyzing temperatures. “If the U.S. doesn’t get this right what might be happening in other places and why did this error persist so long?” he said. In an August 13 Newsweek cover story, “The Truth About Denial,” Kuerter’s organization was labeled as part of the “denial machine” in cahoots with Exxon Mobil and the American Petroleum Institute. Exxon Mobil spokesman Gantt Walton said Exxon had no comment regarding NASA’s climate change revisions.
Even though the data has been corrected, McIntyre is not satisfied. “They claim that they’re adjustment methodology was capable of fixing bad data, I mean, that’s the point I want people to take home from this,” he said. “What they’ve done now is inserted a patch into an error that I identified for them but they haven’t established that the rest of their adjustment methodology is any good.” He recommended that NASA begin archiving the codes they use to make calculations and subject data to public scrutiny or peer-review.
This isn’t the first time McIntyre has caused a stir by questioning global warming data. The Toronto-based McIntyre joined forces with Canadian economist Ross McKitrick to refute data put forth by United Nations in 2001 that said use of fossil fuels was causing global warming. Included in the report was a graphic that showed 20th century temperatures sharply rising as time went on in the form of a hockey stick, which later became the name of the graph. McIntyre and McKitrick found an error in the mathematical calculation used to construct the “hockey stick.” Their findings led to a congressional investigation led by then-chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee Rep. Joe Barton (R.-Tex.).
Tuesday, September 11, 2007
NASA's James Hansen Finally Releases Climate Data Computer Codes
This summarizes the brewing controversy about NASA's temperature data, how it is collected and manipulated. It serves as the basis for the idea of man-caused global warming. If the data is bad, how good can the predictions be?
Peter
Peter
This photo show an example of a weather station collecting temperature data, note the location of the temperature sensor near the air conditioning unit which pumps out hot air. Is this going to result in accurate data?
NASA’s James Hansen Finally Releases Climate Data Computer Codes
By Noel Sheppard September 8, 2007 - 16:00 ET
Much as when the organization he leads quietly made changes to the United States historical climate record at the prodding of Climate Audit's Stephen McIntyre, James Hansen of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies finally released critical computer codes scientists have wanted for years, but did so with absolutely no official press release.
As a result, not one media outlet covered this occurrence that years from now could be seen as a huge turning point in the climate change debate.
Despite the secrecy, there was great celebration amongst anthropogenic global warming skeptics that have wanted these closely held codes to be able to identify how NASA and the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration make adjustments to raw climate data collected by weather stations.
One such skeptic is Anthony Watts, who happily reported Saturday (emphasis added):
Apparently us "court jesters" (as as Dr. James Hansen calls us) carry some weight after all.
I'm happy to report that NASA GISS has in fact released the computer code used to arrive at temperature adjustments for the USA and the world. The first task is to make sure it matches what has been seen, and to verify that we have all of it. This is hugely important in doing independent verification of the surface temperature record. Following that, an analysis of the methodology and replication of the computer program output to see if it matches the current data sets. Then perhaps we can fully understand why some stations that are in "pristine" condition, such as Walhalla, SC, with no obvious microsite biases, get "adjusted" by Hansen's techniques. Shouldn't good data stand on it's [sic] own?
Yes, that sounds reasonable, Anthony, unless your goal is to manipulate the data to support your agenda.
Of course, another happy skeptic was Stephen McIntyre who reported the news at Climate Audit (h/t Anthony Watts, emphasis added):
Hansen has just released what is said to be the source code for their temperature analysis. The release was announced in a shall-we-say ungracious email to his email distribution list and a link is now present at the NASA webpage.
Hansen says resentfully that they would have liked a "week or two" to make a "simplified version" of the program and that it is this version that "people interested in science" will want, as opposed to the version that actually generated their results.
People interested in science? Heck, I thought we were all deniers and court jesters.
Regardless, it seems a metaphysical certitude that the same media which ignored the changes to the climate record a month ago will be equally disinterested in reporting this information.
And, if it turns out that Watts, McIntyre, and skeptical scientists around the world identify errors in these codes requiring additional changes be made by Hansen to the climate record, I doubt we'll hear about that either.
Or am I just being too darned cynical for my own good?
—Noel Sheppard is an economist, business owner, and Associate Editor of NewsBusters.
Thursday, September 6, 2007
Global Warming Movement Melting
Scientific theories such as man-caused global warming, when based on inaccurate, and fraudulent data do not last long. See what is happening in the area of global warming and climate change predictions.
Peter
From:
http://climatepolice.wordpress.com/
Global Warming Movement Falling Apart
August 10th, 2007
A few months ago, a study came out that demonstrated global temperatures have leveled off. But instead of possibly admitting that this whole global warming thing is a farce, a group of British scientists concluded that the real global warming won’t start until 2009. Between 2009 and 2014, they predict temperatures will soar past the record warmth of 1998.
http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=070809225722.demeczc1&show_article=1
Except guess what? A report was released yesterday that NOAA has been using incorrect data! NOAA has admitted this error, the results of which show the 1930s to now be the hottest decade on record. The bottom line is that it hasn’t been nearly as hot as the alarmists thought it was.
http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=1868
But it doesn’t end there. The National Climate Data Center (NCDC) is in the middle of a scandal. Their global observing network, the heart and soul of surface weather measurement, is a disaster. Urbanization has placed many sites in unsuitable locations — on hot black asphalt, next to trash burn barrels, beside heat exhaust vents, even attached to hot chimneys and above outdoor grills!
http://www.dailytech.com/New+Scandal+Erupts+over+NOAA+Climate+Data/article8347.htm
The data and approach taken by many global warming alarmists is seriously flawed. If the global data were properly adjusted for urbanization and station siting, and land use change issues were addressed, what would emerge is a cyclical pattern of rises and falls with much less of any background trend.
