Scientists Discover Arctic Temperature Dataset Seriously Flawed - Significant Fabricated Warming Is The Result
Read here. Over 2,000 previous peer-reviewed studies are severely tainted with bad data from the often used ERA-40 Reanalysis regarding Arctic region temperature trends. Researchers Screen and Simmonds concluded that this dataset should no longer be relied on in future studies, which implies that many past studies indicating Arctic warming are robustly in error.
Essentially, group-think consensus science by “experts” at its worst: “Hey...why don’t we all use the same computer output for every Arctic study.” Brilliant.
“This study explicitly documents a discontinuity in the 40-yr European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) Re-Analysis (ERA-40) that leads to significantly exaggerated warming in the Arctic mid- to lower troposphere, and demonstrates that the continuing use of ERA-40 to study Arctic temperature trends is problematic...Decadal or multidecadal Arctic temperature trends calculated over periods that include 1997 are highly inaccurate...It is shown that ERA-40 is poorly suited to studying Arctic temperature trends and their vertical profile, and conclusions based upon them must be viewed with extreme caution. Consequently, its future use for this purpose is discouraged."....."Such an error not only affects the Arctic troposphere, but necessarily must effect the entire northern hemisphere jet stream."[James A. Screen, Ian Simmonds 2011: Journal of Climate]
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New paper finds some Antarctic temperature measurements show false warming of up to 10C (18F)
A paper published today in the Journal of Atmospheric and Oceanic Technology finds that temperature measurements on the Antarctic plateau “are shown to be significantly warm biased by solar radiation,” resulting in temperature measurements up to 10C (18F) warmer than actual temperatures. The authors find that the summer Sun heats the housing for the electronic thermometers causing the warming bias during summer, which is also exacerbated by low wind conditions. Surface temperature measurements are particularly important at the poles, because satellite measurements of temperature do not include data poleward of 82.5 North and 70 South and the only available measurements in these areas are from surface temperature stations. Considering the tiny change in global temperature over the past 161 years of only 0.7C, this newly-discovered large warming bias of up to 10C calls into question data from areas critical to the AGW debate.
Abstract
Observations of atmospheric temperature made on the Antarctic plateau with thermistors housed in naturally (wind) ventilated radiation shields are shown to be significantly warm biased by solar radiation. High incoming solar flux and high surface albedo result in radiation biases in Gill (multiplate) styled shields that can occasionally exceed 10°C in summer in case of low wind speed. Although stronger and more frequent when incoming solar radiation is high, biases exceeding 8C are found even when solar is less than 200 Wm-. Comparing with sonic thermometers, which are not affected by radiation but which are too complex to be routinely used for mean temperature monitoring, commercially available aspirated shields are shown to efficiently protect thermistor measurements from solar radiation biases. Most of the available in situ reports of atmospheric temperature on the Antarctic plateau are from automatic weather stations that use passive shields and are thus likely warm biased in the summer. In spite of low power consumption, deploying aspirated shields at remote locations in such a difficult environment may be a challenge. Bias correction formulae are not easily derived and are obviously shield dependent. On the other hand, because of a strong dependence of bias to wind speed, filtering out temperature reports for wind speed less than a given threshold (about 4- ms- for the shields tested here) may be an efficient way to quality control the data, albeit at the cost of significant data loss and records biased towards high wind speed cases. See more here.
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This is how ice ages begin
By Robert W. Felix
November 4, 2011
Look at this weekend’s Halloween snowstorm. Headlines across the U.S.A. called it “historic.” Historic because it dumped record snowfall on at least 20 cities from Maryland to Maine. Historic because it was the most snow - and the earliest - in many areas since the end of the Civil War.
And we’re not talking mere tenths-of-an-inch here. This snowfall shattered the old records, it obliterated them.
The 14.6 inches of snow that fell in Worcester, Mass., almost doubled its previous single-day October record of 7.5 inches set in 1979, while Hartford’s 12.3 inches crushed the previous single-day October record of 1.7 inches, seven times more than its earlier record.
