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Visualizations : Top 10 Hottest Years: U.S. Temperature deviation (deg C)

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Created by: cgreen      Created on: Thursday August 23, 3:41 PM

dataset icon Data file: Hottest Years: Temperature deviation (deg C)
Data source: NASA, NOAA and NorCalBlogs
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Comments (10)


cgreen says:
See the site:

http://www.norcalblogs.com/watts/2007/08/1998_no_longer_the_hottest_yea.html
for a great scientific discussion of the issues around global warming.

The authors did some research on surface air temperature sensors, and forced NASA to publish a correction to their web site.


He finally publishes it here, stating that NASA made a correction not only on their own web page, attributing the discovery to McIntyre, but NASA also issued a corrected set of temperature anomaly data which you can see here:
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/Fig.D.txt
Steve McIntyre posted this data from NASA's newly published data set from Goddard Institute of Space Studies (GISS) These numbers represent deviation from the mean temperature calculated from temperature measurement stations throughout the USA.
According to the new data published by NASA, 1998 is no longer the hottest year ever. 1934 is.
Four of the top 10 years of US CONUS high temperature deviations are now from the 1930s: 1934, 1931, 1938 and 1939, while only 3 of the top 10 are from the last 10 years (1998, 2006, 1999). Several years (2000, 2002, 2003, 2004) fell well down the leaderboard, behind even 1900. (World rankings of temperature are calculated separately.)
Posted Thursday August 23, 3:45 PM
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cgreen says:
If four of the top 10 years of US CONUS high temperature deviations are now from the 1930s: 1934, 1931, 1938 and 1939, then how can it have been caused by humans and CO2?
Posted Saturday August 25, 11:53 AM
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Anonymous says:
These are US temperatures and we are talking GLOBAL warming. Globally, the top 10 warmest years have all occurred in the last 12 years.
Posted Wednesday August 29, 5:41 PM
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cgreen says:
yes, anonymous, that point was addressed at the site. The point of the article was that the surface air temperature sensors were faulty. The US data is considered the best temperature record in the world with the best stations.

It will be interesting to see if the rest of the world gets audited.

The other valid point is the one about media bias, which was addressed at the site:

yes, the adjustments are for the US only. Of course, that didn't stop the media and others earlier this year from trumpeting the fact that 2006 (!)was the warmest year in the US:

http://www.publicaffairs.noaa.gov/releases2007/jan07/noaa07-001.html

Then, of course, 2006 fell when revised data were rolled out in May:

http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/research/2006/ann/ann06.html

Are the media outlets now going to correct themselves again? I'm not holding my breath...

As for the rest of the world, I have always wondered about the state of the temperature data from remote areas of the earth - e.g. India, China, Africa, open oceans. I can only imagine how poor many of these sites are compared with the USHCN. How are the global temperatures corrected, especially for the previous century? There certainly must be severe UHI effects in places with large populations like China and India. Questions, questions...

Frank K.

and...

Remember that AGW crowd blames the US as the prime contributor to CO2. And they correlated global warming with the increase in CO2. If 40% of the top 10 years are now huddled in the 30's that certainly decouples that relationship. But don't worry... the AGW crowd will change the topic from AGW to Climate Change. That way all bases are covered - cooling and warming. Regardless we (the US) are responsible and need to be reigned in by the UN and Gore.

and...



Quoth TCO:

Of course none of this means a damn thing unless you can tell us how this revision impacts the measurement of global temperatures, rather than just US temperature.

Why can't climate scientists do proper error checking? The US GISS temp data has major errors and nobody in "the consensus" detected them. Considering the poor peer review the MBH hockey stick got from those same "scientists" though, that's par for the course.

So, thanks to McIntyre, the hockey stick became a total fiasco for the warmmongers (especially for Michael Mann's reputation). Now the despised skeptic who proved that the HS was scientific fabulism has debunked Hansen's treasured "1998 HOTTEST YEAR EVER" meme. And on the same day this story appeared too:

Global warming is forecast to set in with a vengeance after 2009, with at least half of the five following years expected to be hotter than 1998, the warmest year on record, scientists reported on Thursday.

Finally, if the US data is so dodgy, imagine how bad the rest of the world's temp record keeping has been. We need a Global Climate Audit ASAP!


and...

I have a doubt:
If it is man-made CO2 that brings global warming, naively I would exspect that the US should be among the world regions in which the warming is MORE severely felt.
But now, after NASA revision, it seems that US are among the places LESS affected by long term warming...

There is something to ponder upon or everything is perfectly clear?

So, that addresses the "global" warming point. But, as I will address in my next post, it may not matter, because there is no "consensus" that global warming is caused by human activity.

And even the question of whether man is causing global warming may not matter, because of all the scientific papers studied, only a single one makes any reference to climate change leading to catastrophic results. So, why spend trillions of dollars and wreck the US and world economies for something that won't have catastrophic results?
Posted Friday August 31, 10:12 AM
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Anonymous says:
McIntyre's find isn't as big as you might like. If you follow your link to http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/Fig.D.txt
and look at all the data, instead of cherry picking the hottest 10 years, you'll see that the average annual mean temperature from 1990-2006 is 0.518C whereas from 1930-1939 (a period half as long) the average is 0.500C
Contiguous 48 U.S. Surface Air Temperature Anomaly (C)
Average Annual Mean vs Decade

0.653 2000s (only 7 years)
0.5 1930s
0.424 1990s
0.2 1950s
0.195 1940s
0.176 1980s
0.015 1920s
-0.112 1960s
-0.137 1970s
-0.15 1900s
-0.212 1910s
-0.217 1890s
-0.224 1880s
Posted Monday September 03, 7:23 AM
Last edited Monday September 03, 7:43 AM
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cgreen says:
Thank you anonymous, the “Average Annual Mean vs Decade” shows that the average temperature went DOWN in the 1960s (-0.112) and 1970s (-0.137) and UP in other decades. For example the temperature went up 0.500C in the 1930s, when there was little to no increase in C02 output (ppm). The SUV was not even invented yet.

