He can do pretty much what he wants as head of GISS .... apparently for life.
Read the text of this email to Hansen by another GISS employee in which he discusses just a few of his numerous adjustments (in these cases to US temps). You'll see an admission they didn't even keep all the data and that there are multiple adjustments throughout the years:
noconsensus.wordpress.com
BTW as noted ... almost ALL of GISS's adjustments go in the same direction ... past temps are reduced magnifying whatever warming trend might exist.
More on the above email:
In an August 14, 2007, email from GISS’s Makiko Sato to Hansen, Sato wrote that his analysis of a one degree warming between 1934 and 1998 might in reality be half that amount:
I am sure I had 1998 warmer than 1934 at least once because on my own temperature web page (which most people never look at), I have [image/information not visible in document]. … I didn’t keep all the data, but some of them are (some data are then listed, with 1934 0.5 deg C warmer than 1998)
As AGW proponents only claim a one degree warming over the past century, the magnitude of a .5 degree Celsius problem in their calculations is tremendous.
Sato continues:
I am sorry, I should have kept more data, but I was not interested in US data after 2001 paper.
Sato is referencing the paper by Hansen, et al., in which Hansen’s colleagues remind him 1934 was indeed listed as being a full half-degree warmer than 1998 — which is shown in their emails as being what the data said as of July 1999 (their paper described 1934 as only “slightly” warmer than 1998, p. 8). Still, throughout these emails Hansen later insists 1934 and 1998 are in a statistical tie with just a 0.02 Celsius difference and even that their relationship has not changed. For example, Hansen claims in an email to a journalist with Bloomberg: “As you will see in our 2001 paper we found 1934 slightly warmer, by an insignificant hair over 1998. We still find that result.” The implication is that things had not changed when in fact NASA had gone from claiming a statistically significant if politically inconvenient warmer 1934 over 1998, to a tie.
pjmedia.com
More:
More graphic evidence of GISS fraud that you can see - this on historic US temperatures:
GISTEMP Movie Matinées
Posted on July 23, 2010 by Anthony Watts
By Steve Goddard
From reading the press and some blogs, one would think that the hot week in early July on the middle Atlantic seaboard was a rare or unprecedented event. Some believe that the weather used to be perfect before the invention of the soccer mom.
One of my favorite stories growing up was told by my New York relatives. The reason why movie matinées became very popular during the 1930s was because movie theatres were the only place that was air conditioned. People would go to the theatre just to get out of the oppressive heat. I tend to trust historical accounts from reliable sources, but for those who want data – keep reading.
Prior to being corrupted adjusted in the year 2000, this is what the GISS US temperature graph looked like.
The 1930s was by far the hottest decade. After being “adjusted” in the year 2000, it magically changed shape. The 1990s became much warmer. 1998 added almost half a degree – ex post facto.
The video below shows (in reverse) how the graph was rotated in the year 2000. Older temperatures became colder, and newer temperatures became warmer.
Rewriting history is not a good approach to science. It was very hot during the 1930s, as anyone who lived through it can tell you. Someday Hollywood will make a blockbuster movie about the global warming hysteria of the early 21st century.
wattsupwiththat.com
zapruder.nl
.....
stephen richards says:
July 23, 2010 at 6:44 am
Mike
It doesn’t matter how much BS you throw at it altering historical data is a criminal scientific act.
pat says:
July 23, 2010 at 6:50 am
The easiest way to prove the adjustment would be to use actual temperature
rather than ‘anomalies’ or derivatives. Increasingly, the use of derivative information serves merely to confuse. And as this thread discusses, merely to prove the preordained supposition. It is intentional, and in the real sense, ultimately meaningless. The entire world has been swept into a trap wherein actual data is expendable.
As for the revision, it too is a con job, plain and simple. Whether a different and longer base line is utilized as a reader here maintains, or if the information was adjusted without explanation, the intent is to create the impression that the planet is warmer now than it was in the 1930s, early 40s. And according to comparable thermometer readings it was not. Not in the Continental America, not in Hawaii, Australia, New Zealand, Camada, or Europe, including Scandinavia .
.........
stevengoddard says:
July 23, 2010 at 6:20 am
Mike
Do you think it is a coincidence that Hansen has devoted his life’s work towards proving global warming, and that the ADJUSTMENTS always move towards support of that idea?
...........
Bob Koss says:
July 23, 2010 at 8:54 am
I put up a comment in unthreaded at CA back on December 22 concerning the GISS changes to US temperatures since 1998. With Climategate in full swing it didn’t get much notice at the time. The ADJUSTMENTS made between January and November 2009 are stunning. That comment seems to fit well with this post by Steve Goddard so I am reproducing it below.
