Climategate, the sequel?
Marlo Lewis skriver i Global Warming.org om, hvad der er udråbt til klodens varmeste år i målingernes historie ifølge de data man har fra jordbaserede målestationer med traditionelle termometre. Men der er andre og bedre målemetoder
According to NOAA, the 2014 temperature in the troposphere was the third highest in the 1979-2014 record, as analyzed by the University of Alabama Huntsville (UAH) satellite program, and the sixth highest on record, as analyzed by the Remote Sensing Systems (RSS) satellite program.
So why don’t the agencies’ press releases proclaim 2014 the third or sixth warmest year? Or just say that it was one of the warmest in the instrumental record? Perhaps because “warmest on record” feeds the sense of crisis, which helps feed agency budgets. Notice the self-promotional aspect of NASA’s press release: “The observed long-term warming trend and the ranking of 2014 as the warmest year on record reinforces the importance for NASA to study Earth as a complete system, and particularly to understand the role and impacts of human activity.”
Even based on surface station records alone, 2014 may not be a record breaker. James Hansen of Columbia University and colleagues who analyzed the data estimate that 2014 is only 0.02ºC warmer than 2010 and 0.03ºC warmer than 2005, making all three years a “statistical tie.”
According to the Climatic Research Unit of the UK Met Office, the margin of error in estimating global surface temperature is 0.1ºC. That is five times larger than the increment by which 2014 supposedly surpassed 2010.
So how certain are NOAA and NASA that 2014 was in fact the warmest year? NOAA assigns a probability of 48%; NASA, a probability of 38%.
Og som en god perspektivering vedlægger han denne graf, hvor målinger foretaget henholdsvis med ballon og og satellit holdes op imod de modeller, som FNs Klimapanel bruger til at afspejle deres teorier
Der er nogle åbenbare problemer med traditionelle målestationer fordi de kun er nogle få tusinde punkter spredt over hele jordens landmasse (nogle skal måle områder på størrelse med Ungarn). Derudover kan der være omskiftelige lokalforhold, som bebyggelse, der ændrer præmisserne for målingerne. Til at kompensere bruger man store og avancerede statistiske forarbejdninger, der i sig selv også er følsomme. Men ikke nok med det, så frister de mange komplicerede dataset også svage sjæle til at hjælpe fortællingen eller advarslen om man vil mere på vej i de obskure dele af de indsamlede data. Christopher Booker skriver i Telegraph om endnu en lurende skandale i den langstrakte klimadebat om, hvorfor de faste målestationer er mere alarmerende end de bedre ballon målinger og overlegne satellit målinger
Although it has been emerging for seven years or more, one of the most extraordinary scandals of our time has never hit the headlines. Yet another little example of it lately caught my eye when, in the wake of those excited claims that 2014 was “the hottest year on record”, I saw the headline on a climate blog: “Massive tampering with temperatures in South America”. The evidence on Notalotofpeopleknowthat, uncovered by Paul Homewood, was indeed striking.
Puzzled by those “2014 hottest ever” claims, which were led by the most quoted of all the five official global temperature records – Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (Giss) – Homewood examined a place in the world where Giss was showing temperatures to have risen faster than almost anywhere else: a large chunk of South America stretching from Brazil to Paraguay.
Noting that weather stations there were thin on the ground, he decided to focus on three rural stations covering a huge area of Paraguay. Giss showed it as having recorded, between 1950 and 2014, a particularly steep temperature rise of more than 1.5C: twice the accepted global increase for the whole of the 20th century.
But when Homewood was then able to check Giss’s figures against the original data from which they were derived, he found that they had been altered. Far from the new graph showing any rise, it showed temperatures in fact having declined over those 65 years by a full degree. When he did the same for the other two stations, he found the same. In each case, the original data showed not a rise but a decline.
Homewood had in fact uncovered yet another example of the thousands of pieces of evidence coming to light in recent years that show that something very odd has been going on with the temperature data relied on by the world’s scientists. And in particular by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which has driven the greatest and most costly scare in history: the belief that the world is in the grip of an unprecedented warming.
How have we come to be told that global temperatures have suddenly taken a great leap upwards to their highest level in 1,000 years? In fact, it has been no greater than their upward leaps between 1860 and 1880, and 1910 and 1940, as part of that gradual natural warming since the world emerged from its centuries-long “Little Ice Age” around 200 years ago.
This belief has rested entirely on five official data records. Three of these are based on measurements taken on the Earth’s surface, versions of which are then compiled by Giss, by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and by the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit working with the Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction, part of the UK Met Office. The other two records are derived from measurements made by satellites, and then compiled by Remote Sensing Systems (RSS) in California and the University of Alabama, Huntsville (UAH).
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An early glaring instance of this was spotted by Steve McIntyre, the statistician who exposed the computer trickery behind that famous “hockey stick” graph, beloved by the IPCC, which purported to show that, contrary to previous evidence, 1998 had been the hottest year for 1,000 years. It was McIntyre who, in 2007, uncovered the wholesale retrospective adjustments made to US surface records between 1920 and 1999 compiled by Giss (then run by the outspoken climate activist James Hansen). These reversed an overall cooling trend into an 80-year upward trend. Even Hansen had previously accepted that the “dust bowl” 1930s was the hottest US decade of the entire 20th century.
Assiduous researchers have since unearthed countless similar examples across the world, from the US and Russia to Australia and New Zealand. In Australia, an 80-year cooling of 1 degree per century was turned into a warming trend of 2.3 degrees. In New Zealand, there was a major academic row when “unadjusted” data showing no trend between 1850 and 1998 was shown to have been “adjusted” to give a warming trend of 0.9 degrees per century. This falsified new version was naturally cited in an IPCC report (see “New Zealand NIWA temperature train wreck” on the Watts Up With That science blog, WUWT, which has played a leading role in exposing such fiddling of the figures).
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One of the more provocative points arising from the debate over those claims that 2014 was “the hottest year evah” came from the Canadian academic Dr Timothy Ball when, in a recent post on WUWT, he used the evidence of ice-core data to argue that the Earth’s recent temperatures rank in the lowest 3 per cent of all those recorded since the end of the last ice age, 10,000 years ago.
James Delingpole skriver også om det i Spectator. Som en af tvivlens medløbere vil jeg præsentere en 5 år gammel film (som jeg ikke har kunnet finde gratis førend nu).
Not Evil Just Wrong is a 2009 documentary film by Ann McElhinney and Phelim McAleer that challenges Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth by suggesting that the evidence of global warming is inconclusive and that the impact global warming legislation will have on industry is much more harmful to humans than beneficial.