Bryan Leyland: Things you know that ain't so - global temperature

“Things you know that ain't so - global temperature records back to 1850 can be relied upon”

Readers may have noticed that all the hype surrounding the climate meeting in Paris is about reducing emissions of that evil gas, carbon dioxide. While there are frequent references to our dangerously and rapidly warming world, melting ice and (slowly) rising sea levels I have seen no mention of what world temperatures are actually doing. A bit odd isn’t it?

When you start looking at temperature records you rapidly get confused.

The oldest temperature records in the world are the Central England Temperatures that have recorded daily temperatures since 1772. This particular record shows a cold period – the Little ice age –  that ended around 1900 when warming increased fairly rapidly to about 1950, then there was a cooling period to about 1974 by warming until about 2000. Nothing remarkable about that.

But when you examine the temperature records since 1850, you rapidly get confused. There are three generally accepted surface temperature records and two satellite records. climate4you.com  Two of the surface records are from the USA (NCDC and GISS) and one from the UK (HadCRUT). The UK record is used by the IPCC and is generally regarded as the best of the surface temperature records.

The satellite records (UAH and RSS MSU) are regarded as the most accurate as they are the only ones that have uniform cover over land and sea. They show no warming since about 2001.

But if you look a bit further, you discover that all the surface temperature records have been regularly adjusted. There is no doubt that temperature records need to be adjusted because of the urban heat island effect, moving sites as they become more urbanised and so on. But what you do not expect is that, virtually every time they are readjusted, historical temperatures are pushed down and more recent temperatures are pushed up. Common sense would suggest that the adjustment should go both ways and that, due to the urban heat island effect, more recent temperatures would need to be pushed down rather than up. 

The adjustments are not small: according to climate4you.com, in May 2008 the GISS temperatures showed that January 2000 was 0.45° warmer than January 1910. But by 2015, the difference between these two temperatures had mysteriously increased by 0.25°. 0.1° of this change was since 2013 and this allowed them to claim that 2015 was the hottest year ever. Never mind that the UAH, RSS and HadCRUT records do not show this.

A recent examination of the GISS temperature record by an eminent German professor of geology showed that there were strong indications that it had been fiddled.[1]

In New Zealand a comprehensive review of the New Zealand temperature record by a very experienced meteorologist concluded that there was no evidence that New Zealand had warmed or cooled and that the temperature records were not particularly reliable. A few years later, Jim Salinger returned from the Hadley Centre in the UK and produced a new temperature record showing 1° of warming. NIWA adopted this even though it had not been peer-reviewed or archived. The adjustments made to the temperature they show a consistent downward adjustment increasing with age rather than, as one would expect, adjustments going both ways.

A recent review of the same record strictly in accordance with the guidelines set down in a paper by Salinger and Rhoades concluded that the temperature rise was somewhere between 0° and 0.6°.[2] 

So where does that get us? All we really know is that there is a high probability that global warming has not been as fast as we have been told. There is a reasonable possibility that, since 2000, temperatures have actually decreased thus indicating that, as many people who have studied solar cycles already claim, we are entering a new cooling period.

So, it would seem, the best thing for the people in Paris to do would be to disband and carry out a new and careful review of world temperatures to find out just how much the world has warmed and whether or not it is still warming. If it has, they need to investigate whether or not it was caused by man-made carbon dioxide or, like the warming from 1900 to 1950, is entirely natural.

There is no chance this will happen. Too much money, prestige and political power rely on the myth of dangerous man-made global warming for the powers that be to ever accept that it should be re-examined. It is probably the biggest hoax in the history of the world.

Footnotes:

[1] http://notrickszone.com/2015/11/20/german-professor-examines-nasa-giss-temperature-datasets-finds-they-have-been-massively-altered/#sthash.SJuF8Bpk.3OPpNZty.dpbs   Friedrich-Karl Ewert, Prof. Dr.rer.nat. Bad Driburg 

[2] de Freitas C.R, Dedekind, M.O. and Brill B.E., 2015. A reanalysis of long-term surface air temperature trends in New Zealand. Environmental Modeling and Assessment, 20(4), 399-410.