Notes in the Margin

In a matter of just a couple of weeks, a single, seemingly minor error in climate data calculations has spawned a heated discussion on the issue, leading to retractions of alarmist claims and corrections of global warming data by NASA and its prominent global warming alarmist James Hansen.

A prominent scientist in the global warming debate, Steve McIntyre has discovered that James Hansen’s NASA office made a mistake in how they applied a mathematical filter to several years of surface station temperature data from the USHCN data network between the years 2000-2006. This mistake had the effect of erroneously exaggerating surface temperature averages for the US during the period. Not only did that alter the data for those years, but also the analysis of surrounding years was forced into revision. The earlier widespread claims that 1998 was the hottest year on record for the US are now incorrect (it was 1934).

This issue has received very little mainstream media attention. A google news search for the terms “Global Warming GISS Error McIntyre” yields only 7 results as of 08/13/07. Ironically, the issue may be getting more play in McIntyre’s hometown of Toronto, Canada, as published in the Toronto Star today (Red Faces as NASA over Climate Change Blunder):

In the United States, the calendar year 1998 ranked as the hottest of them all – until someone checked the math.

After a Toronto skeptic tipped NASA this month to one flaw in its climate calculations, the U.S. agency ordered a full data review.

Days later, it put out a revised list of all-time hottest years. The Dust Bowl year of 1934 now ranks as hottest ever in the U.S. – not 1998.

More significantly, the agency reduced the mean U.S. “temperature anomalies” for the years 2000 to 2006 by 0.15 degrees Celsius.

NASA officials have dismissed the changes as trivial. Even the Canadian [McIntyre] who spotted the original flaw says the revisions are “not necessarily material to climate policy.”

You may remember Steve McIntyre as the one who called into question the reliability and robustness of the infamous, disputed Mann “Hockey Stick” global warming graph which I discussed earlier (The Impossibility of Prediction).

In discovering this surface station data error, Steve McIntyre has, in my view, shed light on a bigger question: how reliable is this data after all? If such an error could so easily have been overlooked, what other errors exist? What other implications are there to the changing environments of these data collecting stations?

Background

Early in 2007, the website surfacestations.org was born. The mission of surfacestations.org, as it states, is:

Via collaboration, creation of a publicly available photographic database of weather stations and weather station metadata.

Unstated in its mission, but nonetheless, a significant driving factor for the volunteers and editor of this database project, the website has brought to the attention of climatologists and meteorologists how questionable the environmental placement of the USHCN surface weather stations may be. From moving temperature sensors near airport runways an asphalt parking lots, to placing them within feet of massive air conditioner exhaust units, the changes in environmental conditions in the immediate vicinity of these data collection stations over the past century is evidenced by photographs of the stations. Check out some of these particularly odd and irregular placements. The eventual goal is to get as many stations as possible chronicled in the online database (it currently stands at around 23% as of 08/13/07). Not only is the current placement of such stations brought into question, the changes that have been made to the immediate environments of these stations during the period of time that data has been recorded from each site is also being analyzed.

(Note: In the months following the debut of surfacestations.org, NOAA abruptly and without notice removed a great deal of the station location information (latitude/longitude coordinates) from the once publicly-available database, hindering the work of surfacestation.org contributors who are seeking to document the environment and condition of these stations. NOAA has apparently done so under the guise of protecting the privacy of the volunteers who house these data collecting stations. If they are volunteering to collect and provide the data, they also volunteer that location information for public scientific scrutiny, in my view. Otherwise, this reeks of yet another attempt to silence the skeptics.)

An Error Discovered

A couple of weeks ago, the latest addition to the online surfacestations.org database was a surface observing station from Detroit Lakes, Minnesota. The graph of temperature data from this station showed a curious jump in the late 1990s:

Along with the graph of the temperature data, a photograph of the station was added to the database, showing the proximity of the station to two large air conditioner exhaust units.

Steve McIntyre and those involved in the surfacestations.org project recognized the instrument placement problems immediately. But this is nothing new - several other stations are placed in even more questionable locations. Many surfacestations.org readers became curious about that jump in the temperature record. Was it due to a change in the placement of such influencing factors as the AC units? A review of maintenance records from the site indicated the temperature jump did not coincide with the AC placement, so McIntyre delved deeper.

The temperature data is only valuable to the end that it correctly evidenced the discrete temperature of that exact location on earth during that point in time. This discussion is not about instrument error, it is about an error in analysis and application. Any analysis of the trends of such temperature data over time is worthless. There are no mathematical models, no computer simulation, no data extrapolation exercises, no manipulation what so ever that would allow one to statistically negate the effects of the changes in the immediate station environment as to allow the “true” trends of temperature data (independent of effects by such changes as the AC units) to be shown.

