Read somewhere(might have been The Times or the BBCs Science news page) in the last couple of days that due to I believe orbital variation the world would be going through a period of global cooling that would counteract GW but only until 2020.
Whether this is based on accurate data and extrapolation I honestly dont know.
I wish now that I’d read it more closely.
Thanks, Public Animal No. 9, for doing the legwork that any competent journalist should have done in the process of writing such a piece. If you go to the comments section of the piece, Goddard has responded to some comments by saying:
It seems strange to me that it never occurred to him to ask Hansen for his response. Isn’t that taught on like the first day of a Journalism 101 class? (I guess since he is an engineer and geologist, he may have never taken a journalism class…but I thought it was sort of obvious even if you hadn’t taken such a class.)
His statement about the trend from 1998 to 2015 is just bizarre. Is he aware of the fact that it is 2008? I know what it is based on, namely a recent article that is predicting that the temperatures will be flat for the next several years before beginning to rise again in 2015. However, he has turned the predictions of one single paper into fact…And, this is one of the first papers to try to predict short-term trends (which are much harder to predict than long-term trends because in the long term the forcings dominate but over the shorter term, internal variability such as that due to El Ninos and La Ninas becomes very important). Furthermore, this paper’s predictions on in contradiction to another paper that predicted that any lull in warming will only last until 2009.
He then repeats his incorrect claim that the trends are falling below IPCC estimates.
Lust4Life: Well, this is an article about the recent paper that I am referring to, Goddard was presumably referring to, and you may be referring to.
By the way, some of the comments on in the comments section on Goddard’s article question Goddard’s calculation that concludes that the chance of flipping a coin 70 times and coming up with 55 heads is trillion-to-one odds. In fact, I believe that if you calculate it correctly (and taking 2^40, as he does, is not the correct way), you get about 1.64 million-to-1 odds. And, actually, what you ought to calculate is the odds of getting 55 or more heads, which I calculate lowers to odds to about 1.15 million-to-1.
Admittedly, this is still pretty long odds (and the more important argument is that odds calculation is basically irrelevant when the corrections to the temperatures are systematic, not random), but it is just one more in the pattern of errors in this piece.
Thanks for the link. Among other things, I would love to hear Hansen explain why, over the last 100 years, tempertature monitoring stations have been systematically, steadily, and consistently relocated from warmer locations to cooler locations.
So it’s a hundred-year old conspiracy, now?
Errr . . . let me rephrase my last post:
Thanks for the link. Among other things, I would love to hear Hansen explain why according to him, over the last 100 years, tempertature monitoring stations have been systematically, steadily, and consistently relocated from warmer locations to cooler locations.
Clear now?
And I think it’s unlikely that there’s been a hundred-year old conspiracy. Which is exactly why I am suspicious of Hansen’s adjustments.
Monitoring stations get moved for a variety of reasons. Although I’m not familiar with temperature monitoring stations, I am aware of reasons why other monitoring locations change. In some cases, monitoring stations may be located at or near airports - when airports change, the baseline temperatures can also change. As an example, it’s quite likely that the temperature at the new Denver airport is going to be different than the temperature where Stapleton International used to be. Maybe it’s only half a degree, but that’s the level of change that is being evaluated here. As cities grow, the land that is surrounding a monitoring site changes its use pattern, maybe from farmland to suburb. That will affect the environment, including the temperature. Sometimes an area gets too hard to protect from vandals and has to be moved. Monitors may have been in place for half a century or more, and there have been enormous changes in that time in land use patterns and population.
Relative to temperature monitors, the issue of urban heat island may well have been one of the reasons why monitors were moved, as I noted above. As I recall, there was much hue and cry about the fact that temperature increases in urban areas resulted in misleading conclusions regarding temperature trends, so I would expect that there was a corresponding effort to move those monitors into different locations. Any change in the monitors’ locations would require some means to account for the changes in average temperature if any meaningful trend were to be developed. My understanding of the article in question is that is exactly what Hansen et al. were attempting to do.
