Gore's Failed "Live Earth" never mentioned these facts

More on The Global Warming Temperature Error


The blogger who started the whole shabang rolling on the story of bad
temperature date, Steve McIntyre, which resulted in the hottest year on
record changing from the mid 90's to mid 30's has put up another great post
about all the controversy:

There's been quite a bit of publicity about Hansen's Y2K error and the
change in the U.S. leaderboard (by which 1934 is the new warmest U.S. year)
in the right-wing blogosphere. In contrast, realclimate has dismissed it a
triviality and the climate blogosphere is doing its best to ignore the
matter entirely.
My own view has been that matter is certainly not the triviality that
Gavin Schmidt would have you believe, but neither is it any magic bullet. I
think that the point is significant for reasons that have mostly eluded
commentators on both sides.

First, let's start with the impact of Hansen's error on individual station
histories, GISS provides an excellent and popular online service for
plotting temperature histories of individual stations. Many such histories
have been posted up in connection with the ongoing examination of surface
station quality at surfacestations.org.

But it's presumably not just Anthony Watts and surfacestations.org readers
that have used these GISS station plots; presumably scientists and other
members of the public have used this GISS information. The Hansen error is
far from trivial at the level of individual stations. Grand Canyon was one
of the stations previously discussed at climateaudit.org in connection with
Tucson urban heat island. In this case, the Hansen error was about 0.5 deg
C. Some discrepancies are 1 deg C or higher.

~~~

GISS recognized that the error had a significant impact on individual
stations and took rapid steps to revise their station data (and indeed the
form of their revision seems far from ideal indicating the haste of their
revision.) GISS failed to provide any explicit notice or warning on their
station data webpage that the data had been changed, or an explicit notice
to users who had downloaded data or graphs in the past that there had been
significant changes to many U.S. series. This obligation existed regardless
of any impact on world totals.

GISS has emphasized recently that the U.S. constitutes only 2% of global
land surface, arguing that the impact of the error is negligible on the
global averagel. While this may be so for users of the GISS global average,
U.S. HCN stations constitute about 50% of active (with values in 2004 or
later) stations in the GISS network. The sharp downward step in station
counts after March 2006 in the right panel shows the last month in which
USHCN data is presently included in the GISS system. The Hansen error
affects all the USHCN stations and, to the extent that users of the GISS
system are interested in individual stations, the number of affected
stations is far from insignificant, regardless of the impact on global
averages.

~~~

The Hansen error also has a significant impact on the GISS estimate of
U.S. temperature history with estimates for 2000 and later being lowered by
about 0.15 deg C (2006 by 0.10 deg C). Again GISS moved quickly to revise
their online information changing their US temperature data on Aug 7, 2007.
Even though Gavin Schmidt of GISS and realclimate said that changes of 0.1
deg C in individual years were "significant", GISS did not explicitly
announce these changes or alert readers that a "significant" change had
occurred for values from 2000-2006.


~~~


In addition, while Schmidt describes the changes atop the leader board as
"very minor re-arrangements", many followers of the climate debate are aware
of intense battles over 0.1 or 0.2 degree (consider the satellite battles.)
Readers might perform a little thought experiment: suppose that Spencer and
Christy had published a temperature history in which they claimed that 1934
was the warmest U.S. year on record and then it turned out that they had
been a computer programming error opposite to the one that Hansen made, that
Wentz and Mears discovered there was an error of 0.15 deg C in the Spencer
and Christy results and, after fiixing this error, it turned out that 2006
was the warmest year on record. Would realclimate simply describe this as a
"very minor re-arrangement"?


~~~

Now my original interest in GISS adjustments did not arise abstractly, but
in the context of surface station quality. Climatological stations are
supposed to meet a variety of quality standards, including the relatively
undemanding requirement of being 100 feet (30 meters) from paved surfaces.
Anthony Watts and volunteers of surfacestations.org have documented one
defective site after another, including a weather station in a parking lot
at the University of Arizona where MBH coauthor Malcolm Hughes is employed,
shown below.