As discussed in several posts on McIntyre’s own blog, the NASA department responsible for the manipulation of surface temperature data does not make their methods publicly available. Surface station data must be adjusted to allow for analysis between stations and over time. Such changes include accounting for the time of day of each observation. If one station reports at 13:53 and another at 14:00 each day, those data points are not directly comparable without some sort of manipulation to negate that time difference. As such, McIntyre was forced to reverse-engineer NASA’s data correction methods. After doing so, he realized that the GISS office has erroneously applied their formula to the data from 2000-2006. The correction of this error resulted in a decrease in the calculated temperature anomalies of about 0.15 C. This may not sound like much, but in the world of climate analysis, just one tenth of a degree is very significant.

After contacting NASA about the error, Steve McIntyre discussed this process further in several blog postings. Over just a few days’ time, NASA quietly corrected the erroneous data online with no statement of correction applied to each data set. But these corrections had some significant impact on the global warming “leader-board”: The list of the hottest years in the US since records have been kept (a fraction of 1% of the time the US has existed, mind you), namely that 1998 is no longer considered the hottest year in the history of records. Other changes to the leader-board also took place (See the corrected list of temperature anomalies via NASA: Contiguous 48 U.S. Surface Air Temperature Anomoly (C))

James Hansen did take the time to respond directly to Steve McIntyre in a derogatory email (A Light On Upstairs?) but has made no other public statement on the issue.

There is no evidence that any attempt was made by NASA to contact those scientists who may have used such data in scientific analyses in the past. McIntyre discusses the changes to the data (absent any public statement on the issue) in Will the Real USHCN Data Please Stand Up). One is left to wonder how many previous climate change studies have been influenced by the erroneous data.

The Big Picture

This event brings several important points into the forefront:

1. Why have such surface stations been granted validity in the scientific community when it comes to statistical analysis of climate data? A main tenet of even middle school science is that you can only change one variable at a time. Presumably, temperature is the variable being examined…one must not then change the environmental conditions immediately surrounding the equipment if one hopes to complete a robust analysis of large-area trends (admittedly, data will be applicable to an examination of the small-scale changes to the localized environment…but that is not what global climate change is about).
2. How are such “correction” schemes applied to the data by NASA’s USHCN data set and others?
3. Should such (unknown) data manipulation schemes be granted the status of “correcting” the climate data in a way that allows for detailed statistical analysis?
4. If such statistical errors exist on this level, is it appropriate for social, political, and governmental policies to be shaped around such data?

The author offers a great opening abstract of his research:

The mud at the bottom of B.C. fjords reveals that solar output drives climate change - and that we should prepare now for dangerous global cooling

Earlier this year, I examined the connections between solar variability and climate change in great detail (On Solar Variability and Global Warming). Further research into the sunspot activity and terrestrial climate change is revealing some astounding correlations, as published recently by the Financial Times: Read the Sunspots. Written by R. Timothy Patterson, the chief researcher of the project, the article starts out by summarizing the well-known and universally-accepted variability of the Earth’s climate nicely:

Climate stability has never been a feature of planet Earth. The only constant about climate is change; it changes continually and, at times, quite rapidly. Many times in the past, temperatures were far higher than today, and occasionally, temperatures were colder. As recently as 6,000 years ago, it was about 3C warmer than now [ed. margin note: How did those stranded polar bears survive then?]. Ten thousand years ago, while the world was coming out of the thou-sand-year-long “Younger Dryas” cold episode, temperatures rose as much as 6C in a decade — 100 times faster than the past century’s 0.6C warming that has so upset environmentalists.

And then it tackles the solar variability issue. By measuring sediment, diatom and fish-scale records well-preserved in mud, the authors were able to track yet another climate proxy (be sure to read the full article text to understand the detailed analysis of the data that was completed). Via computerized analysis of the fossil record, scientists have been able to identify periods of warmer, abundant growth:

Specifically, we find a very strong and consistent 11-year cycle throughout the whole record in the sediments and diatom remains. This correlates closely to the well-known 11-year “Schwabe” sunspot cycle, during which the output of the sun varies by about 0.1%. Sunspots, violent storms on the surface of the sun, have the effect of increasing solar output, so, by counting the spots visible on the surface of our star, we have an indirect measure of its varying brightness. Such records have been kept for many centuries and match very well with the changes in marine productivity we are observing.