Strictly speaking, this error on the Mars Climate Orbiter you refer to was due to the contractor failing to go thorugh a full requirements and interface verification or a “test like you fly” test program with software. Instead, they cut corners and tried to use existing components and code without full up testing, which is unfortunately not an uncommon problem. You can make the argument that NASA or a designated mission assurance subcontractor like The Aerospace Corporation should be more involved in overseeing testing and performing independent verification beyond component pedigree and mission readiness reviews, but the unit conversion failure was not due to a mix up by NASA personnel.
Stranger
Sure, and that’s the problem. Unless there is some systematic reason for movement of monitoring stations, one would not expect a clear, consistent trend in a proper adjustment for site location.
I have a hard time believing that there was such a hue and cry before 1970. And yet there is a clear trend in the site location adjustment for that time period.
This would seem to mean that according to Hansen, temperature monitoring stations were systematically, steadily and consistently moved to cooler and cooler locations from the turn of the century, to 1970, and thereafter.
I didn’t see anything in the paper attempting to explain this.
That’s very interesting. Easily the best response in the thread.
So we can now say how the changes in data happen. How or why NASA could be producing ‘manipulated’ numbers, or how the changes can be explained.
These numbers are not the raw, factual record of measurement. They’re hypotheses for what ‘the temperatures actually were’ given ‘the temperatures that we’ve actually seen’. The premise of interpreting data is certainly not unreasonable. But it’s easy to see how bias can creep in. How emotional beliefs and predisposition will influence the formation of opinions and a scientist’s process of collection of observations and ideas, and be a big influence when a formed opinion is called to testify about how to interpret the past.
(oops… continuation of post)
Of course we can’t go back and collect any more data. We must either accept that the data is unsufficient, or continue massaging it into something with its noise supposedly removed. But I think the point is: the vagaraties of raw measurement say that warming didn’t happen, and even in the 2001 IPCC report the claim was only that there’s a 60% confidence that global warming had happened up to that year. But it also doesn’t fucking matter. There’s no debate that continued CO2 will boost temperatures. It just saddens me to see more clear evidence that emotion is influcing what we would like to think are facts. But of course, you didn’t think scientists weren’t humans, did you?
Actually, it’s not all that hard to see a reason why there is a consistent trend in movement of monitoring sites. Let’s say a group of scientists puts up a meteorological station in 1930 on the outskirts of a large town, away from the factory and train station that are coal-fired and belching that good ol’ smoke of progress into the air. But the scientists want data that are not as impacted by these emissions, so they put the monitoring station in a relatively clean area away from the city center and the industrial area. The town grows, and by 1950, people have built up the area surrounding the monitoring station. Having removed the farmland and trees to build roads and houses in the newly formed suburbs, the area’s microclimate is changing - most likely getting warmer than the surroundings. So in the mid-60s they move the station farther out, back into somewhat cooler surroundings. Repeat this dozens, if not hundreds, of times, and you have a systematic movement into cooler temperatures. I’d expect the reverse scenario to be relatively rare.
I don’t have any data to back this up, but it’s a plausible scenario. A quick Google search of “relocation of meteorological stations” (227,000 hits) picks up quite a few documents on recent station relocations. With the current emphasis on temperature and other trends, it would seem that there is more awareness of the impact of these relocations now, but that may only be due to the fact that there is more on-line data about recent moves.
Sorry, but that explanation doesn’t make any sense to me. Suppose you have a hypothetical temperature monitoring station that is moved again and again as you describe. The temperature correction for that station would have a sawtooth shape, not a steady rise. Combine a few thousand sawtooths, and you won’t get a steady trend.
I don’t think there are lots of stations that have moved numerous times - certainly not enough to generate a sawtooth pattern. I don’t have anything to cite on that, so it’s possible that it could happen. But to me, anyway, it’s much more likely that there are multiple stations that have been moved away from warmer urban sites into cooler suburban sites, or to even cooler rural sites.
Why not?
If a station is moved just once in your scenario, the correction would be a sawtooth pattern with a single tooth. Combine a few thousand such patterns, and you won’t get a steady increase.
Because, for any station there’s no reason to expect that the correction at time T would be, on average particularly lower than the correction at time T+x.