Climate Data Looks Falsified

Whatsupwiththat.com has an excellent article on what appears to be falsification of the data the CRU, NASA Goddard Institute of Space Studies (GISS) and the NOAA/(GHCN), the Global Historical Climate Network accrued for the continent of Australia for the last 120 years. It's a rather lengthy post and has a number of graphs that make understanding much easier for those of us who are the great unwashed masses and therefore "not able to understand complicated subject matter such as this" (to more or less quote the great Phil Jones, Dir of CRU).

Basically, what it looks like is that the data that the IPCC AR4 report (to be presented in Copenhagen today) has been massaged and almost 5 deg C has been gradually fed into the tempuratures to make them seem much, much warmer than is actually the case. IPCC depends upon CRU, GISS and GHCN, but primarily on the latter for Australian temps.

Figure 1. Temperature trends and model results in Northern Australia. Black line is observations (From Fig. 9.12 from the UN IPCC Fourth Annual Report). Covers the area from 110E to 155E, and from 30S to 11S. Based on the CRU land temperature.) Data from the CRU.

However, upon close examination it appears that those numbers have no relationship to the raw data...which shows a very gradual increase in temperature over the past century plus twenty years....

Figure 4. GHCN Raw Data, All stations extending to 2000 in IPCC area above.

To quote Mr. Eschenbach,

So you can see why Wibjorn was concerned. This looks nothing like the UN IPCC data, which came from the CRU, which was based on the GHCN data. Why the difference?

The answer is, these graphs all use the raw GHCN data. But the IPCC uses the “adjusted” data. GHCN adjusts the data to remove what it calls “inhomogeneities”. So on a whim I thought I’d take a look at the first station on the list, Darwin Airport, so I could see what an inhomogeneity might look like when it was at home. And I could find out how large the GHCN adjustment for Darwin inhomogeneities was.

But what after all does it mean to be "inhomogeneity”? The best definition is from GHCN itself:

Most long-term climate stations have undergone changes that make a time series of their observations inhomogeneous. There are many causes for the discontinuities, including changes in instruments, shelters, the environment around the shelter, the location of the station, the time of observation, and the method used to calculate mean temperature. Often several of these occur at the same time, as is often the case with the introduction of automatic weather stations that is occurring in many parts of the world. Before one can reliably use such climate data for analysis of longterm climate change, adjustments are needed to compensate for the nonclimatic discontinuities.

The reason for doing this is to remove aberations from the data, for instance if a station is moved to a warmer area, then you must "remove" the higher tempurature thus, "homoginizing" it...to make a more consistent data set. An excellent example he gives is from the Darwin, Australia area:

Figure 5. Five individual temperature records for Darwin, plus station count (green line). This raw data is downloaded from GISS, but GISS use the GHCN raw data as the starting point for their analysis.

Darwin does have a few advantages over other stations with multiple records. There is a continuous record from 1941 to the present (Station 1). There is also a continuous record covering a century. finally, the stations are in very close agreement over the entire period of the record. In fact, where there are multiple stations in operation they are so close that you can’t see the records behind Station Zero.

However, there is a serious problem that occurs when you place the "massaged data set" and the raw data set on the same graph...you get a very different result:
Figure 7. GHCN homogeneity adjustments to Darwin Airport combined record

YIKES! Before getting homogenized, temperatures in Darwin were falling at 0.7 Celcius per century … but after the homogenization, they were warming at 1.2 Celcius per century. And the adjustment that they made was over two degrees per century … when those guys “adjust”, they don’t mess around. And the adjustment is an odd shape, with the adjustment first going stepwise, then climbing roughly to stop at 2.4C.

Of course, that led me to look at exactly how the GHCN “adjusts” the temperature data. Here’s what they say in An Overview of the GHCN Database:

GHCN temperature data include two different datasets: the original data and a homogeneity- adjusted dataset. All homogeneity testing was done on annual time series. The homogeneity- adjustment technique used two steps.

The first step was creating a homogeneous reference series for each station (Peterson and Easterling 1994). Building a completely homogeneous reference series using data with unknown inhomogeneities may be impossible, but we used several techniques to minimize any potential inhomogeneities in the reference series.
…
In creating each year’s first difference reference series, we used the five most highly correlated neighboring stations that had enough data to accurately model the candidate station.
…
The final technique we used to minimize inhomogeneities in the reference series used the mean of the central three values (of the five neighboring station values) to create the first difference reference series.

Fair enough, that all sounds good. They pick five neighboring stations, and average them. Then they compare the average to the station in question. If it looks wonky compared to the average of the reference five, they check any historical records for changes, and if necessary, they homogenize the poor data mercilessly. I have some problems with what they do to homogenize it, but that’s how they identify the inhomogeneous stations.

OK … but given the scarcity of stations in Australia, I wondered how they would find five “neighboring stations” in 1941 …

So I looked it up. The nearest station that covers the year 1941 is 500 km away from Darwin. Not only is it 500 km away, it is the only station within 750 km of Darwin that covers the 1941 time period. (It’s also a pub, Daly Waters Pub to be exact, but hey, it’s Australia, good on ya.) So there simply aren’t five stations to make a “reference series” out of to check the 1936-1941 drop at Darwin.

Figure 8 Darwin Zero Homogeneity Adjustments. Black line shows amount and timing of adjustments.

Yikes again, double yikes! What on earth justifies that adjustment? How can they do that? We have five different records covering Darwin from 1941 on. They all agree almost exactly. Why adjust them at all? They’ve just added a huge artificial totally imaginary trend to the last half of the raw data! Now it looks like the IPCC diagram in Figure 1, all right … but a six degree per century trend? And in the shape of a regular stepped pyramid climbing to heaven? What’s up with that?

Those, dear friends, are the clumsy fingerprints of someone messing with the data Egyptian style … they are indisputable evidence that the “homogenized” data has been changed to fit someone’s preconceptions about whether the earth is warming. {emphasis is mine}

If the IPCC is doing this with just one continent's worth of data, what in the hell are they doing with the rest of the world? It's quite possible that this has been done with all of the data, until someone can take the time to review it all that's the logical assumption to take. To me, this means that Anthorpomorphic Global Warming is a complete fraud. We as a nation have spent billions of dollars researching this "problem" only to discover that the money has basically been put to fraudulent use. Now the problem is to come to grips with WHY someone would do this. I have my opinions, but need to do some further research. Lord Monckton's view is that it's a back door attempt by former communists to complete their take over of the world via sever regulation of the global economy...I'm not sure I'd go that far, but his reasoning is fairly impecible.