 

But one question constantly remained - the same core evidence that many doubters of the theory that climate change is driven by solar variability had claimed: the solar variability is not great enough to be the primary driver of terrestrial climate change:

…Even though the sun is brighter now than at any time in the past 8,000 years, the increase in direct solar input is not calculated to be sufficient to cause the past century’s modest warming on its own. There had to be an amplifier of some sort for the sun to be a primary driver of climate change.

Indeed, there must be another piece - some stronger force at work that could be responsible for terrestrial climate change. The correlation between solar variability and climate change has long-since been established, it is the causation that has been saught after in the current research - and it is exactly what they may have found (emphasis mine):

In a series of groundbreaking scientific papers starting in 2002, Veizer, Shaviv, Carslaw, and most recently Svensmark et al., have collectively demonstrated that as the output of the sun varies, and with it, our star’s protective solar wind, varying amounts of galactic cosmic rays from deep space are able to enter our solar system and penetrate the Earth’s atmosphere. These cosmic rays enhance cloud formation which, overall, has a cooling effect on the planet. When the sun’s energy output is greater, not only does the Earth warm slightly due to direct solar heating, but the stronger solar wind generated during these “high sun” periods blocks many of the cosmic rays from entering our atmosphere. Cloud cover decreases and the Earth warms still more.

The opposite occurs when the sun is less bright. More cosmic rays are able to get through to Earth’s atmosphere, more clouds form, and the planet cools more than would otherwise be the case due to direct solar effects alone. This is precisely what happened from the middle of the 17th century into the early 18th century, when the solar energy input to our atmosphere, as indicated by the number of sunspots, was at a minimum and the planet was stuck in the Little Ice Age. These new findings suggest that changes in the output of the sun caused the most recent climate change. By comparison, CO2 variations show little correlation with our planet’s climate on long, medium and even short time scales.

As a footnote, a message to those who belief Global Warming is a no longer up for debate (emphasis mine):

In some fields the science is indeed “settled.” For example, plate tectonics, once highly controversial, is now so well-established that we rarely see papers on the subject at all. But the science of global climate change is still in its infancy, with many thousands of papers published every year. In a 2003 poll conducted by German environmental researchers Dennis Bray and Hans von Storch, two-thirds of more than 530 climate scientists from 27 countries surveyed did not believe that “the current state of scientific knowledge is developed well enough to allow for a reasonable assessment of the effects of greenhouse gases.” About half of those polled stated that the science of climate change was not sufficiently settled to pass the issue over to policymakers at all.

An impressive research project indeed…we can only wait and see if it gets the time of day from the global-warming-alarmist-obsessed mainstream media.

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Previous:

• February 3, 2007: Stranded Polar Bears? Read On
• March 3, 2007: On Solar Variability and Global Warming
• March 19, 2007: ‘Stranded Polar Bear’ Photographer Speaks Out

Astounding. Click each image for a larger file.

Read much more about the tornado via the Dodge City, KS National Weather Service Office full report that is posted here. It includes diagrams of all of the evening’s tornadoes and a brief summary:

Greensburg Tornado Rated EF-5 (updated May 22)

The First “5″ Rating on the new Enhanced-Fujita Scale
…and the first “5″ classification since May 3, 1999 when an F5 tornado ripped through Moore, Oklahoma.

This page is not complete…additional information will be available as time permits. Significant tornadoes tracked over the same areas on May 5th and distinguishing tracks from May 4th and May 5th has been difficult…along with the fact that extensive areal flooding has been occurring in the area of some of the tornado tracks. Below is an image from the Dodge City doppler radar velocity data showing the incredible rotational “tornado vortex signature” shortly before changing the town of Greensburg, Kansas forever (click image for more):

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How to help.

Technorati Tags: Greensburg, Tornado

A huge untapped market is now being realized with corporations targeted a new breed of consumer: the guilty global warming alarmist. As recently published by the NYTimes:

A largely unregulated carbon-cutting business has sprung up. In this market, consultants or companies estimate a person’s or company’s output of greenhouse gases. Then, these businesses sell “offsets,” which pay for projects elsewhere that void or sop up an equal amount of emissions — say, by planting trees or, as one new company proposes, fertilizing the ocean so algae can pull the gas out of the air. Recent counts by Business Week magazine and several environmental watchdog groups tally the trade in offsets at more than $100 million a year and growing blazingly fast.

