An inconvenient update
Cool heads notice flaw in US warming data
SaaS data loss: The problem you didn’t know you had
Comment Last week, statistician and amateur meteorologist Steve McIntyre notified NASA of an error in its climate data. The results of the hasty correction mean that as far as the US is concerned, 1998 is no longer the hottest year on record. 1934 is.
Headline-grabbing statements that nine out of ten of the hottest years on record were in the last decade are no longer correct, for the US, at least (bad news for Mr Gore, certainly). And those who remain sceptical about the nature of the link between human activity and global warming were delighted, as the Goddard Institute for Space Studies had to quietly admit the mistake and publish corrected data.
But what does this mean for the rest of us? What was the glitch? Where was the miscalculation? And do we need to check our data? Can we all hop into our Humvees and barrel around town, untroubled by our carbon emissions?
Goddard itself says the change is not significant enough to change the overall trends associated with global warming. Is it right?
Richard Allen, environmental systems scientist at the Centre for Atmospheric Science, thinks the revision is not worth getting too agitated about.
"The US only provides two per cent of the data, so it is not important as far as global temperature change goes," he told us.
But this is only true if we assume the rest of the world is not suffering from a similar (or entirely different) glitch. So what was the problem?
"What happens is that station data [the raw temperature readings from US weather stations] are corrected for slight changes, such as urbanisation. NOAA [National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration] in the US normally does this, it supplies it in near real time to GISS and NASA. But for some reason, they stopped doing this, and some stations didn't have their corrections. Now they do." Allen explains.
Allen argues that discontinuities like this do tend to get picked up pretty quickly, and says this whole episode is a good example of how this happens. "Nothing is perfect," he says. "But there are a lot of scientists out there who are working very carefully. So it is unlikely that it is a big problem."
Because the error in the US data is so specific to the way the US manages its figures, it seems unlikely that the data from the rest of the world will be afflicted by the same problem.
Meanwhile, McIntyre is unhappy with the way Goddard handled the situation. He says that the failure to put out an official announcement of the update left GISS open to accusations that it being less than frank.
The rather taciturn handling of the change has provoked some to wonder whether a revision in the opposite direction might have been given more prominence. And who can honestly say that it wouldn't?
That alone should be a sobering thought for those working in the field.
But botched PR doesn't prove that global warming isn't happening. That changes had to be made needs to be taken seriously. The scientific community should take note and make sure the rest of the data is in order.
For those who are interested, the old data is here, and the recalculated data is here. The old and new temperatures differ by a hundredth of a degree. ®
COMMENTS
Title
"Take the Dyson article a few days back.
Apparently Dyson is a "climate heretic"
So the fact that 100,000,000 bangladeshis have built their society in a river delta on low lying land is nothing to do with it? If they were a more prosperous society, they would have built flood defences (like the Dutch). The sea has risen in level by ~130m since the last ice age, predictions for the increase from "global warming" have been reduced down to 1m and will be reduced further as the science these predictions are based on is as good as useless. I seem to remember major flooding incidents in that part of the world in the 1980's. Presumably that was caused by the magic gas CO2 as well?
With respect to Dyson, typically the Ad Hominem attack from the AGW alarmists fails to spot the real point he is making.
Lets be cautious, not cruel!
Sorry I didn't mean to appear heartless, I'm not for starving the third world, I just believe its better for all of us if we encourage them to use clean energy and develop their own internal markets rather than make cheap goods in sweatshops for western markets.
I know its all about money, most things are, maybe I hoped we could rise above that. pity really.
Denialists are experts with the Straw Man argument
Take the Dyson article a few days back.
Apparently Dyson is a "climate heretic".
Why?
Here are his "heresies":
1. Climate is complex, data is partial, prediction is uncertain.
duh!
That's not a "heresy", that's plain common-sense.
Maybe Dyson gets his "climate" information from TV and newspapers and thinks the rest of us do the same?
2. Climate change might bring positive changes.
duh!
Hardly heresy, let's just turn the old greek saying "Every Rose has its Thorn" around, and we get "Every cloud has a silver lining".
However, this probably won't help 100,000,000 bangladeshis whose land is going under water, nor the numerous pacific island populations whose islands are disappearing.
In short, Dyson has nothing to add to Global Warming and climate change research, but the denialists leap onto his rhetoric as some kind of justification for their non-factual assertions about gthe Earth's climate.
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