“I still have yet to see anything that embarrasingly contradicts global warming. “
Contradiction? No. Embarrassment? Yes.
The big story here is not the disproof of global warming, but the disproof of that anti-scientific claim from the AGW alarmists that “the science is settled”, which even recently Al Gore repeated. The hell it is.
When even the basic question of the underlying data is in question, most of the studies done up to now should be considered tainted and in need of review and revision.
Arguing global GISS data to ‘prove’ the changes are not significant is a bit of a non sequitor.
The questions are about US data, which is now being revised in a way that dampens some of claimed ramp up in recent temperatures and leaves us with 1934 as the hottest year on record, in the US.
But these revision to US data are a tip of the iceberg that could come:
- US temp records have been considered the ‘cleanest’ of the records globally, and it calls into question reliability of all the data
- there has been way too much secrecy in the algorithms used to make the temp adjustments; the light of day needs to shine on how these records are being constructed; when that happens, surely a lot more than this dataset will be affected
The AGW alarmist camp keeps hand-waving everytime
“There are 4.7 million station months of temperature data in GHCN starting in 1701 and continuing to the present. This embodies the systematic observations of our environment by tens of thousands of individuals over centuries of human history.”
Such a statement in no way refutes the main thing at issue, explained on Coyote blog:
http://www.coyoteblog.com/coyote_blog/2007/08/official-us-cli.html
“One of the interesting aspects of these temperature data bases is that they do not just use the raw temperature measurements from each station. Both the NOAA (which maintains the USHCN stations) and the GISS apply many layers of adjustments, which I discussed here. One of the purposes of Watt’s project is to help educate climate scientists that many of the adjustments they make to the data back in the office does not necessarily represent the true condition of the temperature stations. In particular, GISS adjustments imply instrument sitings are in more natural settings than they were in say 1905, an outrageous assumption on its face that is totally in conflict to the condition of the stations in Watt’s data base. Basically, surface temperature measurements have a low signal to noise ratio, and climate scientists have been overly casual about how they try to tease out the signal.”
Unless and until the ‘internals’ of how termperature adjustments are calculated are made public *and* a deep and thorough review of the actual quality of temp. instruments used to construct global means, charts such as “global average temperature” will be of dubious validity.
Is there evidence the global temperature data should be reviewed? Yes, consider this:
http://www.uoguelph.ca/~rmckitri/research/nvst.html
That’s how science has to work. Get the facts right. If even the facts are not settled, the science can hardly be said to be so.
When even the basic question of the underlying data is in question, most of the studies done up to now should be considered tainted and in need of review and revision.
I disagree. It remains to be shown that there are sufficient errors in the data to significantly affect conclusions drawn from them. Remember that science is self-checking, in a lot of ways. Models indicate Arctic polar amplification of global warming, for example. The data shows similar patterns. So does the retreat of sea ice. So does increasing SST in the North Atlantic. Etc.
The questions are about US data, which is now being revised in a way that dampens some of claimed ramp up in recent temperatures and leaves us with 1934 as the hottest year on record, in the US.
The graphs I posted show that 1934 was virtually as warm as 1998 in the U.S. The revision was very minor. 1998 was globally significantly warmer than 1934.
US temp records have been considered the ‘cleanest’ of the records globally, and it calls into question reliability of all the data
Why? The U.S. has urbanized much more rapidly than other areas of the world. Why does the data have to be "cleaner" just because we're the United States? Do you think a trained weather station operator in Sri Lanka can't make a reliable temperature measurement? Your statement seems to be just an assertion.
there has been way too much secrecy in the algorithms used to make the temp adjustments; the light of day needs to shine on how these records are being constructed; when that happens, surely a lot more than this dataset will be affected.
I suggest, with no time to check right now, that this "secrecy" is illusory, and that it will turn out that much of this information is actually publically available. One of the purposes of Watt’s project is to help educate climate scientists that many of the adjustments they make to the data back in the office does not necessarily represent the true condition of the temperature stations.
It remains to be shown that the true condition of the temperature stations substantially affects the quality of the data set. Read the Peterson paper again, noting how spatial corrections from five stations have to be correlated.