THIS PAGE HAS BEEN ACTIVATED AS THE NEW STATESMAN BLOG IS NOW CLOSED FOR COMMENTS
At 10am this morning, the New Statesman finally closed the Mark Lynas thread on their website after 1715 comments had been added over a period of five months. I don’t know whether this constitutes any kind of a record, but gratitude is certainly due to the editor of of the New Statesman for hosting the discussion so patiently and also for publishing articles from Dr David Whitehouse and Mark Lynas that have created so much interest.
This page is now live, and anyone who would like to continue the discussion here is welcome to do so. I have copied the most recent contributions at the New Statesman as the first comment for the sake of convenience. If you want to refer back to either of the original threads, then you can find them here:
Dr David Whitehouse’s article can be found here with all 1289 comments.
Mark Lynas’ attempted refutation can be found here with 1715 comments.
Welcome to Harmless Sky, and happy blogging.
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10,000 Responses to “Continuation of the New Statesman Whitehouse/Lynas blogs.”
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JZ Smith,
It would have to be an American who said “Governments produce nothing; other than providing national defense and other infrastructural needs, government’s role is almost exclusively regulation of behavior, aka control”
Well here in Australia the Government run the railways, roads (of course), TV and Radio Stations, the electricity supply industry, numerous schools, universities, hospitals, prisons, children’s homes and I’m sure I could think of lots more examples if I took a little longer . They aren’t perfectly run, but there’s no public desire for a general privatisation. The general population, the voters, do have a say when problems come to light. Just like TonyN feels he should have a big say in the BBC, and US` taxpayers feel they might have something to say about obscene levels of remuneration that the crooks who’ve run their finacial system into the ground can’t get out of the habit of paying themselves even though their banks have been rescued by the taxpayer and virtually nationalised.
In a democracy , the general population can organise their governments in any way they wish.
“those who view humans and human activity as evil and in great need of control.” That’s a pretty good description of organised religion. The church even attributes ‘original sin’ to new born children. How sick a concept is that?
It’s a commonly heard argument. ‘Human beings are irrevocably greedy. They are irrevocably anxious to do damage to their fellows. So a system of society based on cooperation can’t possibly succeed. The only way to run society is to allow man’s bestial nature its full scope and hand over the running of society to stock exchange speculators and bankers!’
The truth is that some people are all greedy, though only a few. Some are all unselfish, though only a few. Most people are greedy some of the time and unselfish some of the time.
There is nothing fixed or constant about human nature. There are plenty of examples from history to show that human beings are just as likely to respond to appeals for cooperation as to incentives from competition.
Intelligence tests to divide children on the grounds of their academic ability were only invented about 50 years ago. The psychologists who invented them went around the world trying them out on different races. They soon ran into unexpected difficulty with tribes of American Indians who had been brought up to think in a quite different way.
Among the Sioux Indians it was ‘regarded as incorrect to answer a question in the presence of others who did not know the answer’. The Hopi Indian children simply refused to answer the questions as asked. They replied to the psychologists: ‘Either we answer the question together – or we don’t answer it at all’. It was human nature to them that you didn’t shame or humiliate some people in the group through allowing others to prove himself or herself superior. Who can say that those Indian children were any more ‘savage’ than their testers?
In our own society, the health system relies on volunatary donations of blood, bone marrow, and even skin for burns victims. Not everyone wants to, or can do it but many do, and for nothing more than a cup of tea and a biscuit afterwards.
What’s good and what’s bad in human nature is decided by the kind of society people live in. If the main purpose of society is to make a fortune for a few, then the virtues which society extols will be the virtues of the fortune-makers – meanness, competition, ‘to hell with your neighbour’, ‘stuff your pockets never mind the other man’s’, ‘advance your children, and abuse other people’s’.
