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Re: [Phys-L] climate change continues apace

A blast from past (below) below, discussing the time when the warming hiatus was magically "disappeared" by NOAA.

And fast forward to modern time: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-4192182/World-leaders-duped-manipulated-global-warming-data.html

"/The Mail on Sunday today reveals astonishing evidence that the organisation that is the world’s leading source of climate data rushed to publish a landmark paper that exaggerated global warming and was timed to influence the historic Paris Agreement on climate change.//
//
//A high-level whistleblower has told this newspaper that America’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) breached its own rules on scientific integrity when it published the sensational but flawed report, aimed at making the maximum possible impact on world leaders including Barack Obama and David Cameron at the UN climate conference in Paris in 2015.//
//
//...//
//
//In an exclusive interview, Dr Bates accused the lead author of the paper, Thomas Karl, who was until last year director of the NOAA section that produces climate data – the National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) – of ‘insisting on decisions and scientific choices that maximised warming and minimised documentation… in an effort to discredit the notion of a global warming pause, rushed so that he could time publication to influence national and international deliberations on climate policy’.//
//
//...//
//
//The scandal has disturbing echoes of the ‘Climategate’ affair which broke shortly before the UN climate summit in 2009, when the leak of thousands of emails between climate scientists suggested they had manipulated and hidden data. Some were British experts at the influential Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia.//
//
//NOAA’s 2015 ‘Pausebuster’ paper was based on two new temperature sets of data – one containing measurements of temperatures at the planet’s surface on land, the other at the surface of the seas.//
//
//Both datasets were flawed. This newspaper has learnt that NOAA has now decided that the sea dataset will have to be replaced and substantially revised just 18 months after it was issued, because it used unreliable methods which overstated the speed of warming. The revised data will show both lower temperatures and a slower rate in the recent warming trend.//
//
//The land temperature dataset used by the study was afflicted by devastating bugs in its software that rendered its findings ‘unstable’.//
//The paper relied on a preliminary, ‘alpha’ version of the data which was never approved or verified./"

And so on, and so forth.

Ze'ev

On 6/9/2015 12:14 AM, Ze'ev Wurman wrote:
Reading Thomas R. Karl et al., "Possible artifacts of data biases in the recent global surface warming hiatus," note:
/
/

/First ... [r]ecently, a new correction (13) was developed and
applied in the Extended Reconstructed Sea Surface Temperature
dataset version 4, which we use in our analysis. In essence, the
bias correction involved calculating the average difference
between collocated buoy and ship SSTs. The average difference
globally was −0.12°C, a correction which is applied to the buoy
SSTs at every grid cell in ERSST version 4./
/.../
/Second, there was a large change in ship observations (i.e., from
buckets to engine intake thermometers) that peaked immediately
prior to World War II. The previous version of ERSST assumed that
no ship corrections were necessary after this time, but recently
improved metadata (18) reveal that some ships continued to take
bucket observations even up to the present day. Therefore, one of
the improvements to ERSST version 4 is extending the ship-bias
correction to the present, based on information derived from
comparisons with night marine air temperatures. Of the 11
improvements in ERSST version 4 (13), the continuation of the ship
correction had the largest impact on trends for the 2000-2014 time
period, accounting for 0.030°C of the 0.064°C trend difference
with version 3b. /
/.../
/In addition to the three improvements just discussed, since the
IPCC report (1), new analyses (24) have revealed that incomplete
coverage over the Arctic has led to an underestimate of recent
(since 1997) warming in the Hadley Centre/Climate Research Unit
data used in the IPCC report (1). These analyses have surmised
that incomplete Arctic coverage also affects the trends from our
analysis as reported by IPCC (1). We address this issue as well.

