Britain’s Met Office is set for a do-over on climate data:
After the firestorm of criticism called Climate-gate, the British government’s official Meteorological Office has decided to give its modern climate data a do-over.
At a meeting on Monday of about 150 climate scientists in the quiet Turkish seaside resort of Antalya, representatives of the weather office (known in Britain as the Met Office) quietly proposed that the world’s climate scientists start all over again on a “grand challenge” to produce a new, common trove of global temperature data that is open to public scrutiny and “rigorous” peer review.
In other words, conduct investigations into modern global warming in a way that may help to end the mammoth controversy over world temperature data that has been stirred up in the past few years.
A necessary task, alas. Even if Anthony Watts is not all that impressed:
I’d feel better about it though if they hadn’t used the word “robust”. Every time I see that word in the context of climate data it makes me laugh. It seems though they already have concluded the effort will find no new information. Given that they are apparently only interested in ending the controversy over transparency, and because GHCN (source for GISS and HadCRUT) originates at NCDC with it’s own set of problems and it is controlled by one man, Dr. Thomas Peterson, it means that we’ll have our work cut out for us again. In my opinion, this proposal is CYA and does not address the basic weaknesses of the data collection.
It’s critically important to get this right because so much hangs in the balance. The question I’ve got, what with all of the embedded “normalization” of heterodox data that has occurred in the past, and the loss of urbanization geodesy from temperature gathering sites, whether that will even be possible.
Oh its out there Lex–or a lot of it is. They just don’t want to look for it. For starters there’s the CET–Central England Temperature record–which has been continously running for 351 years and is the world’s oldest. The 2nd oldest, (continuous data set since 1775) at Prague in the Czech Republic, has just been dumped by the GHCN (Global Historical Climatology Network) at Arizona State because its raw thermometer temp data conclusively shows no global warming for the last 200 years. See 16 Feb “Climategate” Blog article by John O’Sullivan@
http://www.climatagate.com/czechgate-climate-scientists-dump-worlds-second-oldest-cold-climate-record
GeezeLouise:
http://www.climategate.com/czechgate-climate-scientists-dump-worlds-second-oldest-cold-climate-record
Yeah dump the thermometer readings. Much better to use tree ring data to measure fractions of a degree changes hundreds of years ago.
Dumping of data tells the world they are simply hucksters, not science. You can’t discard science unless it is clearly flawed, and they dump it simply because they don’t like what it says. Science accounts for all the data, not just the stuff you want to use.
Urban Geodesy? I have no idea what that means, but as a Surveyor the term Geodesy is the name of a field that is part of Geophysics. Perhaps you mean Geography?
“Geodesy also called geodetics, a branch of earth sciences, is the scientific discipline that deals with the measurement and representation of the Earth, including its gravitational field, in a three-dimensional time-varying space. Geodesists also study geodynamical phenomena such as crustal motion, tides, and polar motion. For this they design global and national control networks, using space and terrestrial techniques while relying on datums and coordinate systems.”
My use of this term may have been imprecise – I’m unconvinced – but I was referring to the fact that many earth temperature sensor locations have either been subjected to urbanized heat sink effects, or moved because of that urbanization to other locations in such a way that the consistency of the data they provide cannot easily be ensured.
“Official” temperatures for Jacksonville are taken from the airport which is way the hell up in the Northwest section of the county. This reading can vary as much as 10 degrees with temps recorded at the beaches or the south of the county. Cherry picking….
The important bit, for the current discussion, isn’t where the thermometers are located. We just need the location to be constant. It’s not much stretch to assume that if Jacksonville airport has gotten 2 degrees warmer (or cooler) over the last 30 years the rest of the area has followed suit.
The real trick is that adjustments are necessary: A thermometer 5 miles out of town in 1919 will read higher temperatures today because it’s now in the middle of the urban heat island, or the whole weather station had to be moved because someone bought up the land and built a mall. The problem with the data we have now is nobody from the outside can figure out why the adjustments were made the way they were. It looks like classic fudging to get the desired answer. An understandable human trait, both Newton and Einstein did it, but it’s not science.
The AGW folks will be back. Right now they are beating a tactical retreat, but assuredly they will attack again. There’s too many untold billions of dollars at stake. Just glad I’m not Bill Nye.
Smoke and mirrors, watch what the other hand is doing. Temperature cycles up and down constantly.
Why would anyone think that climate doesn’t change? If there is one thing that has been constant in the history of the planet it is that climate changes. It is either getting hotter or getting cooler, that is the norm. Though we have really had an unusual steady state blip the past few thousand years. Perhaps it is time for it to get back to normal.
I think the IPCC could do a lot to remove the potential for politicization of science if they stopped holding their conferences in “resort towns”. Start gathering in Iceland mid-January, or some random oasis in Anbar during August, perhaps those parts of Indonesia where all-terrain vehicle means stout boots and a machete.
Let’s stop making these meetings an excuse to enjoy the good life on taxpayer’s dimes and make them about actually figuring out what the hell is going on.
Let ‘em telecommute.