UPDATE: *Chris has been over the entire dataset again, and makes a correction that adjustments account for 30-40% of the rise. A bit less than half. Headline updated. See his site for the newer stats. March 9, 2015
Adjustments that cool historic temperatures have almost doubled Australia’s rate of warming.
CSIR published “Meteorological Data” 1855 – 1931
Chris Gillham has spent months poring over both these historic datasets, as well as the BoM’s Climate Data Online (CDO) which has the recent temperatures at these old stations. He also compares these old records to the new versions in the BOM’s all new, all marvelous, best quality ACORN dataset. He has published all the results and tables comparing CDO, CSIR and Year Book versions.
He analyzes them in many ways – sometimes by looking at small subsets or large groups of the 226 CSIR stations. But it doesn’t much matter which way the data is grouped, the results always show that the historic records had warmer average temperatures before they were adjusted and put into the modern ACORN dataset. The adjustments cool historic averages by around 0.4 degrees, which sounds small, but the entire extent of a century of warming is only 0.9 degrees C. So the adjustments themselves are the source of almost half of the warming trend.
The big question then is whether the adjustments are necessary. If the old measurements were accurate as is, Australia has only warmed by half a degree. In the 44 stations listed in the Year Book from 1911-1940, the maxima at the same sites is now about half a degree warmer in the new millenia. The minima are about the same.
Remember that these sites from 1911-1940 were all recorded with modern Stevenson Screen equipment. Furthermore, since that era the biggest change in those sites has been from the Urban Heat Island (UHI) effect as the towns and cities grew up around the sites. In some places this effect may already have been warming those thermometers in the first half of the last century, but in others UHI can make 5 to 7 degrees difference.
If Australian thermometers are recording half a degree higher than they were 70 – 100 years ago, we have to ask how much of that warming is the UHI effect? Common sense would suggest that if these older stations need any correction, it should be upward rather than downward to compensate for the modern increase in concrete, buildings and roads. Alternatively, to compare old readings in unpopulated areas with modern ones, we would think the modern temperatures should be adjusted down, rather than the older ones.
The Official Year Book 1953
Chris Gillham discusses the potential size of the UHI changes:
“In 2012 and 2013 it was anticipated that UHI warming in south-eastern Australia will continue to intensify by approximately 1C per decade over and above that caused by global warming (Voogt 2002), with tests in 1992 showing a UHI influence up to 7.2C between the Melbourne CBD and rural areas. [PDF]
Smaller but significant UHI influences were found in regional towns, with a 1994 test observing a UHI intensity up to 5.4C between the centre of a Victorian town and its rural outskirts.” [PDF]
The historic CSIR data: 226 stations from 1855 – 1931
The situation with adjustments stays roughly the same if we go back even further. Gillham compared 226 stations during the period from 1855 -1931 and the average is about half a degree less than what it is now — from 2000-2014.
The first station in the CSIR record, Melbourne, starts in 1855. Each year, new stations came online. By 1865 there are ten stations and by 1880 there are nearly 30.
Ideally we could compare 50 stations which didn’t move or start and stop over the same period, but even the ACORN dataset in the 1900s doesn’t do that, introducing new stations up to the 1970s.
It is hard to draw conclusions from the CSIR record as is. But neither can it be ignored. Roughly two thirds of the temperatures were recorded on Stevenson screens, but much of the data in the 1800s was recorded on screens, sheds and shades until Stevenson screens were introduced across Australia over the 20 year period from 1887 – 1907. And scientists in the 1930s were very much aware of the effect of slight changes in screens as one long running comparison of different screens side by side had already been going for over 30 years in Adelaide. (I’ll write more on that soon).
It’s rough but, as rough guides go, it’s the only data we have. Other peer reviewed papers have estimated Australia’s average temperature change to 0.09C in 1000AD based on two groves of trees in Tasmania and New Zealand. Wouldn’t thermometers be kinda useful?
One small piece of good news is that at least the early CDO records maintained by the BoM online appear to match the averages within the Year Book and CSIR tables. At least the copies of the original data put online are accurate as far as these rough tests go.
The Bottom line
There is a treasure trove of information in these historic documents for people interested in long-term climate.
The difference between the original records and the adjusted ACORN dataset suggests that the adjustments cooled original temperatures by 0.4C between 1910 and 1940, which means that around 45% of the modern “warming” trend is due to these homogenisations and adjustments which have not been independently justified and oddly appear to go in the opposite direction to what common sense would suggest might be necessary. In the older and larger CSIR tables, there is an overall cooling adjustments of 0.5C.
Thanks to Chris Gillham for the massive amount of data crunching and tracking it takes to provide meaningful numbers.
Chris Gillham’s Conclusions:
Downward ACORN adjustment of historic temperature records from weather stations before 1940 adds 0.3C or 0.4C to Australia’s rate of climate warming since 1910 but the reason for the downward adjustments is unclear.
Various timescale and station comparisons show insignificant changes or warming up to 0.5C from <1931 to 2000-14. These temperatures from 1855 to 1940 are compared to what the BoM describes as the hottest decade ever recorded in Australia (2014 claimed as the third hottest).
Other historic documents add weight to the evidence that pre-1910 temperatures were not significantly cooler than current readings.
For example, On the Climate of the Yass-Canberra District published in 1910 by Commonwealth Meteorologist Henry Hunt shows temperatures at 10 locations were on average 0.1C warmer in all years before 1909 than in 2004-2013. Hunt also presents <1909 summer and winter mean temperatures at six northern Australia locations which average 0.2C warmer than those locations in 2004-2013 (download PDF).
The CSIR and Year Book temperature datasets are unadjusted records compiled by Australia’s leading scientists and weather experts in the mid 20th century and are accurate but differ from BoM records that are adjusted in both RAW and ACORN.
Their dataset timescales include the first 85 years of temperature recording at most weather stations across Australia in a network more than twice as large as ACORN, and their averages are a legitimate historic record indicating climate warming has been significantly less than calculated with adjusted data since 1910.
REFERENCES
Historic temperature sources:
- Meteorological Data for Certain Australian Localities published in 1933 by the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research collating minima and maxima from the earliest records up to and including 1931
- Official Year Book of the Commonwealth of Australia, issue #39 published in 1953 including tabulated mean temperature readings from 1911 to 1940 at 44 locations across the country used by the Weather Bureau to accurately portray Australia’s climate record on the world stage
Current temperature sources:
- CDO: Bureau of Meteorology Climate Data Online
- ACORN: The Australian Climate Observations Reference Network – Surface Air Temperature (ACORN-SAT) current to June 2014
All I can think to start with is that heads must roll.
512
I think its odd that the ABS is struggling to survive right now – it would be opportune to download as much historical free stuff as we can now while we can before its taken off line and “disappears”….
Rewriting history is only possible if you can shut off access to original records.
ON a personal ote, I am making sure our family is versed in historically correct facts and these are preserved , so that when the inevitable push to whitewash facts occurs, that there is a record kept.
70
I’m not. I don’t want to give details but I suspect that its a place where people get a cushy job for selling their souls.
20
Whan faced with a choice between a conspiracy and a stuff upusually a stuff up gets the nod. In this case a stuff up just does not seem feasible.
BOM’s credibility and the credibility of a large swathe of science is in the frame here so either way Dennis is right – heads must roll.
40
The Australian Taxpayer is subsidizing windmills, not building coal thermal power generation & now that the Government is the buyer of Australian Carbon Credit Units (CS2014C00294.pdf). [$ 1.5B + $ 1B]
How much health, education & infrastructure is not being provided because of this junk science smoke & mirrors?
I just hope the rolling blackouts hit the offices in the Giant Roundabout( Canberra) first.
470
Unfortunately rolling blackouts won’t hit the government as the government will have diesel or natural gas powered backup generators installed anywhere that maintaining power matters. I’ll leave it to your own reasoning to determine what the government will consider someplace that matters when it comes to ensuring it has power.
210
Ho ho…you mean the Magic Roundabout dont you?
“Boing, said Zebeedee – its time for bed”
20
Very timely Mr Gillham, no doubt the Environment Minister will receive a memo on your fine effort.
