Glaciergate – It ain’t about love.

The story of the IPCC exaggeration of glacier retreat in the Himalayas has been growing worse and worse for Rajendra Pachauri head of the IPCC. I’ve received some emails regarding an ongoing investigation by Jonathan Leake of the London Times. Apparently in there is financial benefit for exaggeration of climate facts after all.

To catch you up, it’s recently been discovered that;

1 – Glacier retreat was exaggerated dramatically in IPCC AR4. The very report used to document global climate change and make recommendations for policy and funding to the worlds governments. Indeed the IPCC AR4 is the premier docment on which commuhagen was based.

2 – The IPCC was apparently warned of the lack of basis for the claims prior to publication of AR4, however the warnings were rejected. – I need someone to provide a citation for this.

3 – Rajendra Pachauri initially said criticisms were without merit, but they were in fact so far out of whack he was recently forced to admit that in fact the skeptics were right—- again.

4 – Large scale projects were started according to the recommendations of the IPCC and funded by the EU for the investigation into these glaciers. These organizations substantial money to the TERI institute ALSO run by Rajendra Pachauri.

What would it take?

Half of global warming happened since 1990 yet less than half of the temperature stations are available since 1990?

Why?

A Full Open, well funded, quality analysis of temperature stations IS with no doubt warranted yet where are the money hungry researchers?

If we are to spend trillions of dollars on fixing warming, don’t you think we should be able to work out how to read ONLY 7000 thermometers regularly!!

One of my beliefs is that the IPCC is a money hungry political organization with no concerns about correcting any scientific details like not melting glaciers, which might get in the way of it’s growth and funding. So if I’m right, where are the demands for funding better and more complete thermometer data?

So I set out to make a rough estimate of what it would take to document, quality control, keep current and make public all of the temperature stations in the last 150 years. The goal was to find out if it is impossibly difficult, such that only computers are up to the task?

Parliament to Investigate UEA

Ok, this is a big deal.  Climategate has caused the UK government to begin investigations into the UEA. UEA was looking into the illegal blocking of FOI’s the hiding of data from the IPCC and current and future dissemination of data policy, peer review and other issues.  Now UK parliament is asking for comments from interested parties on 3 points below to do their own investigation.   Anthony Watts is also carrying this story at WUWT. It looks like the standard horsecrap “it’s out of context” answers the advocaticians are spouting aren’t holding water with non-advocates after all.

The Science and Technology Committee today announces an inquiry into the unauthorised publication of data, emails and documents relating to the work of the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia (UEA). The Committee has agreed to examine and invite written submissions on three questions:

—What are the implications of the disclosures for the integrity of scientific research?

—Are the terms of reference and scope of the Independent Review announced on 3 December 2009 by UEA adequate (see below)?

—How independent are the other two international data sets?

The Committee intends to hold an oral evidence session in March 2010.

Background

On 1 December 2009 Phil Willis, Chairman of the Science and Technology Committee, wrote to Professor Edward Acton, Vice-Chancellor of UEA following the considerable press coverage of the data, emails and documents relating to the work of the Climatic Research Unit (CRU). The coverage alleged that data may have been manipulated or deleted in order to produce evidence on global warming. On 3 December the UEA announced an Independent Review into the allegations to be headed by Sir Muir Russell.

The Independent Review will:

1. Examine the hacked e-mail exchanges, other relevant e-mail exchanges and any other information held at CRU to determine whether there is any evidence of the manipulation or suppression of data which is at odds with acceptable scientific practice and may therefore call into question any of the research outcomes.

The Hockey Stick Illusion

Andrew Montford (Bishop Hill) kindly provided an electronic copy of his new book the Hockey Stick Illuison.  I asked for it thinking I could grab some quotes and give the story some context.   As often in this life, I again found myself looking at a far bigger project than expected.  Andrew, as it happens, is a natural writer but beyond that he has the dogged attention to detail that a good engineer possesses.  It’s quite  a unique combination.  There are only a few people in the world that have an understanding of Steve McIntyre’s battle with the hockey stick temperature reconstructions and Andrew Montford  is clearly one of  those very few people.

Do “Adjustments” Lead to a Warming Bias?

I keep telling you guys the guest posts are great, check it out.

