Jennifer Marohasy

a forum for the discussion of issues concerning the natural environment

Temperatures

The Central England Temperature Index: A Useful Reference

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It has been suggested at this blog that it is too risky for mainstream politicians, for example the leader of the Coalition, Tony Abbott, to admit to being sceptical of anthropogenic global warming. It has been suggested journalists at the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) would simply poke fun at him.

I disagree.

Indeed using Bob Carter’s new book Taxing Air as a reference, he could start educating ABC journalists on some of the basics. A good starting point is the longest established ground temperature record, termed the Central England Temperature Index (CETI).

Central England Temperature Index

This record starts in 1659, which was soon after the invention of the thermoscope but before the Fahrenheit scale came into use.

It is a 353 year-long data set, archived by the British Meteorological Office, and it shows that the average summer temperature in Central England in the eighteenth century was 15.46ºC while that for the twentieth century was 15.35ºC.

Yes.

Far from being warmer due to assumed global warming, comparison of actual temperature data shows that UK summers in the twentieth century were cooler than those of two centuries previously.

This is the sort of very useful information that Mr Abbott could share with ABC journalists.

He could then conclude, as Professor Carter does, that our longest available thermometer records, like our shorter and more accurate modern measures of temperature, offer little by way of evidence for the occurrence of dangerous human-caused global warming.

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To order your copy of Taxing Air and an extra copy to send to Mr Abbott, visit http://www.taxingair.com. The book has great charts like the one embedded into this post of the CETI.

Bob Carter is the author of more than 100 peer-reviewed research papers in professional scientific journals. The great majority of these concern interpretations of ancient environments, including paleo-climatic studies. Link to full of list of publications here http://members.iinet.net.au/~glrmc/new_page_4.htm

Cooking Books for Hot Summers

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The Australian Bureau of Meteorology has “confirmed” that it is been the hottest summer on record in Australia. But I’m sceptical.

The “record breaking hot summer” is apparently a statistical fact derived from simply averaging across 104 or 112 localities – depending on whom at the Bureau is providing the information.  No mention is made of how the temperatures for all of these localities have been “corrected” over recent years through the ACORN program [2]. In general the “corrections” are such that temperature records for specific localities pre-1970 are adjusted down, while records for specific localities post-1970 are adjusted up.

In their media release [1] attention is drawn to the town of Moomba in South Australia which apparently had the highest temperature recorded at 49.6 degrees C. Interestingly the station of Moomba only opened in 1972 – this of course is not reported in the same media release.

I’ve been trying to get a good long temperature series for some rainfall hindcasting that I’ve been doing for southeast Queensland, and have found that none of the Brisbane temperature recording stations have had any permanence. While once the main temperature recording station for Brisbane was in a bay-side suburb, in recent years the temperature recording station has been moved to the middle of East Brisbane just south of the city’s CBD – where coincidently it tends to be hotter.

The Bureau’s media release goes on to claim this summer follows a pattern of extremely hot summers in various parts of the world over the last few years.

The phenomena whereby government climate scientists correct the historical temperature record to support their theory of anthropogenic global warming is not unique to Australia. In fact the Australian Bureau of Meteorology may be simply following instructions from The Team. The Team are, of course, that notorious in-group who run policy at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC. In the leaked Climategate emails there is discussion involving The Team focused on the need to reduce global sea surface temperatures, SST, during the early part of the 20th Century by about 0.15 degree C.. By reducing, the blip in SST temperatures for example between 1940 and 1945, it is suggested that the rate and magnitude of global warming for the period 1910 to 1945 can be made to not exceed the rate and magnitude of warming for the 35 year to 2009.

Interestingly recent “corrections down” to historical global temperatures by the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, GISS, have been concentrated in this period, Figure 1. The net effect of the adjustments has been to generate a more smoothly increasing global temperature since 1880, and reduce a warming blip that occurred in the late 1930s and early 1940s.

The US National Climatic Data Center has also been making “corrections” to the historical global temperature record, Figure 2.  Indeed through administrative means January 1915 can be made to appear significantly cooler than January 2013, Figure 2.

This used to be known as cooking the books, however, of course, our esteemed climate scientists have detailed justifications for all the changes they have been busily making to all the global historical temperature databases.

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1. Issued March 1, 2013: Bureau of Meteorology confirms it’s been the hottest summer on record… http://www.bom.gov.au/announcements/media_releases/ho/20130301.shtml
2. A team of independent auditors, bloggers and scientists went through the BOM “High Quality” dataset and found significant errors, omissions and inexplicable adjustments, read more here… http://joannenova.com.au/2012/06/threat-of-anao-audit-means-australias-bom-throws-out-temperature-set-starts-again-gets-same-results/
3. Figures 1 and 2 are courtesy of Ole Humlum, Professor of Geosiences at the University of Oslo, Norway.  Click on the above charts for a slightly improved view. Visit http://www.climate4you.com for the best view and background information.

Your Temperatures Diddled

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ALMOST exactly three years ago Michael Hammer showed that the official temperature rise profile for the 20th century in the United States is largely, if not entirely, an artifact of adjustments applied after the raw data is collected from the weather stations [1]. It was a very neat little analysis, first published at this blog. It was a neat little analysis that was, for the most part, ignored.

Back then, meteorologist Anthony Watts was busy documenting evidence of problems with the official temperature record in the US because of poor placement of weather stations and Ross McKitrick was attempting to calculate just how artificially elevated temperatures might be as a consequence.

Then interestingly, just last month, John Hinderaker cited the original study by Mr Hammer at Powerline [2] and other studies, concluding:

‘These disclosures highlight a key fact with respect to global temperature data: the data sets are utterly lacking in integrity. Global warming alarmists confidently announce that worldwide temperatures have risen by, say .1 degree over a decade. It would be extraordinarily difficult to take measurements at many locations around the globe that would actually demonstrate that proposition. But the real situation is much worse: no one tells you what temperatures were actually measured at the world’s weather stations. Rather, they report claims of global warming based on “adjusted” temperature data–adjusted by alarmists, with the systematic purpose of manufacturing a rising temperature trend. If you subtract the “adjustments,” it may well be that there has been no net warming over the last 100 years at all.’

Ho Hum. But no one was publishing the proof in the technical literature.

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Comparing Global Temperatures

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THERE are four official global temperature data sets and there has been much debate and discussion as to which best represents change in global temperature. 

Tom Quirk has analysed variations within and between these data sets and concludes there is 1. Substantial general agreement between the data sets, 2. Substantial short-term variation in global temperature in all data sets and 3. No data set shows a significant measurable rise in global temperature over the twelve year period since 1997.

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