Sorry for the delayed response, trizzlor. Can you say ears and alligators? The chaos that constitutes my life of late…. LOL

I can understand that humoring a comment thread isn’t your top priority on Thanksgiving weekend so thanks for whatever time you can give me … it’s been very useful.

You seem to have a problem with the combined “adjustment” for the stations as one. THat’s odd, as NIWA does the same. So it’s only a problem when NZCSC does it? I’m quite sure that’s not what you mean to convey.

This is cute my problem is that Treadgold omits the fact that he’s concatenating three distributions into one to make a trend while NIWA makes no such omission and explains how they’re doing the adjustment. Whatever we may come to think of the NIWA data, CSC is either purposefully misrepresenting the raw data or doesn’t know what the heck they’re doing.

Now, the rest of your links are essentially accusing NIWA of keeping their adjustments an “enigma” and just releasing the one toy example from Wellington. Salinger has authored dozens of papers so it’s hard for me to believe that none of them detail the merging methodology … and, in fact, NIWA has a very thorough follow-up which explains that the methodology has been explicitly detailed in two papers (1992, 1993). As luck would have it, I can’t get at the critical paper Rhoades, D.A. and Salinger, M.J., 1993: Adjustment of temperature and rainfall measurements for site changes. International Journal of Climatology 13, 899 – 913. through Wiley, but I’ve put in a request. The paper I could get at discusses the results and summarizes the methodology as follows:

For the more detailed New Zealand study, data from 20 New Zealand sites were used. Station histories were prepared (Collen, 1992; Fouhy et al., 1992) from which the omogeneity of the temperature records could be assessed.

The next procedure was to carefully homogenise the temperature series that were as complete as possible from each of the selected climate sites. The methodology of Rhoades and Salinger (1993) was used as this provides a procedure for adjustment of temperature series for sites where no neighbour stations exist for comparisons. Many of the island sites in the South Pacific have no neighbour stations, especially in their earlier years of record. In all cases where adjustments have been made, the data from any earlier site was adjusted to that of the current temperature recording location.

To summarise the temporal temperature trends over such a vast area of the Pacific, two approaches were used to define areas that share coherent temperature anomalies. The first, cluster analysis using hierarchical agglomerative techniques (Willmott, 1978) was used to group stations into clusters based on degree of association from annual values of temperature. Principal component analysis was the second methodological approach employed (Salinger, 1980a, b). As the purpose was to investigate the spatial distribution of interannual temperature anomalies, the principal components were rotated orthogonally by the varimax criterion so as to produce components that delineate separate groups of highly intercorrelated stations.

This isn’t a trivial analysis, obviously, but the underlying techniques (hierarchical clustering & PCA) are not at all unusual to be applied here specifically for avoiding problems detailed by the Colorado paper. I’m not going to draw hard conclusions until I get the 1993 paper in the next few days, but the methodology certainly didn’t just come out of thin air. At the very least, real climatologists like Treadgold and Watt should be making their criticisms with regards to the literature, not CSC or NIWAs exaggerated/simplified press releases.

Lastly, I think the most interesting aspect of the NIWA release is the following:

(b) measurements from climate stations which have never been shifted

Dr Jim Salinger has identified from the NIWA climate archive a set of 11 stations with long records where there have been no significant site changes. When the annual temperatures from all of these sites are averaged to form a temperature series for New Zealand, the best-fit linear trend is a warming of 1°C from 1931 to 2008. We will be placing more information about this on the web later this week.

We’ll wait and see, though I’m sure the debate will just shift to how these these stations were hand-picked…

Like or Dislike: 0  0

One more Wellington/correct piece for you to mull over, triz. And let me say that I do consider you a well reasoned commenter. You and I have had out bouts in the past over group vs individual insurance, and the pre’existing conditions bit. You did a bit of research and learned something new. So I like that you are open to things when presented well.

So let me add one of Anthony Watt’s comments INRE Wellington’s bizarre adjustments.

With no overlap of continuous temperature readings from both sites, there is no way to truly know how temperatures should be properly adjusted to compensate for the location shift.

