Slashdot Mirror
Blogger Finds Bug in NASA Global Warming Study?
An anonymous reader writes "According to an article at DailyTech, a blogger has discovered a Y2K bug in a NASA climate study by the same writer who accused the Bush administration of trying to censor him on the issue of global warming. The authors have acknowledged the problem and released corrected data. Now the study shows the warmest year on record for the contiguous 48 states as being 1934, not 1998 as previously reported in the media. In fact, the corrected study shows that half of the 10 warmest years on record occurred before World War II." The article's assertion that there's a propaganda machine working on behalf of global warming theorists is outside the bounds of the data, which I think is interesting to note.
The opinion: A link to the blog entry in question would have been quite on topic.
The pun.
My 0.02 cents
I looked quickly at the numbers. This impacts U.S. air surface temperatures, not global. It almost seems like the U.S. is experiencing a somewhat lesser global warming effect than the rest of the world. Is this possibly due to the post-industrialized economy and tighter environmental regulations? This would mean we are still being impacted by global warming, but it is being countered by less heat-trapping smog and other pollutants?
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
Then again-- maybe not. I strongly suspect this story will receive little to no attention from the mainstream media. (emphasis mine)
Seriously, this data may be very interesting and correct some of our possible misconceptions about the severity of global warming, but come on. The last part of his blog basically makes him sound like a standard zealot conspiracy theorist with an axe to grind. How does that sort of nonsense advance the debate at all?
In other words, some random blogger claiming that climatologists have been using screwed up figures about global warming due to a "year 2000" bug is pretty miraculous. I find it more believable that there's more to the story here than what's being posted. I read some of the logic chopping in the blog post's comments, but I didn't see any climatologists speaking there. Just some random people who seemed like they were playing detective.
I'd like to see some additional corroboration on this.
RTFA. There is a link to NASA posting the new numbers. Need more corroboration?
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
1934 was also warm in northern Europe.
It wasn't a random blogger, it was Steve McIntyre, a statistician whose attention was drawn to an oddity in the data for an official temperature station next to some air conditioners.
I'd like to see some additional corroboration on this.
Uh, NASA admitted to the error and corrected the data in question, producing the exact same data set as the investigator. How much more corroboration do you need? It's in the article, if you took the time to read it.
I read some of the logic chopping in the blog post's comments, but I didn't see any climatologists speaking there.
Wait... you skipped the article, and read the *comments*? Sheesh.
Comment of the year
.. because people were confusing it. It's called "Climate Change". The havoc we're causing on the atmosphere does not make it uniformly warmer - rather it gets way hotter than average in some areas and way colder than average in others... it just ON THE WHOLE WORLDWIDE is hotter on average.
The huge fluctuations in temperature differential are the main causes of the ever increasing stomr activity in the Atlantic and Pacific.
A nutter who has a pathological hatred of environmentalists and who has atrack record of fraud can put together an incoherent load of shit that reveals how bias he is.
Jesus, do some research before spouting bullshit like that. The Great Global Warming Conspiracy's claims were shredded withing 12hrs of broadcast.
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
"The huge fluctuations in temperature differential are the main causes of the ever increasing stomr activity in the Atlantic and Pacific."
Dude, what planet are you living on? In the two years since Katrina, the Pacific and Atlantic have been incredibly quiet. For 2006, we had 10 named storms in the Atlantic with only 5 becoming hurricanes (and two of those got as high as category 3). This year, in the Atlantic, we are up to a whopping three named systems and all were tropical storms. Heck, the year before in the Atlantic, there were only 15 named systems.
In the eastern Pacific, we have had only six named storms. And this is with half the hurricane season nearly over! I liked your post until the end dude. No need to sensationalize things.
If you want to believe that isolated, anecdotal events suffice as proof of man-made global climate change, that's certainly your prerogative.
a rough probability calculation gives that a p less than 0.03
thats supposed to convince me global warming isn't happening?
also the warmest was 1934,
check out a possible related event
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dust_Bowl
We are going to experience cycles of warming and cooling, especially as water vapor (the most important greenhouse gas) and CO2 fluctuate. CO2 levels are actually very low now compared with normal planetary activity.
