Global Warming Facts  by Roger King  

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. How Temperature Measurements are Processed
  3. Facts

Introduction

How Temperature Measurements are Processed

The USHCN Version 2 Serial Monthly Dataset  National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration  National Climatic Data Center 

Quality Evaluation and Database Construction

First, daily maximum and minimum temperatures and total precipitation were extracted from a number of different NCDC data sources and subjected to a series of quality evaluation checks. The three sources of daily observations included DSI-3200, DSI-3206 and DSI-3210. Daily maximum and minimum temperature values that passed the evaluation checks were used to compute monthly average values. However, no monthly temperature average or total precipitation value was calculated for station-months in which more than 9 were missing or flagged as erroneous. Monthly values calculated from the three daily data sources then were merged with two additional sources of monthly data values to form a comprehensive dataset of serial monthly temperature and precipitation values for each HCN station. Duplicate records between data sources were eliminated. Following the merging procedure, the monthly values from all stations were subject to an additional set of quality evaluation procedures, which removed between 0.1 and 0.2% of monthly temperature values and less than 0.02% of monthly precipitation values.

Time of Observation Bias Adjustments

Next, monthly temperature values were adjusted for the time-of-observation bias (Karl et al. 1986; Vose et al., 2003). The Time of Observation Bias (TOB) arises when the 24-hour daily summary period at a station begins and ends at an hour other than local midnight. When the summary period ends at an hour other than midnight, monthly mean temperatures exhibit a systematic bias relative to the local midnight standard (Baker, 1975). In the U.S. Cooperative Observer Network, the ending hour of the 24-hour climatological day typically varies from station to station and can change at a given station during its period of record. The TOB-adjustment software uses an empirical model to estimate and adjust the monthly temperature values so that they more closely resemble values based on the local midnight summary period. The metadata archive is used to determine the time of observation for any given period in a station's observational history.

Homogeneity Testing and Adjustment Procedures

Following the TOB adjustments, the homogeneity of the TOB-adjusted temperature series is assessed. In previous releases of the U.S. HCN monthly dataset, homogeneity adjustments were performed using the procedure described in Karl and Williams (1987). This procedure was used to evaluate non-climatic discontinuities (artificial changepoints) in a station's temperature or precipitation series caused by known changes to a station such as equipment relocations and changes. Since knowledge of changes in the status of observations comes from the station history metadata archive maintained at NCDC, the original U.S. HCN homogenization algorithm was known as the Station History Adjustment Program (SHAP).

Unfortunately, station histories are often incomplete so artificial discontinuities in a data series may occur on dates with no associated record in the metadata archive. Undocumented station changes obviously limit the effectiveness of SHAP. To remedy the problem of incomplete station histories, the version 2 homogenization algorithm addresses both documented and undocumented discontinuities.

The potential for undocumented discontinuities adds a layer of complexity to homogeneity testing. Tests for undocumented changepoints, for example, require different sets of test-statistic percentiles than those used in analogous tests for documented discontinuities (Lund and Reeves, 2002). For this reason, tests for undocumented changepoints are inherently less sensitive than their counterparts used when changes are documented. Tests for documented changes should, therefore, also be conducted where possible to maximize the power of detection for all artificial discontinuities. In addition, since undocumented changepoints can occur in all series, accurate attribution of any particular discontinuity between two climate series is more challenging (Menne and Williams, 2005).

The U.S. HCN version 2 "pairwise" homogenization algorithm addresses these and other issues according to the following steps, which are described in detail in Menne and Williams (2009). At present, only temperature series are evaluated for artificial changepoints.