Peter
From:
http://climatepolice.wordpress.com/
Global Warming Movement Falling Apart
August 10th, 2007
A few months ago, a study came out that demonstrated global temperatures have leveled off. But instead of possibly admitting that this whole global warming thing is a farce, a group of British scientists concluded that the real global warming won’t start until 2009. Between 2009 and 2014, they predict temperatures will soar past the record warmth of 1998.
http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=070809225722.demeczc1&show_article=1
Except guess what? A report was released yesterday that NOAA has been using incorrect data! NOAA has admitted this error, the results of which show the 1930s to now be the hottest decade on record. The bottom line is that it hasn’t been nearly as hot as the alarmists thought it was.
http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=1868
But it doesn’t end there. The National Climate Data Center (NCDC) is in the middle of a scandal. Their global observing network, the heart and soul of surface weather measurement, is a disaster. Urbanization has placed many sites in unsuitable locations — on hot black asphalt, next to trash burn barrels, beside heat exhaust vents, even attached to hot chimneys and above outdoor grills!
http://www.dailytech.com/New+Scandal+Erupts+over+NOAA+Climate+Data/article8347.htm
The data and approach taken by many global warming alarmists is seriously flawed. If the global data were properly adjusted for urbanization and station siting, and land use change issues were addressed, what would emerge is a cyclical pattern of rises and falls with much less of any background trend.
Thursday, August 16, 2007
Is This The First of NASA's Errors? What Else Are They Covering Up?
This current expose of how NASA handles historic temperature data, which is integral to modeling the climate and making predictions about global warming, demonstrates how easy it is to manipulate data. (See the following article.)
Are they going to have to do all of their climate calculations over, one more time. Will the United Nations' IPCC do the same? Should we be skeptical about the outcome? I say yes, very skeptical, and suspicious. Should NASA get away with this "slight of hand" trickery? There is politics here folks, going on at the highest levels of government and the media. We've been wondering when the global warming facade will begin to crumble. I think this is just the beginning.
Peter
From:
http://www.cnsnews.com/ViewCulture.asp?Page=/Culture/archive/200708/CUL20070816b.html
NASA's Backtrack on Warmest Year Is Being Ignored, Critic Says
By Randy Hall CNSNews.com Staff Writer/Editor August 16, 2007(CNSNews.com) -
NASA scientists this month corrected an error that resulted in 1934 replacing 1998 as the warmest year on record in the U.S., thus challenging some key global warming arguments, but the correction is being ignored, a conservative climate expert charged Wednesday. Yet at the same time, announcements that support global warming are considered "front-page news," said H. Sterling Burnett, a senior fellow at the conservative National Center for Policy Analysis (NCPA).
For his part, James Hansen, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, has called the correction is "statistically insignificant." Burnett challenged that assertion, saying the correction made it clear that NASA's conclusion -- that the majority of the 10 hottest years have occurred since 1990 -- is false. "Time after time, Hansen and other global warming alarmists present their data as 'the facts,' and [say that] 'you can't argue with data,' " he said. "Well, it turns out their data is just wrong. And when it's wrong, they want to say it's not important.
"The controversy began on Aug. 4, when blogger Steve McIntyre of the ClimateAudit.org website, sent an email to NASA asserting that the data collected by the agency after 1999 was not being adjusted to allow for the times of day when readings were taken or the locations of the monitoring stations. According to a blog posting by NASA climate modeler Gavin Schmidt, agency analysts then "looked into it and found that this coincided with the switch between two sources of U.S. temperature data." "There had been a faulty assumption that these two sources matched," Schmidt said. "The obvious fix was to make an adjustment based on a period of overlap so that these offsets disappear. "Schmidt said the data analysis was then adjusted accordingly, and a note of thanks emailed to McIntyre."The net effect of the change was to reduce mean U.S. anomalies by about 0.15 degrees Celsius for the years 2000-2006," which resulted in a "very minor knock" on information from earlier years, Schmidt added.
Burnett, however, called the miscalculation "a serious math error" and noted that according to NASA's newly published data:
The hottest year on record is 1934, not 1998;
The third hottest year on record was 1921, not 2006;
Three of the five hottest years on record occurred before 1940; and
Six of the top 10 hottest years occurred prior to 90 percent of the growth in greenhouse gas emissions during the last century.
