Tag Archives: NOAA

Hurricane—Warming Link Is All Model, No Data

18 Tuesday Oct 2022

Posted by in Climate science, Hurricanes, Uncategorized

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There was deep disappointment among political opponents of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis at their inability to pin blame on him for Hurricane Ian’s destruction. It was a terrible hurricane, but they so wanted it to be “Hurricane Hitler”, as Glenn Reynolds noted with tongue in cheek. That just didn’t work out for them, given DeSantis’ competent performance in marshaling resources for aid and cleanup from the storm. Their last ditch refuge was to condemn DeSantis for dismissing the connection they presume to exist between climate change and hurricane frequency and intensity. That criticism didn’t seem to stick, however, and it shouldn’t.

There is no linkage to climate change in actual data on tropical cyclones. It is a myth. Yes, models of hurricane activity have been constructed that embed assumptions leading to predictions of more hurricanes, and more intense hurricanes, as temperatures rise. But these are models constructed as simplified representations of hurricane development. The following quote from the climate modelers at the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL) (a division of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)) is straightforward on this point (emphases are mine):

“Through research, GFDL scientists have concluded that it is premature to attribute past changes in hurricane activity to greenhouse warming, although simulated hurricanes tend to be more intense in a warmer climate. Other climate changes related to greenhouse warming, such as increases in vertical wind shear over the Caribbean, lead to fewer yet more intense hurricanes in the GFDL model projections for the late 21st century.

Models typically are said to be “calibrated” to historical data, but no one should take much comfort in that. As a long-time econometric modeler myself, I can say without reservation that such assurances are flimsy, especially with respect to “toy models” containing parameters that aren’t directly observable in the available data. In such a context, a modeler can take advantage of tremendous latitude in choosing parameters to include, sensitivities to assume for unknowns or unmeasured relationships, and historical samples for use in “calibration”. Sad to say, modelers can make these models do just about anything they want. The cautious approach to claims about model implications is a credit to GFDL.

Before I get to the evidence on hurricanes, it’s worth remembering that the entire edifice of climate alarmism relies not just on the temperature record, but on models based on other assumptions about the sensitivity of temperatures to CO2 concentration. The models relied upon to generate catastrophic warming assume very high sensitivity, and those models have a very poor track record of prediction. Estimates of sensitivity are highly uncertain, and this article cites research indicating that the IPCC’s assumptions about sensitivity are about 50% too high. And this article reviews recent findings that carbon sensitivity is even lower, about one-third of what many climate models assume. In addition, this research finds that sensitivities are nearly impossible to estimate from historical data with any precision because the record is plagued by different sources and types of atmospheric forcings, accompanying aerosol effects on climate, and differing half-lives of various greenhouse gases. If sensitivities are as low as discussed at the links above, it means that predictions of warming have been grossly exaggerated.

The evidence that hurricanes have become more frequent or severe, or that they now intensify more rapidly, is basically nonexistent. Ryan Maue and Roger Pielke Jr. of the University of Colorado have both researched hurricanes extensively for many years. They described their compilation of data on land-falling hurricanes in this Forbes piece in 2020. They point out that hurricane activity in older data is much more likely to be missing and undercounted, especially storms that never make landfall. That’s one of the reasons for the focus on landfalling hurricanes to begin with. With the advent of satellite data, storms are highly unlikely to be missed, but even landfalls have sometimes gone unreported historically. The farther back one goes, the less is known about the extent of hurricane activity, but Pielke and Maue feel that post-1970 data is fairly comprehensive.

The chart at the top of this post is a summery of the data that Pielke and Maue have compiled. There are no obvious trends in terms of the number of storms or their strength. The 1970s were quiet while the 90s were more turbulent. The absence of trends also characterizes NOAA’s data on U.S. landfalling hurricanes since 1851, as noted by Pail Driessen. Here is Driessen on Florida hurricane history:

“Using pressure, Ian was not the fourth-strongest hurricane in Florida history but the tenth. The strongest hurricane in U.S. history moved through the Florida Keys in 1935. Among other Florida hurricanes stronger than Ian was another Florida Keys storm in 1919. This was followed by the hurricanes in 1926 in Miami, the Palm Beach/Lake Okeechobee storm in 1928, the Keys in 1948, and Donna in 1960. We do not know how strong the hurricane in 1873 was, but it destroyed Punta Rassa with a 14-foot storm surge. Punta Rassa is located at the mouth of the river leading up to Ft. Myers, where Ian made landfall.”

Neil L. Frank, veteran meteorologist and former head of the National Hurricane Center, bemoans the changed conventions for assigning names to storms in the satellite era. A typical clash of warm and cold air will often produce thunderstorms and wind, but few of these types of systems were assigned names under older conventions. They are not typical of systems that usually produce tropical cyclones, although they can. Many of those kinds of storms are named today. Right or wrong, that gives the false impression of a trend in the number of named storms. Not only is it easier to identify storms today, given the advent of satellite data, but storms are assigned names more readily, even if they don’t strictly meet the definition of a tropical cyclone. It’s a wonder that certain policy advocates get away with saying the outcome of all this is a legitimate trend!

