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No Data Manipulation at NOAA

posted by mrpg on Saturday February 11 2017, @05:28PM   Printer-friendly
from the the-truth-shall-prevail dept.

DeathMonkey writes:

A follow-up to this story: NOAA Whistleblower: Climate Data Was Manipulated, the Computers Used "Suffered a Complete Failure"

Top Republicans on the House science committee claim a former National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration scientist “confirmed” that his NOAA colleagues “manipulated” climate data for a 2015 study. But that scientist denies that he accused NOAA of manipulating data.

Rep. Lamar Smith, the chairman of the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, and two subcommittee chairmen issued a Feb. 5 press release — “Former NOAA Scientist Confirms Colleagues Manipulated Climate Records” — as part of an ongoing dispute over the validity of a paper published in the journal Science in June 2015 by NOAA scientists.

[...] But in interviews with the Associated Press and E&E, an online energy and environmental news outlet, Bates said he had not accused his colleagues of data manipulation.

Bates told the AP on Feb. 6 that there was “no data tampering, no data changing, nothing malicious” involved with his colleagues’ study. “It’s not trumped up data in any way shape or form,” he said.

Rather, Bates claimed Karl and his group hadn’t followed NOAA protocol in “the way data was handled, documented and stored, raising issues of transparency and availability,” the AP reported.

No Data Manipulation at NOAA

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 11 2017, @09:26PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 11 2017, @09:26PM (#465893)

    why are republicans so against the thought of climate change, anyway?

    the bible said something about humans being the stewards of the earth, and so many christians vote republican that I really dont understand why the regular people that are faithful will vote for these guys.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 11 2017, @09:51PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 11 2017, @09:51PM (#465909)

    I am more surprised how easily people accept that climate researchers know what is going on. At least the attempts to explain it to the public are very poor. For example,
    1) Assume the Earth was a zero-dimensional object[...] therefore there is a greenhouse effect of 33K
    2) It is a coincidence that the temperature at 1 atm pressure in the Venus atmosphere is the same as on Earth once adjusted for distance from the sun, despite having 96.5/0.04 ~ 2500x more CO2.
    3) We can measure changes in average temperature of less than a degree, but only after byzantine adjustments and fixes to the data, eg:

    The methodology of ERSST.v4 reconstruction follows Smith et al. (1996) and Smith and Reynolds (2003). The SST measurements from in situ buoy and ship observations were used to reconstruct monthly 2° × 2° SSTA data in ERSST.v4 from 1875 to present. The reconstruction before 1875 was not accomplished due to sparseness of observations in the Pacific and Indian Oceans in ICOADS R2.5 and the inability to provide sufficient empirical orthogonal teleconnections (EOTs) for construction of a reliable “global” estimate. The SSTs from ships or buoys were accepted (rejected) under a QC criterion that observed SSTs differ from the first-guess SST from ERSST.v3b by less (more) than 4 times standard deviation (STD) of SST (Smith and Reynolds 2003).

    The ship and buoy SSTs that have passed QC were then converted into SSTAs by subtracting the SST climatology (1971–2000) at their in situ locations in monthly resolution. The ship SSTA was adjusted based on the NMAT comparators; buoy SSTA was adjusted by a mean difference of 0.12°C between ship and buoy observations (section 5). The ship and buoy SSTAs were merged and bin-averaged into monthly “superobservations” on a 2° × 2° grid. The number of superobservations was defined here as the count of 2° × 2° grid boxes with valid data. The averaging of ship and buoy SSTAs within each 2° × 2° grid box was based on their proportions to the total number of observations. The number of buoy observations was multiplied by a factor of 6.8, which was determined by the ratio of random error variances of ship and buoy observations (Reynolds and Smith 1994), suggesting that buoy observations exhibit much lower random variance than ship observations.

    The SSTAs of superobservations were further decomposed into low- and high-frequency components. The low-frequency component was constructed by applying a 26° × 26° spatial running mean using monthly superobservations where the sampling ratio is larger than 3% (five superobservations). An annual mean SSTA was then defined with a minimum requirement of two months of valid data. The annual mean SSTA fields were screened and the missing SSTAs were filled by searching the neighboring SSTAs within 10° in longitude, 6° in latitude, and 3-yr in time. The search areas were tested using ranges of 15°–20° in longitude, 5°–10° in latitude, and 2–5 yr. The final SSTAs did not make much of a difference since the search area is less than the scales of the low-frequency filter. Finally, the annually averaged SSTAs were filtered with a weak three-point binomial filter in longitudinal and latitudinal directions, and further filtered with a 15-yr median filter. These processes were designed to filter out high-frequency noise in time and small scale in space.

