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To: RetiredNow who wrote (14815)12/8/2009 9:58:14 AM
From: RetiredNow2 Recommendations  Respond to of 86355
 
Study Finds Earth’s Temperature More Sensitive to CO2 Than Previously Thought
bristol.ac.uk

Research published in Nature Geoscience

In the long term, the Earth’s temperature may be 30-50 per cent more sensitive to atmospheric carbon dioxide than has previously been estimated, reports a new study published in Nature Geoscience this week.


The results show that components of the Earth’s climate system that vary over long timescales – such as land-ice and vegetation – have an important effect on this temperature sensitivity, but these factors are often neglected in current climate models.

Dr Dan Lunt, from the University of Bristol, and colleagues compared results from a global climate model to temperature reconstructions of the Earth’s environment three million years ago when global temperatures and carbon dioxide concentrations were relatively high. The temperature reconstructions were derived using data from three-million-year-old sediments on the ocean floor.

Lunt said, “We found that, given the concentrations of carbon dioxide prevailing three million years ago, the model originally predicted a significantly smaller temperature increase than that indicated by the reconstructions. This led us to review what was missing from the model.”

The authors demonstrate that the increased temperatures indicated by the reconstructions can be explained if factors that vary over long timescales, such as land-ice and vegetation, are included in the model. This is primarily because changes in vegetation and ice lead to more sunlight being absorbed, which in turn increases warming.

Including these long-term processes in the model resulted in an increased temperature response of the Earth to carbon dioxide, indicating that the Earth’s temperature is more sensitive to carbon dioxide than previously recognised. Climate models used by bodies such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change often do not fully include these long-term processes, thus these models do not entirely represent the sensitivity of the Earth’s temperature to carbon dioxide.



To: RetiredNow who wrote (14815)12/8/2009 10:22:52 AM
From: Little Joe  Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 86355
 
Interesting that they are still relying in part on CRU data. Also NASA which according to what you believe 1934 or 1988 or whateve was warmest year and they refuse to provide raw data just like CRU. There is an outstanding FOIA request that is 2 years old. I wonder why they are dragging their feet releasing the data? Climate Gate 2?

How can you trust conclusions of so called scientists that wont release data.
lj



To: RetiredNow who wrote (14815)12/8/2009 12:53:56 PM
From: Brumar89  Read Replies (2) | Respond to of 86355
 
We can't trust the GHCN, CRU, and GISS adjusted temperature data. Its been "adjusted" to get the warming they think they should see. There's plenty of evidence of this.

Darwin Australia - warming by adjustment:

c3headlines.typepad.com


The Smoking Gun At Darwin Zero

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2009

by Willis Eschenbach

People keep saying “Yes, the Climategate scientists behaved badly. But that doesn’t mean the data is bad. That doesn’t mean the earth is not warming.”

Darwin Airport - by Dominic Perrin via Panaramio

Let me start with the second objection first. The earth has generally been warming since the Little Ice Age, around 1650. There is general agreement that the earth has warmed since then. See e.g. Akasufo . Climategate doesn’t affect that.

The second question, the integrity of the data, is different. People say “Yes, they destroyed emails, and hid from Freedom of information Acts, and messed with proxies, and fought to keep other scientists’ papers out of the journals … but that doesn’t affect the data, the data is still good.” Which sounds reasonable.

There are three main global temperature datasets. One is at the CRU, Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia, where we’ve been trying to get access to the raw numbers. One is at NOAA/GHCN, the Global Historical Climate Network. The final one is at NASA/GISS, the Goddard Institute for Space Studies. The three groups take raw data, and they “homogenize” it
to remove things like when a station was moved to a warmer location and there’s a 2C jump in the temperature. The three global temperature records are usually called CRU, GISS, and GHCN. Both GISS and CRU, however, get almost all of their raw data from GHCN. All three produce very similar global historical temperature records from the raw data.

So I’m still on my multi-year quest to understand the climate data. You never know where this data chase will lead. This time, it has ended me up in Australia. I got to thinking about Professor Wibjorn Karlen’s statement about Australia that I quoted here:

Another example is Australia. NASA [GHCN] only presents 3 stations covering the period 1897-1992. What kind of data is the IPCC Australia diagram based on?

If any trend it is a slight cooling.
However, if a shorter period (1949-2005) is used, the temperature has increased substantially. The Australians have many stations and have published more detailed maps of changes and trends.