  1. First, a series of monthly temperature differences is formed between numerous pairs of station series in a region. Specifically, difference series are calculated between each target station series and a number (up to 40) of highly correlated series from nearby stations. In effect, a matrix of difference series is formed for a large fraction of all possible combinations of station series pairs in each localized region. The station pool for this pairwise comparison of series includes U.S. HCN stations as well as other U.S. Cooperative Observer Network stations.
  2. Tests for undocumented changepoints are then applied to each paired difference series. A hierarchy of changepoint models is used to distinguish whether the changepoint appears to be a change in mean with no trend (Alexandersson and Moberg, 1997), a change in mean within a general trend (Wang, 2003), or a change in mean coincident with a change in trend (Lund and Reeves, 2002) . Since all difference series are comprised of values from two series, a changepoint date in any one difference series is temporarily attributed to both station series used to calculate the differences. The result is a matrix of potential changepoint dates for each station series.
  3. The full matrix of changepoint dates is then "unconfounded" by identifying the series common to multiple paired-difference series that have the same changepoint date. Since each series is paired with a unique set of neighboring series, it is possible to determine whether more than one nearby series share the same changepoint date.
  4. The magnitude of each relative changepoint is calculated using the most appropriate two-phase regression model (e.g., a jump in mean with no trend in the series, a jump in mean within a general linear trend, etc.). This magnitude is used to estimate the "window of uncertainty" for each changepoint date since the most probable date of an undocumented changepoint is subject to some sampling uncertainty, the magnitude of which is a function of the size of the changepoint. Any cluster of undocumented changepoint dates that falls within overlapping windows of uncertainty is conflated to a single changepoint date according to
    1. a known change date as documented in the target station's history archive (meaning the discontinuity does not appear to be undocumented), or
    2. the most common undocumented changepoint date within the uncertainty window (meaning the discontinuity appears to be truly undocumented)
  5. Finally, multiple pairwise estimates of relative step change magnitude are re-calculated (as a simple difference in mean) at all documented and undocumented discontinuities attributed to the target series. The range of the pairwise estimates for each target step change is used to calculate confidence limits for the magnitude of the discontinuity. Adjustments are made to the target series using the estimates for each shift in the series.

Estimation of Missing Values

Following the homogenization process, estimates for missing data are calculated using a weighted average of values from highly correlated neighboring values. The weights are determined using a procedure similar to the SHAP routine. This program, called FILNET, uses the results from the TOB and homogenization algorithms to obtain a more accurate estimate of the climatological relationship between stations. The FILNET program also estimates data across intervals in a station record where discontinuities occur in a short time interval, which prevents the reliable estimation of appropriate adjustments.

Urbanization Effects

In the original HCN, the regression-based approach of Karl et al. (1988) was employed to account for urban heat islands. In contrast, no specific urban correction is applied in HCN version 2 because the change-point detection algorithm effectively accounts for any "local" trend at any individual station. In other words, the impact of urbanization and other changes in land use is likely small in HCN version 2. Figure 2 - the minimum temperature time series for Reno, Nevada - provides anecdotal evidence in this regard. In brief, the black line represents the unadjusted data, and the blue line represents fully adjusted data. The unadjusted data clearly indicate that the station at Reno experienced both major step changes (e.g., a move from the city to the airport during the 1930s) and trend changes (e.g., a possible growing urban heat island beginning in the 1970s). In contrast, the fully adjusted (homogenized) data indicate that both the step-type changes and the trend changes have been effectively addressed through the change-point detection process used in HCN version 2.

 

Facts

Temperature differences between Rural and City temperature recordings.

Environmental extremism must be put in its place in the climate debate   by Dr. Tim Ball & Tom Harris  Wednesday, January 9, 2008   Professor Tim Patterson of Carleton University, in Ottawa pointed out last year in the Financial Post that “Ten thousand years ago, while the world was coming out of the thousand-year-long “Younger Dryas” cold episode, temperatures rose as much as 6 degrees C in a decade—100 times faster than the past century’s 0.6 degrees C warming that has so upset environmentalists.”  Happening as it did before the dawn of civilization, it was, of course, entirely natural    

In Science, Ignorance is not Bliss  by Walter Cunningham   NASA’s Aqua satellite is showing that water vapor, the dominant greenhouse gas, works to offset the effect of carbon dioxide (CO2). This information, contrary to the assumption used in all the warming models, is ignored by global warming alarmists.    