    The high-frequency component of SSTA, defined as the difference between the original and low-frequency SSTAs, was reconstructed by first applying a 3-month running filter that replaces missing data with an average of valid pre- and postcurrent month data. The filtered SSTAs were then fitted to the 130 leading EOTs (van den Dool et al. 2000; Smith et al. 2008), which are localized empirical orthogonal functions restricted in domain to a spatial scale of 5000 and 3000 km in longitude and latitude, respectively. The EOTs were...

    http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/10.1175/JCLI-D-14-00006.1 [ametsoc.org]

    From the information I have seen, it is just is not something easy to believe that they understand the effects of adding CO2 on the climate. Like most, at first I relied on argument from authority heuristic, but once I looked into it a bit...

    • (Score: 2) by butthurt on Saturday February 11 2017, @10:20PM

      by butthurt (6141) on Saturday February 11 2017, @10:20PM (#465916) Journal

      It is a coincidence that the temperature at 1 atm pressure in the Venus atmosphere is the same as on Earth once adjusted for distance from the sun, despite having 96.5/0.04 ~ 2500x more CO2.

      As I mentioned when this point was made in another thread, Venus has heavy clouds which extend higher than that altitude.

      /comments.pl?sid=17916&threshold=-1&commentsort=0&mode=improvedthreaded&cid=465303#commentwrap [soylentnews.org]

      From the information I have seen, it is just is not something easy to believe that they understand the effects of adding CO2 on the climate.

      Do you believe that it has little or no effect? Your remark about Venus suggests that.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 11 2017, @10:39PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 11 2017, @10:39PM (#465922)

        What are you concluding from the clouds? I am aware of them. I think if the high CO2 atmosphere is warming Venus, then it must be that the albedo rose (in the form of these clouds) to maintain radiative equilibrium. Likewise, I would expect some aspect of the Earth climate to change in response to an increase in CO2 (be it albedo, heat capacity of the surface, etc) to maintain equilibrium.

        That actually brings me to another poor aspect of how this theory is presented to the public. As part of that 0-dimensional model of a planet with no atmosphere, they use a value for albedo that is due to Earth's clouds. With no atmosphere, there would be no clouds. These types of illogical explanations leave a very poor impression on me.

        • (Score: 2) by butthurt on Saturday February 11 2017, @11:42PM

          by butthurt (6141) on Saturday February 11 2017, @11:42PM (#465934) Journal

          What are you concluding from the clouds?

          I'd expect them to reflect incoming sunlight and also reflect light coming from below. The former effect would tend to lower the temperature within or below the clouds, but the latter effect would tend to raise it. In the other thread I didn't consider the latter effect.

          I think if the high CO2 atmosphere is warming Venus, then it must be that the albedo rose (in the form of these clouds) to maintain radiative equilibrium.

          That sounds plausible. The post in the other thread stated that "it's the pressure," i.e. the composition of the atmospheres does not affect temperature.

          [...] how this theory is presented to the public. As part of that 0-dimensional model of a planet with no atmosphere [...]

          This sounds familiar. Is it a critique of the American Chemical Society's Climate Science Toolkit pages?

          https://www.acs.org/content/acs/en/climatescience.html [acs.org]

    • (Score: 2) by https on Sunday February 12 2017, @06:19AM

      by https (5248) on Sunday February 12 2017, @06:19AM (#466035) Journal

      You should read this basic primer on why the simple adjustments you mock as byzantine must be made. It is not that complicated: different types of measuring devices have predictably different kinds of bias [arstechnica.com].

      Actually Mr. Trump, anyone who wants to understand why your whole post is woo-woo bullshit should read the ars piece. I'm sorry that you think scientists being precise in their presentation and using math you can't follow yourself means they should be ignored.

      --
      Offended and laughing about it.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 12 2017, @09:19AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 12 2017, @09:19AM (#466066)

        I never said it didn't need to be done.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 12 2017, @07:53PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 12 2017, @07:53PM (#466272)

        Reread that excerpt about the (I agree, totally necessary) adjustments. The idea the final numbers are accurate to within more than a few K seems insane.