Peter,
Here in the States we have government-run passenger trains. Ridership is low, and without heavy government subsidies it would be out of business. We also have government prisons. They are a necessary government function, but they produce nothing of tangible value. They are a far greater expense on society than any tangible benefit, but necessary none-the-less for a safe and secure society. It is a worthwhile burden, like so many other government programs, but like almost all government programs it is inefficient and requires substantial subsidies from the taxpayers.
We also have private prisons run for-profit. Many states contract their prisons out to these for-profit prisons and they save the taxpayers lots of money, even with their evil profit motive.
I don’t wish to get into another boring debate about government involvement in society. It is always a straw man put up by the Left to try to argue that conservatives want NO regulation and NO taxes. No conservative that I know wants no government at all, so taxes, therefore, must be paid. The position of most conservatives is that less government is best government. People should be free to succeed or fail based on their abilities and willingness to sacrifice and work hard.
Your support for a mixed economy with a larger government role is rejected by a plurality of Americans, based on recent polling on the Obama stimulus plan. Moreover, support for the plan is eroding, primarily because people fear a growing government, gigantic deficits, and tepid results.
The desire of the AGW community to further regulate society with new rules on every aspect of our lives, along with new carbon tax schemes to channel desperately needed funds from job creation to their fat-cat supporters and special interests is falling on deaf ears.
Tony B,
Yes, you are right, the uncertainty in the temperature measurements from the 1850’s is greater than it is been in the last 30 or 40 years.
Which is good from your point of view, in that you are happy to create as much doubt as possible. If I put up a graph of temperatures for the last 35 years Max can, and does, say that this is just a ‘blip’ in terms of geological time. If I change that to 150 years you’ll say that the data is uncertain going back so far.
But on the other hand choosing the last ten years is long enough to show that ‘global warming has stopped’. In fact it isn’t even ten years. Just one data point below the trend line, in 2008, is good enough for you guys!
Peter 4053
Thank you for your comments. It is not a matter of casting doubt, it is looking at the science which does not support the use of ‘global’ temperatures as a meaningful way of debating AGW.
To base a complete philosophy as many do on irrevocably flawed data seems rather strange. As a historian I think we need to look much further backwards to see if there have been precedents. (Hence my questions to you regarding temperature spikes during the ‘constant’ 280ppm ice core readings).
The radical change in the nunmber and type of stations following the collapse of communism makes even this subsequent period doubtful, quite apart from the concept of Global temperatures anyway still being debatable.
I think you will see that I have consistently said that I think the last ten years minor cooling is interesting but not statistically valid and the last two years sharper decrease is again nothing more than interesting.
Personally I think we are still recovering very weakly from the little ice age which arguably did not finish until 1880. Looking at it from a historical perspective I would expect continued natural warming for some years.
AS you can see from my previous posting the ice core measurements are from a very new science taken by a tiny number of scientists and does not begin to compare with the ‘consensus’ of the much larger body of scientists using proven technology.
Many aspects of AGW that are pronounced as facts are no such thing or have precedents- sea levels-previous temperatures etc.
Again personally speaking I think this obsession with unproven AGW obscures the far more interesting subjects of securing energy supplies and raising the standards of living through industrialisation of the third world. This in turn tends to reduce population sizes which in turn reduces pressure on resources.
TonyB
JZ and Peter: in your posts 4051 and 4052 you turned my observation at 4048 into what, to my mind, is an unnecessary political discussion. In doing so, you may have missed my point. What I said was that the orthodoxy of today’s Western establishment is “political correctness” and in particular a view that man is essentially a selfish and greedy creature and that it is necessary to control that characteristic for the greater good. (Note: for the purposes of this discussion, I am unconcerned about whether or not that view is justified.) What I observed was that the establishment has seized the AGW hypothesis as a vindication of its view. I then suggested that, just as the establishment’s religious convictions affected science in Darwin’s day, so today’s establishment orthodoxy affects science today.
Science was ill served by orthodoxy then. And so, I believe, it is now.
JZSmith
Your description of driving through cool canyons in your convertible really brought it to life.
