By Joseph D’Aleo, CCM
Virtually every month and year we see stories in the once reliable media and from formerly unbiased data centers that proclaim the warmest such period in the entire record back to 1895 or earlier.
In the ADDENDUM to the Research Report entitled: On the Validity of NOAA, NASA and Hadley CRU Global Average Surface Temperature Data & The Validity of EPA’s CO2 Endangerment Finding, Abridged Research Report, Dr. James P. Wallace III, Dr. (Honorary) Joseph S. D’Aleo, Dr. Craig D. Idso, June 2017 (here) provided ample evidence that the Global Average Surface Temperature (GAST) data was invalidated for use in climate modelling and for any other climate change policy analysis purpose.
“The conclusive findings of this research are that the three GAST data sets are not a valid representation of reality. In fact, the magnitude of their historical data adjustments, that removed their cyclical temperature patterns, are totally inconsistent with published and credible U.S. and other temperature data. Thus, it is impossible to conclude from the three published GAST data sets that recent years have been the warmest ever – despite current claims of record setting warming.
That is made even more true given that 71% of the earth’s surface is ocean and the only ocean data prior to the satellite era began in the 1970s was limited to ship routes mainly near land in the northern hemisphere.
“According to overseers of the long-term instrumental temperature data, the Southern Hemisphere record is “mostly made up”. This is due to an extremely limited number of available measurements both historically and even presently from Antarctica to the equatorial regions.
In 1981, NASA’s James Hansen et al reported that “Problems in obtaining a global temperature history are due to the uneven station distribution (40), with the Southern Hemisphere and ocean areas poorly represented,” – – – – (Science, 28 August 1981, Volume 213, Number 4511(link))
In 1978, the New York Times reported there was too little temperature data from the Southern Hemisphere to draw any reliable conclusions. The report, prepared by German, Japanese and American specialists, appeared in the Dec. 15 issue of Nature, the British journal and stated that “Data from the Southern Hemisphere, particularly south of latitude 30 south, are so meager that reliable conclusions are not possible,” the report says.
“Ships travel on well-established routes so that vast areas of ocean, are simply not traversed by ships at all, and even those that do, may not return weather data on route.
This finding was amplified by Dr. Mototaka Nakamura in a book on “the sorry state of climate science” titled Confessions of a climate scientist: the global warming hypothesis is an unproven hypothesis.
He wrote: “The supposed measuring of global average temperatures from 1890 has been based on thermometer readouts barely covering 5 per cent of the globe until the satellite era began 40-50 years ago. We do not know how global climate has changed in the past century, all we know is some limited regional climate changes, such as in Europe, North America and parts of Asia.”
For the entire record the best data quality was limited to some land areas in North America, Europe and Australia. The vast southern oceans were mainly data void.
See how few land stations were used in the data bases in the early decades of the data window.
The National Academy of Science recognized this in their first attempt at determining a trend in temperature, which they limited to the Northern Hemisphere land areas.
Even as the stations increased in number and coverage, their reliability became a challenge, with many large continents having the percentage of missing months in the station data. That required the data centers to guess the missing data to get a monthly and then annual average.
This required guesswork allows those whose job is to validate their models the opportunity to make adjustments in ways to confirm their biases. See the initial data regions in September 2018 that were filled in by algorithms. It includes in a large data void region a record warmth assessment (Heller).
In our assessments, we found that each update cooled past years more and more which serves to make over time the trends more consistent with their model scenarios.
Here is the NASA GISS adaption of the NOAA GHCN data. Each update cools the past to make the trend upward more significant.
Note how even in areas with better data, station is adjusted (corrupted) by the analysts to turn a cooling trend into the desired warming. We picked just three of many examples – one in Australia, the second in Iceland and the plot for the state of Maine .
For Australia, many examples have been uncovered including Darwin and here Amberley. Blue was the original data plot, red is the one after adjustment in Australia.
The NASA GISS plots for the Iceland raw and the adjusted data shows a cycle replaced by a linear warming ramp.
Maine’s trend was accessed in 2011 and again after 2013. The first showed no statistically significant trend from 1895 (-0.01F/decade) with the warmest year 1913. The second had a trend of +0.23F/decade with 1913 adjusted down almost 5F.
THE UN’S DATA CHOICE
The UN uses Hadley CRU data, the earliest and thought to be the most reliable and best constructed global data set. It too shows an adjustment down of the past temperatures in later constructions.
Climategate emails exposed the true state of the data bases used to drive global policy decisions. Their own developers and their chief scientist were exposed and forced to acknowledge the data flaws.
Ian ‘Harry’ Harris, the lead CRU climate data programmer and analyst in the ‘Climategate’ emails admitted to “[The] hopeless state of their (CRU) data base. No uniform data integrity, it’s just a catalogue of issues that continues to grow as they’re found… There are hundreds if not thousands of pairs of dummy stations…and duplicates… Aarrggghhh! There truly is no end in sight. This whole project is SUCH A MESS. No wonder I needed therapy!!” http://www.di2.nu/foia/HARRY_READ_ME-0.html
The CRU scientist at the center of the Climategate scandal at East Anglia University, Phil Jones after he thought the jig was up, made a candid admission on BBC that his surface temperature data are in such disarray they probably cannot be verified or replicated, that there has been no statistically significant global warming for the last 15 years and it has cooled 0.12C/decade trend from 2002-2009. Jones specifically disavowed the “science-is-settled” slogan.
Attempting to compile a `global mean temperature’ from such fragmentary, disorganized, error-ridden, evere-changing and geographically unbalanced data is more guesswork than science.
THE INCONVENIENT PAUSE
Confounding the warmist claims, the satellites not under climate center control and increasingly some of the data center data provided contradictory results for almost two decades.
Nature and IPCC Lead Author Kevin Trenberth acknowledged the ‘pause’ and cyclic influences of natural factors like El Nino, ocean cycles on global climate.
The American Meteorological Society Annual Meeting in 2015 had 3 panels to attempt to explain away ‘the pause’.
Also the ARGO buoy (nearly 4000 globally) data that provided coverage of ocean temperature and heat content largely missing for the previous century agreed with the lack of warming.
MAKE THE PAUSE GO AWAY
In 2015 pressure from the politicians funding the sciences told the scientists to fix the inconvenient facts.
John Bates, data quality officer with NOAA detailed how Tom Karl in a paper in Science in June 2015, just a few months before world leaders were to meet in Paris to agree on a costly Paris Climate Accord, removed the inconvenient pause by altering ocean temperatures
“They had good data from buoys…and “corrected” it by using the bad data from ships. You never change good data to agree with bad, but that’s what they did — so as to make it look as if the sea was warmer.” Remember with the oceans covering 71% of the globe, even small adjustments could have a major impact.
Bates here noted “the evidence kept mounting that Tom Karl constantly had his ‘thumb on the scale’—in the documentation, scientific choices, and release of datasets—in an effort to discredit the notion of a global warming hiatus and rush to time the publication of the paper to influence national and international deliberations on climate policy.”
CLIMATE REFERENCE NETWORK IGNORED
Though not ever mentioned, the Climate Reference Network of 114 high quality, well sited stations in the U.S. established in 2005 showed no warming in the period of record.
IT IS ALL IN THE NOISE
Even the most extreme interpretations in the models based on flawed data and failed theory are in the category of noise relative to the normal daily, seasonal and year-to year variance. Daytime highs in mid latitudes are on average 30F higher in the afternoon than early morning. The warmest month often average 50F higher than the coldest month. The highest ever is in every state over 100F higher than the lowest ever (as high as 187F in Montana).
Tropical Hot Spot Research 