G'day Soilguy,
I'd post links or citations to pretty much everything I said except I've pretty much given up on this forum. It is a waste of time.
The data of climate is my current direct interest. It is what I have an acceptance for a PhD study for. It is what I'm currently being paid to research. Trouble is it is also almost completely devoid of actual studies.
Instead of looking at NASA's data, look at the GHCN data set that is the data that was used by NASA as a starting point. It is generally of most use to start with the underlying data.
In addition to the GHCN data set, there are several other data sets that also summarise weather station data. Regional ones are numerous. I usually refer to the GHCN data set alone because it is the one most often used.
This thread really cannot be viewed in isolation. If you go back a few months you will find threads that actually pretty much confined themselves to the topic that they started with. Right now the same arguments are being spread over about five or six threads pretty much indescriminantly of the title of the thread. So this thread was in response to other posts. I have always liked the Time article because it is very close to a lot of global warming articles. It just needed the odd word changed. I then thought, how hard could that be, and found not hard at all, so I posted it.
I'm not suggesting the original Time article was accurate just as I used it to suggest that current news articles are about as useful and accurate.
Why can't you mix weather station data with satellite or balloon data? Balloon data started in 1958 but isn't consistent or greatly useful for comparitive temperatures until the mid 70s. Satellite data starts in 1979. Aside from those limitations, satellite data and balloon data, have the huge advantage of being consistent. They are comparible over time. They should be measuring the same relative things.
This is also true for computerised bouys that went into the water starting in the early 80s. The guages have not been altered in the 20 odd years. They are in the same positions. The are comparable, year to year, month to month, day to day.
As to below zero anomolies after 1976, it depends on what data you use. Satellite data gets panned, as best as I can see, for no other reason than it does not reflect the "consensus" view. The two teams that compile the data, the Uni of Hunstville especially do not agree with the issues raised about problems with it at all and the point has been very well made, and seemingly totally ignored, that even if corrrected for the worst of the problems imagined, it still does not match the surface data and still does not show a warming trend and it does show many below zero years after 1976.
Why do I have the position I have? That one is easy to answer. I did not have any particular position on global warming. I assumed it was true but rather doubted the "company line" that it was man's fault and was going to be a disaster. But that wasn't a strongly held position. I just thought the same arguments that I didn't like for global cooling when I first started studying climate, where being used again but for the opposite position.
My interest in climate is to do with something that has never been satisfactorily answered and that is why deglaciations or reglaciations suddenly occur. Why the switch? Particularly why did it suddenly get warmer 11,300 odd years ago. And when I say "suddenly" I was talking in the more geological term, which means it could have taken centuries, however, that also interested me. Just how long did it take?
I've stayed interested in these questions for more than 30 years, and read considerable climate research, including global warming research, because it often touched on my area of interest. It might have been only peripherally relevant to my interest, but this is not an area that got a lot of funding so you take what you can get.
I'm disabled and mostly bed ridden. Basically useless to society. I was offered the change to be of some use by carrying out some research for an institute interested in climate and happily accepted. All I had to do was review climate research and point out problems with scientific methodology or the underlying data, if there was any.
I thought that I'd find the normal bias inherent in most soft sciences. That is the unintentional bias caused by the scientists wishing their results to correspond with their pet theory. Trouble is this isn't what I found.
The more global warming studies I reviewed in depth, the more depressing the subject became. I found fraud, data manipulation, deliberate misinterpretation of data and occasionally I found just bias problems. What I didn't find was any research that demonstrated global warming as even a good suggestion that did not have major flaws.
I also type very fast, meaning my posts can be very long indeed, and have had a very bad habit of not cross referencing the research that I have read, making it much harder to provide citations or links that to express views based on that research.
And if I do provide links or citations, currently in this discussion, it does not seem to matter to the circular argument that has developed. You actually did the same thing, although probably unintentionally. You went from weather data, which is something that is very hard to argue about, if you look at the raw data, as long as you are interested in science and not proving a certain view point, and widened the argument back again to glaciers, etc.
Glaciers are a wide topic all on their own and I did provide several citations to research that throughs doubt on global warming being of any great relevance to glacier expansion or contraction. So I've already been there. Glaciers are problematic in that in an interglacial period they tend to disappear. That's what interglacial means, between glaciers. Since this has been a very long interglacial period then glaciers should be disappearing. That is the philosophic part of the argument. The more technical aspects relate to whether tropical glaciers have been disappearing because it has become warmer in the last hundred years or so, are really contracting, when the total count of glaciers are used, have contracted and expanded by greater amounts than currently during previous parts of this Holocene epoch. I could go on, but thene I'd have to refer to studies again and they would again be ignored.