As Frank insists, there is no evidence of a trend toward more frequent and powerful hurricanes during the last several decades, and there is no evidence of rapid intensification. More importantly, there is no evidence that climate change is leading to more hurricane activity. It’s also worth noting that today we suffer far fewer casualties from hurricanes owing to much earlier warnings, better precautions, and better construction.

Relax: Natural Variability Causes Heatwaves

30 Saturday Jul 2022

Posted by in Global Warming

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Lately almost any passing weather phenomenon is said to have been rooted in climate change and higher carbon concentrations. The recent heatwaves that seared parts of Europe and the U.S. are no exception, and climate change activists always find heat spells ripe for rhetorical exploitation. But while these would-be Cassandras and Gretas push their fearful narrative, there are strong reasons to doubt that these weather events are any cause for alarm. This summer’s heat waves, like all others, were of limited geographic scope, and they certainly weren’t the most severe heat waves on record in terms of either duration or magnitude. More on that below.

Data Problems

Temperature measurements tend to be exaggerated these days because so many “official” temperature records come from local airports or other urban sites rich in impervious cover and heat absorbing building materials. This gives rise to the so-called “urban heat island effect”, which refers to the elevated temperatures measured in urban versus rural areas. It’s even worse than that, however, as the vast majority of active weather stations in the U.S. are sited at “hot spots”, and many of them are poorly maintained. Data problems plague European temperature records as well.

Furthermore, official temperature records are extremely short on climatological scales, going back only about 150 years in the U.S. And these records have been “adjusted” by weather authorities like the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), usually with the early records “cooled” relative to more recent readings. That means the long-term trend in temperatures is biased upward.

Climate Catastrophists

Nevertheless, Joe Biden has been threatening to declare a wholly unjustified “climate emergency“, perhaps thinking these dog days are the perfect time to assume a host of new emergency powers. It’s unclear whether the new “Build Back” bill making its way through Congress will be enough to satisfy the appetite of Biden’s handlers for costly and ultimately ineffective climate measures.

It’s tempting to think delirium from the heat waves is what prompted Al Gore to compare climate change skeptics to the dithering police officers in Uvalde, TX, but Gore’s fever is nothing new. We’re still waiting for the world to end, which he once predicted would occur by 2016.

Even weather reporters on TV are breathless in their descriptions of the heatwaves. They’ve certainly become dramatists for the climate-change cause. And people love good scare stories. It gives them an excuse to polish up their pitchforks! Or to be lazy and stay inside. It’s telling that so many people now quote heat index values (which combine heat and humidity), rather than actual temperatures, in the warm summer months. After all, it’s more thrilling to say it’s 105 outside than it is to say 95.

Anyway, compare the paired maps in each of the graphics below (here are links to sources for the first and second):

The temperatures are comparable, but the use of RED colors on the 2022 maps is so much more frightening! This post from Anthony Watts provides a list of links to news sources taking alarmist perspectives on the heatwaves in the U.S. and Europe, and falsely attributing the heatwaves to CO2.

Same Old High Pressure Domes

Cliff Mass offers a bone to the climate change community. He thinks perhaps 5% – 10% of the recent temperature anomaly in the UK is attributable to greenhouse gases. An effect of that magnitude is hardly worthy of government action, let alone panic. Mass says:

“Natural variability of the atmosphere was the proximate cause of the warmth and does not represent an existential threat to the population of Europe.”

The heat wave phenomenon is typical of slow-moving high-pressure systems that often develop during the summer months. These domes of high pressure vary in temperature and geographic breadth, and they are sandwiched between or adjacent to low-pressure systems with cooler temperatures. That’s been the case in both Europe and the U.S. during this summer’s heat waves, as illustrated by the following graphics, The northern hemisphere is not entirely enveloped in a heat wave.

And the rest of the globe? In the tropics (below 20 degrees latitude), June 2022 was the coolest June in 22 years, according to satellite temperature readings! Furthermore, the monthly anomaly in June was the coolest in 10 years. In the Southern Hemisphere, Australia and South America have had extremely cold winters. Antarctica had its coldest winter on record in 2021. Yet Joe Biden is under the misapprehension that we’re experiencing “a climate emergency”.

These are not the worst heat waves on record. Both the U.S. and Europe experienced higher temperatures and prolonged heat waves during the 1930s. For example, St.Louis, Missouri matched or exceeded 110 degrees four times in the 1930s, and twice in 1954, whereas the city topped out at 102 so far this year, and that was after a cool spring. There was an extreme European heat wave in 1976 that was drier and much lengthier, and others occurred in 1911 and 1906. Of course, available temperature comparisons are distorted because the early readings weren’t as impacted by urban heat islands. There are historical accounts of drastic heat waves much earlier, such as the 1500s and 1700s. Here is more heatwave history, in case you’re interested.

We’ll Be Fine

Heat isn’t the only story, of course. A wide range of other disastrous events are blamed on climate change. Wildfires are a prime example, but as we know, wildfires are not new, and the worst wildfires have more to do with poor forest management than anything else. Likewise, there is little if any association between extreme weather events and climate change. In that context, it’s also worth noting that cold weather is much deadlier than hot weather. The climate today, and going forward, presents far fewer dangers to humanity than in the past.

