- March 2002 was warmer: 0.609C.
- The Jan-March average is the 5th warmest, edged out by those ending in March 2006, 2004, 2002 and 1998.
- The April-March average is the 3rd warmest edged out by those ending in 2004 and 1999.
Someone asked to see NOAA, GISSTemp and Hadley all shown on a common baseline. Here are temperatures and trends since 1980 using Jan 1980-Dec. 1999 as the baseline:
Note:
- Trends computed using any of the three data sets are similar ranging from 0.161C/decade to 0.165 C/decade. Hadley exhibits the lowest least-squares trend, but all are lower than the nominal trend of about 0.2C/decade in the IPCC document. (Note, the trend based on the multi-model mean extended using the A1B scenario was 0.21 C/decade for the period illustrated.)
- The running 12 month average remain below the multi-model mean of projections using the A1B scenario. (This may change next month.)
If these were my experimental data, I might suspect that something happened around 1994-1997. The data were pretty steady before this and are pretty steady subsequently. An unexplained sudden jump in the data would be worrisome if important. But then again, i am no climate scientist.
Lucia Gisstemp is really very reliable..
http://climateaudit.org/2010/04/15/giss-warmest-march-ever-in-finland/#comments
well done keep using it your analysis. It really helps the skeptics cause…
Stephan,
Yep, took all of a day to catch and fix. Though the word on the street is that its the Finnish who are at fault for dropping the minus signs in the CLIMAT reports sent into GHCN. Oddly enough, since all records here use GHCN stations, any of them who updated on the 12th would have the same error (it got fixed on the 13th).
Out of curiosity, do we know whether Nick Barnes rank CCC with the fixed data in the first place? He got the 0.83 value before most of us know about the issue in Finland.
Re: Zeke (Apr 16 12:03),
Yes, it seems it was wrong in the submitted CLIMAT reports from Finland. You can see them at OGIMET. Here’s Jyvaskyla. Minimum mean for March is 2.3C (Feb was -23C).
As it happens I still have the same raw data. It looks to me as if it is inverted.
$ egrep "614028..000.20(09|10)" input/v2.mean
6140283600032009 -114 -123 -70 -16 79 112 137 138-9999 -27 -22 -121
6140283600032010 -146 -175 15-9999-9999-9999-9999-9999-9999-9999-9999-9999
6140286900012009 -117 -121 -74 -25 79 111 136 140-9999 -23 -23 -110
6140286900012010 -166 -153 23-9999-9999-9999-9999-9999-9999-9999-9999-9999
6140287500012009 -80 -92 -48 6 93 132 156 153-9999 4 5 -88
6140287500012010 -150 -129 20-9999-9999-9999-9999-9999-9999-9999-9999-9999
6140289700032009 -102 -101 -51 2 94 126 154 150-9999 2 1 -101
6140289700032010 -170 -133 38-9999-9999-9999-9999-9999-9999-9999-9999-9999
$
Um. That didn’t come out of the comment box well. That’s some of the Finnish numbers for 2009 and 2010 in the raw input files. Altogether the raw input file I used has 10 Finnish stations. All of the stations have negative readings for 2009-03. Of those, 8 have numbers for 2010-03, all of which are positive. The 8 readings for 2009-03 average -3.51 C. The 8 readings for 2010-03 average +2.60 C.
I’ll re-run when I have a minute.
Positive/negative is denoted by a 0 or 1 in a certain position in the CLIMAT.
http://www.wmo.int/pages/prog/gcos/Publications/GCOS-127_EN.pdf
Are the Finns coding the reports by hand? And you’d think an error like that would go right into the QC pile.
Have fetched a fresh v2.mean just now from ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/ghcn/v2/zipd/v2.mean.zip.
It is identical to the one I used before, apart from 6 stations which did not previously have a 2010-03 reading, and now do so: Kitale, Nairobi, Mombasa, Uccle, Joensuu, Helsinki (those are the two Finnish stations which didn’t have a 2010-03 reading last week).
I’m refetching the rest of the input datasets etc and will run the whole of ccc-gistemp from scratch. Expect results in about 20 minutes . . . .
Checking the new v2.mean against the CLIMAT records for Finnish stations, something is still wrong for 2010-03. All the months in 2009, and 2010-01 and 2010-02 are correct, but 2010-03 is not. Something is up with the 2010-03 Finnish records in the GHCN system at NOAA. I expect they are still working on it; data quality issues like this generally get sorted out after a short while, which is why the headline numbers sometimes change by a few hundredths over the first couple of weeks.
For instance, here’s the CLIMAT record for Joensuu:
http://www.ogimet.com/cgi-bin/gclimat?lang=en&mode=0&ind=02929&ord=DIR&year=2010&mes=3&months=12
And here are the last couple of lines for Joensuu in the GHCN raw file downloaded this evening from NOAA:
6140292900012009 -85 -92 -43 10 108 132 162 148 114 11 -1 -100
6140292900012010 -167 -128 50-9999 ….
As you can see, all the readings match the CLIMAT records up to 2010-03, which does not.
Unsurprisingly, given the small change in the input file, the ccc-gistemp result for 2010-03 is still +0.83K.
Re: Nick Barnes (Apr 16 15:33),
I suspect the process is this. GHCN would have queried the CLIMAT form, and the Finns would have submitted an amended one, which GHCN then used. It may take some time for the amended CLIMAT info to show up on OGIMET.
Thanks for continuing these updates Lucia. I’ve been reading the temp posts for months with few comments but really there isn’t a better place on the net right now to see what has been measured globally.
Can anyone explain to me, in simple, non-technical terms, how it is that GISS reports a figure that is 148% of that reported by HADCrut?
For a subject that is getting so much attention, I would expect that a difference that big would be of concern.
Kip–
The difference is not that large. You are taking ratios of temperature anomalies, and it’s not really a meaningful thing to do.
Ouch, this one is exactly at the upper limit of my prediction interval.
http://signals.auditblogs.com/files/2008/12/mar10.png
Maybe there is a trend in the global temperature, let’s see!
BR, Warmer UC
Kip, the GISTEMP figure is relative to a 1951-1980 reference period. The HadCRUT figure is relative to a 1961-1990 reference period. So they are offset by the constant difference between those baselines.
