The World Meteorological Organisation will build the greatest global climate change network

“Having left a legacy of a changing climate, this [reference climate network] is the very least successive generations can expect from us in order to enable them to more precisely determine how the climate has changed.”

Thorne et al. (2018)

 

Never trust a headline. The WMO cannot build the network. But the highest body of the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) has approved our plans for a Global Climate Reference Station Network. Its Congress with the leaders of all member organisations meets every two years in neutral Geneva, Switzerland, and has approved the report on a Global Surface Reference Network of the Global Climate Observing System (GCOS) Task Team on a reference network. The WMO is the oldest international organisation and coordinates the works of its members, mostly national weather services. So the WMO will not build the network itself; we are now looking for volunteers.

(Disclosure: I am a member of the Task Team.^* Funny: in a team with big name climatologists I am somehow the "Climate scientist representative".)

Humanity is performing the greatest experiment in its history. We better measure it accurately. For humanity and for science.

Never trust a headline. What the heck does “greatest” mean? As someone trying to estimate how much the climate has changed, I would have been so happy if people had continued the really poor measurement methods they used in the 19th century. Mercury thermometers were placed in the North (pole) facing window of an unheated room. Being so close to the building is not good for ventilation, the sun could get on the sensor or heat the wall beneath. I would have lost that fight. Mercury thermometers are now forbidden. Weather prediction models would be better than this observation. The finance minister would have forced us to switch to automatic measurements. We may think that how we measure today is good enough, but people in 2100 will likely disagree.

At least following the biggest technological steps will be unavoidable. If that happens we will make long comparisons with the old and new set-up; estimating differences in the averages is not enough, also the variability is affected, which is hard to estimate. The reasons for measurement errors will change and thus its dependence on the weather.

Any data processing, if only averaging or applying a calibration factor, that is performed today, will be performed on hardware and software that is not available in 2100. Any instrument we would buy off the shelf will not be available in 2100; the upper air reference network is being forced to change their instruments because Vaisala will soon no longer sell them. So best means that we have open hardware and open software so that we can keep on building the instrument, can redo the data processing from scratch and can recreate the exact same processing on newer computers or whatever we use after the Butlerian Jihad.


A station of the US Climate Reference Network.

Never trust a headline. What does measuring climate mean? I work on improving trend estimates based on historical measurements made in many different ways by comparing neighbouring stations with each other (statistical homogenisation). This makes me acutely aware that there is only so much you can do with statistical homogenisation, a considerable error remains. It works relatively well for annual average temperatures because the correlations between stations are high. Much harder are estimates of the changes of the variability around the means, which are important for changes in extreme weather. Especially estimates of changes in precipitation, humidity, insolation, cloud cover, snow depth, etc. have wide confidence intervals because statistical homogenisation is very hard. For these other observations having reference data that does not need to be statistically homogenised is crucial. These other variables are very important for climate change impacts and understanding how the climate is changing. Reference networks can not only help in quantifying these confidence intervals, but as an independent line of evidence also provide confidence the confidence intervals are right.

The preliminary proposal for variables to observe in reference quality is:

• Air temperature
• Precipitation
• Pressure
• Wind speed and direction (10 m)
• Relative humidity
• Surface radiation (down and up)
• Land Surface Temperature
• Soil moisture
• Soil temperature
• Snow/ice (Snow Water Equivalent)
• Albedo

If you disagree or have additional ideas please contact us.


Tiered system of systems approach.

Never trust a headline. By itself this network will not be the best to study climate change. We also need the other stations. The reference network will be the stable backbone of the entire climate observation system. The part which is best at estimating the long term trends, while we need the other stations to reduce sampling errors and study spatial patterns.

Maintaining a reference station will be clearly more expensive than a standard climate station. Thus the number of stations will be limited. For the long term warming we expect to need about 200 stations well spread over the world. This takes into account that even if we select locations where we expect nothing will happen in the next century, we will still loose some stations due to conflict or "progress".

At a reference station (or nearby) preferably also measurements with the locally standard set-up are made, so that they can be compared with each other and provide information on any measurement problems. This will improve the quality of the entire network. A network with 200 reference stations would on average have about 1 station per country. For the comparison with the national networks having at least one station per country would also be desirable, but large countries will need multiple stations and it is also more efficient when countries with a reference station have multiple stations because a large part of the costs are overheads (well-trained operators and well-instrumented laboratories).