I did a lot of dirty, outdoor work in my youth, and it was hot! There were times just as hot as this summer, if not worse, I’d venture to say. Anyone old enough to have lived through the 1970s or even the 1950s should recognize the heatwave Chicken Littles as such.

End of Snowfalls Is Greatly Exaggerated

03 Monday Feb 2020

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Snowcover Anomoly

Everyone seems to think it snowed more in their youth than in recent years, but that’s generally incorrect, at least for for late-stage baby boomers, Gen Xers, and Millenials. Gregory Wrightstone thought the same thing as he reflected on his youth in Pittsburgh, but after checking snowfall records he was surprised to find an upward trend. In “Warming and the Snows of Yesteryear“, Wrightstone says his look at the records from other areas showed similar upward trends. The chart above from NOAA shows the Northern Hemisphere has experienced mostly positive snowfall anomalies over the past 20 years. So, the truth is that snowfalls have not decreased over the last 50+ years, contrary to our fond memories of big snows in childhood. Interestingly, Thomas Jefferson thought the same thing in 1801, but I’m not sure whether he was right.

We’ve been told by climate alarmists that “snowfalls are a thing of the past” due to global warming (The Independent in March, 2000). If anything, however, snowfalls have increased, and big snowfalls still happen. As with so many climate predictions over the years, this too is a bust. Most of those predictions have relied on predictive models fitted with an inadequate historical record of data, and the models are inadequately specified to capture the complexities of global climate trends. Don’t bet the house on them, and don’t presume to bet my house on them either, please!

Sea Level Measurement and Perspective

26 Monday Mar 2018

Posted by in Global Warming, Sea Level

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The measurement of sea level change is much more complicated than most people realize. In fact, the reported changes that alarm so many are minuscule relative to the uncertainties caused by these measurement difficulties. First, consider the easy part: If you drive a stake into the ground at the shore at high tide one day, your task of measuring sea level change will be complicated by the changing day-to-day tides. Those changes will force you to calculate average readings off of your stake over complete lunar cycles (and even that isn’t quite right, since the gravitational pull of the sun matters as well, and the moon’s distance from earth fluctuates). Or, you can make comparisons only between readings one lunar cycle apart.

Once the local reference point is established at the shore and the tides are controlled for, there are two kinds of changes that cause the sea to rise or fall relative to the “zero” point on your stake. The sea water can rise or fall, of course, but the land itself might do so as well! Settling or upwelling at the land surface can be caused by a variety of geological phenomena. “Vertical land motion”, up or down, occurs almost everywhere. That means sea level is a relative concept. In addition, over time the placement of on-shore sea-level gauges often change with harbor and ship channel alterations, and even accidents. These all require adjustments in order to make valid comparisons across time. That’s to say nothing of variations in air pressure and water currents, which certainly affect on-shore readings. Today, sea levels are also measured by satellite, but that doesn’t make sea level measurement simpler by any means, as you’ll see below.

Kip Hansen discusses the vagaries of sea level measurement in an excellent post. If it isn’t already obvious, changes in readings from a single tide level gauge do not show the rate at which the absolute sea level is changing over time. It shows only the local net effect of the absolute sea level change and the land movement. But Hansen emphasizes an implication about which few are aware: a comparison of relative sea level changes in two different locales shows only the difference in “vertical land motion” between the two sites (at least as a first approximation).

Hansen notes a major discrepancy between the absolute sea level changes reported by NOAA (1.7 mm per year) and NASA (3.0 mm per year). These figures are estimated by satellite readings, which have extremely poor resolution (measured in cm, not mm) compared to tidal gauges. This quote from Hansen in the comments section is revealing (emphasis added):

“Satellite Altimetry — when reporting sea level rise — is not a measurement, but a complex calculation with a dozen or so ‘corrections’ and ‘adjustments’ for confounding factors, all of which are of greater magnitude than the change in sea surface height being sought. Many of these confounders are orders of magnitude greater. Some additions, such the famed GIA adjustment, are acknowledged not to appear in the physical sea surface height at all, but are added on the basis that ‘the sea would have risen the 0.3 mm/yr if the ocean basins hadn’t expanded. There is no scientific justification for the difference. In this essay, I point out that NOAA has stuck to its scientitic guns and not gone along with the NASA figure.“

There are statements on NOAA’s web site that seem to endorse the NASA estimate, but Hansen discounts those references. He advises that there is a big difference between the NOAA science community and its marketing staff, which undoubtedly dominates the content viewed by the public on the site.

There are many other factors that play havoc with sea level estimates, some of which are intractable. One issue, which comes up in the comments to Hansen’s article, has to do with sedimentation and its displacement of sea water. While its effect spreads out across the entire ocean, Hansen stops short of calling it a contributor to absolute sea level rise, though that would be the implication in terms of measurement.

Alarm over rising sea levels is based partly on the focus of local media on relative sea level changes. That may well be an important local issue, whether the land is settling or the absolute sea level is rising (though the two may have different local policy implications). But local concerns about relative sea level are often translated into global concerns that confuse relative with absolute sea levels. This makes excellent fodder for the propaganda of the leftist climate change movement. That propaganda is so effective that it sometimes feeds back to foment local concern, even in areas experiencing reductions in relative sea level! These concerns fly in the face of local experience as well as the absolute rates of change estimated by NOAA.