These revelations resulted in a variety of aggressive counter-attacks in
the climate blogosphere, many of which argued that, while these individual
sites may be contaminated, the "expert" software at GISS and NOAA could fix
these problems, as, for example here .

they [NOAA and/or GISS] can "fix" the problem with math and adjustments
to the temperature record.

or here:

This assumes that contaminating influences can't be and aren't being
removed analytically.. I haven't seen anyone saying such influences shouldn't
be removed from the analysis. However I do see professionals saying "we've
done it"

"Fixing" bad data with software is by no means an easy thing to do (as
witness Mann's unreported modification of principal components methodology
on tree ring networks.) The GISS adjustment schemes (despite protestations
from Schmidt that they are "clearly outlined") are not at all easy to
replicate using the existing opaque descriptions.

~~~


Schmidt observed that the U.S. accounts for only 2% of the world's land
surface and that the correction of this error in the U.S. has "minimal
impact on the world data", which he illustrated by comparing the U.S. index
to the global index. I've re-plotted this from original data on a common
scale. Even without the recent changes, the U.S. history contrasts with the
global history: the U.S. history has a rather minimal trend if any since the
1930s, while the ROW has a very pronounced trend since the 1930s.


These differences are attributed to "regional" differences and it is quite
possible that this is a complete explanation. However, this conclusion is
complicated by a number of important methodological differences between the
U.S. and the ROW. In the U.S., despite the criticisms being rendered at
surfacestations.org, there are many rural stations that have been in
existence over a relatively long period of time; while one may cavil at how
NOAA and/or GISS have carried out adjustments, they have collected metadata
for many stations and made a concerted effort to adjust for such metadata.
On the other hand, many of the stations in China, Indonesia, Brazil and
elsewhere are in urban areas (such as Shanghai or Beijing). In some of the
major indexes (CRU,NOAA), there appears to be no attempt whatever to adjust
for urbanization. GISS does report an effort to adjust for urbanization in
some cases, but their ability to do so depends on the existence of nearby
rural stations, which are not always available. Thus, there is a real
concern that the need for urban adjustment is most severe in the very areas
where adjustments are either not made or not accurately made.

In its consideration of possible urbanization and/or microsite effects,
IPCC has taken the position that urban effects are negligible, relying on a
very few studies (Jones et al 1990, Peterson et al 2003, Parker 2005, 2006),
each of which has been discussed at length at this site. In my opinion, none
of these studies can be relied on for concluding that urbanization impacts
have been avoided in the ROW sites contributing to the overall history.

One more story to conclude. Non-compliant surface stations were reported
in the formal academic literature by Pielke and Davey (2005) who described a
number of non-compliant sites in eastern Colorado. In NOAA's official
response to this criticism, Vose et al (2005) said in effect -

it doesn't matter. It's only eastern Colorado. You haven't proved that
there are problems anywhere else in the United States.

In most businesses, the identification of glaring problems, even in a
restricted region like eastern Colorado, would prompt an immediate
evaluation to ensure that problems did not actually exist. However, that
does not appear to have taken place and matters rested until Anthony Watts
and the volunteers at surfacestations.org launched a concerted effort to
evaluate stations in other parts of the country and determined that the
problems were not only just as bad as eastern Colorado, but in some cases
were much worse.

Now in response to problems with both station quality and adjustment
software, Schmidt and Hansen say in effect, as NOAA did before them -

it doesn't matter. It's only the United States. You haven't proved that
there are problems anywhere else in the world.

It's a little disturbing that GISS was "fixing bad data," how in the world
is this possible?  I will not pretend to be a climate scientist but I would
think that bad data is bad data.  You could adjust it whichever way you want
but it won't make it a true result.

Steven goes out of his way to write a detailed answer back to this critics
but it all boils down to the fact that the Goracle crowd dismisses anything
that disagrees with them as insignificant or wrong.  They tell you that the
debate is over but when you point out the many scientists who disagree with
them they tell you that the number of scientists who disagree are
insignificant.  You point them to thousands of scientists and they tell you
they are not the right scientists.  You point them to a few thousand of the
"right" scientists and they tell you "well, they all haven't written
papers."  You see where I'm going?

Now that there is evidence that an important data error was fixed quietly
and secretly, and only found because of a few stubborn bloggers, they call
the error insignificant.

But of course this is all mute, the debate is over.....

UPDATE

Look at some examples of questionable placement of weather stations:


--
What we find is that the surge has troops going into areas, where for 4 1/2
years we have not seen our military in action. Naturally, they are routing
out al Qaeda in those areas. That's a good thing.
-- Sen. Dick Durbin
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ZZBunker (13.08.2007 22:03)