Blogger Finds Bug in NASA Global Warming Study? 755
An anonymous reader writes "According to an article at DailyTech, a blogger has discovered a Y2K bug in a NASA climate study by the same writer who accused the Bush administration of trying to censor him on the issue of global warming. The authors have acknowledged the problem and released corrected data. Now the study shows the warmest year on record for the contiguous 48 states as being 1934, not 1998 as previously reported in the media. In fact, the corrected study shows that half of the 10 warmest years on record occurred before World War II." The article's assertion that there's a propaganda machine working on behalf of global warming theorists is outside the bounds of the data, which I think is interesting to note.
Well, well, well.. (Score:5, Informative)
The opinion: A link to the blog entry in question [norcalblogs.com] would have been quite on topic.
The pun [youtube.com].
US vs World (Score:5, Informative)
Very biased article (Score:5, Informative)
Then again-- maybe not. I strongly suspect this story will receive little to no attention from the mainstream media.
Seriously, this data may be very interesting and correct some of our possible misconceptions about the severity of global warming, but come on. The last part of his blog basically makes him sound like a standard zealot conspiracy theorist with an axe to grind. How does that sort of nonsense advance the debate at all?
US centric (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Hume's Maxim (Score:5, Informative)
I'd like to see some additional corroboration on this.
RTFA. There is a link to NASA posting the new numbers. Need more corroboration?
1934 warm in Europe also (Score:4, Informative)
Not a very random blogger (Score:5, Informative)
It wasn't a random blogger, it was Steve McIntyre, a statistician whose attention was drawn to an oddity in the data for an official temperature station next to some air conditioners.
Re:Hume's Maxim (Score:3, Informative)
Uh, NASA admitted to the error and corrected the data in question, producing the exact same data set as the investigator. How much more corroboration do you need? It's in the article, if you took the time to read it.
I read some of the logic chopping in the blog post's comments, but I didn't see any climatologists speaking there.
Wait... you skipped the article, and read the *comments*? Sheesh.
That's why it's not called "Global Warming" anymor (Score:2, Informative)
The huge fluctuations in temperature differential are the main causes of the ever increasing stomr activity in the Atlantic and Pacific.
Re:Don't panic: global warming is still a reality (Score:3, Informative)
A nutter who has a pathological hatred of environmentalists and who has atrack record of fraud can put together an incoherent load of shit that reveals how bias he is.
Jesus, do some research before spouting bullshit like that. The Great Global Warming Conspiracy's claims were shredded withing 12hrs of broadcast.
TWW
Re:Very biased article (Score:5, Informative)
Which Planet Are You Living On? (Score:1, Informative)
Dude, what planet are you living on? In the two years since Katrina, the Pacific and Atlantic have been incredibly quiet. For 2006, we had 10 named storms in the Atlantic with only 5 becoming hurricanes (and two of those got as high as category 3). This year, in the Atlantic, we are up to a whopping three named systems and all were tropical storms. Heck, the year before in the Atlantic, there were only 15 named systems.
In the eastern Pacific, we have had only six named storms. And this is with half the hurricane season nearly over! I liked your post until the end dude. No need to sensationalize things.
Re:oh lord (Score:1, Informative)
revised top 10 (Score:3, Informative)
a rough probability calculation gives that a p less than 0.03
thats supposed to convince me global warming isn't happening?
also the warmest was 1934,
check out a possible related event
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dust_Bowl [wikipedia.org]
Lies of omission (Score:5, Informative)
Re:US vs World (Score:3, Informative)
Climate change is a fact, not warming (Score:5, Informative)
We are going to experience cycles of warming and cooling, especially as water vapor (the most important greenhouse gas) and CO2 fluctuate. CO2 levels are actually very low now compared with normal planetary activity.
While I am concerned about the future of our planet and our species' place upon it, I am growing increasingly sceptical of the wild claims surrounding a looming global warming catastrophe. When a scientist such as Stephen Hawking warns "I am afraid the atmosphere might get hotter and hotter until it will be like Venus with boiling sulfuric acid," any reasonable person begins to fear for the future.