The folks at CRU told Wibjorn that he was just plain wrong. Here’s what they said is right, the record that Wibjorn was talking about, Fig. 9.12 in the UN IPCC Fourth Assessment Report, showing Northern Australia:

Figure 1. Temperature trends and model results in Northern Australia. Black line is observations (From Fig. 9.12 from the UN IPCC Fourth Annual Report). Covers the area from 110E to 155E, and from 30S to 11S. Based on the CRU land temperature.) Data from the CRU.

One of the things that was revealed in the released CRU emails is that the CRU basically uses the Global Historical Climate Network (GHCN) dataset for its raw data. So I looked at the GHCN dataset. There, I find three stations in North Australia as Wibjorn had said, and nine stations in all of Australia, that cover the period 1900-2000. Here is the average of the GHCN unadjusted data for those three Northern stations, from AIS:

Figure 2. GHCN Raw Data, All 100-yr stations in IPCC area above.

So once again Wibjorn is correct, this looks nothing like the corresponding IPCC temperature record for Australia.
But it’s too soon to tell. Professor Karlen is only showing 3 stations. Three is not a lot of stations, but that’s all of the century-long Australian records we have in the IPCC specified region. OK, we’ve seen the longest stations record, so lets throw more records into the mix. Here’s every station in the UN IPCC specified region which contains temperature records that extend up to the year 2000 no matter when they started, which is 30 stations.

Figure 3. GHCN Raw Data, All stations extending to 2000 in IPCC area above.

Still no similarity with IPCC. So I looked at every station in the area. That’s 222 stations. Here’s that result:

Figure 4. GHCN Raw Data, All stations extending to 2000 in IPCC area above.

So you can see why Wibjorn was concerned. This looks nothing like the UN IPCC data, which came from the CRU, which was based on the GHCN data. Why the difference?

The answer is, these graphs all use the raw GHCN data. But the IPCC uses the “adjusted” data.
GHCN adjusts the data to remove what it calls “inhomogeneities”. So on a whim I thought I’d take a look at the first station on the list, Darwin Airport, so I could see what an inhomogeneity might look like when it was at home. And I could find out how large the GHCN adjustment for Darwin inhomogeneities was.

......................
To my great surprise, here’s what I found. To explain the full effect, I am showing this with both datasets starting at the same point (rather than ending at the same point as they are often shown).

Figure 7. GHCN homogeneity adjustments to Darwin Airport combined record

YIKES! Before getting homogenized, temperatures in Darwin were falling at 0.7 Celcius per century … but after the homogenization, they were warming at 1.2 Celcius per century. And the adjustment that they made was over two degrees per century … when those guys “adjust”, they don’t mess around. And the adjustment is an odd shape, with the adjustment first going stepwise, then climbing roughly to stop at 2.4C.

.............

Figure 8 Darwin Zero Homogeneity Adjustments. Black line shows amount and timing of adjustments.

Yikes again, double yikes! What on earth justifies that adjustment? How can they do that? We have five different records covering Darwin from 1941 on. They all agree almost exactly. Why adjust them at all? They’ve just added a huge artificial totally imaginary trend to the last half of the raw data! Now it looks like the IPCC diagram in Figure 1, all right … but a six degree per century trend? And in the shape of a regular stepped pyramid climbing to heaven? What’s up with that?

Those, dear friends, are the clumsy fingerprints of someone messing with the data Egyptian style … they are indisputable evidence that the “homogenized” data has been changed to fit someone’s preconceptions about whether the earth is warming.


One thing is clear from this. People who say that “Climategate was only about scientists behaving badly, but the data is OK” are wrong. At least one part of the data is bad, too. The Smoking Gun for that statement is at Darwin Zero.

So once again, I’m left with an unsolved mystery. How and why did the GHCN “adjust” Darwin’s historical temperature to show radical warming? Why did they adjust it stepwise? Do Phil Jones and the CRU folks use the “adjusted” or the raw GHCN dataset? My guess is the adjusted one since it shows warming, but of course we still don’t know … because despite all of this, the CRU still hasn’t released the list of data that they actually use, just the station list.

............................

What this does show is that there is at least one temperature station where the trend has been artificially increased to give a false warming where the raw data shows cooling.
In addition, the average raw data for Northern Australia is quite different from the adjusted, so there must be a number of … mmm … let me say “interesting” adjustments in Northern Australia other than just Darwin.

And with the Latin saying “Falsus in unum, falsus in omis” (false in one, false in all) as our guide, until all of the station “adjustments” are examined, adjustments of CRU, GHCN, and GISS alike, we can’t trust anyone using homogenized numbers.