'Ignore the man behind the curtain'
The NCPA analyst also charged that because the change does not fit the mainstream media's view of global warming as an immediate and ongoing crisis, the incident was being ignored by television news networks and newspapers across the country. Cybercast News Service conducted a Nexis search for news articles over the past month containing the words "NASA," "1998" and "1934." As of Tuesday, Aug. 14, only eight newspapers had discussed the correction, along with United Press International (UPI) and the Fox News Channel.On Wednesday, however, a dozen major news outlets -- ranging from the Chicago Sun-Times and Tribune to the Los Angeles Times and CNN -- finally ran stories on the change, most emphasizing the resulting controversy that had erupted across the conservative blogosphere.
In the Washington Post, Hansen said that the critics were "making a mountain of a molehill. The change does nothing to our understanding of how the global climate is changing and is being used by critics to muddy the debate." "Hansen said that NASA generally does not release or discuss national weather statistics because it is more concerned with global patterns," the Post reported. "The agency that pays more attention to American temperature trends is the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which has said that most of the warmest years in the past century have been in the past 12 years."
"Hansen said the revised data do nothing to change that overall trend," the newspaper added. Burnett was highly critical of the Washington Post's coverage of the story. "The Post gave James Hansen -- the one who made the error -- four paragraphs to tell you why it's not important and why it should be ignored," he stated. "Hansen basically said, 'I screwed up, but just ignore the man behind the curtain,' and they let him get away with it.
"Burnett also dismissed the idea that the change is "statistically insignificant" because the numbers concerned were so small. "A few years back, an error in satellite data was found and corrected from 0.04 degrees of cooling per decade to 0.01 degrees, and that was front-page news," he said. "If a change of 0.03 degrees is significant, then what about this, which is five times more? If the one is important for making your case, then the other is important for undermining your case.
"What's really important is not that it shows whether it's warming or not -- because it doesn't," Burnett stated. "But we've supposedly got the best data in the world, and we're relying on data from a lot of places where they're not checking it nearly as closely as our guys. "As for NASA, Burnett charged that "they need mathematicians on their staff, not climatologists. What does it say when we had to have a blogger go in there and discover their error?"
Are they going to have to do all of their climate calculations over, one more time. Will the United Nations' IPCC do the same? Should we be skeptical about the outcome? I say yes, very skeptical, and suspicious. Should NASA get away with this "slight of hand" trickery? There is politics here folks, going on at the highest levels of government and the media. We've been wondering when the global warming facade will begin to crumble. I think this is just the beginning.
Peter
From:
http://www.cnsnews.com/ViewCulture.asp?Page=/Culture/archive/200708/CUL20070816b.html
NASA's Backtrack on Warmest Year Is Being Ignored, Critic Says
By Randy Hall CNSNews.com Staff Writer/Editor August 16, 2007(CNSNews.com) -
NASA scientists this month corrected an error that resulted in 1934 replacing 1998 as the warmest year on record in the U.S., thus challenging some key global warming arguments, but the correction is being ignored, a conservative climate expert charged Wednesday. Yet at the same time, announcements that support global warming are considered "front-page news," said H. Sterling Burnett, a senior fellow at the conservative National Center for Policy Analysis (NCPA).
For his part, James Hansen, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, has called the correction is "statistically insignificant." Burnett challenged that assertion, saying the correction made it clear that NASA's conclusion -- that the majority of the 10 hottest years have occurred since 1990 -- is false. "Time after time, Hansen and other global warming alarmists present their data as 'the facts,' and [say that] 'you can't argue with data,' " he said. "Well, it turns out their data is just wrong. And when it's wrong, they want to say it's not important.
"The controversy began on Aug. 4, when blogger Steve McIntyre of the ClimateAudit.org website, sent an email to NASA asserting that the data collected by the agency after 1999 was not being adjusted to allow for the times of day when readings were taken or the locations of the monitoring stations. According to a blog posting by NASA climate modeler Gavin Schmidt, agency analysts then "looked into it and found that this coincided with the switch between two sources of U.S. temperature data." "There had been a faulty assumption that these two sources matched," Schmidt said. "The obvious fix was to make an adjustment based on a period of overlap so that these offsets disappear. "Schmidt said the data analysis was then adjusted accordingly, and a note of thanks emailed to McIntyre."The net effect of the change was to reduce mean U.S. anomalies by about 0.15 degrees Celsius for the years 2000-2006," which resulted in a "very minor knock" on information from earlier years, Schmidt added.
Burnett, however, called the miscalculation "a serious math error" and noted that according to NASA's newly published data:
The hottest year on record is 1934, not 1998;
The third hottest year on record was 1921, not 2006;
Three of the five hottest years on record occurred before 1940; and
Six of the top 10 hottest years occurred prior to 90 percent of the growth in greenhouse gas emissions during the last century.
'Ignore the man behind the curtain'
The NCPA analyst also charged that because the change does not fit the mainstream media's view of global warming as an immediate and ongoing crisis, the incident was being ignored by television news networks and newspapers across the country. Cybercast News Service conducted a Nexis search for news articles over the past month containing the words "NASA," "1998" and "1934." As of Tuesday, Aug. 14, only eight newspapers had discussed the correction, along with United Press International (UPI) and the Fox News Channel.On Wednesday, however, a dozen major news outlets -- ranging from the Chicago Sun-Times and Tribune to the Los Angeles Times and CNN -- finally ran stories on the change, most emphasizing the resulting controversy that had erupted across the conservative blogosphere.