Carbon offsets, while well intentioned, are a scam. But that isn’t stopping them from gaining traction. From standard household offsets, to airlines, to hotels, offsets are being marketed to consumers the world over. But the fact remains: They do not produce a net benefit to the environment, as is claimed by those selling such certificates. An entire industry has quickly sprung up and millions are being spent - and made - by those involved. This ranks right up there with paying a website to name a star for you - it’s a huge fraud.

Planting trees, reducing oil dependency, improving energy efficiency, and a host of other “green” ideas are great in and of themselves - few would disagree. But to do so in the name of offsetting carbon emissions is disingenuous, at best. It gives the perception that one can continue to produce carbon emissions guilt free, as they are undoing them elsewhere. This simply isn’t the case.

Furthermore, even if you buy into the premise that the offset is a legitimate way to neutralize one’s emissions, the math is, as some would say, is “fuzzy”. Unless they find ways to turn carbon dioxide from the atmosphere back into underground oil deposits, the offsets are far from neutralizing the liberated carbon. As CorporateWatch put it (emphasis mine):

‘Carbon neutral’ implies that an exact estimation of both carbon emitted and carbon locked up (or ’sequestered’), is possible and verifiable. It also implies that the carbon sequestered in trees is equivalent to the coal/gas carbon extracted from deep in the earth.

The first of these assumptions is highly contested ; and the second is just plain wrong. Claiming that carbon stored by trees is safely locked away, as it was under the earth, is simply not true. Carbon in trees is part of the active carbon pool, and moves freely between the forests, oceans and air, whereas fossil carbon is from a very inert underground carbon pool and once released cannot return to it for millennia.

They also offer yet another golden analogy:

Cambridge landscape historian Oliver Rackham described the idea of telling people to plant trees as carbon sinks as having all the practical effect of drinking more water to keep down rising sea levels .

This process of offsets gives wealthy individuals and corporations a veil of legitimacy in their continued use of fossil fuels and other carbon-emitting ways.

Even the New York Times, as mentioned previously, has gotten up to speed (Carbon-Neutral Is Hip, but Is It Green?):

“The worst of the carbon-offset programs resemble the Catholic Church’s sale of indulgences back before the Reformation,” said Denis Hayes, the president of the Bullitt Foundation, an environmental grant-making group. “Instead of reducing their carbon footprints, people take private jets and stretch limos, and then think they can buy an indulgence to forgive their sins.”

“This whole game is badly in need of a modern Martin Luther,” Mr. Hayes added.

As details of the lack of regulation or transparency has received increasing media scrutiny, some carbon credits companies have shunned any examination of their methods by failing to participate in research, or even more boldly, lobbying against an examination of their methods (MSNBC: Carbon offset market raises questions) (emphasis mine):

When the environmental group Clean Air-Cool Planet commissioned a study on carbon offsets, communications manager Bill Burtis was surprised to find how few groups offered transparent details of their projects or had set up any process of independently verifying their environmental benefits.

“It was pretty startling,” he said.

Some offset retailers did not even return the study’s questionnaire, and one provider, which Burtis wouldn’t identify, actually lobbied against the release of the report.

Clean Air–Cool Planet hired an independent firm to do the study because it has ties to a carbon offset provider called NativeEnergy.

If the industry won’t police itself, it appears as though congress will (Probe carbon offsets, congressmen say):

The burgeoning carbon offset industry needs more oversight, say two members of Congress. In a letter to the Government Accountability Office, Republican Reps. Tom Davis of Virginia and Darrell Issa of California asked for an investigation into emission offset programs. About 60 different companies sell carbon offsets to U.S. consumers but operate under virtually no standards, the congressmen said. They cited reports alleging that some organizations get money for emissions that don’t exist and that others make large profits on cleanups that would have taken place anyway. Those who support offsets say they offer the reward of “carbon neutrality” without a reduced standard of living. To critics, offsets allow guilt-free pollution. Full Story

This carbon offset / carbon credits concept should quickly be lost on any student of science. You simply cannot undo the use of carbon once it is liberated. When engaged in marathon training, it’d be great if I could pay someone else to complete the long runs - those 20-milers are a killer - and yet still benefit from the endurance training toward my eventual goal of running the full 26.2!

