GWPF Newsletter: How Climate Scientists Fiddle The Data Again & Again & Again & Again

New Hope For Great Barrier Reef As Island Shows Remarkable Coral Growth

In this newsletter:

1) Man-Made Warming: How Climate Scientists Fiddle The Data Again & Again & Again & Again
Paul Matthews, Climate Scepticism, 30 June 2019
 
2) ‘Teeming With Life’: New Hope For Great Barrier Reef As Island Shows Remarkable Coral Growth
ABC News, 2 July 2019

 
3) Jo Nova: Coral Reef Recovers (For 400th Time) And Researchers Are Surprised
Jo Nova, 2 July 2019 
 
4) New Study: Biased Data Undermine Iconic Weather Record
Nature, 1 July 2019
 
5) Contrary To Global Warming Predictions, Great Lakes Water Levels Now At Record Highs
Roy Spencer, 27 June 2019
 
6) Sanjeev Sabhlok: Why India Should Ignore Climate Alarmism
Times of India, 28 June 2019

Full details:

1) Man-Made Warming: How Climate Scientists Fiddle The Data Again & Again & Again & Again
Paul Matthews, Climate Scepticism, 30 June 2019
 
The history of climate scientists adjusting data to try to make recent warming look greater than it really is goes back quite a long way.
 
It’s a regular topic at Paul Homewood’s blog for example. But climate scientists continue to do it, giving the sceptics plenty of ammunition. Here are three recent blog posts discussing how climate scientists continue to adjust data to exaggerate warming.
 
At Pierre Gosselin’s blog there’s a guest post by Kirje from Japan, on NASA GISS temperature adjustments. In the latest GISS version, V4, the supposedly “unadjusted” data sets are different from the unadjusted data in the previous version V3.
 
Tony Heller has a graph of the 2000, 2017 and 2019 version of NASA GISTEMP, showing that Gavin Schmidt and his team have managed to crank up  warming, particularly in the era of the inconvenient pause. You can also see this effect in fig 2 and fig 4 of the GISS history page.
 
Here in the UK, the HadCRUT4 team are doing the same thing. Clive Best asks Whatever happened to the Global Warming Hiatus? The answer is that they have demolished it with a sequence of adjustments to the data. HadCRUT3, as published in 2014, shows a clear pause, with no warming from about 2001-2013, but the latest new improved data set HadCRUT4.6 cranks recent temperatures upwards. Clive thought that night be due to including different measurement stations, but checked and found that was not the case. The numbers have simply been adjusted.
 
The previous versions of HadCRUT4 are available here. From these you can see how the temperature difference between 2013 and 2001 has been steadily nudged upwards in successive versions:

 







But the main point of this post (the 4th ‘again’ in the title) is to report on the very latest data fiddle, not mentioned in any of the above posts. This comes from John Kennedy and colleagues from the Met Office, and is described in a very long paper recently made available here. This is concerned with sea surface temperatures (SSTs) and the brand new data set is called HadSST4 (confusingly, HadCRUT4 uses HadSST3).
 
Here is Fig 14 from the paper. The axis label is on a lower plot, but the big tick marks are 1850, 1900, 1950, 2000. The graph compares the current version HadSST3 with the proposed new one, HadSST4.


 
Obviously, I don’t need to explain which is the new version and which is the previous one. Warming has simply been tweaked upwards by about 0.1C, or about 10% of the total.
 
Figure 16 shows temperature trends from the year marked up until 2012:


 
Here the red diamond is the raw data, the green diamond is HadSST3, and the new HadSST4 is shown as the black line, with grey shading representing uncertainty. In the early years of the 20th century, there was global warming that doesn’t fit with the carbon-dioxide-controlled theory of climate scientists, so that is adjusted downwards. But look at the trend over the pause era, since 2000.
 
Full post & comments
 
2) ‘Teeming With Life’: New Hope For Great Barrier Reef As Island Shows Remarkable Coral Growth
ABC News, 2 July 2019
 
At a time when portions of the Great Barrier Reef are being devastated by coral decline, Southern Cross University doctoral researcher Kay Davis has found an island near Gladstone has experienced remarkable coral growth.
 

PHOTO: Southern Cross University doctoral researcher, Kay Davis, found coral at One Tree Island has experienced growth. (Supplied: Kay Davis)
 
One Tree Island was lashed by Cyclone Hamish in 2009, destroying much of the island’s coral.
 
