Are we Victims of Virtual Vacuousness?

To be good stewards of the environment we need climate data we can trust. Because organisms always respond to local temperatures, ecologists never use homogenized data because the process obliterates natural variability as I had written about before. Now it is coming to light that much of the "warmest year ever" is the product of a fabricated virtual reality some are calling The Great Temperature Manipulation Scandal because homogenization obliterated warm peaks in the 30s and 40s. I would not have given such blog headlines any more attention than a supermarket tabloid, except for the fact my own research observed the exact same thing. It is so outrageous I would urge you all to demand a congressional investigation.

When I began researching the causes of a bird life collapse at one of my  meadows in the Sierra Nevada, I had to examine possible connections between biological competition, parasitism from cowbirds, affects of grazing, landscape changes, the altered hydrology, and climate change. I dismissed climate change because in the Sierra Nevada the maximum temperatures were greatest in the 30s and 40s and that observation held true from Tahoe City to Yosemite to Death Valley. Apparently the Sierra Nevada were not very sensitive to rising CO2. Below is the graph downloaded from the US Historical Climate Network for Yosemite.

USHCN Maximum Temperatures at Yosemite National Park

Later, Peter Meisler, a rabid believer in CO2 caused global warming, who runs a small blog dedicated to smearing all skeptics, began stalking and attacking me in his blog.  When he saw my version of Yosemite's temperature trend in my IEEE presentation, his cognitive dissonance was so great he launched a smear campaign suggesting "my" Yosemite trends were a fraud. But that would only be true if the US Historical Climate Network is also fraudulent. Unfortunately based on recent revelations, the USHCN is coming under increasing suspicion due to The Great Temperature Manipulation Scandal! Meisler proved to be just another whacko internet sniper, as Yosemite's trend is nearly identical to my presentation. But I soon realized that graphs of temperature trends I had created for my book in 2011 were being continuously  adjusted making them warmer and warmer over a period of just 5 years even though the data had been quality controlled over a decade ago.

For example, I had downloaded Death Valley's maximum temperature data (graph on right, maximum temperature is solid line)in 2010 and published the graph in my book. The new USHCN trend for Death Valley downloaded January 2015 (on left) manipulated  a cooling trend into a warming trend.

When I was investigating IPCC's Camille Parmesan's bogus claims that global warming had killed the Eidth's Checkerspot butterfly, I had examined all the USHCN stations in southern California and downloaded USHCN data in 2010. So I was curious if other stations had also been manipulated warmer. Cuyamaca is a high quality weather station that had never moved or change instrumentation, so it should serve as a standard. But for no reason its trends was also manipulated, and manipulated repeatedly from its raw data.

Here's how the Cuyamaca was adjusted since that time and I had to wonder how much of the "warmest year on record" was the result of such data tampering. It didn't take long to find others were observing the same manipulations.

Steve Goddard has posted to his website Real Science the following observations.

For Reykjavik Iceland

Paul Homewood on his blog A Lot of People Don't Know That posted similar manipulations from Paraguay. 

And the same in Russia

And in Australia

Another independent researcher, Bill Illis, posted this Iceland graph (below) to my blog post at WUWT writing "The top right panel is the quality controlled temperatures from Iceland Met which they insist requires no further adjustment for any station moves, TOBs or polar bears or anything. The second right panel is the temperatures the NCDC reports to the public and the bottom right panel is the adjustment they apply to each year. I mean “reports to the public” is a government agency supplying temperature data to the whole world. 75% of the stations from the NCDC have this same pattern.

Bill suggests that about 75% of the global data has been manipulated in a very similar way, so I suspect we will soon see a growing wealth of evidence that adjusted data we are fed in the headlines are not to be trusted. 

To be good stewards of the environment we need data we can trust. Write your congressman and ask for an investigations!

What Does NOAA’s Warmest Year Tell Us About Climate Sensitivity to CO2?