Some more trash from GISS check the two lower NOAA figures it sure looks like the earth is boiling!
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/04/17/which-nasa-data-to-believe/#comments
looks like neither ice
http://arctic-roos.org/observations/satellite-data/sea-ice/observation_images/ssmi_ice_ext.png nor temps
http://discover.itsc.uah.edu/amsutemps/execute.csh?amsutemps+002
are collaborating anymore.. cheery picking ad extremum LOL
Mistakes happen, but they seem to happen with some frequency to GISS. They get corrected, though often seem to follow blogosphere discovery of the mistakes rather than ‘GISS attempts’ ™.
Underlying this isn’t there a serious question? GISS seems to put very few resources into this work yet it is the supposed basis on which much is claimed for a rise in global temperature. One would have expected that ,therefore, GISS would pay considerable attention to their temperature data. But they manifestly do not. Why?
The affect on the global map of temperatures is about the closest visual representation of “cherry picking” anyone could imagine.
In other news, there was an error in the merging of the NOAA-18 data for UAH 5.3, the latest in a long line of errors by UAH. The discrepencies were noticed here and probably elsewhere. When satellite data is processed incorrectly, it affects a much larger area than Finland. Despite this, I don’t see many FOI requests and angry blog posts and editorials demanding resignations, data, and code. Why?
The affect on the global map of temperatures is about the closest visual representation of “cherry picking” anyone could imagine.
In other news, there was an error in the merging of the NOAA-18 data for UAH 5.3, the latest in a long line of errors by UAH. The discrepencies were noticed here and probably elsewhere. When satellite data is processed incorrectly, it affects a much larger area than Finland. Despite this, I don’t see many FOI requests and angry blog posts and editorials demanding resignations, data, and code. Why?
There were no angry blog post about the Finnish data here. There were no FOI’s anywhere.
The reason there are no FOI’s about the UAH data is Spencer and Christy answer questions when people ask them. In contrast, FOIs were sent to CRU after repeated turn downs when people followed the supposedly more conventional and approve path of asking for data without using FOI.
And when people politely point out errors in GISS, Hansen’s repsonse is to call them court jesters.
Also note that the excuse given for jyvaskyla does not apply to Sodankyla, where, as originally reported by Jean S, the fmi.fi and the OGIMET site had -10.3 where GISS had +1.5.
Just for fun lets rile up the warmistas again haha
Unfortunately for the AGW crowd three major pillars have refused to cooperate
1 http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/icecover.uk.php
2 http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/seaice.recent.antarctic.png
3 http://discover.itsc.uah.edu/amsutemps/execute.csh?amsutemps+002
The last one temps notice how the slope of late is not even following normal at this rate mate were heading for the mean=downunder LOL me thinks your last three months of warmista fun is nearing and end, now the coolistas take over thank you..
If you include all the AMSU graphs since 1998 you will notice that at this time ALL the year graphs tend to plod down until the normal peak once again proving that AGW is a scam (ALL should stay up?) even at this time. Of course temp data since 1998 means nada in climate terms anyway…..
Stephan,
I’m waiting for the first Blackboard Regular Who Is A Warmer to break ranks and prove he (or she?) is not a brainwashed drone.
I have a six-pack cooling down in the fridge waiting for the event.
Any day now… 😉
Andrew
Andrew cant wait to drink your beer LOL
BTW the NH ice is thin ice anyway so it will all melt away this summer hahaha
Good to speak with a guy who has got a sense of humour.
vg,
If I cave and drink the beer prematurely (who me?), I can always reload later down at the drive-thru.
But I really feel it’s going to happen soon (this weekend/ or month/year/decade/century)! 😉
Andrew
BTW let us thank the people at DMI and yes, CT as well, for not caving in to AGW demands. I will always believe AMSU even if they say yes its warming but alas… it aint! Three cheers for Roy Spencer hahaha
BTW vg,
You and I are supposed to spar over who is going to be The Official Blackboard Al Gore Critic.
I was for the idea, then I thought, “I’ll be darged if I’m going to be entertainment for Lucia.”
So, it’s off. 😉
Andrew
Could you tell me the SD quoted for the monthly data points by NOAA, GISSTemp and Hadley.
If I politely asked Spencer for his data and source code, do you think I would get it? If I sent FOI requests to get all of his email involving the 2005 diurnal correction, do you think I would get it? Should I sue like our good friends at CEI?
http://www.thenewamerican.com/index.php/tech-mainmenu-30/environment/2462-nasa-faces-foi-lawsuit-over-climate-data
PaulM, McIntyre politely informed GISS of the error by email, and GISS politely thanked him on the website (although I wouldn’t exactly call McIntyre’s blog posts “polite”). I suppose it would be rude of Hansen to call “contrarians” “court jesters” had he not been bombarded with accusations and fraud and demands to resign after all of the usual suspects reported “1934 now warmer than 1998!” and yet another nail in the coffin for global warming. Strange that I don’t remember any of UAH’s much more significant “adjustments” making it to Fox’s “Special Report.”
It’s good that GISS did release the code. That way people like Nick Barnes could do what skeptics had always wanted to do if only they had the code, but, of course, never did once they had it. But they did get a lot of blog posts scoffing at the code in the deal.
The GISS thing is much much worse than you thought. I cannot believe that anyone would even contemplate using it to demonstrate anything same goes for IPCC AGW’ers your days are over face it LOL
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/04/17/giss-metar-dial-m-for-missing-minus-signs-its-worse-than-we-thought/#more-18590
The ONLY data you can trust is RSS and UHA and yes it shows considerable warming BTW for the first 3 months of 2010. The rest is absolute trash
Stephan, your comments demonstrate that you got your climate education from denialist sources.
the difference between the datasets is tiny. the satellites are in good agreement with the surface data. you fell for a scam.
the graphs above all show a comparisons with the latests years. they are doctored to make the real effect (massive change towards the long term means) disappear.
the latests post by Anthony is a very long winded way, of saying that airports write an M instead of a minus sign. he follows his usual tactic of making wild claims, and promising to show the effect later. (as Phil pointed out)
The bad Finland data caused a ~0.01 degree warm bias for March during the few days that it was posted to GISS’ website. The current difference in the decadal trends of RSS and UAH is twice that. Now, how can anyone simultaneously believe that UAH and RSS are both reliable, while trashing GISS? UAH and RSS have very large differences for the tropics, and large seasonal differences (even with UAH 5.3). They can’t both be right.
