How US Temperatures Trends Have Been Artificially Increased Since 2007 – (And It’s Not TOBS!)
By Paul Homewood
In 2007, the US temperature trend, according to GISS, was this:
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/2007/
On 5-year means, the recent peak from 1998-2002 was just a tad higher than the 1930’s peak (1930-34).
Now let’s fast forward to the latest version, and we see that 1998-2002 peak is now considerably higher than it was shown as in 2007.
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs_v3/
GISS conveniently provide the tabular data for the current graph (though they don’t seem to like archiving earlier versions!) The 5-year means now appear as:
| Degree C | |
| 1930-1934 | 0.587 |
| 1998-2002 | 0.947 |
| Difference | 0.360 |
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs_v3/Fig.D.txt
Eyeballing the 2007 version, it looks as if the latest peak was around 0.15C higher than in the 1930’s, so we seem to have had something like 0.2C of warming added, and all just since the 2007 version was calculated.
At this stage, I must point out that this difference has absolutely nothing to do with TOBS adjustments, or any other of the excuses usually wheeled out by the usual suspects.
Since 2001, the GISS analysis has used the USHCN data, adjusted for TOBS, etc. This was made clear in the Hansen et al paper in 2001:
Changes in the GISS analysis subsequent to the documentation by Hansen et al. [1999] are as follows:
(1) incorporation of corrections for time-of-observation bias and station history adjustments in the United States based on Easterling et al.
The effect of these adjustments can be seen from the graph below of the raw and adjusted data, as shown in Hansen et al.
http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/abs/ha02300a.html
Before adjustments, the 1930’s peak was about 0.4C higher, but this difference was adjusted away to virtually nothing.
To make matters worse, the current NCDC version of US temperatures adds another 0.08C to the current GISS version:
| GISS | NCDC | |
| 1930-1934 | 0.587 | 11.59 |
| 1998-2002 | 0.947 | 12.03 |
| Difference | 0.36 | 0.44 |
Even if the TOBS and other adjustments are correct, NCDC are adding something like an extra 0.3C of warming to the US temperature record. Take that away, and current temperatures are no higher than the 1930’s.
Comments are closed.
NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
I doubt even an accuracy of <0.3K of results between 1930 and today.
The problem lies in the calibration procedures. Only after the 1950 did people start realizing that thermometers need to be re-calibrated at regular intervals.
Show me a re-calibration certificate of a thermometer before 1948?
Despite of this, you could still look at results before 1950, provided you look at the [average] rate of change.
What happened before 1930 is anyone's guess, as in that time even thermometers were not accurate to 0.1 degree K.
USHCN stations still only report the the nearest degree – 0.1F of accuracy is irrelevant
Hence the reason why I say that the 0.3K difference reported is irrelevant in itself and a large portion of it could be simply due the inaccuracy of thermometers used.
Apart from the difference in accuracy between thermometers then and thermo-couples today, there is another big problem. Before 1950s we had people in stations observing temperatures 4 x per 24 hours – if they were not sick or absent or on leave – and taking an average for the day. Now, we have the recorders (computers) who take a measurement every second and report the average (no fail).
1) there is a difference between 4 x day and 86400 x day
2) there is between human absence (not 100%) and computer presence (very near 100%)
On top of that you also have the “Sensitivity Bias” in the electronic version which can be far greater than TOBS errors plus no proper adjustment for UHI.
They adjust the hell out of the past and do nothing to fix the errors in the current data.
But it all fits the CO2 induced AGW theme, so nothing will be done about it.
I rather like th graph of historical temperatures posted by someone over at Real Science.
It’s scale is based on the scale of a Mercury/Alcohol Thermometer, the graph is a straight line, even better would be to use 2.7 – 350 degrees Kelvin.
AC Osborn says
the graph is a straight line,
Henry says
I am interested in seeing that graph?
Sorry, it is not Real Science it is WUWT, it is here http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/03/18/global-temperature-report-february-2015/
Latitude
March 18, 2015 at 2:55 pm
I hope he doesn’t mind me copying it.
ehhhh
(I am laughing)
scale says everything
or nothing….
my wife also laughs at me when I speak of cooling evident of about 0.2K since 2000,
when the difference in temperature between rooms in our house is much more, at any time….
“The algorithm is working as designed.”
Ah, the Lance Armstrong defence “I’ve never tested positive”.
Or as Mandy Rice-Davis would have said “They would say that wouldn’t they”.