My surprise and shock was learning that past concentrations of carbon dioxide were much higher than they are today (indeed, limits so high as to be unreachable, assuming that we have hit peak oil), as revealed in the interview below:
RES: Professor Robert E. Sloan, Department of Geology, University of Minnesota [ucl.ac.uk]JC: Dr Joe Cain, interviewer
I have learned that these past CO2 concentrations have been documented in peer-reviewed research journals [harvard.edu]:
My interest in past CO2 concentrations began by reading a (somewhat) more partisan [americanthinker.com] summary of this information:
An even more thorough refutation, specifically of An Inconvenient Truth, can be found here [canadafreepress.com].
Re:War of words. (Score:3, Informative)
IHAMIAS*
You might want to read the IPCC assessment of the affects climate change will have on food production and the spread of tropical diseases.
http://www.ipcc.ch/pub/un/syreng/spm.pdf [www.ipcc.ch]
Here are a few relevant parts (emphasis added):
Starting to put the connections together yet? Climate change is a meta-issue. Dealing with climate change is directly working on world hunger and health.
(* I have a masters in atmospheric science.)
Re:US vs World (Score:5, Informative)
If so, this would tend to bring world-wide temperatures more in-line with US numbers. World-wide temperature records are predominated by urban stations--in areas of substantially growing urbanization in the past 100 years. This urbanization itself taints the temperature trends.
If you look at US cities, their temperature profile matches the global trend.
PLOT of New Data is Informative (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Which Planet Are You Living On? (Score:5, Informative)
If I was using those models at my job, I would have been shot in the face and told to find a job that doesn't require thinking.
Re:US vs World (Score:3, Informative)
Thus, anything you see in the global data is total garbage, until the recalculation is complete.
The guy who found the error - Steve something or other, predicts that the change brings the surface mesasurements down to the point where Global warming will top out at a TOTAL of 1-2 degrees above where it is now. So far he is 2-0 against Hansen on the data. And a total of a 1-2 degree rise does not global warming make.
Mod parent up (Score:5, Informative)
That's the main point that slashdotters do not seem to be getting right now, it's not like all the global warming theory went bananas.
All you guys, do yourself a favour and plot NASA's corrected data [nasa.gov] in your favourite plotting program and then compare to other data [wikipedia.org] (be mindful of the Y scale). The years around 1940 were unusually warm in the US, but the year with the highest 5-year average temperature is 2000.
Re:Y2k? NOT! (Score:5, Informative)
So, it's merely a coincidence that the change happened to occur in 2000. It could have happened any other year. Referring to this as a result of a "Y2K bug" is misleading. If it is, then anything that changed in 2000 could be called a "Y2K bug".
I don't think demoting 1998 to the 2nd-highest US temperature in a century (barely -- by 0.01 annual average degree) is a big deal either. 1998 is an awfully close second. I also wouldn't ascribe much to the the claim that "half" the top ten years in the US were before WWII (1921, 1931, 1934, 1938). Last I checked, 4 is less than half of ten
The TOP 10 annual temperature years in the US are (celcius degrees from mean):
year annual 5-year mean
1 1934 1.25 0.44
2 1998 1.23 0.51
3 1921 1.15 0.15
4 2006 1.13
5 1931 1.08 0.27
6 1999 0.93 0.69
7 1953 0.90 0.32
8 1990 0.87 0.40
9 1938 0.86 0.36
10 1954 0.85 0.47
If you look at the top ten ranking for the 5-year means, the pattern is pretty clear:
1 2000 0.52 0.79
2 1999 0.93 0.69
3 2004 0.44 0.66
4 2001 0.76 0.65
5 1932 0.00 0.63
6 1933 0.68 0.61
7 2003 0.50 0.58
8 2002 0.53 0.55
9 1998 1.23 0.51
10 1988 0.32 0.51
The 1930s are down at 5th and 6th place. 2005 and 2006 are left out because you can't calculate a 5-year window around them yet.
Finally, the error changes the GLOBAL pattern insignificantly, and the global trend in the last couple of decades is greater than the USA trend.
In all, it's a worthwhile error to catch for the US data, but it doesn't change much about the overall pattern.
