Sunday
Aug112013
by 
Bishop Hill
Bishop Hill NASA rewrites the past
Aug 11, 2013 Climate: Surface Lord Deben just asked me on Twitter why he should trust me and not official versions of "the science". I gave him a raft of reasons, but then came across this posting on Unthreaded from Brent Hargreaves:
GISS record of temperature at Teigarhorn, Iceland:
Feb 1901: 0.0C - reported Nov 2011
Feb 1901: -0.9C - reported Mar 2012
Feb 1901: -1.2C - reported Aug 2013
Brent has a full post about what he has found here, but for me his findings seem like a pretty good reason to distrust the official tale.
Reader Comments (76)
Just to clarify one point above (Aug 11, 2013 at 10:32 PM, Paul Matthews) - in this case the shifting adjustments are the work of NOAA/NCDC alone. As GISS treats Teigarhorn as a rural station no further adjustment is added by GISS.
Whether GISS should accept such shifting data as input with apparent equanimity is another question altogether.
"Lord Debden" - or John Selywn Gummer as he was known back in the day, was quick enough to reject "peer reviewed science" when it came to the CJD --> BSE link in the 90s during the "mad cow" scare.
In fact Gummer "denied" the link so strongly, and any possible risks that he dared to carry out a photo-op of himself and his daughter eating a British beefburger.
Cooling the past blurs the abrupt hockey stick blade that pegs CO2 as a recent unprecedented culprit.
Read The Chiefio's blog. He has shown that global warming started in Africa and was alphabetic as GISS, NOAA and CRU systematically altered past temperature data.
We need a Royal Commission to identify who lied and to bar them from working in publicly funded jobs in perpetuity, and that means up to head of department. Also we need to remove pensions from the retired.
Ah, John "drittsekk" Gummer, is it?
3. The iceland met office set up a blog to comment on this, giving links to all the raw data.
Aug 11, 2013 at 10:32 PM Paul Matthews
As for the original data for Iceland, I have them already.
If anyone is interested, just log on.
Aug 11, 2013 at 9:34 PM Paul Homewood
Paul M, Paul H:
Any chance you could give the precise URL in each case? I looked but it was not clear where to find the Iceland MO blog nor where to find the original data on Paul H's blog.
This is a good summary of how GISS massages the temperature data.
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/gistemp/
I guess it depends, actually, on exactly which hockey stick you want to address, as my old graphic of the Grand Canyon record reminded me:
http://i46.tinypic.com/t63qxe.jpg
Martin, last night from my phone I didn't have access to all the links.
Iceland Met Office blog with links to original raw data
My summary of some of the issues, with links to several of Paul Homewood's posts.
GHCN site where you can see original and adjusted data. Click on any of the numbers starting 620 for Iceland. 62004030000 is Reykjavik, 62004092000 is Teigarhorn. Top right red graph is raw data, middle right orange graph is adjusted, bottom right show the adjustment.
Paul Matthews's (link above) data shows how Alice Springs has had the Pastal Cooling treatment. It isn't only in the Arctic that there's a 'thumb on the scales'.
Yes, I know that's a lousy label. Can we come up with a better one? The Global Warming industry is highly skilled at devising these slick phrases, e.g. Tipping Point, Carbon Footprint, Renewable Energy. In each case one could write a little essay about what the two words mean, only to find that you were using a bunch of fallacies to do so. In a way you have to admire the malign deceptive brilliance of such wordcraft.
Can we do better than "Pastal Cooling", to launch this meme into the culture, to get media traction? Six syllables max, preferably four. Ideas, please!
"Who controls the present, controls the past. Who controls the past, controls the future."
1984 It is not considered a warning, so much as an instruction manual.
Ross McKitrick its a good point and one the AGW proponents never want to talk about , like the infamous 97% claim , once you start to look at this claim you see how very poor are its foundations.
Much smaller adjustment here in the tropics where there has been little increase in the last 100 years Port Moresby. 1903 - 1996 (don't know what has happened to the last 16 years since Global Warming apparently stopped).
Figures are only avaiable to 1996
Start off with hide the warming:
1903 - 1919 -0,2 consistently for every monthly record
1920-1931 -0.1 consistently for every monthly record
1932 - 1939 -0.4 consistently for every monthly record
1940 - 1969 random occassional up and down adjustments with minor effects
Then hide the cooling:
1970 - 1982 +0.1 consistently for every monhly record
Then exagerate the warming a little bit.
1983+ Sprinkle a few random numbers in monthly figures with little effect)
Result:
V2 linear trend: y = 0.0023x + 26.817
V3 linear trend y = 0.0062x + 26.578
i.e, almost trebled the rate of warming 1903 - 1996. From 0.23° C to 0.62° C per Century.
