https://data.giss.nasa.gov/gisstemp
Data source NASA GISS, GISTEMP Land-Ocean Temprature Index (LOTI), ERSSTv5, 12000km square smoothing.
Average of monthly temprature anaomolies. GISTEMP base period 1951-1980.
(That's not to say the data aren't also terrifying, of course.)
That would be like opening your refrigerator to cool your room - more heat is emitted from the radiator on the back of the refrigerator than is removed and so the room as a whole gets hotter. (Because movement of the heat from the interior to the back cancels out, but the energy used to move it creates additional heat resulting in a nett increase.)
Cheers.
In reality it's a good question and it prompted some good answers.
Nuclear power is what maybe 40% efficient so 60% of the nuclear energy is waste heat, so for every watt of energy 1.5 watts of heat released.
So now your only netting 1.5 watts for every watt. To make a difference the numbers would be staggering as the earth receives on the order 170,000 terawatts of solar energy.
Solar power rather than nuclear would make more sense but again the scale to make a difference is staggering.
I think more "realistic" would be using energy to split CO2 back into C and O2 and sequestering the carbon in the ground which is basically what plants do through photosynthesis. If we could make machines that do that more efficiently on a large scale from solar power we might make a difference.
Perhaps the excess heat from nuclear can be used to clean up CO2, I remember reading a few articles that suggest CO2 cleaning plants are actually practical
Good curiosity, but they would have to put out atleast an equal amount of heat into the atmosphere! (2nd law of thermodynamics).
We have some materials that are much more thermally conductive in one direction than the other. Pair the two, and it might just be possible to shed some heat into space at night.
Entropy always wins. It’s the heat trapped in the atmosphere that’s killing us. The universe is a mighty big heat sink though.
http://climate-dynamics.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/hanse...
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In 1988, it was claimed that the global avg temperature was 59 deg F = 15 degree C
Multiple sources:
https://www.nytimes.com/1988/03/29/science/temperature-for-w...
https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1915&dat=19880705&id=...
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IPCC's First Assessment Report in 1990, table on page xxxvii of the report listed the "Observed Surface Temperature" of Earth as 15 degrees Celsius:
https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/03/ipcc_far_wg_...
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In Jan 12 1992, it's 15 degree C:
https://news.google.com/newspapers?id=S2xGAAAAIBAJ&sjid=7ugM...
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############## SOMETHING CHANGED IN 1997:
"Global Temperature Down Slightly":
https://books.google.ca/books?id=VyFpAwAAQBAJ&pg=PA62&lpg=PA...
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December 14, 2002: They magically started using 14C as the long term average instead of 15C without any explanation:
https://www.smh.com.au/world/global-warming-blamed-for-heat-...
> This year the Earth's average temperature was 14.64C, compared with the long-term average of 14C, said James Hansen, of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, who analyses the data collected from thousands of weather stations around the world. The meteorological year runs from December to November. During that period, 2001 temperatures were 14.51C. The record remains with 1998, when global temperature rose to 14.67C - the highest since records were first compiled in the late 1800s. The warm temperatures of 2001 and 2002 are especially significant when they are considered in the light of El Nino weather patterns that alter global climate, Mr Hansen said. "The fact that 2002 is almost as warm as the unusual warmth of 1998 is confirmation that the underlying global warming trend is continuing," Mr Hansen said.
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August 25, 2011:
> But Hansen and colleagues have estimated that Earth's actual average surface air temperature between 1951 and 1980 was approximately 287 K (14 degrees Celsius) (Hansen et al. 2010). The difference in temperature is attributed to greenhouse gases that trap thermal radiation, warming Earth as depicted in figure 2.1.
https://www.gao.gov/assets/330/322216.html
##########
Sometime between 1997 and 1998, they magically started claiming the avg to be 14 degree C instead of 15.
18 January 1998's "Vital Signs 1998: The Environmental Trends that are Shaping Our Future" magazine made this magical change with a small footnote:
https://books.google.ca/books?id=EfZRAwAAQBAJ&pg=PA174&lpg=P...
> In earlier versions of Vital Signs, Worldwatch added the temperature change reported by the Goddard Institute to an estimated global temperature of 15 degrees Celsius, but the institute has since informed Worldwatch that a better base number would be 14 degrees Celsius. James Hansen, Goddard Institute for Space Studies, New York, email to author, 18 January 1998.”