In the Washington Post, Hansen said that the critics were "making a mountain of a molehill. The change does nothing to our understanding of how the global climate is changing and is being used by critics to muddy the debate." "Hansen said that NASA generally does not release or discuss national weather statistics because it is more concerned with global patterns," the Post reported. "The agency that pays more attention to American temperature trends is the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which has said that most of the warmest years in the past century have been in the past 12 years."
"Hansen said the revised data do nothing to change that overall trend," the newspaper added. Burnett was highly critical of the Washington Post's coverage of the story. "The Post gave James Hansen -- the one who made the error -- four paragraphs to tell you why it's not important and why it should be ignored," he stated. "Hansen basically said, 'I screwed up, but just ignore the man behind the curtain,' and they let him get away with it.
"Burnett also dismissed the idea that the change is "statistically insignificant" because the numbers concerned were so small. "A few years back, an error in satellite data was found and corrected from 0.04 degrees of cooling per decade to 0.01 degrees, and that was front-page news," he said. "If a change of 0.03 degrees is significant, then what about this, which is five times more? If the one is important for making your case, then the other is important for undermining your case.
"What's really important is not that it shows whether it's warming or not -- because it doesn't," Burnett stated. "But we've supposedly got the best data in the world, and we're relying on data from a lot of places where they're not checking it nearly as closely as our guys. "As for NASA, Burnett charged that "they need mathematicians on their staff, not climatologists. What does it say when we had to have a blogger go in there and discover their error?"
Wednesday, August 15, 2007
Red Faces At NASA Over Temperature Data, Just A Little "Boo-Boo? Or Major Scandal
Is NASA's admitted mistake in interpreting historical temperature data just an insignificant, minor blunder? No way. This is a HUGE, and scandalous error in data recording and interpretation. Worst of all, it seems likely that top people at NASA knew of the errors and covered up this fact.
What does this mean? It means that everyone, meteorologists who forecast the weather have been using false data. I means the hundreds or thousands of researchers using this data in their computer climate models, have been inputting flawed data. Remember the phrase "garbage in garbage out", that refers to any computer program.
It means that insurance companies using weather models to predict future costs due to storm damage, have been using erroneous data. It means farmers, city planners, indeed anyone with an interest in the weather, has been lied to.
What else might this mean? It means Al Gore's entire book and so-called documentary, "An Inconvenient Truth", is as we have long proclaimed, just simple trash. His Oscar Award for the film should be recalled. He can kiss his Nobel Prize nomination good-bye.
Most significant of all, The United Nation's IPCC (International Panel on Climate Change) has been using flawed data in its predictions of global warming, climate change and impending doom. The United States, and other countries have been passing laws costing billions of dollars, based on this flawed data. It means the United Nations has been misled, again.
Every politician, government, corporation, scientist, and citizen should be outraged. Now we'll see who the real "deniers" are. Newsweek, are you paying attention? MSNBC, Brian Williams, are you going to report on this? The Weather Channel, is this going to make your news? What will the public response be? Apathy? Cynicism? Or outrage?
The following article, from the Toronto Star, comments on this un-folding story.
Peter
from: http://www.thestar.com/article/246027
Red faces at NASA over climate-change blunder
Agency roasted after Toronto blogger spots `hot years' data fumble
Aug 14, 2007 04:30 AM DANIEL DALE STAFF REPORTER
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."
What does this mean? It means that everyone, meteorologists who forecast the weather have been using false data. I means the hundreds or thousands of researchers using this data in their computer climate models, have been inputting flawed data. Remember the phrase "garbage in garbage out", that refers to any computer program.
It means that insurance companies using weather models to predict future costs due to storm damage, have been using erroneous data. It means farmers, city planners, indeed anyone with an interest in the weather, has been lied to.
What else might this mean? It means Al Gore's entire book and so-called documentary, "An Inconvenient Truth", is as we have long proclaimed, just simple trash. His Oscar Award for the film should be recalled. He can kiss his Nobel Prize nomination good-bye.
Most significant of all, The United Nation's IPCC (International Panel on Climate Change) has been using flawed data in its predictions of global warming, climate change and impending doom. The United States, and other countries have been passing laws costing billions of dollars, based on this flawed data. It means the United Nations has been misled, again.
Every politician, government, corporation, scientist, and citizen should be outraged. Now we'll see who the real "deniers" are. Newsweek, are you paying attention? MSNBC, Brian Williams, are you going to report on this? The Weather Channel, is this going to make your news? What will the public response be? Apathy? Cynicism? Or outrage?
The following article, from the Toronto Star, comments on this un-folding story.
Peter
from: http://www.thestar.com/article/246027
Red faces at NASA over climate-change blunder
Agency roasted after Toronto blogger spots `hot years' data fumble
Aug 14, 2007 04:30 AM DANIEL DALE STAFF REPORTER
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."
Tuesday, August 14, 2007
NASA Changes Historic Climate Data
The fact that NASA recently changed it's Historical Climate Data is not trivial. It is going to have far reaching impact. This will begin with the questioning of the UN's findings on global warming and climate change as reported by the IPCC. It will affect everything relating to global warming. Read the following please.