Wratt told Investigate earlier there was international agreement on how to make temperature adjustments, and in the news release tonight he elaborates on that:

“Thus, if one measurement station is closed (or data missing for a period), it is acceptable to replace it with another nearby site provided an adjustment is made to the average temperature difference between the sites.”

Except, except, it all hinges on the quality of the reasoning that goes into making that adjustment. If it were me, I would have slung up a temperature station in the disused location again and worked out over a year the average offset between Thorndon and Kelburn. It’s not perfect, after all we are talking about a switch in 1928, but it would be something. But NIWA didn’t do that.

Instead, as their news release records, they simply guessed that the readings taken at Wellington Airport would be similar to Thorndon, simply because both sites are only a few metres above sea level.

Airport records temps about 0.79C above Kelburn on average, so NIWA simply said to themselves, “that’ll do” and made the Airport/Kelburn offset the official offset for Thorndon/Kelburn as well, even though no comparison study of the latter scenario has ever been done.

Here’s the raw data, from NIWA tonight, illustrating temp readings at their three Wellington locations since 1900:

What’s interesting is that if you leave Kelburn out of the equation, Thorndon in 1910 is not far below Airport 2010. Perhaps that gave NIWA some confidence that the two locations were equivalent, but I’m betting Thorndon a hundred years ago was very different from an international airport now.

Nonetheless, NIWA took its one-size-fits all “adjustment and altered Thordon and the Airport to match Kelburn for the sake of the data on their website and for official climate purposes.

In their own words, NIWA describe their logic thus.

Where there is an overlap in time between two records (such as Wellington Airport and Kelburn), it is a simple matter to calculate the average offset and adjust one site relative to the other.
Wellington Airport is +0.79°C warmer than Kelburn, which matches well with measurements in many parts of the world for how rapidly temperature decreases with altitude.
Thorndon (closed 31 Dec 1927) has no overlap with Kelburn (opened 1 Jan 1928). For the purpose of illustration, we have applied the same offset to Thorndon as was calculated for the Airport.
The final “adjusted” temperature curve is used to draw inferences about Wellington temperature change over the 20th century. The records must be adjusted for the change to a different Wellington location
Now, it may be that there was a good and obvious reason to adjust Wellington temps. My question remains, however: is applying a temperature example from 15km away in a different climate zone a valid way of rearranging historical data?

And my other question to David Wratt also remains: we’d all like to see the metholdology and reasoning behind adjustments on all the other sites as well.

Exactly. Or as Cuba Gooding Jr. put in in Jerry McQuire… “show me the money!”

If there is any quasi-logic behind their adjustments, it should be disclosed. Using the “accepted” formula (of which such formula have never been peer-reviewed, BTW) just doesn’t cut the truth meter mustard.

Like or Dislike: 0  0

And yes I “read” NIWA’s response and – as a matter of fact – had provided the most current of that at the time of my NIWA post. I suppose what you want is for me to read it, and blindly accept their commentary sans suspicion. This despite their repeated refusals to respond to NZCSC’s documented requests for clarifications on their select adjustments.

Therefore yup… you sounded like a jerk.

Like or Dislike: 0  0

Sorry for the delayed response, trizzlor. Can you say ears and alligators? The chaos that constitutes my life of late…. LOL

INRE Wellington. I was actually under the assumption it was four stations. But perhaps you are correct it’s only three.

You seem to have a problem with the combined “adjustment” for the stations as one. THat’s odd, as NIWA does the same. So it’s only a problem when NZCSC does it? I’m quite sure that’s not what you mean to convey.

NZCSC’s John McLean discussed Wellington in his article yesterday

NIWA gave the example of an adjustment due to a change of location in 1928 from Thorndon, on the northern edge of Wellington city, to Kelburn, about 1km away but 120m higher, which NIWA claimed meant an average of 0.8°C cooler but which appears to be based on simplistic assumptions.

Sure enough this shift appears on the NZCSC’s graph of the difference between original and adjusted Wellington temperatures but so too does an unexplained adjustment that slides in linear fashion across 1910-15 when it totals about 0.3C and a series of unexplained irregular adjustments since 1970. A close check of other graphs of the difference reveals a number of distinct steps that could be associated with a change of station location – as many as four for Lincoln.