Can someone please explain this unexplained change on how avg surface temperature between 1951 and 1980 went from claims that it was 15C to now being claimed it was 14C?
Edited: changed magic to unexplained change
In fact, animations that show the average global temperature increase, or local, but by (alphabetically sorted) countries like this one don't let us see that trend.
Another mostly hidden temperature trend (that may have regional component too) is the sea temperature, as water is capturing most of the heat. And in part that is what is fueling extreme weather events.
The conversation largely revolves around flooding and food production.
The earth will be fine, itll bounce back. Billions of people however, could be displaced from their homes as their land floods, or starve if food production and distribution is destroyed. The Earth had maybe 1 billion people 200 years ago. Now its at 7.5. Unprecedented doesnt begin to describe the migration that would occur if the Earth lost its coastal cities.
What I dont like about this animation is that giant land masses like the USA and Russia get the same treatment as tiny countries. The average temperature of the USA is a lot less useful than if it were broken down by region.
Like how does p<0.01 compare to my age (38 years)?
from https://www.pnas.org/content/94/16/8314
""" The two main marine data sets are those of Jones et al. (ref. 9; see also ref. 11) and the U.K. Meteorological Office (UKMO) (12, 13). These two data sets have overlapping primary source material but differ in the way that they are corrected for instrumentation changes. """
https://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/docs/2007/2007_Hansen_ha09210n.pd... (mentions the particular model in section 1, along with a discussion of the data sources).
You basically want to be looking at the temperature anomaly not the absolute temperature.
For example, in the following data, for 2016, they say the average global temperature as 14.8C:
https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/global/201613
If the average global temp used to be claimed to be 15C but since 2000, they claim it was 14C, then somebody is making false claims about the avg temp.
I won't pretend to know anything in detail about climate science but these alleged discrepancies don't seem to have raised enough alarms at any point to have warranted a serious rebuttal from the scientific community. Perhaps citing a handful of random cherry-picked sources isn't really the smoking gun you think it is? However, fwiw, here's a comment from a couple of years ago responding to some of those points. https://skepticalscience.com/argument.php?p=11&t=521&&a=110#...
What's the average of [15, 15, 15, 15, 14, 14, 14]? 15.
What's the average of [15, 15, 15, 14, 14, 14, 14]? 14.
Is that a big difference?
If you wouldn't use the word "magic" in your post, I'd perceive it as neutral/curious.
> Sometime between 1997 and 1998, they started claiming the avg to be 14 degree C instead of 15.
So far, I haven't read any valid reasoning on why this happened out of nowhere.
Bad analogy and you cannot rely on conduction to transfer heat in space. The only means of heat transfer is radiation.
The answer is “you can, if you have some place to put the heat”. What would you call the counterpart to a heat source?
So if they find a better way to do it the calculated value will change.
Also in this source:
https://books.google.ca/books?id=VyFpAwAAQBAJ&pg=PA62&lpg=PA...
in 1997, the scientific community knew that the temperature was actually going down and not up:
> "Global Temperature Down Slightly"
In https://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/docs/2010/2010_Hansen_ha00510u.pd... paragraph 6:
""" 6] One consequence of working only with temperature change is that our analysis does not produce estimates of absolute temperature. For the sake of users who require anabsolute global mean temperature, we have estimated the 1951–1980 global mean surface air temperature as 14°C with uncertainty several tenths of a degree Celsius. That value was obtained by using a global climate model[Hansen et al., 2007] to fill in temperatures at grid points without observations, but it is consistent with results of Jones et al.[1999] based on observational data. The review paper of Jones et al.[1999] includes maps of absolute temperature as well as extensive background information on studies of both absolute temperature and surface temperature change. """
The 2007 paper is https://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/docs/2007/2007_Hansen_ha09210n.pd...
Jones' paper https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1029/1999...
Section 6 discusses the anomaly vs absolute temp.
https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/19595636.pdf Introduction gives a brief history and list of the historically calculated values.
So he was probably using the best value they had at the time. I don't know why any specific number was printed in the popular press at any given time though.
The 90's "pause" is still reflected in the data (depending on how you long you want to average over), then temps started increasing again.
And yes, there have been reversals in some years. But overall you can see the industrialisation "hockey stick" quite clearly in that calendar data.