I would be very interested to see a network diagram illustrating the connections between senior officials at the various government climate organisations around the world and big Green. I’d imagine that it is a fairly small cabal, surrounded by their minions, that keeps the scam going.
+1 to that.
At least in Europe it is a huge movement – with many facets. For example, there are dozens or perhaps hundreds of PhD’s being awarded that are related to “climate change”. All those people, having spent some years of their life on their projects, are probably hooked for life. And there are departments of environmental science as well as other academic departments that have piled on the bandwagon. Not to mention a broad miscellany of activist groups, journalists who have decided to champion the cause, etc. This thing really is hydra-headed; while relatively small number of people may have initiated it, that’s not the case now.
Looks like “There are lies, damned lies and homogenised data”. The layman is being totally fooled by academics and politicians abusing dubious information for their own purposes; but unfortunately is not being told that the “proven science” is not even science.
Reblogged this on Real Science.
No, it’s not TOBS, but Tony Heller has much of the answer, IMO. The deletion of rural stations, and the adjustment of remaining rural to coincide with urban measurements.
UHI is by far and away the largest influence on thermometer temperatures, yet it scores a miniscule adjustment from the keepers of the record.
Combine a large (and increasing) UHI-effect with a reduction in non-urban stations, and a consequent “assumption” that these non-UHI-affected stations should be adjusted to match their city comparators, and you have a recipe for warming.
If you’d planned the outcome before the experiment, you truly couldn’t do much worse that this.
@Auto
there is an interesting aspect that I noted when taking my samples of weather stations to evaluate global warming/cooling.
In Las Vegas, I found minimum temperatures rising, for the past 40 years, exactly what you would expect according to AGW theory.
However, I also picked up a place where minima were falling, quite dramatically over the past 40 years; namely in Tandil, Argentina, where they cut the trees, big time.
What was the lesson learned?
More vegetation traps heat. Less vegetation loses heat.
There has been increasing evidence that earth has been getting greener over the past 40 years, which may explain a slight rising tendency, especially noticeably in the NH. Again, this warming is NOT due to AGW. Unless you were to argue that men wanting more trees, lawns, crops, etc. is still AGW?
Anyway, more greening is not bad, even if it does cause more warming!
How much of Vegas minima rising was due to UHI?
I am sceptical about UHI. I don’t think the effect is relevant. In Las Vegas a whole desert was changed in a green patch, complete with trees, imported grown from other places. I don’t know where they got the water from but the transport of that water needed must be substantial ( similar to Johannesburg here, which also has no natural rivers)
Men are making the earth greener. What more can I say?
My various results support the notion that greening traps heat.
I am sceptical about UHI. I don’t think the effect is relevant.
You shouldn’t be. Not only is it common sense, it’s easily tested:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2008/10/29/uhi-is-real-in-reno-at-least/
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/10/10/measuring-uhi-on-a-bike-produces-a-new-paper/
When all is said and done the only true temperature data is the raw temperature data. Everything else is just figures.
Some of them are utter nonsense, a few of them are sensible but they are NOT data they are just figures.
To misquote Mark Twain –
There is something fascinating about climate science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of data adjustments.
I agree 100%.
Adjusted data is not data at all.
How many people in the world would be alarmed by a headline that reads:
” After Adjusting Past Temperature Records Downwards So Many Times That No One Really Knows What The Temperature Was In The Past, Climate Scientists Declare That 2014 Was The Hottest Year Ever By 1/100th Of One Degree”.
While that’s technically true, not all data is equal. There are valid reasons for assuming that some measurements are suspect. However, the best thing to do with those suspect measurements is to throw them out and only rely on the least contaminated data.
However, that wouldn’t support the current narrative.
100% wrong!
All actual measurement data MUST be retained. The throwing of original data is a crime against science. It is your only real data! How does anyone know what will be useful in the future. How do you know that suspect measurements are not signals that have yet to be discovered with relevance yet to be known?
Annotate the original by all means but NEVER contaminate measured data with the narrow views of today academics. That is not science, that is blinkered advocacy engineering.
In true science all measured data is equal, unless you are a clairvoyant.
The altering and throwing of original measurement data is why ‘climate science’ has stopped being a ‘hard’ science like chemistry or physics and has become a ‘soft’ science like social science.