Technorati Tags: Global Warming, Climate Change, Carbon Credits, Carbon Offsets, Carbon Neutral

The media had a field day when earlier research indicated hurricane strength could increase as a result of global warming. The premise was that warmer ocean waters would provide the fuel for hurricanes to strengthen. Fair enough - the logic seems sound. But more recent peer-reviewed scientific research flies in the face of the alarmist claims that regularly get reported by the media. New research published by Gabriel Vecchi an Brian Soden in today’s Geophysical Research Letters (the abstract is available publicly, full text only for paid subscribers):

Increased tropical Atlantic wind shear in model projections of global warming

Geophys. Res. Lett., Vol. 34, No. 8, L08702

To help understand possible impacts of anthropogenic greenhouse warming on hurricane activity, we assess model-projected changes in large-scale environmental factors tied to variations in hurricane statistics. This study focuses on vertical wind shear (V_s) over the tropical Atlantic during hurricane season, the increase of which has been historically associated with diminished hurricane activity and intensity. A suite of state-of-the-art global climate model experiments is used to project changes in V_s over the 21st century. Substantial increases in tropical Atlantic and East Pacific shear are robust features of these experiments, and are shown to be connected to the model-projected decrease in the Pacific Walker circulation. The relative changes in shear are found to be comparable to those of other large-scale environmental parameters associated with Atlantic hurricane activity. The influence of these V_s changes should be incorporated into projections of long-term hurricane activity.

So what does this all mean? As summarized in an article published Tuesday by Reuters, Global warming may spur wind sheer, sap hurricanes:

Global warming could increase a climate phenomenon known as wind shear that inhibits Atlantic hurricanes, a potentially positive result of climate change, according to new research released on Tuesday.

The study, to be published on Wednesday in Geophysical Research Letters, found that climate model simulations show a “robust increase” in wind shear in the tropical Atlantic during the 21st century from global warming.

Wind sheer, in a nutshell, is a hurricane’s worst enemy.

Beyond warm ocean waters, hurricanes and other tropical systems require favorable upper-air environment. This means winds blowing in the right directions throughout all layers of the atmosphere (think of a corkscrew). Winds blowing from opposite directions and/or speeds in upper layers of the atmosphere is the phenomenon known as wind sheer. The wrong kind of wind sheer tears hurricanes and other tropical systems apart, reducing their viability; both their lifespan and their strength.

The Reuters article continues, including the seemingly requisite inclusion of Katrina for any media article on hurricanes:

Debate on the likelihood that human-generated climate change contributes to hurricane development has raged since the 2005 Atlantic season, which produced a record-shattering 28 tropical storms and hurricanes.

That season saw some of the most powerful hurricanes in history and produced Katrina, which killed 1,500 people and caused $80 billion damage on the U.S. Gulf Coast. The hurricane threat roiled global oil and gas markets.

The authors of the study took the direct approach in responding to critics who cite earlier research on warmer ocean waters strengthening tropical systems, including the IPCC:

In recent years some scientists have suggested that human-induced greenhouse warming may be increasing the intensity of Atlantic hurricanes by heating up the sea water from which they draw their energy.

In February a report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said it was “more likely than not” that humans contribute to a trend of increasingly intense hurricanes.

But researchers in the new study said increased wind shear could counter the effect of warming waters in the Atlantic.

“The environmental changes found in the study do not suggest a big increase in tropical Atlantic hurricane activity during the 21st century,” said Brian Soden, a co-author of the report.

This research highlights the likely, long-term implications of global climate change on tropical systems, rather than shorter-term cyclical issues. Alternatively, in the near term, hurricane trends are likely on the increase. This increase will no-doubt be used as big red flag by the likes of Laurie David, Sheryl Crow, Al Gore, and other non-scientist global warming alarmists. But not so fast - this projected busier-than average hurricane seasons are part of a relatively well-understood and very natural cycle, as I wrote about previously on Newsbusters and also cited in Tuesday’s article:

Hurricane researchers believe the Atlantic-Caribbean hurricane zone is in a period of heightened activity that began around 1995 and could last between 25 and 40 years.

NOAA published a great summary of the multi-decadal hurricane variability following the catastrophic 2005 hurricane season. In referring to the current era of increased hurricane frequency (emphasis mine):

This era has been unfolding in the Atlantic since 1995, and is expected to continue for the next decade or perhaps longer. NOAA attributes this increased activity to natural occurring cycles in tropical climate patterns near the equator. These cycles, called “the tropical multi-decadal signal,” typically last several decades (20 to 30 years or even longer). As a result, the North Atlantic experiences alternating decades long (20 to 30 year periods or even longer) of above normal or below normal hurricane seasons. NOAA research shows that the tropical multi-decadal signal is causing the increased Atlantic hurricane activity since 1995, and is not related to greenhouse warming.

Odds favor that 2007 will yield an above-average season when it comes to tropical activity. As such, I can’t imagine that any research indicating global climate change decreasing the number of destructive hurricanes that may impact the US will get much media attention.

Technorati Tags: Global Warming, Climate Change, Hurricanes