Climate change - anthropogenic or not?

BTW: there's a special on tonight about ClimateGate, NASA, and all of these altered temperature records.

More on John Coleman’s Special tonight – KUSI press release says NASA improperly manipulated data Watts Up With That?

and

http://icecap.us/images/uploads/NOAAroleinclimategate.pdf

Incidentally, we've all seen the photos now showing how poorly sited the surface stations are in the USA. You know, having BBQ pits underneath them, being in the middle of asphalt parking lots, etc. How do you think the surface stations in Mongolia are? Hahah, the surface record is a clusterf***

 

These "adjustments" (aka scientific malfeasances) plotted:



In the UK CRU case, the Medieval Warm Period vanished to present a "nice tidy story". In the US GISS case, a nearly 60% temperature anomaly difference vanished to show that 1998 was as warm as 1934! Are these guys serious scientists or just skilled magicians?

 

Morning! A little comedy for ya!

 

Ah, drees, since we were talking about it yesterday:

Global Warming: The Other Side - Segment 4 | KUSI - News, Weather and Sports - San Diego, CA | Coleman's Corner

It just came out last night. Yikes Discusses all of the mucking about of data from the stations, including the poor FILNET application of taking data from stations hundreds of miles away, the 75% station dropout, that most stations that were dropped were from cooler locations, and the homogenization process that skews towards warmer, as I posted on the previous page.

Pretty damning. Big news station too. You can see all 5 parts here:

Global Warming: The Other Side | KUSI - News, Weather and Sports - San Diego, CA | Coleman's Corner

I've only watched the 4th part so far.

 

Since we've been kind of talking about the poor data in the temperature data sets, let's look at the "Bolivia effect.



See Bolivia? It's that big red spot in South America. Bolivia is that country near, but not on, the coast just about half way up the Pacific Ocean side. It has a patch of high cold Andes Mountains where most of the population live.

GHCN – GIStemp Interactions – The Bolivia Effect Musings from the Chiefio

Wow

Just phenomenal.

If you read the article:

GHCN – GIStemp Interactions – The Bolivia Effect Musings from the Chiefio

and

GHCN – South America, Andes? What Andes? Musings from the Chiefio

You'll see that this is not a unique scenario. It's phenomenal that the data is this screwed up. This is your tax dollars at work

 

USHCN vs USHCN Version 2 – more induced warmth Musings from the Chiefio

This guy has a lot of data about the adjustments made to the data sets. Really great material.

Let the animated .GIFs below load. They are blink comparators of the USHCN vs HSHCN version 2 data sets. The majority of stations had their raw data adjusted to show more warming by lowering the temperatures in the first half of the 20th century.








That is just a small sample of the before and after data sets available on the website. You can clearly see how they are adjusted to make the early 1900s look much cooler. This makes the most recent warming episode look more severe, and it gives a greater slope to the more recent warming.

How on earth do they justify this? Also, be sure to read the article so you understand why they are both labeled "raw". As Trenberth said, this is a travesty.

"It looks to me like we will need to go all the way back to “first sources” to have any hope of finding out what is really going on in the temperature history of the planet. GHCN “Unadjusted” clearly is too adjusted to be suitable to the task." - Great quote

 

Antarctic ice is growing. Artic ice is down since 1980, and up since 2007. It's cyclical. The earth warms and cools. I've posted twice before in this thread proof that in 1922 Arctic Ice was melted way more than it is today. It's a cycle.

Also, I think you skipped over the NSIDC ( http://nsidc.org/ ) graph that I posted that showed ice growing and melting in the Arctic is cyclical through out the year. Overall, Arctic ice is down from our last period of cooling (1940-1975), but it's up in recent years. When you hear about all the ice going away at huge rates it's during the ice-melting part of the year. The media never reports that ice is growing by 26,000 square miles per day in the ice-forming part of the year.

 

We all know "weather isn't climate", but look at this recent weather event:

NWS Met on Florida Cold: ?This is the longest stretch ever in 100 years of record keeping.? Watts Up With That?

The longest stretch in the last 100 years of cold in Florida. 12 consecutive days of below freezing temperatures.

An excerpt from the NWS Public Information Statement:

More at the link above...

 

Ah, I forgot who I was talking to. That's right, all sea ice melting is alarming, but all sea ice growth is not "statistically significant." Let's see your calculations that show it's not statistically significant. I'd look at the amount of growth, not the years of growth when you do the calculations for us. The point is that sea ice is not melting at some ridiculous rate that will result in ice-free poles in a few years (like Al Gore incorrectly stated.) The point is to stop the spread of misinformation that we are facing catastrophic anthropogenic global warming.