Peter
from: http://newsbusters.org/blogs/noel-sheppard/2007/08/13/how-important-nasa-s-change-historical-climate-data-last-week
How Important Was NASA’s Change to Historical Climate Data Last Week?
By Noel Sheppard August 13, 2007 - 10:43 ET
Last week's revelation by Climate Audit's Steve McIntyre of a serious mistake and subsequent changes made by NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in the temperature history of America has created quite a debate in the new media.
While conservative bloggers were quick to point out the hypocrisy regarding the lack of an official announcement from GISS chief James Hansen as well as the possible significance to the entire global warming debate, alarmists such as RealClimate and TNR's The Plank viewed McIntyre's discovery and GISS's alterations less than earth shattering.
With that in mind, McIntyre published a response at Anthony Watts' "Watts Up With That?" Saturday (Climate Audit is undergoing a server change) with his take on the issue (emphasis added throughout):
The Hansen error is far from trivial at the level of individual [weather] stations. Grand Canyon was one of the stations previously discussed at climateaudit.org in connection with Tucson urban heat island. In this case, the Hansen error was about 0.5 deg C. Some discrepancies are 1 deg C or higher.
[A]s you can see from the distribution, the impact on the majority of stations is substantially higher than 0.15 deg. For users of information regarding individual stations, the changes may be highly relevant.
GISS recognized that the error had a significant impact on individual stations and took rapid steps to revise their station data (and indeed the form of their revision seems far from ideal indicating the haste of their revision.) GISS failed to provide any explicit notice or warning on their station data webpage that the data had been changed, or an explicit notice to users who had downloaded data or graphs in the past that there had been significant changes to many U.S. series. This obligation existed regardless of any impact on world totals.
Readers should certainly be aware that this was what I specifically took issue with - the lack of disclosure that this had occurred:
GISS has emphasized recently that the U.S. constitutes only 2% of global land surface, arguing that the impact of the error is negligible on the global averagel [sic]. While this may be so for users of the GISS global average, U.S. HCN stations constitute about 50% of active (with values in 2004 or later) stations in the GISS network (as shown below). The sharp downward step in station counts after March 2006 in the right panel shows the last month in which USHCN data is presently included in the GISS system. The Hansen error affects all the USHCN stations and, to the extent that users of the GISS system are interested in individual stations, the number of affected stations is far from insignificant, regardless of the impact on global averages.
McIntyre then pointed out the hypocrisy in the lack of official reporting of these changes:
In my opinion, it would have been more appropriate for Gavin Schmidt of GISS (who was copied on the GISS correspondence to me) to ensure that a statement like this was on the caption to the U.S. temperature history on the GISS webpage, rather than after the fact at realclimate.
Obviously much of the blogosphere delight in the leader board changes is a reaction to many fevered press releases and news stories about year x being the "warmest year". For example, on Jan 7, 2007, NOAA announced that The 2006 average annual temperature for the contiguous U.S. was the warmest on record.
This press release was widely covered as you can determine by googling "warmest year 2006 united states". Now NOAA and NASA are different organizations and NOAA, not NASA, made the above press release, but members of the public can surely be forgiven for not making fine distinctions between different alphabet soups. I think that NASA might reasonably have foreseen that the change in rankings would catch the interest of the public and, had they made a proper report on their webpage, they might have forestalled much subsequent criticism.
In addition, while Schmidt describes the changes atop the leader board as "very minor re-arrangements", many followers of the climate debate are aware of intense battles over 0.1 or 0.2 degree (consider the satellite battles.) Readers might perform a little thought experiment: suppose that Spencer and Christy had published a temperature history in which they claimed that 1934 was the warmest U.S. year on record and then it turned out that they had been a computer programming error opposite to the one that Hansen made, that Wentz and Mears discovered there was an error of 0.15 deg C in the Spencer and Christy results and, after fiixing this error, it turned out that 2006 was the warmest year on record. Would realclimate simply describe this as a "very minor re-arrangement"?
Not a chance. In fact, this would have been announced with great enthusiasm, and likely would have been the lead report on all of the evening news programs, as well as making front page headlines the following day:
So while the Hansen error did not have a material impact on world temperatures, it did have a very substantial impact on U.S. station data and a "significant" impact on the U.S. average. Both of these surely "matter" and both deserved formal notice from Hansen and GISS.
Yet, something that has been lost in the fight over this issue is that as a result of identifying this Y2K error by Hansen et al, McIntyre has grown more concerned about the veracity of other data being collated and disseminated by GISS, as well as the lack of transparency concerning adjustments to raw data to compensate for the heat island effect:
In the course of reviewing quality problems at various surface sites, among other things, I compared these different versions of station data, including a comparison of the Tucson weather station shown above to the Grand Canyon weather station, which is presumably less affected by urban problems. This comparison demonstrated a very odd pattern discussed here. The adjustments show that the trend in the problematic Tucson site was reduced in the course of the adjustments, but they also showed that the Grand Canyon data was also adjusted, so that, instead of the 1930s being warmer than the present as in the raw data, the 2000s were warmer than the 1930s, with a sharp increase in the 2000s.