A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they will never sit in - Greek proverb (I did not check the provenance, experience tells me, the source of such quotes is always wrong, but do leave a comment).

Never trust a headline. The reference network is not only interesting for studying climate change. If it were we would need to wait many decades before it becomes useful. In this age that would likely mean that it would not be funded. Due to the metrological [sic] standards for computing confidence intervals and the traceability back to SI standards, the measurements will be comparable all over the world within specific confidence intervals for the absolute values, not just the (e.g., temperature) anomalies mostly used to study climate change. Together with the representativeness of the stations for the region this makes the network useful for the validation of absolute estimates from satellites or atmospheric models.

Also the comparison of the reference measurements with the national networks will produce valuable information within the first decade. For example, the American Climate Reference Network shows that the warming estimates of the national network are reliable and if anything underestimates the warming in America; the reference network has the larger trend.


The US Climate Reference Network (USCRN; red line) is below the normal national station network (ClimDiv; green line) in beginning and above it at the end. The trend of the reference network is thus larger. (The values themselves are quite noisy because America is just a small part of the Earth and trends over such short periods do not contain information on long-term warming.)

Never trust a headline. We are land animals and it is thus come natural to us to see climate stations as prototypical for climate observations, but the climate system is much richer. There is already a network for reference upper air measurements (GRUAN) made with weather balloons (radiosondes). The high metrological quality of the ARGO network probably also makes them a reference network. They measure ocean temperature profiles to estimate the ocean heat content.

Both the upper air and the oceans are wonderfully uniform media to measure; characterising the influence of the surroundings and preventing changes therein will be the main additional challenge of a land station network.

Studying climatic changes in urban regions is also important. Here it would be even more important to accurately describe the surrounding because changes will happen. Thus urban regions would need their own reference network.

We hope that our reference network will stimulate the founding of further reference networks. The cryosphere (the part of the Earth which is frozen) needs specialised observations. Hydrological and marine surface observations in reference quality would be very valuable; we should never forget that 70% of the Earth is water. Observations of tiny airborne particles (aerosols) and clouds could be made in reference quality.

In other news. The WMO Congress has also decided to make & share more real-time observations for weather predictions. The norms for quality & quantity will become more strict & are monitored.

20-25% of WMO members is already compliant.

25-30% would be compliant if they would share their data internationally. Many of these countries are big, so they represent a larger part of the world.

The rest will need international support to build the capacity to extend their measurement program and share the data.

Hopefully, the Green Climate Fund can help. The 24/7 monitoring by the WMO will give feedback to the funders on the value of their investment.

Climatology has the advantage that national weather services perform observations operationally. This institutional support has produced the long series we can use to study climate change. We currently see huge changes in the biosphere. Insects seem to be vanishing, but this is really hard to study without long-term observations. The ecological long-term observational programs need institutional support.

Where possible these reference networks should aim to use the same locations, so that the observations can support each other, as well as to reduce costs. It may be easier to obtain funding for reference networks in a large coalition than for every network separately. So I hope that these other communities will develop similar plans. If you know of anyone in these communities, please point them to this post or our report.

We estimate that this reference land station network will cost a few million dollars per year. Thus running this network for a decade would still cost much less than a single satellite missions, which measures far fewer climate variances and has much less accuracy and less confidence in its accuracy. If you know someone at Lockheed Martin or Airbus who may be interested in building a space-grade reference network and has the right lobbyists, please tell them of this initiative.

Coming back the first paragraph: we need volunteers. We need weather services interested in setting up reference stations and we need ones interested in becoming a Lead Centre. A Lead Centre would coordinate the network, organise joint calibrations and comparison campaigns, lead the drawing up of measurement requirements, etc. To spread the work load it could be an idea to one Lead Centre to one instrument or observation type. Please talk about this with your colleagues and spread this post.

UPDATE November 2020. The World Meteorological Organization Commission for Observation, infrastructure and information system (INFCOM) has approved the plan. The climate reference network implementation plan is now part of the WMO Infrastructure Commission workplan, which includes in its outputs and deliverables the establishment of a GSRN, identifying candidate stations and the call for the Lead Centre. Based on this and on the recommendation from the report of the GSRN task team, published in February 2019 (GCOS-226),  a new task team has been established to develop (i) a draft implementation plan for the GSRN, (ii) a proposal for management and governance structures of the GSRN, and (iii) a process for nominating and approving stations contributing to the GSRN.