A friend of mine who works for the EPA emailed me a link to NASA’s Earth Observatory page pitching 2014 as the warmest year on record, and asked if  “I dismiss their findings.” The following is an edited version of my reply suggesting the Global Average Chimera tells us precious little about the climate’s sensitivity to CO2, and the uncertainty is far greater than the error bars illustrated in Anthony Watts post 2014: The Most Dishonest Year on Record.

I simply asked my friend to consider all the factors involved in Gavin Schmidt’s making of the global average temperature trend, and ask you all to do the same. Then decide for yourselves the scientific value of the graph and if there was any political motivation.

1. Consider the greatest warmth anomalies are over the Arctic Ocean because more heat is ventilating through thinner ice. Before the Arctic Oscillation removed thick insulating sea ice, air temperatures were declining. Read Kahl, J., et al., (1993) Absence of evidence for greenhouse warming over the Arctic Ocean in the past 40 years. Nature 361, 335 – 337.

 

NOAA's 2014 Temperature Anomalies

  

After subfreezing winds removed thick ice, then air temperatures rose. Read Rigor, I.G., J.M. Wallace, and R.L. Colony (2002), Response of Sea Ice to the Arctic Oscillation, J. Climate, v. 15, no. 18, pp. 2648 – 2668. They concluded, “it can be inferred that at least part of the warming that has been observed is due to the heat released during the increased production of new ice, and the increased flux of heat to the atmosphere through the larger area of thin ice.”

CO2 advocates suggest CO2 leads to “Arctic amplification” arguing dark open oceans absorb more heat. But the latest estimates show the upper 700 meter of the Arctic Ocean are cooling (see illustration below), which again supports the notion ventilating heat raised air temperatures. Read Wunsch, C., and P. Heimbach, (2014) Bidecadal Thermal Changes in the Abyssal Ocean, J. Phys. Oceanogr., http://dx.doi.org/10.1175/JPO-D-13-096.1.

So how much of the global warming trend is due to heat ventilating from a cooling Arctic ocean???

Change in top 700 meters of Ocean Heat Content between 1993 and 2011

2. Consider that NOAA’s graph is based on homogenized data. Researchers analyzing homogenization methods reported “results cast some doubts in the use of homogenization procedures and tend to indicate that the global temperature increase during the last century is between 0.4°C and 0.7°C, where these two values are the estimates derived from raw and adjusted data, respectively.”

Read Steirou, E., and Koutsoyiannis, D. (2012) Investigationof methods for hydroclimatic data homogenization. Geophysical Research Abstracts, vol. 14, EGU2012-956-1.

So how much of the recent warming trend is due to the virtual reality of homogenized data???

3. Consider the results from Menne. M., (2009) The U.S. HistoricalClimatology Network Monthly Temperature Data, version 2. The Bulletin for the American Meteorological Society, in which they argued their temperature adjustments provided a better understanding of the underlying climate trend. Notice the “adjusted” anomalies in their graph below removes/minimizes observed cooling trends. More importantly ask why does Menne (2009) report a cooling trend for the eastern USA from 1895to 2007, but NASA shows a graph (below Menne’s) with a slight warming trend for all of the USA from 1950-2014?  Does that discrepancy indicate more homogenization, or that they cherry-picked a cooler period to start their warming trend? 

How homogenization warmed the USA

NOAA's 1950-2014 global warming trend 

4. Consider that most of the warming in North America as illustrated by Menne 2009 (above) happened in the montane regions of the American west. Now consider the paper Oyler (2015) Artificial amplification of warming trends across the mountains of thewestern United States, in which they conclude, “Here we critically evaluate this network’s temperature observations and show that extreme warming observed at higher elevations is the result of systematic artifacts and not climatic conditions. With artifacts removed, the network’s 1991–2012 minimum temperature trend decreases from +1.16°C/decade to +0.106°C/decade.

So how much of the recent warming trend is due to these systematic  artifacts???

5. Consider that NOAA’s graph is based on adjusted data and the fact that NOAA now homogenizes temperature data every month and climate trends change from month to month, and year to year. As an example, below is a graph I created from the US Historical Climate Network Cuyamaca weather station in southern California; a station that never altered its location or instrumentation. In 2011 the raw data temperature trend does not differ much from the homogenized trends (Maximum Adj.)

