|
Post by mrsonde on Sept 28, 2012 17:37:01 GMT 1
It is most certainly justifiable to adjust for improved radar technology and satellite views of the world. Adjust what? Past records? No, it isn't. It's guesswork, nothing more. You don't need to adjust anything. All you need to do is establish a "like for like" data set, as you mentioned. Fifty years ago the number of tornadoes and hurricanes across North America at least was counted, according to contemporary measurement techniques. Use the same techniques and you have a reliable data-set. Similarly, the techniques available today - don't change them for future measurements, and you have a reliable data-set from now. Yes - the same sort of challenges as you mentioned about measuring tornado numbers. I've seen three tornadoes in my life - none of them would ever get recorded as such, unless new techniques and thoroughness is employed. If they are, and the data set were then retroactively "inflation adjusted", would they predict my sighting of three tornadoes in West Wales, over a timespan of what, twenty years? If they did they'd be completely wrong. They all occurred in one week in the winter of 1989.
|
|
|
Post by marchesarosa on Sept 28, 2012 19:27:14 GMT 1
One would not adjust the past. One would adjust the present downwards slightly. It's only done for purposes of comparison with times when the logging of tornadoes and hurricanes was more limited.
I don't know the details but NOAA has devised it. How else are you going to realistically compare the present with the less technologically advanced past?
It's the same with sunspots. More sunspots can now be seen with powerful telescopes that early astronomers would not have seen with their more feeble instruments. So you have to ignore some of the smaller modern ones in order to get a fair comparison with the past.
It's the same argument for inflation-adjusted storm damage.
In the past coastal areas were hardly developed so hurricanes did less damage. Today they are full of very valuable real estate and a hugely "inflated" population, too.
You have to make some adjustment if you are claiming that hurricanes are increasing just on the basis of rapidly growing insurance claims.
It doesn't seem problematic to me.
|
|
|
Post by mrsonde on Sept 29, 2012 13:42:10 GMT 1
One would not adjust the past. One would adjust the present downwards slightly. Just as daft. How slightly? How do you know? But no such comparison is possible - because you don't have the data. Well, if you don't have the information, you don't. You say: we don't know. That's a far better scientific procedure than making it up, or the adulteration of what you do know based on an illegitimate projection because you've assumed that causal conditions (which you're assuming you know in the first place) remain unchanged. Not really the same at all. The sunspot record is very good, for at least three hundred years anyway. Not in terms of "sunspot number" - which in quantitative terms is a useless data set anyway. Length of cycle on the other hand is known to high precision, and can be determined using exactly the same instruments as the Chinese used a millenia ago. What you arrive at with the procedure you're saying is justified here - extrapolating across unobserved data based on averaging out of currently available, or vice versa - results in the actual patterns within observed data being totally obscured. The three tornadoes I saw in December 1989, for example - caused by a specific astronomical cirumstance, a once in 800 years event, but which would be completely lost if my report was erased in the assumed projection of some sort of smooth average. In the case of sunspots, you'd actually lose the sunspot cycle altogether if you pursued that policy to its logical end - which is why until the 70s the Maunder and other minima in the sunspot record (coinciding with the Little Ice Ages) were considered to be a myth, an error in observation due to primitive techniques. It's not, because in that case you have no "like-for-like" record - not going back centuries, anyway. There's a reasonably lengthy one going back to the war - leave it alone. What fool is claiming that? Nor me, except as a general principle of reliable data analysis. This is how they tried to erase the medieval warm period. Nickrr tried to do the same thing with his assumption that the Little Ice Age and the mid-20th Century cooling was caused by mysteriously dense particulate pollution - because otherwise the data isn't smoothly in the direction he's already decided it should be.
|
|
|
Post by marchesarosa on Sept 29, 2012 19:00:20 GMT 1
|
|
|
Post by nickrr on Sept 29, 2012 23:09:06 GMT 1
|
|
|
Post by marchesarosa on Sept 30, 2012 0:16:34 GMT 1
Must be galling for the promoters of climate alarmism to see the evidence for the distortion of the temperature record laid out so clearly. Louis Hooffstetter in WUWT comments remarked: Temperature data from the past does NOT change. Recorded past temperature data is fixed, empirical data recorded by human beings at specific points in time. For the periods when recorded empirical data is available, we DO know the temperature of the past (at specific locations). This data is fixed and unchanging, period! It is what it is. The people who recorded the data didn’t get it wrong, and climatologists have to deal with it. That’s the whole point of this post! Climatologists can’t adjust the data at will to suit their desires, and that’s exactly what it looks like NASA, Hadley CRU, etc., do on a routine basis. This about sums it up.