/

Ref. [13] writes: /"//Tests show that the impacts of the revisions to ship SST bias adjustment in ERSST.v4 are dominant among all revisions and updates. The effect is to make SST 0.1°–0.2°C cooler north of 30°S but 0.1°–0.2°C warmer south of 30°S in ERSST.v4 than in ERSST.v3b before 1940/." Yet Karl et al. applied it "_*at every grid cell.*_"

In the same vein, the second correction notes that "/recently improved metadata (18) reveal that _*some ships*_ continued to take bucket observations even up to the present day/" yet the "/improvement to ERSST4/" is "/extending the ship-bias correction to the present [in_*all ships*_ data]/"

And the last paragraph effectively says "we know the Arctic is getting hotter, so let's oversample it to add some weight." How about oversampling the Antarctic too? Nah, we don't want that.

Reminds me of an old Hungarian joke.

An old skeleton was found in Budapest, suspected of being of Genghis Khan. Not knowing what to do, the Hungarians placed it in a coffin and shipped it to Moscow with a note saying "Genghis Khan?" Two month later the Hungarians got a telegram back: "The Accused confessed."

Now, I realize that the great climatologist JD already pronounced the case closed. We all understand why all those new "corrections" were needed to fit the data to the model. But in typical science, shouldn't one fit the model to the data instead?

Oh, well. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

Ze'ev

On 6/8/2015 9:57 PM, John Denker wrote:
In case you missed it:

the central estimate for the rate of warming during the first 15
years of the 21st century is at least as great as the last half of
the 20th century. These results do not support the notion of a
“slowdown” in the increase of global surface temperature.
Thomas R. Karl et al. (mostly NOAA guys)
"Possible artifacts of data biases in the recent global surface warming hiatus"
Science (June 4 2015)

==========================

Pedagogical remarks:

It is better to light a candle than to curse the damn darkness.
http://www.buffyworld.com/buffy/transcripts/082_tran.html

I have been asked on various occasions (including socially, not
just professionally) how I would teach people about climate
change. I do *not* recommend attacking the issue head-on.
Instead I suggest starting with tack-tossing
https://www.av8n.com/physics/tack-tossing.htm
or some similar ultra-simple probability exercise. The point
is, people need to have some clue what real data is /supposed/
to look like. The tack data is noisy; it takes a looong time
for the running average to settle down to any kind of asymptote.

If people toss the tacks with their own hands and plot the
data with their own hands, there is "some" chance they will
believe it.

Then -- maybe -- they can look at the climate data and
understand that it's noisy. It's OK that it's noisy. It's
supposed to be noisy. One slightly-weird point in 1998 is
NOT a problem. I've been saying for more than 10 years,
loudly and publicly, that it is not a problem and has never
been a problem. There are always going to be slightly-weird
points here and there. Forsooth, if you saw a bunch of
data that never had any outliers, you would know it was
fake.

The program to lie about the dangers of climate change is
using the same techniques -- and in some cases even the
same institutions and the very same liars -- as were used
for lying about the dangers of cigarettes and the dangers
of lead in the environment. These liars are very good at
what they do.

In the real world, people make decisions all the time based
on imperfect data. If you want a pair of slippers, you don't
shop around until you find some that fit your feet /exactly/;
instead you find some that fit well enough.

People are really good at coming up for so-called "reasons"
for doing whatever selfish evil thing they feel like doing.
It has always been so. Cain had a "reason" when he slew Abel.
But enough is enough. Those who have selfish evil reasons
for spewing CO2 into the environment will always find
"reasons" why that's OK ... but let's stop pretending
that imperfect data is one of the reasons. It's not. It
wasn't a reason a year ago, or ten years ago ... and it's
certainly not a reason now.

The IMF reckons that direct and indirect subsidies to the
carbon-emitting energy industries are on the order of 5.3
trillion dollars per year.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/05/18/imf-energy-idUSL1N0Y61S220150518
That seems like an ultra-conservative low-ball figure to
me, but let's not worry about that right now. Accepting
it at face value means that any attempt to recapture that
money from the industry would immediately make fossil carbon
fuels uncompetitive against renewable energy, across a wide
(but not unlimited) range of applications. We could start
by leveling the playing field and letting good ole' invisible
hand do its job.
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