Tuesday
Jun242014
by 
Bishop Hill
Bishop Hill Watts reasons with Goddard
Jun 24, 2014 Climate: Sceptics Climate: Surface Over at Reason magazine, Anthony Watts is very critical of "Stephen Goddard" over claims he made that US temperature records have been fiddled.
Some segments of the Internet are abuzz with the claim by climate change skeptic Steven Goddard (Tony Heller) over at his Real Science blog that NASA/NOAA have been jiggering the numbers so that they can claim that warmest years in the continental United States occurred recently, not back in the 1930s. Folks, please watch out for confirmation bias.
Via email, I asked Anthony Watts, proprietor of WattsUpWithThat, what he thinks of Goddard's claims. He responded...
Reader Comments (95)
If the facts don't fit the theory, alter the facts...
Why haggle over the meaning of the word 'fabrication'?
It seems the main issue is with the use of the word fabricated because Anthony still says the temps are skewed upwards thanks to warming bias.
Mailman
The silence of NOAA, GISS etc is deafening.
Adjusted = alter or move (something) slightly in order to achieve the desired fit, appearance, or result.
Fabricated = invent (something) in order to deceive.
Anthony Watts agrees that
nefarious = extremely wicked or villainous; iniquitous:
In order to adjust data to give what you want the last thing you do is pluck numbers out of thin air, you use numbers you've calculated to give the answer you want.
They fabricated a warming trend by adjusting the data as part of their iniquitous activities.
Are any of the USCHN stations missing or not?
I'm not sure fabricated is off the mark even if Goddards methods are simplistic -the adjustment methods are after all very simplistic too! The biggest adjustment is from the TOBS and that comes from a paper where they openly admitted they had largely guessed the adjustment curve because they didn't have sufficient raw data. Of course the adjustment is a warming bias as always! I have never yet seen any adjustment that cools any record anywhere. Even the sea surface temperatures, which were showing cooling initially, had to be adjusted - which made the whole exercise somewhat pointless. We all know that if there was a warming bias there is no way they would have bothered correcting it. Goddard also did a very good job of comparing the Giss recon from the past to the present, demonstrating an ongoing adjustment culture that seeks to progressively cool the past. That gif animation needed no stats or explanations - it neatly showed the real bias is the assumption that warming should be there even when it isn't.
I think Watts is trying to round the edges because he is closer to the vortex.
The elephant is still in the room and is still big.
Andrew
I agree that Goddard is frequently over the top, probably his intention that "Real Science" be a counter to "Real Climate", which is over the top alarmist.
That said, it is still troubling the estimated warming is increased by half because of "adjustments", even according to Watts.
The warming trend is created by the 'adjustment' process, not the actual measurements. Since the process is not very transparent and not justified I would say that arguing about semantics is irrelevant to the point being made. The 2000s were not the warmest MEASURED decade. It becomes the warmest decade after the adjustments add a warming signal to the actual data.
I see this as arguing the toss over a nuance, certain stations 'disappeared' the data has definitely been cooked and for one purpose only - by hook or by crook: to present a warming trend period.
Don't forget these guys and their ILK, they wanted to 'disappear' the Mediaeval Warming and if they thought that they could get away with it they would ditch any other 'unhelpful' T data figures.
I deem that this may be an unnecessary quibble Anthony. Though, I do know where you are coming from - realists have to be seen to do and to accord with the proper - authenticated science and its statistical methods but with this lot [NASA/NOAA] - what the reality is, God only knows and lets face it - they have history.
While Steve Goddard can be over the top at times, he has served a vital purpose in opening up the "adjustments" NCDC, GISS etc are doing to cool the past.
This is undeniable, yet most of the public would have been blissfully aware of this fact, and assumed the "honest scientists" were simply totting up the real data.
As we all know, most of these adjustments go to "cool the past", so to put it down to "not paying attention to detail" is perhaps a bit naive.
It would appear that any adjustment that increases the warming trend is welcomed with open arms by the Team, and any that might work the opposite way are swept under the carpet.
Watts has always taken a reasonable approach which is why WUWT is either highly thought of or a site to be feared.
However, I have often thought that on the subject of temperatures he is too generous.
I understand the benefits of using anomalies rather than absolute temperature readings but they also lend themselves to manipulation by tinkering with the baseline averages and those averages are made up of observations and we have plenty of evidence from NZ, Australia, Iceland and Russia that temperature records have been "adjusted" to produce a certain result.