^* The opinions in the post are mine, the report represents the opinion of the Task Team.

Further reading

Thorne P.W., H.J. Diamond, B. Goodison, S. Harrigan, Z. Hausfather, N.B. Ingleby, P.D. Jones, J.H. Lawrimore, D.H. Lister, A. Merlone, T. Oakley, M. Palecki, T.C. Peterson, M. de Podesta, C. Tassone, V. Venema and K.M. Willett, 2018: Towards a global land surface climate fiducial reference measurements network. Int J Climatol., 38, pp. 2760–2774. https://doi.org/10.1002/joc.5458

The report of the GCOS Task Team: GCOS Surface Reference Network (GSRN): Justification, requirements, siting and instrumentation options

GCOS, 2017: Report of the 1st Meeting of the GCOS Surface Reference Network (GSRN) Task Team
Maynooth, Ireland, 1-3 November 2017.

My first post trying to get the discussion going in October 2016: A stable global climate reference network

January 2018 GCOS Newsletter on designing a GCOS Surface Reference Network

No, we do not have 12 years to stop catastrophic climate change #12years

I have to apologize to Peter Hadfield (better known as Potholer54) as I am not sure I have found the source of the talking point that we only have 12 years. Science journalist Hadfield always encourages real skeptics to check claims by searching for the source in the scientific literature. The best solution to the riddle I found is really disappointing, but independent of the source, the claim is terrible.

How much warming is seen as acceptable is a political compromise between how hard it is to change the energy system (against powerful vested interests) and how much damages people see as acceptable. All world leaders have agreed in the Paris climate agreement on the following compromise.

Holding the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2°C [3.6°F] above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C [2.7 °F] above pre-industrial levels, recognising that this would significantly reduce the risks and impacts of climate change.

Previously the political compromise used to be to keep the warming below 2°C and most scientific work thus focused on the impacts of 2°C warming and on possible ways to make the transition that fast. After Paris politicians asked scientists to study how much the damages from climate change would be reduced and how much harder it would be to limit warming to 1.5°C.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) thus brought all the research on this topic together and in October published a report on the difference between 1.5°C and 2°C warming. In the media reporting a frequent talking point somehow was that we only have 12 years to stop climate change.

How much CO2 can we still emit?

Before looking into it I had guessed the claim would be based on the carbon budget. How much CO2 we can still emit until we reach the amount that will likely warm the Earth by 1.5°C. Note that CO2 accumulates in the climate system and the warming is determined by the total historical amount we emit. I sometimes worry people think that when global warming becomes too devastating we can stop emitting CO2 and the problem is solved. When the French stopped dumping salt in the Rhine and Meuse the water quality quickly became better. CO2 is not like that. When we stop emitting CO2 warming will even continue for some time, it will not go back to the temperature we used to have and many consequences (such as sea level rise) will keep getting worse, just slower.



The Earth has already warmed by about 1°C since the end of the 19th century.* Based on past emissions alone we would not reach the 1.5°C warming level yet, according to the IPCC report. A part of the carbon budget is still left. This is a bit more than 10 times how much we currently emit per year and could thus have been the source of the talking point. The Summary for Policy Makers of the IPCC states:

Limiting global warming requires limiting the total cumulative global anthropogenic emissions of CO2 since the pre-industrial period, that is, staying within a total carbon budget (high confidence). By the end of 2017, anthropogenic CO2 emissions since the pre-industrial period are estimated to have reduced the total carbon budget for 1.5°C by approximately 2200 ± 320 GtCO2 (medium confidence). The associated remaining budget is being depleted by current emissions of 42 ± 3 GtCO2 per year (high confidence). The choice of the measure of global temperature affects the estimated remaining carbon budget. Using global mean surface air temperature, as in AR5, gives an estimate of the remaining carbon budget of 580 GtCO2 for a 50% probability of limiting warming to 1.5°C, and 420 GtCO2 for a 66% probability (medium confidence).

This would have been a better reason for the talking point than the possible reason below, but even then we do not have 12 years, we should do more NOW. We cannot wait 12 years and then suddenly stop all emissions. We are already doing a lot, half of all new electrical generation capacity in the world is already renewable power, but we need to do more and do this now. The only time better than now is decades ago.

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The best time to start [reducing emissions] was 25 years ago. The second best time is today.