But just a side question (of interest to TonyB and Peter, I’m sure).
Did you see any weather stations in those cooler canyons (or are they all in the warmer urban areas?
Max
Hi Peter,
You wrote to TonyB (4053), “Yes, you are right, the uncertainty in the temperature measurements from the 1850’s is greater than it is been in the last 30 or 40 years.”
This is probably only partially true.
In the 1850’s there was more “human element” and less automation, hence the greater possibility of the introduction of human error.
In “the last 30 or 40 years” there has been a more rapid rate of industrialization and many rural weather stations in several countries all over the world have been shut down, leading to the well-documented globally occurring UHI distortion of the record.
One major example: Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, a very large number of rural stations located in Siberia were shut down. Under the old regime, these stations had a direct incentive to overstate winter cold (as their fuel rations, etc. depended on the degree of coldness). The shutdown of these stations (and the end of the fuel incentive) coincided directly with an upward “blip” in the temperature record. It is interesting to note (on NASA’s temperature anomaly map) that Siberia is exactly the location where temperatures have “risen” the most.
So I would not necessarily claim that “the uncertainty in the temperature measurements from the 1850’s is greater than it is been in the last 30 or 40 years”.
In fact, I would argue that the UHI distortions of the last 30 or 40 years have probably caused a greater distortion of the overall temperature record than human errors did back in the 1850s, for one principle reason: the 19th century “human errors” went in both directions (overstating as well as understating the reading, thereby partially canceling one another out), while the 20th century UHI distortions ALL go in the direction of overstating the temperature.
Maybe TonyB has some thoughts on this, but that would be my assessment, based on the extensive literature out there compiled by CA, WUWT and other sites.
Regards,
Max
Max
It is not just human error involved, but instrument error, incorrect siting error, an extremely small number of stations that continually moved error, not reading the instruments for days on end and inventing the temperatures error….
To base a global temperature on 30 or 40 reasonably reliable stations in 1850, perhaps 100 in 1900 and still as few as 200 in 1938 (according to GS Callendar) is no sort of scientific measure on which to base a debate that could fundamentally affect the economy of the world.
The number of stations from 1939 to 45 also changed radically for obvious reasons, and did not recover for another five years. I previously posted a ‘blink’ chart showing what happened to stations from 1950 onwards, which clearly showed the rapid loss of cold and rural stations resulting in a noticeable ‘uptick’which will combine with the UHI effect.
I also don’t think we should base our entire way of life on temperatures that- due to human error -may have been equally wrong either way in the distant past and cancelled themselves out!
The whole dataset and concept is extremely flawed. That is why I prefer to use as many reliable National records as possible, but accept they are giving you just a snapshot.
Speaking of snapshots, our friend and my relatively near neighbour Pen Hadow was on the radio this morning talking about his forthcoming expedition
http://www.penhadow.com
He leaves very shortly on what will be a 100 day trek covering some 700 miles. He has sonar equipment to measure the thickness of the ice and will take up to ten boreholes a day to examine the ice. There is also a submersible designed to give water temperature readings under the ice pack.
This is genuinely very interesting but all it can show is the ice thickness and water temperatures in a straight line a few hundred yards wide and seven hundred miles long in a specific three month period.
If repeated annually on the same dates for 100 years it may start to yield data that can be used on one side or the other of the arguement, but what is for sure is that neither you, me, or Peter will be doing the arguing! (Perhaps we ought to make it a condition of our wills that our descendants have to analyse the data in 100 years and agree who was ‘right’ or they get no money!)
Incidentally I would much welcome your comments on the extensive ice core information I posted, that is now hiding on the previous page.
TonyB
Brute and TonyB,
Its curious that you trust 19th century scientists with measurements of atmospheric CO2, which are very difficult, but not with temperature, which even at the time were quite straightforward.
