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Friday,
December 11, 2009 Data and Climate
Science
First, if you have
any interest in the climate debate, you must read the
careful analysis of the data from Darwin, Australia that we referred to
last evening. I have studied this in some detail since Joanne recommended
it, and it is important: not because it is a "smoking gun" demonstrating
evil on the part of the climate analyzers, but because it raises questions
that must be answered before the world spends trillions on remedies to
climate change.
The analysis shows that the primary raw data show one trend; the adjusted
"harmonized" data that were input into the models used to predict climate
change show quite another. Now this may be a very reasonable adjustment --
but that adjustment has to be open, aboveboard, and justified. So far we
have not seen any such explanations, and it has all been done in house, not
openly.
The analysis also shows the difficulties of finding a temperature. Think
on it. Suppose all of us put thermometers outside our houses somewhere.
Today we can get electronic thermometers, or we can stay with a column of
mercury with number painted on it. Either way we need a calibration: where
do we paint the numbers? A mercury thermometer isn't self-calibrating as a
mercury manometer would be. Millimeters or inches of mercury is itself a
primary measure of pressure; but how high a sliver of mercury rises in a
small tube as a function of temperature needs comparison with some known
temperatures before you paint the numbers on. This is easy enough to do, but
it must be done; keep this in the back of your mind as we look into the
problem of determining just what the temperature is 0ut on my balcony.
Having found a calibrated thermometer that I can read to some given
accuracy, where do I put it? I gather there is now some agreement on the
structure for housing the thermometers, but certainly that wasn't standard
in 1890 or 1900. I am not sure when the housing was standardized. But since
we're not going to try to project the temperature on the balcony back to
past times, it doesn't matter just now; just that I use the standard
housing.
Now, when do I take the measurements? It's certainly cooler at 8 AM than
at 4 PM. How many measurements do I take? Since my goal is a single
measurement for "how hot is it on your balcony today?" and to project that
into data on "How hot was it on your balcony this year?", we have to agree
on just what the "daily" temperature means: an average of how many
measurements per day? Given that I don't intend to spend my life on this
project, I am not likely to take measurements every hour. Perhaps 2 a day?
At Noon and at Midnight? Is that enough? But when I look on line for digital
recording thermometers I find I can afford a gizmo that samples the
temperature continuously, and I can let it do a daily average. What formula
it uses isn't apparent but it's consistent. Suppose I use that: it's going
to give something different from what I got back when I was eyeballing a
mercury thermometer at Noon and Midnight. If I want some continuity in my
temperature measurements, I have to figure out how to translate the
automatic thermometer data to indicate what I would have got had I been
using a mercury thermometer twice a day. I need to "harmonize" the data, and
that, I presume, is what is happening in the Australian data recalculations:
but whatever they were doing in Darwin, it needs to be made explicit. What
data were changed, by how much, and for what reasons?
Of course we're still not through. Eventually I come up with some
definition of just what was the temperature on my balcony for any given day,
and I suppose I could just take those daily figures and average them for my
estimate of the annual temperature. Does anyone have an estimate of what
confidence I should have in that figure? Given that I could calculate my
"annual temperature on the balcony" in a lot of ways, which one do I rely
on? And if I come up with a "better" way to do that, how do I compare the
new and better data with the older data? To what accuracy do we have
confidence in this? A tenth of a degree? Half a degree? A degree?
And now I want "the daily temperature in Studio City." So long as I only
have the data from my balcony I would suppose that one will have to do: I
can compare it to the figure(s) I get from the newspapers or on the weather
channel. They're different. Now how do the newspapers and TV reporters get
"the temperature in Studio City"? Generally they take a single measure, I
think in Studio City from somewhere on the CBS lot. Why is theirs better
than mine? Now to get the temperature in Los Angeles, we can either take a
measure from somewhere downtown and use that, or we can average temperatures
taken in Studio City, and Van Nuys, and Venice Beach, and San Pedro, and
Brentwood, and -- well, you get the idea. Do we weigh them all the same and
just average them? Are they all taken the same way, with standard housing of
a thermometer and measures taken at the same time every day? Suppose the
temperature from one of my points is just a lot different from all the
others, and I go look and find that someone in the past couple of months has
put in an air conditioner and the exhaust fan from that blows across my
temperature measurement station. Do I remove the Brentwood data points? For
how long? Do I take them out all the way back to their beginning, or only
since they started looking odd?