I utilized three GISS graphs from publications with data ending in 1998, 1999, and 2006. Sources are Hansen et al. 1999, Hansen et al. 2001, and the recent Hansen PDF “The Temperature of Science” which is currently under discussion at WUWT.
Oddly, in the recent publication Hansen included the outdated 2006 US temperature graph in a mix with other graphs from 2009. Kind of makes one wonder why he didn’t use a more recent one. A look at the available graphs and data 1998-2008 may aid in solving that conundrum.
I also used a copy of GISS US 48 data updated 01/01/2009 which I downloaded awhile ago. Recently I went back and got the latest update 11/14/2009. That was three weeks before Copenhagen and a few days before Climategate erupted. Both updates have the same url so the older copy is no longer available. Here is the link for the current data.
Extracting temperature values from the GISS graphs by blowing them up in Photoshop and doing a pixel count was rather tedious. So my concern focused on the history of the current top six US annual temperatures as of the end of 2008. Combining the graph data along with the two data files downloaded allowed production of a useful graph.
Here is the Graph.
We now have new co-leaders in the race to the top of the US temperature world. Although aged 1934 broke quickly from the gate with an anomaly of 1.45c, it has now faded to 3rd with a value of 1.26c. The 1998 contender got off to a slow start with a mediocre value of 0.92c, but came on strong to be in a neck and neck tie with the 2006 youngster who recovered after an early stumble to tie for the lead with 1.29c.
Is it possible the new rankings were to be announced to coincide with Copenhagen, but Climategate put the kibosh on them sticking their head up unnecessarily by making the announcement?
With all the Climategate fallout in recent weeks, perhaps the solution to the conundrum of mixing old and new graphs lays with Hansen not wanting to draw unnecessary fire concerning 1934 falling to third in the US temperature rankings.
I don’t know, but hey, when you see temperatures move around like that I guess anything is possible in climate science.
i48.tinypic.com
Here are links to the GISS provided graphs and the ones I made.
GISS graphs from publications. x,y axis are not uniform in length.
Jan 2009 data graph.
Nov 2009 data graph
Data ADJUSTMENTS made between Jan 2009 and Nov 2009.
PS.
In 1998 the year 1953(not shown) was ranked 4th with a value of 0.94c, but fell to 11th in the current temperature rankings at 0.86c.
Steve McIntyre looking at GISS adjustments. BTW the 2010 study LandShark posted wasn't written to "explain" adjustments, but to claim the UHI was insignificant ... in response to criticism of the quality of surface stations:
NASA GISS – Adjusting the Adjustments
As a simple exercise, I quickly revisited the everchanging Hansen adjustments, a topic commented on acidly by E.M. Smith ( Chiefio) in many posts – also see his interesting comments in the thread at a guest post at Anthony‘s, a post which revisited the race between 1934 and 1998 – an issue first raised at Climate Audit in 2007 in connection with Hansen’s Y2K error.
As CA readers recall, Hansen’s Y2K error resulted in a reduction of US temperatures after 2000 relative to earlier values. The change from previous values is shown in red in the graphic below; the figure also shows (black) remarkable re-writing of past history since August 2007 – a rewriting of history that has increased the 2000-6 relative to the 1930s by about 0.3 deg C.
This impacts comparisons made in 2007 between GISS and CRN1-2 stations. At the time, it was noted that GISS adjustments for UHI resulted in the GISS US temperature anomaly having quite a bit in common with a TOBS average from Anthony’s CRN1-2 stations.
Critics of Anthony’s surfacestations.org project commented on this rather smugly – too smugly given the large differences with NOAA and CRU versions in the US and the incoherence of Hansen’s adjustments outside the US. The post-2007 adjustments to GISS adjustments change this.
The increased trend in the GISS US statistic comes at the expense of reconciliation with CRN1-2 stations: the trends no longer cohere.
In the past, Hansen said that he was too busy to joust with jesters – see here. At the time, I observed:
presumably he’s too busy adjusting to have time for jousting. We by contrast have lots of time to jest with adjusters.
Little did we appreciate that Hansen’s new adjustments were not in jest.
Update Dec 26- Hansen’s new article on GISTEMP – Hansen et al 2010 here updates Hansen et al 1999, 2001. Section 4 contains a discussion of US adjustments under different systems, each purporting to show that UHI doesn’t matter. Later in section 9, there is a section on US adjustments, with a brief whining mention of the Y2K adjustment and the following graphic purporting to show that change to USHCN v2 had negligible impact.