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On the other hand, the Earth does not explode in 12 years, any action reduces damages and adaptation costs. If we do not manage to limit the warming to 1.5°C, it would be better to limit it to 1.6°C than to 1.7°C, and so on. There is no brick wall we crash into, there is no cliff we fall into, there is no "deadline", CNN. Any limitation of the warming makes life on Earth better. Being lied into one Iraq war is catastrophic, but still better than 2 or 3 wars.

Any analogy is imperfect, but a better analogy would be that climate change is like crossing a busy street without looking, it is a irresponsible risk and the farther you go the higher the risk. Another analogy is walking into a mine field as Michael Mann often says. We do not know when the mines will explode, better walk into the field as little as possible and not 12 meters.

Reducing CO2 emission means changing our energy system and agriculture. This is a big task, and not something we will not be finished within 12 years. When we do more now, we would also have more time than 12 years to finish the task.

It is much better to say that to achieve the climate goals we have set ourselves in the Paris climate agreement we have to be at zero emissions in a generation. Or that we have to half emissions in 2030.

I would vote for that, but considering the resistance to change of the establishment, Gavin Schmidt is probably realistic when writing on RealClimate:

Can we avoid going through 1.5ºC?

IPCC has to use a few circumlocutions to avoid giving a direct answer to this question (for reasonable and understandable reasons). I’m not quite so constrained…

There are many issues related to the feasibility question of which physical climate-related issues are only one. The basic issue is that the effort to reduce emissions sufficiently to never get past 1.5ºC would require a global effort to decarbonize starting immediately that would dwarf current efforts or pledges. This seems unlikely (IMO).
...
So my answer is… no.

I get that there is reluctance to say this publically – it sounds as if one is complicit in the impacts that will occur above 1.5ºC, but it seems to me that tractable challenges are more motivating than impossible (or extremely unfeasible) ones – I would be happy to be proven wrong on this though.

The craziness begins

However, the press articles and TV segments on the IPCC report do not talk about the carbon budget. In most cases they do not explain at all where the 12 years comes from. The Guardian headline is: "We have 12 years to limit climate change catastrophe, warns UN." Given that English is the global language, the difficulty of the English have understanding international relations is rather surprising. The IPCC is not the UN. More importantly for this post, the headline is not explained anywhere in the article.

The most surprising place to see the claim is Fox News**: "Terrifying climate change warning: 12 years until we’re doomed." That is some contrast to their evening television opinion shows operating as the PR arm of the Republican party. This article was on their homepage, in the science section, under the category "Doomsday" and republishing an article written by the New York Post. Again I cannot find a justification for the headline in the article.

The Sunrise Movement will visit members of Congress to lobby for a Green New Deal on Monday, December the 10th and would like climate scientists, who happen to meet at the AGU Fall meeting in Washington DC, to join them. They also did not go to the source, but trusted newspapers when they write in their call for action: "the latest UN report says we have 12 years to rapidly transform our economy to protect human civilization as we know it."

As an aside, had I been in Washington, I would have been happy to join them, I feel we need to do more to reduce climate change damages, but the Green New Deal is politics, not science. So I would not show up as a scientist (in one of those stereotypical white lab coats).



We may be getting a bit closer to the solution listening to CNN. Interrupting their programming on the missing Malaysia Airlines aircraft CNN titles "Planet has only until 2030 to stem catastrophic climate change, experts warn" and says: "In Paris leaders pledge to keep the rise well below 2 degrees [Celsius]. This report now suggests we aim for 1.5°C. A benchmark we are predicted to reach in 2030."

(No, the politicians suggested we'd aim for 1.5°C.) Why does CNN think that experts warned about this? The reporting of LifeGate may give a hint:

If not curbed, this trend will lead the Earth to exceed the threshold of +1.5 degrees between 2030 and 2052 (according to the different scenarios the SR15 took into consideration). This means that in just 12 years we could reach the temperature rise that the Paris Agreement hypothesised for 2100.

LifeGate is a news organization calling itself "the leading point of reference for sustainable development since 2000". They at least describe this situation is sufficient detail to have a look what the source says.

What does the IPCC say about 1.5°C, 2030 and 2052? The summary for policy makers states in their description of the current situation:

Human activities are estimated to have caused approximately 1.0°C of global warming above pre-industrial levels, with a likely range of 0.8°C to 1.2°C. Global warming is likely to reach 1.5°C between 2030 and 2052 if it continues to increase at the current rate. (high confidence)

Chapter one of the report has the details and confirms that the period 2030 to 2052 is based on an estimate of how much the world has warmed up to now and how fast it is warming. That fits, we have warmed about 1°C and the warming is about 0.2°C per decade. So one degree more warming would be in 5 decades and half a degree warming more would be 25 years, which is the middle of the 2030 to 2052 year interval.


