Bob Tisdale takes a deep dive into the data, which seems to indicate that NOAA is continuing to try to cook the books.
4 thoughts on “The Mid-Twentieth Century “Global Warming Consensus””
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Bob Tisdale takes a deep dive into the data, which seems to indicate that NOAA is continuing to try to cook the books.
Comments are closed.
Anthony Watt’s surface station poster here also out this week.
I still say exposing the unreasonable error bars would be most-damning. A normal liquid-level thermometer measures the temperature of the thermometer, it doesn’t measure the temperature of a gridcell. Propagating the instrumental error is completely unreasonable. If one were taking the same temperature homogeneity and continuity assumptions in rocket engineering, there would be a lot more unintentional flying bombs. If they made it that far.
If the warming signal can only be seen when you look at corrected data, and the corrections themselves are monotonically warming, that is simply saying that you have no good data.
They say that the thermometers were wrong – OK so far. Then they say that in order to make them “right” we have to add “X”. Once you have added “X” to the data, you have no data anymore. Especially when the values of “X” being added are larger than the signal being measured.
Where does one look for a Debunking CAGW 101? Folks like the Volokh Conspiracy’s Jonathan Adler tells readers:”The case that humans are contributing significantly to climate change, on the other hand, is based upon a wide range of studies, employing a wide range of methodologies and looking at a wide range of evidence.” How do we fact-check this claim?
The issue is that all the pieces get added in overlapping ways, and retractions and revisions in one area never propagate to the ‘overall consensus’.
Anthony Watts and Steven McIntyre have a very long list, but it is tough to weed through. And there’s a fair amount of wandering off into the weeds. Judith Curry is a climate scientist that’s basically being thrown overboard by her profession for asking tough questions.
These are each full topics that can be researched:
1) The hockeystick “flattened” global surface temperatures in a completely unreasonable fashion. If the 1940’s weren’t hot, and the Medieval Warm Period (named by historians before Mann said ‘not so hot’) wasn’t that hot, that’s what pushes us into ‘new/unprecedented’ territory.
2) The distinction between AGW and -C-AGW. All of the major ill-effects happen only if we’ve got -Catastrophic-AGW. That not only does carbon dioxide warm the planet – but it causes enough new water vapor that -that- will warm the planet further … and around the cycle again. It is fundamentally the claim that Earth is open-loop unstable. I have never yet run across a climate scientist that has taken classes in control theory, but from an -engineering- perspective I have a very hard time accepting the pieces of the puzzle we do know and having the slightest possibility of ‘open-loop unstable’. We had ice ages, we have solar variation, and volcanism provides a wide array of step/impulse tests on chemicals that are claimed to be vital to this process – and none of that pushed us into Venus even though they were significantly -sharper- changes than pure carbon dioxide growth.
3) There are a variety of shenanigans in the surface station temperature records. The vast bulk of surface station measurements were ordinary people volunteering to read a ‘wet bulb’ and ‘dry bulb’ thermometer. They were pretty ordinary liquid-level thermometers marked to the nearest degree – some F, some C. But the process from ‘raw reading’ to ‘published temperature value for this station’ has odd steps. Some are fine (wet/dry allows correction for humidity, altitude adjustment to find ‘sea level’ temperature, and an adjustment because there was a systemic time-of-observation change). But more recently there’s been “homogeneity adjustments” and “Urban Warming” adjustments. In my opinion, the methodology of the homogeneity adjustment is filtering out precisely the desired data. The idea is “We don’t trust the logbooks of the actual observers, so we look for ‘break points’ in the data and treat them as two separate streams of data”. So a -climate- shift, like a shift from summer-pattern-weather and winter-pattern-weather, which has no particular need to be ‘smooth’, gets your temperature stream split for no good reason. Yes, a temperature swing from 50-to-40 is going to pass through 49,48,47 … on the way. But there’s nothing fundamentally preventing temperature-at-noon looking like 50,50,50,40,40,40. That’s more of a -weather- shift. But they’re making the claim of sudden climate shifts … then cutting the record at shifts.
Sigh. Too long.
Shorter:
1) Key words -significant-. -> -HOW- significant? It’s a tough question to answer for anyone.
2) Mann’s stick is still the ‘long term’ temperature record, and that is a crucial piece if you want to be worried. The ‘multiple studies’ in this one area are in two groups: A) Used basically Mann’s data and method (bad data, hidden data, mistakes and all.), or B) Don’t really agree with obliterating the Medieval Warm Period. Some are touted as “Confirmed!”, but confirming that 2000 is warmer than 1960 is not confirming that 1300 -wasn’t- warmer than 1960.
3) The satellite temperatures for the last 18+ years or so are basically flat. Several surface-based non-US “World temperature estimates” are basically flat. But the NOAA/NASA data climbs. Why?