Guest post by Dr. Craig Loehle

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Recent news items have shown that adjustments to climate data seem to create warming trends where none exist in the raw data.  The Darwin case evaluated by Willis Eschenbach (http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/12/08/the-smoking-gun-at-darwin-zero/) shows the recent adjusted data to be tilted upwards. Willis also had another post about Karlen’s comments on IPCC data (http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/11/29/when-results-go-bad/). An analysis of 88 stations in Siberia shows a cooling trend for the raw data but a big warming after adjustments by Hadley (http://heliogenic.blogspot.com/2009/12/adjusting-siberia.html).  Data from New Zealand are adjusted by their own weather service to create strong warming where none exist in the raw data (http://www.climateconversation.wordshine.co.nz/docs/awfw/are-we-feeling-warmer-yet.htm).  In none of these cases is a rationale for adjustments publicly available. It seems implausible on its face that all corrections for inhomogeneities should lead to a warming bias, especially when the UHI effect if corrected would cool recent years rather than warm them.

I have come across a paper that may help explain how Hadley, GHCN, and GISS do their adjustments and where the warming trends come from.  The paper is:

Peterson, T.C., D.R. Easterling, T.R. Karl, P. Groisman, N. Nicholls, N. Plummer, S. Torok, I. Auer, R. Boehm, D. Gullett, L. Vincent, R. Heino, H. Tuomenvirta, O. Mestre, T. Szentimrey, J. Salinger, E.J. Førland, I. Hanssen-Bauer, H. Alexandersson, P. Jones, and D. Parker.  1998.  Homogeneity adjustments of in situ atmospheric climate data: A review. International Journal of Climatology 18:1493‑1517.

http://www3.hi.is/~jonasson/peterson.pdf

I include 2 sections of text.  4.2.2 describes what the GHCN does, and then 3.4.4 describes the method they use for detecting inhomogeneities and adjusting them.  There are other methods described in the paper which will have a similar effect, with some methods correcting slopes as well as means.

4.2.2. Global Historical Climatology Network. The Global Historical Climatology Network (GHCN; Peterson and Vose, 1997) includes data sets of both original and homogeneity-adjusted time series of mean monthly maximum, minimum, and mean temperature. Because of the paucity of available station history information for many of the 7280 GHCN temperature stations around the world, no metadata beyond latitude and longitude are used in the GHCN adjustment methodology. First a reference series for each station is made as described in Section 3.2 and Peterson and Easterling (1994) then the candidate reference series is tested using a 2-phase regression technique described in Section 3.4.4 and Easterling and Peterson (1995a,b). This determines the date and the magnitude of the adjustments.

Thank You Again Massachusetts

Only two months ago it was communist China that saved us from Commuhagen global wealth redistribution. Presented under the ruse of saving the world from a small amount of warming the policies were extremist, dangerous and very anti-business. China publicly said they wanted no limits on their economic growth and would sign nothing that required verification that they were doing as they promised. Today Massachusetts, an 80% democrat state made the same call, too much government is not good for peoples health (Some pun intended).

The peoples money

The peoples property

The peoples freedom

The peoples choice

The Peoples Seat!

Lest we forget from whence we came, how we arrived, and what was sacrificed.

—————–

In Boston on March 5, 1770, what began as a rock-throwing incident against a few British soldiers ended in the shooting of five men by British soldiers in what became known as the Boston Massacre. The incident caused further anger against British authority in the commonwealth over taxes and the presence of the British soldiers.

Long Record GHCN Analysis

Nic L has done what I think you’ll find to be a very interesting analysis of GHCN data. All of these analyses should be considered preliminary because of the huge amount of data and unusual QC issues in the data. I’ve checked his code briefly and his version of the getstation should work fine with the mod parameter set. My older version had a problem in it that resulted in it ignoring the WMO version number. There are a couple of other QC issues with the data that this getstation function doesn’t attempt to repair, but they should not affect the results.

In the meantime, It’s very interesting what Nic found. Consider that old GISS had 1934 vs 1998 ratios of 1.4 : 0.9 – Nic’s results mirror their original. Gissmatic.

