Guest essay by Dr. Jennifer Marohasy
The hubris of the Australian Bureau of Meteorology is on full display with its most recent remodelling of the historic temperature record for Darwin. The Bureau has further dramatically increased the rate of global warming at Darwin by further artificially lowering historic temperatures.
This begins by shortening the historical temperature record so that it begins just after the very hot years of the Federation drought. Then by changing the daily values: that is changing the observed measured temperatures to something else.
For example, on 1st January 1910 the maximum temperature recorded at the Darwin post office was 34.2 degrees Celsius.
A few years ago, the Bureau changed this to 33.8 degrees Celsius, cooling the recorded temperature by 0.4 degrees. In its most recent re-revision of Darwin’s climate history the temperature on this day has been further reduced, and is now just 32.8.
Environmental reporter for the Australian newspaper, Graham Lloyd, asked the Bureau why it had made such changes earlier in the week. A spokesperson is quoted in The Weekend Australian as follows:
“For the case of Darwin, a downward adjustment to older records is applied to account for differences between the older sites and the current site, and difference¬s between older thermometers and the current automated sensor.
“In other words, the adjustments estimate what historical temperatures would look like if they were recorded with today’s equipment at the current site.”
Yet this is a version of exactly the same reason given by the Bureau just six years ago for reducing the temperature on 1 January 1910 by ‘only’ 0.4 degrees.
Neither the equipment, nor the site has changed since ACORN-SAT Version 1 was published in 2012.
Yet another 1 degree has been shaven from the historical temperature record!
To be clear, the weather station has been at the airport since February 1941, and an automatic weather station was installed on 1 October 1990. A Stevenson screen was first installed at the post office site in 1894, and has always been used at the airport site.
So, why was the temperature dropped down by a further one degree for 1 January 1910 in the most recent revision – undertaken just a few months ago? There is no logical or reasonable explanation.
Apparently, at the Bureau, the future is certain and the past can be continually changed – history can be continually revised.
When the daily values are added-up, and compared between versions as annual mean maximum temperatures we see the magnitude of the change – and its effect on temperature trends.
The warming trend of 1.3 degrees C per 100 years in ACORN V1 has been changed to 1.8 degrees C per 100 years in Version 2. The annual average maximum temperature for 1942, as one example, has been reduced by 0.5 degrees.
In the maximum temperature record as actually measured at Darwin from 1895 to the present — and taking into consideration the move from the airport to the post office –- there is no warming trend in the Darwin temperature record. This is consistent with other locations in northern Australia with long high-quality records, for example Richmond in north western Queensland.
What the Bureau has done to the historical temperature record for Darwin is indefensible. The Bureau has artificially shortened and cooled Darwin’s climate history to make it consistent with the theory of human-caused global warming.
Published originally on Dr. Jennifer Marohasy’s website, republished here at her suggestion.
Willis Eschenbach has covered the issues with the Darwin climate station in the past here and here at WUWT. Worth a read.
To borrow from “Good Morning Vietnam” –
Roosevelt, what town are you stationed in?. “I’m stationed in Darwin.”
Well, thank you, Roosevelt. What’s the weather like out there?
“It’s hot. Damn hot! Real hot!
Hottest things is my shorts. I could cook things in it. A little crotch pot cooking.”
Well, can you tell me what it feels like. “Fool, it’s hot! I told you again!
No worries, I predict Stokes will be by soon to justify all of this.
I suspect he will not, unless somebody makes a mistaken claim that he can jump all over while studiously ignoring the question of BoM malfeasance.
It’s simple really.
The BoM’s method of homogenization is based on temperature distribution, which then gets resolved into percentiles (and it’s the relationship between the percentiles that matters). When the ~6 years of data between ACORN-SAT v1.0 and v2.0 were included the temperature distributions changed, which meant the percentiles changed.
I believe that the BoM’s homogenization method has several flaws but I accept that it has been applied consistently.
Having said that, I question the ethics of of determining historical data adjustments according to recent temperature distributions rather than the temperature distributions at the time of the adjustment.
A general bull sh*t alert has been issued for the Bureau of Misinformation ( BOM ) following on from it’s attempts to revise PAST temperatures downwards in it’s new ACORN 2 climate study.
oh yes! couple of nights back the online bom for my town said it was 23c
Ishould have put my thermometer outdie cos it was NOT that warm ..I had shut windows and put warmer clothes on, would have been closer to 15, and i am just 1/4mile from airport
of course the tarmac there upped the night reads i guess.
It’s been cold the past week for February in my part of South Australia.
And the leaves of deciduous trees are in my garden are turning brown as well.
Probably from lack of water as In don’t water them. I water only the fruit trees.
But maybe Summer is back from today for a while
There’s no reason to question the “ethics” of data adjustments. Adjusting the data after collection, and without the original measuring device, is just wrong. After you’ve collected the data, that’s it. You could, I suppose, discard it as inaccurate providing you could prove that claim. Otherwise, it’s just the data.
Agreed! “Data” should NEVER be “adjusted.” The “adjusted” number simply IS NOT DATA. Data is what your measured with an instrument at the time of measurement. Anything else is guesswork. Any data “issues” should be dealt with PURELY by increasing ERROR RANGES. That would at least be more honest, since it would serve to highlight just how bad the “data” and all of the largely spurious “trends” calculated from it really IS, and how completely unfit it is for the purpose of driving policy.
Well said
The alarmist win with their rhetoric tricks the minute we accepted terms like “raw data” and “adjusted data”. Measured “raw” data is what it is and all the “adjustments” are interpretations of the data. Some interpretations might be necessary but they need to be explained with scientific precision. The point is that as long as alarmists are allowed to fool people to think that “adjusted data” is something else than the scientists interpretation of the data, some fools (and most journalists) will believe them without any questions asked.
Generally the Raw part of the graph is RAW (Adjusted) … Not RAW data,
I always thought that the man made theory hinged on slower warming at the equator than the poles, something like 1:6 equator to poles so a 1.8oC warming would mean the poles have each warmed over 10oC right? pfft.