And of course if I want a national temperature it gets worse, and to get
the temperature of the Earth I have to decide a bunch of other stuff
including temperatures at various altitudes, and various depths in the sea.
But of course most of my sea temperature from 1950 on were taken by putting
a thermometer in a bucket and hauling it up and down on a line. That's the
best data I have: but how confident can I be in its accuracy? To a half
degree? Surely on better than that. Perhaps to a degree?
The Australia analysis goes further. It shows
that all of Australia has something like 30 input stations, and none of them
have been continuous since 1900.
For the Earth: "Surface Area: Land area, about 148,300,000 sq km, or
about 30% of total surface area; water area, about 361,800,000 sq km, or
about 70% of total surface area."
Australia 2,968,000 Sq. Miles (7,687,000
Sq. Km) or 5.2% of the land area.
So: 5% of the Earth's temperature is
determined by 50 (actually it's more like 30, but call it 50) thermometers
reporting daily. .05X = 50 so we have about 1,000 thermometers to determine
the Earth's land temperature. Since the land is 30% of the earth's surface,
.30X = 1000 and we have 3,333 thermometers to determine the entire
temperature of the earth. (I doubt we have that many, but it'll do for
this.) That means 3,333 data points ever hour, or 29,200,000 data points a
year. At 8 bytes per data point we're talking about 2 gigabytes of data per
year; meaning that everyone reading this has the capacity to store that much
data, and probably the computing power to do daily averages and print out
trend curves. It's too late to do that for past years, but I propose that
given the enormous economic importance of climate trends, the IPCC should
publish all the raw data: uncorrected, not homogenized, just the numbers
you'd get if you went out on the porch and read the thermometer (or dropped
your thermocouple over the side of a boat, or whatever it is they do to get
the numbers); and also publish the corresponding "corrected" or
"homogenized" number that is fed into the models. That's publishing a few
gigabytes of data per year, or some 10 megabytes a day. Let everyone on
earth look at the data, and do things like calculate differences between raw
and corrected data. We can all look at the trends and differences.
Given the trillions at stake the costs of
doing this are trivial. I doubt that it will be done, but shouldn't it be?
=======================
IPCC says
warmest October on record
As to why I would
like to see the data published for all to see, try this:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/
columnists/christopherbooker/3563532/
The-world-has-never-seen-such-freezing-heat.html
When NASA Goddard says that last October was the warmest October in human
history, it would be useful to have some instant checks on it. Turned out
that Russia gave some erroneous reports that changed the trend.
I find it interesting to note that apparently the climate models weigh
temperatures taken in Russia rather heavily. All of Asia is 30% of the land
mass, so the area reported by Russia is what, half that? So at 15% of the
land mass, or 15% of 30%, or 4.5% of the data points meaning 109,500 data
points of the 2,433,333 data points per month we estimated as going into the
average. Not a lot of data to manipulate, and one does wonder if anyone
looks at the results: few of us would have thought that last October was all
that warm. Didn't seem that warm to me, and my impression from the radio and
TV was that it was actually pretty cold. Why would the 4.5%, or even 15% of
world data points taken from Russia be enough to take October from pretty
cold to the hottest October in human history? Doesn't seem reasonable to me.
But Hansen and NASA Goddard thought it was warm, and the Chairman of the
IPCC who speaks for the science consensus didn't see anything odd about the
data, and he was quick to use the "warmest October" in his speech opening
the Copenhagen conference.
With Copenhagen opening to that key note, is it any wonder I think we
need more openness with the data? And it wouldn't cost all that much to
publish it; and we all have computers good enough to examine it once it is
published.
Or is that what the IPCC is afraid of?
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