FOLLOW-UP TO THE RECENT NASA CLIMBDOWN

An excerpt below from a long post in which Steve McIntyre looks at the defensive reaction from warmists to the recent NASA adjustments of the U.S. temperature record. In the excerpt below he notes with remarkable politeness the problems inherent in using U.S. weather station records that are sited in artificially warm locations. He notes that adjustments have allegedly been made for such locational problems but is politely appalled by the secrecy surrounding the adjustments. Science that does not make available enough detail of its research to enable replication of that research by others is just not science. He notes that at least one adjustment was UPWARDS rather than downwards, as one would expect. He also notes that, corrupted though the US data may be, it is undoubtedley less corrupted than much of the ROW (rest of the world) data -- suggesting that the recently improved U.S. record may be a better model of world effects than the corrupt figures at present in use. It is at any event now clear that we do not have GLOBAL warming. Warming that leaves out the USA is not global. At most we have ROW warming. GISS is NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, led by the frantically Warmist James Hansen.

Can GISS Adjustments "Fix" Bad Data?

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,

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

"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. For example, there is nothing in the methodological description that hints at the change in data provenance before and after 2000 that caused the Hansen error. Because many sites are affected by climate change, a general urban heat island effect and local microsite changes, adjustment for heat island effects and local microsite changes raises some complicated statistical questions, that are nowhere discussed in the underlying references (Hansen et al 1999, 2001). In particular, the adjustment methods are not techniques that can be looked up in statistical literature, where their properties and biases might be discerned. They are rather ad hoc and local techniques that may or may not be equal to the task of "fixing" the bad data.

Making readers run the gauntlet of trying to guess the precise data sets and precise methodologies obviously makes it very difficult to achieve any assessment of the statistical properties. In order to test the GISS adjustments, I requested that GISS provide me with details on their adjustment code. They refused. Nevertheless, there are enough different versions of U.S. station data (USHCN raw, USHCN time-of-observation adjusted, USHCN adjusted, GHCN raw, GHCN adjusted) that one can compare GISS raw and GISS adjusted data to other versions to get some idea of what they did.

In the course of reviewing quality problems at various surface sites, among other things, I compared these different versions of station data, including a comparison of the Tucson weather station shown above to the Grand Canyon weather station, which is presumably less affected by urban problems. This comparison demonstrated a very odd pattern discussed here. The adjustments show that the trend in the problematic Tucson site was reduced in the course of the adjustments, but they also showed that the Grand Canyon data was also adjusted, so that, instead of the 1930s being warmer than the present as in the raw data, the 2000s were warmer than the 1930s, with a sharp increase in the 2000s.

Now some portion of the post-2000 jump in adjusted Grand Canyon values shown here is due to Hansen's Y2K error, but it only accounts for a 0.5 deg C jump after 2000 and does not explain why Grand Canyon values should have been adjusted so much. In this case, the adjustments are primarily at the USHCN stage. The USHCN station history adjustments appear particularly troublesome to me, not just here but at other sites (e.g. Orland CA). They end up making material changes to sites identified as "good" sites and my impression is that the USHCN adjustment procedures may be adjusting some of the very "best" sites (in terms of appearance and reported history) to better fit histories from sites that are clearly non-compliant with WMO standards (e.g. Marysville, Tucson).

There are some real and interesting statistical issues with the USHCN station history adjustment procedure and it is ridiculous that the source code for these adjustments (and the subsequent GISS adjustments - see bottom panel) is not available

Closing the circle: my original interest in GISS adjustment procedures was not an abstract interest, but a specific interest in whether GISS adjustment procedures were equal to the challenge of "fixing" bad data. If one views the above assessment as a type of limited software audit (limited by lack of access to source code and operating manuals), one can say firmly that the GISS software had not only failed to pick up and correct fictitious steps of up to 1 deg C, but that GISS actually introduced this error in the course of their programming.

According to any reasonable audit standards, one would conclude that the GISS software had failed this particular test. While GISS can (and has) patched the particular error that I reported to them, their patching hardly proves the merit of the GISS (and USHCN) adjustment procedures. These need to be carefully examined. This was a crying need prior to the identification of the Hansen error and would have been a crying need even without the Hansen error.

The U.S. and the Rest of the World

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, ithere 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.