So much money is at stake in the renewable energy hustle. Lots of green hedge funds and investors like Tom Steyer have gone long on wind and solar. The hustle must continue at any price. Someone is getting paid off to make these changes, to keep the scam going. And with IPCC AR6 CMIP6 efforts underway, the hustlers and their record keepers have got to start now, trying to avoid a major embarrassment of nature not cooperating with models when the report has to be written.
While Trump was disaster for the climate hustlers like Steyer, it will nature that is about to doom their hustle.
PS: Epic snowfall occurring here in Tucson. And it is still snowing here this morning as I write this. Yeah, I know weather is not climate, but this was not supposed to be happening in late February of 2019 according to the climate hustlers from their Y2K climate scriptures.
It was reported on KNX (the local CBS affiliate) yesterday that it snowed on Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu, California. Probably just a light dusting, which probably didn’t last very long, but snow at almost sea level in Southern California. The overnight temperatures in the valleys in LA County were forecast to be in the upper 20’s (F) to lower 30’s (F).
This dosen’t disprove the hypothesis of CAGW. But it sure is odd. I would dare say “unprecedented”, but I won’t.
There was a hail storm/violent winds/rain/uncharacteristic low temperatures at the Pebble Beach Pro-Am is this consistent with your snowfall event?
In fact the Venture Genesis Tourney at Riviera was also unseasonable cold.
Just started up again – cleared for a few minutes around 3 PM (a bit of sun) – and now dusting us again.
Max accumulation in my back yard (so far, anyway) was about 3.25″.
Of course, it is supposed to be pushing 70F by Sunday (after a hard freeze tonight). Again, anyone around here, be VERY careful if you absolutely have to go out. I had to pick up my son from work around 2 PM (when it was still fairly heavy snowfall) and an idiot decided to pass me (where there IS no passing zone) because I was a whole two miles under the limit. Phaugh!
Joel, one of the accumulated weekly rainfall maps showed a huge amount in central AZ (changes daily):
Richard Lindzen said it was beyond suspicious that the temperature adjustments were always in the same direction. If ‘they’ were correcting actual errors, the positive and negative adjustments should roughly cancel.
It is hard to dispute the validity of any individual adjustment. In this case, we have a pattern of conduct. ‘They’ are guilty as heck.
It’s not beyond suspicion at all. I selected a US station at random and looked at both the unadjusted and adjusted data from NASA/GISS. Some adjustments were upwards, some were downwards.
But here’s the thing … each adjustment changed all previous data by a fixed amount. Most external non-meteorological influences on temperature are those that gradually increase until there’s a deliberate – dare I say it? – man-made correction. The homogenization methods identify step changes but don’t identify gradual distortions. They identify a step caused by relocating a badly urbanized station, a step when nearby vegetation removed and where the old screen was replaced.
The adjustment might be correct for the data just prior to the “correction” but the earlier data is over-adjusted because the non-meteorological distortion wasn’t as strong.
And yet we have this.
Since 2009, all NASA/GISS data is adjusted data, including the “Raw” data.
The Climate Gamers are at it again.
Isn’t this a modern scientific journalism? They don’t report facts any more. Only opinions disguised as facts.
The original observers are spinning in their grave.
Synthetic temperature data sets are kind of a virus that has irreversibly infected climate science.
However, to the north of Melbourne there is a place called Echuca, place where climate synthetic data virus has not reached yet.
This place defies climate ‘science’, no early 1900s cooling, no 1930-1950 or 1980-90 warming, no AMO, no PDO, no el Nino, just unadulterated, direct (undelayed) solar magnetic (Hale) cycle!
http://www.vukcevic.co.uk/Echuca.htm
How about that?
Coincidence, no chance, just that the large areas of Australia are extremely rich in iron deposits.
To find out how the iron deposits link temperature data into solar magnetic cycle, I need an immodest size, no strings research grant.
If you’ve ever spent any time in Echuca, Vukcevic, you’d appreciate that NOTHING out of the ordinary ever happens in Echuca. :))
(It has a great pie shop there also because they never change the recipes)
Echuca is 574 km ESE of Adelaide and 187 km due north of Melbourne on the Murray River. Not surprisingly, it shows the same 22-year Hale-cycle pattern that is seen in the median summer-time maximum temperatures for Adelaide:
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-RsGVz_DLr2w/T-nHkBIbjjI/AAAAAAAAAOw/E0jKXoKp88E/s1600/Adelaide_Sp.JPG
Both are influenced by the strength and vorticity of the semi-permanent high-pressure system that is located in either the Tasmanian Sea or the Great Australian Bight.
interesting
my area has a high iron content in whats locally called coffeerock cos itslike beans
if you drag a magnet over the ground its soon coated heavily in the bits of it
doesnt help me when trying to make sure no nails etc are on driveway or other dirt areas;-/
a huge swathe of the area is covered with this layer about 8 inches thick under a sandy topcoat from 1 to 3ft above it
the clay under the rock layer is also highly iron loaded and forms iron red rocks through it also
we do get higher areas that are absolute magnets:-) for lightning strikes as well
I can’t understand how they can alter historical records and keep a straight face. A location changes then it is a different data set and can’t be portrayed as the same. Different equipment which doesn’t properly mimic previous, then it’s not the same data set. Combining data sets is valid only if clearly marked as such.
It would be difficult to keep a straight face if only one group was doing it but there are now so many doing it that each gains courage from the other. It is the new norm.
Coolin’ the past and hottin’ the present, makes for a boilin’ future. It’s science!
They’re just ensuring that the observations match the settled science.
/sarc
It is not sarcasm if it is the hard truth.
“Those who control the present, control the past and those who control the past control the future.”
― George Orwell, 1984
What is odd about the Bureau’s claim regarding equipment is that the modified temperatures always go down. Why not up? After all, the greater sensitivity of today’s technology makes for higher temperatures; mercury simply did not, for it could not, react to a hot puff of air. It is all very confusing and leaves one with a nasty taste. And all this atop the strange dependence upon average temperatures; why not median?