All this even after UAH just posted bad data from 2005 to the present. There are two posts on WUWT and one on climateaudit about the Finland problem, and zero about the UAH snafu, despite the latter being vastly more significant.
As far as airports are concerned, Nick Stokes got these results:
Trends Globe NH SH Airport Rural Urban
No. Stations 7280 6056 1224 2390 2712 4568
1900-2009 0.0760 0.0833 0.0479 0.0661 0.0678 0.0761
1978-2009 0.2717 0.3297 0.1199 0.2438 0.2599 0.2721
http://moyhu.blogspot.com/2010/04/ghcn-results.html
Sorry, “AGWers” won’t be running for the hills (or the airports).
“The reason there are no FOI’s about the UAH data is Spencer and Christy answer questions when people ask them.”
Have they published the code they’re using to produce UAH?
cce
1. magic java has asked Spencer for source code. A public version is being made available, but I don’t know the schedule.
2. I don’t know if FOI applies to University of Alabama. There is a federal version of the law that applies to department of energy laboratories, NASA, NIST and other things under the federal entities. University of Alabama is not a federal entity. Some states have FOI laws. You’d have to familiarize yourself with the laws of Alabama and figure out how it’s used. (You’d also need to word the FOI properly.)
3. Didn’t CEI sue because they sent an FOI and NASA failed to respond? FOI applies to NASA and they are required to reply. If it did not apply to NASA, NASA would not have been required to apply.
cce (Comment#40899) April 17th, 2010 at 11:28 pm
While asking for it, on your blog make a note of how polite you are, and how you already suspect Spencer of fraud.
never make only one polite FOI request. 50 per week, is the number of polite requests, that you should be trying to get in…
.
ps: talk about the request also should focus on “climate science” and “data”, while the requests should focus on e-mails…
.
pps. and keep escalating. currently you should focus on who chose those investigating team members and who chose the subjects they looked at. next level will be, who chose those who investigated the investigators. that is the funny aspect of conspiracy theory. there always is another layer waiting to be investigated…
Of Judith Curry
We need another cartoon.
Awake! Get up, Josh.
==================
The record of temps
A disgrace and such a mess,
And paleo, too.
============
cce (Comment#40905) April 18th, 2010 at 1:33 am
“The bad Finland data caused a ~0.01 degree warm bias for March during the few days that it was posted to GISS’ website.”
It’s not just bad Finland data. Watt’s has been poking around and we have bad Russian data. Bad Canadian data, Bad Antarctic data. Turn a minus 30C into a plus 30C creates quite a swing.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/04/17/giss-metar-dial-m-for-missing-minus-signs-its-worse-than-we-thought/
it’s a fundamental problem with using data intended for aviation for something other then it’s original purpose. Pilots need temperature data to calculate maximum takeoff weight.
A minus 30/plus 30 error will automatically be interpreted by the pilot as an obvious sign error because the pilot is at the airport and has visual cues of the current temp. If the control tower is reporting +30 temps and the baggage handlers are wearing parkas it’s probably a minus 30 temp. No harm, no foul.
Take the same data and run it thru a computer that doesn’t have the luxury of seeing how the baggage handlers are dressed. Garbage in – Garbage out.
Unless one has some sort of sanity check/feedback loop the data will quality will always be garbage. In a business one keeps books and then has to reconcile with the bank balance. That’s the sanity check. The bank balance agrees.
All the global temperature sets are based on similar reporting stations. Nobody is doing sanity checks with the reporting stations.
without a feedback loop going back to all the temperature stations on a daily of weekly basis asking the question “Does this look right to you” one just ends up with garbage. No different then a business/household that never reconciles it bank balance.
So we end up with the climatologist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks with an opinion that there hasn’t been any ‘Global Warming’ in Alaska since 1978 and GISS showing Alaska being on fire.
http://climate.gi.alaska.edu/Fairbanks/graphics/fai_temp_1906-2009F-lrg.jpg
vg [40893]
Keep that beer cold and not so fast about this just being a case of thin Arctic ice. A comprehensive Canadian-German airborne survey of the Arctic basin last year showed ice on average to be twice as thick as projected.
And how to explain away that 1] Arctic ice extent is not only the highest in the past decade, 2] is smack dab on the 1979-2006 average, and 3] that ice loss due to the onset of the spring melt is lower than anytime over the past decade. Thicker and more ice, perhaps?
Lucia,
It would be useful to hear your views on how it can be that all the countries of the NH experienced one of the severest and longest winter in living memory, with very large numbers of new extreme cold and snow records established throughout the US and Canada, Europe, Russia and Asia, and that anomalies for those same winter months from all data sources are up.
The question is pertinent because it goes to the heart of why the great unwashed in droves are tuning out the “A” portion of the AGW/ACC story. The fact that Phil Jones acknowledges to millions of viewers on the BBC that the HADCRU data for practical purposesis a useless shambles and that there has been “no statistically significant warming since 1995” only adds to the confusion.
Let’s see…
1. Increasing trend in the percentage of airports used to compute temp averages over time.
2. Increasing trend in the percentage of airports changing to a new system of reporting air temps over time.
3. The new system looks to be more susceptible to user input error. New system uses “M†to denote a neg temp. Forget and use “-“ instead of “Mâ€, and the temp is reported as a positive.
4. Input error will almost always be in favor of warming with both old system and new system.
5. Error will be more prone to the colder climes. If it does not ever go below “0â€, never a chance to forget and not add an “M†or a “-“.
6. Error will much more pronounced in colder climes as +/- 1 in mild climes vs +/-50 in colder climes swings the error quite a bit more.
What have we been seeing in the posted data?
An increase in the temp over time, mainly in the colder climes……Hmmm.
tetris–
Not everyone in the NH experienced on the of severest longest winters. Texas stayed relatively warm. I think Alaska was relatively warm. I guess there were more warm places than we Chicagoans might guess based on our local weather. Also, there’s that whole southern hemisphere.
