Bloggers Debunk Global Warming Data

Bloggers Debunk Global Warming Data


Ok, now this is classic. Bloggers have now debunked the myth that
1998 was the hottest year on record:

My earlier column this week detailed the work of a volunteer team to
assess problems with US temperature data used for climate modeling.
One of these people is Steve McIntyre, who operates the site
climateaudit.org. While inspecting historical temperature graphs, he
noticed a strange discontinuity, or "jump" in many locations, all
occurring around the time of January, 2000.

These graphs were created by NASA's Reto Ruedy and James Hansen (who
shot
to fame when he accused the administration of trying to censor his
views on climate change). Hansen refused to provide McKintyre with the
algorithm used to generate graph data, so McKintyre reverse-engineered
it. The result appeared to be a Y2K bug in the handling of the raw
data.

McKintyre notified the pair of the bug; Ruedy replied and
acknowledged the
problem as an "oversight" that would be fixed in the next data
refresh.

NASA has now silently released corrected figures, and the changes
are
truly astounding. The warmest year on record is now 1934. 1998 (long
trumpeted by the media as record-breaking) moves to second place.
1921 takes third. In fact, 5 of the 10 warmest years on record now all
occur before World War II. Anthony Watts has put the new data in
chart form, along with a more detailed summary of the events.

Yup, man made global warming is here and its time you all realized
this you knuckledraggers. Buy a damn Prius and STFU! You cannot
dispute the data!

Guess someone just did.

Meanwhile go check out some of the comments left at Roger Pielke's
blog:

It appears that the historians busily re-writing history in the
novel
"1984? have modern competition. Does the well-meaning possession of an
agenda excuse such excess of professional scientists?

GISS may well have to adjust 2006 down a bit further [as Steve M
observes,
it's only been adjusted down by 0.10 as compared to 0.15 for all other
years].

As it stands, we are looking at a bladeless "Hockey Stick", and for
all
intents and purposes at the falsification of the anthropogenic warming
hypothesis for North America.

Of particular note is that the Climate Audit piece indicates that
GISS has
erased the old [unadjusted] data, giving it the makings of an
excercise in covering one's tracks. The legality of this must be
questionable given that we are dealing a federally funded agency.
Astounding.


Yesterday they completely overwrote their US data set, changing
virtually
every number prior to 2000, explaining this only with a cursory
comment on their webpage. In addition, they have changed their UHI
adjustments so that in many cases the changed UHI adjustments offset
the error in their "raw" data.

Even before these change, I was unable to track their pre-2000 data
to any
archive. It was sort of like USHCN adjusted data in the 1990s but
diverged in earlier periods. I've requested a copy of the original
data set or information on its provenance.

I would welcome letters to GISS urging them to fully disclose their
source
code.


The unravelling of the GISS temperature story has only just begun
and is
bound to have repercussions. You can fool all of the people some of
the time, some of the people all of the time, but not both. The
non-scientific, professional press have been airing questions about
the IPCC "science" for some time now, and the mainstream media are
picking up on the fact that some things don't smell all too good in
the AGW/Climate Change larder.

And this great comment rounds up the timeframe of events:

The whole issue came up because of some photos Anthony Watts
volunteers
took of the Detroit Lakes, MN USHCN site in July.

http://gallery.surfacestations.org/main.php?g2_itemId=3891

Climate Audit first commented on the Detroit Lakes site on July
26th.

http://www.climateaudit.org/index.php?paged=3

The debate/discussion continued with a post at
http://rabett.blogspot.com/ on August 1st.

With a further look at the data, Steve McIntyre discovered the Y2K
error
and announced it on August 3rd.

http://www.climateaudit.org/index.php?paged=2

And NASA corrected it's GISTEMP data on August 7th. I believe.

http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/

All happened very fast.

And this commenter explains why this change in data is so important:

the USA has been the single biggest source of CO2 emissions in the
world
over the past 100 years. We have for 20 years or so been asked to
accept as the fundamental hypothesis the postulate that an increase in
CO2 is the primary and single most important independant variable
forcing increased temperatures. CO2 ppmv has continued to increase,
temperatures have not. The hypothesis has been falsified for North
America.

[...]The overarching question in all of this is: why have publicly
funded
research organizations [in the US, UK and elsewhere] been getting away
with publishing increasingly questionable climate data that is turned
into government policy as if gospel, without subjecting themselves the
most basic of scientific scrutinies, that of publishing their
respective "materials and methods" sections?

if CO2 is a so called greenhouse gas, it was supposed to force an
increase
in temperatures. This has not happened and is not happening. 1934,
during the Depression and the ensuing economic downturn [= less use of
hydrocarbons = less CO2] is the warmest year on record since 1900.
There is no post-1998 Hockey Stick as forecast by the IPCC. The CO2
based AGW hypothesis has been falsified. Back to the drawing board.

The error noted by Steve M. was obvious, its source was obvious, and
the
fix was obvious. The keepers of the data could not argue against it
and so they caved in and adjusted their data in less than a week. The
fact that one error had such a profound impact on a key piece of hype
that is used to push the need for drastic action should make everybody
pause and wonder what the eventual outcome will be of the broader
issues being looked at by Anthony Watts and his volunteer observers.
What happens if there is another tenth of a degree (or more) taken out
of the dataset by errors and biases uncovered there? Doesn't that
begin to call into question the whole theory of AGW? If the models can
account for warming up to the 1950s with natural forcings, but not all
of the warming since 1980, then what happens if that chunk of the
post-1980s warming is found to be error or measurement artifacts? Will
the experts admit that the models can account for all warming with
natural forcings? Then what? The wheels fall off the Al Gore
snake-oil-mobile.

For all who were sarcastic, etc., about that .1C. As pointed out
that is
16.7% of a total phenomena claimed to be valid. Not only is it
significant, considering that IPCC claimed that the correctness was
about 99% and now part has been shown to be at best 83.3%, should
cause an appreciation that potential (not actual) problems have been
proven. The correction has falsified an important claim of at least
the significance, if not the relation itself.

Much more where that came from. Go check it out.

Bloggers Debunk Global Warming Data


Ok, now this is classic. Bloggers have now debunked the myth that 1998
was the hottest year on record: