Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society

The Unraveling Continues

20 Comments

We now have substantial evidence, from several independent sources, that the data used as the basis for the IPCC report has been adjusted in undocumented ways, and those adjustments account for nearly all the warming we are told has been caused by humans.

The manufactured consensus continues to fall apart.

[Update early afternoon]

Just like that, the warming is gone:

Given all this manipulation and cherry-picking, you should ignore the press releases that will undoubtedly be coming from NOAA (when they return from snowy, cold Copenhagen), NASA, and Hadley about how this has been among the warmest years, and how the last decade was the warmest on record.

I guess that Heidi Cullen will be calling for the former head of meteorology of her employer to be “decertified.”

20 thoughts on “The Unraveling Continues”

  1. “those adjustments account for nearly all the warming we are told has been caused by humans.”

    Well, you have to admit – the warming trend was caused by humans!

  4. First, the largest adjustment was one that Willis Eschenbach, the source of the graph, agrees with – the movement of the weather station from downtown Darwin to the airport.

    Second, the other adjustments happen to be generated by the Australian Bureau of Meteorology, not CRU. They are based on the average of multiple northern Australian stations and the fact that, prior to 1941, the recording unit wasn’t in a standard enclosure.

    This post provides chapter and verse on Eschenbach’s other errors.

  7. Except Eschenbach is still arguing that GHCH was used to adjust Darwin. It wasn’t – the adjustments were from the Australian Bureau of Meteorology. This comment, by an actual climatologist, gives chapter and verse of the Darwin station problems.

    BTW, Eschenbach completely ignores the warming data at the other stations – including the two (Katherine Aer and Wyndham Port) that he didn’t know about.

  8. Chris, that’s nice and all, but here’s yet another case where the temperature change is adequately explained by the adjustment. With the sole exception of the first adjustment, the subsequent ones have all corresponded to a subsequent rise in temperature on the combined graph. That a warning sign to me that the adjustment was improperly done. I don’t know how the heat island adjustments were done, but that’d be one area that I’d be particularly suspicious of.

    For example, suppose a century ago, I had a thermometer in the middle of a small town. Over time, it gets crowded and the weather station is moved outside of town. As the town grows into a fair sized city, this process is repeated a couple of times. For none of these moves did I care about the heat island effect. The weather station was just in the way.

    But note that in each case, the heat island effect will start to increase the average temperature measurement with the greatest effect right before a move and the move is always to an area with a lower heat island effect. So if we attempted to merge the data as described above, we’re going to see a temperature drop from the heat island effect at each move. If you just naively glued it all together with adjustments based on the periods of overlap, then you’ll get a steady but non-existent increase in temperature over time. The obvious thing is that you need to adjust for the heat island effect, but how do you do that? I gather the approach is to use an inland thermometer that supposedly isn’t susceptible to the effect and covers enough of one of the thermometers to estimate the thermal island effect.

    The thing is, if this is done improperly or not at all, then you’d see the sort of stepped increases in temperature that we see in the graph.

  9. Chris,

    Bollocks. Your own first linked citation has:

    “Addendum: I spoke earlier today with Blair Trewin, a climatologist at the Australian BOM’s National Climate Center. He said the BOM was trying to reconcile its own adjustments for the Darwin station with those of the GHCN. The BOM’s “current data set does have a number of small adjustments over that period that are step functions. And all of those are attributed to there being quite a number of stationary locations within the Darwin Airport boundaries between 1970 and 1990s. We in our current set have an adjustment of 0.8 of a degree at 1941, which matches GHCN pretty well. And then the various small adjustments between 1940 and 1990 are a cumulative 0.6. Whereas GHCN, that graph makes it look like it’s about a cumulative 1 degree. But that’s probably within the margin of error for a single-station adjustment.”

    That sure sounds like GHCN is making it’s own adjustments to the raw data, not using someone else’s, even though that is entirely beside the point. IT DOESN’T MATTER in the end WHO made the adjustments except for apportioning blame if they’re bogus.

    Your second point about the other stations may or may not be relevant because we don’t know yet how THEY were adjusted. Darwin raw data showed no warming. What of those other station’s raw data also shows no warming, but were adjusted in similar fashions? Wouldn’t that tend to corroborate Eschenbach’s hypothesis?

  10. Karl Hallowell – if the only factor you are adjusting for is heat island, yes. But there are other factors to adjust for, including whether or not the station is on grass, what instrument is in the station, etc.

    Larry – the other stations’ raw data in fact did show clear warming trends.

  12. You know, Chris, it’s almost as though you want AGW to be true. As though you’d be disappointed to discover there was no need to pauperize the West and line the pockets of kleptocrats in the Third World.