I’ll close with the following comment taken from an earlier post on SacredCowChips:

“The prospect of rising sea levels is another matter that concerns alarmists, who always fail to note that sea levels have been increasing for a very long time, well before carbon concentrations could have had any impact. In fact, the sea level increases in the past few centuries are a rebound from lows during the Little Ice Age…. But even those fluctuations look minor by comparison to the increases in sea levels that occurred over 8,000 years ago.“

Climate Change, Hurricanes and Noisy Statistics

22 Friday Sep 2017

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IMG_4919

The nasty spate of hurricanes this year has been a catch-up of sorts following a decade of subdued activity. In fact, global hurricane activity has been flat to declining in frequency since 1970. Until the recent increase, hurricane activity had been trending down in terms of 24-month cumulative energy since the 1990s, as the chart above shows. The historical data on the number of U.S. landfalls extends back to 1900, and it has had a negative trend as well. Nevertheless, we hear from climate alarmists that Hurricanes Harvey and Irma, which ended a drought of record length in U.S hurricane landfalls, and now presumably Maria, were a consequence of anthropomorphic global warming (AGW), er… climate change.

The implication is that increases in the atmospheric concentration of CO2 led to these hurricanes or their high intensity. Apparently, the paucity of hurricane activity over the previous ten years can be waved off as a fluke. A further implication of the alarmist view is that the longer negative trends in hurricane frequency and energy can be ignored in the context of any relation to CO2 concentration. But how so? One confounding factor I’ve seen mentioned blames El Nino warming in the Pacific, and a consequent increase in Atlantic wind shear, for the long lull in activity after 2005. That has a ring of plausibility, but a closer look reveals that actual El Nino activity during those years was hardly impressive, with the exception of 2015-16.

More historical data can be seen in the charts on the tropical cyclone page on the Watts Up With That? blog. (The charts in question start about two-thirds of the way down the page.) Hurricane expert Ryan Maue compiled a number of these charts, including the one above. He authored an editorial in the Wall Street Journal this week bemoaning the climate-change hype surrounding Harvey and Irma (if the link doesn’t work, it is available at the WSJ’s Opinion page on Facebook, posted on 9/17). Maue believes that both the climate science community and the media share in the blame for that hype. But he also says the following:

“Although a clear scientific consensus has emerged over the past decade that climate change influences hurricanes in the long run, its effect upon any individual storm is unclear.“

Maue provides a link to this NOAA web site offering cautious support for the proposition that there is a link between global warming and hurricane intensity, though the data it cites ends about ten years ago, so it does not capture the recent lull. Also, some of the information it provides is based on modeled global temperatures and hurricane activity through 2100. As is well-known by now, or should be, long-term climate forecasts based on carbon forcings are notoriously inaccurate, and NOAA admits that the association between those predicted temperatures and future hurricanes is tenuous:

“It is premature to conclude that human activities–and particularly greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming–have already had a detectable impact on Atlantic hurricane or global tropical cyclone activity.“

Perhaps the idea that there is consensus regarding the relationship between climate change and hurricanes is more of a stretch than Maue and NOAA let on. Here is a summary of 30 peer-reviewed studies showing no connection to either hurricane frequency or intensity. Most of these studies are more recent than the end of the data record cited by NOAA. And in fact, many of these studies find support for a negative link between global temperatures and hurricane activity.

One of the prominent alarmists in the climate research community is Penn State’s Michael Mann, who has famously claimed that hurricanes are more frequent now than at any time in the past 1,000 years. He based his conclusions on highly speculative hurricane “proxies” identified in layers of sediment. Mann’s claims and research technique have been called into questioned by other climate scientists, who have arrived at contrary results in their own research. Lest anyone forget, Mann was implicated in a  data manipulation fraud related to the East Anglia climate scandal. Though cleared by a group of tenured professors at his own university, there are a number of climate scientists who believe Mann violated scientific standards.

The claim that global warming will cause hurricanes to become increasingly intense relies on elevated sea surface temperatures. This year, temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico are elevated and are said to have had a role in strengthening Harvey as it approached the Gulf Coast. Texas, however, has experienced as many landfalls of major hurricanes with cooler Gulf waters as with warmer waters. And Irma strengthened in a part of the Atlantic without such warm temperatures. Instead, minimal wind shear was implicated as a factor contributing to Irma’s strength.

In general, Atlantic temperatures have been relatively warm since the late 1990s, a fact that most scientists would at least partially attribute to the “Atlantic multi-decadal oscillation“, a regular cycle in water temperatures that repeats with a period of multiple decades. Potentially adding to that temperature increase is a controversial change in NOAA’s calibration of sea surface temperatures, as an increasing share of those readings are taken from buoys rather than ship-board measurement. There is some suspicion that NOAA’s adjustments “cool the past” more than is justified, a suspicion that was heightened by allegations from one whistle-blowing NOAA scientist early this year. Then, there is the contention that the sea surface temperature makes little difference if it is matched by an increase in air temperature.