See the graph and discussion showing their is no consensus in the scientific community that man is causing global warming:
http://services.alphaworks.ibm.com/manyeyes/view/SIk76IsOtha6Zmm6Nf2jI2-


Of course even if all of the above are true it by no means validates the conclusion that we face catastrophic warming over the next hundred years.

It is required of those MAKING the extraordinary claims to provide the strong evidence.

The more you examine the evidence the more holes appear. Mr. McIntyre, with no specific climate science training, has now punched two fairly significant ones in two of the most ballyhooed sacred cows of the AGW faithful.

First Mann's "Hockey Stick" and now the alleged "hottest year" totem.

Anonymous, you make another good point. In the past, the alarmist media were cherry picking the data and trying to foist the claim on us that “the 1990s were the warmest in history”. It turns out they were using data that was not accurate.

“The 1990s were the warmest in history is a common refrain among the alarmists like Jim Hanson, who evidently was responsible for this error. This finding invalidates a great many peer-reviewed articles about climate change. It may take several years to discover all of the fallout that results from this one discovery by McIntyre. To pretend this is a minor discovery is ridiculous. RonCram 01:32, 9 August 2007 (UTC)”

The fact the U.S. record has errors and unexplained adjustments is important because it is widely seen as the best temperature network in the world, having the most stations and the highest quality stations. Now, if the best network has these kinds of problems then the networks in the rest of the world also need much closer scrutiny. This means the metatdata needs to be collected, the quality assessed, some stations cut from the network, then the methods and source code need to be examined. Jim Hansen at GISS refused to turn over their methods and code and McIntyre still found an error. Who knows how many other errors are lurking hidden in the shadows? Phil Jones at CRU has refused to turn over his code, making it look like he has something to hide as well. No, this is an important discovery that causes everyone to question the temperature record on a global scale. Watts has already said that SurfaceStations.org is going global once they finish with the USHCN. McIntyre is not going to stop either, even though people have temporarily shut down his web site with a denial of service attack. RonCram 13:37, 12 August 2007 (UTC)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Instrumental_temperature_record#Stephen_McIntyre_finds_error_in_GISS_temp_record

McIntyre's find is significant when you follow the science and the data. The point of the post is that “a climate station in Detroit Lakes MN had two air conditioner units right next to it. It looked like an obvious cause and effect because in 1999 on May 5th, it was determined that the a/c units were moved off the roof of the radio station where this station resides and moved them to the ground where the temperature sensor is close by.” (see picture at site: http://www.norcalblogs.com/watts/2007/08/1998_no_longer_the_hottest_yea.html )
This “led to an examination of this idea: if its not the a/c units, what then did cause the temperature jump at that time?”
“Steve McIntyre, of Toronto operates www.climateaudit.org and began to investigate the data and the methods used to arrive at the results that were graphed by NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS).
What he discovered was truly amazing. Since NASA does not fully publish the computer source code and formulae used to calculate the trends in the graph, nor the correction used to arrive at the "corrected" data. He had to reverse engineer the process by comparing the raw data and the processed data..
Here is one of his first posts where he begins to understand what is happening. "This imparts an upward discontinuity of a deg C in wintertime and 0.8 deg C annually. I checked the monthly data and determined that the discontinuity occurred on January 2000 - and, to that extent, appears to be a Y2K problem. I presume that this is a programming error."
He further refines his argument showing the distribution of the error, and the problems with the USHCN temperature data. He also sends an email to NASA GISS advising of the problem.
He finally publishes it here, stating that NASA made a correction not only on their own web page, attributing the discovery to McIntyre, but NASA also issued a corrected set of temperature anomaly data which you can see here:
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/Fig.D.txt
Steve McIntyre posted this data from NASA's newly published data set from Goddard Institute of Space Studies (GISS) These numbers represent deviation from the mean temperature calculated from temperature measurement stations throughout the USA.
According to the new data published by NASA, 1998 is no longer the hottest year ever. 1934 is.
Four of the top 10 years of US CONUS high temperature deviations are now from the 1930s: 1934, 1931, 1938 and 1939, while only 3 of the top 10 are from the last 10 years (1998, 2006, 1999). Several years (2000, 2002, 2003, 2004) fell well down the leaderboard, behind even 1900.”
So, “I salute the work of Steven McIntyre, he has now made two major contributions to climate science.
1) Proving how the Mann "hockey stick" used in all Gore's movie, An Inconvenient Truth, was based on unsupportable data and methods.
2) Proving how yearly temperature anomalies for the USA are based on data that had been processed incorrectly.”
Posted Tuesday September 04, 12:14 PM
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Anonymous says:
Is this the cause fo global warming? i mean look at the signs this is giving us.....sooo what does this mean..that the years coming are going to get hotter? I mean come on! What is this going to mean to us. are you trying to say that the next years are goin to get hotter? just wandering this stuff for my report that is due..haha
Posted Monday October 29, 6:56 PM
Anonymous says:
mkufg4oty
Posted Monday June 16, 9:59 PM
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Anonymous says:
how can we help the bay
Posted Monday June 16, 10:03 PM
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Anonymous says:
how can we help the bay
Posted Monday June 16, 10:05 PM

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