While I am concerned about the future of our planet and our species' place upon it, I am growing increasingly sceptical of the wild claims surrounding a looming global warming catastrophe. When a scientist such as Stephen Hawking warns "I am afraid the atmosphere might get hotter and hotter until it will be like Venus with boiling sulfuric acid," any reasonable person begins to fear for the future.
My surprise and shock was learning that past concentrations of carbon dioxide were much higher than they are today (indeed, limits so high as to be unreachable, assuming that we have hit peak oil), as revealed in the interview below:
RES: Professor Robert E. Sloan, Department of Geology, University of MinnesotaJC: Dr Joe Cain, interviewer
I have learned that these past CO2 concentrations have been documented in peer-reviewed research journals:
My interest in past CO2 concentrations began by reading a (somewhat) more partisan summary of this information:
An even more thorough refutation, specifically of An Inconvenient Truth, can be found here.
IHAMIAS*
You might want to read the IPCC assessment of the affects climate change will have on food production and the spread of tropical diseases.
http://www.ipcc.ch/pub/un/syreng/spm.pdf
Here are a few relevant parts (emphasis added):
Starting to put the connections together yet? Climate change is a meta-issue. Dealing with climate change is directly working on world hunger and health.
(* I have a masters in atmospheric science.)
Take a look at the NASA GISS PLOT of the new data; it's quite informative: http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/Fig.D_lrg .gif
That's the main point that slashdotters do not seem to be getting right now, it's not like all the global warming theory went bananas.
All you guys, do yourself a favour and plot NASA's corrected data in your favourite plotting program and then compare to other data (be mindful of the Y scale). The years around 1940 were unusually warm in the US, but the year with the highest 5-year average temperature is 2000.
Victims of 9/11: <3000. Traffic in the US: >30,000/y
It's not really a Y2K bug in the conventional sense, and it has nothing to do with Y2K software compliance. It's more like 2000 happened to be the year that the organization collecting the temperature data in the USA changed their procedures for correcting the data for the "time of day" that the temperature reading was taken. This meant a slight difference between the pre-2000 dataset and the 2000-and-later dataset, which is the inconsistency correctly recognized by the guy mentioned in the article.
:-) Two others were in the 1950s (1953, 1954), and the rest were 1990, 1998, 1999, and 2006. Perhaps this is merely indicating that, in the US, lately it's been the hottest it's been since the "dust bowl" years. That's not a pleasant thought.
So, it's merely a coincidence that the change happened to occur in 2000. It could have happened any other year. Referring to this as a result of a "Y2K bug" is misleading. If it is, then anything that changed in 2000 could be called a "Y2K bug".
I don't think demoting 1998 to the 2nd-highest US temperature in a century (barely -- by 0.01 annual average degree) is a big deal either. 1998 is an awfully close second. I also wouldn't ascribe much to the the claim that "half" the top ten years in the US were before WWII (1921, 1931, 1934, 1938). Last I checked, 4 is less than half of ten
The TOP 10 annual temperature years in the US are (celcius degrees from mean):
year annual 5-year mean
1 1934 1.25 0.44
2 1998 1.23 0.51
3 1921 1.15 0.15
4 2006 1.13
5 1931 1.08 0.27
6 1999 0.93 0.69
7 1953 0.90 0.32
8 1990 0.87 0.40
9 1938 0.86 0.36
10 1954 0.85 0.47
If you look at the top ten ranking for the 5-year means, the pattern is pretty clear:
1 2000 0.52 0.79
2 1999 0.93 0.69
3 2004 0.44 0.66
4 2001 0.76 0.65
5 1932 0.00 0.63
6 1933 0.68 0.61
7 2003 0.50 0.58
8 2002 0.53 0.55
9 1998 1.23 0.51
10 1988 0.32 0.51
The 1930s are down at 5th and 6th place. 2005 and 2006 are left out because you can't calculate a 5-year window around them yet.
Finally, the error changes the GLOBAL pattern insignificantly, and the global trend in the last couple of decades is greater than the USA trend.
