Is Hayhoe Wrong, Or NOAA?
By Paul Homewood
Just returning to Katharine Hayhoe’s Northeast Climate Impacts Assessment, that I posted on the other day, David noted that, whereas the Assessment, published in 2007, stated that mean temperatures between 1970 and 2006 had been rising at 0.5F/decade, the latest trend is 0.6F. This is borne out by NOAA’s graph.
However, we should not run away with the idea that the Northeast climate is warming faster than before. The increase in warming trend is simply the effect of NOAA’s temperature adjustments, that were only introduced to these regional and individual state series a few months ago.
NOAA themselves provide this useful little toolkit, which graphs the adjustments their new system has been making to the numbers offered as recently as last year. For the Northeast there is this:
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/temp-and-precip/divisional-comparison/
Since 1970, the past has been cooled by about half a degree fahrenheit, thus easily accounting for the extra 0.1F/decade of “extra warming” now reported by NOAA.
The only thing I would add to this is this. If it was so obvious that the historic temperatures were so far wrong, then surely Hayhoe and her accomplices would have detected this and adjusted their figures accordingly. As we know, they did no such thing and simply accepted the original figures as reported.
We are left with two conclusions.
1) Either Hayhoe is utterly incompetent.
2) Or, the adjustments bear little resemblance to reality.
Either way, this whole saga leaves a very poor impression of the state of climate science today. Would other fields of science accept such shoddiness? I suspect not.
Comments are closed.
NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
I take one and two as facts in this discussion of NOAA and Kathrine.
Sorry, Paul, I can not see why your two conclusions must be mutually exclusive.
Agreed. I could be both.
If only I could type…..Agreed, it could be both.
You must be Beside yourself…
Well, Hayhoe was pretty far off in her appearance in “Years of living Dangerously,” in her presentation about the weather and climate change in Plainview, TX.
Plainview Texas NASA temp record: http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/show_station.cgi?id=425004170790&dt=1&ds=14.
Texas – NOAA precipitation record: http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cag/time-series/us/41/00/pcp/ytd/12/1895-2014?base_prd=true&firstbaseyear=1901&lastbaseyear=2000&trend=true&trend_base=10&firsttrendyear=1895&lasttrendyear=2013
This would be just the latest in a series of adjustments made, all of which, strangely enough, help to increase the trend.
Your work along with Steven Goddard, Joanne Nova and Jennifer Marohasy, in exposing the blatant tampering with data is paying dividends. It is exposing their own hypocrisy and incompetence in their proclamations of doom.
Eventually, we will be setting record highs in the past during the second coming of the LIA, and freezing to death in record heat of today.
“We are left with two conclusions.
1) Either Hayhoe is utterly incompetent.
2) Or, the adjustments bear little resemblance to reality.”
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Not an ‘either or’ question. The report’s authors weren’t tasked with interrogating the accuracy of the temperature data. That requires specialised homogenisation techniques. They were tasked to work with what was ‘then’ the best data available.
We can’t say that the homogenised data is unrealistic. An algorithm appears to have detected a diminishing warm bias in the Northeast data throughout the 70s, 80s and 90s; possibly a failure to fully account for UHI or similar in the earlier data?
Anyway, the effect is slight, just ~0.01C/dec on the rate between 1970-2006. Both the raw and adjusted data series show warming.
But TOBS and other adjustments were already known about and used for the national series. It was simply that NOAA had not got around to building them into the State & Regional data.
Actually I agree it is not an either/or question. Both statements are vaild!
The NOAA adjustment method used in V1 only addressed documented discontinuities. The V2 homogenization algorithm addresses both documented and undocumented discontinuities: http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/research/ushcn/#homogeneity
The authors of the 2007 report only had data with the V1 adjustments. Calling them ‘utterly incompetent’ for not using V2 adjusted data is like calling researchers in 2007 using UAH V5.2 ‘utterly incompetent’ because UAH V5.6 is slightly different; never mind that UAH V5.6 wasn’t available to them!
If there are flaws in the NOAA method, then no doubt these will be corrected via the normal process. The method is plainly laid out in the peer reviewed literature. We’re still awaiting a peer reviewed rebuttal to it; notwithstanding various suggestions to the contrary (and claims of ‘work in progress’ that never seem to quite materialise).
But she did not even incorporate V1 adj.