Overall, NOAA says the combination of frequency and intensity of tropical cyclones will increase by 2%-11% over the rest of this century. As Roy Spencer notes, that is not a terribly alarming figure given the risks people have always willingly accepted by living in coastal areas. In any case, the range is based on models of climate behavior that are of questionable reliability. And like past temperature predictions produced by carbon-forcing climate models, it is likely to be a gross overestimate. Here is Roger Pielke, Sr., who is quoted in this wide-ranging post on hurricanes and climate at the Fabius Maximus web site:

“Model projections of hurricane frequency and intensity are based on climate models. However, none have shown skill at predicting past (as hindcasts) variations in hurricane activity (or long term change in their behavior) over years, decades, and longer periods. Thus, their claim of how they will change in the future remains, at most, a hypothesis (i.e. speculation). When NOAA, IPCC and others communicate to the media and public, to be scientifically honest, they should mention this.”

Despite the spike in activity this year, strong hurricanes are intermittent and fairly rare. Establishing reliable statistical connections with other forces is difficult with emergent events like hurricanes. Moreover, the degree of error in measuring global or regional temperature itself is much larger than is generally acknowledged, and the global warming “signal” is very weak. As we say in the statistical analysis business, noisy data are compatible with diverse hypotheses. The relationship between hurricanes and climate change is a prime example.

Playing Pretend Science Over Cocktails

13 Thursday Apr 2017

Posted by in Global Warming

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It’s a great irony that our educated and affluent classes have been largely zombified on the subject of climate change. Their brainwashing by the mainstream media has been so effective that these individuals are unwilling to consider more nuanced discussions of the consequences of higher atmospheric carbon concentrations, or any scientific evidence to suggest contrary views. I recently attended a party at which I witnessed several exchanges on the topic. It was apparent that these individuals are conditioned to accept a set of premises while lacking real familiarity with supporting evidence. Except in one brief instance, I avoided engaging on the topic, despite my bemusement. After all, I was there to party, and I did!

The zombie alarmists express their views within a self-reinforcing echo chamber, reacting to each others’ virtue signals with knowing sarcasm. They also seem eager to avoid any “denialist” stigma associated with a contrary view, so there is a sinister undercurrent to the whole dynamic. These individuals are incapable of citing real sources and evidence; they cite anecdotes or general “news-say” at best. They confuse local weather with climate change. Most of them haven’t the faintest idea how to find real research support for their position, even with powerful search engines at their disposal. Of course, the search engines themselves are programmed to prioritize the very media outlets that profit from climate scare-mongering. Catastrophe sells! Those media outlets, in turn, are eager to quote the views of researchers in government who profit from alarmism in the form of expanding programs and regulatory authority, as well as researchers outside of government who profit from government grant-making authority.

The Con in the “Consensus”

Climate alarmists take assurance in their position by repeating the false claim that  97% of climate scientists believe that human activity is the primary cause of warming global temperatures. The basis for this strong assertion comes from an academic paper that reviewed other papers, the selection of which was subject to bias. The 97% figure was not a share of “scientists”. It was the share of the selected papers stating agreement with the anthropomorphic global warming (AGW) hypothesis. And that figure is subject to other doubts, in addition to the selection bias noted above: the categorization into agree/disagree groups was made by “researchers” who were, in fact, environmental activists, who counted several papers written by so-called “skeptics” among the set that agreed with the strong AGW hypothesis. So the “97% of scientists” claim is a distortion of the actual findings, and the findings themselves are subject to severe methodological shortcomings. On the other hand, there are a number of widely-recognized, natural reasons for climate change, as documented in this note on 240 papers published over just the first six months of 2016.

Data Integrity

It’s rare to meet a climate alarmist with any knowledge of how temperature data is actually collected. What exactly is the “global temperature”, and how can it be measured? It is a difficult undertaking, and it wasn’t until 1979 that it could be done with any reliability. According to Roy Spencer, that’s when satellite equipment began measuring:

“… the natural microwave thermal emissions from oxygen in the atmosphere. The intensity of the signals these microwave radiometers measure at different microwave frequencies is directly proportional to the temperature of different, deep layers of the atmosphere.“

Prior to the deployment of weather satellites, and starting around 1850, temperature records came only from surface temperature readings. These are taken at weather stations on land and collected at sea, and they are subject to quality issues that are generally unappreciated. Weather stations are unevenly distributed and they come and go over time; many of them produce readings that are increasingly biased upward by urbanization. Sea surface temperatures are collected in different ways with varying implications for temperature trends. Aggregating these records over time and geography is a hazardous undertaking, and these records are, unfortunately, the most vulnerable to manipulation.

The urbanization bias in surface temperatures is significant. According to this paper by Ross McKitrick, the number of weather stations counted in the three major global temperature series declined by more than 4,500 since the 1970s (over 75%), and most of those losses were rural stations. From McKitrick’s abstract:

“The collapse of the sample size has increased the relative fraction of data coming from airports to about 50% (up from about 30% in the late 1970s). It has also reduced the average latitude of source data and removed relatively more high altitude monitoring sites. Oceanic data are based on sea surface temperature (SST) instead of marine air temperature (MAT)…. Ship-based readings changed over the 20th century from bucket-and-thermometer to engine-intake methods, leading to a warm bias as the new readings displaced the old.“

Think about that the next time you hear about temperature records, especially NOAA reports on a “new warmest month on record”.