Of course the temperature error bars were bigger then than they are now. I don’t believe that this has been overlooked in the overall analysis. The data is still useful. The entire case doesn’t rest on the accuracy of 19th century measurements. If there weren’t any at all it wouldn’t affect the overall conclusion.
Its just another rehash of the ‘because we don’t know everything we therefore know nothing’ argument. Hoping, of course, this piece of disinformation leads to nothing being done to fix the CO2 problem.
It’s just as likely that gaps in our knowledge are leading to an underestimate of the problem rather than an overestimate. It’s just as valid to argue that we should stay on the save side and try even harder to reduce CO2 emissions.
Peter
A scientist taking a measurement on calibrated equipment is rather different to a casual observer taking sporadic readings on a thermometer that is uncalibrated.
You see co2 as a ‘problem’ I don’t because there is no evidence to demonstrate that it is-If there is no back up from 1850 temperatures it rather diminishes the ‘scientific’ proof that co2 is causing temperatures to rise.
Tonyb
TonyB,
“You see co2 as a ‘problem’ I don’t because there is no evidence ………”
Well that’s alright then! I guess we can all now safely ignore everything mainstream science is reporting on the problem and defer to the wisdom of TonyB.
Now that TonyB has turned me into a hardened sceptic with his devastating expose of the CO2 hoax in 4060, I’m just posting up these graphs as further evidence of the UHI effect(as if any were really needed!)
Sea ice at the end of Aug. Usually corresponds to the minimum extent
As can be clearly seen this is the third consecutive January that there has been an annual increase in sea ice.
If the figures for February show a similar rise we should advise TonyN that the argument is won and he might want to think about closing the thread.
Peter 4061/2
Quite rightly you insist on using science in your arguements yet have a number of significant and selective blind spots in its application.
I am merely pointing out that the science is based on a number of very shaky foundations. Perhaps we can imagine a giant inverted pyramid supported by four very slim pillars
*Global temperature from 1850 and co2 rise proves man is at fault
*Sea levels are rising
*Arctic ice melt is unprecedented
*Current temperatures are unprecedented.
You seem to be agreeing that the parsing of such demonstrably inapproriate dataset as global temperatures since 1850 has flaws.
The edict that there are sharp rises in sea levels come from the IPCC who in turn require govt sea level agencies- such as the one I work with- to use that data even though observed data shows no such rise and sea levels have been higher in our recent past.
I have never read that you seriously believe that arctic ice is at historically low levels presumably as you have seen the numerous records that demonstrate otherwise.
the belief that current temperatures are unprecedented largely comes about through the iconic work of one man who blithely ignored past warm and cold periods. Previously you have agreed that you believe he has somewhat overstated his case.
So what are we left with?
The possibility that co2 levels have risen since pre industrial times? The vague possibilty that all sorts of highly theoretical feedbacks might occur as a result?
The fly in this particular ointment is that past temperatures have been warmer and cooler than today at a constant 280ppm. How is this possible unless co2 is at best a weak driver?
Without the ability to extrapolate temperatures from 1850 sharply upwards in the future, and match it to a rising co2 level, the AGW hypothese is extremly threadbare.
The pillars are being supported by blind faith not science, and the Pyramid starts to topple if the various pillars are shown to have serious flaws.
Our obsession with AGW is diverting attention from genuinely important matters and which better deserve our time money and effort.
TonyB
Hi Peter,
Let’s not exaggerate.
1850-80 was a bad, cold time but things were looking up, as we started to emerge from an unpleasantly cold period called the Little Ice Age.
Glaciers in Europe were just starting to recede again after having reached their highest extent in 10,000 years.
1950-1980 (100 years later) was a friendlier climatic period as the horror of the LIA was far behind us (and almost forgotten).
1980-2000 was even warmer and friendlier (although only by a small fraction of a degree).
Since 2001 temperatures have started to drop slightly, but so far this has not been alarming.