It is entirely possible that the change in GISS US since August 2007 is primarily due to the replacement of USHCN v1 methodology (TOBS and that sort of thing that we discussed in the past) with Menne’s changepoint methodology used in USHCN v2.
Menne’s methodology is another homemade statistical method developed by climate scientists introduced without peer review in the statistical literature. As a result, its properties are poorly known.
As I mentioned some time ago, my impression is that it smears stations together so that, if there are bad stations in the network, they influence good stations. Jones used the Menne method in Jones et al 2008, his most recent attempt to show that UHI doesn’t “matter.”
My guess is that it will be very hard to construct circumstances under which UHI will matter after data has been Menne-transformed. And that tests of the various night lights scenario on data after it has been Menne-transformed will not tell you very much. This is just a surmise as I haven’t waded through Menne code. (I requested it a number of years ago, but was unsuccessful until 2009.)
It’s too bad that the Menne adjustment methodology wasn’t published in statistical literature where its properties might have been analysed by now. It’s a worthwhile topic still.
climateaudit.org
.. it is easy to dislike the craftsmanship of the major indices (GISS, CRU and NOAA) and the underlying GHCN and USHCN datasets. GISS, for example, purports to adjust for UHI through a “two legged adjustment” that seems entirely ad hoc and which yields counterintuitive ADJUSTMENTS in most areas of the world other than the US. GISS methodology also unfortunately rewrites its entire history whenever it is updated. CRU notoriously failed to retain its original separate data sets, merging different stations (ostensibly due to lack of “storage” space, though file cabinets have long provided a low-technology method of data storage. GHCN seems to have stopped collecting many stations in the early 1990s for no good reason (the “great dying of thermometers”) though the dead thermometers can be readily located on the internet.
Even small changes in station history can introduce discontinuities. Over the years, USHCN has introduced a series of ADJUSTMENTS for metadata changes (changes in observation times, instrumentation), all of which have had the effect of increasing trends.
climateaudit.org
NASA GISS is doing Soviet style "science" where history is changed to fit the movements needs. http://joannenova.com.au/2010/03/the-mystery-deepens-where-did-that-decline-go/
More on surface temp records:
Surface Temperature Records: Policy Driven Deception? by D'Aleo and Watts
1. Instrumental temperature data for the pre-satellite era (1850-1980) have been so widely, systematically, and unidirectionally tampered with that it cannot be credibly asserted there has been any significant “global warming” in the 20th century.
2. All terrestrial surface-temperature databases exhibit very serious problems that render them useless for determining accurate long-term temperature trends.
3. All of the problems have skewed the data so as greatly to overstate observed warming both regionally and globally.
4. Global terrestrial temperature data are gravely compromised because more than three-quarters of the 6,000 stations that once existed are no longer reporting.
5. There has been a severe bias towards removing higher-altitude, higher-latitude, and rural stations, leading to a further serious overstatement of warming.
6. Contamination by urbanization, changes in land use, improper siting, and inadequately-calibrated instrument upgrades further overstates warming.
7. Numerous peer-reviewed papers in recent years have shown the overstatement of observed longer term warming is 30-50% from heat-island contamination alone.
8. Cherry-picking of observing sites combined with interpolation to vacant data grids may make heat-island bias greater than 50% of 20th-century warming.
9. In the oceans, data are missing and uncertainties are substantial. Comprehensive coverage has only been available since 2003, and shows no warming.
10. Satellite temperature monitoring has provided an alternative to terrestrial stations in compiling the global lower-troposphere temperature record. Their findings are increasingly diverging from the station-based constructions in a manner consistent with evidence of a warm bias in the surface temperature record.
11. NOAA and NASA, along with CRU, were the driving forces behind the systematic hyping of 20th-century “global warming”.
12. Changes have been made to alter the historical record to mask cyclical changes that could be readily explained by natural factors like multidecadal ocean and solar changes.
13. Global terrestrial data bases are seriously flawed and can no longer be trusted to assess climate trends or VALIDATE model forecasts.
14. An inclusive external assessment is essential of the surface temperature record of CRU, GISS and NCDC “chaired and paneled by mutually agreed to climate scientists who do not have a vested interest in the outcome of the evaluations.”
15. Reliance on the global data by both the UNIPCC and the US GCRP/CCSP also requires a full investigation and audit.
noconsensus.files.wordpress.com
More on the subject:
Message 26161432
Message 26267155
Message 26268524
Message 26361559 adjustments
Message 26389593
.
|