It appears that in some cases new and old observation stations operated simultaneously for a period that was perhaps long enough to sensibly calculate the average variation. In other cases though, one station ceased operation and simultaneously another started at a new location, so how was the variation between those sites determined?

Adjustments for station relocations are reflected as a consistent difference between the original and adjusted temperature but several stations also exhibit extended periods of unexplained irregular differences between the original and adjusted temperatures. These bring to mind the “trick” described in the CRU emails but perhaps NIWA can account for the irregularities.

In reality it needs to do more than that if it is to recover any credibility; it needs to fully describe all adjustments to the original data so that its calculations can be independently verified. There’s an enormous difference between no change in average temperature and what it claims is a rise of 0.92°C over the last 100 years, which it blames on human activity and is above the IPCC’s global average.

In short, NIWA’s adjustments are still yet an enigma. And, in fact, NIWA’s David Wratt consistently says that the impact of global warming is likely to be less felt in NZ because it’s surrounded by oceans.

My… that sure contradicts with NIWA’s adjusted graphs showing warming where there is none…

Perhaps this contradiction with the trend in NIWA-adjusted temperature data can be resolved by the graph of NIWA-adjust temperature for New Zealand in which it is clear that the overall trend is largely driven by temperature change between 1850 and 1950, with a flat trend in later years. The IPCC’s 2007 report said that human activity had very little influence on temperatures prior to 1950 and far more influence after that year, which leaves NIWA the difficult task of explaining its belief that human activity has driven the increase in what it claims is New Zealand average temperature.

Coming on top of Climategate and the finding by Anthony Watts that 80% of temperature observation stations in the USA are not sited in accordance with quality standards but often near local heat sources, this claim by the NZCSC further raises the question of the accuracy of temperature monitoring and its subsequent processing.

And this comes back to my main point. The accuracy of both monitors and the adjustment models/formulae need to be questioned. Where the measurements are taken and the methods of adjustments… these methods NOT be “peer-revied” but simply given a pass… are all highly suspicious. There’s no more “trust me” granted in light of the emergence of these corrupt sideshows in the backrooms.

Like or Dislike: 0  0

I have no idea what CSC paper you are discussing. If you search the PDF document I linked to the CSC report (relinked in the 4th paragraph in this comment) in my NIWA post (linked above), you’ll find no references anywhere in the paper to Airport, Kelburn or Thorndon stations. Their paper focused on the unexplanable anomolies of seven stations… =

•Auckland (1853)
• Masterton (1906)
• Wellington (1862)
• Hokitika (1866)
• Nelson (1862)
• Lincoln (1863)
• Dunedin (1852)

What kind of straw man defense is that??

You’ve hit on my point exactly. The data that the CSC paper conveniently leaves out is that the Wellington station actually consists of three different stations (Thorndon, Kelburn, and Airport) that have been adjusted to the mean to create one distribution. In his table on “Wellington Temperature anomaly” (pg. 6), Treadgold hides this fact by pretending that the three stations (represented as three colors by NIWA), is actually a single station that, represented by a single blue “NIWA Unadjusted” line by Treadgold. This is absolutely bogus: no one in their right mind would just concatenate three different stations to form one distribution, and without even making a note of it anywhere in the paper. Treadgold is doing exactly what the Colorado paper suggests not to do – blindly merging multiple data points. The jump at 1930 is then easily explained because Thorndon was adjusted down to the mean and Kelburn/Airport were adjusted up/down to the mean and cancel each other out.

’splain that wide range of adjustment in the later years, please. If so, you’ll be a step ahead of NIWA, that doens’t give a plausible explanation but to say they use “accepted” adjustment formulas.

Not to sound like a jerk, but perhaps you should actually read the NIWA explanation. They explicitly document the fact that there are three stations not one; that two of them are extremely well correlated in the overlap; and that their temperature differences are consistent with their altitude differences.

Like or Dislike: 0  0

I cross posted this from another thread as relevant, Triz.