Until now I thought it was generally accepted that the mid-30s was the warmest on record right up till 2000 until all of a sudden a graph appeared which showed that the the 30s temperatures were lower. Personally I cannot see any justification for altering a temperature reading once recorded unless it is patently evident that the figure has been mis-read or the equipment is faulty. Temperatures are what they are.
And on the same basis the process of interpolation is, to my mind, equally unacceptable. If you don't have a figure then you don't have a figure. Building up a possible reading based on other readings taken up to 1200km away (which Hansen is reputed to have done for parts of the Arctic) lends itself to corrupt practice (noble cause or not) and means that the whole science is called into question because we simply don't know what the temperature is or was in areas where there are no thermometers. Even a child knows that.
Which — to go off at a slight tangent — makes a joke of the DT's report about May being the hottest May worldwide on record. Do the activists and their useful idiots in the media not understand just how ridiculous such a claim is — even supposing it were true?
BTW, Paul Homewood has also looked into this and has raised flags. Ronan Connolly has critiqued the GISS adjustments about UHI effect, and Jennifer Marohasy has similar issues with the Australian temperature records.
http://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2014/03/25/cooling-the-past-in-nebraska/
http://globalwarmingsolved.com/category/temperature-records/
http://joannenova.com.au/2014/06/dont-miss-jennifer-marohasy-speaking-in-sydney-wednesday/
Watts did a paper with Joe D'Aleo back in 2010:
Surface Temperature Records:
Policy Driven Deception
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/01/26/new-paper-on-surface-temperature-records/
The use of the word deception is quite strong.
Gridding, averaging, adjusting, anomalies. All ways of losing data and making what remains conform to your preferred narrative.
What do I propose instead? Stick to the long records, chuck the ones with big changes or breaks. Keep the max and min data, that's far more relevant than their mean. Look at how the long records compare. Some will be warming, some cooling, some flat. It is the distribution of those trends which tells you what is going on. If you need to look at a lot of curves not just one, tough. At the end you'll know a lot more about how climate changes than some tweaked fiddled single number.
Anthony is wrong on this one.
Goddard has been looking at both raw data and sometimes at the Estimating that goes on in the Final data.
There are multiple steps in USHCN. The last step before data hits the "Final" stage is to create "Estimated" numbers for station missing data.
You can take a look at how "Estimated" data changes a cooling trend in Arizona to a warming one here:
http://sunshinehours.wordpress.com/2014/06/05/ushcn-2-5-estimated-data-is-warming-data-arizona/
Remember, the data I was graphing in the above post is the "Final" data. But some of it has an E for Estimated flag.
Other looks at the data:
http://sunshinehours.wordpress.com/?s=USHCN
(One thing to remember about the Blackboard. They don't approve comments they disagree with or they delay approval for days and leave the comment in the original position so no one notices it ... but they let Mosher post his BEST propaganda and snarks right away).
Who are you going to believe ? Our PERFECT data , or your flippin lying freezing fingers ?
Do I need sarc ?
Did you know USHCN puts out a "Final" data set daily?
From June 21 to June 22 1934 changes were made just to the December Monthly average. Of those only 7 were for 2013.
Here is an example of changes made to Jan 1998.
http://sunshinehours.wordpress.com/2014/06/22/ushcn-2-5-omg-the-old-data-changes-every-day/
"One thing to remember about the Blackboard..."
Dr. Curry does the same kind of stuff at Climate Etc. Mosher is like the teacher's pet over there.
Andrew
What Paul Homewood says is exactly right. Goddard is careless and often overstates the case, but the basic point he makes (several times every day) is correct - climate scientists and in particular the GHCN team have made unacceptable past-cooling adjustments to data.
It's good to see the issue making the Booker Telegraph column.
This is nothing to do with fabrication or otherwise.
Anthony Watts (like our host) has discovered that the best way to convince undecided people (and possibly some on the other side of the fence) is to be civil, admit mistakes, and not resort to ad hominem.
I'm surprised that anyone takes the anomalies seriously seeing as they are purely a theoretical exercise. You can't measure to sub 0.1 degree accuracy without extensive characterisation and state of the art thermocouples.
Most temperature measurements are great at +/- 0.5 degrees though that's a best case scenario. The problem here is that the temperature anomalies are constructed in opposition to the field of metrology. And then for further insult people argue about minute changes to them.
More adventures in Theoryland. Next someone's going to tell me if I keep measuring a strand of my hair with a ruler marked in millimetres I'll eventually achieved sub micron accuracy.
"I think Watts is trying to round the edges because he is closer to the vortex.
The elephant is still in the room and is still big.
