Can the methods of Intelligent Design be brought to bear to detect anthropogenic influence in temperature records? Core to the climate debate is the danger of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming. We hear of “tipping points” promising coast lands drowning in glacial melt. Defining “very likely” as > 90%, the IPCC’s Climate Change 2007: Synthesis Report holds that:
Most of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic GHG concentrations.
In The Smoking Gun At Darwin Zero Willis Eschenback examines temperature records at Darwin, North Australia. He looks
at what happens when the GHCN removes the “in-homogeneities” to “adjust” the data. Of the five raw datasets, the GHCN discards two, . . . The three remaining records are first “homogenized” and then averaged to give the “GHCN Adjusted” temperature record for Darwin.
To my great surprise, here’s what I found. To explain the full effect, I am showing this with both datasets starting at the same point (rather than ending at the same point as they are often shown).
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. . . .
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.. . .
And with the Latin saying “Falsus in unum, falsus in omis” (false in one, false in all) as our guide, until all of the station “adjustments” are examined, adjustments of CRU, GHCN, and GISS alike, we can’t trust anyone using homogenized numbers. . . .
Do you agree with Eschenback in attributing to humans these differences in reported temperatures? Can such “adjustments” be reliably distinguished from natural variations such as those due to Figure 3 Glacial fluctuations, Temperature & PDO
See Easterbrook's presentations onglobal warming including his predictions of global cooling and warming . See also Matt Vooro on AMO and PDO- The Real Climate Makers In United States?
So what say you? Can anthropogenic influence be detected in temperature records or can these variations be considered as natural? Can such data be depended on to make public policy decisions for trillion dollar investments?
See Willis Eschenback’s full article: The Smoking Gun At Darwin Zero
As an Australian, I must say that I am absoutely outraged at the duplicity shown by the Global Historical Climate Network (GHCN), in its clumsy adjustment of temperature records from my country. Willis Eschenback is quite right to describe it as “blatantly bogus.” The GHCN has been caught red-handed, and its “experts” can’t talk their way out of this one. A lie is a lie.
A few weeks ago the notion that temperature data from around the world for the past 100 years was being “cooked,” would have sounded like the ravings of a conspiracy theorist. Willis Eschenback wisely refrains from drawing that conclusion: we don’t yet know the full extent of these duplicitous data adjustments. But I for one think that the “fixing” of the data from Australia is just the tip of the iceberg.
How many data “fixers” were there? I’d say probably no more than a few dozen at the outside. The thousands of scientists contributing to the last IPCC report were, for the most part, acting in good faith, I’m sure. Could the relatively small number of scientists who compiled the raw temperature records from around the planet for the past 100 years have succumbed to their own “groupthink” and engaged in highly questionable statistical fudges which they justified to themselves, on the grounds that they were “saving the world”? And did they then dupe the larger community of scientists who didn’t have access to the raw data, or who may have had access but didn’t think of questioning the scientific integrity of the data “compilers”?
Getting back to your questions:
My answer at the present time would be: no. Climatologist Roy Spencer has written some excellent articles explaining why the hypothesis of man-made global warming can neither be proven nor disproven, based on the data.
In Hotspots and Fingerprints , Spencer writes:
In a recent post entitled, Can Global Warming Predictions be Tested with Observations of the Real Climate System? , Spencer argues that uncertainty over cloud feedbacks makes global warming predictions impossible:
Roy Spencer and William Braswell’s 2008 presentation, Feedback vs. Chaotic Radiative Forcing: Smoking Gun Evidence for an Insensitive Climate System? is also well worth having a look at.
Spencer’s concluding paragraphs in the post cited above, entitled, Can Global Warming Predictions be Tested with Observations of the Real Climate System? , are well worth pondering:
Sounds like the lawyers need to get busy on this one.
vjtorley
Excellent response on the challenges of robustly detecting a statistically significant anthropogenic signature in the overall climate with validated models.
My intended double entendre worked.
What do you think of the differences between the final and raw data as shown above by Willis Eschenback?
Also look at:
How correcting the data heats the earth.
http://themigrantmind.blogspot.....earth.html
More analysis like Eschenback did needs to be done!
“I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.“