260
One of the issues rarely discussed is how the adjustments make the official temperature series useless for research. All of the papers using that data, yes, even sceptics work matching wiggles with solar output, is useless without the RAW DATA!!
Leif Svalgaard likes to taunt sceptics that the sun is NOT at a grand maximum in the 20th century and that their efforts to match the older solar graphs to the temp data are bad. He himself is wrong due to the fact it is unlikely there has been ANY warming since the 1930’s. Yes, he may be right that his reconstruction is cbetter and there was no grand maximum. He is probably WRONG that the sun’s output does not match the ACTUAL TEMPS!!!
GIGO
302
Good point. I think of all those correlations that are deemed not to correlate but against what? Seems like all these non-correlating findings ought to be put on hold until they are compared to the actual temperatures.
The more I see all the problems with historical records in the US and Australia, the more I’m convinced there is a complete mess confronting the climate establishment.
The more analyses like the above get public attention, the greater will be calls for accountability and answers.
80
Don’t yer love it when
they throw stuff down
thememory hole and then
someone brings it up again,
finds some old tome,
a document, maybe, that
foils their little game?
110
Superb!
30
“..the reason for the downward adjustments is unclear”
“Unclear” meaning “no reason given”, or something else?
160
In this context, it means ‘not that reason you give that disproves the adjustments were valid.’
40
“..the reason for the downward adjustments is unclear”.
I think it is very clear – it is a worldwide conspiracy driven by the “UN’s Agenda 21” conspiring (secretly) with Govt funded entities like Oz’s BOM & the UK’s Met Office to support their “CAGW Doctrine” by tampering (illegally) with one’s countries vintage temperature data. These Govt Entities need to be subjected to due diligence, ie explain the reason for this vintage temperature data manipulation.
283
Never suspect conspiracy when fashionable herd instinct and vested self-interest will suffice very nicely.
253
I disagree – you cant have such a perfectly coordinated effort world wide without some deliberate coercive and clearly intelligent force at play….
The majority of people know what communism and socilaism looks like, and yet they are happy to bring it about by lying to everyone.
If thats not a conspiracy, what do you call it?
In the USA, its clear Nazism is very active within the Elite, including past prezes etc. Nazism didnt stop at teh end of WWII, it simply went underground. Now its surfacing again.
I’ll be proven right, unfortunately.
52
It most probably means none was given or a very cursery explanation was given. (As in: Surrounding temperatures were higher so this was raised. Without knowing what temperatures were and how much difference there was, there is no clear explanation there. It’s also clear why temperatures are adjusted to “more closely match surrounding stations”. There is nothing in the real world that in any indicates it cannot be much hotter or colder in one area ten miles away.) It may also mean a station moved or something similiar but the one changing the value did not document this as the reason and did not indicate where the station moved to or from.
110
“These are not the adjustments you are looking for” (sic)
80
Dave N,
Something. The World Meteorological Organization Guide provides the guidelines that all national and regigional meteorological organizations, like the BoM must follow. Although this publication provides these guidelines as suggestions, a close inspection of the language shows that these sugestions are in fact instructions.
In the document there is this quote:
Adjustment of the older data to align with newer data is made as a suggestion, but the overall tone of the document, and the facts on the ground, show that this is in fact what is occuring. All you need to do is find a situation where a station, for whatever reason, suddenly reads colder than before and you then go ahead and lower the older readngs. Because of the diffuculty involved in obtaining detailed explanations on the application of these adjustments on a case by case basis, we have no way of knowing exactly what reasoning was used each time.
There is no reason to resort to the use of a con-spear-a-see here. The WMO is funded by the UN. The UN gets it’s funds from member states. The member states get their funds from the taxpayers. The program is well thought out, and has been in place for as long as the UN has been in existence, if not earlier.
The meteorological organizations in every country/region are members of the WMO and the UN and pay for these guidelines to be created, so naturally the guidelines are followed.
Abe
51
How many otherwise useful hours are being wasted on this. Mark Twain wrote “A lie is halfway around the world before the truth can put its pants on” or something like that. It’s an expensive pair of pants.
280
The hours are not wasted. The hours spent gathering the data was scientific and useful. The hours spent manipulating the data is political and a perfect example of how humans do not learn from the past nor do they often care to learn at all. The reason a lie sells so quickly is humans are just flat out lazy and don’t want to be bothered to learn the truth. Truth is hard, lies are easy. Unfortunately, there’s little evidence that long periods ever existed where this was not true. In the end, truth often wins out. Still, one must record the truth and let others know, even if the belief factor is very small. It’s the only possilbe way to get people to think and care. Otherwise, the lie costs them dearly and they learn to trust the truth again only after incredible hardships and ruin. Humans are just very, very flawed when it comes to wanting to believe something and not caring if it’s true or not. (This works poorly for the animal kingdom. If baby cheetas who “don’t want to beleve”—or fail to follow—the rule about not moving when lions are around they are immediately eaten by lions. Truth is very evident in the animal kingdom.)
170
“Downward ACORN adjustment of historic temperature records from weather stations before 1940 adds 0.3C or 0.4C to Australia’s rate of climate warming since 1910 but the reason for the downward adjustments is unclear.”
You don’t need to be an expert statistician to know why these figures have been adjusted.
The head of the climate change branch has previously stated, on record, that the data is being adjusted because he “knows” that towns in Australia have warmed last century, and they need to identify anomalies to bring the data in line with international standards etc etc.
So they have gone about identifying towns which have not showed enough warming, and changed them. Simple.
In other words, no other reason is needed except data conformity to agendas and politics. Regional data variation is NOT allowed. The smallest excuse can be invented to change the data.
Socialism gone mad, not science.
592
It’s all about “Agenda 21”. As I say in #5.2, BOM’s manipulation of Oz’s vintage temperature data needs to be subjected to a high level judicial inquiry.
211
Who appoints the judges?
20
The accused.
10
Who appoints the judges?
The Attorney-General George Brandis.
10
“To bring the data in line with international standards etc, etc.”
The international standards to which you refer are the deliberate policy of cooling of the past, as exhibited in GISS and other data sets.
This is classic climate science – if the data conflicts with the the theory, then the data is wrong and therefore needs adjustment.
How the gatekeepers of ground temperature statistics must hate those pesky satellites for keeping their data reasonably honest in recent years. Unfortunately, only ‘reasonably honest’ as the UHI effect has all too often been underestimated and homogenisation techniques are designed to smudge upwards any awkward//inconvenient low figures.
272
Words have power. So in my workplace, we have introduced a policy of never referring to the words “climate” and “science” in the same sentence without apostrophes.
Our preferred term, which better refers to the adjustment policy, is “climate socialisation”, which really names the dragon.
151
Personally, I prefer the terms “climatescientologists” and “climatescientology” .
21
RW, if I might, simply spelling climate with a ‘k’ could provide sufficient written differentiation and clarity. Afterall, the Team Pachauri helpfully sanctioned definitions of ‘klimate khange’ (KK), that may be conveniently confused with climate change, a term we all thought we understood perfectly well prior to its urgent adoption and politicization when being faced with the inconvenient absence of warming. Adopting KK also permitted an expansion of the alarmist meme to include, well, quite literally everything.
Nevertheless, I usually insist on a definition of terms prior to discourses centering on KK, which once done, has the unfathomable effect of limiting the discourse. If it didn’t, then a brief reference to a ‘dirty old man’ in a high place or “the world’s leading climate scientist” would have an equally satisfying and truncating influence. This will become known as the Pachauri Effect.
12
Lysenkoism!
190
Da Tovarish! And “Our ABC” is the new Pravda.
210
Да друг! ABC новая правда.
30
да ререке факааро! очин хорошо!
10
Cyrillic to western for us poor people.; Na zedrovie!,
00
So how do we describe “The Age” Rereke ? 😉
00
If Tony Abbott wants to jump up in the polls, all he has to do is present this sort information in a very simple, easy to understand way to the Aussie public –he’d be on a winner.
I’m sure Jo would volunteer to write the details on no more than, say an A4 page in a way that every Australian could read and understand.