Solar Cycles, Not CO2, Determine Climate  by Zbigniew Jaworowski, M.D., Ph.D., D.Sc.   Winter 2003-2004

  1. Get out the fur coats, because global cooling is coming! A world-renowned atmospheric scientist and mountaineer, who has excavated ice out of 17 glaciers on 6 continents in his 50-year career, tells how we know.

  2. Without the greenhouse effect, the average near-surface air temperature would be –18°C, and not +15°C, as it is now.

  3. During the past million years,there were 8 to 10 Ice Ages, each only about 100,000 years long, interspersed with short, warm interglacial periods each of about 10,000 years’ duration.

  4. Over the past thousand years, multiple 50-year periods have been much warmer that any analogous period in the 20th Century, and the changes have been much more violent than those observed today. Such are the findings of an analysis of more than 240 publications, performed by a team of CalTech and Harvard University scientists.

  5. In the Eocene period (50 million years ago), this concentration was 6 times larger than now, but the temperature was only 1.5°C higher. In the Cretaceous period (90 million years ago), the CO2 concentration was 7 times higher than today, and in the Carboniferous period (340 million years ago), the CO2 concentration was nearly 12 times higher.30 When the CO2 concentration was 18 times higher, 440 million years ago (during the Ordovician period), glaciers existed on the continents of both hemispheres.

  6. in 1997, it suddenly became apparent that the decisive impact on climate change fluctuations comes not from the Sun, but rather from cosmic radiation. This came as a great surprise, because the energy brought to the Earth by cosmic radiation is many times smaller  than that from solar radiation. The secret lies in the clouds: The impact of clouds on climate and temperature is more than a hundred times stronger than that of carbon dioxide. Even if the CO2 concentration in the air were doubled, its greenhouse effect would be cancelled by a mere 1 percent rise in cloudiness: The reason is simply that greater cloudiness means a larger deflection of the solar radiation reaching the surface of our planet.

  7. In 1997, Danish scientists H. Svensmark and E. Friis-Christensen noted that the changes in cloudiness measured by geostationary satellites perfectly coincide with the changes in the intensity of cosmic rays reaching the troposphere: The more intense the radiation, the more clouds.52 Cosmic rays ionize air molecules, transforming them into condensation nuclei for water vapor, where the ice crystals— from which the clouds are created—are formed.

  8. The quantity of cosmic radiation coming to the Earth from our galaxy and from deep space is controlled by changes in the so-called solar wind. It is created by hot plasma ejected from the solar corona to the distance of many solar diameters, carrying ionized particles and magnetic field lines. Solar wind, rushing toward the limits of the Solar System, drives galactic rays away from the Earth and makes them weaker. When the solar wind gets stronger, less cosmic radiation reaches us from space, not so many clouds are formed, and it gets warmer.  When the solar wind abates, the Earth becomes cooler.

  9. The typical length of climatic cycles in the last 2 million years was about 100,000 years, divided into 90,000 years for Ice Age periods and 10,000 years for the warm, interglacial ones. Within a given cycle, the difference in temperature between the cold and warm phases equals 3°C to 7°C.  The present warm phase is probably drawing to an end—the average duration of such a phase has already been exceeded by 500 years. Transition periods between cold and warm climate phases are dramatically short: They last for only 50, 20, or even 1 to 2 years, and they appear with virtually no warning.

Errors covertly corrected by the I.P.C.C. after publication And Uncorrected Errors by Al Gore  by Lord Monckton of Brenchley March 2007 

  1. Solanki et al. (2005) have reported that in the past 50 years the Sun  has been hotter, for longer, than at any time in the previous 11,400  years.

  2. Khilyuk and Chilingar (2006), from a geological perspective, have calculated that the total climatic influence of humankind to date amounts to a warming of about 0.1C

  3. Buentgen et al. (2006) have concluded that the anthropogenic effect on climate has been so small that it cannot be clearly distinguished from the background of natural climatic variability.