Old data has to be left as it is. One can engage in all kinds of discussions as to how it might have been measured differently or under different conditions or how it should be considered differently but to modify it is fraud. If a later data set is created using different equipment then show the two as different lines on the graph and leave the original data (with its trends) as they are. In many ways, it is the trends that we are interested in.
Adjustments also include wrong way values
From the Climategate emails # – 2328
date: Wed, 3 Jun 2009 15:07:25 +010 ???
from: “Parker, David”
subject: RE: Tom’s thoughts on urban errors …
Everybody wants to add an estimate of what UHI bias might be into their error bars, but it seems to me that rather than trust folk lore that there is a uhi bias, they first need to find one systematically in the network. Until they do that, the former is just hand waving to appease the know-littles. Jim Hansen adjusts his urban stations (based on night-lights) to nearby rural stations, but if I recall correctly (I’ll send that paper shortly), he warms the trend in 42 percent of the urban stations indicating that nearly half have an urban cold bias. Yet error analyzers want to add a one sided extra error bar for uhi…..
Regards,
Tom
http://www.ecowho.com/foia.php?file=1057.txt&search=Hansen+adjust
Bold in the original.
What they say.
Climate Etc. – Understanding adjustments to temperature data
by Zeke Hausfather All of these changes introduce (non-random) systemic biases into the network. For example, MMTS sensors tend to read maximum daily temperatures about 0.5 C colder than LiG thermometers at the same location.
http://judithcurry.com/2014/07/07/understanding-adjustments-to-temperature-data/
What He measured
Interviewed was meteorologist Klaus Hager. He was active in meteorology for 44 years and now has been a lecturer at the University of Augsburg almost 10 years. He is considered an expert in weather instrumentation and measurement. One reason for the perceived warming, Hager says, is traced back to a change in measurement instrumentation. He says glass thermometers were was replaced by much more sensitive electronic instruments in 1995. Hager tells the SZ ” For eight years I conducted parallel measurements at Lechfeld. The result was that compared to the glass thermometers, the electronic thermometers showed on average a temperature that was 0.9°C warmer. Thus we are comparing – even though we are measuring the temperature here – apples and oranges. No one is told that.” Hager confirms to the AZ that the higher temperatures are indeed an artifact of the new instruments.
http://notrickszone.com/2015/01/12/university-of-augsburg-44-year-veteran-meteorologist-calls-climate-protection-ridiculous-a-deception/
Or just put in any number you like.
Monthly temperatures which are marked with an “E” are “estimated” rather than measured. More than half of the current data for 2015 is fake.
https://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2015/02/26/ncdc-hits-new-milestones-of-fake-data/
And of course forget your own reporting.
(1) The Climate of 1997 – Annual Global Temperature Index = 16.92°C.
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/global/1997/13
(2) 2014 annual global land and ocean surfaces temperature = 0.69°C above 13.9°C = 14.59°C
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/global/2014/13
Which number do you think NCDC/NOAA thinks is the record high. Failure at 3rd grade math or failure to scrub all the past. (See the ‘Ministry of Truth’ 1984).
Here is 1981 NH NASA compared to 1999….
The past continues to change, often .01 degree at a time.
And here is proof that it is still happening, changing the deep past, no reason given, it just keeps happening.01 degrees at a time, month after month, as this Bill Illis comment demonstrates…
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/03/06/can-adjustments-right-a-wrong/#comment-1877173
“Here are the changes made to GISS temperatures on just one day this February. Yellow is the new temperature assumption and strikeout is the previous number. Almost every single monthly temperature record from 1880 to 1950 was adjusted down by 0.01C.
I mean every freaking month is history suddenly got 0.01C colder. What the heck changed that made the records in 1880 0.01C colder.”
Bill continues….”GISS’ data comes from the NCDC so the NCDC carried out the same adjustments. They have been doing this every month since about 1999. So 16 years times 12 months/year times -0.01C of adjustments each month equals -1.92C of fake adjustments.
Lots of opportunity to create a fake warming signal. In fact, by now it is clear that 1880 was so cold that all of the crops failed and all of the animals froze and all of the human race starved to death or froze to death and we went extinct. 135 years ago today”
To verify for yourself what Bill posted, go here….http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/03/06/can-adjustments-right-a-wrong/#comment-1877500
The Baseline has changed. All baselines continue to change. The surface record at this point is nothing more then FUBAR
but,…looking at the rate of change at each weather station cancels any absolute errors concerning accuracy of instruments and variance in observation and it shows you exactly what is happening.
so don’t worry about all those idiots trying to change history
the past 40 years are telling the whole story
1) there is no AGW – otherwise there would be chaos in the curvature
2) we are cooling down.