If electronic means are used to measure temperature, and take the temperature every two minutes or so, then a puff of hot air would be easily recognised. It can then be homogenised to bring the overall temperature more in line with less sensitive mercury thermometers.
Sauce for the goose..
Not to worry. All this “adjustment” means is that forward predictions based on ACORN v2 will further over-predict Darwin/Australian average temperatures. The Australian Bureau of Meteorology—whether they realize it or not—is just postponing the day they will have to atone for their sins (against scientific integrity).
Knife with 2 edges. Often the case with fudged data.
Satellite data going forward is not likely to follow the manufactured trend.
You’re more optimistic than I am, Gordon. I think the climate scientists can spin this as long as they want.
If the historical adjustments to the temperature record are appropriate and justified they will improve the models. If they are not appropriate or justified they will distort any climate models using the data — making them run hot, such that predicted future warming is likely to exceed the actual trend.
Models HAVE been running hot. This is either an indication that the models are biased, or an indication that faulty data is biased, or both. Either way, it highlights the unreliability of one or the other, greatly reducing the justification for large infrastructure spending or radical steps to address climate change. Whatever one may believe about CO2, warming trends, or the risks involved, the business case for decarbonizing the worlds’ economy utterly fails.
What is amazing is that they keep doing this, keep getting caught, and yet keep doing it again, all provable and without justification. At some point folks need to be held to account in more than just the blogosphere.
They have a really thick skin.
Lizards with forked tongues and thick skin
The BoM’s latest v2 data set adjustments will make it into the Global records kept by NOAA/NASA/UKMET to keep the scam going. So much is riding on AR6, thus they are being driven to alter the observations to stay within some semblance of the 90% confidence interval of the upcoming CMIP6 ensemble average.
And I would guess the same kind of adjustments are underway elsewhere.
And any anomalies I see on weather sites are STILL based on 1970-2000 or 1980-2000. Why not on 1980-2010? (Rhetorical question)
“The BoM’s latest v2 data set adjustments will make it into the Global records”
No, they won’t. Global records use GHCN adjusted, which made this adjustment long ago, for the same reason. Change of sites. As a note to the post mentioned, Willis wailed about this nearly ten years ago. But I guess the story never loses its charm.
Wailed? Gee Nick, grouchy today?
Point is, cooling the past changes the trend, and the adjustment isn’t justifiable except with you government types.
The trend is that schoolchildren now lead the way. The time of tribal elders is over; now kids lead the tribe. Experience – or, God forbid, memory – is harmful. Look at those old Darwinians who could not even read a thermometer without making a 2 degree error. No more proof needed. Dinosaurs like me and you should just quietly dig our graves and stop bothering the progressives.
Nice slight of hand, Nick; the station change was acknowledged above. It was subsequent alterations that are at question.
It isn’t a subsequent alteration. GHCN made its adjustment to its adjusted record over ten years ago. BoM’s ACORN is a different adjustment to the raw data. With Darwin, ACORN has now made basically the same change to raw data for the same reason.
Nick, this is a fantastic place for you to start:
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/hide-and-seek/201508/the-psychology-self-deception
“It isn’t a subsequent alteration”
AcornV1 has an adjustment over raw. AcornV2 has a subsequent alteration, which is what is in question.
For this: “..account for differences between the older sites and the current site, and differences between older thermometers and the current automated sensor”, I want to know how they work out what the “differences” are, and their proof that the adjustments are correct.
“Nick Stokes February 22, 2019 at 2:01 pm
It isn’t a subsequent alteration. GHCN made its adjustment to its adjusted record over ten years ago. BoM’s ACORN is a different adjustment to the raw data.”
Utter garbage data not fit for purpose. Thanks for confirming what has been suspected all along. Climate change *IS* adjustments of data by man. It’s a good thing “climate scientists” are not allowed anywhere near critical engineering systems.
My contention is that these BoM homogenization adjustments lays the foundation for NOAA to make there own additional homogenization adjustments to GHCN for these Aussie station obs. And adjustments at 1910 Historical Darwin obs will have an outsize impact due to the regional sparseness of Southern Hemisphere station data prior to 1930’s (due to infilling). The data manipulators clearly understand which stations obs and when offer the highest returns on manipulation.
They are probably guided by the following:
– Make the fewest adjustments necessary to keep from crossing an outrage threshold that even a compliant media couldn’t ignore.
– Making the fewest adjustments as necessary means they must be carefully picked for greatest impact.
– Use the homogenization excuse, even though the obs were previously homogenized, becasue well… progress.
Since the Australian Ice Age that ended in 1788…
And as expected, the white knight rushes in just in time to defend the indefensible.
How painful it must be, Mr. Stokes, to be a foregone conclusion. Your lack of awareness and loyalty to “the cause” will not save you from their plans. Don’t you know? Useful idiots were the first to be eliminated.
There is an apt Forest Gump quote floating around in my mind…
Clearly they need more “warmest year eva” in Darwin there must be a group holding out 🙂
You are correct Rud, but when the politicians all believe the climate ponzi scam to a greater or lesser extent, nothing is ever done.
The Australian BOM have publicly stated that their data manipulations require “human intervention” and that it would be unlikely that anybody outside the BOM could replicate their homogenisation process. In other words, a non-scientific procedure that cannot be replicated.
According to the CO2 amplification hypotheses the Poles should warm, but not the tropics.
Has BOM found new data that contradicts this hypotheses?
Could there be another one?
It is that station adjustments in the Southern Hemisphere will have a larger impact on the final anomaly number. This is due to the much higher amount of infilling that occurs in the southern hemisphere as the station data is much more sparse there.