[Comment by] mathman

I am a mathematician, and I teach statistics. Allow me to choose from a set of data the values that prove my point, and I can prove anything. Statistics has no validity if there is any tampering with the raw data. Statistics, as a mathematical skill, has as a basis the presumption that the purpose of computation is to infer information from the raw data.

A poll is taken. 60% of the respondents belong to one political party, where that political party represents 45% of the population. This is called a skewed poll, and is of no value.

Any textbook on statistics will tell you this; the text will even tell you the various means of assuring that the sample is truly random and includes no bias.

What I am saying about statistical computations is established fact; even non-mathematicians can verify that sampling and computation must be based on unbiased samples.

I am also a scientist. True science investigates phenomena without pre-ordained results. Government-funded science is by definition an oxymoron; to obtain a grant one must specify in advance the results one will obtain using the grant money. Fulfilling a government grant means making the committee which makes the grants happy, by checking that the conclusion matches the specified goal of the research. This method of investigation will discover nothing.
None of the great scientific discoveries of the past were pre-ordained. All of them were gotten by the acute observer seeing something unexpected and following that unexpected event to a new conclusion. Penicillin. Teflon. Carbon rings. Pasteurization. Relativity. I could go on for pages.

What is so sickening about AGW is the systematic effort to bias the data. To cherry-pick certain trees out of a larger sample, then claim that the trees (selected for their bias) are representative, is fraud.

To discard data because it is not reflective of the desired conclusion is fraud.

To use a high-pass filter to discard low temperatures and include high temperatures is fraud.
To systematically report the disappearing ice around the North Pole (when, in fact, said ice cyclically expands and contracts in its extent) is fraud.

To introduce one’s movie by using a fabricated view of a collapsing ice sheet from a commercial move, presented as real, is fraud.

To publish one’s new book and include as the flyleaf an illustration of the Earth with many hurricanes (airbrushed in, including on the equator) is fraud.

The truly sick part of the story is that the fraud is justified by the nobility of its purpose: one New World Order, the grand dream of Karl Marx imposed upon all, so that all can enjoy living under tyranny.

AGW is not science. AGW is a hoax, a fraud, a vast chicanery foisted off on unsuspecting people, for the intended purpose of world domination.

And that is wrong.

Like or Dislike: 0  0

Triz, perhaps you didn’t read my NIWA post in total. Had you done so, you could have gone direct to CSC’s report and read their words instead of taking the twisted version from an AGW proponent blog site.

Also had you done so, you could check out the various comparison charts that CSC put together. I had only provided Auckland’s of this compiled version of raw, adjusted and adjustment differences in my post. But since you are discussing Wellington, I’ve provided the CSC compiled graph for Wellington below, plus some excerpts from the CSC paper.

As CSC notes, older readings have been adjusted way down, and later readings adjusted way up in order to create a “trend” where there is no warming trend. Now basic adjustments are one thing, but extreme adjustments sans good reason merely to display a non-existant trend are another.

From pg 4 of the CSC paper direct, and not some naysayer blogger….

Six of the seven stations have had their past (pre-1950) data heavily adjusted downwards. In all six cases this significantly increased the overall trend. The trend at the remaining station, Dunedin, was decreased, but the reduction was not as great as the increases in the other six.