HERETICAL THOUGHTS ABOUT SCIENCE AND SOCIETY

By Freeman Dyson (Freeman Dyson is a theoretical physicist and mathematician, famous for his work in quantum mechanics, solid-state physics, nuclear weapons design and policy, and for his serious theorizing in futurism and science fiction concepts, including the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. He is a lifelong opponent of nationalism and a proponent of nuclear disarmament and international cooperation)

My first heresy says that all the fuss about global warming is grossly exaggerated. Here I am opposing the holy brotherhood of climate model experts and the crowd of deluded citizens who believe the numbers predicted by the computer models. Of course, they say, I have no degree in meteorology and I am therefore not qualified to speak. But I have studied the climate models and I know what they can do. The models solve the equations of fluid dynamics, and they do a very good job of describing the fluid motions of the atmosphere and the oceans. They do a very poor job of describing the clouds, the dust, the chemistry and the biology of fields and farms and forests. They do not begin to describe the real world that we live in. The real world is muddy and messy and full of things that we do not yet understand. It is much easier for a scientist to sit in an air-conditioned building and run computer models, than to put on winter clothes and measure what is really happening outside in the swamps and the clouds. That is why the climate model experts end up believing their own models.

FULL ARTICLE here





Clouding The Issue

Climate Change: A new study indicates that poor Asians burning dung for energy may be a major cause of global warming. It may explain why glaciers are really melting - and why climate is more complicated than some think

It used to be a straight-line theory based on easily connected dots. The Earth was warming due to increased levels of carbon dioxide generated by man, his factories, power plants and vehicles. The U.S. and the industrialized world had to drastically reduce its CO2 levels to prevent the poles from melting and the seas from rising. But a new study in the Aug. 2 issue of the British science journal Nature suggests that the absence of technology, not its reckless use, may be a major factor in raising the Earth's global temperature.

The haze of pollution called the "Asian Brown Cloud," caused by wood and dung burned for fuel, may be doing more harm than the tailpipes of our SUVs. Researchers led by Veerabhadran Ramanathan, a professor of atmospheric sciences at Scripps Institute of Oceanography in California, launched three unmanned aircraft last March from the Maldives island of Hanimadhoo to fly through the Brown Cloud at various altitudes. A total of 18 missions were flown to explore the blanket of soot, dust and smoke that at times is two miles thick and covers an area about the size of the U.S. They found that the cloud of soot and particulate matter boosted the effect of solar heating on the surrounding air by as much as 50%. "These findings might seem to contradict the general notion of aerosol particulates as cooling agents in the global climate system . . . ." concluded the Nature article summing up the study. Dang. Just when we thought the science of global warming was settled.

These findings also may help to explain the rapid melting among the 46,000 glaciers on the Tibetan Plateau and why the Himalayan glaciers have been retreating since at least 1780. This phenomenon also might help explain why carbon dioxide emissions and global temperatures don't track very well, if at all.

The Asian Brown Cloud was first discovered by Ramanathan in 1999. He had grown up near Madras, India, where his mother, like millions of other Indian homemakers, cooked with dried cow dung - a plentiful, and renewable, source of cheap fuel that was a good source of heat. One might call it the earliest form of biofuel. Such pollution, because it contains the residue from hundreds of millions of dung-fueled cooking fires and inefficient wood and coal furnaces, carries an unusually large amount of soot. It previously had been assumed that such particulate matter, like that from volcanic eruptions, had a cooling effect on the Earth. Guess not - at least not all the time.

A computer simulation run by Surabit Menon, an atmospheric scientist at Columbia University, using Chinese weather reports calculated the warming effects of the cloud. Menon found the brown cloud as it spread around the globe contributed more to global warming than Western greenhouse gas emissions.

S. Fred Singer, professor emeritus of environmental sciences at the University of Virginia, finds it "ironic that much of (this) pollution could be avoided by the use of cleaner fossil fuels, like gas, oil, and even coal, all of which release CO2."

Ramanathan has found some resistance to his discovery and its conclusions. "My colleagues warned me when I got into this that global warming is not really pure science - politics is mixed in with it." An inconvenient truth for a dedicated scientist.

India, of course, is exempt from the Kyoto Protocol as a "developing" nation. It's not that easy to put a catalytic converter on a cow. Then there's the politics of the issue. It's easier to blame a soccer mom in her SUV than an Indian family struggling to get through the day.

Source





Sun's Shifts May Cause Global Warming

Interview with Svensmark

Most leading climate experts don't agree with Henrik Svensmark, the 49-year-old director of the Center for Sun-Climate Research at the Danish National Space Center in Copenhagen. In fact, he has taken a lot of blows for proposing that solar activity and cosmic rays are instrumental in determining the warming (and cooling) of Earth. His studies show that cosmic rays trigger cloud formation, suggesting that a high level of solar activity-which suppresses the flow of cosmic rays striking the atmosphere-could result in fewer clouds and a warmer planet. This, Svensmark contends, could account for most of the warming during the last century. Does this mean that carbon dioxide is less important than we've been led to believe? Yes, he says, but how much less is impossible to know because climate models are so limited.

