JoNova A science presenter, writer, speaker & former TV host; author of The Skeptic's Handbook (over 200,000 copies distributed & available in 15 languages).
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This is yet another example of things that don’t add up in the world of GISS temperatures in Australia. Previously, we’ve discussed Gladstone and Darwin.
Ken Stewart has been doing some homework, and you can see all the graphs on his blog. Essentially, the Bureau of Met in Australia provides data for Mt. Isa that shows a warming trend of about 0.5 degrees of warming over a century. GISS takes this, adjusts it carefully to “homogenize urban data with rural data”, and gets an answer of 1.1 degrees. (Ironically among other things, “homogenisation” is supposed to compensate for the Urban Heat Island Effect, which would artificially inflate the trend in urban centers.)
To give you an idea of scale, the nearest station is at Cloncurry, 106km east (where a flat trend of 0.05 or so appears in the graph). But, there are other trends that are warmer in other stations. Averaging the five nearest rural stations gives about 0.6 degrees; averaging the nearest ten stations gives between 0.6 and 0.88 degrees.
Mt Isa and surrounds with temperature trends
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Gladstone is half way up the coast of Queensland, and though GISS (the Goddard Institute of Space Studies) can claim it has not “adjusted” the data, it appears to have cherry picked it.
Thanks to Ken Stewart for his detailed attention. The information here and graphs come from his blog.
Here’s how you double the warming trend without “adjusting” the data.
Start with several different records The oldest is the BOM (Bureau of Met) Post Office. The highest is the BOM radar, which stepwise jumps up a whole degree. The last is the BOM Airport, which confirms that the Radar for some reason is 1 degree higher than the rest.
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Greenland Temperatures – last 10,000 years. Are we headed for an ice age? (See below for more detail.)
David Lappi is a geologist from Alaska who has sent in a set of beautiful graphs–including an especially prosaic one of the last 10,000 years in Greenland–that he put together himself (and which I’ve copied here at the top).
If you wonder where today’s temperature fits in with the grand scheme of time on Earth since the dinosaurs were wiped out, here’s the history. We start with the whole 65 million years, then zoom in, and zoom in again to the last 12,000 from both ends of the world. What’s obvious is that in terms of homo sapiens history, things are warm now (because we’re not in an ice age). But, in terms of homo sapiens civilization, things are cooler than usual, and appear to be cooling.
Then again, since T-rex & Co. vanished, it’s been one long slide down the thermometer, and our current “record heatwave” is far cooler than normal. The dinosaurs would have scoffed at us: “What? You think this is warm?”
With so much volatility in the graphs, anyone could play “pick a trend” and depending on [...]
Yet again, we have a situation where the data doesn’t match the full-gloss coloured graphs produced by the PR agency for global warming called the IPCC.
Frank Lansner and Nicolai Skjoldby have started a new blog Hide The Decline, and posted that Scandinavian data shows clearly that temperatures got markedly cooler from 1950-1970, before they began rising again, and even after the warming, they only appear to be back where they were. But, all the IPCC graphs minimize the cooling. It would be reasonable to conclude from the data that the temperature today in Scandinavia is roughly similar to that of the 1930′s. But, you’d never know this from looking at the IPCC graphs.
Scandinavian Temperatures: 25 data series combined from The Nordklim database (left), compared to the IPCC's temperature graph for the area.
The IPCC needs to come forward and explain why its graphs are so different.
There is no “hockey stick warming” here. There is no unprecedented heat, and there is no good correlation with the rise of carbon dioxide either. Sure, this is just one region, not the globe, but this is yet another example of how the IPCC has not presented an honest assessment of [...]
UPDATE, Feb 2011. This post, this question has been out for over two years, and yet still remains as valid as ever. Most of the evidence still cited is irrelevant. — Jo
The all important question that rises above and before ALL other questions is the one of evidence.
Is there any evidence that carbon dioxide causes major warming?
In science, “evidence” has a very specific meaning and for a very good reason. In a court of law or a game of football, the label “evidence” can be plastered all over the place. If 500 footballers signed a petition to change a rule, that would be “evidence” the rule needed changing. But if 5 billion people signed a petition to make it rain in Mumbai on Thursday, that’s a waste of paper.