NASA Climate History Changes

Did Media Or NASA Withhold Climate History Data Changes From The Public?   by Noel Sheppard  09-08-2007

Four of the top 10 are now from the 1930s: 1934, 1931, 1938 and 1939, while only 3 of the top 10 are from the last 10 years (1998, 2006, 1999). Several years (2000, 2002, 2003, 2004) fell well down the leaderboard, behind even 1900.  Most importantly, according to the GISS, 1998 is no longer the warmest year in American history. That honor once again belongs to 1934.    

 

Hockey Stick Debunked

The Great Global Warming Hoax? Michael Mann, a paleoclimatologist ( one who attempts to interpret the past climate through certain Paleolithic records, such as ice core samples, sea bed sediments, coral heads, and tree ring growth ), submitted a paper to Nature magazine in 1998 which, unfortunately, was not subjected to peer review before publication.  In it, he offered what has now become known as the famous "hockey stick" chart, showing the earth's temperature having been relatively constant for the past thousand years before suddenly skyrocketing upward at the dawn of the 20th century.  His interpretation was that man's production of CO2  in the modern age was obviously responsible for the sudden increase.  It turned out to be one of the biggest scientific blunders of all time.

 ...   

Along comes Steve McIntyre, a Canadian analyst, who spends two years of his own personal time reverse-engineering Dr. Mann's PCA program.  McIntyre subjects Mann's PCA program to a "Monte Carlo" analysis - which inserts random data sets into the function - and discovered that no matter what data he fed it, the result was always the same.  The arm of the "hockey stick" ( paleo-record ) always came out straight.  In Dr. Mann's case, the rising temperature of the Medieval Warm Period and the expected trough of the Little Ice Age had been completely erased.  The hockey stick was broken.  Fini.  Kaput.  We may never know whether Mann's work was deliberately contrived to fit some personal environmental agenda, or just a colossal mathematical blunder.

McIntyre submitted his work to Nature Magazine - since they were responsible for publishing Mann's flawed research without peer review in the first place, but they reportedly rejected it, saying it was "too long".  He then shortened it to 500 words, and re-submitted it, but again it was rejected, this time saying it was "too mathematical" or words to that effect.  Heaven forbid any publication calling itself an "International Weekly Journal of Science" from actually publishing any science that hinged on mathematics.  Let's all push a yard stick into the snow, measure the snow depth, call ourselves "climate scientists", and get published in Nature.  In the end, McIntyre turned to the internet and its true freedom of the press, and today he is known to every serious climate scientist on the planet as the man who broke the hockey stick.

The National Academy of Sciences has found Mann's graph to have “a validation skill not significantly different from zero” – i.e., the graph was useless.  Note the corrected version, below, in which neither today's temperatures nor the rate of warming are particularly unusual compared to the historical record.  Thus, even the "global warming" of the 20th century was not even remotely a cause for the slightest alarm.  It was all "much to do about nothing".

The Medieval Warm Period, of which the proponents of Anthropogenic Global Warming don't want you to be aware, was a period in which agriculture flourished, helping Europe emerge from the Dark Ages.  The Little Ice Age produced crop failures from too-short growing seasons leading to widespread hunger and even starvation in some more northern locales.  Since our emergence from the Little Ice Age, agriculture has again flourished, and most of us hope it lasts quite a while longer.  This is certainly no cause for panic, and a few of us think being comfortably warm and having plenty to eat is actually good.  

 

Problems with NOAA Temperature Stations

Cool News About Global Warming   by Bill Steigerwald   March 4, 2008  California meteorologist Anthony Watts self-funded project to quality-check 1,221 ground weather stations around the country that are used by NASA to measure the "official" average annual temperature of the United States.

So far, Watts and his volunteers have checked out more than 500 weather stations (none in Western Pennsylvania) to see if their temperature data can be considered credible. As he details on his other Web site, surfacestations.org, nearly 70 percent of the sites fail to meet the government's own standards because they are not 100 feet from a building, are on blazing rooftops, sit next to air-conditioner exhaust fans, etc  

www.surfacestations.org    as of April 23, 2008

This web site has surveyed the NOAA's temperature stations to see how well they meet NOAA's specifications as a recording station.   Their results are far less than stellar and help explain the difference between temperatures reported by these stations and satellite's, which show less warming.