In the five years following the cyclone, no metabolic recovery was detected on the reef and by 2014 calcification of the coral had declined by 75 per cent.
But things changed dramatically between 2014 and 2017, when Ms Davis and her team at the National Marine Science Centre found the coral system calcification increased four-fold.
 
“We found that the coral ecosystem has completely recovered from this cyclone event after eight years,” Ms Davis said.
 
“It wasn’t what we were expecting at all.”
 
The new research was published this month in Frontiers in Marine Science open-source journal with Ms Davis as the lead author.
 
Ms Davis had expected the declining health of the reef to continue due to ocean acidification inhibiting coral recovery.
 
Instead the coral is doing better now than it was when it was first studied in the 1970s.
 
“Not only is calcification of the reef recovering, there was a visible increase in the amount of coral as well; with coral cover increasing by 30 to 40 per cent.”
 
Full story
 
3) Jo Nova: Coral Reef Recovers (For 400th Time) And Researchers Are Surprised
Jo Nova, 2 July 2019 
 
If only coral researchers read skeptic blogs, they’d know that corals have been getting bleached and wrecked by cyclones for millions of years.
 
They have adaptable genes, honed by 500 million years of natural selection, plus epigenetic tricks, and with safe zones to seed recovery. The Great Barrier Reef spans 2,000 kilometers and five degrees Celsius from 27 to 32°C and we’re still finding reefs we didn’t even know about. The pH swings on a daily basis, and fish do better when it does. One coral has adapted to ocean “acidification” in 6 months. Otherfish remarkably adapted from salt to freshwater in just fifty years. As Peter Ridd says: Of all the ecosystems in the world, the reef is one that’s best at adapting to climate change.
 
So once again, corals have recovered — and yet the “experts” who wear their dogma covered glasses didn’t see it coming.
 
Full post
 
4) New Study: Biased Data Undermine Iconic Weather Record
Nature, 1 July 2019
 
Flaws are revealed in a highly cited database that dates back more than two centuries.

 









Scientists have identified biased data in an iconic meteorological record, and are now challenging conclusions about long-term precipitation trends in England, Wales and possibly other regions.
 
The England and Wales Precipitation (EWP) series is a continuous monthly record of British snow and rainfall, stretching back to 1766. For decades, climate scientists have used this record — one of the longest-running available — to examine precipitation and atmospheric-circulation patterns in northwest Europe.
 
Conor Murphy at Maynooth University, Ireland, and his colleagues drew on independent data, including long-term measurements of British snowfall, to reconstruct the record’s early portion. Their reconstruction showed that the EWP underestimated winter precipitation before 1870, whereas summer rainfall was overestimated before 1820. As a result, the widely accepted conclusion that winters have become wetter and summers dryer since 1766 appears to be an artefact.
 
Full post
 
5) Contrary To Global Warming Predictions, Great Lakes Water Levels Now At Record Highs
Roy Spencer, 27 June 2019
 
It is a truism that any observed change in nature will be blamed by some experts on global warming (aka “climate change”, “climate crisis”, “climate emergency”).
 
When the Great Lakes water levels were unusually low from approximately 2000 through 2012 or so, this was pointed to as evidence that global warming was causing the Great Lakes to dry up.

 






Take for example this 2012 article from National Geographic, which was accompanied by this startling photo:


 
The accompanying text called this the “lake bottom”, as if Lake Michigan (which averages 279 feet deep) had somehow dried up.
 
Then in a matter of two years, low lake levels were replaced with high lake levels. The cause (analysis here) was a combination of unusually high precipitation (contrary to global warming theory) and an unusually cold winter that caused the lakes to mostly freeze over, reducing evaporation.
 
Now, as of this month (June, 2019), ALL of the Great Lakes have reached record high levels.
 
Time To Change The Story
 
So, how shall global warming alarmists explain this observational defiance of their predictions?
 
Simple! They just invoke “climate weirding”, and claim that the climate emergency has caused water levels to become more erratic, to see-saw, to become more variable!
 
The trouble is that there is that there is no good evidence in the last 100 years that this is happening.