And I would make the guess that the data manipulators at BoM/GISS/UKMet have realized that adjustments to Darwin (and probably a few others in the So Hem) are particularly effective at inducing out-size effects due to infilling across a large area. They would probably love to fiddle with measurements in Siberia, Africa, India, and Indonesia as well, it is just that they do not control those products. I mean it would look much more suspicious indeed if NOAA or GISS tried to manipulate Siberia or Indian subcontinent station records. But BoM adjusting 109 year old station data from its own Australian records they know won’t get the outcry that it deserves.
“it is just that they do not control those products”
Bad news for you. GHCN publishes two files, one unadjusted (which will not include ACORN adjustments) and one adjusted, which GISS etc use. The latter makes homogeneity corrections worldwide. They adjusted Darwin long ago.
Throw out data that needs adjusting. It isn’t fit for purpose. There, problem solved.
This has been my issue for years, if the data needs adjusting that much it is not fit for purpose, it is an estimate at best, and probably should be discarded. If these scientists were working in industry where there are legal ramifications on their output, they would understand that.
This is how the BoM and CSIRO do “science” in Australia. If the result does not fit what is expected, change in the input data (Or algorithm). Unfortunately, most Australians accept the BoM’s siting of devices at airports as OK. 10 of the 15 hottest records in Australia (And the world apparently) last summer were at an airfield, aerodrome or airport. Pointing this out to people is met with a blank stare!
You shattered the illusion that most surface data was reliable with your station-by-station analysis here in the US. Perhaps you could repost some of that. I remember stations next to building exhaust ducts, stations next to tarmacs, etc.
Kind of blew up the narrative that surface record was in any way reliable.
How is that bad news? It certainly isn’t news to me that GHCN raw data is also available. It is just they know that no one but data geeks and scientists will use it.
So of course we are talking about the adjusted data, not the raw data. The IPCC AR’s (and the upcoming AR6) all use the adjusted data sets that get compared to the CMIP ensemble average.
The only ones who actually care about raw data are working scientists in climate and the the data watchers like Marohasy, Homewood, Heller, and Eschenbach.
There’s your ‘man-made’ warming.
Again.
and once again the faithful zealots will defend the indefensible. It is so predictable the jokes aren’t even funny anymore.
meaning they are continuing to defend one way adjustments.
“The simple step of a courageous individual is not to take part in the lie. “One word of truth outweighs the world.”
― Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn
In the end it’s the lies that will beat them. Citizens of the Soviet Union believed what they were told for a very long time. Then they stopped believing and were silent. Then they stopped being silent.
Conclusion, the politician who’s portfolios includes the BOM simply does not understand that he is being fed rubbish, or does not care as it suits the “Scare the people “scenario. “”
Don’t expect the new Labour Government to improve things, they are already locked into a 50 % renewable.
Again its a case of having to wait until the lights and industry power fails.
MJE
Roughly half of the highest official temperatures on record for US weather stations were set in the 1930s. It’s taken nearly a century for many Dust Bowl tecords to be gradually surpassed by random regional heat waves, or very likely by urban heat island (UHI) effects.
… records …
If alarmists cannot agree about historic records how can anyone think they have accurate knowledge about the future. It’s like they keep changing their predictions ( when they are proven to be wrong so they think that makes it ok to change the past. These deliberate efforts to deceive need to be brought to account. Audit the BOM now!
On a somewhat related note, Chiefio shows how they get a hockey stick just by dropping out stations in rural areas.
There is a series of posts graphing stations by years.
https://chiefio.wordpress.com/2019/02/12/ghcn-v3-3-stations-by-altitude-by-years-or-mountains-what-mountains/
or
https://chiefio.wordpress.com/2019/02/10/an-intriguing-look-at-temperatures-in-australia/
and more.
Thanks for the pertinent link, which demonstrates what I have long argued is objectionable about GHCN’s modus operandi.
Since ca. 1990, their data has been subjected to the carnival trick of “station shuffle.” Instead of maintaining the same set they started with, stations that fail to perform as expected are quietly dropped and “good” performers are substituted. Induced step-changes are “homogenized” away. That’s how, in their tendentiously constructed “global” sample, they manage to nearly obliterate the deep cooling during the third quarter of the last century and fabricate a century-long warming trend.
I would not expect the BOM to appreciate irony however, their rather large “correction” of historical temperatures to compensate for a quite small geographic location calls into question all global temperature averages. The IPCC, BOM et al, use single site measurements to average across, in soms cases, hundreds of thousands of square kilometers of land and ocean. The error bars just got a lot wider.
But I thought warming only started after 1975, and since then it’s all been due to evil CO2.
So how often does this record get changed?
Andrew
Hi Andrew,
The first set of adjustments were by Torok and Nichols and published in 1996. Then there were changes made by Della Marta et al. a little later, creating what was known as the High Quality (HQ) dataset. Then ACORN-SAT Version 1 came out in 2012, and now we have ACORN-SAT Version 2.
Bad Andrew, they have a very hygienic approach to changing records at BoM –
it appears to be similar to the frequency with which underwear gets changed – too often is barely enough.
The fact that they get away with this is very worrying and of course this all gets jumbled up with the other homogenised data and the world is agog with a tainted view of reality.
The BoM spokesperson – “In other words, the adjustments estimate what historical temperatures would look like if they were recorded with today’s equipment at the current site.”
“Estimate”????
Who, what, why and how????
Much of northern Australia has been getting wetter over the last 100 or so years, which is why there is so little warming in Darwin. Wetter years are demonstrably cooler, as one would expect. This wetter trend is ignored and the flat temperature trend changed because the creative types at the BOM can’t imagine a reason why Darwin’s temperature wouldn’t warm in conformity with government policy.
I’m more convinced than ever that there is something very fishy happening at the BOM. Just more religious dogma posing as science.
Acorn 1 was supposed to be”world’s best practice” in 2012 but now this has changed in just a few years? Welcome to the ADJUSTOCENE and that means that it will never end.
IOW it’s a never ending story and OZ wastes endless billions $ for a guaranteed ZERO return while China, India etc laugh all the way to their banks. Unbelievable but true.