Figure SMP1, panel a, from the Summary for Policy Makers of the IPPC Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5°C.

This is the warming baseline WUWT & Co., Big Coal and Big Oil and the pro-torture politicians Trump, Jair Bolsonaro and Mohammad Bone Saw Salman are fighting for, which is for comparison with climate policies that benefit humanity in the remainder of the report.

The period of 2030 to 2052 is mentioned in the beginning of the report and was also mentioned early in the IPCC press conference. So it makes sense that is was noted in the press, but that they used the lower uncertainty range (12 years) and not the mean (26 years) is weird, as well as calling reaching the 1.5°C level an immediate catastrophe or deadline, while it had a different function.

Maybe I am too much of a scientist, but mentioning the lower boundary of an uncertainty range makes no sense without defining the range. The IPCC used the term "likely", which is defined as a probability between 66 and 100%. If you wanted to more sure the period contains the year we will cross the 1.5°C level, for example "virtually certain" (99-100%), the range would have been much wider and the lower bound much earlier. Scientifically speaking the "12 years" without that context is meaningless.

So what most likely happened is that we have scientists describing the progression of climate change. They give the uncertainty range and the press decides to only mention the lower boundary of this range. Then they somehow turn it into a deadline, put this in many headlines and never tell their readers where the number comes from. This made #12years a somewhat viral political meme. Chinese whispers of the worst kind. Journalists please listen to Peter Hadfield: check the source.




* If we define the pre-industrial temperature as the temperature of the second half of the 19th century, as the newest IPCC report did. The actual industrial revolution and our CO2 emissions started a century earlier. Politicians will have to clarify how they define their thresholds. It may be a good idea to convert the 1.5°C and 2°C limits into warming since a more recent period, as this is better defined due to much better observations.

** Clicking on the Fox News link may give you "Access Denied". Copy and paste works.

Related reading

Professor Myles Allen lead author of the IPCC Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5°C: Why protesters [everyone, red.] should be wary of ‘12 years to climate breakdown’ rhetoric.

The Carbon Brief: In-depth Q&A: The IPCC’s special report on climate change at 1.5C

Andrew King, Ben Henley & Ed Hawkins in The Conversation: What is a pre-industrial climate and why does it matter?

Special Report: Global Warming of 1.5 ºC

There’s one key takeaway from last week’s IPCC report. Cut carbon pollution as much as possible, as fast as possible.

Largest ever group of global investors call for more action to meet Paris targets. 'The group of 414 institutional investors with $31 trillion under management say governments must take serious steps to cut emissions. ... Among specific policies, they request governments “phase out thermal coal power”, “put a meaningful price on carbon” and “phase out fossil fuel subsidies.”'

In the ongoing climate negotitions in Poland, Saudi Arabia, the US, Russia & Kuwait objected to the conference "welcoming" the IPCC Special Report on 1.5°C warming, the BBC reports. The flood of messages on this BBC article suggests that climate scientists who volunteered to write the report are not amused.

An ignorant proposal for a BEST project rip-off

It looks like the "Competitive Enterprise Institute" (CEI) just conned their dark money overlords with a stupid report rehashing all the same old claims of the mitigation sceptical movement the BEST project of Richard Muller already studied as a Red Team.

Conservative physics professor Richard Muller claimed that before his BEST project he "did not know whether global warming was real, was completely bogus or may was twice as bad as people said". He was at least open to all sides.

Joe D’Aleo, co-author of the CEI-affiliated report, made the embarrassingly uninformed and wrong claim that “nearly all of the warming they are now showing are in the adjustments.”

The report "On the Validity of NOAA, NASA and Hadley CRU Global Average Surface Temperature Data & The Validity of EPA’s CO2 Endangerment Finding - Abridged Research Report" (with annotations) by James P. Wallace III, Joseph S. D’Aleo, and Craig D. Idso provides no evidence for this claim; the graph above shows the opposite is true.

They don't do subtle. But really? You want to claim the Earth is not warming? In 2017?