Data Manipulation

It’s rare to find alarmists having any awareness of the scandal at East Anglia University, which involved data falsification by prominent members of the climate change “establishment”. That scandal also shed light on corruption of the peer-review process in climate research, including a bias against publishing work skeptical of the accepted AGW narrative. Few are aware now of a very recent scandal involving manipulation of temperature data at NOAA in which retroactive adjustments were applied in an effort to make the past look cooler and more recent temperatures warmer. There is currently an FOIA outstanding for communications between the Obama White House and a key scientist involved in the scandal. Here are Judith Curry’s thoughts on the NOAA temperature manipulation.

Think about all that the next time you hear about temperature records, especially NOAA reports on a “new warmest month on record”.

Other Warming Whoppers

Last week on social media, I noticed a woman emoting about the way hurricanes used to frighten her late mother. This woman was sharing an article about the presumed negative psychological effects that climate change was having on the general public. The bogus premises: we are experiencing an increase in the frequency and severity of storms, that climate change is causing the storms, and that people are scared to death about it! Just to be clear, I don’t think I’ve heard much in the way of real panic, and real estate prices and investment flows don’t seem to be under any real pressure. In fact, the frequency and severity of severe weather has been in decline even as atmospheric carbon concentrations have increased over the past 50 years.

I heard another laughable claim at the party: that maps are showing great areas of the globe becoming increasingly dry, mostly at low latitudes. I believe the phrase “frying” was used. That is patently false, but I believe it’s another case in which climate alarmists have confused model forecasts with fact.

The prospect of rising sea levels is another matter that concerns alarmists, who always fail to note that sea levels have been increasing for a very long time, well before carbon concentrations could have had any impact. In fact, the sea level increases in the past few centuries are a rebound from lows during the Little Ice Age, and levels are now back to where the seas were during the Medieval Warm Period. But even those fluctuations look minor by comparison to the increases in sea levels that occurred over 8,000 years ago. Sea levels are rising at a very slow rate today, so slowly that coastal construction is proceeding as if there is little if any threat to new investments. While some of this activity may be subsidized by governments through cheap flood insurance, real money is on the line, and that probably represents a better forecast of future coastal flooding than any academic study can provide.

Old Ideas Die Hard

Two enduring features of the climate debate are 1) the extent to which so-called “carbon forcing” models of climate change have erred in over-predicting global temperatures, and 2) the extent to which those errors have gone unnoticed by the media and the public. The models have been plagued by a number of issues: the climate is not a simple system. However, one basic shortcoming has to do with the existence of strong feedback effects: the alarmist community has asserted that feedbacks are positive, on balance, magnifying the warming impact of a given carbon forcing. In fact, the opposite seems to be true: second-order responses due to cloud cover, water vapor, and circulation effects are negative, on balance, at least partially offsetting the initial forcing.

Fifty Years Ain’t History

One other amazing thing about the alarmist position is an insistence that the past 50 years should be taken as a permanent trend. On a global scale, our surface temperature records are sketchy enough today, but recorded history is limited to the very recent past. There are recognized methods for estimating temperatures in the more distant past by using various temperature proxies. These are based on measurements of other natural phenomenon that are temperature-sensitive, such as ice cores, tree rings, and matter within successive sediment layers such as pollen and other organic compounds.

The proxy data has been used to create temperature estimates into the distant past. A basic finding is that the world has been this warm before, and even warmer, as recently as 1,000 years ago. This demonstrates the wide range of natural variation in the climate, and today’s global temperatures are well within that range. At the party I mentioned earlier, I was amused to hear a friend say, “Ya’ know, Greenland isn’t supposed to be green”, and he meant it! He is apparently unaware that Greenland was given that name by Viking settlers around 1000 AD, who inhabited the island during a warm spell lasting several hundred years… until it got too cold!

Carbon Is Not Poison

The alarmists take the position that carbon emissions are unequivocally bad for people and the planet. They treat carbon as if it is the equivalent of poisonous air pollution. The popular press often illustrates carbon emissions as black smoke pouring from industrial smokestacks, but like oxygen, carbon dioxide is a colorless gas and a gas upon which life itself depends.

Our planet’s vegetation thrives on carbon dioxide, and increasing carbon concentrations are promoting a “greening” of the earth. Crop yields are increasing as a result; reforestation is proceeding as well. The enhanced vegetation provides an element of climate feedback against carbon “forcings” by serving as a carbon sink, absorbing increasing amounts of carbon and converting it to oxygen.

Matt Ridley has noted one of the worst consequences of the alarmists’ carbon panic and its influence on public policy: the vast misallocation of resources toward carbon reduction, much of it dedicated to subsidies for technologies that cannot pass economic muster. Consider that those resources could be devoted to many other worthwhile purposes, like bringing electric power to third-world families who otherwise must burn dung inside their huts for heat; for that matter, perhaps the resources could be left under the control of taxpayers who can put it to the uses they value most highly. The regulatory burdens imposed by these policies on carbon-intensive industries represent lost output that can’t ever be recouped, and all in the service of goals that are of questionable value. And of course, the anti-carbon efforts almost certainly reflect a diversion of resources to the detriment of more immediate environmental concerns, such as mitigating truly toxic industrial pollutants.

The priorities underlying the alarm over climate change are severely misguided. The public should demand better evidence than consistently erroneous model predictions and manipulated climate data. Unfortunately, a media eager for drama and statism is complicit in the misleading narrative.