Now some portion of the post-2000 jump in adjusted Grand Canyon values shown here is due to Hansen's Y2K error, but it only accounts for a 0.5 deg C jump after 2000 and does not explain why Grand Canyon values should have been adjusted so much. In this case, the adjustments are primarily at the USHCN stage. The USHCN station history adjustments appear particularly troublesome to me, not just here but at other sites (e.g. Orland CA). They end up making material changes to sites identified as "good" sites and my impression is that the USHCN adjustment procedures may be adjusting some of the very "best" sites (in terms of appearance and reported history) to better fit histories from sites that are clearly non-compliant with WMO standards (e.g. Marysville, Tucson). There are some real and interesting statistical issues with the USHCN station history adjustment procedure and it is ridiculous that the source code for these adjustments (and the subsequent GISS adjustments - see bottom panel) is not available/ [sic]
Adding it up, and data from seemingly good weather stations is being adjusted up for reasons that McIntyre can't explain, and Hansen and company refuse to provide the procedure and the source code such that folks like McIntyre - and policymakers - can review the methodology.
Why is all this a big secret, and why should any American citizen or politician just blindly accept data from an agency that refuses to make transparent what the station history adjustment procedure is?
If one views the above assessment as a type of limited software audit (limited by lack of access to source code and operating manuals), one can say firmly that the GISS software had not only failed to pick up and correct fictitious steps of up to 1 deg C, but that GISS actually introduced this error in the course of their programming.
According to any reasonable audit standards, one would conclude that the GISS software had failed this particular test. While GISS can (and has) patched the particular error that I reported to them, their patching hardly proves the merit of the GISS (and USHCN) adjustment procedures. These need to be carefully examined. This was a crying need prior to the identification of the Hansen error and would have been a crying need even without the Hansen error.
One practical effect of the error is that it surely becomes much harder for GISS to continue the obstruction of detailed examination of their source code and methodologies after the embarrassment of this particular incident. GISS itself has no policy against placing source code online and, indeed, a huge amount of code for their climate model is online. So it's hard to understand their present stubbornness.
Finally, McIntyre addressed how the Y2K changes might impact global data (ROW):
In the U.S., despite the criticisms being rendered at surfacestations.org, there are many rural stations that have been in existence over a relatively long period of time; while one may cavil at how NOAA and/or GISS have carried out adjustments, they have collected metadata for many stations and made a concerted effort to adjust for such metadata.
On the other hand, many of the stations in China, Indonesia, Brazil and elsewhere are in urban areas (such as Shanghai or Beijing). In some of the major indexes (CRU,NOAA), there appears to be no attempt whatever to adjust for urbanization. GISS does report an effort to adjust for urbanization in some cases, but their ability to do so depends on the existence of nearby rural stations, which are not always available. Thus, ithere [sic] is a real concern that the need for urban adjustment is most severe in the very areas where adjustments are either not made or not accurately made.
In its consideration of possible urbanization and/or microsite effects, IPCC has taken the position that urban effects are negligible, relying on a very few studies (Jones et al 1990, Peterson et al 2003, Parker 2005, 2006), each of which has been discussed at length at this site. In my opinion, none of these studies can be relied on for concluding that urbanization impacts have been avoided in the ROW sites contributing to the overall history.
Moreover, Keenan's report last week cast grave doubt about the veracity of Jones et al's 1990 paper on urban effects being negligible.
In sum, though this Y2K error and subsequent changes to America's climate history is not necessarily a smoking gun, the lack of reporting, and consistent refusal on the part of Hansen and Schmidt to share methodologies and source codes surrounding statistical formulae remains a grave concern, as does how much all this impacts the global numbers.
Of course, I'm sure when Hansen and Schmidt get around to seeing how this does indeed relate to world temperatures, they'll be quick in alerting the media.
Alas, unless the changes to global data are deemed miniscule, that could be irrelevant, for with the exception of Fox News, it appears that not one major American press organization felt the revelation of GISS's Y2K error, and how it related to U.S. climate history, was at all newsworthy.
Imagine that.
—Noel Sheppard is an economist, business owner, and Associate Editor of NewsBusters
Peter
from: http://newsbusters.org/blogs/noel-sheppard/2007/08/13/how-important-nasa-s-change-historical-climate-data-last-week
How Important Was NASA’s Change to Historical Climate Data Last Week?
By Noel Sheppard August 13, 2007 - 10:43 ET
Last week's revelation by Climate Audit's Steve McIntyre of a serious mistake and subsequent changes made by NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in the temperature history of America has created quite a debate in the new media.
While conservative bloggers were quick to point out the hypocrisy regarding the lack of an official announcement from GISS chief James Hansen as well as the possible significance to the entire global warming debate, alarmists such as RealClimate and TNR's The Plank viewed McIntyre's discovery and GISS's alterations less than earth shattering.
With that in mind, McIntyre published a response at Anthony Watts' "Watts Up With That?" Saturday (Climate Audit is undergoing a server change) with his take on the issue (emphasis added throughout):
The Hansen error is far from trivial at the level of individual [weather] stations. Grand Canyon was one of the stations previously discussed at climateaudit.org in connection with Tucson urban heat island. In this case, the Hansen error was about 0.5 deg C. Some discrepancies are 1 deg C or higher.