Andrew"
I think this is spot on. Watts does not really like to be too "heavy" on GISS/NOAA as he hopes to influence them and have his paper published. Good luck to him. I have a lot of respect for A Watts and reads WUWT almost every day. There is no denying that regardless of Steve Goddard's stubborn character he is bringing up important isssues even acknowledged 50% by A Watts. The other aspect of his site is the amazing historical articles he can locate and display showing that recent weather is anything but "unprecedented". In fact we may be living in a very benign time and long may it continue.
Bruce - I think your comment about the moderation at the Blackboard is totally unjustified.
Lucia does operate a moderation policy which is fairly automated and she does tweak on occasion but I would regard it as the fairest I have seen out of the moderated blogs. Any delay in clearing posts out of moderation is down to her personal availability rather than personal preference for any particular posters..
http://rankexploits.com/musings/2011/caught-in-moderation/
Lucia does attract posters with a variety of opinions and her blog is the stronger for it.
"Watts does not really like to be too "heavy" on GISS/NOAA as he hopes to influence them and have his paper published."
That is all fine and good but even though Goddard has made a number of errors s/he is still correct about the fact that the warming signal comes from unjustified adjustments. The fact that they may 'fabricated' or due to 'incompetence' does not change the fact that the trend cannot be justified by GIAA/NOAA.
Perhaps it is an opportunity for a "consensus" climate-scientist to communicate how and why the adjustments work the way they do. Satellite measurements are not perfect either, but I don't recall seeing such large post hoc adjustments over the same period from 1979.
Bruce, I am confident that any problems you encounter posting at The Blackboard are probably for technical reasons, not due to Lucia's moderation policy (unless your name is Doug Cotton or you share an IP address with him). She likes to deal with spam more directly rather than delegate it entirely to a web-hosting company. As a result it sometimes appears idiosyncratic.
"He’s hopelessly stubborn, worse than..."
My wife often says that about men in general, who she says prefer to fight to the death before admitting they've made a mistake.
I've always suspected there was something between the two. But hey, I come from a big family and animosities between siblings are all part of a being big happy family.
There is not a single change to recorded temperature measurements I would find acceptable. TOBS, altitude, site change, instrument change, ... whatever the reason.
USHCN changes "Final" data all the way back to the 1800s EVERY DAY. There is no justification for it.
I think it is foolish to knock Steven Goddard as he has a valid point. I don't blame him for harping on it. Manipulation of station usage in addition to individual months is definitely a possibility. You can readily see the potential by looking at the figures below changing over time.
I recently started looking at the NCDC/GHCN data, though not specifically the USHCN sub-set which is included. It didn't take me long to extract the USHCN portion for a quick analysis. I presume the USHCN stations are the ones with an ID starting with 4250. Someone can correct me if I am wrong. There are 1218 stations IDs beginning with 4250 in the GHCN inventory file. This is a rough look at that data assuming I am right about the station IDs.
Using averages for all stations with at least one month of valid data.
For USHCN data in the GHCN unadjusted(raw) database.
1951-1980 stations used 1215.8(99.8%)
Data months per station used was 11.8(99.2%).
2013 stations used 964(79.1%).
Data months per station used was 11.3(94.2%).
2014(5 months) stations used 921(75.6%).
Data months per station used is 4.6(92%)
-----------------------------------
For USHCN data in the GHCN adjusted database.
1951-1980 stations used 1152.6(94.6%)
Data months per station was 11.35(94.6%).
2013 stations used was 828(68%).
Data months per station used 11(92%).
2014(5 months) stations used 736(60.4%).
Data months per station used 4.7(94%).
Goddard is correct about the 60% usage when it comes to the GHCN adjusted data. That adjusted data is then passed on to GISS so they can apply their special sauce to top it all off.
"As CA readers know, Phil Jones keeps his CRU data secret. Embarrassingly, the UK Met Office relies on this secret data and says that it is unable to provide this supporting data for the most relied upon temperature data set in the world. Their statements in response to FOI requests as to what they actually hold seem contradictory, but most recently they state that they do not hold original data, but only the “value added version” provided to them by Phil Jones. Whether they are entitled to keep the “value added version” secret is something that their FOI officer is presently considering."
http://climateaudit.org/2009/06/21/phil-jones-the-secret-agent-in-hawaii/
"Value added data" is of course not anywhere close to being fabricated. :)
"Phil Jones keeps his CRU data secret"
But it's only secret in the sense that he doesn't know precisely where he put it...
