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New Analysis Shows Lamar Smith's Accusations On Climate Data Are Wrong (arstechnica.com)

Layzej writes from a report via Ars Technica: In 2015, NOAA released version 4 of their marine temperature dataset called ERSST. The new dataset accounted for a known cooling bias introduced when ocean temperature measurements transitioned from being taken in ship engine intake valves to buoy-based measurements. The warming of the last couple decades increased ever so slightly in NOAA's new analysis. This was a red flag for U.S. House Science Committee Chair Lamar Smith (R-TX), who rejects the conclusions of climate science -- like the fact that the Earth's climate is warming. Suddenly he wanted to see the researchers' e-mails and echoed the accusations of contrarian blogs about scientists' supposedly nefarious adjustments to sea surface temperature measurements. Rather than invoking scientific conspiracies, issues like this should be settled by analyzing the data. A new study, led by University of California Berkeley's Zeke Hausfather, does just that -- and Rep. Smith won't like these results, either. To test the NOAA dataset, Zeke's team created instrumentally homogeneous temperature records from sensors available only over the last couple decades. As it happens, the Argo float data, the buoy data, and the satellite data each hew closer to the updated dataset that NOAA used. The older version (3b) gives a global average that is too cool in recent years, growing to an offset of about 0.06 degrees Celsius. The researchers repeat this same analysis for two more major sea surface datasets that are used by the UK Met Office and the Japanese Meteorological Agency for their global temperature records. Both of those datasets also drift cooler than the comparison data, but less so than NOAA's old dataset.

17 of 502 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Who cares? by mwvdlee · · Score: 5, Informative

    Bullshit.
    It's the kind of obvious, blatant, easily disprovable but nonetheless convenient lie that leads to electing bullshit presidents.

    http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/w...

    http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/s...

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  2. Re:Who cares? by locofungus · · Score: 4, Informative

    From where are you getting your figures?

    http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/s...

    That claims they're down 22% from 1990 levels.

    Those exclude LULUCF (land use changes) - perhaps you have inclusive figures? (Although I'd be surprised if LULUCF could be bigger than the significant reductions in everything else.)

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  3. Re:instrumentally homogeneous temperature records by dywolf · · Score: 5, Informative

    200 years ago, and at roughly 330,000x faster than all previous known trends it's nothing like previous trends.
    go peddle your paid shilling somewhere else.

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  4. Not even a debate by sjbe · · Score: 5, Informative

    Climate scientists haven't established Human caused global warming is real.

    You are wrong. It's not even really a debate among climate scientists at this point. So far all the data seems to clearly show that humans are a key factor in recent climate change. And even just on the face of it the notion that we could be dumping so many billions of tons of CO2 and other pollutants into the atmosphere without any effect or consequence is just absurd. If you want to argue that we are still pinning down the exact extent of the effect of our activities then you might have an argument. But to pretend that our activities have had no effect on global climate is ridiculous.

    That said, it doesn't really matter anyway. Even if hypothetically speaking humans weren't responsible at all for climate change we still would need to take action to deal with the reality of it. It's going to affect food supplies, energy resources, ecosystems, pollution, geopolitics, etc. The US Department of Defense (hardly a bastion of liberal thinking) considers it real and a significant threat to national security.

    So far we just have a gently upward trend starting about 400 years ago, very similar to the previous upward trends that were entirely natural.

    Yeah sorry but the data is just a tad more complicated than your little made up and cherry picked sound bite.

  5. Re:Or skeptics by Layzej · · Score: 5, Informative

    Right. During the late 20th century, ocean temperatures readings were primarily taken mechanically through an “engine-intake valve.” Ships pump water into their hull in order to cool the engine room, and a thermometer measures its temperature on the way. This can introduce bias to the numbers, though: Because engine rooms get hot, engine-intake-valve readings are skewed warmer than the actual ocean.

    Whereas 95 percent of NOAA’s readings came from ship engine rooms in the early 1990s, 85 percent now come from buoys, which provide a more accurate reading. It turns out that if you don't account for that known bias you get a result that is less accurate.

  6. Re:Two questions before I call BS. by locofungus · · Score: 5, Informative

    (2) Aren't they talking about data taken on ships by physically reading thermometers to an accuracy less than the claimed effect? As I was taught: If you don't know your error, you haven't made a measurement. In this case the error could be even greater than the effect itself!

    No.

    Over time the proportion of data contributed by taking measurements on ships has decreased.

    NOAA said "hey guys, this has introduced a systematic error into the data and we need to adjust for it"

    Other scientists were skeptical.

    This group decided to test it. So they took several independent data sets that each used just one measurement so that each dataset is internally consistent.

    They then discovered that all the data sets matched the NOAA adjusted combined data better than the previous unadjusted data.