Glaciers are melting, from the tropical [[Kilimanjaro]] glaciers, to the ones in the Alps and Greenland. Arctic sea ice is shrinking. The growing season in the mid-latitudes has become weeks longer. Trees bud and blossom earlier. Wine can be harvested earlier. Animals migrate earlier. The habitat of plants, animals and insects is shifting poleward and up the mountains. Lakes and rivers freeze later and break-up the ice earlier. The oceans are rising.

Even without looking at any thermometer data, even if we would not have invented the thermometer, physics professor Muller was not sure the Earth is warming? Some corporate lobbyists of the CEI claim the Earth is hardly warming? Really? And the same group of people like to say scientists should get out of the lab more often.

Richard Muller explained in the New York Times the main objections of the mitigation sceptics, which he studied and the CEI wants to study:

We carefully studied issues raised by skeptics: biases from urban heating (we duplicated our results using rural data alone), from data selection (prior groups selected fewer than 20 percent of the available temperature stations; we used virtually 100 percent), from poor station quality (we separately analyzed good stations and poor ones) and from human intervention and data adjustment (our work is completely automated and hands-off). In our papers we demonstrate that none of these potentially troublesome effects unduly biased our conclusions.

In the end Muller and his team found:

Our results turned out to be close to those published by prior groups. We think that means that those groups had truly been very careful in their work, despite their inability to convince some skeptics of that. They managed to avoid bias in their data selection, homogenization and other corrections.

The CEI report carefully avoids any mention of the BEST project. If fact it avoids any mention of previous studies on their "issues". That could be because they are uninformed henchmen, because they want to con their even dumber sponsors or because they want to deceive their friends and keep the public "debate" going on ad nauseam.

If they were real sceptics they would inform themselves and if they do not agree with a claim respond to the arguments. A scientific article thus starts with a description of what is already known and then puts forward new arguments or new evidence. Just repeating ancient accusations, ignoring previous studies, does not lead to a better understanding or a better conversation.

Global mean temperature estimates

Before going over the main mistakes of the report, let me explain how much the Earth is estimated to have warmed, why adjustments need to be made and how these adjustments are made.

The graph below shows the warming since 1880. The red line is the raw data, the blue line the warming estimate after adjustments to account for changes in the way temperature was measured. Directly using raw data, the warming estimate would have been larger. Due to adjustments about 10% of the warming is removed.

This would be a good point to remember that Joe D’Aleo wrong claimed that “nearly all of the warming they are now showing are in the adjustments.”  It is really really hard to be more wrong. Joe D’Aleo gets points for effort.



The main reason why the raw data suggests more warming is how sea surface temperature was historically measured. The ocean surface warming estimates of the UK Hadley centre are shown below. The main adjustment necessary is for the transition of bucket observations to measurement at the engine cooling water inlet, which mostly happened in the decades around the WWII. The war itself is an especially difficult case.

Bucket measurements are made by hauling a bucket of water from the ocean and stirring a thermometer until it has the temperature of the water. The problem is that the water cools due to evaporation between the time it is lifted from the ocean and the time the thermometer is read.

This is not only a large adjustment, but also a large uncertainty. Initially is was estimated that the bucket measurements were about 0.4 °C colder. Nowadays the estimate, depending on the bucket and the period, is about 0.2 °C, but it can be anywhere between 0.4 °C and zero. We studied these biases with experiments on research vessels, in labs and numerical modelling and by comparing measurements made by different nearby ships/platforms.



The graph below shows the warming over land as estimated from weather station data by US NOAA (GHCNv3). Over land the warming was larger than the raw observations suggest. The adjustments are made by comparing every candidate station with its nearby neighbours. Changes in the regional climate will be the same in all stations, any change that only happens at the candidate station is not representative for the region, but likely a change in how temperature was observed.

There are many reasons why stations may not measure the regional climate correctly. The best known is urbanization of the local surrounding of the station. Cities are often warmer than the surrounding region and when cities grow this can produce a warming signal. This is a correct measurement, but not the large-scale warming of interest and should thus be removed. The counterpart of urbanization is that city stations are often moved to the outskirts, which typically produces a cooling jump that also needs to be removed. This can even be important for small villages.

City stations moving to cooler airports can produce an artificial cooling. Also modern equipment generally measures a bit cooler than early instruments.



Where the CEI report gives examples of data before and after adjustment, do you want to guess whether they showed the sea surface temperature or the land surface temperature?

Sea or land? What do you think? I'll wait.


If you guessed the land surface temperature you won the price: a free twitter account to tell the Competitive Enterprise Institute what you think of the quality of their propaganda.

