OOPS, We Forgot Siberia! (M4GW)

OOPS, We Forgot Siberia!

By Elmer Beauregard

When you first glance at the chart from my last blog entry it sure looks like Global Warming is for real, after 1990 the bars never go into the blue zone. But how can this be when 1934 is still the hottest year on record, this chart makes it look like 1998 is the hottest?

06.13.08.globalairtemp.jpg

If you look at the charts from Minnesota there is a lot of ups and downs but no clear warming trend.

The thing that these skewed charts never take into account is the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1990. This brought the number of reporting weather stations around the world down from a high of 15,000 in 1970 to 5,000 in 2000. This takes some of the coldest places on the planet out of the equation, like Siberia.

TrackBack

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.m4gw.com:2005/cgi-bin/northstatesman/mt-tb.cgi/2568

Comments (27)

Larry Sheldon:

You need to teach the speel chooker the difference between "from" and "form".

Subtle errors in expression are sometimes important.

Especially when you are finding fault with somebody else.

Distracting, eh?

Posted by Larry Sheldon | December 9, 2008 4:38 PM

Posted on December 9, 2008 16:38

Anon:

You've done the first half - established that less weather stations are being used.

However in order to make your point you have to demonstrate that no compensatory weighting wasn't applied.

The ideal situation would be that a grid of equidistant stations covered the entire world. That's impossible because of the sea. Land might get covered but even there the creation of weather stations owed less to a desire to establish the average global temperature and more to local quirks. My understanding is that GISS data is made using a world grid and then selecting a station within that grid. That means that even in places where lots of stations exist many do not get used in GISS. They adjustments to account for places with no station - ie a proxy. They also tweak the data to account for UHI and other problems

This post shows how data is tweaked for one site and as you can see there is something fishy going on.

Clearly you on on to something but you need to handle the second half - ie how is the temperature calculated for the ex-USSR. (Clearly some calculation is made). Has the elimination of weather stations caused an upward jump in reported temperature for Siberia?

Posted by Anon | December 10, 2008 4:19 AM

Posted on December 10, 2008 04:19

John (pilot):

It's interesting that you include Minnesota. The Minnesota and Dakota region has the second most varied temp range in the world, just behind Siberia.

Minnesota also has a very well maintained network of AWOSs. No weather sensors installed on blacktop here.

Posted by John (pilot) | December 10, 2008 9:08 AM

Posted on December 10, 2008 09:08

Elmer Beauregard:

I used the Minnesota data because I live in Minnesota and we do have a continuous unbiased record. And your right Minnesota is similar to Siberia in weather. So this is a good indication of what type of data is missing.

But even NASA admits that 1934 is the warmest year WORLDWIDE on record, so how can this chart be accurate?

Posted by Elmer Beauregard | December 10, 2008 9:25 AM

Posted on December 10, 2008 09:25

George Hanshaw:

"Averaging" temperature which is merely a reflection of the kinetic energy of molecules in itself is a little dicey. It is sort of like averaging logarithms. Issues of specific heat of masses of matter in the near vicinity of those measurements as well as other geographic features affecting air of water flow also abound.

A simple arithmetic average NEVER made sense, and never was meaningful.

Add to that the simple fact that any climate model that excludes the effect of variability in the solar radiation which constitutes the source of 98+% of heat on Earth - can never hope to tell you anything about human-caused effects because you are leaving your greatest variable unweighted.

This isn't science - it isn't even religion - it's simply a huge farce.

Posted by George Hanshaw | December 10, 2008 10:15 AM

Posted on December 10, 2008 10:15

William Wallace:

Good point about Siberia. Seems that scientists are more interested in modeling than taking actual measurements. I wonder why?

Posted by William Wallace | December 10, 2008 11:08 AM

Posted on December 10, 2008 11:08

Elmer Beauregard:

This is why satellite data is more accurate. So when THAT data doesn't match the model they just change the data.

http://sayanythingblog.com/entry/nasa_caught_publishing_phoney_baloney_global_warming_data/

Posted by Elmer Beauregard | December 10, 2008 11:30 AM

Posted on December 10, 2008 11:30

Elmer Beauregard:

Interestingly enough it was Siberia that the satellite data was messed with. Maybe this was an effort to make the satellite data match the skewed ground station data.

Posted by Elmer Beauregard | December 10, 2008 3:08 PM

Posted on December 10, 2008 15:08

Tom_W:

"A simple arithmetic average NEVER made sense, and never was meaningful."

Of course it didn't which is why it was never used to calculate global averages. The claim that reducing the number of stations biases the result is incorrect although it does make the results less accurate. The sign of the error can be positive or negative however.

