GISS Adjustments Since 2008

By Paul Homewood 

  

Following the pause busting adjustments made by RSS, we need to keep in mind how GISS have been up to the same tricks for years.

Last year, of course, they instituted the same massive set of adjustments that NOAA had done, following Thomas Karl’s efforts. However, although these were by far the largest ones, in recent years other adjustments had been made, gradually cooling the past and warming the present.

One of the problems in trying to keep track is that, unlike RSS, they don’t archive old data. Also, because they only report anomalies, it is impossibly to identify which years have been adjusted in absolute terms.

Fortunately, bloggers have been archiving their own GISS records, and we also have the Wayback Machine, so we can piece together some of the recent alterations.

 

First, let’s take the GISS LOTI dataset produced for April 2008, as archived by Climate4You here, and compare with the current version here.

 

 

We see in the latest version that the past has been cooled, particularly the 1930s, and recent decades warmed.  

 

But let’s now take a closer look at the recent period since 1998.  

We have the pre-Karlised version from February 2015 archived in the Wayback Machine here.

If we compare this with the latest Karlised version, an extra 0.05C has been added to 2014 anomalies, when compared with 1998. The actual anomalies are shown in Appendix A, but, as an example, in the old version 2014 was 0.06C warmer than 1998, but in the new 0.11C warmer – in other words an extra 0.05C.  

 

 

   However, the Feb 2015 version had itself been adjusted in comparison with the 2008 one. We can see below that by 2007 an extra 0.01C was being added on, relative to 1998.

 

 

 

 

These may only be small amounts, but cumulatively they gradually add up, and over such a short period of time can be quite significant. 

Also we don’t know what other changes took place prior to 2008, or what 2014 would have looked like if the 2008 methodology was still being used. 

But if we add the 0.01C adjustment. made between the 2008 to 2015 versions, to the 2014 discrepancy of 0.05C, we get a total of 0.06C. This is more than half of the claimed increase from 1998 to 2014.

 

 

  

 

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

APPENDIX A – GISS LOTI Anomalies (Hundredths of Degree C)

	Current	Version 2008	Version 2015
1998	63	57	61
1999	41	33	40
2000	42	33	40
2001	54	48	53
2002	62	56	61
2003	61	55	60
2004	54	48	51
2005	68	62	66
2006	63	54	59
2007	65	57	62
2008	53		49
2009	64		59
2010	71		66
2011	59		55
2012	62		57
2013	65		60
2014	74		67