  13. Rand, I don’t want AGW to be true. What I want and what the scientific evidence shows are not the same thing.

    I don’t want to pauperize myself (I am a Westerner, after all) nor do I think we need to in order to control AGW. I fail to see how, for example, migrating from coal to nuclear for electrical energy would “pauperize” the US.

    I especially don’t want to line the pockets of kleptocrats. That’s why my Rotary projects focus on providing aid to local communities, and I think any aid given to the developing world needs to be distributed with care.

  15. All I see in the mainstream

    The mainstream is going to cover it up as long as it can, but that doesn’t mean it’s having no impact. For instance, you can be sure that it will be a hot topic of debate in any attempt to do cap’n’tax in the Senate.

  16. You know reading you guys reminds me more and more of dealing with Creationists.

    There’s a long and extremely detailed falsification of radio-metric dating methods because lava flows in Hawaii that are a few hundred years old were measured at hundreds of thousands of years.

    Of course, the data was cherry-picked and those doing the picking missed the point that the dating was done to show that the method in question couldn’t be used for that type of dating.

    And, just like, the creation debates, a lot of “scientists” and “engineers” jump in with both feet on a subject they have a semi-religious feeling about claiming that they are as qualified to judge the data as scientists who specialize in the field.

    I would dearly like that we weren’t living through a period of climate change which is going to have dire economic consequences and could well be one that we changed. But I don’t think the climate really gives a toss what any of us would like to be true.

  17. You know reading you guys reminds me more and more of dealing with Creationists.

    Funny, because the creationists are basing their arguments on religious beliefs, just like the war mongers. We’re challenging them both to do real science.

    a lot of “scientists” and “engineers” jump in with both feet on a subject they have a semi-religious feeling about claiming that they are as qualified to judge the data as scientists who specialize in the field.

    So, Joe D’Aleo, professor of climatology and meteorology, and former head meteorologist for the Weather Channel, doesn’t “specialize in the field”?

    We’ve seen who cherry picks data now, and it isn’t the “deniers.”

  18. If the Amazing James Randi can come out and declare his skepticism over the “A” in “AGW”, then it may be that a large number of other potentially influential thinkers are trending the same way.

    Particularly in the wake of the Climate-Gate CRU conspiracy to shut out the dissenting voices, and to hide the true trends in the climate numbers. Why the CRU threw out the original data is a mystery that future scientists will still be wondering about.

  19. You know reading you guys reminds me more and more of dealing with Creationists.

    No offense, but look who’s talking. And it would be nice if the AGW people had something similar to the talk.origins FAQ. For example, that FAQ discusses all sorts of interesting stuff like human “atavisms” which are physiological traits and deformations that are consistent with having evolved from something else. For example, humans have been born with “true” tails (tails with vertebrae) and of course, human embryos at stages of their development share atavistic features with fish, reptiles, and single celled organisms. It’s a preponderance of evidence.

    In comparison, global warming FAQs preach bad economics at you without any of the attention to detail that characterizes the talk.origins FAQ. For example,

    Will responding to global warming be harmful to our economy?

    Reducing oil dependence. Strengthening energy security. Creating jobs. Tackling global warming. Addressing air pollution. Improving our health. The United States has many reasons to make the transition to a clean energy economy. What we need is a comprehensive set of smart policies to jump-start this transition without delay and maximize the benefits to our environment and economy. Climate 2030: A National Blueprint for a Clean Energy Economy (“the Blueprint”) answers that need.

    To help avoid the most dangerous consequences of climate change, ranging from extreme heat, droughts, and storms to acidifying oceans and rising sea levels, the United States must play a lead role and begin to cut its heat-trapping emissions today—and aim for at least an 80 percent drop from 2005 levels by 2050. Blueprint policies lower U.S. heat-trapping emissions to meet a cap set at 26 percent below 2005 levels in 2020, and 56 percent below 2005 levels in 2030.

    The nation achieves these deep cuts in carbon emissions while saving consumers and businesses $465 billion annually by 2030. The Blueprint also builds $1.7 trillion in net cumulative savings between 2010 and 2030. Blueprint policies stimulate significant consumer, business, and government investment in new technologies and measures by 2030. The resulting savings on energy bills from reductions in electricity and fuel use more than offset the costs of these additional investments. The result is net annual savings for households, vehicle owners, businesses, and industries of $255 billion by 2030.

    Under the Blueprint, every region of the country stands to save billions. Households and businesses—even in coal-dependent regions—will share in these savings.