|
|
|
Post by mrsonde on Sept 30, 2012 3:51:43 GMT 1
There is data on tornado counts from the past but it was collected without the benefit of modern techniques which capture the big picture. The US population is much greater now and more spread out and therefore more impacted by events like tornadoes than ever before. When everyone has a mobile phone to capture pictures etc there SEEMS to be more activity than in the past when some tornadoes were missed from the record simply because of a sparser population spread. Yes, marchesa, it's not a difficult point. Well, that's obviously your interpretation of what's happened - the people who did the tampering certainly wouldn't agree with that description. They would say they're merely making adjustments to incomplete or imperfect records, trying to bring them up to a comparable level with those we're able to collect today. Nor would they say they've been criminal in such tampering with the data, of course. As for whether such tampering has been done in a just direction or not - as I said, how do they know? Population growth and spread is clearly no guide at all - how does that tell you how many tornadoes there might have been when there was no one there to see them? What difference does that make? That would only be a useful difference, allowing for an averaging out projection, if the variability was a smooth continuous one, in one direction. Obviously, it isn't.
|
|
|
Post by mrsonde on Sept 30, 2012 4:01:03 GMT 1
"This about sums it up."
Quite.
|
|
|
Post by nickrr on Sept 30, 2012 20:34:38 GMT 1
I'm afraid not. It's the usual WUWT bollocks. An individual temperature measurement doesn't change but collating a large number a temperature measurements from across the world to produce an estimate of global temperature rise over decades is a complex process and in this case they've refined that process slightly. In fact if you'd bothered to read the link I gave above you'd see that NOAA explicitly say that the raw data is unaffected.
It's pathetic that WUWT allows such blatant and distorted reporting. The trouble is that their audience is so uncritical of anything that smacks of anti-AGW that they think they can get away with it.
|
|
|
Post by marchesarosa on Sept 30, 2012 20:56:51 GMT 1
It's more than pathetic that NASA/GISS has been permitted to artificially steepen the trend of the global mean temperature over the last century and attempt to level out the inconvenient (for the AGW narrative) hump in global temperatures of the 1930s and 1940s and the clear mid-century dip which caused some who later jumped on the warming bandwagon to extrapolate another Ice Age looming. and this All this started BEFORE the internet made information and data records ubiquitous. Now every adjustment they make is trackable and the trend of all the adjustments is clearly seen to be implacably exaggeratedly upwards. Lowering of the temperature of the past and increasing the temperature of the present is clearly apparent. What Hansen has done at GISS over the decades of the AGW scandal is gratuitous fraud. Here is Spencer and Christie's Satellite data for comparison (since 1979) www.drroyspencer.com/2012/10/uah-v5-5-global-temp-update-for-sept-2012-0-34-deg-c/Note the virtual standstill in warming since the 1998 El Nino year in the satellite data above compared to the GISS data below which shows global mean temperature still shooting upwards after 1998. Do you believe GISS's corrupt ever more alarming trend or the more objective satellite data that shows no more warming since 1998?
|
|
|
Post by marchesarosa on Sept 30, 2012 21:51:11 GMT 1
marchesa: You have to make some adjustment if you are claiming that hurricanes are increasing just on the basis of rapidly growing insurance claims. Mr Sonde: What fool is claiming that? MunichRe, the alarmist Insurance Company (now what could be suspicious about that!) argues that increasing insurance claims from Hurricane damage is evidence of more hurricanes and therefore evidence of Anthropogenic global warming. I know it's stupid, but that's what they tried to claim and some people like Kevin Trenberth, a Lead Author of the IPCC, are still claiming it . You might think that claiming weather is getting more extreme would be a good ploy for an insurance company that wished to raise its premiums. I couldn't possible say! But there are competent statisticians around to demonstrate the error of their claims. rogerpielkejr.blogspot.co.uk/2010/11/mixed-messages-from-munich-re.htmlrogerpielkejr.blogspot.co.uk/2011/11/new-study-on-insured-losses-and-climate.htmlMunichRe has its fingers in lots of AGW - Renewable Energy Investment pies. Go figure.
|
|
|
Post by marchesarosa on Sept 30, 2012 22:15:36 GMT 1
|
|
|
Post by nickrr on Oct 1, 2012 20:48:03 GMT 1
Then tell us why their changes are wrong.