Goddard was such a willfully sensationalistic fool that for over two years he promoted an adjustment hockey stick that suddenly shot upwards a full degree or two in the last year merely due to data drop off from temporary late station reporting which showed up as a spike since he failed to convert to anomalies but didn't tell anybody what he was really doing. When I pressed him to provide before/after plots of individual stations to demonstrate this massive sudden adjustment not only himself but an entire tribal cheerleading squad shouted me down by calling me crazy and I am now completely banned from his site. He is now a great embarrassment to skepticism in general as he actively alienates the only remaining demographics of open minded people that could otherwise be converted to skepticism, namely highly liberal young scientists and rather liberal young urban professionals and tech workers. Goddard's main commenters included a convicted son/daughter sodomist and a truly insane ancient gods theory crackpot, and the activist alarmist crowd is well *aware* of this and uses it to great advantage in quite successfully stereotyping all climate model skepticism. His regular promotion of a brain washing gun control conspiracy theory complete with Holocaust photos loses him the entire Internet culture debate for *all* of us skeptics because he has the second highest traffic skeptical site. He actually claims the CIA is using drugs to promote school shootings in order to disarm America in preparation for a liberal holocaust against conservatives, cheered on by one of the most polarizing right wing forum owners out there, his new bulldog Jim Robinson whose highly bigoted FreeRepublic forum content is exposed on a dedicated liberal Twitter account:
https://twitter.com/FreeRepublicTXT
Goddard's blog allows Gore to continue to effectively stereotype skeptics as being wackos and skepticism as being primarily political in motivation rather than moral and technical.
The blade of Goddard's adjustment hockey stick was just as spurious as the blade of the Marcott 2013 temperature hockey stick celebrated by Michael Mann as being vindication of his life's work.
Singing to such a choir as Goddard has assembled only helps alienate the few remaining people skeptics can hope to soon convince. They live in cities and in college towns and they are liberals who will not listen to you if you allow skepticism to be attached so strongly to conspiratorial far right wing politics. Not shunning Steven Goddard for being a hack is the skeptical version of alarmist support for John Cook.
It is indicative of how much we sceptics are put on the back foot by the alarmists and their friends in the media, that we take shots at each other rather than expose the undoubted malfeasance of the alarmists in CRU, GISS and NOAA:
http://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2014/03/12/phil-jones-southern-hemisphere-data-tampering/
http://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2014/02/21/gavin-wins-the-2014-world-cup-of-data-tampering-in-brazil/
Source GISS v2 - http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/show_station.cgi?id=303825860000&dt=1&ds=1
GISS v3 - http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/show_station.cgi?id=303825860000&dt=1&ds=14
http://notrickszone.com/2012/03/01/data-tamperin-giss-caught-red-handed-manipulaing-data-to-produce-arctic-climate-history-revision/
Dr Roy Spencer - most of warming in USHCN dataset from adjustments
http://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2014/02/08/give-mosher-the-benefit-of-the-doubt/
I am with Steven Goddard on this one.
NikFromNYC,
Your comment seems a little overwrought.
Andrew
NikFromNYC is an excellent example of left-wingers accusing skeptics of being right wing stooges in order to shut them up.
I've been looking at the Final USHCN data and I am appalled at the huge amount of Estimated data and appalled that it almost invariably warms the USA.
The data is here. ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/ushcn/v2.5
The FInal data is ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/ushcn/v2.5/ushcn.tavg.latest.FLs.52i.tar.gz
Goddard has made his code available.
Go ahead, download the "Final" data one day ... wait a few days. Uncompress the data into each folder and use a simple differencing tool like Windif and compare the folders.
They are changing the data all the way back to the 1800s all the time.
Look how many E values there are.
Like this station:
USH00011084 1960 1006 1032E 1169E 1977E 2134E 2627E 2851E 2737E 2543E 2034E 1459E
Any value with an E is Estimated from surrounding stations.
Read this post to see how much E data skews the temperature:
http://sunshinehours.wordpress.com/2014/06/11/ushcn-2-5-estimated-warming-by-year-and-month/
I'm not a left winger, but a Tea Party enthusiast, and one of the most active ever online skeptics with about 140K Google hits mostly to posts of skeptical infographics to news sites, having once spent sixteen hours a day for a solid eight months doing only that with my personal time. My biggest barrier to convincing folk was how whole armies of Al Gore and John Cook tutored activists used Goddard's output to tarnish skepticism, very successfully. I also happen to live and work two blocks from the NASA GISS office above Tom's Diner, here just above the Upper West Side, and I know my neighbors well enough to offer useful feedback to skeptics about alarmism and how skeptics might better present it. In other words I'm in the trenches, fighting your battle for you as you sit on blogs all day, safely, far away from the front, and I'm *telling* you that you are causing me to lose because you are promoting a readily ridiculed charlatan as one of your leaders.