But with 32 inches (81 cm) of snow, Peru, Massachusetts, won the prize. Two-and-a-half feet! Waist deep! Before Halloween!
This is how ice ages begin.
Not by huge glaciers slowly grinding out of the north, not by temperatures plunging to Siberian levels, but by more and more snow.
Unfortunately, we’re getting that snow.
According to Rutgers University Global Snow Lab, three of the four snowiest winters in the Northern Hemisphere have occurred in the last four years.
Three of the four snowiest Northern Hemisphere winters have occurred since 2008. http://climate.rutgers.edu/snowcover/chart_seasonal.php?ui_set=nhland&ui_season=1
Look at last winter.
Last year’s blizzard-filled winter and unusually cold, wet spring left record snowpack at more than 90 measuring sites across the western United States.
By Memorial Day, epic snowpack had been reported in Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, Oregon, Washington and California.
On California’s Mammoth Mountain, the snowpack measured an incredible 728 percent of normal.
At Oregon’s Mt. Bachelor Ski Resort, snow totals reached 650 inches, far eclipsing the previous record of 606 inches.
In Washington, Crystal Mountain broke its all-time snowfall record for the second time in only 11 years.
And the snow kept coming. In early June, Utah’s Snowbird ski resort reported snowpack at 525 percent of normal
“There are places on the mountain that will probably retain snow all summer long,” said Emily Moench, Sunbird’s communications manager.
Read that again. “There are places on the mountain that will probably retain snow all summer long”!
This is how ice ages begin!
And lest we forget, just a few months ago the Missouri River suffered its second 500-year flood in 15 years. Why? Because of heavy rains and melting record snowpack.
But the news gets even worse.
Glaciers are growing in the United States.
Even though last winter’s historic snowpack has not yet melted, new snow is already piling up in the Rocky Mountains.
In Montana’s Glacier National Park, in Colorado’s Front Range, in Wyoming’s Grand Tetons, the glaciers and snowfields are actually gaining volume.
When Bob Comey, director of the Bridger-Teton National Forest Avalanche Center, compared photographs of Wyoming mountain peaks, he found “significantly” more ice in the Teton Range compared with two years ago.
“I’ve never seen a season with a gain like we’ve seen this summer,” said Comey.
And when scientist Nel Caine checked on Arikaree Glacier 20 miles west of Boulder, Colorado, he measured between 2 and 3 feet of snow from last winter and spring still remaining in late September.
Meanwhile, scientists have measured a “very modest” increase on Sperry Glacier in Montana’s Glacier National Park.
Mind you, these are not the only glaciers growing in the United States. Glaciers are also growing in California, Alaska and Washington state.
This is how ice ages begin.
And our leaders keep screaming about global warming.
Important updates: See Anthony Watts and Lubos Motl respond using comments from Muller BEST co-author Judith Curry. Muller had so many people attack his findings and premature release of incomplete data before peer review that he has his own page on Climate Depot.
See enlarged of Best confirmation that global warming stopped.
by Willis Eschenbach, WUWT
My theory is that the BEST folks must have eaten at a Hollywood Chinese restaurant. You can tell because when you eat there, an hour later you find you’re hungry for stardom.
Now that the BEST folks have demanded and received their fifteen minutes of fame before their results have gone through peer review, now that they have succeeded in deceiving many people into thinking that Muller is a skeptic and that somehow BEST has ‘proven the skeptics wrong’, now that they’ve returned to the wilds of their natural scientific habitat far from the reach of National Geographic photographers and people asking real questions, I thought I might take a look at the data itself. Media whores are always predictable and boring, but data always contains surprises. It can be downloaded from the bottom of this page, but please note that they do not show the actual results on that page, they show smoothed results. Here’s their actual un-smoothed monthly data:
Figure 1. BEST global surface temperature estimates. Gray bars show what BEST says are the 95% confidence intervals (95%CI) for each datapoint (enlarged).
I don’t know about you, but Figure 1 immediately made me think of the repeated claim by Michael Mann that the temperatures of the 1990s were the warmest in a thousand years.