You get different baseline body temperatures depending on whether you use an oral thermometer or one of those infrared thermometers you put in the ear, but you'll both be able to detect a fever -- it's higher than it would normally be with that thermometer.
There are many ways of measuring the average temperature of the planet, and they will return different results today, tomorrow and yesterday -- but if you use the same method across time, all of them should agree on whether the planet is warming or cooling over all. One might say it was 15 in the 60s and 16 today, another might say that it was 14 in the 60s and 15 today -- they both agree the planet has warmed by a degree, though.
It's easy to go through several decades of stories on climate and cherry pick measurements from different news stories to make it look like the numbers are all over the place, but you have to compare measurements from a single source using a single method.
Therefore you need to cover many locations, and that's the problem. Global temperature data is not very good for the first half of the 20th century.
I am very careful to wait until other people confirms that there is indeed a methodological problem before jumping to conclusion, but it really sounds very interesting.
I want to check more of his claims in future. But for now, I only checked how many data points in the NOAA US temperature dataset are now the output of model simulations and not actual measurements:
https://realclimatescience.com/61-fake-data/
I verified the "Percent of USHCN Monthly Temperature Data which is fabricated" graph by downloading the source dataset and writing some scripts to process it. I was able to replicate his numbers. It's alarming that over half of reported temperature readings in the USA are actually not readings at all but rather estimates by a computer program.
I also spent some time reading the source code of the programs doing the temperature simulation but wasn't impressed. It's very old FORTRAN that has no unit tests of any sort. There are code comments giving the basic gist of what it's doing, but it's clear that the code has been grown and patched ad-hoc since the 1980s. There's nothing resembling real software engineering.
However there are also reasons to not be alarmed.
Some years ago climate skeptic bloggers started pointing out extensive problems with the network of weather stations used to calculate US temperatures. It had degraded over time as measuring stations dropped out, moved, had things built next to them etc. This in turn led to climatologists making extensive adjustments to the raw data, which is a very sketchy thing for scientists to be doing.
Congress agreed there was a problem and released funding to build a pristine new temperature network, which started operating some years ago. The skeptic bloggers agreed that the design of this new network was excellent, and the good news is the output of it matches the adjusted output of the old network (in fact, the adjusted old network measurements are still being used as canonical, which is a bit weird). So it seems that the current set of adjustments is not a problem even though it looks alarming.
The bad news is that this is partly because the adjustments made to modern measurements are quite small compared to the extent to which historical temperatures have been adjusted. Heller has been investigating the TOB adjustment in particular, which is near non-existent now but massively alters past readings. It's based on the belief that for most of the 20th century weather station operators didn't know how to properly use a min/max thermometer and that this methodological failure was never documented in primary sources, but has to be inferred from the recorded data.
I haven't made up my mind about these adjustments yet and remain in the neutral "they're probably OK" position. TOB is one but there are many others. The issue for Heller is not only methodological but also "where there's smoke there's fire", that is, the adjustments might be correct but everything around them is extremely suspicious, starting with the fact that - as this thread shows - climatologists keep adjusting even very recent data. How hard can it possibly be to read a thermometer and write down the numbers? Apparently, very hard.
ftp://sidads.colorado.edu/DATASETS/NOAA/G02186/
Used masie_4km_allyears_extent_sqkm.csv to plot it.
It looks like this:
https://i.imgur.com/9kNtYbI.png
Another source which confirms this too:
June 22, 2008:
http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/icethickness/images/FullSize_CICE...
June 22, 2014:
http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/icethickness/images/FullSize_CICE...
June 22, 2018:
http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/icethickness/images/FullSize_CICE...
It seems impossible that so many people keep doing their work on fragile data (and code, apparently), while at the same time seeing their work used by politicians all over the world to advocate massive policy changes.
I still haven't reached a personal conclusion, but i would be glad to read about the progress made by "hands deep in the dirt" people like you in their investigation.
Is is sad how much of very important software is so maintenance starved.
[1] https://www.desmogblog.com/steven-goddard
[2] https://insideclimatenews.org/news/12032015/leaked-email-rev...
> good friends with the deniers
What does that have to do with anything when he's pointing out with raw data which is provided by science and anybody has the ability to point out what he's doing wrong? If you don't have the ability to point out holes in his data, then I don't think you are acting in good faith.
Also political attacks in a civil debate about science isn't good.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/nasa-climate-scientist-says-wer...