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Ice cores reveal that CO2 levels rise and fall hundreds of years after temperatures change
In 1985, ice cores extracted from Greenland revealed temperatures and CO2 levels going back 150,000 years. Temperature and CO2 seemed locked together. It was a turning point—the “greenhouse effect” captured attention. But, in 1999 it became clear that carbon dioxide rose and fell after temperatures did. By 2003, we had better data showing the lag was 800 ± 200 years. CO2 was in the back seat.
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If there was enough money, fame and power on the table (think seismic proportions, money that moves the economic landscape), would it be possible to take a small unproven scientific theory as an excuse and, with the best PR teams in the world, promote it, support it, and make it appear unquestionable?
If it were cloaked in the most “innocent” of motives, and shrouded in terminology that veils the truth, would it not run unchecked for years, unless some big vested interest opposed it? And if there was no particular big vested interest to oppose it, isn’t it possible that if the only harm it causes is to the giant disorganized mass known as humankind, there would be no committee of humankind to check its momentum.
On Watts Up tonight, we get some insight into just one specific example of how corrupt science can be. It’s yet another day in the history of the climate-scam where people may say years from now… remember that night we got the news about Darwin? Thanks to Willis Eschenbach’s dedicated analysis.
The blue line is the raw unadjusted data from Darwin. There are five stations there [...]
Carbon dioxide only causes 1.1°C of warming if it doubles. That’s according to the IPCC. Did you know?
The real game is water.
Researchers made guesses about humidity and clouds in the early 1980s and they built these guesses into their models. We now know they were wrong, not about carbon, but about water in the form of humidity and clouds. Here’s how the models can be right about carbon and wrong about the climate.
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These maps and graphs make it clear just how brazen the fraud of the Hockey Stick is.
It’s clear that the world was warmer during medieval times. Marked on the map are study after study (all peer-reviewed) from all around the world with results of temperatures from the medieval time compared to today. These use ice cores, stalagmites, sediments, and isotopes. They agree with 6,144 boreholes around the world which found that temperatures were about 0.5°C warmer world wide.
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Thanks to Eric Raymond, famous computer guru and leader of the open-source movement, at ESR, we can see what those sophisticated climate modelers were doing. They’ve found the code from the leaked files, and Eric’s comment is:
This isn’t just a smoking gun, it’s a siege cannon with the barrel still hot.
Here’s the code. The programmer has written in helpful notes that us non-programmers can understand, like this one: “Apply a very artificial correction for decline”. You get the feeling this climate programmer didn’t like pushing the data around so blatantly. Note the technical comment: “fudge factor”.
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The headline is tongue in cheek, but the message is serious.
Look at these pictures of NOAA’s U.S. temperature stations. These thermometers on the ground have recorded faster temperature rises than sensors on satellites and weather balloons.
Lucky heat doesn’t rise off asphalt…
Things may have looked different at this site in 1909.
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A big news day. It appears Steve McIntyre (volunteer unpaid auditor of Big-Government-Science) has killed the Hockey Stick a second time…
The details are on the last three days of Steve McIntyre’s site Climate Audit, and summed up beautifully on Watts Up.
The sheer effrontery and gall appears to be breathtaking.
The Briffa temperature graphs have been widely cited as evidence by the IPCC, yet it appears they were based on a very carefully selected set of data, so select, that the shape of the graph would have been totally transformed if the rest of the data had been included.
Kieth Briffa used 12 samples to arrive at his version of the hockey stick and refused to provide his data for years. When McIntyre finally got hold of it, and looked at the 34 samples that Briffa left out of his graphs, a stark message was displayed. McIntyre describes it today as one of the most disquieting images he’s ever presented.
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Click for a larger (powerpoint size) image
The world has not warmed since 2001.
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Part I was posted in The antidote to 150 million quadrillion joules.This is the updated and revised calculation.