    What their work indicates is that the slow migration from ship thermometer to buoy, satellite etc has hidden an extra 0.06C/decade of warming - and that the warming rate over the last several decades is much closer to the rate over the previous decades than was thought.

    (It should be pointed out that some statisticians don't accept that there was any statistically significant change in the warming rate over the last several decades even when using the pre NOAA (3b) data. My statistical knowledge isn't sufficient to be able to independently do the changepoint analysis necessary to confirm or refute this)

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  7. Thrid party review by Layzej · · Score: 4, Informative

    The evaluation was performed by a third party that is not associated with NOAA. In fact, lead author Zeke is associated with the Berkeley BEST skeptics that were once the darlings of the climate contrarian movement - until the results of their audit were released and ended up confirming the consensus position.

    Regarding the graph, what you are looking at is the difference between the reference and the reconstruction. A negative trend means the reconstruction is lower than the reference. A positive trend means that the reconstruction is higher than the reference. A zero trend means that the reconstruction is bang on. You'll notice that the ERSSTv4 matches the instrumentally homogeneous reference datasets quite well. That's a good thing!

  8. Re: Who cares? by Notabadguy · · Score: 5, Informative
  9. Re:Two questions before I call BS. by silentcoder · · Score: 3, Informative

    >I don't know and neither do you
    Yes... we do... because only one of the two options is even POSSIBLE. The other is literally declared impossible by Newton's first law and ALL THREE laws of thermodynamics. Put a ship engine intake thermometer and a buoy thermometer in the same water - it's physically impossible that the ship will NOT measure hotter than the buoy. Because those heaters, engines, people - all those things PRODUCE ENERGY. And energy cannot be destroyed, it cannot dissapear. It's there and it WILL affect the measurement.
    Luckily we DO know exactly by how MUCH it affects it - because we DO have buoy's to compare it with.

    > I mean I may be thick as a stick in a bucket of pig-shit
    There's no may be about it, but congratulations on the closest to true thing you've said all day (it would have been entirely true if you replaced 'may be' with 'am').

    >I do at least know these kinds of statistical shenanigans are usually bollocks.
    There was nothing statistical about this - and besides which, no they NEVER are - but professional liars like Steve Mcntyre will write screeds declaring the statistics invalid. Not because it is - because he is flat out lying to you about what the numbers mean (or even, on occasion, what those numbers ARE). It's not that he doesn't understand the statistics, he has the training and he does. It's that he knows YOU DO NOT. So he knows if how to tell a convincing lie. And you fall for it.
    Probably because of the above stated stick in a bucket of pig-shit problem.

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  10. Re:Two questions before I call BS. by silentcoder · · Score: 2, Informative

    Okay fucknuckle - please educate yourself on why medicine is one of the hardest scientific fields to study - and why that low replication rate tells you NOTHING about other sciences.

    Hint: because experimenting on people is very difficult to do ethically and there are a lot of things you OUGHT to do to get reliable scientific results which you CANNOT do because doing them would be considered mass murder.

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  11. Re:instrumentally homogeneous temperature records by dywolf · · Score: 5, Informative

    while not large, yes actually it does have an effect, even on greenhouses.

    greenhouses work because glass (or plastic sheeting) does not well transmit infrared radiative energy. IE, its an insulator that blocks the transmission of radiative heating, or radiative transfer. visible and ultraviolet light passes through the glass and strikes the surface of the objects inside, including the molecules of air. some of this energy is then re-radiated as infrared light energy, ie, heat. Because the glass blocks the infrared from exiting the structure, the system becomes unbalanced.

    In thermodynamics terms, the greenhouse is an enclosed system with 1 input and no output.
    And therefore because Ei > Eo, the total energy of the system must increase, and this results in increased temperature inside.

    Now, it is completely possible to create a greenhouse (or simply, enclosed system) and control the gases inside, then measure the effect different compositions have on the total temperature increase when exposed to a source of radiative energy that can enter but not escape.

    In fact, that's exactly how it's been proven that CO2 is in fact a greenhouse gas as early as the 1800s by scientists studying the radiative effects of various gases, such as john Tyndall.

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  12. Do greenhouses create their own heat? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    No. Therefore DESPITE NO HEATING FROM THE GLASS, the greenhouse heats up.

    And therefore one of the simplest and dumbest denier memes "how can it make"things warmer? That breaks the 2nd law of thermodynamics!" is shown to be bollocks.

    You see, if it were NOT proposed as an ANALOGY (look the word up, moron), your "complaint" that greenhouse glass isn't made of CO2 would stand up. But it isn't and it doesn't.

    The proof of AGW is

    1) CO2 causes heat to be trapped
    2) If the sun's output remains the same, the earth will warm
    3) We are burning fossil fuels, increasing the CO2 content of the atmosphere

    The greenhouse is an analogy.

