Top scientists start to examine fiddled global warming figures

[Peter1469]

Top scientists start to examine fiddled global warming figures

Last month, we are told, the world enjoyed “its hottest March since records began in 1880”. This year, according to “US government scientists”, already bids to outrank 2014 as “the hottest ever”. The figures from the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) were based, like all the other three official surface temperature records on which the world’s scientists and politicians rely, on data compiled from a network of weather stations by NOAA’s Global Historical Climate Network (GHCN).



But here there is a puzzle. These temperature records are not the only ones with official status. The other two, Remote Sensing Systems (RSS) and the University of Alabama (UAH), are based on a quite different method of measuring temperature data, by satellites. And these, as they have increasingly done in recent years, give a strikingly different picture. Neither shows last month as anything like the hottest March on record, any more than they showed 2014 as “the hottest year ever”.

My cue for those pieces was the evidence multiplying from across the world that something very odd has been going on with those official surface temperature records, all of which ultimately rely on data compiled by NOAA’s GHCN. Careful analysts have come up with hundreds of examples of how the original data recorded by 3,000-odd weather stations has been “adjusted”, to exaggerate the degree to which the Earth has actually been warming. Figures from earlier decades have repeatedly been adjusted downwards and more recent data adjusted upwards, to show the Earth having warmed much more dramatically than the original data justified.

[Polecat]

Climatology has morphed from just being junk science to being a bizarre religious cult. You are in the wrong sub forum mister.

[Green Arrow]

My guess is that the usual suspects are going to either ignore this thread completely, or immediately attack the source.

[Don]

http://www.thenewamerican.com/tech/e...e-change-alarm

A team of independent climate scientists and public policy experts is traveling to Rome to enlighten Pope Francis about climate science in advance of the Vatican's April 28 environmental conference. They plan to host two public workshops to explain that there is no global warming crisis and to discourage the pontiff from relying on faulty information from climate alarmists within the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

"Sadly, the pope is aligning himself with a U.N. agenda that will limit development for billions of the world's desperately poor residents," says Marc Morano, former communications director for the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee and founder of the watchdog website Climate Depot. Morano is one of the policy experts slated to speak at the workshops scheduled on Monday, April 27 and Tuesday, April 28 in Rome. He explains, "The pope has been misled on climate science, and his promotion of the U.N. agenda will only mean the poor will be the biggest victims of climate change policies."

[Polecat]

There you go. The Pope is coming in as a technical adviser.

[Don]

There you go. The Pope is coming in as a technical adviser.

And aligning himself with the Dictators Club (U.N.)

[Archer0915]

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/arti...ure-right.html

and then nutters?

http://poorrichardsnews.com/post/857...year-on-record

[Bob]

If I alarm you by saying it is the hottest ever on record, but you are wise enough to ask me by how much, and I then tell you it is .2 hundredths of a degree, won't you say so what?

But hell no, not when it serves the Democrats purposes. Then it becomes the world calamity.

[Bob]

If I alarm you by saying it is the hottest ever on record, but you are wise enough to ask me by how much, and I then tell you it is .2 hundredths of a degree, won't you say so what?

But hell no, not when it serves the Democrats purposes. Then it becomes the world calamity.

Let me put it this way.

You found out you now weigh 180 pounds. This is 1 oz heavier than your previous record. Are you that upset?

The hockey stick is a carefully crafted graph that is only created to try to scare you.

Crafted the proper way, the line would be flat. That is why they had to concoct this strange version to attempt to prove the worst case to you. And for most of you, it worked to perfection.

Over a super long span of time, longer than you will live, the heat moved up by super tiny amounts.

As if I plan to change my mind over such tiny changes. ha ha

http://a-sceptical-mind.com/the-rise...e-hockey-stick

The “problem” of the Medieval Warm Period
Until the 1990s there were many, many references in scientific and historical literature to a period labelled the Medieval Warm Period (MWP) lasting from about AD 800–1300. It was followed by a much cooler period termed the Little Ice Age. Based on both temperature reconstructions using proxy measures and voluminous historical references it was accepted that the Medieval Warm Period had been a period when global temperatures were a bit hotter than today’s temperatures. Until about the mid-1990s the Medieval Warm Period was for climate researchers an undisputed fact. The existence of the Medieval Warm Period was accepted without question and noted in the first progress report of the IPCC from 1990. On page 202 of that 1990 IPCC report there was the graphic 7c (see below), in which the Medieval Warm Period was portrayed as clearly warmer than the present.
By the time of the second IPCC report in 1995 where for the first time CO2 forcing began to be proposed more prominently as a cause of serious alarm, the Medieval Warm Period was sidelined in the text and narrative. An important way that this was done in the report was to alter the diagram of recent climate history by simply shortening the time period it covered so that it now started after the Medieval Warm Period. All that was shown was the long slow recovery from the Little Ice Age to today’s temperatures, i.e. a long period of increasing temperatures. But clearly this was only a short term solution. The way that the Medieval Warm Period dominated the recent climate graph challenged the basic argument for CO2 forcing which was that the late 20th century climate was some how unique. As Jay Overpeck, an IPCC participant said in his email to Professor Deming, “We have to get rid of the Medieval Warm Period”.
In order to prove CO2 forcing the Medieval Warm Period had to be eliminated.
The Rise of the Hockey Stick
Between the 1995 second IPCC report and the 2001 third IPCC report there was a complete revision in the way that recent climate history was portrayed. The supporters of the theory that CO2 changes were driving temperatures up had succeeded in their goal of eliminating the Medieval Warm Period. This rewriting of climate history and the elimination of the Medieval Warm Period was achieved through the famous Hockey Stick graph.
To understand the scale of the revision that had taken place compare the two graphs below. The one on the left is diagram 7c from page 202 of the 1990 IPCC report in which the Medieval Warm Period was portrayed as clearly warmer than the present. On the right is the Hockey Stick graph from the 2001 IPCC report in which the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age have all but disappeared and the recent climate history is dominated by a rapid temperature rise in the last 20th century.