Michael Hammer previously calculated that if the IPCC were right, the oceans should have absorbed a lot more heat, but just how much? He has revised his previous calculation after discovering an error. Now instead of oceans missing as much as 90% of the heat capacity, they are missing less, but it’s still around two-thirds. Its a lot of energy that somehow, somewhere, is not being absorbed. Where is the energy that greenhouse gases are supposedly ‘trapping’? Not in the air, and not in the water. What sort of radiative imbalance is this? Not one to get scared of.
Naturally, as always, Michael is keen for people to check his numbers and give us feedback.
Here is another example of a skilled expert doing pro bono work because he is concerned at the state of the science and the unnecessary damage to our society that it will bring. Michael Hammer has around 20 patents in the field of spectroscopy, that means he’s produced work that’s so useful and original that his employers have shelled out hundreds of thousands of [...]
There has been a change in direction by the alarmists, as shown by their new “Synthesis Report.” The independent scientists noticed it during the Wong-Fielding meeting.
The alarmists have abandoned air temperatures as a measure of global temperature, because the air temperature graphs are just too hard to argue with (like the second figure below, from the Skeptics Handbook). Instead they’ve switched to ocean temperatures, which they often disguise as ocean heat content (a huge number like 15×10²² Joules sounds much more scary than the warming it implies of 0.003° C/year).
All three pages of the Synthesis Report that deal with ‘evidence’ are about factors or trends that tell us nothing about whether or not the warming is due to carbon emissions. If God put the galaxy in a toaster, sea levels would rise, ocean heat content would increase, and ice would melt.
Notice how the graph above from the Synthesis Report that came out this month doesn’t include the last six years of data? Carrier pigeons from the remote worldwide network of Argo buoys make it back to base eventually, but the world’s leading team of climate researchers seem to have trouble googling “argo”. Not coincidentally, measurements [...]
This is a Guest Post by Dr David Evans
The big temperature picture. Graph and insight from Dr Syun Akasofu (2009 International Conference on Climate Change, New York, March 2009).
The global temperature has been rising at a steady trend rate of 0.5°C per century since the depths of the little ice age in the 1700s (when the Thames River would freeze over every winter; the last time it froze over was 1804). On top of the trend are oscillations that last about thirty years in each direction:
1882 – 1910 Cooling 1910 – 1944 Warming 1944 – 1975 Cooling 1975 – 2001 Warming
In 2009 we are where the green arrow points, with temperature leveling off. The pattern suggests that the world has entered a period of slight cooling until about 2030.
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Science based ideas are falsifiable, whereas religious ones are not (thanks Karl Popper). The acid test for climate scientists: “What evidence would convince you that carbon was not significant?” [...]
Evidence means observations, made by people at some time and place. Things you can see, hold, hear and record. Computer models are not, and can never be evidence. [...]
The gap between real world data and thermometers is a make-or-break issue for the AGW theory. The models predict a hot-spot in the atmosphere above the tropics, but the weather balloons (called radiosondes) can’t find any sign of it. Most claims that the hot-spot has been found are not providing any new data, they are just massaging the same old numbers with a different statistical tool. Here are three variations (though the third is not a statistical-spin, it’s just nonsense).
1-Some AGW supporters claim that Santer et al has found the hot-spot. But his paper boils downs to a statistical reanalysis that suggests that due to noise and error, the hot-spot might be there. Santer hasn’t actually found the missing hot spot. He has a case, but it’s not a strong one. The statistical counterargument is at Climate Audit.
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The ‘Hotspot’ is crucial to the climate debate.
If greenhouses gases are warming the planet that warming will happen first in the cold blob of air 8-12 km above the tropics. It’s freezing cold up there, but it ought to be slightly less freezing cold thanks to greenhouse gases. All 20-odd climate models predict warming there first—it’s the fingerprint of greenhouse gas warming, as opposed to warming by some other cause, like solar magnetic effects, volcanic eruptions, solar irradiance, or ozone depletion etc etc.
Look at A above, the greenhouse gas fingerprint is markedly different from the rest and dominates the overall predicted pattern in graph F. The big problem for the believers of AGW is that years of radiosonde measurements can’t find any warming, as shown in part E of Figure 5.7 in section 5.5 on page 116 of the US CCSP 2006 report
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