"There must have been some long faces."
Posted on 08/14/2007 9:34:47 AM PDT by ricks_place
Agency roasted after Toronto blogger spots `hot years' data fumble
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."
Well there are Reds at NASA in the global warming scare, but it goes to their core, not just their faces.
Making an adjustment error is one thing . . . . pulling numbers out of thin air (or even less savory places) is data falsification.
Wow!
"There must have been some long faces."
review.
That’s one long, orange face.
they should offer him a job at NASA.
This is the one I referred to in my prior post to you; thanks for pinging me!
Well, help us out here. Help us sight a cite on decommissioned sites.
Plate techtonics can account for some - some regions drifted from warmer to cooler climates.
But climate also was much warmer at times globally in the distant past - to where the polar regions were warm enough for much more plant and animal growth. Just don't tell AlGore.
This is just how they crunched the numbers.
The article and DBM is NOT discussing the microclimates of the thermometer locations!
Exactly! What is the source data after a site is decommissioned?
The US source sites were taken from surfacestations.org and the site status was found at NOAA Satellite and Information Service. The Maryland temperature data source sites are listed in the table below with the decommissioned sites crossed out. Seven stations stopped reporting in the 1990s!
| COOP# | SITE | Post Office Dist Dir | STATE | LAT | LONG |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 180470 | 0.5 SE | MD | 39.28 | -76.62 | |
| 181385 | 0.4 W | MD | 38.57 | -76.07 | |
| 181750 | CHESTERTOWN | 0.6 NE | MD | 39.22 | -76.07 |
| 181995 | 0.7 N | MD | 38.98 | -76.95 | |
| 182282 | CUMBERLAND | 2 1.4 S | MD | 39.63 | -78.75 |
| 182523 | 1.6 E | MD | 38.88 | -75.8 | |
| 183675 | GLENN DALE BELL STN | 1.5 SE | MD | 38.97 | -76.8 |
| 185111 | LAUREL 3W | 2.8 W | MD | 39.1 | -76.9 |
| 185985 | 1 SE | MD | 39.27 | -75.87 | |
| 186620 | OAKLAND 1SE | 1 SE | MD | 39.4 | -79.4 |
| 186770 | 3.9 SW | MD | 38.68 | -76.67 | |
| 186915 | 0.5 N | MD | 38.33 | -76.42 | |
| 187330 | PRINCESS ANNE | 1 NE | MD | 38.22 | -75.68 |
| 187806 | ROYAL OAK 2SSW | 2 SSW | MD | 38.72 | -76.18 |
| 188000 | SALISBURY | 0.6 E | MD | 38.37 | -75.58 |
| 189440 | 3 SE | MD | 39.55 | -76.97 | |
| 189750 | 1 NE | MD | 39.33 | -76.87 |
Thank You. Claimed facts should be verifiable. Follow the links in post 17. The sites are listed in surfacestations.org and are reproduced at the post. The site status can be checked at the NOAA link. Login using guest; search by COOP #. Please verify my assertion.
I would pose the question at climateaudit.org and see what they say.
That and precipitation.
This is not necessarily true. At one time, fossils were discovered adjacent to coal deposits, which gave us the misnomer "fossil fuels." However, it has been observed that some abandoned oil fields have refilled. Some speculate that the heat and pressure within the earth's crust is capable of reforming inorganic carbon into hydrocarbons.
Bumpity bump, thanks for the information. Good digging.
One would think “precipitation” would be the first item in any “climate” model?
The U.S. Historical Climatology Network 1,239 stations measure precipitation and temperature. In Maryland, 7 of the 17 stations stopped operating in the 1990s and 2 of 17 stopped operating in the early 2000s.
Reacting yesterday to word that certain European governments and officials are suddenly trying to abandon their costly “global warming” policies, Royal Astronomical Society fellow Benny Peiser, of the science faculty at Liverpool John Moores University in Great Britain, recalls the teachings of the Roman emperor/philosopher Marcus Aurelius: “The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane.”
Just keep on telling the truth.
A long face at NASA.
The histrionics were on high this morning on CNN when they were talking about the U.S. sending up Coast Guard and scientists to scout the Arctic Ocean to see if the U.S. has any rights to land up there after Russia went up there and planted their flag.
What does this have to do with this thread?
CNN says the Arctic Ocean will melt by 2050 and the U.S. wants to get in there now and grab as much oil as possible.
YIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIKES. LOL
Congress would never allow oil exploration in the pristine Arctic Ocean /sarc.