This graph helps to picture the differences. Note that, after adjustment, every station shows a warming trend, although, originally, three showed cooling and one (Lincoln) showed no trend. In every case, apart from Dunedin, a warming trend was either created or increased. It is highly unlikely this has happened by mere chance, yet to date Dr Salinger and NIWA refuse to reveal why they did it.

~~~

The following graphs dramatically show the effect of the adjustments NIWA applied to the raw temperature readings. The important thing to note is the difference in the slopes of the two trend lines, unadjusted (blue) and adjusted (red). When the slope becomes a climb, or gets steeper, from left to right it means they created warming or made it stronger.

(Note: Click here for a full size version)

‘splain that wide range of adjustment in the later years, please. If so, you’ll be a step ahead of NIWA, that doens’t give a plausible explanation but to say they use “accepted” adjustment formulas.

Now, INRE your comment:

As detailed in the various critiques, CSC literally took Thorndon and Kelburn, two sites that were at different locations, and treated them as if they were a single “Wellington” distribution.

I have no idea what CSC paper you are discussing. If you search the PDF document I linked to the CSC report (relinked in the 4th paragraph in this comment) in my NIWA post (linked above), you’ll find no references anywhere in the paper to Airport, Kelburn or Thorndon stations. Their paper focused on the unexplanable anomolies of seven stations… =

•Auckland (1853)
• Masterton (1906)
• Wellington (1862)
• Hokitika (1866)
• Nelson (1862)
• Lincoln (1863)
• Dunedin (1852)

What kind of straw man defense is that??

The 2001 Colorado study revealed the instability of averaging and adjustments in general… that even well intended data manipulation does not accurately portray what the actual raw data readings would be at the station itself.

Thus these are two different issues, but related in the sense that any adjustments applied that are not within logical reason (i.e. two stations with identical trends and similar measurement patterns) results in a questionable dataset.

This is the reason I call *all* adjustments and corrections into question, Triz. How do we know what formula they applied, and why? Most especially in the case of CRU, where the original data was revised and merged into the IPCC database foundation… now conveniently inavailable to check for initial errors.

CSC has pointed out just such unexplanable adjustments, and NIWA has not sufficiently explained them but to say – paraphrased – “hey, it’s what we all use”.

Not good enuf.

Like or Dislike: 0  0

@MataHarley: I’ve had a chance to read the paper you mention and I genuinely think that they are attacking a different problem from what is going on in NZ. First, from the abstract:

It is unlikely that one or a few weather stations are representative of regional climate trends, and equally unlikely that regionally projected climate change from coarse-scale general circulation models will accurately portray trends at sub-regional scales. However, the assessment of a group of stations for consistent more qualitative trends (such as the number of days less than −17.8 °C, such as we found) provides a reasonably robust procedure to evaluate climate trends and variability.

The point being that A) A few sub-regional weather stations are not representative of regional trends B) Regional trends cannot be used to infer sub-region scales C) Grouping stations together for qualitative trends is “reasonably robust”. Now, digging into the paper (what fun, by the way) shows that their main claim is that the trends at each site are significantly different from each other (Table II). In other words, Ft. Collins shows a significant increasing trend while Holly shows a significant decreasing trend, so it certainly doesn’t make any sense to just average the two sites together. Or as they put it: “The magnitude of spatial variation in this relatively homogeneous region far exceeds the ‘main effect’ of any average projected climate change.” This is a fair conclusion to reach from the Colorado data.

Now, let’s go back to the NZ plots: compare the distribution between Airport and Kelbourn, these two site are perfectly correlated – every rise and fall in Airport corresponds to an identical one in Kelbourn. This kind of correlation is entirely different from the CO analysis, and it’s perfectly reasonable to normalize the sites to the mean. Moreover, Wellington isn’t some kind of minor outlier – by CSC’s own analysis it is the site with the strongest post-normalization change.

The most egregious fudging, however, is what CSC did in their own report. As detailed in the various critiques, CSC literally took Thorndon and Kelburn, two sites that were at different locations, and treated them as if they were a single “Wellington” distribution. As the previous link explains: “Look again at Treadgold’s graph. He makes no distinction between the blue and green lines — he just joins them up. Temps before the mid-20s were recorded at Thorndon, near sea level, but then the recording station moved to Kelburn at 125 m above sea level.“. Whatever you may think of NIWA’s adjustments, Treagold’s analysis is utterly bogus and clearly creates a false decline across two sites by pretending that they are a single continuous site.

Of course, Treagold has succeed in one thing, and that is to piggy-back off the CRU hack to shed doubt on the completely unrelated NZ data, which in turn creates a “pattern of deception”. In reality, there is yet to be any demonstrative link between the “fudged” CRU experiments and actual published IPCC data.

Like or Dislike: 0  0

@Trizzlor

Thank you for the hints/advise. Sticking with the “provable” goes much farther than exaggeration.

After finding out that Realclimate is the DIRECT mouthpiece of Hadley, I doubled the amout of “salt” applied.

Like or Dislike: 0  0

I’m sorry, Triz. “Bad papers”? In whose opinion but theirs?

Like or Dislike: 0  0