440
A graphic presentation of the bones is a must I think.
180
I have been thinking about how Tony Abbott could do this. Probably if Chris let TA know that he was presenting his findings to the review panel and then TA put out a press release commending private individuals putting so much effort into a submission ( I’m sure the communication people could find the right words). This would arouse interest which could be followed up by the “A4 page” in the media which wouldn’t necessarily have to be directly attached to TA , but it would be quite clear that TA stood for looking at hard facts and not the spin that Turnball likes.
With a bit of luck it could be pop corn time.
50
It would be better for Hunt to tell the electorate the good news and let Tony say nothing in the first instance. This is to protect the PM from flack coming from the deranged left.
After the dust settles TA could say a few words:
‘It is now apparent that the hiatus in global temperatures is a myth, the atmospheric high priests have deliberately adjusted the data to hide global cooling’, the PM said.
30
They might need to do more adjustments very soon:
Holdren: Ice age will kill 1 billion
White House science czar John Holdren has predicted 1 billion people will die in “carbon-dioxide induced famines” in a coming new ice age by 2020
“In a 1971 textbook co-authored with Malthusian population alarmist Paul Ehrlich that global over-population was heading the Earth to a new ice age unless the government mandated urgent measures to control population.”
. . .
Four (4) and a half years to go until a “carbon-dioxide induced famines” in a coming new ice age by 2020!
220
They could recycle the ’70s docutainment series, “The Coming Ice Age”, narrated by Leonard Nimoy, and featuring Stephen Schneider, with serious hair, and wearing bell-bottom trousers.
It wouldn’t cost them anything – it is free to view on YouTube.
60
What would be very interesting is the adjustment(homogenization) for the new semiconductor instruments. This must have been phased in during the 1980s. Of course no two devices give the same results over a range from minimum to maximum because of differences in both linearity and accuracy. Adjustments would have been made to connect a device with three decimal places to data to one, to connect pseudo mechanical devices to electronics. This adjustment could be the entire warming.
The real question then is whether such correction had a built in bias for warming, as you have to make a decision as to whether warming is real or an artifact of the conversion. This might well account for the remaining 0.4C and UBI for the rest. You can tell. There was a plateau in the data both before and after the rapid 1980’s warming used to create the Hockey stick. This switch over would have been a world wide problem. So if the rapid, runaway ‘warming’ corresponds nearly exactly to the switch over, there was no warming. Without this 0.4C 1980s climb and even without the Federation drought, you can nearly put two horizontal straight lines through the temperature data within the error bars, one line pre 1980 and another post 1980. So you can potentially wipe out any temperature increase in the 20th century. At the same time CO2 has been climbing steadily. The myth is busted.
191
And these very same adjustments are being “copied” at every bureau of meteorology or their equivalents in countrys right around the world.
Under the guise of “world’s best practice”.
The reason is obvious to all.
Even those doing tbe adjustments know they’ve been caught out.
They just continue on adjusting the worlds temperature UP.
Providing “proof” the planet is warming and collecting more and more taxpayers money in the form of billions of dollars in grants.
If they are delivering false and misleading temperature information.
While procuring billions from taxpayers for that false and misleading information.
There is simply but one conclusion to be drawn.
They’ll happily align me with the holocaust but for me to give them the label they so justly deserve, they’ll sue me.
Amongst the majority here we are all preaching to the converted.
There’s some real smart people here that amaze me every day.
And there are the not so smart like me that only have the wisdom of years.
But every one of of us can see with crystal clarity what these alarmists are doing.
But our protestations here and around the world is having no affect in bringing them to account.
Confronted with overwhelming evidence that they’ve been caught out…….again.
The BOM thumbs its nose at Jo and others to supply answers simply because they are under no obligation to tell anybody anything.
The government of the day is the only entity that could demand answers.
Under the warmist Hunt, that is highly unlikely.
Has the stacked “white wash” inquiry into the BOM progressed?
Or is that still a secret to?
And if labor get back in…..well turn out the lights.
201
Never, ever, put yourself down for being smart enough to have survived for as long as you have, in a world that is designed to kill you, and tries to, every time you cross the road, or catch a plane or train, or walk into a bank or a drugstore. How else can you gain “wisdom”, but through gathering experience over a long time, and seeing the world for what it really is.
I like your comments Leigh. They are always well considered, and nicely presented in a readable way. So please, do not underrate yourself.
70
TdeF: Don’t know if this is relevant to what you posted but a good article non the less.
Germany’s Warming Happens To Coincide With Late 20th Century Implementation Of Digital Measurement – See more at:
http://notrickszone.com/2015/01/14/germanys-warming-happens-to-coincide-with-late-20th-century-implementation-of-digital-measurement/#sthash.d4oyPWnn.dpbs
121
Thank you. Amazing. It really highlights the technology change which so clearly coincides with the sudden ‘warming’ from 1983 to 2001 so sharp. Yes, it does look like a giant and world wide instrumentation bungle.
What would be very interesting is to know the dates of a BOM program to update the Stevenson Boxes to fully electronic and computer adjusted. As the world moved in lockstep in electronics since WWII, it would have also been coincident around the world and so produced something you could call “Global Warming” in the mid 1980s, just in time for the creation of the IPCC.
At the same time there would have been a shift to electronic data collection and automatic software correction (homogenization) for the readings, if only to align the new temperature range of the thermistors with the old range of the thermometers. This would be a point where without real care, warming prejudice could be introduced, if you start with the idea that the data has to be adjusted anyway. The homogenization would have compared old maxima and minima with new and attempted to align them not just at a given temperature.
So it would have been hard not to introduce some sort of shift and as 0.4C is close to the original acceptable accuracy and warming was fashionable, this shift could have been introduced as reasonable. Quite apart from the later and quite inexcusable selection of data, editing of data upwards, and the deliberate omission of critical data, we could be looking at a giant but innocent stuff up. The hockey stick was real, but it was not tree ring generated. Telephone rings more like it.
Then when the warming ‘stopped’ just when the technology switch was complete and so certain elements in the world meterological community were desperate to ‘hide the decline’. So a period of group censorship and blackout followed and secret folders. It even took 18 years for Pachauri to admit publicly the world had not warmed at all. Then you can add an hysterical approach to hot places and days, rising sea levels, polar bears and more, an hysteria which continues.
It all fits and it looks like there has been no warming at all.
As for evil steady increase in CO2, that could be due to a slight steady ocean surface warming and Henry’s law because 98% of all CO2 is already in the oceans. Why anyone thinks adding another 1% from fossil fuel would make a difference is beyond logic.
121
Wouldn’t it be pretty easy to test this? By re-introducing old style equipment at some of the original sites and comparing the data collected with that from modern equipment.
150
Yes.
30
Under the title “Proof Australia is getting hotter” on news.com.au
“According to the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO), the average global temperature for 2014 was 0.57 degree warmer than the 1961-1990 average. In Australia, 2014 was ranked as the third warmest since records first began, dating back to 1910.”
He you see the two claims. One the choice of periods, because the world was measured to be suddenly and permanently hotter after 1990. Not only does that sudden change not match CO2, +0.5C is not beyond reasonable discrepancy given the fundamental change in measurement technology and previous reading errors. It does not mean the world heated at all.
Secondly, exclude the Federation drought, “since records first began” is not true. It is possibly more like “deliberately and blatantly excluding all excellent State based records back to at least 1887 often at the same locations with the same equipment”.
11
That’s just too obvious!
10
Here’s an issue. What if the accuracy of the new instruments is worse than the old ones? They’ve been replacing Stevenson Screens with MMTS sensors for temperature in the US. NOAA themselves calls out the accuracy as +/-0.5°F. That’s a fair chunk of error when you’re parsing 0.01°C trends. It’s all cooked.
http://www.srh.noaa.gov/srh/dad/coop/specs-1.html
91
At hundredth’s of a degree tolerance, they are likely to be measuring variances in overall system accuracy, and impurity noise in the individual system components, and then reporting what they get as signal.
These people can only be called scientists, at a stretch, with a small “s”, but as sure as sure, they ain’t Engineers.