Tetris re 40893 I was being sarcastic….sorry
‘Also, there’s that whole southern hemisphere.’
Lucia, Last time I was down that way, they called it ‘summer’.
“I guess there were more warm places than we Chicagoans might guess based on our local weather”
Lotta guessin’ goin’ on there, huh. 😉
Oh wait, this is ‘Climate Science’. Carry on.
Andrew
Lucia [40927]
Vancouver was warmer too, just like Alaska, not due to “global warming” as our Premier here argued during the Olympics, but classic El Nino patterns. Those are exceptions in what is generally accepted as a very severe NH winter: France and the UK completely paralyzed for 6-7 days in a row several times over, snow on the beaches from Barcelona to Nice, the UK entirely snow covered for over a month [not seen in more than 50 years], two full months of snow cover in the south of Sweden [also not seen in more than 50 years], Holland frozen solid for more than a month, absolute cold records in Siberia and some 2 million cattle freezing to death in Mogolia, absolute cold records in Northern China and the list goes on. Is all of that just weather? And the SH is mostly ocean. What are the anomalies measuring? SSTs or land?
Stephan [40928]
I was not. I would like someone to provide a coherent explaination for the ice situation. Not handwave frantically to somehow explain it away, and as tell us the current situation is “only temporary” [as the NSIDC suggested last week].
The point I was trying to make in my request to Lucia, is that the folks on the street [as evidenced by polls everywhere, including most interestingly Germany] are no longer buying the “when-temperatures-are-up-it-is-climate-and when-temperatures-are-down-it-is-weather” or “when-there-is-abnormally-low-Arctic-ice-extent-as-in-2007-it-is-proof-of-AGW/ACC-and-when-we-are-back-to-1979/2006-averages-as-in-2010-it-is-only-a-load-of-thin-ice-and-means-nothing”.
And Lucia’s calculations and graphs notwithstanding, what to do about the fact that it is not only Lindzen et. al., but also Phil Jones and the Wold Meteorological Organization [in September, 2009] who have acknowledged that there has been “no statistically significant” warming since at least 1998 and arguably since 1995?
Ed Forbes, tetris, welcome to the club of the people who try to demonstrate that they couldn t finish primary school.
.
6. Error will much more pronounced in colder climes as +/- 1 in mild climes vs +/-50 in colder climes swings the error quite a bit more.
What have we been seeing in the posted data?
An increase in the temp over time, mainly in the colder climes……Hmmm.
.
and that funny guy who is reading the satellite temperature data is also constantly confusing M and -.
.
http://www.remss.com/msu/msu_data_monthly.html
.
And Lucia’s calculations and graphs notwithstanding, what to do about the fact that it is not only Lindzen et. al., but also Phil Jones and the Wold Meteorological Organization [in September, 2009] who have acknowledged that there has been “no statistically significant†warming since at least 1998 and arguably since 1995?
.
read the interview.
.
JUST not significant.
.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8511670.stm
.
oh and arctic sea ice are is not normal either.
.
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/sea.ice.anomaly.timeseries.jpg
Sod,
A question. Would you describe the last ice age as ‘global’ ?
Once, in fact, and it wasn’t for as long as that. I travel quite a bit in southern England, and was only properly snowed in for two days. It was unusually cold, and there were unusual amounts of snow, but your statement is hyperbole.
Go here: http://www.remss.com/msu/msu_data_monthly.html
click on “Anomaly” and go back to February. That’s pretty much the pattern we saw through the winter: a hot stripe from Vancouver across Canada and Greenland to Novaya Zemlya; a cold stripe from Mexico, across the US and the north Atlantic, northern Europe and across to central Sibera; a warm stripe from the central Pacific right across the tropical Atlantic, the Magreb, the Middle East, the trans-Caucasus, the Himalayas, right across China. The southern hemisphere was more chaotic.
Re: harrywr2 (Apr 18 10:27),
Watt’s has been poking around
And so has Ron Broberg.
AW was talking about METAR forms, which are produced pretty much on the fly and contain a lot of detail. BUT GHCN uses the CLIMAT forms that are submitted monthly by the Met organisations, and have another level of quality control. There’s no evidence from Anthony that these Russian etc mishaps even made it onto a CLIMAT form, let alone got into GHCN. That was what made the Finnish case a rare exception, and even then it only lasted a couple of days.
Nick Stokes (Comment#40936) April 18th, 2010 at 2:24 pm
SOP for Watts et al. Throw up anything that they can’t explain, then use their inability to explain it as proof of something.
sod (Comment#40933)
April 18th, 2010 at 1:52 pm
“Ed Forbes, tetris, welcome to the club of the people who try to demonstrate that they couldn t finish primary school.”
Love and kisses sod.
Jones& Brohan:
“Calculation and reporting errors can be large
(changing the sign of a number and scaling it
by a factor of 10 are both typical transcrip-
tion errors; as are reporting errors of 10â—¦ C (e.g.
putting 29.1 for 19.1)) but almost all such er-
rors will be found during quality control of the
data. Those errors that remain after quality
control will be small, and because they are also
uncorrelated both in time and in space their
effect on any large scale average will be negli-
gible. For these reasons ϵRC is not considered
further. ”
It seems to me from an error analysis perspective that Jones is making a good number of assumptions here. Assumptions which sweep a small measure of uncertainty under the rug. personally I’d rather see an estimate of those small errors and see them added to the final measure, rather than assuming them away.
if it makes no difference to exclude it, then it makes no difference to include it with an explanation of how it was
estimated.
At the limit: if you think the small error amount to 1/100 of C
it is better to include that along with the reasoning as opposed to excluding it.
bugs (Comment#40938) April 18th, 2010 at 4:35 pm
“SOP for Watts et al. Throw up anything that they can’t explain, then use their inability to explain it as proof of something.”
We live in a country where the ‘defense’ is not required to provide proof of anything, merely reasonable doubt.
Whether or not the GISS data has flaws is no longer in doubt. It does. The question is whether the flaws are materially sufficient to discard the entire data set.
The burden of proof is not on Mr Watts, the burden of proof is on Dr Hansen et al to demonstrate that their ‘evidence’ is beyond a ‘reasonable doubt’.
