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To: Brumar89 who wrote (835713)

2/10/2015 12:25:05 PM

From: Brumar89

Respond to of 1574854

Cooling The Past In New Zealand

February 9, 2015

By Paul Homewood

In case you thought widespread temperature adjustments were confined to the Arctic and South America, consider again. Apparently, New Zealand has caught Paraguayan fever!

There are five stations currently operational under GHCN in New Zealand and surrounding islands. It will come as no great surprise now to learn that GHCN warming adjustments have been added to every single one. (Full set of graphs below).

In all cases, other than Hokitika, the adjustment has been made in the mid 1970’s.

This adjustment has been triggered by a drop in temperatures in 1976, as we can see with Gisborne, below. (The algorithm did not spot that temperatures recovered to previous levels two years later!)

Raw Data

http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/show_station.cgi?id=507932920000&dt=1&ds=1

Was this temperature drop due to some local, non-climatic factor at Gisborne. Apparently not, because the same drop occurred at all eleven of the other NZ stations operating at that time.

Below is a comparison of the unadjusted annual temperatures for 1975 and 1976.

	1975	1976	Change
Gisborne	14.37	13.37	-1.00
Napier	14.65	13.69	-0.96
New Plymouth	14.22	13.07	-1.15
Auckland	15.59	14.66	-0.93
Wellington	12.84	11.53	-1.31
Nelson	12.87	11.72	-1.15
Kaitaia	15.87	15.00	-0.87
Christchurch	11.86	10.52	-1.34
Hokitika	12.17	11.09	-1.08
Chatham I	11.58	10.36	-1.22
Invercargill	10.34	9.17	-1.17
Raoul I	19.57	19.04	-0.53

http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/station_data_v2/

As a result of the adjustment, Gisborne’s temperatures for 1974 and earlier have been lowered by 0.7C. Similar sized adjustments seem to have been made at the other stations.

As the algorithm cannot have arrived at the adjustment by comparing NZ stations with each other, it must have used stations further away, presumably in Australia.

But can we really compare the two? Once again, the evidence points strongly to the adjustments being incorrect, and reacting to a genuine drop in temperature.

It is often claimed that, overall, temperature adjustments up and down largely cancel each other out. But, while we keep coming across warming adjustments that are questionable, I don’t see cooling ones similarly criticised. Maybe most of these are justifiable.

If this is the case, and many of the warming ones are not, then the overall effect would be much greater than suggested.

On the other hand, if many cooling adjustments are also incorrect, it does not inspire much confidence in the process.

.....
https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2015/02/09/cooling-the-past-in-new-zealand/

To: Brumar89 who wrote (835713)	2/10/2015 12:28:33 PM
From: Wharf Rat	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1574854

"You can’t just take raw data off a detector and claim it’s real; if you do so, then at best you’d be fooling yourself, and at worst you’d be trying to fool others" No, Adjusting Temperature Measurements Is Not a Scandal By Phil Plait That thermometer reads higher all the time.Drawing by lilmallugirl/Shutterstock The latest salvo in the War on Reality comes from the U.K. paper the Telegraph, which is a safe haven for some who would claim—literally despite the evidence—that global warming isn’t real. The article, written by Christopher Booker (who flat out denies human-induced global warming), is somewhat subtly titled “The Fiddling With Temperature Data Is the Biggest Science Scandal Ever.” In it, Booker claims that climate scientists have adjusted temperature readings from thermometers in Paraguay to make it look like the temperature is increasing, when the measurements off the detectors actually show the opposite. The theme of the article is that scientists “manipulated” the data on purpose to exaggerate global warming. This is nonsense. The claim is wrong. The scientists didn’t manipulate the data, they processed it. That’s a very different thing. And the reason they do it isn’t hard to understand. Imagine you want to measure the daily temperature in a field near a town. You want to make sure the measurements you get aren’t affected by whether it’s cloudy or sunny—direct sunlight on the thermometer will increase the temperature you measure—so you set it up in a reflective box. Look: Right away you’ve adjusted the temperature, even before you’ve taken a measurement! You’ve made sure an outside influence doesn’t affect your data adversely. That’s a good thing. So you start reading the data, but over time someone buys the property near the field, and builds houses there. Driveways, roads, houses leaking heat … this all affects your thermometer. Perhaps a building is erected that casts a shadow over your location. Whatever: You have to account for all these effects. That’s what scientists do. That’s what scientists did. They examined the data from these thermometers all over the world, and tried to minimize the impact of outside influences. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t be able to trust the data. How you correct the data is important, of course, and this is where the second claim comes in: Scientists manipulated the data specifically to make it look like global warming is stronger than it really is. Ah, but we know that’s not true! A few years ago, an independent group at Berkeley Earth took that same temperature data and re-examined it, processing it in a different way. Guess what they found? Yup. The planet’s warming up, and pretty much just as the other scientists had said. You can read more about this in an excellent article by Neville Nicholls, who is an expert in how meteorological measurements need to be adjusted in this way. There’s more at the “… and then there’s Physics” blog and at Real Sceptic, and Skeptical Science has an article debunking this as well. and Message 29935985 A graph is worth a thousand words. Here are the results of the Berkeley research compared with various other groups: The recalibrated temperatures by the Berkeley group (black) versus various other groups. In the past, measurements are less certain, but in modern times they converge and all trend the same way.Graph by Berkeley Earth As you can see, there’s virtually no difference. As long as the measurements are processed properly they show what we know, what we’ve known, for quite some time: The world is warming up, and it’s warming up rapidly. So, far from being “the biggest science scandal ever,” this isn’t even a scandal at all, and is in fact how science works. You can’t just take raw data off a detector and claim it’s real; if you do so, then at best you’d be fooling yourself, and at worst you’d be trying to fool others. And that’s certainly not how science works. slate.com