81
Nothing more annoying that somebody trying to pretend they can do somebody else’s job… eg. a mammalogist pretending to be a climate scientist or a climate scientists pretending to be an engineer.
30
Please.
The Engineer should always be referred to in reverential tones as the “the world’s leading climate scientist.”
10
This has been bothering me, to put it mildly, for some time. They are claiming a precision in their records that the instrumentation does not support. 0.01 degree precision may be obtainable in a laboratory with some specialized equipment and much greater control of the test environment, but out in the big bad world it’s not going to happen.
40
Yes, accuracy is not precision. Having a lot of decimal points and even being sensitive to 0.001C or displaying three decimal points does not mean you are accurate to 0.001C. You could even display 5 decimal points, but what does it mean? How do you calibrate this? How do you get consistency with previous records. That is called homogenization and it can go very wrong.
Also as one blogger explained yesterday, a set of many thermometers in a small area will produce variations of 0.5C anyway, without any of them being necessarily wrong. There is a normal variation in what you are doing which may well vastly exceed your accuracy, so a measurement with a vast number of digits may be no more representative or accurate than a visually read thermometer from 1880.
20
Exactly. I can report data to whatever degree of precision I choose, but if my instrumentation is not accurate to the same degree then the data is open to interpretation. If someone reports they recorded a value of 12.0037 on the whatever scale and I know their instrumentation is only accurate to +/- 0.2 on said scale then I can assume that a) they’re trying to b.s. me, and b) I can expect that it was somewhere close to 12. That’s about it.
What I suspect is that the “keepers of the temps” have decided that using a precision of 2 decimal points makes it look like their data is more accurate than it is. For the average person who lives by what the media tells them that will work. For people who work with sensors, probes, thermistors, thermocouples, etc. they won’t be so easily led. I also suspect that much of it is coming from someone’s computer program who figured that %.2f would make the reports look more impressive.
Then again I’m getting very cynical as this climate circus drags on.
30
Yes I wondered how you would detect 1/100th of a degree change accurately …probably some bloke accidentally breathing in the thermomenter at the time….its like using a 6′ crow bar to do surgery on someones cornea….
41
Completely off topic but the voting for the finalists for the 2015 web blog awards is open. Get in and vote for Jo
http://2015.bloggi.es/
220
Done! Thank you! A vote for Jo is a vote for the truth.
141
I voted early, in order to get the additional set of steak knives, and the free earwax removal tool.
50
A New Zealander who uses steak knives?
The ear wax I could believe 🙂
50
Just one nomination this year. Has the World of Blogging been learning from the skeptic blogs, raising the standard overall ?
31
All the main temperature sets work to the same standards,what they call ‘internationally agreed best practice’ if there are two areas that warmists and sceptics largely agree on its that the climate has been warming since we came out of the LIA and that temperatures have stalled in the last 18 yrs or so.Well if theyve been uniformally cooling the past and not correctly adjusting for UHI then we havent really come out of the LIA period just yet and the temperature plateau has possibly been going on for around 150 yrs or more.So if thats the case then its neither sceptics or warmists that are correct about C02 and its effects as a greenhouse gas,its those that say C02 has no warming effect detectable from zero
123
Plant me firmly in the “CO2 is not a magic gas that gets to violate the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics and only makes equilibrium temp lower due to Gas Law” group.
40
More concerning I think is that if that post-LIA period warming hit a plateau earlier and has been going on for possibly 150 years and given the cyclical nature of the planet does that mean we are that much closer to a return to a LIA type of event?
We can adapt, technologically speaking we are in a far better position to adapt to a long term cooling cycle than people of earlier periods. But we first need to know we have something we need to be preparing for, and second the government and the greens need to stop screwing around with the technology that would enable us to adapt and get through such a change.
If all the “powers that be” are focused on warming and warming only then there won’t be any time to prepare for some other eventuality as they won’t consider it until it is too late.
Instead of stroking their egos and pacifying whatever god or goddess of nature they are infatuated with this week thinking they can control the climate, they and we would be in better shape trying to sort out what it really is doing and will be doing in the near term so we can adjust accordingly. I don’t see that happening.
30
I agree with Doubting Dave. There’s not even any correlation between increasing levels of CO2 and increasing temperature. It almost makes me feel sorry for the IPCC as they are looking for something – “climate sensitivity” – that doesn’t exist. Makes looking for a needle in a haystack easy.
Cheers,
Dave B
21
The only good correlation is between CO2 levels and temperature data “adjustments” by agencies whose budgets would not be as large if there wasn’t a “crisis.”
20
28 Fe
http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/scienceshow/artists-respond-to-climate-change/6266170
20
Are there still sharks in Shark Bay? Is it safe to swim there, at hide tide?
If there are, and if it is not, then there has been no significant change – simples.
30
BoM seems to have developed its own brand of high-octane fuel to power CAGW scepticism!
51
but ABC just told me climate change has caused all kinds of things i hadn’t even noticed…and they’re teaching the kids too:
28 Feb: ABC Science Show: Artists respond to climate change
Host: Robyn Williams
Laura Stocker presented a seminar on the impacts of climate change on the coast of Western Australia to honours students studying visual arts at Curtin University in Perth. The seminar described sea level rise, storm surge, inundation, with eventual recession of the shoreline. The students responded by producing art works. Laura Stocker describes some of the art and how it affected members of the public.
From Transcript:
Robyn Williams: Yes, quite a few people, say in Tasmania, are actually taking photographs of fish and birds and various other animals which are further south than they usually are. So you’ve got people actually using a sort of art to track these changes.
Laura Stocker: That’s right, yes, there’s a poleward shift of a lot of marine species, and in Western Australia as well as Tasmania this poleward shift is very, very pronounced and has already had an impact on commercial as well as non-commercial fish species…
Robyn Williams: Give me some examples, what did they portray?
Laura Stocker: Okay, well, Tanisha Percival, for example, she put in two entries. One was a huge acrylic painting called Coastline which showed a double perspective of the coast before and after sea level rise. She also produced some modernist etchings with Chinese ink, pencil, and gauche, which were called Thermal Expansion, and they showed industrial infrastructure being inundated by the sea…
Robyn Williams: Those are interesting examples. What sort of impact did that have on the public when they came? Did they see it as propaganda or as too bleak or what?
Laura Stocker: Well, it’s an interesting question and we did specifically ask viewers to complete some exit surveys and we interviewed some viewers as well. And of all the work that I’ve done around engaging the public or decision-makers with science, I think these artworks had the most powerful effect on people. So for some people it was really about the communication of the science itself. They said it was about making specific topics easier to understand, that it was a great way to communicate with people who might not necessarily read a scientific tract, which in fact most people don’t want to read an article in Nature or a detailed technical report…READ ON
http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/scienceshow/artists-respond-to-climate-change/6266170
90
How scary!
Art and emotion brazenly try for a foothold to swamp scientific objectivity.
60
Has anyone on this forum tried to comment on Radio National programs from a sceptics viewpoint? I commented on an interview with Bob Massie on RN recently and was only allowed one post. Subsequent replies were ignored even though they were brief and polite.I have a distinct impression that they don’t like sceptics.Keep all that good info coming Pat!
171
This the same “comedian” replying to Bolt?
Andrew Bolt: I’m telling you, there’s a lot of fear out there. So what I do is, when I see an outlandish claim being made…, Tim Flannery suggesting rising seas this next century eight stories high, Professor Mike Archer, … dean of science, suggesting rising seas this next century of up to 100 metres, or Al Gore six metres…. I ask you, Robyn, 100 metres in the next century…do you really think that?
Robyn Williams: It is possible, yes. The increase of melting that they’ve noticed in Greenland and the amount that we’ve seen from the western part of Antarctica, if those increases of three times the expected rate continue, it will be huge.
90
Williams might as well try for comedian. That answer proves he isn’t a scientist.
61
As memory serves, a comparison was made between two Stevenson screens, one was whitewashed, as they were up until the 60’s and the other was painted with plastic paint. The plastic paited screen recorded an increase in temperature of 0.5 degrees, I cannot remember if it was F or C.