Where is my "thank you" for teaching you about the surface stations?

 

I love that in the last couple pages hardcore non-refutable evidence has been posted that conclusively and unequivocally (did I use all the alarmist buzz words yet?) proves that the temperature records are altered to enhance and/or create warming have been posted, and the alarmists skip right over those and harp about the most ridiculous of things. You guys wanna stop spreading misinformation? Start with your temperature data sets!

 

So, let's talk more about ClimateGate!

So, we've all read Phil Jones' infamous ClimateGate email about the trick to "hide the decline." The original email is available here.

In this post I will briefly describe what the alarmists claim "hide the decline" means, then show what it actually means, and then demonstrate the real problem the alarmists face. There are already two expert demonstrations of "hide the decline". One is at American Thinker (also this from AT) and the other is at Climate Audit.

First, we will look at Phil Jones' official explanation from November 23, 2009 for his use of the word "trick."

So Phil Jones' position is that the word "trick" did not mean to imply anything deceitful. That is the whole of his attempt to explain away this quote. "Hide the decine" was never addressed in this apology. Alarmist apologists have furthered Jones' explanation by saying that the "hide the decline" was an attempt to deal with the "divergence problem."

What is the divergence problem? Before I explain that, I need to give you a very brief introduction to something called dendrochronology.

Dendrochronology (dendro=tree; chron=time; ology=study of) is the scientific method of dating based on the analysis of patterns of tree-rings. Dendrochronologists study tree rings and attempt to reconstruct past temperature data from them. Since we did not have accurate thermometer records prior to 1850-ish we have to rely on other sources of data for temperature information. These other sources are called proxies. One such proxy are these tree rings.

To determine the temperature, the dendrochronologist looks at the width of the tree rings. They believe that a wider tree ring indicates a greater growing season which means greater temperatures. What has not been discussed is how they disentangle other factors that influence tree growth, such as amount of sun light, fertilization, and CO2. There is no known method to disentangle this information. But they assume anyways that the wider tree rings means a higher temperature (instead of it meaning greater exposure to sunlight, greater availability of fertilizer, or any quantifiable increase in CO2.)

To see if these tree ring temperature reconstructions are accurate they are validated against the past 160 years of thermometer temperature records. Below is an example. The three colored lines that look like spaghetti are the tree ring proxy reconstructions. The black line is the thermometer temperature record.



You can look at this yourself and see whether they match up reasonably well or not. They appear to match up quite well from 1900-1950, where the graphs ramp upwards (the reality behind this is rather dubious, but that's a subject for another post.) Around 1960 the tree ring reconstructions greatly diverge from the thermometer record. You can see the green line declines while the thermometer record ascends. You can also see that the red and blue lines diverge from the temperature record, although they don't dip quite as bad as the green line. This non-agreement of the tree ring reconstructions with the thermometer record is the "divergence problem."

Why is this problem important? If they can not give accurate temperature measurements in recent years, how can they be trusted to give accurate temperature measurements for the past? If the tree-ring reconstructions could not read the higher temperatures of today, how can these scientists be sure that there weren’t higher temperatures throughout the last thousand years that have also gone undetected by the tree-rings? If they can not give accurate temperature measurements for the past, then how can these reconstructions be used to belittle the Medieval Warm Period?

To date, dendrochronologists have not been able to reconcile this divergence problem of the tree ring record from the thermometer record.

This ClimateGate email (1141398437.txt) on the subject is rather telling:

So, we know now what Phil Jones claimed he "meant" by using a "trick." We also have seen what alarmists say the divergence problem is. We have shown that dendrochronology indeed suffers from the divergence problem, and that because of this we can not accept their reconstructions to accurately give us important temperature information from the past.

So, now let's look at what he meant by "hide the decline." This get's complicated, because his one sentence is so telling and actually covers so much material.

He is saying that he completed Mike's trick. This means that there are two tricks. Mike's trick, and then Phil's trick.

First we will look briefly at Mike's trick. Mike in this case is Michael Mann, the inventor of the now-debunked hockey stick, and probably the biggest bully (as revealed in the ClimateGate emails) in climate science. Mann's "trick" has already been covered expertly by Steve McIntyre so I invite you to read his link for a full explanation. I will only show the relevant graphics and briefly explain them.