Here is Goddard's preposterous adjustment hockey stick that I personally put and end to by loudly protesting the posting of it by Tony Watts, enough to get technically equipped people to finally look into Goddard's claim in detail.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/05/10/spiking-temperatures-in-the-ushcn-an-artifact-of-late-data-reporting/
For that act I was banned on his site.
Here is the exact same error promoted by Michael Mann:
http://s6.postimg.org/jb6qe15rl/Marcott_2013_Eye_Candy.jpg
In both cases the blade is spurious, quite obviously so. So what moral authority does any skeptic now have who fails to condemn Goddard as being as big a hack as Mann? None. You have forfeited your moral authority, willfully, and when criticized you harp on about politics. Only on Goddard's blog have I ever been so openly attacked in tribal fashion for trying to add value and constructive criticism to the claims being made. Since Watt's is very much correct that Goddard is closed off to criticism, the most effective response is to actively shun him in order to restore the reputation of skepticism as being *scientific* in character. You could barely design a better PR disaster than Goddard's Nazi photos and conspiracy theories. But the bulk of you only cheer him on, disastrously, playing right into Gore's PR machine in a way that tarnishes my own reputation along with yours.
-=NikFromNYC=-, Ph.D. in carbon chemistry (Columbia/Harvard)
Prof. Ole Humlum, Physical Geography, University of Oslo, maintains the climate4you blog …
he says: “The administrative upsurge of the temperature increase between January 1915 and January 2000 has grown from 0.39 (in May 2008) to 0.52 °C (in May 2014), representing an about 33% administrative temperature increase”
Of course NOAA is fiddling with the temperatures. And they will go on, and more, until someone stops them, or they become the temperature equivalent of Comical Ali, whichever comes first.
(you become the temperature equivalent of Comical Ali when you maintain that it is 30°C outside your house and your own observations tell you that there is some ice forming on the pond in your garden)
ps ... Steven's most valuable work is putting all "news" in climate change in perspective of 150 years of digitized newspapers at the TROVE project ...
Those who intend to falsify data understand that their credibility must not fall pray to accusation. So how much do you falsify? Only a little. As you falsify you test. When it looks too much you reduce. In the end it all looks very reasonable to the saintly Mr. Watts.
Nothing deliberate, just some errors. Errors are OK everyone makes the. Deliberate falsification is criminal. Who would dare to say such a thing. Look in America a man is seen to murder. So what is he called. A suspect.
ducdorleans
This information published at Real Science should be spread more widely.
"So what moral authority does any skeptic now have who fails to condemn Goddard as being as big a hack as Mann?"
Steven Goddard's graphs haven't been used to perpetuate a large-scale hoax at taxpayer expense. There's a difference right there.
At the end of the day Nik, you can name drop, make dubious comparisons, claim you live in the right neighborhood, or spend 25 hours a day on the internet and get banned... none of it matters.
If someone is cooking the books, they're cooking the books. You are just noise.
Andrew
NikFromNYC, you attack Goddard mostly because he attracts people who seem to vehemently disagree with on non-climate issues. So I suspect your motivations.
I no longer include Goddard's site in those I recommend to others. His stuff is very variable and the political flavour of his site isn't suitable for beginners. It's a pity because his work on newspaper records is fascinating and persuasive.
So this is how NOAA can claim that last May was the hottest May month ever, as the Telegraph reports today -
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/environment/climatechange/10921695/May-was-the-hottest-month-ever-for-Earth.html
Paul Homewood does a good job of taking it apart over at
http://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2014/06/24/noaas-hottest-month-claims-are-unscientific/
Steve, can be a strange mix, he is quite deliberately provocative but underneath his sometimes mischievous facade is a pretty sound mind, he is nobodies fool.
"He's only having fun!"
Well I'm with those who think Anthony is wrong on this one.
Goddard does some simple investigative work and his 'animated' graphs do a great job of putting a simple picture out there that anyone can easily see or interpret.
It is not highly detail scientific work --I don't think it is intended to be. It just looks at the basics and says if the data is not right how can ANYTHING that follows on from it be right.
NikFromNYC ... I reckon you're a decent bloke ... but you develop a tik when Goddard is mentioned. I've read your exchanges with him, let it go.
As for Watts, does good work but can also be an arrogant sob ... he shouldn't throw stones.
Bruce:
This statement is false.
Comments are not moderated on the Blackboard, unless you use a word that invokes a filter or use too many links.
You can still email Lucia in that case, and she usually responds within a few minutes.
One can't teach people who are unteachable as this blog proves on occasion.
Chill out people. Everyone is edgy today.