60
Anthony Watts did the Stevenson screen paint job comparison back in 2007.
A typical day in the Stevenson Screen Paint Test
90
Thank you.
20
We all owe Chris Gillham a huge vote of thanks and gratitude for the great work he has done to highlight the unscientific behaviour of the Australian B.O.M.
These revelations must surely come out in the present government enquiry. Someone has to be accountable. Where is our media all this.
Thank goodness for Alan Jones on his radio show.
Geoff W Sydney
301
Little did they know that almost 46 years of that 74 year history (before 1905) would be deemed “unfit” to be used in Australia’s temperature record, because it would expose the Federation Drought and the hot 1880s, and if used, prevent the downward manipulation of the temperature record after 1905 by as much as 2 degrees!
191
Half the global warming is caused by reducing past temperatures, and another half by fudging the current temperatures.
Then there’s the half due to selecting the warmest stations and the half caused by averaging areas mainly from the warmest stations.
Omigod- that’s double the warming! Its worse than we thought. Where is Chicken Little when we really need her?
221
It’s even worse here. In the US the National Climatic Data Center, who keeps the USHCN network (like your ACORN,) is now creating over 50% of the “weather stations” that comprise their “High Quality Network” for 2015 inside computers. Data from places that don’t have thermometers created out of thin air. They’ve dumped most of the good rural stations and replaced them with video game avatars that look like thermometers. And of course they’ve kept all the UHI contaminated urban stations.
Just… Arghhh… I can’t use those words here.
https://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2015/02/26/ncdc-hits-new-milestones-of-fake-data/
91
That should guarantee the desired outcome then.
10
Google’s boss Eric Schmidt is funding this search for the ‘missing heat’ at the bottom of the ocean out from Perth. At least, it’s the ABC that said it was to investigate
‘global warming’climate change.100
It won’t be too long before a group of scuba divers can sit around on the ocean floor and boil the billy.
90
FUGRO are onto it mate. Looking for flight MH 370 is just a ploy, they are really searching for the missing heat. Who knows, they might find the missing continent, Lemuria and prove continental drift is another BS hypothesis.
30
Accolades to Chris Gillham and to you Jo for persevering with this investigation which BOM dont want to know about.
You only need to find one continuous Stevenson Screen record back into the early 1880’s to blow up the homogenisation fabrication. And would any UHI effects only be in the latter part of the record – say the last 70 years – implying the first part of the record is probably OK, and doesnt need adjustment?
But remember, activists and environmental fanatics inside the BOM and CSIRO, including high divisional positions, will fight you every step of the way.
152
These ‘adjustments’ and ‘homogenisations’ were not done by faeries, they were made by public servants by the direction of more senior public servants. Some of these may now be retired (and unless they are committed to the noble cause) so now is the time for them to step up and tell what they know about what they were doing and who directed their work. We can then move up the chain to the source.
I am at a loss as to how people can go to work every day and spend their lives fudging data. I thought that only happened in kindergartens. Then again, maybe that is the new paradigm for the once great CSIRO and the never great BoM.
112
Not quite this thread
Did anyone have a look at WXMaps this morning?
Then check it now. And I’d be very curious as to what climate variable input managed to kick the rain hotspot about the width of the Coral Sea in 12 hours.
I was pointed at this site around 1995 and it has been pretty bloody good for our area until about 2 years ago when we had that laydown misare (500 cards) el Nino that didn’t happen.
Since then it seems to have been bouncing around like a fart in a bottle
50
There’s a very interesting off topic but very relevant and interesting point arising out of Chris Gillham’s rsearch .
An it is a point that is starting to create a very large amount of concern in the inner circles of the internet and electronic data storage industry.
Chris is going back as others are now also doing, some 128 years, one and quarter centuries, into the news papers that printed the news, the reports and the opinions of that century and a quarter ago.
Steve Goddard is doing likewise for some of his information out of those old papers as he mines information out of Australia’s digitisation of those now invaluable old newspapers through Trove
[ Don’t know why i started this as a quick check on those figures means at 76 coming up to 77 years old I have damn well lived through 60% of that time.
Seems like I’m just another bloody old fossil as some of the young ones are not so gently suggest to me on occassions these days ! ]
Anyway my point is we can find and read those completely unaltered and original news reports from all that time ago knowing that it is as reported in those times of a century and quarter ago, warts and all.
But how many out there in our times of obsessive manipulation and corruption of climate and weather electronic data all done apparently to fit some socialistic agenda, would expect to still find all the immediate past and current temperature and rainfall data and records and no doubt near future climate and weather and temperature and rainfall data all still fully existent , all still as it was originally recorded, still fully readable, unaltered and unalterable unless it was facsimiled ,in every detail and fully readable by the common man in it’s current electronic form by around, say year 2145?
NASA lost a great deal of data when it changed programming languages a number of times. some of that data was retrieved when a dedicated researcher spent a lot of time tracking down the old computers that were used by NASA 50 or more years ago
And it turned out in one very important case that an old time NASA engineer retrieved a couple of those machines from the scrap heaps [ there were I think five built in total ] as they were being thrown out. retrieved for as he thought to himself, “They are going to need these one day.”
50 or so years later those two machines were found and retrieved from his store shed where they had sat for all those years.
NASA’s experience now repeated increasingly in so many sectors is just a microcosm of the real problems looming for the future of science, for research, for industry and society as the ever changing electronic media and languages and electronic formats used for computing and storage of immense amounts of data keeps ever evolving. And as the electronic formats and languages change eventually those who had the skills in the older electronic data and storage technologies and languages die
With their loss goes the essential knowledge of the languages and the formats that would have allowed access to those old records and data from the past , in fact possibly as far back as to draw a comparison from 2145, say a century and quarter ago.
Thats us and our world and our climate, all recorded as far as the scientists and public of 2145 are concerned, in totally unreadable incomprehensible electronic formats and languages.
The 2145 AD Greenpeace, WWF, Manns, Hansens, Gores, Romms, Wards, Holdrens Obamas and etc and etc would have a filed day in promoting and forcing their ideology and cult like beliefs onto the populace of those future times as there would no longer be any means available for the common man and citizen scientists left to challenge their ideology through the use of facts and data from the now unreadable and no longer comprehensible past.
152
ROM, That’s why I don’t use cloud computing for back up. Who knows where it will be or who will control in in the future.
20
me@home,
google has been pushing their cloud virtual computers a lot lately and I sort of got the same impression but from a different perspective.
Currently, in order to build an index for the webpage lisings that they return in their search results, they use a program called a spider to go from website to website retrieving all the data and making a copy of each webpage on their own servers. (they call this crawling the web)
By putting your data in the cloud, basically your storing your data directly on their servers for them, reducing the overhead in the crawling process. As a consequence of this, your data no longer has the amount of security it used to.
Say their server is hacked, the hacker now has access to countless websites whereas if the data remained on your original server, the hacker would have to hack each website seperately.
A close look at all the different computer networks that have been hacked over the years should put quiet to any one who might reply to me by saying that google couldn’t possibly get hacked.
Scary s#!t.
Abe
10
This is devastating to BOM’s credibility
122
This is a great example of the Importance of the JoNova blog.
Chris Gilham has done a massive effort to clarify the contribution of OLD CLIMATE RECORDS and to correct some mistaken views about Global warming promoted through our Media, our government institutions and our political parties.
But who would know about it?
I would not have known about it if not for JoNova, and neither would most of the other readers.
There are a lot of readers.
It is our job to spread this information! Which I will try to do. And also to support our each other with encouragement and sharing of ideas.
I am going to buy some chocolate.
151
yep
50
Well done Chris, you deserve recognition for your relentless pursuit of the truth. You’ve been doing this number crunching for years. I dips me lid.
Ken Stewart
140
Looks like the CSIRO has had a visit from NZ’s Dr Jim Salinger. He did a similar massaging of the NZ NIWA historical data to create Global Warming.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/11/01/new-zealnds-temperature-record-challenged-by-new-skeptical-paper/
93
Lots of work to get this far so thanks. Coming up; the survey or whitewash by the CSIRO led investigation into the methodology of the BoM. We hope the findings are published and then the smart people here will have more sleuthing to do. Sandlands will have a hard job convincing the sceptics here that he has done an honest job.