The temperature record is since long being heavily tampered with. Here are some other links showing this:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/Print/2008/06/05/goddard_nasa_thermometer/
Global warming is indeed human made, and some people contribute much more then the others through painting the numbers:
http://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2011/02/15/data-corruption-at-giss/
http://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2012/01/25/how-giss-has-totally-corrupted-reykjaviks-temperatures/
http://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2012/01/23/noaa-dont-believe-the-iceland-met-office/
http://notrickszone.com/2012/03/01/data-tamperin-giss-caught-red-handed-manipulaing-data-to-produce-arctic-climate-history-revision/
and not only in the arctic - you can see here a data capture about australia, alice springs:
http://professorinajatuksia.blogspot.co.uk/2012/03/ilmastonmuutos-ja-ilmastotilastojen.html
This is why in my view the surface temperature dataset have absolutely no scietifical value, it is a huge effort wasted for science, valid only for activists, documenting only the interpretation through models of some historical values, adjusted based on models that fail the test of reality.
I have previously setup and run a series of scripts to recalculate the monthly means and anomalies data from GHCN V2. This was to reproduce the anomaly trend with time plot whereby about 0.25 degC is systematically added to GHCN from about 1910 to late 1980's.
I currently have saved versions of GHCN V2 from downloads that I made in June 2007 and December 2009. I went to the ftp site ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/ghcn/v2/ but this seems to be an incomplete set of GHCN V2 as much of the temperature data is missing, there only seems to be a full set of the precipitation data. The only temperature file there seems to be v2.max, there is no v2.min, mean adjusted and so forth. Anyone know where the complete set can be found?
If I can find the time, I might be able to rerun the calculation of the total monthly adjustments again, for each of the three date versions (if I can get the last version of GHCN V2) and compare them to see if there is a systematic change in the adjustments.
The Austrian Met Office (Zamg) is doing the same with the historical record in the Alps. They call it homogenisation, which is an euphemism for 'cooling the past'. Here is an example from Obergurgl, a village at over 1900m in the Austrian Alps: http://imageshack.us/a/img822/4262/pt0q.png
The met station is at 46.866769N,11.024619E, at the university center. Now the station is surrounded by a parking lot, whith much more activity than 20 years ago, but that does not seem to affect the "homogenisation" process
I should add that the raw data comes directly from the met station records through trusted contacts and the homogenised data from the Zamg: http://www.zamg.ac.at/histalp/
As others have said, it is not just Iceland where GCHN and GISS has been cooling the past. A couple of years ago I had a look at raw verses adjusted data for a number of North Atlantic stations and found some very dubious adjustments for Lerwick (Shetland). Irrc Dublin Airport also had some 'past-cooling' adjustments which made little sense considering it is a prime candidate for UHI. I concluded there's little which can be considered as trustworthy in climate science, and it is difficult to rule out fraud.
Temperatures in Iceland - as originally published (Iceland Met Office)
Martin A: Well found!
I can't access the link you provided at the moment. Could you pluck out the Teigarhorn temperature at Feb 1901?
As for some new snappy terminology, how about 'fridged'? As in, 'the Teigarhorn results have been fridged...'
Or something very similar ;-)
http://icelandweather.blog.is/users/a5/icelandweather/files/original_pub_temperature_values.txt
675;1901;1.6;-0.3;0.0;0.3;6.9;8.4;9.9;9.0;8.8;3.6;1.4;-1.1;4.0;1;2
675 14.345 64.676 23 Teigarhorn
So Feb 1901 -0.3C
I'm still confused. This page, also linked from the same blog (13/3/2012 post)
http://www.vedur.is/Medaltalstoflur-txt/Teigarhorn.txt
gives the 1901 data as
675 1901 1.8 -0.2 0.0 0.1 6.1 7.6 8.9 8.4 9.0 3.9 1.7 -1.0
which doesnt fit with the numbers given by Tiny from the other file.
Then there's the 'raw' GHCN data from their ftp site which is (in hundredths of a degree)
160 0 90 90 770 980 1120 1010 930 380 180 -80
which is different again!
One other amusing little point. If you look at the GISS graph or data, or at the GHCN graphic for Teigarhorn, you will see that the data is missing for the whole of the 1980s. How careless of the Icelanders to forget to measure the temperature for a whole decade. Except that they didn't - it's all there in the iceland Met Office file. It must have got lost somewhere on the way to the GHCN filing system.
So much easier to make invisible step changes if you cut sections out. They are adding back in stations with modern data because the can't go on arguing the stations are flawed. The great station decline of the 80s may be being reversed.
What is the stated reasons and methods for such adjustments?
And why would anyone trust the 'burgermeister'..?