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Back into the fray!

The AGW debate, or whatever you wish to call it, continues unabated with as much, or more, scientific support for questioning AGW and its carbon trading schemes, than is provided by the IPCC and its supporting scientists and bloggers.

Heaps of references mentioned on this site, on other sites referenced here-in and plenty of other sites, provide significant evidence and argument to satisfy the conclusions that proposed, related, world-wide financial and social upheavals are both unjustified and based on debatable science and motivations.

As a suitable example, I refer to WUWT‘s post by Anthony Watts, ‘Unadjusted data of long period stations in GISS show a virtually flat century scale trend’. (Rev 1025, article author Michael Palmer, University of Waterloo, Canada).

The article and associated comments are practically conclusive in demonstrating the futility of making accurate scientific sense of the attempted temperature measurements and computations. Certainly not to the degree necessary to, as mentioned above, make serious political decisions affecting millions of Earth’s residents. Arguments are never-ending and obviously never-to-be-resolved.

In addition, it is almost futile to now expect that governments already on “unshakeable’ paths of practical destruction, are going to change their ways no matter what evidence, no matter how obvious, is unleashed. The inertia, the funding, the power of the organizations and their agendas make them virtually unstoppable.

The drive for truth and justice is also strong and unstoppable, BUT ‘brick walls’ are solid and perhaps impenetrable.

Back to the science. An extract from the article is useful in making my point and indicating the author’s drift.  I hope that this, and I mentioned the comments, provide the reader with some glimpse of the reality of this global debacle.

3 Continuously reporting stations

There are several examples of long-running temperature records that fail to show any substantial long-term warming signal; examples are the Central England Temperature record and the one from Hohenpeissenberg, Bavaria. It therefore seemed of interest to look for long-running US stations in the GISS dataset. Here, I selected for stations that had continuously reported at least one monthly average value (but usually many more) for each year between 1900 and 2000. This criterion yielded 335 rural stations and 278 non-rural ones.

The temperature trends of these stations are shown in Figure 3.

Figure 3: Temperature trends and station counts for all US stations in GISS reporting continuously, that is containing at least one monthly data point for each year from 1900 to 2000. The slope for the rural stations (335 total) is -0.00073 deg/year, and for the other stations (278 total) -0.00069 deg/year. The monthly data point coverage is above 90% throughout except for the very first few years.

While the sequence and the amplitudes of upward and downward peaks are closely similar to those seen in Figure 2, the trends for both rural and non-rural stations are virtually zero. Therefore, the average temperature anomaly reported by long-running stations in the GISS dataset does not show any evidence of long-term warming.

Figure 3 also shows the average monthly data point coverage, which is above 90% for all but the first few years. The less than 10% of all raw data points that are missing are unlikely to have a major impact on the calculated temperature trend.

4 Discussion

The number of US stations in the GISS dataset is high and reasonably stable during the 20th century. In the 21st century, the number of stations has dropped precipitously. In particular, rural stations have almost entirely been weeded out, to the point that the GISS dataset no longer seems to offer a valid basis for comparison of the present to the past. If we confine the calculation of average temperatures to the 20th century, there remains an upward trend of approximately 0.35 degrees.

Figure 4: Locations of US stations continuously reporting between 1900 and 2000 and contained in the GISS dataset. Rural stations in red, others in blue. This figure clearly shows that the US are large, but the world (shown in FlatEarth™ projection) is even larger.

Interestingly, this trend is virtually the same with rural and non-rural stations.

The slight upward temperature trend observed in the average temperature of all stations disappears entirely if the input data is restricted to long-running stations only, that is those stations that have reported monthly averages for at least one month in every year from 1900 to 2000. This discrepancy remains to be explained.

While the long-running stations represent a minority of all stations, they would seem most likely to have been looked after with consistent quality. The fact that their average temperature trend runs lower than the overall average and shows no net warming in the 20th century should therefore not be dismissed out of hand.

The full article is linked here. 

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