81
Always the issue with behind-closed-doors investigations
Will the unexpurgated report be released publicly, and how can we tell that it is unexpurgated ?
21
BoM maps out via peterhannam@twitter:
February was Australia’s second-hottest on record for maximum temps just shy of 1983 record
https://twitter.com/p_hannam/status/572215587511799808
February also posted 5th-warmest for minimum temps, a full degree above average
https://twitter.com/p_hannam/status/572215936712753152
For summer as whole, it was Australia’s fourth-warmest on record for max temps
https://twitter.com/p_hannam/status/572217016595005441
After a wet burst in January, Australia dried out a bit in Feb, with half average rain for the month
https://twitter.com/p_hannam/status/572237186663227392
Australia’s run of abnormally warm weather has continued with the country recording its second-hottest February in data going back to 1910, according to the Bureau of Meteorology.
http://www.smh.com.au/environment/weather/australia-posts-second-hottest-february-as-warm-run-continues-20150302-13slj0.html
30
And February, 2015 was the coldest evah in many parts of the US. I am sure they would want a bit of Aussie heat to temper these records. Thank God for the wonderful gifts of coal and gas reserves to stop people dying of the cold. Bloody windfarms and solar panels would be useless. People survive in the heat, but die in the cold, unless they chop a few trees down or put a few coals on the fire.
71
HJ I call BS. The first link shows a map claiming that the Melbourne are was hotter than average in Feb, Rubbish! I needed socks on all month. Feb should be sandals only here. Yes, I know it’s only my toes talking but it’s as scientific as anything we get from the BOM these days.
42
ROFL…hottest Feb?! Not here in this part of Vic. We’ve not reached 40C this summer past…who do they think they are kidding? My use of AC has been far less than last year and I hate the heat.
10
To summarise :
Historic temperatures adjusted down 0.4°C
Shifting from whitewash to latex paints can bump Stevenson screens Max temps up by 0.8°C
Older style max temp thermometers had a tendency to read low by 0.27°C
Electronic measurement system known to produce a mean temperature of 0.93°C warmer than Lig thermometers
Combined , all the temperature read errors add to a whopping 2.0°C Higher for modern kit so in addition They cool the past by 0.4°C to create a 2.4°C divergence between the same temperature measured then and measured now . How the hell can anyone expect to extract a piddling near nonexistent F%#ing anthropogenic warming signal of out of that crap ?
172
You forgot the part where they use statistics to take that +/-1°C or +/-2°C data to create historic trends and future projections out to 0.01°C. I’d love to know how to do that. I could save a fortune buying inexpensive test gear and just using their adjustment and trend math to make it perform like the expensive kit. Maybe that’s the real reason they won’t give anybody their code. The companies that make measuring and test equipment have bought them off to keep it all a secret.
91
You forgot UHI.
21
And the removal of low reading stations.
31
I hadn’t known about the website “Energy Matters” before today.
They’re on a campaign to expose misleading data adjustments. Surprisingly, in view of the conclusions by Chris Gilham et al, they conclude that BOM homogenisation did not distort the record for the stations they looked at. An equally surprising finding was that the data set revealed no warming in the signal. They looked at over a third of the continent.
I’m astonished, but their work is out there.
http://euanmearns.com/temperature-adjustments-in-australia/
Certainly a relevant resource for everyone interested in temperature adjustments.
61
See comment 37.
Yes, as you say but bear in mind that Alice Springs isn’t anywhere near a city, so the BoM had nothing to enable a big upward adjustment. Of course if they were to widen the area to include Sydney and the UHI there, they will be able to adjust Alice Springs to bring it in line.
61
Has anybody submitted Mr. Gillham’s work to the BOM Review Panel?
Just a thought.
70
I second this point.
That Panel needs this data.
71
I continent to struggle with how there could be ANY justification for changing data.
If it is obviously and demonstrably wrong, then is should be discarded, but the idea that is is wrong and we know what it should be is utterly ludicrous.
Where is the data that show unequivocally what these people claim the temperature should be? If they have that, then why do they need to fiddle with the other data?
81
Well done to Chris Gillham for undertaking this work.
It shows that the “raw data” ain’t so raw after all.
However, this is unlikely to make any difference at all. When it comes to any climate issues, validation of results is against consensus expert opinion not against the real world. To point out that the real world differs from the consensus is to be in denial (of that consensus).
61
Jo, still trying to catch your attention. If you could send me an email confirming you’ve at least seen this that would be grand. The post shows the average temperature for 30 CHCN V2 records within 1000 kms of Alice Springs. It really is quite awesome.
Temperature Adjustments in Australia
And the chart that every wee ozzy should see:
http://www.euanmearns.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/alice_temp_anom.png
91
Jo,
Euan has done some good stuff here. Worth a look.
40
Kevin … when there’s an overlap with available early raw temps in CDO, whether or not it’s quality controlled, station data in CSIR and/or Year Book are usually the same or pretty close. I agree there are plenty of oddities in the BoM’s raw CDO database, old and recent, so the source from which ACORN does adjustments isn’t quite as raw or accurate as it should be.
I agree that Euan’s page is interesting. Among the inland Australian stations he analyses, three are in the Year Book 1911-40 Stevenson database – Daly Waters, Cloncurry and Alice Springs. The Year Book 1911-40 mean of the three is 24.3C compared to their 2000-14 raw mean of 24.6C, suggesting 0.3C warming.
Alice Springs is an ACORN station. It had an unadjusted Year Book 1911-40 mean of 20.6C rising to 21.3C in raw 2000-14 – a 0.7C increase (albeit an airport instead of the original PO). In ACORN, it had an adjusted 1911-40 mean of 20.1C and a 2000-14 mean of 21.4C – a 1.3C increase.
I suspect the ACORN rationale is that post offices warm up but airports don’t. Urban or airport heat islands have in various studies been shown to have an influence of several degrees in some cities and regional centres, and it’s hard to understand where ACORN adequately counters this artificial warming. The impact of 1972 metrication adds to concerns over what is and isn’t deemed worthy of adjustment.
My take on the historic datasets is that Australian mean temps overall have increased roughly 0.5C from 1940 to 2000-2014 (1910 to 2000-2014 if you prefer – same thing), and mean temps before 1940 at the ACORN locations seem to have been cooled roughly 0.5C (e.g. Alice Springs above). The CSIR temps are questionable because of exposure uncertainties but Jo has touched on how a large majority were Stevenson and if the Glaisher vs Stevenson mean warming bias of 0.2C per annum is accepted, that averages among all 226 CSIR stations min/max till 1931 as an insignificant decimal fraction.
I’ve compared seasonal averages at the 44 Year Book 1911-40 stations with their 1800s-1931 CSIR averages. These were the same 44 stations and none had been relocated to my knowledge. Summer max were 0.2C warmer in CSIR which might be claimed as evidence of non-Stevenson hot max bias from the 1800s when many stations used other shelters before upgrading to Stevenson. However, summer min were 0.1C cooler in CSIR, max were exactly the same in autumn/winter and 0.1C warmer in spring, while min across the year were 0.1C cooler.
If seasonal differences are considered indicative of a screen influence, the annual mean shelter bias was about the same as the difference between the 1800s-1931 and 1911-40 mean temperatures at the same 44 stations – 18.1C and 18.1C. That won’t settle any Stevenson argument but it’s relevant.
The CSIR and Year Book data has been submitted to the ACORN review panel.
52
Chris, thanks for the details. My initial objective with this study was to examine the veracity of the GHCN V3.1 adjustments. Does anyone seriously believe that this chart has anything remotely to do with correcting non-climatc artefacts?
http://www.euanmearns.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/dT.png
But the surprising thing is that the net result of doing all this is zero. So why do it? Records changed by ±1.5˚C. When I hear you talk about adjustments of 0.2˚C, which would be a single step change that’s fine, and it should be done manually by those who know. In Africa I’ve got some records adjusted by 4˚C.