So I looked at the actual data from the Danish Meteorological Institute:
http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/icethickness/thk.uk.php
June 22, 2008:
http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/icethickness/images/FullSize_CICE...
June 22, 2014:
http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/icethickness/images/FullSize_CICE...
June 22, 2018:
http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/icethickness/images/FullSize_CICE...
The data shows the exact opposite of the claims which were made and even made now a days by the media. It shows it has gotten thicker, more volume and area.
You can confirm this from another source by using the data provided here too:
ftp://sidads.colorado.edu/DATASETS/NOAA/G02186/
It looks like this:
It also makes for different POV about the same issue ( data fixing methodology and code quality), and it’s always a good way to bring improved arguments in the debate.
Mmmm. Surely it's the other way around, this is the expected and indeed only possible outcome.
I was in a different HN thread this week where I pointed out that there are some conclusions that might be right but which some sections of academia institutionally cannot reach, conclusions like:
1. We don't know enough to make predictions in this field.
2. Our datasets are inadequate for use.
3. Our research is unimportant and doesn't need to be done.
Note that commercial research can easily reach any of these conclusions; that's the function of senior management who are motivated by some fundamental ground truth goal rather than research for the sake of it.
Climatology is almost entirely driven by academia and other government institutions. They cannot reach a conclusion like, "old temperature datasets are of too low quality to derive models from" because then they'd invalidate the basis of their own careers. My impression is that climatologists have few transferable skills. Perhaps it's just small sample sizes, but it seems like their maths skills aren't really "hard" enough to outcompete physicists, mathmos or CS profs for jobs in finance or other exit routes.
Given that climatology has a single main theory (global warming), and that theory is based primarily on a single dataset (temperature), problems with that dataset have to be addressed by adjusting the data. Otherwise what's left for the field to do?
> In honor of the late AUGIE AUER, Professor of Atmospheric Science at the University of Wyoming, Chief Meteorologist for the MetService, co-founder of the NZ Climate Science Coalition and much-loved scientist of the highest integrity, members of the Coalition have established a fund now totaling $10,000 to be granted to the first applicant to present real-world evidence showing that the man-made fraction of airborne carbon dioxide causes dangerous global warming. Professor Augie Auer was appalled that climate scientists should be denied funding and be branded ‘deniers’ unless they submitted to the political global warming narrative and renounced the ancient principle that science is never settled. Those refusing the NZCSC’s request for evidence of dangerous man-made global warming include the IPCC, the Royal Society, the Royal Society of New Zealand, the NZ Ministry for the Environment and Professor James Renwick. To the first person who proves what they cannot, we offer this prize in the name of our late, incorruptible colleague.
So far, no one has been able to win it.
> The Medieval Warm Period (MWP) also known as the Medieval Climate Optimum, or Medieval Climatic Anomaly was a time of warm climate in the North Atlantic region lasting from c. 950 to c. 1250.[1] It was likely[2] related to warming elsewhere[3][4][5] while some other regions were colder, such as the tropical Pacific
.. which implies that Japan may have been slightly colder at the time.
(Neatly illustrates that computing global average temperature from a set of local measurements is not as simple as it sounds, because there may also be local climate phenomena)
Until 2000, it was claimed that the MWP was global.
IPCC's 1990s report Page 8 of 44 (PDF page number, not the one on the text)
https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/03/ipcc_far_wg_...
Look at the bottom graph and the text.
> Schematic diagrams of global temperature variations since the Pleistocene on three time scales > There is giowing evidence that worldwide temperatures were higher than at present during the mid-Holocene (especially 5 000-6 000 BP), at least in summer, though carbon dioxide levels appear to have been quite similar to those of the pre-mdustnal era at this time (Section 1 i Thus parts <si western Euiope China, Japan, the eastern USA were a few degrees warmer in July during the midHolocene than in recent decades (Yoshino and Urushibara, 1978, Webb ct al 1987, Huntley and Prentice, 1988, Zhang and Wang 1990) Parts of Australasia and Chile were also waimei The late tenth to early thirteenth centuries (about AD 950-1250) appear to have been exceptionally warm in western Europe, Iceland and Greenland (Alexandre 1987, Lamb, 1988) This period is known as the Medieval Climatic Optimum China was, however, cold at this time (mainly in winter) but South Japan was warm (Yoshino, 1978) This period of widespread warmth is notable in that there is no evidence that it was accompanied by an increase of greenhouse gases
Sorry about the spelling issues in the copied text, the PDF's OCR isn't the best.
