Garbage In, Garbage Out: Latest Revelations on the IPCC Data
This week brought a slew of discoveries on the “Settled Science”:
1. Thanks to Steve McIntyre of ClimateAudit.org, we know now that James Hansen’s NASA Goddard Institute of Space Studies made a little mistake in calculating the temperatures in the U.S. over the last seven years. Evidently, before 2000 a “time-of-observation” adjustment was made to the temperature calculations. When they changed to a new system in 2000, they ceased using this adjustment. Oops! Now the “nine of the top ten warmest years” claim has to be changed—to only three in the last decade, versus four from the thirties. And the warmest U.S. year now is not 1998, but 1934!
2. From a recent paper co-authored by UAHuntsville’s Dr. Roy Spencer, Dr. John R. Christy and Dr. W. Danny Braswell; and Dr. Justin Hnilo of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory published in the American Geophysical Union’s “Geophysical Research Letters we know that computer modelers made some incorrect assumptions about the effects of clouds in a warmer environment. Dr. Roy Spencer, a principal research scientist in UAHuntsville’s Earth System Science Center, says, “All leading climate models forecast that as the atmosphere warms there should be an increase in high altitude cirrus clouds, which would amplify any warming caused by manmade greenhouse gases. That amplification is a positive feedback. What we found in month-to-month fluctuations of the tropical climate system was a strongly negative feedback. As the tropical atmosphere warms, cirrus clouds decrease. That allows more infrared heat to escape from the atmosphere to outer space.”
3. As to those very accurate temperature measuring stations? Look at the siting for this MMTS.
Two papers [Wang et al., Urban heat islands in China (GRL 1990) and Jones et al., Assessment of urbanization effects in time series of surface air temperature over land (Nature 1990)] seem to be based on fabricated data such as data from China that were claimed to come from the same stations even though the location of most stations was changing many times by as much as dozens of miles (which is, of course, a huge problem for any analysis of the urbanization effects) The paper by Jones et al. (1990) is important because it is used by IPCC AR4 to resolve an apparent contradiction: the paper argues that the urbanization effects are 10 times smaller than needed to explain the observed 20th century warming trend. Douglas Keenan has used some observations of Steve McIntyre (climateaudit.org) and himself and filed a formal complaint of research fraud regarding this work.
Large data miscalculations, opposite-resulting climate modeling assumption errors, dubious temperature station sitings, and possible research fraud? I’m so glad that the congressional used car salesmen want us to quickly sign on the bottom line for $533 billion dollar wealth transfer schemes based on this science.