Personally I’m happy to assume that some non-climatic effects will warm and some will cool and that this comes out in the wash. I’m also happy to trust my geochemists eye for pattern recognition. If a series of adjacent records show the same thing then they are probably all OK. But note I have been entirely objective in station selection using all the 30 records that the GISS web platform returned with Alice at centre.
But you are also talking about another issue which is the veracity of the raw record, GHCN V2 in this case. I’m going to try and make time to check this out on Iceland and the UK where local met office records are available.
20
With warming gone into decline,
Or paused on the temperature line,
Then,the past to be cooled,
Would leave the world fooled,
And the hockey-stick curve would look fine.
80
Magnificent!
20
Ruairi: You surpass yourself! 🙂
10
“What class!
March 2, 2015 at 9:19 pm · Reply
Has anybody submitted Mr. Gillham’s work to the BOM Review Panel?
Just a thought.”
This must be a top priority for someone like Jo Nova to do with a commentary.
70
And your point is … what exactly?
11
Please explain Rereke!
It seems a good idea to me
30
About fifteen years ago when I was trying to decide if I should use a Heat Pump for my heating source I quickly and easly found the Weather Service charts, tables and even raw data on the Heating and Cooling degree days for most of the cities in the USA. This data went back to the late 1800’s early 1900’s for many cities. About four years ago I had a brainstorm. This data would show if it was getting warmer, colder or staying the same. I could not find the data, I have spent many hours looking trying to find those records and regardless of the search terms or search engine I use I can no longer find this data. Although there are many web pages providing Heating/Cooling Degree day data, it only goes back to about 1940 or 1950. WHY? What are they trying to hide? What does it show?
151
Exactly right Uzurbrain.
You have to find the unhomogenised original reference data in a library somewhere.
As ROM has pointed out, internet data is not reliable anymore.
20
The enquiry into BoM homogenization risks deteriorating into an argument about methods. I want to know from whom the orders came to adjust the records. I want to know the names of every single person involved from the very top. Who they are, who they work for and any financial benefits accruing to them. I would like complete transparency and exposure. Nothing does will do.
141
Does Australia have a Freedom of Information Act, or equivalent?
40
It does, and good luck with it!
http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/legis/cth/consol_act/foia1982222/
30
Dr Blain Trewin (BOM) seems like a good starting point.
21
Well I guess that Blair is a rusted on AGW type. Fairfax goth old of Weatherzone and decided to expunge any contrary views on above mentioned subject,Trewin is complicite with that
11
I have not the most trust in the BOM adjustments, especially because they keep it so secret.
On the other hand some adjustments could be OK, the adjustment concernig reading/reset of max/min temperature.
If it is done once a day there will be some higher readings when done afternoon versus when done in the morning. What the real change is depends very much on the variability of the actual temperatures at the station, and if and how they changed observation time.
It is not so obvious that a change happens, but with large variations over some days it can be up to 0.8C as seen from Boulder Colorado USA, that really has some large variations.
21
The time of min/max reset (TOBS) is not a real issue. Steven Goddard (Tony Heller) has checked trends of stations that did morning resets vs. stations that did afternoon resets. There is no difference in the trends. As long as the resets are done about the same time each day it doesn’t matter. It just moves the 24 hour window back and forth a few hours. The folks making all the adjustments are just using it as another excuse to change data. Note that they don’t complain about the morning resets messing up the daily min temperatures. Hmmm, I wonder why? The worst possible error you could have is a max temperature could be assigned the next day’s date. It’s still a max temperature and doesn’t need adjusting. The adjustment logic also assumes that max temps will always be in mid afternoon as if weather fronts follow a schedule. Like homogenization, it’s an excuse to change temperatures to match some agenda.
81
Forgot the link. This should give you all his recent TOBS posts:
https://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/?s=tobs
11
Hi NielsZoo
As i said, it is not obvious, but the effect is anyway real and most likely real for every station, but with different values. I am just saying that if time of observation has changed and if they use max/min system it is difficult to compare measurements.
I would like to know how the earlier/later measurements were performed before i dismiss them completely. No need to bark at the wrong tree.
Even with 24 hours max/min, there is a daily component retained in the result, that changes the result dependent on the time of reading and reset.
I did not believe it, but finding the effect at two stations, i figured out how and why.
You might be able to check yourself by loading down data: http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/crn/qcdatasets.html Use the hourly02 series with hourly measurements, then you can make your own max/min results any time of the day.
It is a credit to NOAA that the data is accessible.
01
No, the “effect” is not real. The ONLY thing that might change is that a high temperature may be slipped to the next date. Morning resets can do the same for low temps. The high temperature and low temperature is still recorded for the 24 hour period between resets. The trends are identical for morning, afternoon and evening resets. The only “valid fix” if a station is reset “too early” or “too late” would be to shift ALL high or all low temperatures back or forth one calendar day… and that wouldn’t make any difference in trends either. As long as the station was consistently reset at the same time, changing the measured temperature is tampering, not science. Weather and climate do NOT follow the schedule put forth in a manual, so consistency is the key to getting valid trends as well as min and max temps at some set frequency.What happens if a front moves through before, after or during a reset? Do you “adjust” the time of the front to match your schedule?
TOBS might change an average temperature created with high and low readings for a day… but that isn’t a real temperature, it’s a fictional number, a useless data point that means nothing. It doesn’t represent anything concrete in the real world. It can be 10° for 12 hours and 20° for 12 hours and the “average” is 15°. It could be 10° for 23 hours and 20° for 1 hour and the “average” temperature is still 15°. Same goes for 10° for 1 hour and 20° for 23 hours. All three are very different days given the exact same “average” temperature. It’s a fantasy number with no validity and a “change” in it due TOBS is being used as an excuse to alter real data.
20
NielsZoo,
If all they record is min/max, what’s the point in averaging the two. We lose information in the process. From a scientific point of view, if there is a change in trend, it’s much more interesting to know if the change is occuring to the same degree in both the min and the max and, if not, then that difference is more likely to reveal new knowledge about nature, than just knowing what the overall trend is.
I’d just as soon leave the data as it is and produce two plots one min, one max.
Abe
20
I wonder what future statisticians and homogenisers will make of the temperature record in Melbourne on 11 February 2015. The maximum temperature at Melbourne (Olympic Park) was 26.8. The maximum temperature at Melbourne Airport, 19.4 kms away, was 35.4. Both measured on our current, state of the art equipment. A northerly was blowing at Tullamarine and a sea breeze was blowing at Olympic Park. Both valid data. Will one of the readings be homogenised in future?
51
Extremes are easier for climate extremists to exploit than averages .
21
A great post. Congratulations to Chris and Jo.
51
Here we go again…
http://www.news.com.au/national/the-proof-australia-is-getting-hotter/story-fncynjr2-1227235090301
10
Yes, Australia has been warming for 300 years probably — like the rest of the world. What’s it got to do with man made emissions which came after WWII?
Jo
111
Subtly and natural with occasional upsandowns of greater magnitudes than at other times. Big wheels;little wheels.
20
February average maximum as Boulia
Jan monthly average max temps at Boulia.
The shift to Boulia Airport appears to be in the late 60s but no trend before or after. The hot weather was just that, weather.
Here is 1914. Any idea why this February might have been the hottest eva!
25 days of 40 plus in Jan and then 20 days of 41 plus in Feb until the data goes missing.
00
Meanwhile in Canada February was extremely cold this year
http://www.cbc.ca/m/touch/news/story/1.2977794
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Dennis: You could say the eastern half of Canada, just like the USA was extremely cold. However, there is another half called western Canada and this winter was not bad overall. We had some extreme cold but overall in my opinion it was a normal winter.
Good old CBC believes eastern Canada and in particular Toronto is the centre of the universe.
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http://www.news.com.au/technology/environment/the-proof-australia-is-getting-hotter/story-fnjwvztl-1227246219514
Abandon all hope.. here is the “PROOF”!
This is not journalism….
41
That’s odd isn’t it, because satellite data from 1979 shows that the Southern Hemisphere hasn’t warmed hardly at all, eyeballing maybe about 0.2C. The tropics also have been relatively flat.