The corrected temperature plot (Score:1, Informative)
Here's [imageshack.us] a plot courtesy of gnuplot.
(Posted anonymously because people are completely irrational about global warming.)
Re:Very biased article (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Orson Scott Card: Laugh at Gore, Please (Score:5, Informative)
Point 1: He starts with Mann and Santer and their 1998 "hockey stick" paper. Now, having not done paleoclimate research myself, I'm not going to spend a long time defending the paper. But I don't have to. There have been half a dozen independent analyses or more using different sets of paleo data that come up with very similar results. And that National Academy of Sciences stepped in to do an analysis of all these reconstructions, and published their results last year (http://books.nap.edu/openbook.php?isbn=0309102251 ). Their conclusion? "No reconstruction shows temperatures in the Medieval Warm Period as large as the last few decades of the 20th century". Because of the difficulty of estimating global mean temperatures 1000 years ago, the NAS study declined to assert more than a 70% chance that the last few decades were the very warmest of the millennium, and that is was only "plausible" that they are the warmest of the past 2000 years.
My conclusion: Yeah. Figuring out how warm it was 1000 years ago is hard. But the experts all seem to think it is pretty likely that we are seeing warmth unprecedented in 1000 years, possibly 2000, and it is just getting warmer. Plus, this 1000 year old data isn't fundamental to our theory or our estimates of how bad things will be in 100 years.
Point 2: "Global warming vs. Climate change": First: the reason that the wording has changed is because we're worried about more than just increased in global average surface temperature, but also in changes in precipitation patterns, hurricanes, droughts, variability, etc. So climate change was more inclusive.
2nd: If temperatures fall for three years, that doesn't really mean much. There is noise in the system. El Nino years are warm. Years after massive volcanoes like Pinatubo in 1992 are cool. This displays fundamental ignorance of statistics. If you are looking for trends in noisy data, you use running averages. Otherwise... shoot, it is colder this week than it was last week in Boston. I guess summer is over already, and it is just going to keep getting colder. Sheesh! The number of times this sort of reasoning has been repeated is ridiculous. So called "warming stopped in 1998" arguments are all over the net, even though any climate scientist in 1998 would have told you it was an anomalously warm year because of a very strong El Nino event that moves heat out of the Pacific and into the atmosphere temporarily.
3rd: And it isn't even true that temperatures have been falling for 3 years! The last 12 months have been the warmest 12 months on record! See the GISS temperature record. http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/tabledata/GLB.Ts
4th: The Alarmists (at least the scientists) usually talk about 2100, not 2010 or 2020, and have been doing so for the past 20 years. And indeed, in the past twenty years average temperatures have gone up by 0.4 degrees C. That may not sound large but... 6 degrees C is the difference between an Ice Age and today.
5th: The models do quite a good job at replicating the large patterns of the past century. See the Fourth Assessment Summary for Policymakers released in February. It has a nice graph of "temperatures for each continent in data and from models using: natural forcings, human forcings, or all forcings". www.ipcc.ch
6th: Who is everyone? Why, ocean experts, atmospheric dynamicists, atmospheric chemists, modelers, paleoclimate people, ecologists: they each have their own area, and in each area, the fingerprints of climate change are clearly visible, and those who does interdisciplinary work (like me) can draw all the results together and see a ridiculously clear picture (given how complex the climate is, there is a surprising amount of evidence).
7th: Card says: "Even the IPCC, which was so heavily biased in favor of
Re:Very biased article (Score:4, Informative)
Oh, for heaven's sake. Nobody's saying it's the US's fault. The US is only part of the problem. But the US is responsible for a much larger amount of CO2 emissions on a per-capita basis than most countries in the world. Numbers vary, but it is either number 1 or in the top 5 for per-capita emissions. The US is also responsible for about 20% of global emissions, which is out of proportion with the size of its population, and it means that without some change in the US, changes made elsewhere aren't going to make much difference. Finally, even if annual emissions from China are just recently (2006) estimated to equal the US, it's still going to be a while at that rate before China catches up to what the US (and other industrialized countries) have already put into the atmospheric system for many decades before.