WHAT I FIND IN THE BEST DATA
Uncertainty
I agree with William Briggs and Doug Keenan that “the uncertainty bands are too narrow”. Please read the two authors to see why.
I thought of Mann’s claim because, even with BEST’s narrow uncertainty figures, their results show we know very little about relative temperatures over the last two centuries. For example, we certainly cannot say that the current temperatures are greater than anything before about 1945. The uncertainty bands overlap, and so we simply don’t know if e.g. 2010 was warmer than 1910. Seems likely, to be sure...but we do not have the evidence to back that up.
And that, of course, means that Mann’s claims of ‘warmest in a mill-yun years’ or whatever he has ramped it up to by now are not sustainable. We can’t tell, using actual thermometer records, if we’re warmer than a mere century ago. How can a few trees and clamshells tell us more than dozens of thermometers?
Disagreement with satellite observations
The BEST folks say that there is no urban heat island (UHI) effect detectable in their analysis. Their actual claim is that “urban warming does not unduly bias estimates of recent global temperature change”. Here’s a comment from NASA, which indicates that, well, there might be a bias. Emphasis mine.
The compact city of Providence, R.I., for example, has surface temperatures that are about 12.2 C (21.9 F) warmer than the surrounding countryside, while similarly-sized but spread-out Buffalo, N.Y., produces a heat island of only about 7.2 C (12.9 F), according to satellite data. SOURCE
A 22F (12C) UHI warming in Providence, and BEST says no UHI effect...and that’s just a couple cities.
If there were no UHI, then (per the generally accepted theories) the atmosphere should be warming more than the ground. If there is UHI, on the other hand, the ground station records would have an upwards bias and might even indicate more warming than the atmosphere.
After a number of adjustments, the two satellite records, from RSS and UAH, are pretty similar. Figure 2 shows their records for global land-only lower tropospheric temperatures:
Figure 2. UAH and RSS satellite temperature records. Anomaly period 1979-1984 = 0 (enlarged).
Since they are so close, I have averaged them together in Figure 3 to avoid disputes. You can substitute either one if you wish. Figure three shows a three-year centered Gaussian average of the data. The final 1.5 years are truncated to avoid end effects.
Remember what we would expect to find if all of the ground records were correct. They’d all lie on or near the same line, and the satellite temperatures would be rising faster than the ground temperatures. Here are the actual results, showing BEST, satellite, GISS, CRUTEM, and GHCN land temperatures:
Figure 3. BEST, average satellite, and other estimates of the global land temperature over the satellite era. Anomaly period 1979-1984 = 0 (enlarged).
In Figure 3, we find the opposite of what we expected. The land temperatures are rising faster than the atmospheric temperatures, contrary to theory. In addition, the BEST data is the worst of the lot in this regard.
Disagreement with other ground-based records.
The disagreement between the four ground-based results also begs for an explanation. Note that the records diverge at the rate of about 0.2C in thirty years, which is 0.7 per century. Since this is the approximate amount of the last century’s warming, this is by no means a trivial difference.
My conclusion? We still have not resolved the UHI issue, in any of the land datasets. I’m happy to discuss other alternative explanations for what we find in Figure 3. I just can’t think of too many. With the ground records, nobody has looked at the other guys’ analysis and algorithms harshly, aggressively, and critically. They’ve all taken their own paths, and they haven’t disputed much with each other. The satellite data algorithms, on the other hand, has been examined minutely by two very competitive groups, UAH and RSS, in a strongly adversarial scientific manner. As is common in science, the two groups have each found errors in the other’s work, and when corrected the two records agree quite well. It’s possible they’re both wrong, but that doesn’t seem likely. If the ground-based folks did that, we might get better agreement. But as with the climate models and modelers, they’re all far too well-mannered to critically examine each other’s work in any serious fashion. Because heck, if they did that to the other guy, he might return the favor and point out flaws in their work, don’t want that kind of ugliness to intrude on their genteel, collegiate relationship, can’t we just be friends and not look too deeply"…
w.