I guess that there must be a place or places in the S H (outside the Antarctic which is not well covered by satellites) where there has been no warming or even cooling.
Or, difficult as it may be to believe, there may something wrong with the BoM surface record.
61
[…] Adjustments that cool historic temperatures have almost doubled Australia’s rate of warming at Jo Nova. Category: Climate Change […]
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Here is a thought and a question.
There has been a to-do lately about corrections for US-style time-of-observation bias (change from afternoon to morning observation). In Australia and NZ I would assume that most historic records don’t suffer from this much. In NZ most temperature measurements have been taken at about 9 am since well before the year 1900.
But what adjustments are made to max, min and mean temperatures due to the initial adoption of daylight saving, to changes in the date of the annual switch-over, and changes in the amount of daylight saving?
11
BoM confidence in it’s own work:
Renewed warming in the tropical Pacific Ocean
Issued on 3 March 2015 | Product Code IDCKGEWW00
The Bureau’s ENSO Tracker has been upgraded to El Niño WATCH.
El Niño WATCH indicates about a 50% chance of El Niño forming in 2015.
http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/enso/archive/ensowrap_20150303.pdf
~ ~ ~
No percentages with solar physicists.
Either they are correct. Or wrong:
There will be no El Nino Pacific Ocean warming event until November 2015 predict two US physicists who have developed a theory for how the sun drives warming and cooling cycles in the world’s oceans.
This discovery has significant implications for climate science more generally.
“You can’t get phase locking like this unless there is some non-linearity in the system somewhere,” stated Douglass.
It also means that attempts to model climate phenomena such as El Nino events with conventional climate models that take past data and incrementally project it into the future are flawed.
21
And a 50% chance of … what?
And, as an added bonus:
Well, well, hooda thunk …?
21
Over @theconversation, a new post will yield a goldmine of comments from people suffering from climate depression from imminent armageddon.
They have already started.
Understanding grief can help us adapt to climate change
. . .
Somebody call the whaaaambulance!
30
I’ve looked for the author’s credentials and all I can find is at Linkedin:
She’s a drama queen.
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handjive,
One day soon the whole climate change meme will finally be lowered into it’s final resting place. That’s when the AGW faithful will really be in need of grief counselling.
Abe
10
And you forgot the Zombie stations , those stations that no longer exist but are still generating “estimated data ” plus stations that have never existed but were created to fill some imaginary hole in the geographical distribution of stations in the USA and possibly in the ROW.
Both of these examples of Zombie stations estimated data are being fed into the official NCDC climate data base and from there to GISS. CRU, Hadley and the German climate research organisations.
And you forgot the Break Point adjustments, possibly and arguably the most influential adjustments also used by the BOM as a part of their suite of adjustments that creates the largest past historical cooling of the recorded historical temperatures thereby apparently and fallaciously warming the present temperatures to a point where it has been used as warmista and the eco-fascist green blob propaganda to destroy hundreds of billions of dollars of Global wealth on totally useless and invariably impotent and grossly faulty research and projects.
That same immense wealth could have been utilised for the overall benefit of mankind in so many different fields such as permanently supplying clean drinkable water to every person on earth..
Berkeley Earth: raw versus adjusted temperature data
[ $30 billion dollars is the WHO’s estimated cost of bringing high quality drinkable water to every citizen on Earth.
$30 billion dollars is less than half of the wealth that the USA has spent on it’s climate program between 1989 and 2009.]
JoNova; U.S. Government Funding for Climate Change Related Activities 1989-2009 = $79 billion
And THAT is only the USA’s spending on climate change related activities and climate alarmist science..
21
Sigh!
” Fat Finger Syndrome” as the financial traders call it!
Above Post #50 refers to Byron and following comments beginning @ Post 32
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Has Chris Gilham put his name on the paper?
http://www.waclimate.net/year-book-csir.html
Is this for publication? I hope so. This is a very important reference in the Australian climate data base.
Chris, Please put your name on the paper and take the credit.
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O/T – I can recommend the movie Kingsman. Global warming zealotry makes an appearance. The fact I’m still recommending it probably gives away one aspect of the ending. Lots of violence too but you’ll just have to laugh that off when you see it.
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It is increasingly obvious that a trend to fudge for political purpose is afoot, but alas poor Yorrick I new him well is about to descend on these idiots of AGW . The well Known cycle of around 3 hundred years is descending upon us, being old, the normal 30 year cycle of warm and cold which I have lived with is also upon us, thus we have a double whammy, it is the longer cycle that could also be encroaching upon our climate that is the biggest worry, not for me but for the grand children. This crap about global warming is really starting to get on my goat.
The sun in all it’s glory has been a tad spotless lately , this maybe a bad portend of things to come, the good news is that Australia may have a new influx of European and north American immigrants escaping the cold, in the coming decades. The bad news is that the IPCC in Paris may pull off a miracle and bugger the entire world for a generation.
Good people like Jo and the author of this post are real heroes trying to save the world from it’s own insanity. Being just an old engineer I take on lots of information and correlate it over time, some of it from centuries past, it can all make sense and be useful, AGW thus far has eluded my sensibilities and has emerged as a political construct.
The sun however has some strange behaviours thus far unexplained by the supposed scientists of solar bent. The odd solar cycle of around 11 years has been unexplained, why 11 years, seems a simple task, must be a beat somewhere that causes a cycle, solar scientists, almost idiots all
analysing the effect and not the cause.
The moods of dear old Sol are not of his making, the almost suns, our gas giants in their various perambulations alignments , misalignments and
harmonics are the key to old Sols moods and our climate variations, it is not astrology it is real science and that is the real reason the sun has it’s ups and downs. The music of the spheres is alive and well, give me another reason for solar cycles and I will think about it.
Remember all that the sun is cyclic, what if anything have the solars scientists told you, why the sun cycles, it must be magic for it is meant to be constant. So we have a varying climate, all over the shop, must be CO2, liars profiteers and charlatans all. It is the sun, a glowing gas giant keeping us warm.
Non can tell us how the sun works it is but speculation, a sunspot is dark, that means what you see is cooler, how can that be, if fission in the sun is it’s heat, looking in should be hotter? Much have we to learn, much is known but not told, the standard model of physics and the standard model of the universe are a crock, it is not just AGW that is wrong, mainstream science has been barking up the wrong tree for all my life.
Rant over Wayne
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Wayne Job,
I’m reminded of an article I read in some so called ‘respected’ journal like Science or Scientific American, about the research of some theoretical physicists investigating the mathematics of string theory. One of the things that struck me was an explanation by one of them of why it’s so hard to prove it.
Basically, he said, it’s so hard because there are an infinite amount of possible ways to express the equations and so finding the right arrangement of these equations has been a challenge. Now, you have to laugh, right? I know I did!
If you have an infinite number of combinations the the chances of finding the right one must be…
one in infinity!
But let’s say they got lucky and found a permutation of the equations that works. That still would not be a valid scientific theory because it would need to be falsifiable. At the very least, they’d need to show that all the other permutations didn’t work which could never be done. There’s an infinite number of them so how would you check them all?
Then came the sad part. Funding for the program had run out so they were lobbying for more money from the government to continue their research. This article was primarily focused on the importance of ‘deciphering the secrets of creation’. So they want our money to continue trying to find something that’s impossible to find, (as close to impossible as you can get), and which could never be confirmed to be correct.
The punch line?
The article was called “High Priests of the New Cosmology”. *
Abe
*the title may not be completely accurate, word for word, but the phrase “High Priests” was definitely there.
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All these adjustments and the fuzz about them is a sign that it is not important in itself, but by the political implications.
If peoble really could feel any changes without constantly being told, they would not question it so much, and it would certainly be measurable without any adjustments.
Without all this focus on “Climate”, all would have called it weather and then moved on.
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Homogenization is evil. Watts found that rural pristine longstanding stations were almost flat since the 19thC, but are routinely treated by the adjustment algorithms as “outliers” and matched to the nearest urbanized sites, and effectively vanished.
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