[A]s you can see from the distribution, the impact on the majority of stations is substantially higher than 0.15 deg. For users of information regarding individual stations, the changes may be highly relevant.
GISS recognized that the error had a significant impact on individual stations and took rapid steps to revise their station data (and indeed the form of their revision seems far from ideal indicating the haste of their revision.) GISS failed to provide any explicit notice or warning on their station data webpage that the data had been changed, or an explicit notice to users who had downloaded data or graphs in the past that there had been significant changes to many U.S. series. This obligation existed regardless of any impact on world totals.
Readers should certainly be aware that this was what I specifically took issue with - the lack of disclosure that this had occurred:
GISS has emphasized recently that the U.S. constitutes only 2% of global land surface, arguing that the impact of the error is negligible on the global averagel [sic]. While this may be so for users of the GISS global average, U.S. HCN stations constitute about 50% of active (with values in 2004 or later) stations in the GISS network (as shown below). The sharp downward step in station counts after March 2006 in the right panel shows the last month in which USHCN data is presently included in the GISS system. The Hansen error affects all the USHCN stations and, to the extent that users of the GISS system are interested in individual stations, the number of affected stations is far from insignificant, regardless of the impact on global averages.
McIntyre then pointed out the hypocrisy in the lack of official reporting of these changes:
In my opinion, it would have been more appropriate for Gavin Schmidt of GISS (who was copied on the GISS correspondence to me) to ensure that a statement like this was on the caption to the U.S. temperature history on the GISS webpage, rather than after the fact at realclimate.
Obviously much of the blogosphere delight in the leader board changes is a reaction to many fevered press releases and news stories about year x being the "warmest year". For example, on Jan 7, 2007, NOAA announced that The 2006 average annual temperature for the contiguous U.S. was the warmest on record.
This press release was widely covered as you can determine by googling "warmest year 2006 united states". Now NOAA and NASA are different organizations and NOAA, not NASA, made the above press release, but members of the public can surely be forgiven for not making fine distinctions between different alphabet soups. I think that NASA might reasonably have foreseen that the change in rankings would catch the interest of the public and, had they made a proper report on their webpage, they might have forestalled much subsequent criticism.
In addition, while Schmidt describes the changes atop the leader board as "very minor re-arrangements", many followers of the climate debate are aware of intense battles over 0.1 or 0.2 degree (consider the satellite battles.) Readers might perform a little thought experiment: suppose that Spencer and Christy had published a temperature history in which they claimed that 1934 was the warmest U.S. year on record and then it turned out that they had been a computer programming error opposite to the one that Hansen made, that Wentz and Mears discovered there was an error of 0.15 deg C in the Spencer and Christy results and, after fiixing this error, it turned out that 2006 was the warmest year on record. Would realclimate simply describe this as a "very minor re-arrangement"?
Not a chance. In fact, this would have been announced with great enthusiasm, and likely would have been the lead report on all of the evening news programs, as well as making front page headlines the following day:
So while the Hansen error did not have a material impact on world temperatures, it did have a very substantial impact on U.S. station data and a "significant" impact on the U.S. average. Both of these surely "matter" and both deserved formal notice from Hansen and GISS.
Yet, something that has been lost in the fight over this issue is that as a result of identifying this Y2K error by Hansen et al, McIntyre has grown more concerned about the veracity of other data being collated and disseminated by GISS, as well as the lack of transparency concerning adjustments to raw data to compensate for the heat island effect:
In the course of reviewing quality problems at various surface sites, among other things, I compared these different versions of station data, including a comparison of the Tucson weather station shown above to the Grand Canyon weather station, which is presumably less affected by urban problems. This comparison demonstrated a very odd pattern discussed here. The adjustments show that the trend in the problematic Tucson site was reduced in the course of the adjustments, but they also showed that the Grand Canyon data was also adjusted, so that, instead of the 1930s being warmer than the present as in the raw data, the 2000s were warmer than the 1930s, with a sharp increase in the 2000s.
Now some portion of the post-2000 jump in adjusted Grand Canyon values shown here is due to Hansen's Y2K error, but it only accounts for a 0.5 deg C jump after 2000 and does not explain why Grand Canyon values should have been adjusted so much. In this case, the adjustments are primarily at the USHCN stage. The USHCN station history adjustments appear particularly troublesome to me, not just here but at other sites (e.g. Orland CA). They end up making material changes to sites identified as "good" sites and my impression is that the USHCN adjustment procedures may be adjusting some of the very "best" sites (in terms of appearance and reported history) to better fit histories from sites that are clearly non-compliant with WMO standards (e.g. Marysville, Tucson). There are some real and interesting statistical issues with the USHCN station history adjustment procedure and it is ridiculous that the source code for these adjustments (and the subsequent GISS adjustments - see bottom panel) is not available/ [sic]
Adding it up, and data from seemingly good weather stations is being adjusted up for reasons that McIntyre can't explain, and Hansen and company refuse to provide the procedure and the source code such that folks like McIntyre - and policymakers - can review the methodology.