Complain about how the US is demonized, if you like, but it is still responsible for a significant chunk of the problem, and it purports to be one of the most economically vibrant countries in the world. If it can't or won't reduce CO2 emissions, then why should a developing country like China or India even try? Why should they slow down doing the same things that we in the industrial world have done for the last century or so? And if they don't try, then we are pretty much committing ourselves to an experiment to see what happens as human CO2 inputs to the atmosphere continue to rise higher and higher. Maybe the estimates of what will happen to climate will be wrong -- that would be nice. Here's hoping.
Anyway, if the US doesn't care about this, well, fine, but it isn't much of a demonstration of the global leadership the US claims have for most other issues of global concern. I guess we'll just mark that in the "non-leader" column. You still have plenty of other things to fall back on.
"Can you give me a good reason why the number from a government scientist who's report was used to "prove" global warming and then later complained he was censored for his actions being disproved shouldn't be reported just as big as the original story?"
Because it's a tiny error that doesn't change the global pattern significantly. So, it's a "ha! ha!" moment, but I don't think any scientist is going to claim they never make errors, and, in the end, this one doesn't amount to much.
Re:Well, well, well.. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:US vs World (Score:3, Informative)
The classic paper on this is: Jones PD, Groisman PYa, Coughlan M, Plummer N, Wangl WC, Karl TR (1990) Assessment of urbanization effects in time series of surface air temperatures over land. Nature 347:169-172. This conclusion was refreshed by Easterling '97.
The IPCC TAR stated:
There have been a couple of recent papers that Steve has been looking at, but as his site is down I don't have the citations handy (and I don't know them off-hand).
You should be careful with realclimate.org. While the site is climate science by climate scientists, it is characterized by evangelism rather than objectivity. This isn't to say their evangelism isn't often scientific and correct, but they do distort, obscure, and ignore information that hurts their evangelism.
As it happens, Steve started his blog climateaudit.org after he was subject to smear campaigns on realclimate.org over a couple of papers he published demolishing the statistical techniques used in MBH'98. Judge for yourself: MM'05 [climate2003.com], rc1 [realclimate.org], rc2 [realclimate.org], Recap [climate2003.com]
Steve's papers were ultimately vindicated by a NAS panel review. A copy of which Steve posted on his website: Wegman Report [climateaudit.org]
.Re:Y2k? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:US vs World (Score:3, Informative)
I have pointed out the flaws in these Anti-Ozone-Hole mythologies before and it's a waste of my time to rehash it. Feel free to go back in my comment history a ways and find them, or read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozone_hole [wikipedia.org]. That is if you are willing to consider all of the data out there.
I will cover the Mt. Pinatubo argument though. Chlorine does not equal CFCs, Chlorine by itself rarely makes it up to the ozone layer. Now by shear quantity Mt. Pinatubo was able to have an effect on the Ozone layer, but not nearly as much chlorine actually got up there as you think, nothing on the order of "more REACTIVE Chlorine into the upper atmosphere than we ever dumped into the environment with Freons."
Yes the researchers who have spent months either flying over the South Pole or living near it know about lack of sun. In fact, the amount of ozone in the ozone layer has generally decreased over years, which shows that any sort of seasonal oscillations are BROKEN. The truth is, Ozone is a very stable compound and we should not be seeing the sort of dips that we do now if it were just seasonal oscillations.
To be honest there is A LOT of good science behind the 'freon theory'. It is one of the most well known and understood chemical process in the atmosphere. These people have years of experience and research to back up what they say. They are not crazy. Just because you have a mass of neurons in your skull doesn't mean that it automatically makes you smart enough to just "know" better than them(*). Nor does this mean that a talk show host has enough experience to debunk them. I invite you to actually read papers and do research rather than spout some conspiracy theorist or "bad science" line. (When was the last time you produced good science, much less in the field of atmospheric science? Anyways)
It takes years to repair the dips in the ozone layer (in fact if we stopped creating CFCs now it would take a century or more to return to natural levels).
(*) I am not saying you should turn your brain off either, just actually read all the data out there before you go on a crazy misguided attempted debunking spree.
Patrik