The ocean is 71% of the Earth's surface. Thus if you combine these two temperature signals taking the area of the land and the ocean into account the net effect of the adjustments is a reduction of global warming.

A semi-regular reminder that adjustments in surface temp analyses for non-climate-related biases LOWER 20th C trends. You're welcome. pic.twitter.com/jPRAehujYN

— Gavin Schmidt (@ClimateOfGavin) 6 July 2017

The Daily caller interviewed D'Aleo and calls the report a "peer-reviewed study". Suggesting that it underwent the quality control by scientists with expertise in the field that is typical for scientific publications. There is no evidence that the report is published in the scientific literature and the blog science quality, lack of clarity how the figures were computed and where their data comes from, the lack of evidence for the claims, the lack of references to the scientific literature makes it highly unlikely that this work is peer reviewed, to say it in a friendly way. There is no quality bar they will not limbo underneath; they don't do subtle.

Homogenisation

The estimation of the climatic changes at a station using neighbouring stations to remove local artefacts is called statistical homogenisation. The basic idea of comparing a candidate station with its neighbours is easy, but with typically multiple jumps at one station and also jumps in the neighbouring stations it becomes a beautiful statistical problem people can work on for decades.

Naturally scientists also study how well they can remove these artefacts. It is sad this needs to be mentioned, but the more friendly blog posts of the mitigation sceptical movement (implicitly) assume scientists are stupid and don't do any due diligence. Right, that is how we got the moon and produced smart phones.



Such a study was actually how I started with this topic. The homogenisation community needed an outsider to make a blind benchmarking of their methods. So I generated a dataset with homogeneous station data where you need to get the variability of the stations right and the variability (correlations) between the stations. As the name of this blog suggests just the job I like.

To this homogeneous data we added inhomogeneities. For me that was the biggest task, talking with dozens of experts from many different countries how inhomogeneities typically look like. How many (about one per 20 years), how big (about 0.8 °C per jump), how many gradual inhomogeneities and how big (to model urbanization), how often do multiple stations have a simultaneous jump (for example, due to a central change in the time of observation).

I gave this inhomogeneous station dataset to my colleagues, who homogenised it and, after everyone returned the data, we analysed the results. We found that all methods improved the quality of monthly temperature data. More importantly for us was that modern homogenisation packages were clearly better than traditional methods. The work of the last decade had paid off.

The figure to the right is from a similar blind validation study for the homogenisation method NOAA used to homogenise GHCNv3 and shows something important. The four panels are four different assumptions about how inhomogeneities and the climate looks like. This study chose to make some inhomogeneity cases that were really easy and some that were really hard.

On the horizontal axis are three periods. The red crosses are the trends in the inhomogeneous data, the green crosses the ones in the homogeneous data, which the homogenisation algorithms are supposed to recover and the yellow/orange crosses are the trends of the homogenised data.

The important thing is that the yellow cross is always in between: homogenisation improved the trend estimates, but part of the error in the trend remains. In the most difficult case of this study, which I consider unrealistic, the homogenised result was in the middle. Half of the trend error was removed, half remained.

Because real raw station data shows too little warming and statistical homogenisation makes the trend larger, better homogenisation thus also means stronger temperature trends over land. Homogenisation became better because of better homogenisation algorithms and because we have more data due to continual digitisation efforts. With more data, the stations will on average be closer together and thus experience more similar weather. This means that it becomes easier to see homogeneities in their differences.

CEI claims from Daily Caller

Michael Bastasch of the Daily Caller makes several unsupported or wrong claims about the report. Other claims are already wrong in report.

A new study found adjustments made to global surface temperature readings by scientists in recent years “are totally inconsistent with published and credible U.S. and other [New Zealand and upper air] temperature data.”

No shit, Sherlock. Next you will tell me that cassoulet does not taste like a McDonald’s Hamburger, sea food or a cream puff. The warming of different air masses is different? Who would have thought so?

This becomes most Kafkaesk when the authors want to see the high number of 100 Fahrenheit days of the 1930s US [[Dust Bowl]] in the global monthly average temperature and call this a "cyclical pattern". Not sure whether a report aimed at the Tea Party folks should insult American farmers and claim they will mismanage their lands to produce a Dust Bowl in regular cycles.