Mr Watts isn’t running around vandalizing coal fired power plants and demanding the world spend trillions of dollars on his ‘theory’.
The first rule of getting up on a high horse is avoid handing out rocks and tomatoes to the crowd.
Finland managed to get thru the ‘rigorous quality control’. People who Dr Hansen considers to be ‘frauds’ pointed out the error.
Reasonable doubt that there are errors in the temperature record is not the same as reasonable doubt that the planet is warming due to increased carbon in the atmosphere and that this warming is becoming dangerous – especially when the temperature records are already presented with sizeable error margins (look at Hadley, for example).
As to the defence/prosecution notion, I think that there if we reverse the positions it is more apt. Those on my side of the fence think that the planet deserves the benefit of the doubt and, given the evidence, it is up to those prosecuting the argument that there is no dangerous warming occurring to prove their case – not beyond reasonable doubt, however: I would accept ‘on the balance of probabilities’.
harrywr2 (Comment#40942) April 18th, 2010 at 6:34 pm
All data has flaws, especially ones that run over a century. No point discarding the data set, it’s the only one we have to work with.
sod[40933]
Nice try. It so happens that I have both a PhD and 25+ years of experience in due diligence and being in charge of companies built with multi-million dollars of other people’s money as CEO, Chairman, of board member internationally.
The days of pissing on skeptics like me or brushing us off as “deniers” are over, because of “A” part of the AGW/ACC hypothesis is being increasingly questioned by observations.
I have twice over asked some pretty staightforward questions. Your putdown will not do as an answer.
“SOP for Watts et al. Throw up anything that they can’t explain, then use their inability to explain it as proof of something.â€
We live in a country where the ‘defense’ is not req
Actually, you had kinda the opposite here. You had the SOP for GISS which was to fix the “problem”, not attitribute the person who found it, and no attempt ( apparently) to diagnose the cause of the problem. Whereas Anthony apparently figures out why these things happen. Now, will it change the final answer? no. But GISS and other would do well to spend a little more time combing over these things looking for the nits that dont matter. I mean seriously. If you believed the planet was at stake, if you believed that every tiny error would be SEIZED upon and amplified by the megaphone of the internet what you do?
1. Bring in people who know about quality control. real sticklers for the last little decimal point OR
2. put gavin in charge of PR.
or michael Tobis.
I believe in AGW bugs. I want these guys to hit the shower and think about the way they misplay this at every turn.
tetris,
Re record cold temperatures, here is a look at the global situation during the record cold:
http://www.skepticalscience.com/December-2009-record-cold-spells.htm
Note the terrible cold over Siberia. And the cold over much of the USA. But also note the warm regions elsewhere in the world.
The satellite data from UAH tells the same story.
http://vortex.nsstc.uah.edu/data/msu/t2lt/uahncdc.lt
Look at, for example, the anomaly for the US lower 48 for December 2009. It is -1.47 degrees C. But the anomaly for the North Pole is 2.09 degrees C. (Those are just extreme examples for December).
February was even colder for the US, and warmer for the North Pole.
The point of this is that cold or hot records here and there do not necessarily add up to much over the extent of the globe. What matters is the average and how it changes over time.
steven mosher,
Who found the problem and alerted GISS to it?
David Gould [40995]
Thx.
Fact is that what people experience and what the various anomalies are supposed to tell us, just don’t mesh. Forget about the “A” component of the AGW/ACC story.
Meanwhile, I repeat my question: what to do about the observation [as per Lativ, Jones, Lindzen, the WMO, et., etc…] that temperatures are not following the IPCC programme?
tetris,
My experience meshes perfectly with what the various anomalies are supposed to tell us. But that is simply because the place that I happen to live has relatively steadily increasing temperatures – no record colds recently, lots of record warmth.
The issue for me is that local experience is not the same thing as the global temperature anomaly. As you can see by the image and data provided, while there were indeed large areas that were very cold, globally the world was warm. Those in the very cold areas will have obvious difficulty reconciling their local experiences with the global reality.
Re temperatures not following the IPCC program, the thing is we disagree on that point. Jones, for example, said that there has been no statistically significant warming since 1995. That is not the same as saying no warming. What it means is that the zero line falls within two standard deviations of the least squares trend line. Extend that for another year to 2010 and we will ‘suddenly’ have statistically significant warming. Extend that back to 1994, and we have had statistically significant warming since 1994. Makes you think that picking the period 1995 to 2009 is not all that significant …
Latif has consistently said that his paper was *not* in disagreement with the IPCC and that his words have been repeatedly misinterpreted.
Re Lindzen, we will likely disagree about the import of his work. 🙂
It seems to me that the IPCC, predicting a climate sensitivity of between 1.5 and 4.5, has had its prediction verified by observation.
Poland stations have missing minus sign in Feb 1991 (GHCN, CRU). I told about this issue, but it’s still not corrected,
Polish, not “Poland” of course.
Bialystok for example:
6351229500041991 -11 51 25 66 106 148 181-9999 131 69 34 -21
have warmest Feb on record, but Berlin
6171038400001991 24 -22 68 85 108 150 210 194 164 95 48 19
have Feb 1991 below normal. As i remember, Feb 1991 was cold month in Poland.
“The days of pissing on skeptics like me or brushing us off as “deniers†are over,”
Actually, with the loonie Lord exposed as a serial liar, Bob Carter’s data manipulation laid bare, Mann’s hockey stick vindicated, and two independent inquiries clearing the slandered scientists targeted by the Wattsgate witch hunt, the days of you denialists being on the receiving end of a golden stream of hard facts are just beginning.
😉
If you can remember how cold it was in a particular month two decades ago, you have a superior memory to me.
Further, -51 degrees farenheit would seem a very cold month indeed for Bialystok. Average for January in Bialystok is around 41 degrees farenheit. So, 51 is high. But -51 would be very low indeed …
In fact, the coldest day ever recorded in Poland was -41 degrees C. Which is -42 degrees farenheit. So I would doubt very much that there is a sign error for February 1991 in that data.
http://www.deplu.go.id/warsaw/Pages/TipsOrIndonesiaGlanceDisplay.aspx?IDP=3&l=id
http://www.stabb.com/tools/convert.html
steven mosher (Comment#40954): Whereas Anthony apparently figures out why these things happen
What is the relationship between METAR at WU and v2.mean at NOAA/NASA that Anthony figured out?
