The New York Times, the very apotheosis of agenda-driven “journalism,” has a front-page story today that takes up a quarter of that page, above the fold, and half an inside page, entitled, “Not Even Close: 2012 Was the Hottest Ever in U.S.” It covers the recently issued report of NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center regarding last year’s weather statistics.
The Times correctly tells its readers what NOAA reported, which fits in perfectly with the Times’s take on global warming. What it does not do is question in any way, shape or form, whether the statistics in the report are accurate.
But there are a lot of questions, as Power Line reported yesterday. Anthony Watts, who runs the highly popular Watts Up With That blog on climate change, has uncovered evidence that the data had been systematically corrupted in order to produce the desired curve of rising temperatures. For instance, he found that in the original paper versions of data from February 1934, the average temperature for that month in Arizona is given as 52.0 degrees F. In the current on-line data available from the National Climatic Data Center, the average temperature for Arizona in February 1934, is given as having been 48.9 degrees. The difference of more than three degrees is huge.
If Anthony Watts’s reporting is accurate, this would be gross scientific malpractice. I haven’t the faintest idea who is right here, Anthony Watts or the NCDC, as I am neither a climatologist nor a statistician. But one would think that the New York Times, with its unmatched journalistic resources, might have looked into the discrepancy before running with the story.
After all, if they could discredit Watts Up With That, they would diminish a major critic of the global warming hypothesis. If they can prove that the NCDC data has been cooked, they will have uncovered a major government scandal, and that sells newspapers, which is the business the Times is supposed to be in.
But, it seems, there’s an agenda to advance and so … Oh, look, a squirrel!
It was a very cold year in Europe, so average global temperature did not go up very much, if at all. I recently read a reply in the WSJ from Dr. Hansen of NASA objecting to an article I did not read. The gist of Hansen's reply was that there is consensus among scientists that a doubling of CO2 will result in a global temperature rise of 4 to 8 deg C. What the good doctor failed to say was that, at 2 ppm per year, it would take over 300 years for this doubling to occur. Over the next century the increase would only be about 1.5 – 2.5 deg C, at which time we will, almost certainly have exhausted all economic fossil fuels and will be powering the world with solar and nuclear.
Agreed on principle, Raphael, with a few qualifications. Hansen is misleading us, as he has done a few times, if he claims consensus among scientists. All he can actually say is that the majority of the "climate scientists," i.e., government-funded researchers and institutions openly assigned to promote climate alarm agree. Also, the alarmist estimates on peak oil are seriously faulty; the definitions of "accessible" and "economical" include current and projected (i.e., imagined) future political and regulatory limits on exploration and exploitation.
Thank you, Mr Gordon, for finally featuring Anthony Watts and his WUWT! n nOf course, he's right; Anthony is a true scientist, a careful researcher, who shares his data and invites inspection, criticicism and commentary from scientists in all fields and the public at large. Given the history of the "climate science" pal-review process, the hidden or destroyed data sets, the threats to journals, the outright fraud, his is the only genuinely peer reviewed publication on the subject of global climate.
The climate scientists are wrong! Commentary found a weatherman's blog that disagrees with them. Proof enough for the right.
The validity of the data is at issue and anyone can examine it, even a "weatherman" on a blog or a trucker at a bar in a tavern, Hillel. That's how science works. n nOn the other hand, agenda-driven climatologists relying on government funding are not scientists by any definition of the term if they prejudge, falsify, fudge or hide data and instead rely on propaganda, a compliant liberal media and a crowd of science illiterates and authority junkies like you to shout, cheerlead and bully.
Those of us who are not interested in clicking away at links to obscure, possibly bug-ridden sites, would prefer a brief argument from you. Quite understandlable if you can't knock one together before the end of the week, old boy, so perhaps you can enlighten us as to why anyone interested in knowing the quality of an important claim is "childish," or what is wrong with a journalist being paid for his work.
So Why the Difference in current NCDC records and past USWB records? n nThe basic reason for the difference is that the NCDC has begun to switch over from using what they call the ‘Traditional Climate Division Data Set’ (TCDD) to a new ‘Gridded Divisional Dataset’ (GrDD) that takes into account inconsistencies in the TCDD. Here is a summary of what was wrong with using the TCDD data sets to determine temperature averages and trends. This is a quote from ‘Transitioning from the traditional divisional dataset to the Global Historical Climatology Network-Daily gridded divisional dataset’ by Chris Fenimore, Derek Arndt, Karin Gleason, and Richard R. Heim Jr., NOAA/NESDIS/NCDC, Asheville, NC: n n“The GrDD is designed to address the following general issues inherent in the TCDD: n n1. For the TCDD, each divisional value from 1931-present is simply the arithmetic average of the station data within it, a computational practice that results in a bias when a division is spatially under sampled in a month (e.g., because some stations did not report) or is climatologically inhomogeneous in general (e.g., due to large variations in topography). n n2. For the TCDD, all divisional values before 1931 stem from state averages published by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) rather than from actual station observations, producing an artificial discontinuity in both the mean and variance for 1895-1930 (Guttman and Quayle, 1996). n n3. In the TCDD, many divisions experienced a systematic change in average station location and elevation during the 20th Century, resulting in spurious historical trends in some regions (Keim et al., 2003; Keim et al., 2005; Allard et al., 2009). n n4. Finally, none of the TCDD’s station-based temperature records contain adjustments for historical changes in observation time, station location, or temperature instrumentation, inhomogeneities which further bias temporal trends (Peterson et al., 1998).” n nThe new GrDD is based upon 25 square kilometer (about 9.6 square miles) gridded divisions rather than the traditional regional climate divisions used in the TCDD. The original raw data of specific weather stations has not been changed, but for the purpose of the GrDD analysis the temperature assigned to a grid that happens to include a specific weather station will not match the actual station measurement since the gridded area may include several different weather stations and will also be weighted to take local topography and urbanization (heat island) issues into account. The complete transformation to the GrDD from the TCDD is slated to be complete in 2013 but has been used to some degree already since about 2007. n nA journalist, or anyone with an ounce of intellectual rigor, finds answers. Mr. Gordon was not interested in finding an answer. He crossed his arms like a child and expected others to do his work.