FYI: The cartoon at the top of this post refers to the climate blog climateaudit.org. The site’s blogger Steve McIntyre did much to debunk the “hockey stick” depiction of global temperature history, though it seems to live on in the minds of climate alarmists. McIntyre appears to be on an extended hiatus from the blog.

Manipulating Temperatures, People & Policy

21 Friday Aug 2015

Posted by in Global Warming, Tyranny

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The heavily-manipulated global surface temperatures quoted by NOAA and NASA point to another “hottest month on record” in July, but the satellite temperature measurements do not agree. Nor do several other widely-followed global temperature series maintained elsewhere, such as the UK Meteorological Office (UK Met Office). I wrote about the manipulation of surface temperatures by NOAA and NASA in January in “Record Hot Baloney“, and in “Fitting Data To Models At NOAA” in June:

“If the facts don’t suit your agenda, change them! The 18-year “hiatus” in global warming, which has made a shambles of climate model predictions, is now said to have been based on “incorrect data”, according to researchers at National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Translation: they have created new data “adjustments” that tell a story more consistent with their preferred narrative, namely, that man-made carbon emissions are forcing global temperatures upward, more or less steadily.“

The last link provides detail on the nature of the manipulations. Perhaps surprisingly, rather large downward adjustments have been made to historical temperature data, reinforcing any upward trend in the late 20th century and hiding the current 18-year pause in that trend. Suffice it to say that the “adjustments” made by these agencies are at fairly detailed levels; some of the before-and-after comparisons shown by gifs at this link are rather astonishing. Some climate researchers have started to refer to the temperature series as “reconstructions” instead of “data”, out of respect for the legitimacy of actual data.

In the meantime, the “warmist” propaganda keeps flowing from NOAA and NASA, and it is hungrily swallowed and then regurgitated by media alarmists. The media love a good scare story. They are so complicit in reinforcing the warmist narrative they will ignore the revelation of a faulty temperature sensor at National Airport in Washington, D.C. (another hat tip to John Crawford). It has been recording temperatures averaging 1.7 degrees Fahrenheit too warm for the past 19 months. Now that the sensor has been changed, NOAA states that it will not make any adjustments to the past 19 months of recorded temperatures from the National weather station, despite the fact that they have routinely made many other changes, often without any real explanation.

Here is a recent opinion from Duke University Professor Robert Brown on the divergence of satellite and NASA/NOAA surface temperatures and the adjustments to the latter:

“The two data sets should not be diverging, period, unless everything we understand about atmospheric thermal dynamics is wrong. That is, I will add my “opinion” to Werner’s and point out that it is based on simple atmospheric physics taught in any relevant textbook. …

This does not mean that they cannot and are not systematically differing; it just means that the growing difference is strong evidence of bias in the computation of the surface record.“

Every new report issued by NOAA/NASA on record warm temperatures should be severely discounted. They are toiling in the service of a policy agenda; it will cost you dearly, and it will severely punish the less fortunate here and especially in less developed parts of the world; and it will reward the statist elite, bureaucrats and Green crony capitalists. Ronald Bailey in Reason recently weighed in on the consequences of this “apocalyptic anti-progress ideology“. Or read the wise words of Matt Ridley on “The recurrent problem of green scares that don’t live up to the hype“. Hey greens, relax! And don’t waste our resources and our well being on precautions against exaggerated risks.

Fitting Data To Models At NOAA

08 Monday Jun 2015

Posted by in Global Warming

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Dilbert Made Up Numbers

If the facts don’t suit your agenda, change them! The 18-year “hiatus” in global warming, which has made a shambles of climate model predictions, is now said to have been based on “incorrect data”, according to researchers at National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Translation: they have created new data “adjustments” that tell a story more consistent with their preferred narrative, namely, that man-made carbon emissions are forcing global temperatures upward, more or less steadily. The New York Times’ report on the research took a fairly uncritical tone, despite immediate cautions and rebuttals from a number of authorities. On balance, the NOAA claims seem rather laughable.

Ross McKitrick has an excellent discussion of the NOAA adjustments on the Watts Up With That? blog (WUWT). His post reinforces the difficulty of aggregating temperature data in a meaningful way. A given thermometer in a fixed location can yield drifting temperatures over time due to changes in the surrounding environment, such as urbanization. In addition, weather stations are dispersed in irregular ways with extremely uneven coverage, and even worse, they have come and gone over time. There are gaps in the data that must be filled. There might be international differences in reporting practices as well. Sea surface temperature measurement is subject to even greater uncertainty. They can be broadly classified into temperatures collected on buoys and those collected by ships, and the latter have been taken in a variety of ways, from samples collected in various kinds of buckets, hull sensors, engine room intakes, and deck temperatures. The satellite readings, which are a recent development, are accurate in tracking changes, but the levels must be calibrated to other data. Here’s McKitrick on the measurements taken on ships:

“… in about half the cases people did not record which method was used to take the sample (Hirahari et al. 2014). In some cases they noted that, for example, ERI readings were obtained but they not indicate the depth. Or they might not record the height of the ship when the MAT reading is taken.“

The upshot is that calculating a global mean temperature is a statistical exercise fraught with uncertainty. A calculated mean at any point in time is an estimate of a conceptual value. The estimate is one of many possible estimates around the “true” value. Given the measurement difficulties, any meaningful confidence interval for the true mean would likely be so broad as to render inconsequential the much-discussed temperature trends of the past 50 years.