Why is all this a big secret, and why should any American citizen or politician just blindly accept data from an agency that refuses to make transparent what the station history adjustment procedure is?
If one views the above assessment as a type of limited software audit (limited by lack of access to source code and operating manuals), one can say firmly that the GISS software had not only failed to pick up and correct fictitious steps of up to 1 deg C, but that GISS actually introduced this error in the course of their programming.
According to any reasonable audit standards, one would conclude that the GISS software had failed this particular test. While GISS can (and has) patched the particular error that I reported to them, their patching hardly proves the merit of the GISS (and USHCN) adjustment procedures. These need to be carefully examined. This was a crying need prior to the identification of the Hansen error and would have been a crying need even without the Hansen error.
One practical effect of the error is that it surely becomes much harder for GISS to continue the obstruction of detailed examination of their source code and methodologies after the embarrassment of this particular incident. GISS itself has no policy against placing source code online and, indeed, a huge amount of code for their climate model is online. So it's hard to understand their present stubbornness.
Finally, McIntyre addressed how the Y2K changes might impact global data (ROW):
In the U.S., despite the criticisms being rendered at surfacestations.org, there are many rural stations that have been in existence over a relatively long period of time; while one may cavil at how NOAA and/or GISS have carried out adjustments, they have collected metadata for many stations and made a concerted effort to adjust for such metadata.
On the other hand, many of the stations in China, Indonesia, Brazil and elsewhere are in urban areas (such as Shanghai or Beijing). In some of the major indexes (CRU,NOAA), there appears to be no attempt whatever to adjust for urbanization. GISS does report an effort to adjust for urbanization in some cases, but their ability to do so depends on the existence of nearby rural stations, which are not always available. Thus, ithere [sic] is a real concern that the need for urban adjustment is most severe in the very areas where adjustments are either not made or not accurately made.
In its consideration of possible urbanization and/or microsite effects, IPCC has taken the position that urban effects are negligible, relying on a very few studies (Jones et al 1990, Peterson et al 2003, Parker 2005, 2006), each of which has been discussed at length at this site. In my opinion, none of these studies can be relied on for concluding that urbanization impacts have been avoided in the ROW sites contributing to the overall history.
Moreover, Keenan's report last week cast grave doubt about the veracity of Jones et al's 1990 paper on urban effects being negligible.
In sum, though this Y2K error and subsequent changes to America's climate history is not necessarily a smoking gun, the lack of reporting, and consistent refusal on the part of Hansen and Schmidt to share methodologies and source codes surrounding statistical formulae remains a grave concern, as does how much all this impacts the global numbers.
Of course, I'm sure when Hansen and Schmidt get around to seeing how this does indeed relate to world temperatures, they'll be quick in alerting the media.
Alas, unless the changes to global data are deemed miniscule, that could be irrelevant, for with the exception of Fox News, it appears that not one major American press organization felt the revelation of GISS's Y2K error, and how it related to U.S. climate history, was at all newsworthy.
Imagine that.
—Noel Sheppard is an economist, business owner, and Associate Editor of NewsBusters
Do You Believe This Temperature Data?
Here is a link to a website showing weather stations around the country and why we should be skeptical about the temperature data being used to predict global warming and climate change.
Peter
"If you really want to have some cold water thrown on the debate, check out the pictures of the weather stations that have been generating all that data that was so incorrectly analyzed. The blogger at http://www.surfacestations.org/odd_sites.htm is asking Americans to take pictures of the weather stations in their area. He has posted some truly remarkable shots of weather stations in such isolated locations as parking lots, rooftops, beside air conditioners, burn barrels and BBQ's, by sewage treatment plants etc. Do you think the location of the sensors MIGHT have an impact on the data collected?
And Roy, before you even start, don't. I am a biologist and an environmentalist. I also believe in TRUE science, which embraces the development of hypotheses and questioning of theories. Given the questions that are developing in my mind about the data itself, its collection methodology, the politics of the players involved, my natural mistrust of all politicians (Gore et al), the hype, hysteria, and general overall stifling of contrary opinion, I cannot support the spending of quadrillions of dollars over the next several decades to fight something that may not exist."
From: "Grizzled-Bear" on MSNBC "Climate Change" discussion board
Peter
"If you really want to have some cold water thrown on the debate, check out the pictures of the weather stations that have been generating all that data that was so incorrectly analyzed. The blogger at http://www.surfacestations.org/odd_sites.htm is asking Americans to take pictures of the weather stations in their area. He has posted some truly remarkable shots of weather stations in such isolated locations as parking lots, rooftops, beside air conditioners, burn barrels and BBQ's, by sewage treatment plants etc. Do you think the location of the sensors MIGHT have an impact on the data collected?
And Roy, before you even start, don't. I am a biologist and an environmentalist. I also believe in TRUE science, which embraces the development of hypotheses and questioning of theories. Given the questions that are developing in my mind about the data itself, its collection methodology, the politics of the players involved, my natural mistrust of all politicians (Gore et al), the hype, hysteria, and general overall stifling of contrary opinion, I cannot support the spending of quadrillions of dollars over the next several decades to fight something that may not exist."
From: "Grizzled-Bear" on MSNBC "Climate Change" discussion board
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