In all, it's a worthwhile error to catch for the US data, but it doesn't change much about the overall pattern.
Here's a plot courtesy of gnuplot.
(Posted anonymously because people are completely irrational about global warming.)
Here is a response I wrote the last time someone brought up the Card article:
.txt
Point 1: He starts with Mann and Santer and their 1998 "hockey stick" paper. Now, having not done paleoclimate research myself, I'm not going to spend a long time defending the paper. But I don't have to. There have been half a dozen independent analyses or more using different sets of paleo data that come up with very similar results. And that National Academy of Sciences stepped in to do an analysis of all these reconstructions, and published their results last year (http://books.nap.edu/openbook.php?isbn=0309102251 ). Their conclusion? "No reconstruction shows temperatures in the Medieval Warm Period as large as the last few decades of the 20th century". Because of the difficulty of estimating global mean temperatures 1000 years ago, the NAS study declined to assert more than a 70% chance that the last few decades were the very warmest of the millennium, and that is was only "plausible" that they are the warmest of the past 2000 years.
My conclusion: Yeah. Figuring out how warm it was 1000 years ago is hard. But the experts all seem to think it is pretty likely that we are seeing warmth unprecedented in 1000 years, possibly 2000, and it is just getting warmer. Plus, this 1000 year old data isn't fundamental to our theory or our estimates of how bad things will be in 100 years.
Point 2: "Global warming vs. Climate change": First: the reason that the wording has changed is because we're worried about more than just increased in global average surface temperature, but also in changes in precipitation patterns, hurricanes, droughts, variability, etc. So climate change was more inclusive.
2nd: If temperatures fall for three years, that doesn't really mean much. There is noise in the system. El Nino years are warm. Years after massive volcanoes like Pinatubo in 1992 are cool. This displays fundamental ignorance of statistics. If you are looking for trends in noisy data, you use running averages. Otherwise... shoot, it is colder this week than it was last week in Boston. I guess summer is over already, and it is just going to keep getting colder. Sheesh! The number of times this sort of reasoning has been repeated is ridiculous. So called "warming stopped in 1998" arguments are all over the net, even though any climate scientist in 1998 would have told you it was an anomalously warm year because of a very strong El Nino event that moves heat out of the Pacific and into the atmosphere temporarily.
3rd: And it isn't even true that temperatures have been falling for 3 years! The last 12 months have been the warmest 12 months on record! See the GISS temperature record. http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/tabledata/GLB.Ts
4th: The Alarmists (at least the scientists) usually talk about 2100, not 2010 or 2020, and have been doing so for the past 20 years. And indeed, in the past twenty years average temperatures have gone up by 0.4 degrees C. That may not sound large but... 6 degrees C is the difference between an Ice Age and today.
5th: The models do quite a good job at replicating the large patterns of the past century. See the Fourth Assessment Summary for Policymakers released in February. It has a nice graph of "temperatures for each continent in data and from models using: natural forcings, human forcings, or all forcings". www.ipcc.ch
6th: Who is everyone? Why, ocean experts, atmospheric dynamicists, atmospheric chemists, modelers, paleoclimate people, ecologists: they each have their own area, and in each area, the fingerprints of climate change are clearly visible, and those who does interdisciplinary work (like me) can draw all the results together and see a ridiculously clear picture (given how complex the climate is, there is a surprising amount of evidence).
7th: Card says: "Even the IPCC, which was so heavily biased in favor of
I'm going to respond to myself, since I found actual information at http://realclimate.org/: It's not a Y2K bug at all, but a change in sources of temperature data that had not been calibrated with respect to each other. And it's not the gargantuan error that some people seem to be thinking. The anomalies for 1998 and 1934 used to be +1.24 degrees and +1.23 degrees, a difference of 0.01 degree. Now it's the other way around. And the long-term trend is unaffected. The uncertainties in data collection methods over the last 70 years mean that differences of less than 0.1 degree are not considered significant, so we're talking about changes *an order of magnitude* too low to even discuss meaningfully, much less get excited about.