Here’s OZ rainfall anomaly since 1900, note much wetter after 1970.
http://www.bom.gov.au/cgi-bin/climate/change/timeseries.cgi?graph=rranom&area=aus&season=0112&ave_yr=8
Here’s NT and Darwin is the Capital city of NT. Note again that rainfall is much higher after 1970.
http://www.bom.gov.au/cgi-bin/climate/change/timeseries.cgi?graph=rranom&area=nt&season=0112&ave_yr=8
I just read the two mentioned ‘Darwin posts’ by Willis Eschenbach. I can recommend everyone to read them too:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/12/08/the-smoking-gun-at-darwin-zero/
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/12/20/darwin-zero-before-and-after/
The evolution forced upon the Darwin record to make it conform to the AGW narrative is nothing short of abominable!
Anthony,
Thanks so much for re-posting this. I’m enjoying reading the comments … and as always learning from them. BTW, I was born in Darwin.
Cheers, Jen
Thank you for keeping the spot light on the Darwin “adjustments”
When you correct for an error when you do not know the nature or degree of the error you are not ‘correcting ‘ at all. Rather you are creating another form of the error.
In this case, there is a clear ‘habit ‘ of producing errors which favor their outlook that you can claim it is not an error at all, but deliberate intent.
The Trump Administration should announce that our EPA scientists can no longer use any temperature data that includes Australian data because of the malfeasance in their record. Embarrass them.
Trump ought to have Happer’s group investigate these changes made to the temperature record by BOM. Here’s a good opportunity to shine the light on these temperature manipulations.
And alarmists wonder why skeptics complain about the legitimacy of the surface temperature record. This kind of “cooling the past and warming the present” is going on all over the world on a continuing basis. NOAA and NASA have disappeared the significance of the El Nino year of 1998, and turned it into a cool, also-ran, rather than the second-hottest year in the 21st century, right behind 2016, which was 0.1C (statistically a tie) warmer than 1998 (according to UAH). And they did this right in front of our eyes, just like this BOM manipulation is taking place right in front of our eyes.
We should just go with TMax charts and forget all this homoginization. After all, if we want to measure Global Warming, what better way is there than using the maximum temperature of the day and comparing it to the maximum temperature of a day in 2019.
In the Tmax case, the maximum temperatures of the day in the 1930’s would show to be warmer than the maximum temperatures today. In other words, no unprecedented heating of the atmosphere today. No CAGW.
Instead, we get Hockey Sticks.
Sorry Tom the Bureau of Misinformation is an Aussie problem. It is pure bull sh*t sure. But Aussie bs.
Best we try and take care of it here in Oz.
It was kind of a “tongue-in-cheek” suggestion, Bill.
I bet an inquiry from Happer to the BOM would get their attention, though, even though he has no power over them. 🙂
“In other words, the adjustments estimate what historical temperatures would look like if they were recorded with today’s equipment at the current site.” ??
How could they possibly know that ?
Handwavium, of course.
I thought it was Delorean
Who is responsible for review and formal approval of such changes? How do they justify and document altering the already altered data? One degree is statistically significant.
‘The Bureau has further dramatically increased the rate of global warming at Darwin’
Wut? GLOBAL warming at Darwin. You can have warming at Darwin. You can have global warming. But you can’t have global warming at Darwin.
Any professional engineer knows that there is no such thing as “adjusted data.” The data is what was read off the instrument.
Any changes to this data produce something new, called “Fiction.”
This is only one of the reasons I always put quotes around “Climate Scientists…”
You say “fiction”, they say “rigorous analysis”. All same-same.
Darwin, soon to become a Chinese stronghold after the corrupt incompetent Aussie government handed Darwin port to a Chinese state company. A useful spy post to watch the USA military assets based there.
From the article: “So, why was the temperature dropped down by a further one degree for 1 January 1910 in the most recent revision – undertaken just a few months ago? There is no logical or reasonable explanation.”
I think there is a logical explanation for it. I think this is another attempt to promote the CAGW narrative by manipulating the temperature record in a certain way to make it look like the temperatures are steadily getting hotter and hotter.
These CAGW lies are costing humanity trillions of wasted dollars. Perhaps there will be some criminal liability in the future for these data manipulators. One can only hope.
Small ACORNs grow into mighty HOAX
Yes, that’s what it is : a mighty HOAX
https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=darwin+australia+temperature
They’re actually wrecking their own case.
Ultimately, they key argument won’t be about past temperature increases; it’ll be about the ACCELERATION (the second derivative). Yes, cooling the past increases the apparent warming (the first derivative) but will ultimately decrease the acceleration (the second derivative). In just a few years, their adjustments of the past will make it look like the warming is slowing down.
They may be counting on everyone implementing the Paris accords, so they can take credit for the slowdown. Unfortunately for them, that ain’t happenin’; CO2 continues to rise very fast.
No wonder they’re screaming like mad that we have to act now. As they like to say, “If we don’t act in the next five years it’ll be a catastrophe.” Problem is, five years from now, the “catastrophe” will be the falsification of their predictions.
So,…did they calibrate their instruments in the old days. You know freezes at 0 , boils at 100? Just asking, but really. I think they did.
They’re going to run out of ammo soon. You can only distort the data so much before it gets ridiculous. They aren’t going to gain any converts when everyone with half a brain knows they are doing this, so what’s the point. No one trusts the MSM anymore. No one trusts the government ‘scientists’ anymore. Less and less people believe their bs so they’ve pulled out the stops. In the US Trump is going to run as us vs. the socialists. I’m not a huge Trump fan but I sure as hell will be voting for him because I would never vote for Mao, Stalin or Hitler. We’re lucky they’re all dead or they’d be running for the Dem nomination in 2020. Theyll have to settle for whoever ends up the farthest on the left without offending the low IQ special snowflake groups.
Prior to WWII, there were VERY few climate station in the southern hemisphere (SH), especially Africa and South America. They were mainly concerned with rainfall, not temperature, and temperature was not regularly taken. Reliable temperature data of the southern oceans were almost non-existent, and no data for Antarctica.
