Willis Eschenbach posts occasionally at the Watts Up With That? blog, hosted by Anthony Watts. Today he has posted a thorough analysis of one hundred years of "data" for Darwin. This may seem a bit arcane, but Darwin is one of the stations-of-record which has been used in the global temperature data set in the NASA temperature database.
Eschenbach is a fair minded, detail orientated chap. He goes into the Darwin temperature record in great detail. The whole post is worth reading carefully--but here is the shortened version (we have all heard this before).
Point one: the base temperature record for Darwin shows no warming at all over one hundred years. Point two: the "adjusted record" shows enormous increased in temperatures in the last fifty years. Point three: the increases are so large they defy common sense. This is the kind of nonsense and fraud being perpetrated in the name of science.
The "adjustments" were so large they wrote in six degrees of warming over the past fifty years. Now that is nonsense, pure and simple. When he found the rort, Eschenbach said:
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.
One thing is clear from this. People who say that “Climategate was only about scientists behaving badly, but the data is OK” are wrong. At least one part of the data is bad, too. The Smoking Gun for that statement is at Darwin Zero.
Lessons to be taken from this include:
-never take the word of a climate scientist about temperature data at face value; -always go back and check the base data;
-if the base data is not make available by the protagonist, dismiss his claims as most likely false.
Hat Tip: Whaleoil
1 comment:
A shocking piece of information in the article on adjusting the Darwin temperature.
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.
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