Angry in the Great White North

News from NASA -- it's getting warmer!

This news will likely heat up the contentious global warming argument. NASA scientists say January 2000 to December 2009 was the warmest decade on record.

This news will likely heat up the contentious global warming argument. NASA scientists say January 2000 to December 2009 was the warmest decade on record.

NASA said records show 2009 was tied for the second warmest since 1880 and in the Southern Hemisphere, 2009 was the warmest year on record.

Uh huh.  But then this little bit of a disclaimer:

NASA's GISS said it uses publicly available data from three sources to conduct its temperature analysis. The sources include weather data from more than a thousand meteorological stations around the world, satellite observations of sea surface temperatures, and Antarctic research station measurements, GISS stated.

NASA also points out that other research groups also track global temperature trends but use different analysis techniques. The Met Office Hadley Centre in the United Kingdom uses similar input measurements as GISS, for example, but it omits large areas of the Arctic and Antarctic where monitoring stations are sparse, NASA stated.

Omitting Arctic data?  But that would make the "average", whatever that means on a global scale, seem warmer than it is, wouldn't it?

But then that's the way the CRU does things, and they're hip deep in the whole Climategate scandal.  NASA isn't messing around with the data, right?

Maybe they are:

Not surprisingly, the blatant corruption exposed at Britain's premiere climate institute was not contained within the nation's borders. Just months after the Climategate scandal broke, a new study has uncovered compelling evidence that our [US] government's principal climate centers have also been manipulating worldwide temperature data in order to fraudulently advance the global warming political agenda.

Last Thursday, Certified Consulting Meteorologist Joseph D'Aleo and computer expert E. Michael Smith appeared together on KUSI TV to discuss the Climategate -- American Style scandal they had discovered. This time out, the alleged perpetrators are the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS).  

NOAA stands accused by the two researchers of strategically deleting cherry-picked, cooler-reporting weather observation stations from the temperature data it provides the world through its National Climatic Data Center (NCDC). D'Aleo explained to show host and Weather Channel founder John Coleman that while the Hadley Center in the U.K. has been the subject of recent scrutiny, "[w]e think NOAA is complicit, if not the real ground zero for the issue."

Read the whole thing.  The allegations are stunning.  As only one example of the data manipulation being alleged, Canada data that showed that parts of Canada are, well, really really cold, were simply dropped:

Perhaps the key point discovered by Smith was that by 1990, NOAA had deleted from its datasets all but 1,500 of the 6,000 thermometers in service around the globe.

These are the same datasets, incidentally, which serve as primary sources of temperature data not only for climate researchers and universities worldwide, but also for the many international agencies using the data to create analytical temperature anomaly maps and charts. 

It seems that stations placed in historically cooler, rural areas of higher latitude and elevation were scrapped from the data series in favor of more urban locales at lower latitudes and elevations. Consequently, post-1990 readings have been biased to the warm side not only by selective geographic location, but also by the anthropogenic heating influence of a phenomenon known as the Urban Heat Island Effect (UHI).   

For example, Canada's reporting stations dropped from 496 in 1989 to 44 in 1991, with the percentage of stations at lower elevations tripling while the numbers of those at higher elevations dropped to one. That's right: As Smith wrote in his blog, they left "one thermometer for everything north of LAT 65." And that one resides in a place called Eureka, which has been described as "The Garden Spot of the Arctic" due to its unusually moderate summers.

Not just Canadian data, but data sets everywhere were torqued so that cold data simply melted away, or so say these researchers.

For instance, Hawaiian data (taken on hot airport tarmacs, of course) was used as stand-in data for cooler ocean waters 1200km away.

See, the climate model breaks the planet surface down into 8000 grids.  But there are only 1500 weather stations.  They fill the gaps using stations within 1200 km of the empty grid:

So it's no surprise that Smith found many examples of problems surfacing in actual practice. He offered me Hawaii for starters. It seems that all of the Aloha State's surviving stations reside in major airports. Nonetheless, this unrepresentative hot data is what's used to "infill" the surrounding "empty" Grid Boxes up to 1200 km out to sea. So in effect, you have "jet airport tarmacs 'standing in' for temperature over water 1200 km closer to the North Pole."

And that brings me back to Canada's skewed weather data.  So one weather station in the warm-ish Eureka is the stand-in for all the Arctic.

Sounds pretty bad, right?

Did you know that, for many years now, there has been a movement to have Canada annex the Caribbean British overseas territory of the Turks and Caicos Islands?

The idea keeps coming up every few years, it seems.

As measured from Toronto, those islands are 2500 km away to the sunny south.  But if annexation had happened, they'd be part of Canada, and part of the weather dataset the Canadian government would have collected.

It makes me wonder if some enterprising global warming alarmist might have seen the list of "Canadian weather stations", including our weather station in the great Canadian territory of Turks and Caicos showing a sweltering 29 degrees Celsius (Eureka is shivering at -44 today), and might have thought to himself, "Hey, we can drop a few of these cold outliers in favour of this Turks station that clearly shows global warming making life miserable for sub-Arctic Canadians!  Let me just homogenize those two weather stations and infill this empty Arctic grid using some Turks data..."

I know, it sounds dumb.  I mean, who would do something like that?  Trying to hide Canadian weather data because it doesn't show their precious global warming.  Would these people really had used Turks and Caicos data as "Canadian" weather, to try and make things look a bit warmer?

Are these people really afraid of Canadian weather data being too cold?

From the Climategate data, options with regards to how to fulfill a Freedom of Information request in such a way as to avoid revealing the "wrong" information:

From a document titled "jones-foiathoughts.doc" (witholding of data):

Options appear to be:

1. Send them the data
2. Send them a subset removing station data from some of the countries who made us pay in the normals papers of Hulme et al. (1990s) and also any number that David can remember. This should also omit some other countries like (Australia, NZ, Canada, Antarctica). Also could extract some of the sources that Anders added in (31-38 source codes in J&M 2003). Also should remove many of the early stations that we coded up in the 1980s.
3. Send them the raw data as is, by reconstructing it from GHCN. How could this be done? Replace all stations where the WMO ID agrees with what is in GHCN. This would be the raw data, but it would annoy them.

I guess they are afraid of Canadian data, or at least of having how they dealt with Canadian data being revealed.  Too bad for them Canada is still the True North, minus any balmy Caribbean bits.  It might have made things a bit easier for them if we had a sunny (and hot) Caribbean outpost to use to "fix" the averages.