A graphic was needed for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) Third Assessment Report. The ClimateGate dendrochronologists wanted to make the graphic illustrate several different tree ring reconstructions that all showed that temperatures were spiking upwards in recent times. The first graph they assembled was this:



You can clearly see that Briffa's data (in yellow) did not match up well with the data from Mann and Jones. They pressured him to alter his graph to show more global warming, as evidenced in this email:

To which they received this reply from Keith Briffa:

Much discussion ensued, and eventually Briffa caved and then we ended up with this graphic being published in the report:



If you look rather carefully, you can see that Briffa's data has been moved so that it is more in line with what Mann and Jones had. Also, in this graphic, the decline in Briffa's data has been eliminated. You can clearly see that it trends up with the rest of the data, and then you don't really see it anymore. You no longer see the big decline. In other words, it is hidden.

This blow-up of the graphic clearly shows where it is hidden:



You can clearly see, that rather artfully, and extremely deceitfully, Michael Mann cut off the decline of the graph, and hid the truncation of Briffa's data behind the rest of the lines.

If you think this is a misrepresentation of what Mann did, look at this before and after of Briffa's data:



The red line shows Briffa's data. The green line shows how Briffa's data was represented in Mann's graphic. You can clearly see that the temperature decline in the reconstruction was truncated.

Now, let's look at Phil Jones' trick. Again, this was expertly covered by American Thinker previously. Phil Jones was preparing a graphic for an upcoming World Meteorological Organization report. This wasn't just a tiny graphic in the report. It is featured on the cover of the report, and you can download the report here to see it for yourself.



When we look at this image, we see three lines that go back about 1,000 years. As the lines move toward the present we see the lines all shoot upwards. This conveys the message that these three lines all agree that the recent temperatures skyrocket upwards.

So let's look at the original data he was working with:



This is the same graphic we saw earlier. Note again that there are three tree ring proxy reconstructions shown in different colors, and then the thermometer temperature record shown in black. Look at the present time on this graph. You see the green line trend down sharply, the blue line trend flat, and the red line trend down then back up. Now look at the chart that Phil Jones published. These declines in the temperature data are absent! What happened?

You can clearly see that Phil Jones cut off the declining parts of the tree ring proxy reconstructions and spliced on the thermometer data. Where exactly did he do that? Let's look again carefully at what he said:

You can clearly see that he cut off Briffa's data (green line) around 1960 and spliced on the thermometer record, and he cut off his own and Mann's data (red and blue, respectively) at around 1980 and spliced on the thermometer record.

Clearly, he "hid the decline" in the temperature data. This method was never discussed in the World Meteorological Report. Never did he mention that he spliced tree ring data with thermometer data to give the impression that all of the tree ring data suggests recent warming.

This is as deceitful as you can possibly be. What makes this worse is that he emailed this to Bradley, Mann, Hughes, Briffa, and Osborn (look at the To: and Cc: lines of the original email.) This means that they were all aware of his "trick" and no replied that it was a very deceitful and dishonest thing to do. They were more than happy to go along with Jones' misrepresenting and misleading data.

So now we have seen for a fact that Phil Jones spliced thermometer data onto tree ring reconstructions, and we know for a fact that he sent the email admitting this to Michael Mann. That makes the following Mann lie so much more revealing of what a slimy, lying bastard he truly is:

It's funny that he blames these claims on "industry-funded climate disinformation websites." Sorry Mikey! We can all see that, without a doubt, you are lying. You got the email, you saw the report, you know it happened.

So, there we have it. Plain as day. We have seen how Mann truncated and hid the decline in his graphic, and then we saw how Jones cut off the declining parts of the tree ring reconstructions and grafted the thermometer record onto them. Two of the biggest names in climate science caught red-handed. By their own admission.

What does this show? Well, besides that the ClimateGate scientists are crooked, we see that dendrochronology, as a science, sucks and that it can not reliably detect warm temperatures. It is therefore impossible to use dendrochronology to rule out any previous warming episodes.

So, what is the real divergence problem that alarmists should be worrying about? It's the divergence between temperatures and CO2 levels.



As we have seen before, we are, without a doubt, experiencing nearly a decade of cooling. This is despite record high levels of CO2. Experts are now predicting that we should expect to continue on this trend for 20 or 30 years. The divergence between temperature and CO2 is only getting larger. This is the divergence problem they should be worrying about!

 

Met Office admits they botched snow warning Watts Up With That?

At least they are admitting they can't predict anything. Yes, this is weather not climate.

Now all we have to do is get the NOAA, etc, to admit they've screwed up our global data sets, go back to the originals and start all over.