So modern climate science extrapolates northern hemisphere temperature readings southward. (They admit such.) The argument is that temperature does not vary much across a broad region. The SH is a very large region. Given that the SH receives solar insolation differently from the NH (more ocean), this method of guessing SH temperature prior to WWII is subject to all types of “theoretical” manipulations.
My thoughts that they would be cooling modern temperatures not reducing previous temperatures as the Urban Heat Island gets more substantive….seems off.
Remember, it’s a federal and New South Wales (NSW) election year. NSW in March, Federal in May. Liberals (Conservatives) are going to be thrashed and will assume power.
In most Australian news feeds, the Sydney Morning Herald for instance, are publishing many articles, daily, that show we are destroying the planet by burning coal. Cyclone Oma, was hyped to be a “monster” Cat 3 to strike the east coast and Brisbane to be hit for the first time in 30 years. DOOM! DOOM! DOOM! And then fizzed out and downgraded to Cat 1 before landfall!
BoM data fiddling, again? Well, it is an election year after all and it HAS to be shown we are past tipping point.
And now the Chinese are going to stop buying Aussie coal!
Interesting few months ahead for Australia.
The Labor party (Democrat?) will assume power at both state and federal levels is what I meant to say.
It’s the same old dishonest tactic to make the temperature appear to rise continuously. They cannot raise the current temps as everyone knows them, but nobody knows the temps from 100 or 50 years ago, if they were measured acurately at all.
I love Darwin and I believe it has always been “bloody hot”.
“In other news from the world of science, members of the Royal Society adjusted dozens of Tycho Brahe’s observations, ‘to make them look like they had been recorded with modern instruments,’ and also rewrote portions of De Nova et Nullius Aevi Memoria Prius Visa Stella ‘to get rid of the hard parts.'”
“The members of The Society then retired to their club, where they pantsed the busboys and burnt first editions of Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica and assorted short works by Galileo. in the fireplace”
I saw several comments in the above thread suggesting that there may have not have been a lot of care in how the early measurements were recorded and archived in Australia.
This is nonsense … myth. The Darwin record, as an example, was the responsibility of Charles Todd who was both astronomer and engineer. He was responsible for the building of the overland telegraphic line from Adelaide to Darwin that eventually connected Australia with the world. He was an obsessive ‘data collector’ and ‘data watcher’ and the measurements collected under his supervision are of very high quality – not just the early Darwin record.
We have some exceptionally high quality records for locations in Australia back to about 1890. A problem is that the measuring did not continue through the second half of last century. Also some of these records have not been digitised.
In vetting station records world-wide via sophisticated signal analysis tools, I found a surprising DECREASE in data quality in recent decades for virtually all continents. While some of this can be traced to ever-increasing deployment of automated systems and confusion about the relationship between the daily mid-range value and the actual mean, much of the devolution is due to data drop-out due to editing and to various ill-founded adjustments. Unlike rigorous sciences, which have made great strides forward in data treatment, “climate science” seems to have seriously regressed.
In the coming Federal election here in Australia , with a almost certain victory for the Labour Party, the ones who want 50 % renewable, one of the seats almost certain to go Labour is held by Greg Hunt, who for many years was the Minister for Climate Change.
It will be of interest as to where he, with his large taxpayers pension, ends up.
Probably on some Labour Government Board still pushing the Climate Change nonsense.
MJE
And Greg Hunt signed off on the Abbott Point terminal that Labor was against just before losing to the LNP in 2013. But you are right, he’s not bothered, he has a nice fully fat taxpayer funded pension and free travel for him and his partner for the rest of their natural lives.
Yes! Go Australia! The Lucky Country!
I don’t know if anyone else will find this interesting, but I downloaded all of the NOAA GHCN-Daily files — there’s a bit over a hundred thousand of them, in a Zip file — and ultimately picked out 313 GSN stations that had good data over the 1981-2010 period and generally throughout their lifetimes. They tended to favor North America, Russia, Australia, and Europe , with almost nothing from South America and Africa. I’m going to revisit that later on, but for now this will do.
I took the daily TMIN and TMAX readings separately, and averaged them for the month, and then averaged all of the months over the thirty-year period from 1981 to 2010 to get a baseline average for each month. After that, I got the averages for the rest of the months in the station’s records, and subtracted the baseline months to get anomalies. For the most part, each station provided enough good data to get anomaly measurements back to the early Fifties.
What I found, and found interesting, was that in 220 out of 313 stations, the warming trend of the TMIN measurements was greater than that of the TMAX. i suppose that implies the Urban Heat Island effect, but I was surprised it was so widespread, and such a big difference — over half a degree C at some stations over their lifetime.
I averaged all the stations for each year, and the effect was the same: the warming trend of TMAX was much less than that of the TMIN. in the overall global average of the stations, TMIN had surpassed TMAX by a half-degree C, and raised the global average by a quarter degree more than where it would have been if the two trends had been closer.
I’ll post a couple of charts I made, some in R and some in Excel, that will hopefully make what I said more understandable. As everyone says, at this point, , please quote my exact words so that we all know what we’re talking about — even if you think I don’t know what I’m talking about.
This tool allows you to chart GHCN data, both adjusted and unadjusted, from 1900 to 2014: https://tools.ceit.uq.edu.au/temperature/index.html
It also allows you to select for rural stations only and stations that are classified as rural nightlight. Rural and rural nightlight stations in the unadjusted data amount to 2,624 globally and collectively they show a warming trend of +0.8 C/century from 1900 to 2014. Unfortunately the tool only provides Tavg, but it’s a decent bet that a lot of that is due to Tmin. UHI can’t really account for that warming.
The article in the link below discusses the proposition that enhanced Tmin warming is the result of the daily cycle in the boundary-layer depth coupled with increased greenhouse forcing. It basically says that at night, because there is a much smaller volume of air to warm up, the extra energy added to the climate system from increased greenhouse forcing causes greater warming at night than during the day: https://phys.org/news/2016-03-nights-warmer-faster-days.html
The article reads like a “just-so” story, with an ad hoc mechanism dreamt up to explain an unpredicted behavior. It was always my impression that decreased cooling at night was the UHI signature — is this no longer true?