After recovering from the 1930-1940 shrinking, the global sea ice extent since December 1979 has again receded by 1.1% per decade (the average for all months was 1.3% per decade).
This equals an average of 13% per century (all gone in 770 years! – if the rate were to really keep up).
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3502/3257153789_56ccb816fa_b.jpg
But then, the rate does not appear to be continuing, as the last two Decembers have again recovered to values above the 1979-2000 baseline, and higher than any year since 1988.
Rejoice, Peter!
Regards,
Max
TonyB,
Well Arctic ice was at its all time recorded minimum in 2007. The global warming alarmists would no doubt say that this is strong evidence for global warming. But it improved significantly last year and in five or six years it will be back to where it was in the mid-seventies on current trends.
The alarmists would no doubt say that reducing sea ice disproved the possibility UHI effect. But maybe we should just say that ‘island’ is not quite the right word for it. The heat does have to flow somewhere. Most cities and urban areas are in the northern hemisphere. Therefore they will have a bigger effect on the Arctic than the Antarctic. This is very consistent with observations that the warming of the Arctic is greater than the Antarctic.
So not only is the UHI effect responsible for measured temperatures being too high it is also responsible for the melting of the Arctic ice too!
The other thing to say about the graphs of the Arctic ice is that the number of years that the ice cover increases is almost equal to the number of years of decreases.
If the ice was really decreasing, wouldn’t you expect the number of years that it decreased to be more than the years it increased? On this basis it’s hard to be sure that it is actually decreasing overall as the size of the changes from one year to the next is not much difference in the error of the measurements anyway.
Max,
I’m pretty new to arguing for your team. But I think I’m getting the hang of it. What do you think so far?
Sorry a couple of errors to be fixed:
… disproved the possible UHI effect.
…next is not much different from the error of the measurements anyway
Peter #4064
Brilliant but a liitle unconvincing!The real sceptic would point out that modern recorded ice readings only go back to 1978 and that there are numerous records of other episodes of warming of which the most significant are the Viking settlements in Greenland.
Still you are coming along nicely…
TonyB
Melbourne’s Hottest Day on Record, 46.4C Screams the Media
The hottest since Black Friday, 1939, at 45.6C!
Funny that; I did not use the air-conditioning in my lounge today, because it was unnecessary. However, last week, every day of the three-day heatwave, (~43C/~44C/~45C) I did so for about half of each day, out of need.
Here is a trace of the Melbourne City temperature record from a short while ago. (I “flickered it” because it is real-time moving)
Near me (Viewbank) to the NE, it reached 46.7C at 4:15 PM, (~70 minutes later than the city), but I went outside at ~6:15PM and it was cool. The strong wind had swung from northerly to southerly.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
We have had some bushfires burning in recent days, and milder conditions, and the fire risks today have been likened as worse than back on “Ash Wednesday” 1983, when 75 people were killed and over 2,000 homes were destroyed.
Boy, I remember that time. It was very hot, and on the killer day, quite nervy, what with burnt leaves falling out of the sky on my large bush block. Currently there are about 10 major fires on the go in Victoria, and one estimate of maybe one hundred homes destroyed. That’s modest compared with 1983, so far. It’s early though; even though cooler tomorrow, the change in wind direction may cause broader fire-fronts from the flanks. That’s what killed 17 fire-fighters back in 1983, when the cool change came through and they became trapped by the change in wind direction.
Hi Peter,
You asked (4065) about tips for “arguing for your (i.e. my) team.”
Since I am not on a “team”, I suppose you were asking about arguing for the group some AGW-supporters refer to as “AGW skeptics” or “climate deniers”.
Rather than doing this, I would prefer to give you tips on how to write an un-biased report, which does not “argue” for either team, but simply states the facts.
You wrote, “Well Arctic ice was at its all time recorded minimum in 2007.”
I would correct the “all time recorded minimum” and change the wording slightly to:
In summer 2007 Arctic sea ice extent was at the lowest point since satellite readings started 30 years earlier, in 1978. This has recovered somewhat since then.