US Historical Network raw and homogenized maximum temperatures at Cuyamaca

Just 2 years later, the 2011 homogenized century warming trend (in black ) increased by more than 2°F the 2015 trend (in red.) I have archived several other similar examples of this USHCN datamanipulation. Then ask your self which is more real? The more cyclical changes observed in non-homogenized data or the rising trend created by homogenized virtual reality?

Cuyamaca's rapidly warming trend created by homogenization

6. Consider that climate change along western North America has been completely explained by the Pacific Decadal Oscillation and the associated cycles of ventilation and absorption of heat. Read: Johnstone and Mantua (2014) Atmospheric controls on northeast Pacific temperature variability and change, 1900–2012.  Such research suggests non-homogenized data may better represent climate reality.

Knowing that the upper 10 feet of the oceans contain more heat than the entire atmosphere ask yourself if decadal warming trends are simply artifacts of the redistribution of heat.

7. Consider that increasingly temperature data is now collected at airports. A 2010 paper by Imhoff, “Remote sensing of the urban heat island effectacross biomes in the continental USA”, published in Remote Sensing of Environment 114 (2010) 504–513 concluded that “We find that ecological context significantly influences the amplitude of summer daytime urban–rural temperature differences, and the largest (8 °C average) is observed for cities built in biomes dominated by temperate broadleaf and mixed forest. For all cities combined, Impervious Surface Area is the primary driver for increase in temperature explaining 70% of the total variance. On a yearly average, urban areas are substantially warmer than the non-urban fringe by 2.9 °C, except for urban areas in biomes with arid and semiarid climates.”

So how much of this recent warming trend can be attributed to increases in Impervious Surface Area in and around weather stations in rural, suburban and urban settings?

8. Consider that direct satellite observations show lost vegetation has a warming effect, and transitions from forest to shrub land, or grassland to urban area raise skin surface temperatures by 10 to 30°F.  Satellite data reveals the canopies of the world’s forests averaged about 86°F, and in the shade beneath the canopy, temperatures are much lower. Grassland temperatures are much higher, ranging from 95 to 122°F, while the average temperatures of barren ground and deserts can reach 140°F. Read Mildrexler, D., et al. (2011) A global comparison betweenstation air temperatures and MODIS land surface temperatures reveals thecooling role of forests. J. Geophys. Res., 116, G03025, doi:10.1029/2010JG001486.

Ask yourself, “how much of the warming trend is due to population effects that remove vegetation??” How much is due to citizens of poorer nations removing trees and shrubs for fuel for cooking and heating or slash and burn agriculture?

9. Consider that neither of the satellite data sets suggest 2014 was the warmest ever recorded.

Global temperature trend from satellite data 

10. Consider that none of the tree ring data shows a warming that exceeds that 1940s as exemplified by Scandinavian tree ring data (from Esper, J. et al. (2012) Variability and extremes of northern Scandinavian summer temperatures over the past two millennia. Global and Planetary Change 88–89 (2012) 1–9.)

Tree ring and Scandinavian instrumental data show show warmest decade in the 1930s

Consider international tree ring experts have concluded, “No current tree ring based reconstruction of extratropical Northern Hemisphere temperatures that extends into the 1990s captures the full range of late 20th century warming observed in the instrumental record.”  Read Wilson R., et al., (2007) Matter of divergence: tracking recent warming at hemispheric scalesusing tree-ring data. Journal of Geophysical Research–A, 112, D17103, doi: 10.1029/2006JD008318.

In summary, after acknowledging the other factors contributing to local temperature change, and after recognizing that data homogenization has lowered the peak warming of the 30s through the 50s in many original data sets by as much as 2 to 3°F, (a peak warming also observed in many proxy data sets less tainted by urbanization effects), ask yourself, does NOAA’s graph and record 2014 temperatures really tell us anything about climate sensitivity or heat accumulation from rising CO2? Or does it tell us more about climate politics and data manipulation?

NOAA's Global Temperature Trend: What does it tell us about the causes?