@David Gould
We use metric units. -51 means -5.1C, not -5.1F
GSOD database tells different story than GHCN
http://www.ogimet.com/cgi-bin/gsodres?lang=en&mode=0&state=Spa&ind=12295&ord=REV&ano=1991&mes=02&day=28&ndays=28
“If you can remember how cold it was in a particular month two decades ago, you have a superior memory to me.”
Well, that was first really cold month after very warm winters 1987/8, 1988/9 and 1989/90. And i have remember very cold Jan
1987 too (see GHCN for Bialystok :))
Robert:
What fantasy world do you live in?
His original analysis is certainly wrong, and even his most recent analysis is barely one grade above compost-grade manure (I don’t know what there is to say about people who don’t know how to perform proper verification analyses on what amount to previously untested ad hoc methodologies). M&M and Von Storch just pointed out the obvious.
And this from somebody who thinks we are very probably warmer now than during the MWP. Getting the “right” answer isn’t the same thing as doing the analysis correctly. 16/64 = 1/4, but you don’t solve it by eliminating the “6”‘s.
There are a lot of moral cowards in the climate community who just can’t admit truth when it stares them in the face. That’s part of why there is a credibility gap.
Re: steven mosher (Apr 18 21:26),
I don’t think anyone put gavin in charge of PR. He jumped in to fill a void, causing as much (or more) harm than good.
Worst possible choice. Of course, no one put him in charge either. But, the guy is one PR catastrophe.
Next Months head posting
HadCrut April 0.297C: 22nd warmest April Hahaha
“p” is correct about Bialystok. The average of the obs in ISD for February 1991 is-4.9 , so GHCN’s +5.1 is obviously wrong.
@torn8o
All polish stations have missing minus sign at feb 1991, but i don’t think that GHCN database is “garbage”. Errors like this didn’t affect overall trend so much.
@Stephan
Hahaha
@p – I don’t think GHCN is garbage either, but unnecessarily incomplete, yes. If it hasn’t already been done though, it would be good to compare ISD to GHCN and clean up the errors. Even if an error here or an error there does not affect the overall trend, it affects the confidence in the product and if Joe Schmo on the internet can find the error, the big data centers ought to be able to also.
torn8o,
GHCN v3 is in the works as we speak, so hopefully that should fill in a lot of the gaps.
.
Lucia,
Putting Gavin in charge of PR wouldn’t be a terrible move; he’s by and far a better communicator than most scientists. That’s just not saying much 😛
.
David Gould,
Someone at GISS read the post on CA and notified the GISTemp folks. Oddly enough the folks who first posted the issue at CA didn’t think to notify NASA.
Re: lucia (Apr 19 05:48),
lucia:
I understood mosher to mean that the perceived choice was either a substantive response to quality issues or a self-destructive PR approach as personified by Schmidt/Tobis, not an endorsement by mosher of the named PR spokesmen.
The best response by the data set makers to Watts, M&M et al. is to say (a) we are pleased that our work is getting a lot of attention (b) we welcome any and all attempts to help us ferret out defects or otherwise make a better product which is why (c) we make our data and code as widely and rapidly available as possible.
Instead, we got Plan B: circle-the-wagons, demonize the critics and exude a self-satisfied air of superiority, if not infallibility. It is precisely the pompous, better-than-you tone that gives power to even small discoveries of errors and overstated certainties.
@Zeke
Does anyone knows when GHCNv3 will be available?
p,
I’ve gotten the impression that it will be some time next year, but I’m not sure. Its a big project to collect paper records from 1000s of stations and digitize them!
Zeke
I’ll grant you that Tobis would be a worse move. But Gavin isn’t terrific. I don’t know who would be terrific though.
lucia says
I humbly disagree. I see your Michael Tobis and raise you one Eli Rabbit.
George
Ahh… Ok. I think that’s actually what they did this time, right? They admitted that the Finnish data had a quality issue and fixed it.
Now, I suspect it would be even better to have some sort of automated scanning/filtering sort of script would help. Just checking the correlation between adjacent stations and flagging ones that are clearly out of bounds would have caught this. So would flagging record high/low anomalies for a station or region. Or, possibly, high/low relative to the past 30 years or so. (Otherwise, the won’t catch mistakes on the low side.)
If anything triggered a flag, a human could check. It would save embarrassment. Embarrassment is the real difficulty with the GISSTemp system. I’m sure the Finnish problem would have been caught within a month even without the web. Heck, the Finns would have caught it!
Re: Artifex (Apr 19 10:01),
I concede your point. Imagine if we combine the two. We might get a PR person who thinks he’s rabbit, refers to himself in third person and tells women who have 6 kids they can’t think!
Lucia and Artifex,
I regret to inform you that you are both wrong. Even your horrific vision of a foot-in-mouth grammatically challenged rabbit pales in comparison to the true dark master of abysmal PR – the one and only Tamino. The man who put the luster back into bluster. The man who never met a question he couldn’t censor. Now there would be a true PR catastrophe in the making.
(Hmmm, maybe Gav isn’t so bad after all…)
Imagine this:
Someone actually demonstrating that AGW is anything more than Group A (Elitists) Trying To Get Over On Group B (Everyone Else).
Now that would be a PR Coup. 😉
Andrew
Talking about PR, from what I’ve seen and heard until now, Dick Lindzen did the best PR excercize, by a mile.
“Mann’s hockey stick vindicated”… Robert, you’ve justed caused me spilling my evening coffee over my keyboard.
p.
Ah! I had ruled out celsius because plus or minus 51 seemed odd. That explains it. Thanks. 🙂
“What fantasy world do you live in?”
That would be the world of the scientifically literate. Get yourself a library card and join the party.
Every denialist that has gone up against Mann has been humiliated, and Mann’s work has been completely vindicated. No matter how many times the denialist echo chamber repeats its discredited garbage, the fact is your ass got whipped by the hockey stick.
It’s pushing nonsense like this that makes you, as tetris accurately noted, the urinal of all thinking people.