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Also here in another report, graph b) on page 2/16 shows the same MWP and little ice age as "Global temperature trend for millennium"
https://web.archive.org/web/20070404001809/http://www.epa.go...
The graph c) also shows that in the past 25,000 years, it first used to be much colder, then got much hotter and then cooler and then warmer. It is pretty much impossible for it to be a local phenomenon if the variation was that much in that many areas.
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https://www.epw.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/hearings?Id=BFE4...
Dr. David Deming, geologist and geophysicist, College of Earth and Energy, University of Oklahoma, senate testimony from December 6, 2006:
> I had another interesting experience around the time my paper in Science was published. I received an astonishing email from a major researcher in the area of climate change. He said, "We have to get rid of the Medieval Warm Period." The Medieval Warm Period (MWP) was a time of unusually warm weather that began around 1000 AD and persisted until a cold period known as the "Little Ice Age" took hold in the 14th century. Warmer climate brought a remarkable flowering of prosperity, knowledge, and art to Europe during the High Middle Ages. The existence of the MWP had been recognized in the scientific literature for decades. But now it was a major embarrassment to those maintaining that the 20th century warming was truly anomalous. It had to be "gotten rid of."
--------
Edit:
I read the wikipedia citation:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_Warm_Period#cite_note...
The citation seems to contradict what's said in the wikipedia.
http://ruby.fgcu.edu/courses/twimberley/EnviroPhilo/Glacial....
> The first phase of the LIA began around the thirteenth century in all the regions for which there is evidence. The glacial phase preceding the MWP seems to have begun between the seventh and ninth centuries A.D. but is generally less securely dated and not dated at all in Canada. There are at least some indications of fluctuations in ice position in the course of the MWP in Norway, Alaska, and perhaps in extratropical South America and New Zealand, indicating that recession may have been interrupted by advances, perhaps of limited extent, as in the European Alps. The available evidence suggests that the MWP was global in extent and not uniform climatically. The glacial data needs to be considered in relation to that from other sources, but is of value in obtaining a more complete understanding of both the environment in the later medieval period and the possible causes of climatic change on the century time scale.
> The available evidence suggests that the MWP was global in extent and not uniform climatically.
It's also a huge problem that once a scientific theory (man-made climate change due to CO2) becomes "mainstream" and labelled as "official", you can't oppose it without immediately having all kinds of people with various interests supporting you for sometimes bad reasons. It's unfortunately inevitable.
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/hotpolitics/intervi...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_Warm_Period#cite_note...
http://ruby.fgcu.edu/courses/twimberley/EnviroPhilo/Glacial....
> The first phase of the LIA began around the thirteenth century in all the regions for which there is evidence. The glacial phase preceding the MWP seems to have begun between the seventh and ninth centuries A.D. but is generally less securely dated and not dated at all in Canada. There are at least some indications of fluctuations in ice position in the course of the MWP in Norway, Alaska, and perhaps in extratropical South America and New Zealand, indicating that recession may have been interrupted by advances, perhaps of limited extent, as in the European Alps. The available evidence suggests that the MWP was global in extent and not uniform climatically. The glacial data needs to be considered in relation to that from other sources, but is of value in obtaining a more complete understanding of both the environment in the later medieval period and the possible causes of climatic change on the century time scale.
> The available evidence suggests that the MWP was global in extent and not uniform climatically.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2FBF01092411
> Dating of organic material closely associated with moraines in many montane regions has reached the point where it is possible to survey available information concerning the timing of the medieval warm period. The results suggest that it was a global event occurring between about 900 and 1250 A.D., possibly interrupted by a minor readvance of ice between about 1050 and 1150 A.D.
The other citation they used is:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_Warm_Period#cite_note...
https://science.sciencemag.org/content/342/6158/617
> The findings support the view that the Holocene Thermal Maximum, the Medieval Warm Period, and the Little Ice Age were global events, and they provide a long-term perspective for evaluating the role of ocean heat content in various warming scenarios for the future.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_Warm_Period#cite_ref-...
https://books.google.ca/books?id=z-BWE4iCrfYC&pg=PA134&redir...
> "They conclude that the Medieval Warm Period was a global event"