So let's go back to data and why I have a problem with even the concept that there is any consistent global warming. In order to review the last few studies I was looking at, I had to look at the data that supported them. It was as I looked at this data that I found really serious problems with the data, not with satellite data or balloon data, but SAT (Surface Air Temperature) data.
I've gone into those problems in considerable detail in other posts over several months but basically it comes down to this:
1. The data is inconsistent, poorly recorded, and from weather stations that have experienced very large changes. Most of these changes bias the data towards appearing to show a warming trend. Moving a weather station into a more urban area raised the recorded temperature for instance without the regional temperature changing one iota.
2. Only about 3% of the 7,000 weather stations currently recording world data go back to 1880 or a data anywhere close to this. So the data has to be stitched together or manipulated to provide longer term trends.
3. There is no such thing as "average". There is no definition of what a world temperature is. No suggestion of what weighting should be given to particular regions or whether massed weather stations in small regions such as the Eastern seaboard of the US should be just added to the total or some adjustment made for the concentration.
4. There is no definition of how a daily average should be recorded. There is not even a standard for when records should be taken. Should they just be maximum and mimimums. Should they be two hourly. Should they be three hourly. Should they be taken at midday and whose midday would that be. How do you adjust for even the simple things such as daylight savings.
5. There is no definition of how any weather service should calculate an average. Should it just include max and min or every record available. This one has the potential to introduce a margin of error in the multiple degrees in a discussion where .8 of a degree over a century is the reason for the global warming discussion.
6. There is no method of determining what urban effect has done to the temperatures or how to adjust for it. It is interesting to me anyway that the raw data often shows less of a trend towards warming than when an attempt is made to adjust the temperatures down for the urban effect. That one just does not make sense at all.
7. There is no acknowledgment of local urban effects or any attempt to actually record changes to weather stations which would effect their usefulness for comparing temperatures over time. This one is of direct interest to me because I've gone to the trouble of actually contacting individual stations to find out why there has been a sudden change in temperatures for instance (which in itself is not easy to spot when a yearly average can change by 10 degrees celcius in a temperate station just because it is a slightly hotter or colder year than the one before). Even randomly contacting stations, reveals very large changes that are not recorded anywhere but effect the weather data by as much as a couple of degrees. Everything from the weather station was moved in relation to a building, to it was moved to another part of a town, to the other side of the building, to a different height. It is actually very rare to find a weather station that has not moved their measuring equipment.
So forgive me if I'm rather skeptical of the use of SAT data to provide a trend. Of course none of this would matter hugely if the trends accorded with other data. If the satellite data even remotely matched the SAT data then you could at least guess the SAT data had some use. But it doesn't.
If you didn't have regions where accuracy is more likely such as the US data that completely contradict the global data then you could suggest that all the problems I've mentioned average out.
And it goes on and on and on. Why are there more weather stations that show a cooling trend than those that show a warming trend? Using the NASA site you started with, you can demonstrate this for yourself. You can either download the whole data set and do some arithmetic on it or you can just select a few stations. Doesn't matter. You will get the same problem.
Where are the studies critical of this data? There aren't any. I was asked to write an arcticle on this topic and even to present a paper at a conference. The article has never been published. My invitation to the conference was withdrawn. Is this because I'm a crackpot? Maybe. I could be an idiot that has no idea what he's talking about. I could be a "professional spinner" or have been paid vast sums of money to destroy the only planet I or my family have. Does this really sound logical to you?
This is what happens with discussions on global warming in the end. If you don't agree, you are nuts, you have no academic skills, you are paid by the oil industry or the automobile industry, or you are a Bush supporter. I get a pension from my government. I'm not paid by anyone currently. I have not seen a cent of the research money I'm supposed to receive and if I did it would have been from an institute that is extremely pro global warming. I rather like this planet. Believe it is the only one we have. Think man has done some horrible things to it and continues to do so. I worry about the loss of forests and other habitat for native animals. I'm not sure that makes me a crank but I tire of being accussed of somehow being paid to present the position I hold. Making such an accusation is actually defamatory, in addition to not advancing the discussion at all.
Regards
Richard