(provide NSIDC graphs you posted)
But to give a clearer overall picture to the reader, I would have discussed Arctic sea ice changes prior to the current short-term shrinking “blip” in the record. For example:
Where sea ice extent was measured, the summer melt during a recorded warmer period in the 1930s and early 1940s resulted in a lower sea ice extent than that of more recent readings, but there were no satellite measurements to confirm that this was an overall rather than just a regionally limited phenomenon.
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2004JCli…17.4485P
“Here it is demonstrated through the analysis of a vast collection of previously unsynthesized observational data, that over the twentieth century Atlantic water variability was dominated by low-frequency oscillations (LFO) on time scales of 50-80 yr.”
“Observational data provide evidence that Atlantic water temperature, Arctic surface air temperature, and ice extent and fast ice thickness in the Siberian marginal seas display coherent LFO.”
Studies show that this was also the case over a prolonged period of time during the Medieval Warm Period.
http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2006/2005JD006494.shtml
“The degree of summer melt was significantly larger during the period 1130–1300 than in the 1990s.”
So is what we are seeing today the result of modern anthropogenic greenhouse warming or simply the continuation of natural warming / cooling cycles that have repeated themselves over and over again historically?
Who knows? But it would certainly be premature to assume that the recent melting had anything to do with AGW.
That would not have been a “skeptic’s” or “denier’s” writeup, but rather a more informative and unbiased report, stating the facts objectively and leaving the conclusion up to the reader.
Regards,
Max
Hi TonyB,
I posted this two days ago, but it somehow did not get through. Am resending with links separately. It refers to your earlier post on errors in the surface temperature record and Peter’s later post on the UHI impact on the record..
You are obviously right when you write, “It is not just human error involved, but instrument error, incorrect siting error, an extremely small number of stations that continually moved error, not reading the instruments for days on end and inventing the temperatures error….”
Most of these factors (possibly excluding the “incorrect siting”) will result in random errors, some higher some lower than the “actual” local temperature at the time. One could argue that these will cancel one another out, if there are enough readings.
I would be more concerned about the systematic errors that skew the result in one direction. This would include poor siting (thermometers next to AC exhausts, buildings, asphalt parking lots, etc.), general effect of urbanization, shutting down rural stations in general, and, of course, the very large error introduced by shutting down a large percentage of the rural stations in the former Soviet Union (a major geographical location now showing the highest temperature anomaly in the world).
Around two-thirds of the weather stations, mostly in remote and rural locations in northern latitudes and many in the former Soviet Union, were shut down between 1975 and 1995, with over 60% of these shut down in the 4-year period 1990-1993. This coincides exactly with a sharp increase in the calculated global mean temperature (particularly in the Northern Hemisphere), giving additional credence for a significant UHI distortion of the surface temperature record. There is good reason to believe that, prior to the breakup of the Soviet Union, these remote Siberian locations systematically reported lower than actual temperatures, in order to qualify for added subsidies from the central government, which were tied to low temperatures, so as this distorted record was removed, it resulted in a spurious warming trend. For a graph showing this correlation see:(posted separately)
The impact on the warming trend due to the urbanization / poor siting effect can also be seen clearly from the comparison of the long term temperature record from two nearby locations in California (both near Sacramento). The previously isolated Marysville station ended up being encroached by urban sprawl, major highways and poor siting (nearby asphalt parking lot, buildings, etc.), while the Orland station remained fairly isolated from urban sprawl and had a grassy field with no buildings in the immediate visinity.
The graph below shows the impact on the temperature record.
(posted separately)
The spurious distortion of the Marysville record resulted in around 0.2C per decade of the reported 0.256C/decade, and around 1.4C error over the 70-year time period.
There are, of course, many more examples from all over the world, which confirm that the UHI distortion of the record could be as high as 0.3 to 0.6C over the 20th century.