Ha ha ha ha! If you actually understood what this apologetic gobledeygook says, you'd know that it's exactly what Anthony Watts and thousands of other scientists have been saying: That in order for the alarmists to "hide the decline" in global temperature projections, rules of evidence must be tossed out and creative data "adjustments," "smoothings," "forcings" and data "massaging" has to be employed willy-nilly and handed down to the Great Unwashed under a slew of authoritative sounding names, journals and organizations. "Torturing" evidence this way is not science, it's another "look there's a squirrel" moment by the same folks caught yet again, for the umpteenth time, with their pants down, blinking at the search lights. n nMr Gordon didn't even take sides and you flipped. He did the right thing in reporting on an ongoing debate and a credible critique by a well-known scientist with an excellent track record of debunking pseudo-scientific claims time after time. Your contempt for journalistic ethics and the scientific method, and your preference for hand-waving and shouting-down is obvious.
Abe, you are a lunatic.
Perhaps. And if I were, it still wouldn't change the rules of science and you still lost this debate. To a lunatic, no less. n nToodle-pips, old boy; you used up all the classic argument fallacies, so might as well give it up.
Willard Anthony Watts (Anthony Watts) is a blogger, weather caster and non-scientist, paid AGW denier who runs the website wattsupwiththat.com. He does not have a university qualification and has no climate credentials other than being a radio weather announcer. His website is parodied and debunked at the website wottsupwiththat.com. Watts is on the payroll of the Heartland Institute, which itself is funded by polluting industries. n nIronically, Watts has done more to strengthen the scientific evidence for AGW than refute it. A conservative think tank, the Heartland Institute, published his "academic" work based on the Surface Stations data claiming that NOAA's weather stations did not meet regulatory code and had collected unreliable data that exaggerated maximum temperatures. n nWatts' data, however, was collected by volunteers using only microsite data. When the data was reviewed in the Journal of Geophysical Research – Atmospheres, the authors found that the stations Watts flagged as unreliable were indeed unreliable…in the opposite direction. They had actually underestimated the maximum temperatures, meaning that warming was even stronger than originally measured. n nIn 2011 Watts was back again, claiming to have new "research" that would prove the unreliability of the weather stations and shake the very foundations of AGW theory. In fact, when the paper was finally released, it came to essentially the same conclusion as the aforementioned Journal of Geophysical Research study: minimum temperatures at a number of stations were biased slightly upward and maximum temperatures biased slightly downward, thus canceling out the bias when averaged. n nWatts is a former radio and TV weatherman, but as is typical of media weather casters he has no academic training in the physics of climate or related disciplines. n n
In March of 2011, Anthony Watts appeared to stake his entire stance on the reliability of surface temperature data on a single upcoming study: the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature Study (BEST), an independent temperature record to be constructed using over 39,000 unique stations. On March 6th, Watts said on his blog: n n"I’m prepared to accept whatever result they produce, even if it proves my premise wrong. I’m taking this bold step because the method has promise. So let’s not pay attention to the little yippers who want to tear it down before they even see the results." n nHowever, when BEST's results confirmed the reliability of preexisting surface temperature records, Watts backpedaled. Apparently, he was only willing to stake his claims on an independent study if it came to the conclusion he wanted. n n
You've done the argumentum ad hominem already. n nHere, and in the post above, you have cut and pasted a collection of lies, some actionable, directly from the website of a radical organization, sourcewatch.org. n nYou ripped off Creative Commons material without attribution and hid the source and the fact that it was written by someone other than yourself. n nYou plagiarized. n nYour credibility is toast and you've opened yourself to civil action by at least 4 sources. You're a lepper….syaonara!
Intrepid detective work, Abe. Fearless, even, considering that your reaction to an earlier citation was: "…not interested in clicking away at links to obscure, possibly bug-ridden sites…" n nAlso quaint is your reprimand on "classic argument fallacies." That, coming from someone who was given the exact information he asked for, and characterized it as: "gobledeygook"(sic), "adjustments," "smoothings," "forcings" and data "massaging." n nOh, Bravo, Abe.
n n
Not mentioned here is that one must wade deep into the Times story to discover that the analysis is based on records starting from 1895. Last time I checked the U.S. did not start in 1895. The story is thus, at best, misleading and at worst, an outright lie.
Good one! This one's worth looking into. Warmist claims about rising global temperatures often depend on picking regions and starting points which would produce the infamous "hockey stick" graph. Basically, it's a perception shtik. On a much larger scale, the CO2 warming claims only work if one edits out pre-Holocene paleohistorical records of much, much warmer periods with lower levels of atmospheric CO2.
Hi Smokey, I lurk at Anthony site and I always enjoy your posts.