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Long Record GHCN Stations – an Analysis of the Data

At Jeff’s request, I present here some findings from work I have carried out using long-record GHCN stations. I have defined these as stations with temperature data in both 1900 and 1999 and fewer than 240 months (20%) in that period with no data. The reason for looking at long record stations is primarily that one can have some confidence that trends over the last 100 years or so reflect actual changes in recorded temperature and are not affected by changes over time in the set of stations that are combined to produce an average.

The GHCN database contains temperature records from 7280 separate stations; 4495 of these are WMO stations and the remainder are non-WMO stations, whose station number includes the WMO number of the closest WMO station but also a non-zero modifier to distinguish them from that WMO station. The map below shows the location of all 7280 GHCN stations. (Please ignore the large black spot in the centre, which I have not yet figured out how to get rid of. J)

Click to expand

Although the geographical coverage of the 7280 GHCN stations is impressive, unfortunately many of them have short records, with only a minority having data before 1950 or after 1990, and fewer still having data before 1900.

Climatequote, 2009 – Final

For all the marbles!

.

After about 1750 votes in the first round, the competition was stiff. While James Hansen could be declared the winner for taking 29% of the vote across his many entries, we’re going to 50% and Dr. Gavin Schmidt jumped in with a stunning last minute entry from Real Climate. While the quote is slightly out of context, it nevertheless demonstrates the mindset of climatology and has earned the wrath of the readers.

It seems, Gavin just couldn’t let Hansen take all the marbles without any competition. From Climategate, we learned that if nothing else these guys are a competitive bunch. Think about how everything was tied up for Hansen as he threw one crazy quote after another all year, Gavin sneakily hides in the background waiting for a carefully chosen end of year moment to jump in and take a run at the trophy. Originally I was thinking there might be 3 quotes in this round, but these two fierce competitors stood out well in front of the pack.

History and verification of these quotes can be found at the link in the headerbar above or at the links below,

Dr Schmidt

Dr. Hansen

With out further ado, let’s take our lead from these powerful and brilliant men. It’s time for the final runoff vote for most extreme climate quote of 2009!!

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GHCN, Sorting a box of sox

So I’ve been trying to do a little more QC with the GHCN data. The problem with the raw data is that a single station ID has multiple curves and very little explanation as to what causes the differences. All of the following curves were taken from the same instrument. Yes they have different data, yes they have odd steps compared to each other and unfortunately careful examination reveals that the data is a mess.

If you take the anomaly of this data and then average the trend has substantially less slope than if you first average then take the anomaly. Since these are the same data, it makes sense to take the anomaly after averaging. If you have different datasets, it makes sense to take the anomaly before averaging.

1934 – 1998 Gissmatic

Lucy Skywalker put an interesting link in the thread of the new just released GISS emails.  While not as dramatic, there are interesting details in these as well.  The GISS adjustments are highly questionable on their basis in my opinion but not necessarily wrong out of hand.  They do go in the direction we have come to expect.  In this case though, you can see the dramatic progress toward shifting the 1934 temperatures downward.  When you consider that 1934 was at one time .5 C higher than 1998 and over the years was repressed until they were equal – this is for the US only 2% of global area.  Currently the global trend over that time is about 0.5C.

Here is a plot of this climategissgate email from the Virtual Philosopy club linked above.

Climategate: The CRUtape Letters

Michael Mann’s stimulus money nearly wrecked my whole night. This though makes it a bit better. Steve Mosher and Tom Fuller have completed the first book and most complete accounting of climategate emails to date. They put huge effort into it and delve into considerable detail as to the meaning and context of these emails.

This book has very little to do with the Air Vent and there is no compensation to me – in case you were wondering.

PREFACE
In late 2009, over 1,000 emails, attachments and files containing computer code were posted on
an anonymous internet site. A few weblogs that focused on global warming received comments
alerting them to the existence of these files. News of their existence quickly spread, and
thousands of people downloaded the documents. This is the story of this event.

Mann Receives Over a Half Million of Stimulus Money

Michael Mann got paid $541,184 usd in F.ING stimulus money to make a multivariate mash of proxy, temp and model data.

You Asked for More Emails Right?

Judicial watch has received by FOI, emails from the team regarding Steve McIntyre’s location of the error in the GISS data.

SST Anomaly Video

Back to science.