So I agree with you that the surface temperature record is essentially worthless. Whether or not the satellite record (since 1979) gives us a better picture is debatable, but at least there are no systematic errors “built in” (now that the earlier drift error was corrected and the readings confirmed by independent radiosondes).
Regards,
Max
Link #1 for TonyB
Link #1
http://www.uoguelph.ca/~rmckitri/research/nvst.html
Peter #4059
Yopusaid;
“The entire case doesn’t rest on the accuracy of 19th century measurements. If there weren’t any at all it wouldn’t affect the overall conclusion.”
I am intrigued as to what you believe the rest of the case in favour of AGW to be if you don’t use 19th Century measurements. I shall follow your duel with Max with interest
TonyB
Max 4072
Thanks for this great link (great because it agrees with me of course)
It would have been even more revealing if Ross had continued his study back to 1850 as that graph would look even worse than the one since 1950. I have collected around 20 national temperature data sets from around the world which this link will provide a useful background to,
TonyB
TonyB
We discussed the spurious warming error introduced into the surface temperature record by rural station shutdowns.
In the cited report by Ross McKitrick, which shows the reduction in number of stations, there is a link to a visual time series from the University of Delaware showing this, with the paragraph below:
“The loss in stations was not uniform around the world. Most stations were lost in the former Soviet Union, China, Africa and South America. To see this visually, go to the University of Delaware global temperature archive. Click Available Climate Data; log in; under Global Climate Data select Time Series 1950 to 1999; then select Station Locations (MPEG file for downloading). Then sit and watch the movie. The remarkable things are, first, how bad the spatial coverage is outside the US and Europe, and second, what happens at 1990.”
This movie is worth watching to get a feel for the magnitude and impact of the problem of station shutdowns, as well as a picture of the geographical regions involved.
A study by Willmott, Robeson and Feddema (“Influence of Spatially Variable Instrument Networks on Climatic Averages, Geophysical Research Letters vol 18 No. 12, pp2249-2251, Dec 1991) calculated a +0.2C bias in the global average due to pre-1990 station closures.
The 1976-2000 Hadley record showed a linear warming of around 0.4C over this 25-year period; this would indicate that 0.2C of this overall increase is a spurious error resulting from the station closures.
Interestingly, correcting for this error alone would put the surface record roughly in line with the UAH satellite record over the period from 1979 (when the satellite record started) to 2000.
There is a second distortion that has not yet been mentioned. In addition to the distortion of the record caused by massive shutdown of rural stations, there is the problem of “adjustment” made to the readings.
“The temperature data recorded from the stations is not simply used in the averaging calculations: it is first adjusted. Different agencies use different adjustment methods. The station data is adjusted for homogeneity (i.e. nearby stations are compared and adjusted if trends are different). The U.S. based GHCN data set is freely available including both raw and adjusted data so that anyone can see what the station data show. However, the HadCRU data used by the IPCC is not publicly available – neither the raw data nor the adjusted data. They publish only a list of stations and the calculated 5×5 degree grid anomaly results.”
These adjustments introduce a spurious warming trend into a data series that shows no warming. This distortion appears to be as much as +2C over a 20-year period for these stations. For a good summary of how “adjustments” to the surface temperature record have introduced an apparent warming trend, see:
http://www.appinsys.com/GlobalWarming/GW_Part3_GlobalTempMeasure.htm
(quoted above)
It really does appear that the surface record has been manipulated, massaged and distorted to such an extent (especially in the late 20th century) that it is truly worthless.
Maybe it would make more sense to use the surface record (with a grain of salt) until 1979, and then “splice” on the UAH satellite record.
I know how you regard “spliced” records with horror, but there are at least two well-known precedents of this approach by IPCC:
· the CO2 record (Mauna Loa readings “spliced” on to ice core data)
· the sea level record (satellite altimetry readings “spliced” on to the tide gauge record)
What do you think?
Regards,
Max