This plot of the four major lake systems (Huron and Michigan are at the same level, connected at the Straits of Mackinac) shows no increased variability since levels have been accurately monitored (data from NOAA Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory):

 
 










This is just one more example of how unscientific many global warming claims have become. Both weather and climate are nonlinear dynamical systems, capable of producing changes without any ‘forcing’ from increasing CO2 or the Sun. Change is normal.
 
Full post
 
6) Sanjeev Sabhlok: Why India Should Ignore Climate Alarmism
Times of India, 28 June 2019
 
The problem with climate “science” is that the data – which are telling us to relax – fly in the face of the strong tendency of its advocates to bully us into a panic.
 
We are asked to drop all common sense and to accept that CO2 – a monumentally insignificant fraction of the air – is the control knob of the climate.
 
I consider climate science’s recommendations to be less worthy of acceptance in comparison with those of biotechnology for five main reasons.
 
First, established physics theories are precise and have a single set of equations but we have over a hundred different climate models. One can understand different parametric estimates for sensitivity analysis but when hundreds of different sets of equations purport to forecast the future we know that the science is not settled.
 
Second, the average predictions of climate models have grossly exceeded observed temperatures. This has been found not only in James Hansen’s model but in charts in the IPCC’s own 2013 report. A paper by Fyfe, Gillett and Zwiers in Nature in 2013 showed how badly climate models have performed. John Christy’s subsequent comparison of model predictions with satellite temperature measurements has come to the same conclusion. The Economist magazine said it well in 2013 that “If climate scientists were credit-rating agencies, climate sensitivity would be on negative watch”.
 
In addition, Roy Spencer’s analysis of ocean warming, using data in IPCC’s own report shows much lower climate sensitivity than even in the moderate IPCC scenarios. Recently he mentioned a 2018 peer-reviewed paper that re-confirms this. And I don’t even want to start off on the tens of false alarms that have splattered newspapers over the past century.
 
Third, the suggested strong correlation between CO2 and temperature simply does not exist. I looked at IPCC’s first report and found no correlation at all: (a) there were extensive variations in the climate over the past few thousand years despite CO2 remaining pretty much constant, and (b) when CO2 actually started increasing rapidly from 1950, the temperature plummeted for three decades. At that time, in the 1970s, climate scientists scared us about an impending Ice Age.
 
Many independent and bigger underlying natural causes than CO2 are at work including forces that pulled us out of the Little Ice Age (c.1400 to c.1800). One of these causes relates to the Atlantic multidecadal ocean oscillation that  Judith Curry and other scientists have studied. Her study of the oscillation’s effect on Arctic ice is illuminating.
 
Such forces add sinusoidal and non-linear overlays to the trend of recovery of temperatures from the Little Ice Age and explain not only the significant warming of the first part of the 20th century (which took place without any CO2 emissions) but the subsequent cooling till the late 1980s and the small subsequent warming surge followed by a pause over the first twenty years of this century.
 
In fact, the increase in temperatures in the past thirty years is principally no different to the increase of the first half of the 20th century except that it comes on top of a higher base because of the longer-term trend since 1800. Yes, the climate is changing and yes, the greenhouse gas effect is rock-solid science but the observed sensitivity of the climate to increases in CO2 is very low.
 
Fourth, I want to briefly touch upon data quality since no science can succeed without high quality data. The reader will notice I have deliberately cited the first IPCC report’s charts, not its recent reports informed by a controversial (and arguably defective) study.
 
Geologists who have studied this issue tell us that there definitely was medieval warming and a Little Ice Age – there is too much circumstantial evidence to “disappear” them.
 
It is concerning that IPCC has tried to erase both these well-established periods. More problematically, we see regular reports in newspapers that physically measured temperatures of the past are being changed to fit the “panic” claims. The book “Evidence-Based Climate Science”, edited by highly respected scientist Don Easterbrook and published by Elsevier, contains a chart at page 130 that confirms these suspicions.
 
I have come to the view that we can trust only four pieces of data: temperature measurements by satellites – particularly of the troposphere, sea level measurements (which are getting better due to satellites), ocean temperature measurements and counts of extreme events and their intensity over the past 100 years. All four of these measures provide strong assurance that the planet’s sensitivity to CO2 is extremely low.
 
Full post

The London-based Global Warming Policy Forum is a world leading think tank on global warming policy issues. The GWPF newsletter is prepared by Director Dr Benny Peiser - for more information, please visit the website at www.thegwpf.com.