There is probably no greater scientific heresy today than questioning the warming role of CO2, especially in the wake of the report issued by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). That report warned that nations must cut back on greenhouse gas emissions, and insisted that "unless drastic action is taken . . . millions of poor people will suffer from hunger, thirst, floods, and disease." As astrophysicist ?Eugene Parker, the discoverer of solar wind, writes in the foreword to Svensmark's new book, The Chilling Stars: A New Theory of Climate Change, "Global warming has become a political issue both in government and in the scientific community. The scientific lines have been drawn by `eminent' scientists, and an important new idea is an unwelcome intruder. It upsets the established orthodoxy." We talked with the unexpectedly modest and soft-spoken Henrik Svensmark about his work, the criticism it has received, and truth versus hype in climate science.

Q. Was there something in the Danish weather when you were growing up that inspired you to study clouds and climate?

I remember being fascinated by clouds when I was young, but I never suspected that I would one day be working on these problems, trying to solve the puzzle of how clouds are actually formed. My background is in physics, not in atmospheric science. At the time when I left school and began working, it was almost impossible to get any permanent work whatsoever in science. That was why, after doing a lot of physics on short-term things at various places, I took a job at the Meteorological Society. And once I was there I thought, "Well, I had better start doing something." So I started thinking about problems that were relevant in that field, and that was how I started thinking about the sun and how it might affect Earth.

It was a purely scientific impulse. With my background in theoretical physics, I had no-well, certainly not very much-knowledge about global warming. I simply thought that if there is a connection to the sun, that would be very interesting, and I certainly had no idea it would be viewed as so controversial.

Q. In 1996, when you reported that changes in the sun's activity could explain most or all of the recent rise in Earth's temperature, the chairman of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel called your announcement "extremely naive and irresponsible." How did you react?

I was just stunned. I remember being shocked by how many thought what I was doing was terrible. I couldn't understand it because when you are a physicist, you are trained that when you find something that cannot be explained, something that doesn't fit, that is what you are excited about. If there is a possibility that you might have an explanation, that is something that everybody thinks is what you should pursue. Here was exactly the opposite reaction. It was as though people were saying to me, "This is something that you should not have done." That was very strange for me, and it has been more or less like that ever since.

Q. So it's difficult to do climate research without being suspected of having a hidden agenda?

Yes, it is frustrating. People can use this however they want, and I can't stop them. Some are accusing me of doing it for political reasons; some are saying I'm doing it for the oil companies. This is just ridiculous. I think there's a huge interest in discrediting what I'm doing, but I've sort of gotten used to this. I've convinced myself the only thing I can do is just to continue doing good science. And I think time will show that we are on the right track.

Q. Do you ever worry that people will take your findings and use them to support unwarranted or even harmful conclusions?

I would be happy to kill the project if I could find out that there was something that didn't fit or that I no longer believed in it. When we started, it was just a simple hypothesis based on a correlation, and correlations are, of course, something that could be quite dubious, and they could go away if you get better data. But this work has only strengthened itself over the years.

Q. What first made you suspect that changes in the sun are having a significant impact on global warming?

I began my investigations by studying work done in 1991 by Eigil Fiin-Christensen and Knud Lassen Fiin-Christensen. They had looked at solar activity over the last 100 years and found a remarkable correlation to temperatures. I knew that many people dismissed that result, but I thought the correlation was so good that I could not help but start speculating-what could be the relation? Then I heard a suggestion that it might be cosmic rays, changing the chemistry high up in the atmosphere. I immediately thought, "Well, if that is going to work, it has to be through the clouds."

That was the initial idea. Then I remembered seeing a science experiment at my high school in Elsinore, in which our teacher showed us what is called a cloud chamber, and seeing tracks of radioactive particles, which look like small droplets. So I thought to myself, "That would be the way to do it." I started to obtain data from satellites, which actually was quite a detective work at that time, but I did start to find data, and to my surprise there seems to be a correlation between changes in cosmic rays and changes in clouds. And I think in early January 1996, I finally got a curve, which was very impressive with respect to the correlation. It was only over a short period of time, because the data were covering just seven years or something like that. So it was almost nothing, but it was a nice correlation.

Q. How exactly does the mechanism work, linking changes in the sun with climate change on Earth?

The basic idea is that solar activity can turn the cloudiness up and down, which has an effect on the warming or cooling of Earth's surface temperature. The key agents in this are cosmic rays, which are energetic particles coming from the interstellar media-they come from remnants of supernova explosions mainly. These energetic particles have to enter into what we call the heliosphere, which is the large volume of space that is dominated by our sun, through the solar wind, which is a plasma of electrons, atomic nuclei, and associated magnetic fields that are streaming nonstop from the sun. Cosmic-ray particles have to penetrate the sun's magnetic field. And if the sun and the solar wind are very active-as they are right now-they will not allow so many cosmic rays to reach Earth. Fewer cosmic rays mean fewer clouds will be formed, and so there will be a warmer Earth. If the sun and the solar wind are not so active, then more cosmic rays can come in. That means more clouds [reflecting away more sunlight] and a cooler Earth.

