FORGET CLIMATEGATE: THIS ‘GLOBAL WARMING’ SCANDAL IS MUCH BIGGER[...]
So before I go into technical detail about why the temperature records are suspect, let me provide an analogy which ought to make it perfectly clear to any neutral parties reading this why the problem I’m about to describe ought not to be consigned to the realms of crackpottery.
Suppose say, that for the last 100 years my family have been maintaining a weather station at the bottom of our garden, diligently recording the temperatures day by day, and that what these records show is this: that in the 1930s it was jolly hot – even hotter than in the 1980s; that since the 1940s it has been cooling.
What conclusions would you draw from this hard evidence?
Well the obvious one, I imagine, is that the dramatic Twentieth Century warming that people like Al Gore have been banging on about is a crock. At least according to this particular weather station it is.
Now how would you feel if you went and took these temperature records along to one of the world’s leading global warming experts – say Gavin Schmidt at NASA or Phil Jones at CRU or Michael Mann at Penn State – and they studied your records for a moment and said: “This isn’t right.” What if they then crossed out all your temperature measurements, did a few calculations on the back of an envelope, and scribbled in their amendments? And you studied those adjustments and you realised, to your astonishment, that the new, pretend temperature measurements told an entirely different story from the original, real temperature measurements: that where before your records showed a cooling since the 1940s they now showed a warming trend.
You’d be gobsmacked, would you not?
Yet, incredible though it may seem, the scenario I’ve just described is more or less exactly analogous to what has happened to the raw data from weather stations all over the world.
Take the ones in Paraguay – a part of the world which contributed heavily to NASA GISS’s recent narrative about 2014 having been the “hottest year on record.”
If it wasn’t for the diligence of amateur investigators like retired accountant Paul Homewood, probably no one would care, not even Paraguayans, what has been going on with the Paraguayan temperature records. But Homewood has done his homework and here, revealed at his site Notalotofpeopleknowthat, is what he found.
He began by examining Paraguay’s only three genuinely rural weather stations. (ie the ones least likely to have had their readings affected over the years by urban development.)
All three – at least in the versions used by NASA GISS for their “hottest year on record” claim – show a “clear and steady” upward (warming) trend since the 1950s, with 2014 shown as the hottest year at one of the sites, Puerto Casado.
Judging by this chart all is clear: it’s getting hotter in Paraguay, just like it is everywhere else in the world.
But wait. How did the Puerto Casado chart look before the temperature data was adjusted? Rather different as you see here:
Perhaps, though, Puerto Casada was an anomaly?
Nope. Similar adjustments, in the same direction, appear to have been made to the two other rural sites.
Ah. But there was surely some innocent explanation for this, Homewood surmised. Perhaps the rural stations were wildly out of kilter with the urban stations and had been ‘homogenised’ accordingly.
Except, guess what?
OK. So why am I making you look at all these charts? Because seeing is believing.
Without those charts, it would be all too easy for you to go: “Yeah well he’s not a scientist so he probably doesn’t know what he’s talking about” or “he’s exaggerating” or “he has got the wrong end of the stick.”
So, judge for yourself. These are the actual before and after charts, reproduced from NASA’s own website.
Now the next thing the doubters among you will be thinking is: “Well these are reputable scientific institutions. They wouldn’t be making these adjustments without good reason.”
And I’d agree with you. That’s certainly what one would reasonably hope and expect.
But the odd thing is that no satisfactory explanation has been forthcoming from any of the institutions which have been making these adjustments. Not from NASA GISS. Nor from NOAA, which maintains the dataset known as the Global Historical Climate Network. Nor from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia which, with the Met Office, maintains the third of the world’s three surface data records, known as Hadcrut.
About as close as we’ve got to an attempted justification is this piece by Zeke Hausfather – Understanding Adjustments To Temperature Data – at the website of lukewarmer Judith Curry.
The explanations he offers for the basic principles of temperature adjustments are plausible enough. They include things like the Urban Heat Island effect; weather stations which have moved locations; weather stations which appear to give false readings which need to be adjusted in line with their neighbours; changes in measuring equipment; changes in the time of day measurements are taken (formerly in the afternoon, now more usually in the morning,) and so on.
In other words it’s a case of “move along. Nothing to see here” and “trust the Experts. They know best.”
The problem with Hausfather’s explanations is that though they’re fine on the theory they don’t seem to bear much relation to the actuality of the adjustments that have been made around the world.
Take, for example, the Urban Heat Island effect. This is where weather stations, over time, have become surrounded by buildings or other heat sources and which therefore record hotter temperatures than they used to. You’d expect, as a result of this, that recent (ie late 20th century) raw temperature readings from urban areas would be adjusted downwards in order to make them more accurate. Rarely though, is this the case. More usually, the adjustments appear to have been made in the other direction, so that the late twentieth century readings are made hotter still – while the early twentieth century readings have been adjusted to make them look cooler.
And this isn’t just an issue with the adjustments to the Paraguay stations by the way. It has happened all over the world.
http://www.breitbart.com/london/2015/01/30/forget-climategate-this-global-warming-scandal-is-much-bigger/------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I am sure the real scientists here could explain to me what is the meaning of all of this... Go read the full article