“The article reads like a “just-so” story, with an ad hoc mechanism dreamt up to explain an unpredicted behavior.”
Yes, and the problem with “talking” to naysayers.
Constant pleas to incredulity.
No, it’s just basic meteorology, that you could try to understand.
When surface air becomes decoupled from the atmosphere above via nocturnal cooling under a surface inversion. The energy retained as measured by T2m temp will be higher (much) than that experienced by one that is uncoupled. The DALR makes that so.
True, I’m not a meteorologist, my degree is in geology — but contrary to popular belief we can read numbers and do basic math. If 2/3 of a set of 313 stations show these inversions over a decades-long series , and an article is written proposing an explanation to said phenomenon, is it safe to presume this event was not predicted? Is the explanation then, that inversions are becoming so common that they are warming the entire globe?
In science, one is supposed to make predictions about future occurrences or findings based on the observations and relationships derived from those observations. When a new, unpredicted observation occurs, and an ad hoc explanation is created, it’s not adding to the predictive power of the model.
Two hundred twenty stations reported TMIN warming faster than TMAX. But 93 stations did not. Can anyone explain how CO2 causes this inversion effect at one site but not another? Can the AGW model explain this difference? Is this just another case of ignoring the data that doesn’t fit the model? If the Earth ON AVERAGE experiences something, then it’s like it happens everywhere, and the model doesn’t have to explain why it happened here, but not there. That’s really not very good science.
“Can anyone explain how CO2 causes this inversion effect at one site but not another? ”
Yes, a meteorologist can.
Me for instance.
No, you cant reduce climate to CO2 doing everything.
It doesn’t.
Geography has an enormous effect with local weather.
In a word “exposure” – to wind.
Places on sloping ground on hills/ground exposed to wind flow will experience few surface inversions.
Those places on more sheltered ground, most usually low ground, will – where katabatic drainage seeps to. In hollows, valleys FI.
BTW: this is one reason why the Sat tropospheric temp series (UAH, RSS etc) do not capture the warming of AGW.
James Schrumpf
The UHI signature is not expected to be present to any significant degree in rural and rural nightlight stations. Yet the nighttime warming in such locations is clear, even in the unadjusted GHCN data. Something else at these locations is causing the decreased cooling at night (or warming at night, if you will).
BOM are the worst for audacious fraud. Stokes no doubt doesn’t see an issue with fraud, only with criticisms that might not be accurate, but the actual data fraud, he leaves well alone, which is why I respect the likes of Stokes as much as I respect Smollet
The Australian climate zealots are at the forefront of historical revisionism.
Even “scientists” like Gerhis, have been caught bare faced lying, caught by their own emails in FOI
Of course the conversation deleted all comments on the article with Gergis, that pointed out the evidence she was lying in the article.
Apologies if it’s been mention before, but the changes made recently by the BoM to the Darwin record appear to be pretty consistent with the adjustments made to that record by the BEST team back in 2013: http://berkeleyearth.lbl.gov/stations/152446
Best also identified a huge ‘continuity break’ in the Darwin record, centered around 1940. This seems to coincide with the station move mentioned, which must have taken the thermometer from a warmer to a cooler location. Failure to adjust for this obvious change would render the trend in the data meaningless.
http://berkeleyearth.lbl.gov/auto/Stations/TAVG/Figures/152446-TAVG-Alignment.png
Annual Darwin data on the BEST site only runs to 2012, but from 1910 to 2012 the raw trend is -0.28C/century and the adjusted trend is +1.03C/century; a difference of 1.31C/century.
I would argue that you don’t “adjust for this obvious change” but that you stop the record at the break and give the station a new name and ID for records after the break. It’s not the same location after all; you said there was a station move. Who moves a station, from a place where it’s accrued a 100-year series of temperature measurements, to a new place that is noticeably cooler — or warmer — and “adjusts” for the change by changing the old data to match the new? The data has been made meaningless by the adjustment.
I think there were a few more ‘explosive’ events around Darwin, just after 1940…?
What temperatures would look like with today’s equipment at the current sites …..
Why is this an aim of the BOM?
Surely it would be more logical to leave old temperature observations as they were, then to adjust recent temperatures with different equipment, to look as they would in the past.
That way pays respect to the many conscientious observers who carried out duties to the best of their abilities, with the best instruments that were feasible, through all types of weather and circumstances.
Let us not throw them on a scrap heap of science, overtaken by the progress of minds imagining a different reality to suit an ideology.
It now seems that EVERY pre 1970 official Australian temperature has been BOM adjusted. Every one of many millions. Not one was correct. Geoff
Thanks Geoff for putting this so succinctly.
The Bureau of Misinformation does not respect the work of it’s own past employees in previous generations.
They prefer the mumbo jumbo of models and algorithms and homogenised data.
One day a real temperature reading might bite them on the bum
And it would be deserved !
Geoff Sherrington
It makes no difference to the overall trend whether you raise more recent temperatures affected by a move to a colder area or lower older temperatures recorded in a warmer area. You have to do one or the other in order to set the two records on a like-for-like basis.
It makes no difference to that station’s trend, but it’s going to artificially warm or cool that trend when compared to the baseline for getting an anomaly value. Anyway, didn’t you just say that the “adjustments” changed the trend from -0.28C/century to 1.03C/century?
Are the people who do things like this just completely ignorant of correct scientific practices, do they just not care, or are they actively trying to pull off a fraud?
It has to be one of the above, because there’s just no way a thinking person would take a weather station with a hundred-year record, move it a couple of miles away to a much cooler location, and then try to pretend that making some “adjustments” can make all of that change go away and it will be just like before , as though nothing happened.
It beggars the imagination.
DRW54,
That imaginative response, dogma laden, reveals little more than your low knowledge of what has been happening.