Posted by Tom_W | December 10, 2008 11:33 PM

Posted on December 10, 2008 23:33

Jay Alt:

And Siberia forgot all about you. That's their loss.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/1534463/Siberian-heatwave-keeps-bears-from-sleep.html

Posted by Jay Alt | December 11, 2008 2:37 PM

Posted on December 11, 2008 14:37

Dissenter:

Will people please, please, please stop referring to the ex-USSR, or formet Soviet Union, or "when the Soviet Union collapsed". Its highly annoying seeing people with brainpower still making basic errors of political observation.

Other than that, an interesting article.

Posted by Dissenter | December 11, 2008 2:38 PM

Posted on December 11, 2008 14:38

Matthew:

National Public Radio says 'Global Warming' is real. So that's that. End of story. A carbon tax is necessary to finance armies to beat people down who might disagree noticing how bitter cold its becoming.

Posted by Matthew | December 15, 2008 6:16 AM

Posted on December 15, 2008 06:16

Charle S. Opalek, PE:

For the last 600,000,000 years the Earth's atmospheric temperature has remained between 12-degC and 22-degC (Scotese 2002). We are now only 13% off the bottom of this range. Sorry, Dr. Hansen, we are no where near any tipping point.

During this same period, CO2 concentration decreased from 7,000 ppm to the roughly 390 ppm today (Berner 2002). Within the last 200 years (1825, 1857, 1942), CO2 levels have been higher than they are today (Beck 2007).

So much for the non-sense of manmade global warming!

Posted by Charle S. Opalek, PE | December 15, 2008 4:31 PM

Posted on December 15, 2008 16:31

joeythelemur:

Dissenter, so you're saying that the USSR still exists? What's your point?

Posted by joeythelemur | December 16, 2008 1:44 PM

Posted on December 16, 2008 13:44

CloudWalker:

I live an hour away from Minneapolis, Mn. and have noticed in the 8 years that I have been here how much colder each year is becoming. It is almost as if each Summer/Autumn is a couple weeks shorter than the one before in the temperture.

Posted by CloudWalker | December 17, 2008 1:59 AM

Posted on December 17, 2008 01:59

Michelle:

Talk about ah "Aha!" moment!

Any idea where to get the raw temperature data for the complete period? I would love to run the pre-1990 data with and without the USSR/ Russian/ Siberian readings to see what difference there is.

What is the bold black line? It appears to show that the temp readings are cooling WITHOUT the extra 10,000 USSR temperature reading points.

BTW - IPCC's temperature map shows the Arctic circle as being the area of greatest degree of warming, and this doesn't match NASA's sea level change map. Hmmmm......

Posted by Michelle | January 7, 2009 3:40 AM

Posted on January 7, 2009 03:40

JerryB:

15,000 reporting weather stations in 1970?

Reporting what to whom? Not reporting temperature data to NOAA's NCDC, or to GISS, or to the CRU, or to the UK Met office.

You might consider starting over again with more precision, and with links to your sources.

Posted by JerryB | January 7, 2009 4:43 AM

Posted on January 7, 2009 04:43

Elmer Beauregard:

The heavy black line indicates the decline in the number of weather stations, notice how the mean temperature rises as the number of reporting stations fall.

Here are some good links on the subject

Good Chart

Here is a page with the number of reporting stations at GISS if you click anywhere in Russia especially in Siberia, notice how many stations went offline around 1990.

Here is a another article

Posted by Elmer Beauregard | January 7, 2009 12:13 PM

Posted on January 7, 2009 12:13

JerryB:

From http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/ghcn-monthly/index.php

"Data Coverage

GHCN-Monthly contains mean temperature data for
7,280 stations (Figure 1) and maximum/minimum
temperature data for 4,966 stations (Figure 2).
All have at least 10 years of data. The archive
also contains homogeneity-adjusted data for a
subset of this network (5,206 mean temperature
stations and 3,647 maximum/minimum temperature
stations). The homogeneity-adjusted network is
somewhat smaller because at least 20 years of data
were required to compute reliable discontinuity
adjustments and the homogeneity of some isolated
stations could not be adequately assessed.
Precipitation data are available for 20,590
stations (Figure 3) and sea level pressure data
for 2,668 stations (Figure 4). In general, the
best spatial coverage is evident in North America,
Europe, Australia, and parts of Asia. Likewise,
coverage in the Northern Hemisphere is better than
the Southern Hemisphere."

So, GHCN-monthly (or GHCN V2) includes temperature
data for 7280 of what GHCN calls "stations". It
seems that the chart indicating as many as 15,000
"weather stations" may be including precip
stations, and possibly slp stations.

Meanwhile, if you link to
ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/ghcn/v2/
you can find a file named v2.country.codes
in which you can find an entry

222 RUSSIAN FEDERATION (ASIAN SECTOR)

which seems to indicate that the GHCN country code
for Siberia is 222.

If you then check the file v2.temperature.inv for
entries with country code 222 (in the first three
columns at the left of each line), you will not
find several thousand; you can find only 153.

In short, most of the GHCN V2 temperature stations
that "went offline" since 1990 were in places
other than Siberia.