Regards to all, keep fighting the good fight,

w.

wattsupwiththat.com

......
david atlan (00:35:05) :

Impressive detective work, congratulations!
I wish that journalists today would work this way, instead of copy pasting simply some press releases and showing a few pictures of polar bears looking lost in the water…

8

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2009
debreuil (00:35:22) :

Sure that UFO sighting was faked. But look at the other 2500 UFO sightings, they obviously couldn’t all be faked (very tired of hearing that argument regarding both the data and the ’scientists’).


Not sure why I still find these things so shocking, I think mostly how they didn’t even use some made up excuse and hide things in complex math. They literally just move the line by hand and then submit it. Usually cheating is ‘going against the spirit of the game’, but I guess sometimes it is just cheating.

Excellent work figuring all this out, kudos.

......

Ben Gardiner (00:54:30) :

It can’t be a one off. The link below is to a graph from the NOAA’s website, and it shows that over 0.5 degree F of warming is all down to the adjustments. I find this hard to reconcile with common sense – surely they would have to adjust down for UHI effects?

ncdc.noaa.gov

........
.......
yonason (01:26:02) :

What they are hiding, apart from just “the decline.’

“Iceland Temperatures Higher In Both Roman & Medieval Warming Periods Than Present Temps Peer-Research Confirms”
c3headlines.com

“Climategate: Is There Evidence That NASA/GISS Researchers Have Fabricated Global Warming? If There’s Smoke, It’s Usually A Fire “
c3headlines.com
(Or, context is everything.)

“The Climate Liars: Obama Administration Claims Fossil Fuels Kills Millions – A 100% Lie, Opposite of All Known Health Facts & Statistics”
c3headlines.com

And, so very much more.

The data is the data. The only reason to “adjust” it is to hide the fact that it was bad data to begin with. On top of that, the “adjustments,” made by the same people who couldn’t do the measurements properly, are only likely to multiply rather than “correct” any “errors” in the data. There is no reason to trust people who have been lying for decades. They have been doing it so long, it’s second nature to them. They no longer care about or know how to tell the truth.

........



To: RetiredNow who wrote (14815)12/9/2009 4:40:35 PM
From: Brumar89  Respond to of 86355
 
Copenhagen Climate Hype – ‘Warmest Decade on Record’

We shouldn't believe the "warmest decade" claim till its been audited by independent parties like bloggers Steve McIntyre, William Briggs, AJStrata, or Jeff Id. The CRU and their fellow conspirators have demonstrated they're willing to lie and deceive the public to promote the climate alarmist cause. Furthermore, peer-reviewed studies show that the surface temp component of the global warming is distorted in a warming direction.

The BBC and other media report that the past decade has been the warmest in the instrumental record. The past decade has also been one of temperature stagnation despite a 29% increase in man-made CO2 emissions. The recent BBC website article by Paul Hudson entitled: ‘What happened to global warming?’ caused quite a stir amongst the gatekeepers of climate alarmism, as revealed by the leaked UEA CRU emails. The claim that the 3 global surface temperature datasets (NASA GISS, NCDC, and CRU) are ‘independent’ isn’t entirely true – they share 90 to 95% of stations, although they apply their own adjustments to the ‘raw’ data. Also, NASA GISS uses a ‘cooler’ temperature baseline of 1951 to 1980, compared to 1961 to 1990 for the others.

The media don’t mention the unresolved issues/warm bias in the near surface temperature record:

Up to a 50% surface temperature warm bias: McKitrick, Ross R. and Patrick J. Michaels (2007) Quantifying the influence of anthropogenic surface processes and inhomogeneities on gridded global climate data. Journal of Geophysical Research-Atmospheres, 112, D24S09, doi:10.1029/2007JD008465.

A number of signficant uncertainties and biases in these temperatures when they are used to diagnose the magnitude of global warming; Pielke Sr., R.A., C. Davey, D. Niyogi, S. Fall, J. Steinweg-Woods, K. Hubbard, X. Lin, M. Cai, Y.-K. Lim, H. Li, J. Nielsen-Gammon, K. Gallo, R. Hale, R. Mahmood, S. Foster, R.T. McNider, and P. Blanken, 2007: Unresolved issues with the assessment of multi-decadal global land surface temperature trends. J. Geophys. Res., 112, D24S08, doi:10.1029/2006JD008229.