PS - I remind folks again that the hype about BEST showing skeptics are wrong is just that. Most folks knew already that the world has been generally warming for hundreds of years, and BEST’s results in that regard were no surprise. BEST showed nothing about whether humans are affecting the climate, nor could it have done so. There are still large unresolved issues in the land temperature record which BEST has not clarified or solved. The jury is out on the BEST results, and it is only in part because they haven’t even gone through peer review.
Addendum: Palmer’s stations that reported continuously since 1900
By: Marc Morano 10/23/11
OpEd Contributor
Many of the proponents of man-made global warming are now claiming that climate change is worse than they predicted. According to an Oct. 18, 2011, Daily Climate article, global warming activists claim that the “evidence builds that scientists underplay climate impacts,” and “if anything, global climate disruption is likely to be significantly worse than has been suggested.”
But a forthcoming Climate Depot A-Z Climate Reality Check report on the failure of the science behind man-made global warming theory will shatter any such illusions that the climate is “worse than we thought.” Recent scientific data and developments reveal that Mother Nature is playing a cruel joke on the promoters of man-made climate fears.
The scientific reality is that on virtually every claim, the scientific case for man-made climate fears has collapsed. The only thing “worse than we thought” is the shoddy journalism of the mainstream media, which parrots global warming activists’ baseless talking points.
Consider these facts:
The Antarctic sea ice extent has been at or near record extent in the past few summers; the Arctic has rebounded in recent years since the low point in 2007; polar bears are thriving; the sea level is not showing acceleration and is actually dropping; cholera and malaria are failing to follow global warming predictions; Mount Kilimanjaro-melt fears are being made a mockery by gains in snow cover; global temperatures have been holding steady for a decade or more as many scientists are predicting global cooling is ahead; deaths because of extreme weather are radically declining; global tropical cyclone activity is near historic lows; the frequency of major U.S. hurricanes has declined; the oceans are missing their predicted heat content; big tornadoes have dramatically declined since the 1970s; droughts are neither historically unusual nor caused by mankind; there is no evidence we are currently having unusual weather; scandals continue to rock the climate fear movement; the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has been exposed as being a hotbed of environmental activists; and scientists continue to dissent at a rapid pace.
Even President Obama has been criticized by former Vice President Gore for failing to do enough when it comes to climate change legislation. The now-defunct congressional climate bill failed because the Democrats realized it was political suicide. The new political expediency in Washington is global warming skepticism. The U.N. global warming treaty process lies in shambles.
The promoters of man-made climate fears are now reduced to claiming—as University of California, Berkeley, professor Richard Muller did last week—that any warming trend equals some sort of “proof” of man-made warming. Those of us who laugh at Gore’s mythical “climate crisis” tip our hat to Obama for not pushing very hard for the Congressional Climate Bill and for being so tepid at U.N. climate conferences.
Of course, Obama is still threatening to unleash the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to regulate that harmless trace essential gas we exhale from our mouths—CO2—but that effort will most likely wait until after the next presidential election.
As for Gore and the U.N.’s scientific claims, it has been quite a joy to watch the entire man-made global warming fear movement disintegrate before our eyes. A movement that had the divisive Gore as its face was bound to fail. A movement that utilized the scandal-ridden U.N.—which is massively distrusted by the American people—as the repository of science was doomed to fail. Gore is now reduced to pointing to every storm, flood, hurricane or tornado as proof of man-made global warming.
But a scientific moment of clarity is now prevailing: The U.N. and Congress do not have the power to legislate, tax or regulate the weather.
Professor emeritus of biogeography Philip Stott of the University of London explained the crux of the entire global warming debate when he rebutted the notion that CO2 is the main climate driver.
“As I have said, over and over again, the fundamental point has always been this: Climate change is governed by hundreds of factors, or variables, and the very idea that we can manage climate change predictably by understanding and manipulating at the margins one politically-selected factor (CO2), is as misguided as it gets,” Stott wrote.
To put it bluntly, the great man-made global warming catastrophe that was predicted has been canceled! And that is a victory for science.
Marc Morano is publisher of Climate Depot and a former staff member of the U.S. Senate Environment and Public Works Committee.