[Bob]

More from above link

And then it all went horribly wrong.
The Fall of the Hockey Stick
In the years immediately after the 2001 IPCC report it seemed as if the sudden adoption of the Hockey Stick model of the earth’s recent climate past had created a new orthodoxy which could not be challenged. Even when some scientists quietly worried that the new theory about the past climate had been adopted way too quickly or were unhappy about the way that satellite temperature readings didn’t seem to fit the Hockey Stick model or they noticed that new individual proxy studies still seemed to keep showing that the Medieval Warm Period was hotter than today, they mostly stayed silent. They didn’t want to be branded as ‘deniers‘ after all.
Then an unlikely hero emerged in the shape of Stephen McIntyre a retired mineralogist fromToronto. McIntyre is not a scientist or an economist but he does know a lot about statistics, maths and data analysis and he is a curious guy. He didn’t start off as a climate sceptic but was just someone interested in the nuts and bolts of these new and apparently exciting ideas about climate change, and he was curious about how the Hockey Stick graph was made and wanted to see if the raw data looked like hockey sticks too. In the Spring of 2003, Stephen McIntyre requested the raw data set used in the Hockey Stick paper from Mann. After some delay Mann arranged provision of a file which he said was the one used in the original 1998 Hockey Stick paper and McIntyre began to look at how Mann had processed all the data from the numerous different proxy studies cited as his source material and how they had been combined to produce the average that was the basis of the famous Hockey Stick shape.
About this time Steve McIntyre linked up with Ross McKitrick a Canadian economist specialising in environmental economics and policy analysis. Together McIntyre and McKitrick began to dig down into the data that Mann had used in his paper and the statistical techniques used to create the single blended average used to make the Hockey Stick. They immediately began to find problems.
Some of these problems just seemed the sort of errors that are caused by sloppy data handling concerning location labels, use of obsolete editions, unexplained truncations of available series, etc. Although such errors should have been spotted in the peer review process and they would adversely affect the quality of Mann’s conclusions they had a relatively small effect on the final results.
But McIntyre and McKitrick found one major error, an error so big that it invalidated the entire conclusion of the whole paper. A whopper of an error.
As we have seen what Mann had done was blend together lots of different proxy studies of the past climate going back a 1000 years and then produced an average of all these studies and a single graph showing the trend. Clearly the validity of the techniques used to blend together and average the different data from the various different studies was absolutely critical as to the validity of the final conclusions reached and the resulting Hockey Stick graph. This sort of blending of data sets is a very common statistical exercise and there are very well established techniques for undertaking such an exercise, these techniques use values that are called ‘principal components’ (if you want to know a lot more about the technical details then download McKitrick’s paper from here). What McIntyre and McKitrick discovered was that Mann had used very unusual principal component values and the effect of the choice of value used had drastically skewed the outcome of the blending and averaging exercise. Effectively what Mann’s odd statistical techniques did was to select data that had any sort of Hockey Stick shape and hugely increase its weight in the averaging process. Using Mann’s technique it meant that any data was almost certain to produce a spurious Hockey Stick shape.
Here is an example of the sort of things Mann was doing to the raw date.

Above are two separate temperature reconstructions running from 1400AD, both use tree rings, one is from California and one is from Arizona. Both were were part of the data used by Mann and included in the Hockey Stick average. The top one shows a temperature up tick at the end in the 20th century like the final Hockey Stick, the other shows a relatively flat temperature for the 20th century. Mann’s statistical trick gives the top series, the one with the desired Hockey Stick shape a weighting in the data that is 390 times that of the bottom series just because it has a Hockey Stick bend at the end. This means that whatever data is fed into Mann’s statistical manipulations is almost bound to produce a Hockey Stick shape whether it is actually in the data or not.
McIntyre and McKitrick then took their critical analysis a step further. When you apply a statistical manipulation to a set of data it is important to make sure that what you doing is not actually distorting the data so much that you are really just creating something new, spurious and false in the numbers. One way to do this is to take the statistical manipulation in question and apply it to several examples of random numbers (sometimes this is called a Red Noise test). To simplify, you use random numbers as input data, then apply the statistical technique you are testing to the random numbers then if the techniques are sound you should get a set of random numbers coming out the other end of the calculations. There should be no false shape imparted to the random noise by the statistical techniques themselves, if what you get out is random numbers then this would prove that the techniques you were testing were not adding anything artificial to the numbers. This is what McIntyre and McKitrick did using the techniques that Mann had used in the Hockey Stick paper. And the results were staggering.
What they found was that 99% of the time you could process random data using Mann’s techniques and it would generate a Hockey Stick shape. This meant that Mann’s claim that the Hockey Stick graph represented an accurate reconstruction of the past climate was in tatters.
Here are some examples. Below are eight graphs. Seven were made by processing random numbers using Mann’s techniques. The eighth is the actual Hockey Stick chart from Mann’s paper. See if you can spot which is which.

McIntyre and McKitrick submitted a letter to Nature about the serious flaws they had uncovered in the methodology used in the Hockey Stick paper. After a long (8-month) reviewing process Nature notified them that they would not publish it. They concluded it could not be explained in the 500-word limit they were prepared to give McIntyre and McKitrick, and one of the referees said he found the material was quite technical and unlikely to be of interest to the general readers!
Instead of publishing anything from McIntyre and McKitrick explaining the serious errors that they had found Nature allowed Mann to make a coy correction in an on-line Supplement (but not in the printed text itself) where he revealed the nonstandard method he had used, and added the unsupported claim that it did not affect the results.