Now it's well known that solar activity can turn up and down the amount of cosmic rays that come to Earth. But the next question was a complete unknown: Why should cosmic rays affect clouds? Because at that time, when we began this work, there was no mechanism that could explain this. Meteorologists denied that cosmic rays could be involved in cloud formation.

Q. You and a half-dozen colleagues carried out a landmark study of cosmic rays and clouds while working in the basement of the Danish National Space Center. How did you do it?

We spent five or six years building an experiment here in Copenhagen, to see if we could find a connection. We named the experiment SKY, which means "cloud" in Danish. Natural cosmic rays came through the ceiling, and ultraviolet lamps played the part of the sun. We had a huge chamber, with about eight cubic meters of air, and the whole idea was to have air that is as clean as you have over the Pacific, and then of course, to be able to control what's in the chamber. So we had minute trace gases as you have in the real atmosphere, of sulfur dioxide and ozone and water vapor, and then by keeping these things constant and just changing the ionization [the abundance of electrically charged atoms] in the chamber a little bit, we could see that we could produce these small aerosols, which are the basic building blocks for cloud condensation nuclei.

So the idea is that in the atmosphere, the ionization is helping produce cloud condensation nuclei, and that changes the amount and type of clouds. If you change the clouds, of course, you change the amount of energy that reaches Earth's surface. So it's a very effective way, with almost no energy input, to change the energy balance of Earth and therefore the temperature.

More here






UK GOVERNMENT TRYING TO GET OUT OF EU CLIMATE POLICY

Government officials have secretly briefed ministers that Britain has no hope of getting remotely near the new European Union renewable energy target that Tony Blair signed up to in the spring - and have suggested that they find ways of wriggling out of it. In contrast to the government's claims to be leading the world on climate change, officials within the former Department of Trade and Industry have admitted that under current policies Britain would miss the EU's 2020 target of 20% energy from renewables by a long way. And their suggestion that "statistical interpretations of the target" be used rather than new ways to reach it has infuriated environmentalists.

An internal briefing paper for ministers, a copy of which has been obtained by the Guardian, reveals that officials at the department, now the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform, think the best the UK could hope for is 9% of energy from renewable sources such as wind, solar or hydro by 2020. It says the UK "has achieved little so far on renewables" and that getting to 9%, from the current level of about 2%, would be "challenging".

The paper was produced in the early summer, around the time the government published its energy white paper. Under current policies renewables would account for only 5% of Britain's energy mix by 2020, the document says. The EU average is 7%; Germany is at 13%. It acknowledges that Germany, unlike Britain, has built a "strong and growing renewables industry".

EU leaders agreed the 20% target for the bloc in spring. The European Commission is working out how to reach this . DBERR officials fear that Britain may end up being told to get to 16%, which it describes as "very challenging". The paper suggests a number of ways ministers could wriggle out of specific commitments. It also suggests ministers lobby certain EU commissioners and countries such as France, Germany, Poland and Italy to agree to a more flexible interpretation of the target, by including nuclear power, for example, or investment in solar farms in Africa.

Officials ask ministers to examine "what options there are for statistical interpretations of the target that would make it easier to achieve". They suggest the target lacks credibility because it is so ambitious, while acknowledging that the Germans will be difficult to persuade because the Chancellor Angela Merkel is the champion of the 20% target and wants to commit Germany to 27%. "These flexible options are ones that may be difficult to negotiate with some member states such as Germany, who we expect to resist approaches that may be seen to water down the renewables target," the briefing says.

Environmentalists were shocked. "This briefing reads like a 'wriggle and squirm' paper," said Andrew Simms, director of the New Economics Foundation. "It combines almost comic desperation from civil servants suddenly realising that they actually have to do something to promote renewable energy, with a breathtaking cynicism as they explore every conceivable get-out clause to escape the UK's international commitments."

FULL STORY here

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The Lockwood paper was designed to rebut Durkin's "Great Global Warming Swindle" film but it is in fact an absolute gift to climate atheists. What the paper says was of course all well-known already but the concession from a Greenie source that fluctuations in the output of the sun have driven climate change for all but the last 20 years really is invaluable. And the one fact that the paper documents so well -- that solar output is on the downturn -- is also hilarious, given its source. Surely even a crazed Greenie mind must see that the sun's influence has not stopped and that reduced solar output will soon start COOLING the earth! Unprecedented July 2007 cold weather throughout the Southern hemisphere might even be the first sign that the cooling is happening. And the fact that warming plateaued in 1998 is also a good sign that we are moving into a cooling phase. As is so often the case, the Greenies have got the danger exactly backwards. See my post of 7.14.07 for more detail on the Lockwood paper

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.

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