No. Of course not. Did you hear John F Kennedy was assassinated?
That is a fringe theory, definitely not a valid one among the GW acolyte crowd, which the previous poster is addressing.
Of course, the current NASA changes are only for data collected in the United States. But available surface temperature readings cover only half the planet even today. Before the Second World War, they covered less than a quarter. So U.S. readings for a period that goes as far back as 1880 are among the most reliable there are.
From this article:
Well now, this inconvenient truth is gonna have ALGORE digging out his slide rule again.
Within the last few days someone on FR kindly posted the link to the NIST document on thermometer calibration standards. There it is, in simple terms that any high school math or chemistry class student can understand: PLUS/MINUS 1 DEGREE F.
You cannot get more accuracy out of a system than the system already has. You cannot get data to the 1/10th of a degree from PLUS/MINUS 1 DEGREE equipment, especially when there are no controls on station siting.
One station I am familiar with, at the Columbia Regional Airport (KCOU) located the instrument hutch on the grass a few yards to the southwest of where two large, black asphalt ramp areas met. A reading taken when the wind was blowing from the SW would be representative of actual conditions. One taken when the wind was from the NE would have the air moving over hundreds of yards of asphalt before hitting the thermometer.
To say this instrumentation and the readings from them are “unsound” is a quaint understatement based on the photos of hutch locations posted recently.
All this does not negate any sound science, but in my opinion, the amount of sound science we can rest upon in trying to understand climate change is FAR LESS today than it was when the MSM started to slam people who deny Global Warming.
Given what we know now, any “science” based on the readings of thermometers located in hutches next to airport ramp areas and behind air conditioners in parking lots would not even pass the judges at a high school science fair, let alone be worthy of any government grants.
I wonder if the decomissioning of RURAL sites in favor of URBAN sites will affect temperatures.
(perhaps all the death vally thermometers are still active)
How fast do plates move? I think the current leader is the one smashing into Southern Asia at about 7cm a year.
BUMP!
which ones are decommissioned? The closest one to me is Westminster; I was thinking about going out there to take pictures of it.
Yes! I'm glad to see someone saying this.
Thanks, I should have kept reading. For fun, stick the Baltimore coordinates into Google maps, zoom in, and then switch to the satellite view.
Oil mainly comes from dead single cell plants in the oceans. Coal is made of land plants. Animals make almost none of either. The oil from dinosaurs thing was a marketing gimmick.
Yes - Pangaea
Millions and millions of years ago there was only one Continent ('supercontinent'). The North pole wasn't at the North Pole, ditto the South Pole. Then it broke up and the continents drifted apart.
Google Pangaea and Plate Tectonics. You'll find maps at the various stages of the drift with approximate time lines.
This is simple experiment design, and quality control principles. As a matter of fact, I would love to see what the Royal Statistical Society or the American Society for Quality Control would have to say about attempting to use this dataset, once the facts as we know them now are laid out.
I just shudder to think that we have people who hold far more in the way of credentials than do I, taking this data seriously, and scolding us for doubting their results.
We could ask a whole series of questions about the thermometers themselves, and I would venture that few of the answers will move us to having more confidence in the data and more of the answers will add to the doubt we already have.
But most important, will any researcher at some distant university who is attempting to study the raw dataset, also have access to the calibration logs, or even when the instrumentation hut was changed, moved, repainted, repaved, rebuilt, or any other of the many events that can introduce bias? I doubt it, and based on how rabid some of these people are, I doubt that some even care.
LOL!!
John Kerry is the cartoonist’s/wag’s/satirist’s dream. As much as I detest him, I must admit that he has given me much pleasant diversion and mirth.
It would bias the data by magnifying the relevance of any 'heat island' effect.
One really has to be concerned about bias with respect to any large amount of collected data. For example, long term temperature readings of deep ocean water will be affected more by solar radiation input and the release of internal heat from the earth. Terrestrial temperature readings will be affected more by atmospheric effects and the effects of man made 'heat islands' (city-states).
Michelle Malkin » Hot news: NASA quietly fixes flawed temperature ...
| He had to reverse engineer the process by comparing the raw data and the ... So Steve McIntyre, who lives in Toronto, began to investigate the data and the ... michellemalkin.com/.../ - 189k - [ More results from michellemalkin.com ] |
It would bias the data by magnifying the relevance of any 'heat island' effect.
Plus these lazybones/fraudsters have many climate monitoring station on or near hot asphalt and air conditioner exhausts
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