Anto says
You [Henry] shouldn’t be [skeptical of UHI]. Not only is it common sense, it’s easily tested:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2008/10/29/uhi-is-real-in-reno-at-least/
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/10/10/measuring-uhi-on-a-bike-produces-a-new-paper/
Henry says
In the above examples, I don’t see any reported results for UHI>?
Did you see my comment here:
https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2015/03/19/how-us-temperatures-trends-have-been-artificially-increased-since-2007-and-its-not-tobs/#comment-39984
Other examples: Dublin airport shows cooling at a rate of y -0.0164K/annum since 1990 and -0.0227K/annum since 2000.
Eelde a/p (near Groningen in the Netherlands) shows warming from 1990 of 0.0166K/annum and then cooling of -0.0573K/annum since 2000.
Both places experienced big growth, both in numbers of population and in energy- and CO2 output. \
Where is the UHI either in Eire or in the Netherlands??
I am assuming the weather (wind) took it?
Did I stun you all into a silence?
Best wishes,
Henry
Can someone explain why we should even see long-term atmospheric temperature trends? If you calculate the enthalpy of evaporating/condensing water, you can easily show that there is enough energy to annually cool or heat the earth’s atmosphere 3000 degrees C.. Any atmospheric warming is completely washed out and balanced by the hydrology cycle. Anything like a fraction of degree is noise.
Jim, the 87 and 210 year solar/weather cycles can be picked by looking at various variables, one of which is reported here:
http://www.nonlin-processes-geophys.net/17/585/2010/npg-17-585-2010.html
Here is another one:
Click to access CICLO_SOLAR_PeristykhDamon03-Gleissbergin14C.pdf
In fact I have challenged Paul to publish some older papers not supported by today’s technology that give numerous examples of a 80-100 year cycle.
If all of this were not enough, I picked up on it myself, by looking at the rate of change as reported here, just above you:
https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2015/03/19/how-us-temperatures-trends-have-been-artificially-increased-since-2007-and-its-not-tobs/#comment-40036
Indeed it shows that minma have fallen 0.009 x 15 = -0.14K since 2000.
indeed [my assumption is that the] the climate reacts by condensing more at the lower latitudes and less at the higher latitudes.More clouds around the equator means less energy coming in, so the cooling cycle is enhanced.
I tested this theory by looking at the temperatures in Alaska:
You can see clearly that temps. have gone down:
Here I measured -0.055K/annum since 1998. That is almost -1K down since 2000.
Note this observation:
Clearly, you can guess that [hopefully] the curve must be turning up soon (A-C wave) as otherwise we are going to freeze up….
So, to answer your question: we must not underestimate the dangers from entering the cooling phase of the Gleisberg. Clearly, less energy will be coming in, as the sun is getting brighter (fewer spots)
The Dust Bowl drought 1932-1939 was one of the worst environmental disasters of the Twentieth Century anywhere in the world. Three million people left their farms on the Great Plains during the drought and half a million migrated to other states, almost all to the West. http://www.ldeo.columbia.edu/res/div/ocp/drought/dust_storms.shtml
I find that as we are moving back, up, from the deep end of the 88 year sine wave, there will be standstill in the change of the speed of cooling, neither accelerating nor decelerating, on the bottom of the wave; therefore naturally, there will also be a lull in pressure difference at that > [40 latitude], where the Dust Bowl drought took place, meaning: less weather (read: rain). However, one would apparently note this from an earlier change in direction of wind, as was the case in Joseph’s time. According to my calculations, this will start around 2020 or 2021…..i.e. 1927=2016 (projected, by myself and the planets…)> add 5 years and we are in 2021.
Danger from global cooling is documented and provable. It looks we have only ca. 7 “fat” years left……
WHAT MUST WE DO?
We urgently need to develop and encourage more agriculture at lower latitudes, like in Africa and/or South America. This is where we can expect to find warmth and more rain during a global cooling period.
We need to warn the farmers living at the higher latitudes (>40) who already suffered poor crops due to the droughts that things are not going to get better there for the next few decades. It will only get worse as time goes by.
We also have to provide more protection against more precipitation at certain places of lower latitudes (FLOODS!), <[30] latitude, especially around the equator.