By the way just copying graphs from WUWT doesn't count as we already know that they go out of their way to distort the data.
And Roy Spencer is even worse. Someone who thinks that creationism is valid science can't be relied on for any scientific opinion.
Anyone who uses 1998 as the base year for temperature rise is an obvious charlatan. Ever wonder why people never use 1997 or 1999 for their comparisons?
|
|
|
Post by marchesarosa on Oct 1, 2012 22:36:51 GMT 1
These are GISS graphs and UAH satellite data, silly billy. You can SEE can't you, how GISS (James Hansen's baby) has adjusted the figures over the years? 1998 was the biggest EL Nino event ever recorded, it produced the highest global temperature spike ever recorded and since then it has not been overtaken and temperatures have levelled off. I am amazed that you fall back on the old SkS, Desmogblog ad hominems about Spencer. He runs one of the two global satellite systems. The other satellite system called Remote Sensing Systems has its own MSU (microwave sensing unit) which comes up with much the same global mean temperature data as UAH Spencer is a highly regarded scientist. Even wiki cannot hide his illustrious career After receiving his Ph.D. in 1982, Spencer worked for two years as a research scientist in the Space Science and Engineering Center at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He then joined NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center as a visiting scientist in 1984,where he later became a Senior Scientist for Climate Studies. After leaving NASA in 2001, Spencer has been a Principal Research Scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville (UHA). As well as his position at UHA, Spencer is currently the U.S. Science Team leader for the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer (AMSR-E) on NASA's Aqua satellite, a position he has held since 1994. In 2001, he designed an algorithm to detect tropical cyclones and estimate their maximum sustained wind speed using the Advanced Microwave Sounding Unit (AMSU). Spencer has been a member of several science teams: the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) Space Station Accommodations Analysis Study Team, Science Steering Group for TRMM, TOVS Pathfinder Working Group, NASA Headquarters Earth Science and Applications Advisory Subcommittee, and two National Research Council (NRC) study panels. He is on the board of directors of the George C. Marshall Institute,and on the board of advisors of the Cornwall Alliance. Spencer's research work is funded by NASA, NOAA, DOE and the DOT You are not dealing with a Phil Jones here, nickrr, who cannot produce his own excel spreadsheets, who "loses" the original data on which his global mean temperature was based and who struggled long and hard before being forced to reveal his data. Seems you are in denial about the way the GISS global temperature estimate has departed markedly not only from the satellite data but also the other surface temperature data sets particularly CRU. Here is a comparison between GISS, NCDC CRU, UAH and RSS. You can see the two satellite datasets are well below the other three (which all put their own different adjustments on to basically the same surface station data) Figure 1. Global temperature anomalies from September 1989 through August 2009 as contained in five different data compilations. The GISS (Goddard Institute for Space Studies), NCDC (National Climate Data Center), and CRU (Climate Research Unit) data are all compiled from surface records, while the RSS (Remote Sensing Systems) and UAH (University of Alabama-Huntsville) data are compiled from satellite observations of the lower atmosphere. Note that both the satellite datasets recorded the El Nino year temperature higher than the others, as well as all the other years lower.
|
|
|
Post by marchesarosa on Oct 2, 2012 3:45:21 GMT 1
Another useful thing about satellites, nickrr, is that they can measure outgoing radiation. Outgoing radiation has increased since 1985 suggesting that incoming radiation from the sun has also increased because what goes out is equivalent to what comes in. The climate models, on the other hand, predicted outgoing radiation would be level or fall since it was being intercepted by GHGs and warming up the atmosphere. In fact the unexpected increase in outgoing radiation proves that the cause of the warming was more sunshine reaching the the ground and not the Greenhouse effect of more CO2.
|
|