    The greenhouse effect is the effect, and no greenhouses are required.

  13. Get yer data here. by hey! · · Score: 5, Informative

    On one hand the per capita CO2 emitted HAS increased from 4.3 tons per person in 1990 to 4.9 tons per person in 2014. This suggests that the world doesn't care.

    On the other hand the world is far wealthier than it was twenty-five years ago. If you look at CO2 per dollar of purchasing power (PPP GDP), the world reduced it's CO2 emissions per dollar by fifty-six percent. The per dollar of GDP emissions have declined most markedly in ... Europe. The major industrial countries of Europe scored per dollar reductions on the order of 60% - 80%. (UK 600 g/$ --> 200; France 367 g/$ --> 129; Germany 560->208; Denmar 597->148; UK 557->182). Most European countries emit less CO2 per person, in the cases of the largest industrialized countries (UK, France, Germany) dramatically so. Italy is the only industrialized country to score large increases in C02 over that period.

    SO here's the TL;DR: the world has tried and succeeded at becoming dramatically more carbon efficient -- about 2x as efficient on a dollar basis. That efficiency gain have not kept up with a Gross World Product that has more than doubled, and a population increase of over 1/3.

    There's a world of difference between doing nothing and not doing quite enough to solve the problem. What we have done is push a number of climate change consequences further into the future, and that makes a big difference. For many of us it means not living to see those changes.

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  14. Re:instrumentally homogeneous temperature records by Ol+Olsoc · · Score: 4, Informative

    There's no convection in a greenhouse.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

    From the article:

    The possibility of using carbon dioxide enrichment in greenhouse cultivation to enhance plant growth has been known for nearly 100 years.[18][19][20] After the development of equipment for the controlled serial enrichment of carbon dioxide, the technique was established on a broad scale in the Netherlands.[21] Secondary metabolites, e.g., cardiac glycosides in Digitalis lanata, are produced in higher amounts by greenhouse cultivation at enhanced temperature and at enhanced carbon dioxide concentration.[22] Commercial greenhouses are now frequently located near appropriate industrial facilities for mutual benefit. For example, Cornerways Nursery in the UK is strategically placed near a major sugar refinery,[23] consuming both waste heat and CO2 from the refinery which would otherwise be vented to atmosphere. The refinery reduces its carbon emissions, whilst the nursery enjoys boosted tomato yields and does not need to provide its own greenhouse heating.

    Go figure, eh?

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  15. Re:instrumentally homogeneous temperature records by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    unfortunately this has nothing at all to do with science. It has everything to do with politics and religion.

    republicans generally (this days) appear to want to say 'x isn't happening' if x is something that they do not see as 'good for business' or 'written in the bible'.

    It has nothing to do with whether or not they personally believe or disbelieve, can be educated/are educated. it has everything to do with their predisposition and desire to promote what they perceive as 'good for big business'.

    Like deregulation, for example: allowing businesses to throw toxic waste into my drinking water is good for business (in the short term) because it allows big business to avoid costs related to treating said toxic waste or disposing of it somewhere else other than my drinking water.

  16. Re:Funny how by hey! · · Score: 4, Informative

    Not so funny if you know how scientists think and communicate.

    Most of us live in a world where overstatement and oversimplification rule. Politicians certainly do it, but don't forget advertisers. Take that advertisement that says "Four out of five dentists recommend Trident for their patients who chew gum." We know it's bullshit, which is not quite the same as saying it is untrue. Four out of five neurosurgeons probably recommend .22 caliber bullets for their patients that shoot themselves in the head.

    Scientists don't communicate that way. My wife is a geophysicist who's believed in AGW since the mid 80s. Yet she's never been happy with the state of the data. Her trained response to something clear as night and day is to point out you've neglected to mention civil and nautical twilight. Although she expected the warming trend of the 90s to happen, the unequivocal nature of the data really irked her because data is supposed to be more contradictory than that.

    So it boils down to this: a politician won't change his mind unless the evidence is unequivocal, a scientist is reluctant to change his mind unless there is data to support both sides of a question.

    This means there is a huge incentive for a scientist to understate their results and make them seem more equivocal. Faced with a very large and dramatic effect, initial scientific reports will almost always understate it. That's because you have to give every possible benefit of the doubt to the null hypothesis.

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  17. Re: Who cares? by IWannaBeAnAC · · Score: 2, Informative

    Ignoring all other points but just focusing on one: The 'corrections' in this data set are, at most, 0.06 degrees C. That is only a couple of pixels on the XKCD comic. Do you know what a pixel is? Hint: it is really small. If you looked at the original comic, and the 'corrected' comic, you wouldn't be able to tell the difference, unless you looked very very closely.