    An 80% drop in CO2 emissions from 2005 and we save a pile of money? Can I get a pony with that? Such unrealistic drivel subtracts from the purpose of a FAQ, which is to present efficient and cogent answers to serious questions. Saying that you can save hundreds of billions of dollars per year based on some half-baked plan is not helpful. For example, the paper they cite proposes raising price of gas to $10 per gallon in order to encourage customers to switch to more fuel efficient vehicles. They’re also claiming that we’ll get 30 billion gallons of biofuel from somewhere and are pushing biofuel from corn.

    And um, what about the evidence for global warming?

    How do we know that humans are the major cause of global warming?

    The Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) states: it is a greater than a 90 percent certainty that emissions of heat-trapping gases from human activities have caused “most of the observed increase in globally averaged temperatures since the mid-20th century.” We all know that warming—and cooling—has happened in the past, and long before humans were around. Many factors (called “climate drivers”) can influence Earth’s climate—such as changes in the sun’s intensity and volcanic eruptions, as well as heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere.

    So how do scientists know that today’s warming is primarily caused by humans putting too much carbon in the atmosphere when we burn coal, oil, and gas or cut down forests?

    * There are human fingerprints on carbon overload. When humans burn coal, oil and gas (fossil fuels) to generate electricity or drive our cars, carbon dioxide is released into the atmosphere, where it traps heat. A carbon molecule that comes from fossil fuels and deforestation is “lighter” than the combined signal of those from other sources. As scientists measure the “weight” of carbon in the atmosphere over time they see a clear increase in the lighter molecules from fossil fuel and deforestation sources that correspond closely to the known trend in emissions.
    * Natural changes alone can’t explain the temperature changes we’ve seen. For a computer model to accurately project the future climate, scientists must first ensure that it accurately reproduces observed temperature changes. When the models include only recorded natural climate drivers—such as the sun’s intensity—the models cannot accurately reproduce the observed warming of the past half century. When human-induced climate drivers are also included in the models, then they accurately capture recent temperature increases in the atmosphere and in the oceans. [4][5][6] When all the natural and human-induced climate drivers are compared to one another, the dramatic accumulation of carbon from human sources is by far the largest climate change driver over the past half century.
    * Lower-level atmosphere—which contains the carbon load—is expanding. The boundary between the lower atmosphere (troposphere) and the higher atmosphere (stratosphere) has shifted upward in recent decades. See the ozone FAQ for a figure illustrating the layers of the atmosphere. [6][7][8]This boundary has likely changed because heat-trapping gases accumulate in the lower atmosphere and that atmospheric layer expands as it heats up (much like warming the air in a balloon). And because less heat is escaping into the higher atmosphere, it is likely cooling. This differential would not occur if the sun was the sole climate driver, as solar changes would warm both atmospheric layers, and certainly would not have warmed one while cooling the other.

    Sounds nice except that the evidence is shoddy. Carbon isotopes can be explained by human agriculture (grasses such as cereals absorb carbon differently from other plants). Models not fitting without modification can be explained as bad models. And it’s interesting how this particular FAQ didn’t know whether heating of upper atmosphere was occurring or not, but claimed that it was “likely” (who calls that evidence?). Note that even if we accept the data as true, this says nothing about the human share of global warming unless the models also happen to be correct.

    Ok, so where am I going with this? If we’re going to compare AGW to the theory of evolution, then it’s reasonable for the basic evidence to be similarly solid. It is not. And to avoid political garbage like fantasy economics.

    The recent scandal with CRU scientists illustrates an similar side to scientists of the early 20th century. Back then, there were several cases where the scientists of the time suppressed data because they were worried that the creationists of the time would use that. For example, there was evidence of great ancient floods hundreds to thousands of feet high in the Columbia River valley (in northwest US) and elsewhere. That was disputed until a conference was held in the field showing off the various landforms made by the flooding.

    My view is that climatology is like the old days of geology and similar fields. The big difference, of course, is that there’s a lot more riding on whether AGW is true or not. We need that open frank exchange of information like the old geologists had. We need the comprehensive deep layers of mutually supporting facts like the talk.origins people have for evolution.

  20. Since I decided to check this one more time, I have a little to add. Evolution is a very transparent theory. It’s easy to check many of the assertions even if you don’t have more than a shallow understanding of biology, geology, genetics, breeding, etc.

    With climatology, you quickly get bogged down in the complex interpretation of data. We’ve been assured that climatologists have properly adjusted their data, but we as outsiders aren’t confident in those assurances or even the necessity for the data adjustment. The problem is that the data adjustments are more than sufficient to explain the proposed observations of climate change.

    That means unlike the theory of evolution, there’s no cloud of supporting facts that a layperson can understand, but bald assertions of correctness that can only be verified by another expert. This needs to change before one can claim that the theory of anthropogenic global warming has supporting evidence as sound as that for the theory of evolution.

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