The story is ever so much more complicated than you seem to imagine. I can say this confidently, because I have been learning about BOM adjustments for the last 15 years, after an initial episode in 1982 showed how troublesome much climate work is for temperature records. Try to come up to steam with what really happens.
The present BOM method. like the global exercises, hold the present constant and adjust the past. My proposal is to hold the past constant and adjust the recent. You will likely get a vastly different outcome. Geoff.
“To be clear, the weather station has been at the airport since February 1941, and an automatic weather station was installed on 1 October 1990. A Stevenson screen was first installed at the post office site in 1894, and has always been used at the airport site.”
–
There would be a difference between the one at the post office which would have been 20 meters above sea level, with strong sea breezes coming up the nearby cliffs only 400 meters from the coastal edge in a small shantytown with dirt roads (1890’s -1941) , horses and buggy’s and the odd car late in the piece,
and one at the airport, bitumen now I think, not sure about the war years which has a number of international and national flights daily plus has housed our defence airforce planes , Mirages in the 1960’s and F/A18’s since 1984. It has always had a large runway surface area. It is much lower in elevation being barely 2 meters above sea level ( if that) and is situated at least 2 kilometres possibly 3 from the sea coast edge.
–
The difference between the temperatures at ground level at the 2 sites would easily/ obviously / sensibly be accounted for by the different locations, elevations, air streams and surrounding tarmac (or lack thereof at the post office).
–
Confusing matters is the fact that the change seems to have been initiated about a year before the bombing of Darwin February 14th 1942, the Post Office (famously destroyed in said bombing) and the airport, amazing the screen stayed intact? I wonder if the dates are wrong and the new screen was actually set up in 1942, not 1941, because the one at the Post Office was destroyed in the bombing.
–
Be that as it may the sad fact is that Darwin, as a temperature site, is entirely influenced by the effect of the surrounding sea temperature.
Thus it can vary by a degree depending on the fact that sea (ocean) temperature anomalies can vary locally by a degree over a year or a few years but the temperature anomalies must on a decadal or century coverage reflect and be tied to the average sea temperature.
Hence a shift up or down of a degree Centigrade is entirely possible for a year or a few years but not, normally, for decades and certainly not upwards by a degree plus over a century.
The BOM would certainly have lots of records for sea temperatures in the Darwin and Indonesian area.
These records cannot show a decadal or century shift upwards of sea temperature enough to cause a 1 degree C rise in the related coastal land temperature over that time period.*
(NB the sea temperature rise to cause a nearby 1 C land rise could be quite small in comparison but still should be clearly measurable.)
The BOM is presumably quite well aware of this, knows the altered figures are not physically feasible but still allows this portrayal to go ahead.
–
* If sea temps world wide or OHC if wishing to use a more often quoted measure did show such a rise the world would be 1.4C warmer over the same period with no missing heat QED.
Good comment.
The adjusters can often produce superficial reasons for what they have done, but it often just doesn’t pass the smell test of a properly inquiring scientific mind.
There have been some reviews of the BOM methods for adjustments in the version 1 of ACORN-SAT.
Those interested in some depth about the problem, in addition to the work of Dr Marohasy, can read my response to the final report of the Technical Advisory Forum, dated 29 Sept 2017. It has not been made public before.
Copies were sent to the Forum members, but no response was received from most members and a perfunctory one with no technical comment from the secretariat. I am happy to correspond with interested others on this. sherro1 at optusnet dot com dot au
http://www.geoffstuff.com/ghs_taf_acorn.docx
Geoff that link you provided does not work for me here in South Australia.
Is there an problem in the link ?
Billl
Ummmmm I gave up trying to open the link from my email application and instead tried from the actual post on the WUWT website.
So now I have it open on my screen.
But I cannot save it at all..For later reference or copy & paste to another document so as to get around the block on saving.
I don’t use WORD because of these kinds of stuff ups. Too dopey for words.
So.. what next Geoff ?
DRW54 linked to a graphic at BEST in an earlier post, which caused me to download BEST’s LATEST – Breakpoint Corrected.zip file, and in the natural course of things I got to the data.txt file, where I read this , which caught my eye.
That is wrong; it violates most of the rules for calculating uncertainty and significant digits in measurements. Don’t believe me though; here’s a page on it from The Penn State University chemistry department:
http://chemistry.bd.psu.edu/jircitano/sigfigs.html
Another page, from the Faraday School of Physics at the University of Toronto, gives these rules for the propagation of error and significant figures therein:
The correct result of the conversion, according to the accepted rules of error propagation and significant digits, would be:
sigmaZ = Z * sqrt((sigmaX/X) ^2 + (sigmaY/Y)^2)
sigmaZ = (40.5-32)* 5/9 * sqrt((0.05/40.5)^2 + (0/(9/5))^2)
sigmaZ = 4.7 * sqrt(0.0012 ^ 2)
sigmaZ = 4.7 * .0012
sigmaZ= 0.006
The final answer would be, according to the rules of error propagation and significant digits:
4.7 + – 0.006 , because 4.7 has only 1 significant digit to the right of the decimal place, so the uncertainty would as well.
The answer as given in the data.txt page is way too overprecise for the starting values. 40.5 has three significant digits, and is the only measurement. 32 and 5/9 are constants and have no uncertainty. 32 has two significant digits, and 5/9 when converted to a decimal can have no more than 2.
No matter how you look at it, or from where you learned to do physics measurements, you have to know that you can’t convert a number with one significant digit in the decimal’s place t a number with four. it’s just not done.
When will there be charges brought against such fraudsters?
A case can surely be brought that these people are raising their chances of getting grant funding (i.e., taxpayers’ hard-earned money) and, with a little will-to-win by the police, a case for financially motivated deception.
It wont be long now before we reach the 2C hand rail thingy through adjustments, perhaps someone cant wait for nature to get us there? Most people are too stupid to know the difference anyway.
Don’t worry folks, in 100 years, today will be much cooler than it is today.
Ya know, when you say it like that, it sounds bat shit crazy.