Climate Reference Network Rating Guide - adopted from NCDC Climate Reference Network Handbook, 2002, specifications for siting (section 2.2.1) of NOAA’s new Climate Reference Network:  

Class 1 - Flat and horizontal ground surrounded by a clear surface with a slope below 1/3 (<19deg). Grass/low vegetation ground cover <10 centimeters high. Sensors located at least 100 meters from artificial heating or reflecting surfaces, such as buildings, concrete surfaces, and parking lots. Far from large bodies of water, except if it is representative of the area, and then located at least 100 meters away. No shading when the sun elevation >3 degrees.

Class 2 - Same as Class 1 with the following differences. Surrounding Vegetation <25 centimeters. No artificial heating sources within 30m. No shading for a sun elevation >5deg.

Class 3 (error ~1C) - Same as Class 2, except no artificial heating sources within 10 meters.

Class 4 (error >~= 2C) - Artificial heating sources <10 meters.

Class 5 (error >~= 5C) - Temperature sensor located next to/above an artificial heating source, such a building, roof top, parking lot, or concrete surface.”

Alarmists use weather to promote global warming hoax  by Dr. Tim Ball   July 7, 2008

  1. The severe weather of this spring across the Northern Hemisphere was caused by cooler weather not warmer.

  2. The IPCC and the NOAA positions that severe weather will increase with global warming is scientifically wrong.

  3. The records show current weather extremes are well within long term natural variability.

Almost all global severe weather occurs in the middle latitudes between approximately 30° and 65° of latitude. Cyclonic storms, blizzards, severe thunderstorms and tornadoes are created where warm and cold air meets and that is most dramatic along what is generally known as the Polar Front.  

image
Source: ncdc.noaa.gov   

 

Jupiter, Mars and Triton Climate Change

No kidding! Climate change spreads to Jupiter, Mars  at WorldNetDaily  May 23, 2008
Scientists reported today there is noticeable climate change taking place on Jupiter  ...   According to Philip S. Marcus, a professor of fluid dynamics at UC Berkeley, analysis of the Hubble and Keck images may support his 2004 conjecture that Jupiter is in the midst of global climate change that will alter temperatures by as much as 10 degrees Celsius, getting warmer near the equator and cooler near the south pole.  ...  Scientists from NASA say that Mars has warmed by about 0.5C since the 1970s. This is similar to the warming experienced on Earth over approximately the same period.  Since there is no known life on Mars it suggests rapid changes in planetary climates could be natural phenomena.  There's one striking difference between Earth and the other two planets, however. Neither Jupiter or Mars has any people – and no artificial activity creating so-called "greenhouse gases" like carbon dioxide.  

Global Warming on Pluto Puzzles Scientists   by Robert Roy Britt  Senior Science Writer  October 2002   ...  astronomers today said Pluto is undergoing global warming in its thin atmosphere even as it moves farther from the Sun on its long, odd-shaped orbit.  Pluto's atmospheric pressure has tripled over the past 14 years, indicating a stark temperature rise, the researchers said. The change is likely a seasonal event, much as seasons on Earth change as the hemispheres alter their inclination to the Sun during the planet's annual orbit.  They suspect the average surface temperature increased about 3.5 degrees Fahrenheit, or slightly less than 2 degrees Celsius.   


Global Warming Detected on Triton   June 28, 1998    "At least since 1989, Triton has been undergoing a period of global warming," confirms astronomer James Elliot, professor of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "Percentage-wise, it's a very large increase."

Elliot and colleagues from the Lowell Observatory and Williams College report their findings in the June 25 issue of the journal Nature. Triton's 5 percent increase on the absolute temperature scale from about -392 to -389 degrees Fahrenheit would be like the Earth experiencing a jump of some 22 degrees Fahrenheit in just nine years.