McKitrick emphasizes the three major changes made by NOAA, all having to do with sea surface temperatures:

  1. NOAA has decided to apply an upward adjustment to bring buoy temperature records into line with ship temperatures. This is curious, because most researchers have concluded that the ship temperatures are subject to greater bias. Also, the frequency of buoy records has been rising as a share of total sea temperature readings.
  2. NOAA added extra weight to the buoy readings, a decision which was unexplained.
  3. They applied a relatively large downward adjustment to temperatures collected by ships during 1998-2000.

Even the difference between the temperatures measured by ships and buoys (0.12 degrees Celsius), taken at face value, has a confidence interval (95%?) that is about 29 times as large as the difference. That adjustments such as those above are made with a straight face is nothing short of preposterous.

A number of other researchers have weighed in on the NOAA adjustments. Carl Beisner summarizes some of this work. He quotes McKitrick as well as Judith Curry:

“I think that uncertainties in global surface temperature anomalies is [sic] substantially understated. The surface temperature data sets that I have confidence in are the UK group and also Berkeley Earth. This short paper in Science is not adequate to explain and explore the very large changes that have been made to the NOAA data set. The global surface temperature datasets are clearly a moving target.“

There are a number of other posts this week on WUWT regarding the NOAA adjustments. Some of the experts, like Judith Curry, emphasize the new disparities created by NOAA’s adjustments with other well-regarded temperature series. It will be interesting to see how these differences are debated. Let’s hope that the discussion is driven wholly by science and not politics, but I fear that the latter will have a major impact on the debate. It has already.

Record Hot Baloney

18 Sunday Jan 2015

Posted by in Global Warming

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It’s easy to make big headlines that serve a policy agenda when you can control the process generating “scientific” data. Here’s the latest in an ongoing fraud perpetrated by NASA, NOAA and a few other organizations. The disinformation is happily scooped up and reported by the unsuspecting news media, in this case The Wall Street Journal. The headline says that 2014 was the warmest year on record back to 1980, but there are several important respects in which the report from NASA and NOAA is misleading.

The surface temperature records maintained by NASA and NOAA (and others) utilize the same source data (despite NASA’s claim that the two series are “independent”), but they are heavily adjusted by the respective agencies. We can all probably agree that more recent temperature measurements (the raw data) are more reliable due to the availability of better and more numerous instruments (particularly for ocean surface temperatures). However, combining recent measurements with older data in a way that assures comparability is difficult over more than a few decades. Weather stations come, go, and relocate, environmental conditions around stations change with urbanization and airport expansions, and new measurement techniques are introduced.

Constructing a consistent temperature series over 130+ years at the world or regional level is therefore subject to much controversy. Here is a page with links to several good posts of the problems inherent in these efforts. Data is “infilled” and sometimes deleted, and statistical techniques are often applied in an effort to achieve consistency over time. However, it is curious that the NASA and NOAA adjustments over time seem to pivot around the levels of the 1950s and 1960s, as if to suggest that the temperatures measured in those decades are the most reliable part of the series. Take a look at the “gifs”in this post, which show temperatures before and after adjustments. An apparent consequence of the NASA / NOAA statistical techniques, which may seem even more curious to the casual observer, is that new observations can influence the entire temperature series. That is, adding 2014 temperatures to the series may lead to fresh downward adjustments to 1936 temperatures, if it suits the agencies. By the way, 1936 was a very warm year, but according to these agencies, it’s been getting less warm.

Another fascinating aspect of the report on 2014 temperatures is the obvious attempt to propagandize. This Bob Tisdale post sheds light on three serious omissions in the report and the related effort to “spin” the findings for the press:

1)  The range of uncertainty cited by NOAA in background documents indicates that the small margin (0.04 deg C for NOAA, 0.02 deg C by NASA) by which the reported 2014 global temperature exceeds the previous high is within the confidence interval around the previous high. By their own standard, it was “more unlikely than likely”that the 2014 temperature was the warmest on record, but that is not what the agencies report in their “Highlights.”

2) The report states that “This is the first time since 1990 the high temperature record was broken in the absence of El Niño conditions at any time during the year in the central and eastern equatorial Pacific Ocean….” Yet there were El Nino conditions elsewhere in the Pacific in 2014.

3) “NOAA failed to discuss the actual causes of the elevated global sea surface temperatures in 2014, while making it appear that there was a general warming of the surfaces of the global oceans.”

Tisdale notes elsewhere that the tiny margins of “record warmth” reported by NASA and NOAA contribute to a growing disparity between reported “actual temperatures” and those projected by climate warming models. The “Warmist” community will view the NASA / NOAA findings favorably, as the new “record high” supports their narrative,” providing new fodder for the agenda to end the use of fossil fuels and to regulate activities deemed “unsustainable.” Unfortunately, the misleading reports are likely to seem credible to the general public, which is largely ignorant of the agencies’ rampant manipulation of temperature data.

Hat Tip: Watts Up With That? and cartoonist Josh!