“His original analysis is certainly wrong,”
Sorry, he’s been proven right over and over.
“and even his most recent analysis is barely one grade above compost-grade manure”
And you have published exactly what, O great blog-commenter? Sorry, everybody is hip to the science-illiterate’s dodge of hand-waving and appeals to their nonexistent authority.
I love this part:
“And this from somebody who thinks we are very probably warmer now than during the MWP. Getting the “right†answer isn’t the same thing as doing the analysis correctly.”
Mann was right and you admit Mann was right. That’s the whole story. A couple embarrassing psuedo-scientists dislike his analysis. Many more see no problem with it. Naturally, with ten years of hindsight, even Mann does some things differently. And his results, as you admit, are correct.
In other words, the hockey stick has been vindicated, and you are wasting my time.
“There are a lot of moral cowards in the climate community who just can’t admit truth when it stares them in the face.”
We call them “deniers,” or, if one is feeling especially polite, “skeptics,” although that’s not really the right word.
“That’s part of why there is a credibility gap.”
There’s a credibility gap, all right. Your clowns don’t have any. If you’re referring to the fact that Sarah Palin et al have a problem with climate science, the idea that that is on the scientists is laughable. It’s like saying 16th women with cats had a credibility problem with witch-burners. Try again. 😉
““Mann’s hockey stick vindicatedâ€â€¦ Robert, you’ve justed caused me spilling my evening coffee over my keyboard.”
You mean “just.” And it should be “to spill” not “spilling.”
That makes the final score:
Objective errors found in Mann et al (1998, 1999): 0
Objective errors found in Hoi Polloi (Comment#40996): 2
Looks like Mann wins that one.
@Carrick: ” M&M . . . just pointed out the obvious.”
It wasn’t obvious to the editors of Nature, who rejected their laughable “critique,” which never made it through peer-review, but ended up in E&E, from whence it was shredded by multiple real scientists.
I won’t ask you if that’s the best you can do, because we both know it is.
torn8o (Comment#40973): “p†is correct about Bialystok. The average of the obs in ISD for February 1991 is -4.9, so GHCN’s +5.1 is obviously wrong.
? Teach me to fish.
There is an ISD daily data archive here:
ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/gsod/
And Bialystok for Feb 1991 is here:
ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/gsod/1991/122950-99999-1991.op.gz
But the Feb Tmean = 5.1, same as GHCN.
So you must have a different (better?) ISD archive, torn8o. Care to share?
p (Comment#40964)
http://www.ogimet.com/cgi-bin/gsodres?lang=en&mode=0&state=Spa&ind=12295&ord=REV&ano=1991&mes=02&day=28&ndays=28
.
Hmmm. Interesting. Different GSOD archive here
ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/gsod/1991/122950-99999-1991.op.gz
.
This one has a 5.1 ave for Feb 1991 as well.
.
(sorry for the near dupes)
@Ron Broberg
?
I see 23,1F there, so it is -4,9C
p (Comment#41043): I see 23,1F there, so it is -4,9C
.
I gotta put down crack-pipe before posting!
Yes, it’s 23.1F.
.
And I also see that the ogimet site readme references the noaa site.
http://www.ogimet.com/docs/readme_gsod.txt
Robert:
Thanks for the humor. Clueless thy name is Robert.
Oh, snap! I should have bought that book of juvenile insults that you obviously picked up.
And nature editors are known for their neutrality on this issue , aren’t they?
The Mann 1998 and 1999 reconstructions are essentially just 1/f noise, no signal. Real climate has well defined coupled atmospheric-ocean oscillations, these are totally absent from Mann’s reconstructions.
Even Mann 08 fails this basic verification analysis.
Individual proxies do show structure in their power spectra… So do the “real” temperature series (e.g., GISTemp in the above figure).
There is an explanation for why combining a lot of proxies would “wash out” the spectra structure present in individual proxies, but it isn’t very flattering in terms of what it also implies about the combined temperature reconstruction (it implies it is meaningless, because you are adding the contributions out of phase with each other).
It wouldn’t surprise me if the relationship of proxies like Tilljander are to temperature are complex valued, may involve a delay, and may even require a deconvolution to arrive back at temperature.
Need I say that’s a tricky thing to do, even if you are trained to do it. (As far as I know, Mann is not. That is not an insult, just that given the klutzy sort of algorithms he hobbles together, he is obviously not a signal processing expert.)
Carrick
You really need to publish your objections to Mann et al. 2008
If his methods are poor, you need to outline why in the literature.
Nathan
No he doesn’t. You’re just being silly. Seriously.
Lucia:
Not only that, you’d be crackers to start out your first publication in a new field with a salvo against one of the stalwarts. That’s just guaranteed to not end well.
My own predilection is not to write papers single out particular work, but don’t provide constructive alternatives in any case.
Crackers?
Come on, this is serious, yes? This paper is critical to AGW is it not? The scientists need to know they got it wrong. No point in just leaving your findings undiscovered on some blog!
Carrick, did you email Mann and talk to him about why his methods are wrong?
I can’t get over the self indulgence here. “Oh I know Mann is wrong, but I won’t publish my findings, I won’t formally present the reasons why. I’ll just wander around on blogs and call Mann wrong.”
I don’t understand why no one wants to publish their findings. Lucia you said you were working on a publication, are you still doing so?
Carrick
You could also be a bit creative. You don’t need to target Mann’s paper you just need to outline the way to get a signal ‘properly’ you could make up dummy data that is similar to Mann’s and demonstrate that it doesn’t work.
This is not about ‘targetting’ Mann or attacking anyone. Your paper could be about the appropriate method to tease a signal out of noisy data. It would be valuable.
Nathan
So, to observe Mann’s paper has problems, now Carrick must actually do the problem Mann failed to do? As I said, you are being silly. There is no rule that says people can’t point out that Mann is flawed until they figure out the right way to do the problem Mann tried to do, but did incorrectly. It is perfectly ok to say that Mann’s attempt was a failure, and one can say it at a blog, at home over dinner, to friend’s at a conference or where-ever.
You are trying to make up idiotic rules that have never existed anywhere. Even if you get some of your friends to agree to this rule, plenty of other people will continue the long standing practice of recognizing that the thing you claim is a rule is simply silly.