A 30 to 50% warm bias in the surface temperature: Klotzbach, P.J., R.A. Pielke Sr., R.A. Pielke Jr., J.R. Christy, and R.T. McNider, 2009: An alternative explanation for differential temperature trends at the surface and in the lower troposphere. J. Geophys. Res., 114, D21102, doi:10.1029/2009JD011841.


The ‘warmest decade on record’ hype is no doubt part of the unrelenting climate alarmism leading up to, and during, the Copenhagen ‘wealth redistribution’ Summit and doesn’t explore the aforementioned important issues with the near surface temperature trend.

climateresearchnews.com

Peer reviewed study indicating likely warming bias in surface temp data:

Three Decades of Near-Surface and Lower-Troposphere Temperature Measurements
________________________________________
Reference
Klotzbach, P.J., Pielke Sr., R.A., Pielke Jr., R.A., Christy, J.R. and McNider, R.T. 2009. An alternative explanation for differential temperature trends at the surface and in the lower troposphere. Journal of Geophysical Research 114: 10.1029/2009JD011841.

What was done
The authors calculated global linear temperature trends over the 1979-2008 time period based on data provided them by (1) the National Climate Data Center (NCDC, near-surface thermometer data), (2) the Hadley Center (HadCRUT3v, near-surface thermometer data), (3) the University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH, lower-troposphere satellite data), and (4) the Remote Sensing Systems (RSS, lower-troposphere satellite data), after which they compared the four global trends and then subdivided each of them into land and ocean components for further analyses.

What was learned
Klotzbach et al., as they describe it, "find that there have, in general, been larger linear trends in surface temperature data sets such as the NCDC and HadCRUT3v surface data sets when compared with the UAH and RSS lower-tropospheric data sets," which variation in warming trends, as they continue, "is also confirmed by the larger temperature anomalies that have been reported for near surface air temperatures (e.g., Zorita et al., 2008; Chase et al., 2006, 2008; Connolley, 2008)." In addition, they report that "the differences between surface and satellite data sets tend to be largest over land areas."

What it means
With respect to the observation that "differences between surface and satellite data sets tend to be largest over land areas," the five researchers say that this fact indicates "there may still be some contamination because of various aspects of land surface change [such as growing urban heat islands], atmospheric aerosols and the tendency of shallow boundary layers to warm at a greater rate," which ultimately leads them to "consider the possible existence of a warm bias in the surface temperature trend analyses."

We would only add that this possibility is looking ever more likely, especially in light of the ClimateGate email revelations of potential tampering with (i.e., inflation of) near-surface air temperature data over earth's land area, as well as the fact that Santer et al. (2005) have noted that "a non-significant trend differential [between the surface and satellite warming trends] would also occur if the surface warming had been over-estimated by [only] 0.05°C per decade in the IPCC data," and that this seemingly small differential could be responsible for a full half-degree Centigrade upward trend of near-surface air temperature over the planet's land area over the course of the 20th century.

References
Chase, T.N., Wolter, K., Pielke Sr., R.A. and Rasool, I. 2006. Was the 2003 European summer heat wave unusual in a global context? Geophysical Research Letters 33: 10.1029/2006GL027470.
Chase, T.N., Wolter, K., Pielke Sr., R.A. and Rasool, I. 2008. Reply to comment by W.M. Connolley on "Was the 2003 European summer heat wave unusual in a global context?" Geophysical Research Letters 35: 10.1029/2007GL031574.
Connolley, W.M. 2008. Comment on "Was the 2003 European summer heat wave unusual in a global context?" by Thomas N. Chase et al. Geophysical Research Letters 35: 10.1029/2007GL031171.
Santer, B.D., Wigley, T.M.L., Mears, C., Wentz, F.J., Klein, S.A., Seidel, D.J., Taylor, K.E., Thorne, P.W., Wehner, M.F., Gleckler, P.J., Boyle, J.S., Collins, W.D., Dixon, K.W., Doutriaux, C., Free, M., Fu, Q., Hansen, J.E., Jones, G.S., Ruedy, R., Karl, T.R., Lanzante, J.R., Meehl, G.A., Ramaswamy, V., Russell, G. and Schmidt, G.A. 2005. Amplification of surface temperature trends and variability in the tropical atmosphere. Science 309: 1551-1556.
Zorita, E., Stocker, T.F. and von Storch, H. 2008. How unusual is the recent series of warm years? Geophysical Research Letters 35: 10.1029/2008GL036228.

co2science.org