I saw this post the other day.  Recently I’ve added Bob Tisdale to the blogroll basically because I got tired of having to find his blog another way.  TAV does the worst job of maintaining a blogroll of any of the blogs and I need to spend more time on it b/c there are a lot of good climate science blogs not on the list. Anyway, Bob has done a very nice post containing a video of sea surface temperatures.  There are some interesting features in the video, including a huge push of warm water into the Arctic during the 07 ice minimum.  I’ve reposted with permission from Bob below who will stop by for those who have questions.

—————

Guest post Bob Tisdale.

Tuesday, January 12, 2010

Animation Of Weekly Global SST Anomaly Maps – November 1, 1981 To January 6, 2010

My Problem With the Scientists

Warning, political opinion from a grumpy conservative tired of being run over:

Kevin Treberth has recently made a post complaining about how his ‘travesty we can’t explain cooling’ comment was out of context. First, I find his explanations lacking because it’s not very difficult to see his context and backpedaling in the emails he’s complaining about, Kevin is one who may have worked with Jones to keep Micheals and McKitrick out of an IPCC report in which they were chapter heads. In a brilliant move of sophistry, they misdirected the argument to McIntyre McKitrick but that was not likely the paper being discussed in this quote from 1089318616.txt

I can’t see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep
them out somehow – even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is !

The point is that Kevin is not one of the good guys, he does believe in what he’s doing is for the good of us all though. As is the case with far too many liberal minded, they are happy to force their incorrect views on us no matter the result. The article:

Two Sundays in a row ill-informed columns about carbon dioxide and climate have appeared in the Camera. The first by Bob Greenlee (Jan. 3) and the second by Charlie Danaher (Jan. 10). Both misrepresent me and my work, and in particular, quote from one of my e-mails that was illegally stolen: “The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t.”

The quote has been taken out of context. It relates to our ability to track energy flow through the climate system. We can do this very well from 1992 to 2003, when large warming occurred, but not from 2004 to 2008. The quote refers to our observation system which is inadequate to observe Earth’s energy flows at the accuracy needed to understand small fluctuations in climate; it does not mean there is no global warming, as is often interpreted by the likes of Danaher. What is does mean is that our observing system is not adequate to fully track the energy in ways that allow us to understand and make best statements about the effects of natural climate variability: the La Niña of 2007-2008, and the current El Niño, for instance.

It is absolutely certain that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas and produces warming, despite Danaher’s wishes. Without carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, Earth’s surface would be some 32 degrees Fahrenheit colder than it is now. Increased carbon dioxide will increase this warming effect, and both theory and observations are consistent with this fact. The evidence of this happening is widespread and abundant, so that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 2007 was able to state with unanimous agreement from all of over 100 countries that global warming is unequivocal. But global warming does not stop weather from happening, and cold outbreaks continue and are fully expected. It does not stop winter. And it does not stop La Niña from happening and setting up unusually cold regional patterns of weather across the United States and other parts of the world that last a year or two.

To misunderstand the role of weather and natural climate variability the way it is being done is to undermine much-needed actions in limiting carbon dioxide emissions. Global warming is happening. It will continue to happen and the way we are going it will jeopardize the very nature of climate on planet Earth some decades from now. Because of the long lifetime of carbon dioxide, by the time it is so obvious to everyone, it will be far too late to do anything about it.

Americans should be outraged that the Chinese are putting huge amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, and changing our climate! But by the same token, the Chinese should be outraged that the United States is putting nearly as much into the atmosphere, and historically a whole lot more than any other country, and changing their climate. We try to outdo each other in mutual self-destruction!

Putting a price on carbon dioxide emissions is an essential first step to responsible management of our planet. The United States needs to show leadership on this critical environmental issue.

Kevin Trenberth is the Head of the Climate Analysis Section at NCAR, and has been a leader in the IPCC, which received the Nobel Peace Prize for its work in 2007. See cgd.ucar.edu/cas/trenbert.html. E-mail: trenbert@ucar.edu.

So now that Kevin has had his say, and his pathetic defense of his email which was quite correctly understood in many comments. In fact, try this.  For his defense of ‘energy’ substitute ‘heat’ for every instance and you’ll see the context I’ve read it discussed in, is correct. However, I would like to address only the last item in his post, how it relates to the final outcome on CO2 production and the basic wrongthink so prevalent in the left headed.