Nathan’s argument is akin to athletes claiming that sport writers can’t accurately report a team’s problems because they themselves are not athletes.
This, of course, led one sport writer to remark “I don’t have to be a pilot to tell you when an airplane has crashed.”
John M,
Yes, it’s like yelling “You Suck!” at a terrible batter from the stands.
He may flip you the bird…
…but he still sucks. 😉
Andrew
Lucia
Not making up rules, this is about taking something seriously.
“So, to observe Mann’s paper has problems, now Carrick must actually do the problem Mann failed to do?”
It would certainly the best way to prove Mann had failed.
And sure he can say it all he likes, but it lacks credibility when he’s uprepared to formalise it. It’s like me claiming someone de-famed me and never taking it to court, in fact refusing to take it to court just because I’m allowed to say what I like in conversations with friends. It’s just a lame excuse.
You can make up all the excuses you like, but failure to publish is weak. Especially when it is over something as important as this.
Why is it that skeptical posters on blogs refuse to publish anything. And in fact spend a lot of time constructing rhetorical reasons why it’s not important. It’s lazy, weak, and lacks credibility. At least people like Mann go to the trouble of getting things published.
Nathan
Interesting analogy.
Most reputation managers advise against filing defamation suits in nearly all cases. Generally, the person who sues is harmed more by the filing than by whatever they considered to be the defamation. This is true even if the plaintiff wins.
Lucia
So are you still writing your paper?
AndrewKY
“Yes, it’s like yelling “You Suck!†at a terrible batter from the stands.”
It’s exactly like that. If you are trying to get the batter to do better, you be far better off going over to him/her and giving them some coaching tips. Yelling ‘you’re doing it wrong’ is useless for the batter, especially when they don’t even know you’re saying it.
Nathan,
We aren’t trying to get the batter to do better or telling him he’s doing it wrong. We are telling him that he sucks at what he’s doing, which is appropriate if he does suck. Don’t read stuff into it that isn’t there.
If a particular climate scientist sucks at science, we should let him or her know, simply and directly.
Andrew
Nathan–
The answer to your question is neither yes nor no. I’m not going to be discussing this issue on your schedule.
Andrew_KY
“If a particular climate scientist sucks at science, we should let him or her know, simply and directly.”
This is what I am advocating. It’s not what you are doing. You are sitting in the stands complaining he is doing it all wrong. The coach isn’t shifting him, the player doesn’t know what you think. The player is still batting.
Nathan:
That’s just BS. Nobody has a requirement to publish a d@mn thing, especially in fields where they don’t receive funding.
And in my opinion, it isn’t even particularly important. Whether the MWP was warmer or cooler than today is pretty much unrelated to the question of how we should respond to the question of AGW. IMO.
Nathan,
Lucia is being kind by saying you are silly. Mann made what is really the equivalence of arithmetic errors in his paper. No journal is going to publish a paper that points out an error that obvious (apart from a comment of course and that window is long gone). Your position seems to be that unless a critic can find something publishable, that critic is not entitled to point out clear bone-headed mistakes. Quite a foolish view.
“It’s not what you are doing.”
Nathan,
It is what I’m doing. I can’t prevent the batter from (not) hitting and or sucking. I have no power to replace any of the players, other than to let my opinion be known, in the most likely way it can be heard.
It’s the ownership of the team that has the problem, if it chooses to field players that don’t produce.
Andrew
Imagine Terrible Team’s Snake Oil Front Office Staff telling fans they HAVE to buy tickets or catastrophies will insue.
Wouldn’t that be insane? 😉
Andrew
I see a batter in the Major Leagues who doesn’t often manage curveballs, sliders, or change-ups. When he connects with a fastball, it’s rarely more than a single. In the field, more errors than his peers.
So what that he holds his own performance in high regard. Or that he views the acerbic commentary of some sportscasters and viewers as evidence of a dark plot against him. Human nature being what it is.
What’s notable is the public stance of other players (and the views of many devoted fans and establishment sportswriters). They insist that this batter’s contributions are outstanding, that his slugging is first rate, that his fielding is without compare. That those who hold contrary opinions are indeed agents of a far-reaching conspiracy.
Although, in baseball, we don’t demand insightful, independent judgments from players. In interviews, we expect they’ll offer standard fare in the service of the Team.
Of course, in baseball, members of the public aren’t then instructed to heed the pronouncements of these same individuals on public policy issues. We aren’t taken to task for asking how a person can take on the role of Team Player, and at the same time expect to be hailed as a fount of dispassionate, independent expertise.
lucia (Comment#40989) April 19th, 2010 at 10:02 am
George
I understood mosher to mean that the perceived choice was either a substantive response to quality issues or a self-destructive PR approach as personified by Schmidt/Tobis, not an endorsement by mosher of the named PR spokesmen.
Ahh… Ok. I think that’s actually what they did this time, right? They admitted that the Finnish data had a quality issue and fixed it.
Now, I suspect it would be even better to have some sort of automated scanning/filtering sort of script would help. Just checking the correlation between adjacent stations and flagging ones that are clearly out of bounds would have caught this. So would flagging record high/low anomalies for a station or region. Or, possibly, high/low relative to the past 30 years or so. (Otherwise, the won’t catch mistakes on the low side.)
If anything triggered a flag, a human could check. It would save embarrassment. Embarrassment is the real difficulty with the GISSTemp system. I’m sure the Finnish problem would have been caught within a month even without the web. Heck, the Finns would have caught it!
It sounds like that is what NOAA did, they suspected an error in the Finnish data and temporarily blanked it out. It wasn’t found by someone on the web, it had already been corrected before being mentioned on CA. In fact the error didn’t show up at all on CCC because they downloaded the data after GISS by which time the data had been corrected. So the Finnish error was detected within a day by NOAA without input from the web.
Phil–
I knew NOAA is working on automated systems to find things because someone from NOAA talked to Jim about what we do for CSEPP data after he presented a paper on discussing our algorithms. (We have a more time critical need to check than people in climate.)
I suspected that because CCC had the “right” number immediately. Nick mentioned this was one of the rare events where his numbers were different from GISTemp. Now we know why.