JJA 2016 compared directly to JJA 1936. Only western US and ~sub-polar N. Atl cooler last year. In annual mean, only N. Atl. pic.twitter.com/GsGcQsJfT9

— Gavin Schmidt (@ClimateOfGavin) 7 July 2017

The report is drenched in conspiratorial thinking:

Basically, “cyclical pattern in the earlier reported data has very nearly been ‘adjusted’ out” of temperature readings taken from weather stations, buoys, ships and other sources.

They do not even critique the methods used or even mention them and do acknowledge that adjustments are necessary, but the pure outcome being inconvenient for their donors is enough to complain.

It also illustrates that the mitigation sceptical movement is preoccupied with the outcome and not with the quality of a study. Whether a new study is praised or criticized on their movement blog Watts Up With That depends on the outcome, on whether it can be spun as making their case against solving climate change stronger or weaker. On science blogs it depends on the quality and the strength of the evidence.

As I already showed above, the adjustments make the estimated warming smaller. The exact opposite is claimed by the Daily Caller:

In fact, almost all the surface temperature warming adjustments cool past temperatures and warm more current records, increasing the warming trend, according to the study's authors.

The study provides no evidence for this. They do not show the warming before and after adjustment for the global temperature, only for the land temperature.

Is it too much to ask to inform yourself before you accuse scientists of wrongdoing? Is it too much to ask if you write a report about the global temperature to read some scientific articles on data problems in the sea surface temperature? Is is too much to ask if you talk about the 1940s to wonder whether the WWII might have influences the measurements?

“Each dataset pushed down the 1940s warming and pushed up the current warming.”

The war increased the percentage of American navy vessels, which make engine intake measurements, and decreased the percentage of merchant ships, which make bucket measurements. That produces a spurious warm peak in the raw data.

Modern data also have a better coverage over the Earth. Locally there is more decadal variability, what they call "cyclical pattern". A better coverage will remove spurious decadal variability from the global average.

I have no clue why they would think this:

“You would think that when you make adjustments you’d sometimes get warming and sometimes get cooling. That’s almost never happened,” said D’Aleo, who co-authored the study with statistician James Wallace and Cato Institute climate scientist Craig Idso.

The transitions in the measurements methods due to technological and economic changes can naturally affect the global average temperature. For example ships in the 19th century used bucket measurements, now most sea surface temperature data comes from buoys.

If you assume inhomogeneities can have no influence on the global mean, like D'Aleo, then why are the mitigation sceptics claiming to be worried about the influence of urbanization on the global mean temperature? If that were the main problem, the adjustments would tend to produce cooling more often than warming to remove this problem. They would not "sometimes get warming and sometimes get cooling".

The report was an embarrassing mixture of the worst of blog science. The Daily Caller post managed to make it worse.

The positive side of Trump claiming that his inauguration was the biggest evah, is that the public now understands were such wild claims come from. Science is harder to check than crowd sizes. Even if you do not know them personally, there are people on this globe willing to deny the existence of global warming without blinking an eye.

Related reading

Quality of climate data

The climate scientists of Climate Feedback had a look at an Breitbart article on the same report. Seven scientists analyzed the article and estimate its overall scientific credibility to be 'very low'. Breitbart article falsely claims that measured global warming has been “fabricated”.

Fact checker of urban legends Snopes judged the Breitbart article to be: False. Surprise. Had Breitbart known it to be true, they would not have published it.

Ars Technica: Thorough, not thoroughly fabricated: The truth about global temperature data. How thermometer and satellite data is adjusted and why it must be done.

John Timmer at Ars Technica is fed up with being served the same story about some upward adjusted stations every year: Temperature data is not “the biggest scientific scandal ever” Do we have to go through this every year?

Steven Mosher, a climate sceptic and member of the BEST project: all the adjustments demanded by the "sceptics".

The astronomer behind And Then There's Physics writes why the removal of non-climatic effects makes sense. In the comments he talks about adjustments made to astronomical data. Probably every numerical observational discipline of science performs data processing to improve the accuracy of their analysis.

Nick Stokes, an Australian scientist, has a beautiful post that explains the small adjustments to the land surface temperature in more detail.

Two posts of mine about some reasons for temperature trend biases: Temperature bias from the village heat island and Changes in screen design leading to temperature trend biases.

You may also be interested in the posts on how homogenization methods work (Statistical homogenisation for dummies) and how they are validated (New article: Benchmarking homogenisation algorithms for monthly data).

Just the facts, homogenization adjustments reduce global warming.

Zeke Hausfather: Major correction to satellite data shows 140% faster warming since 1998.

If you would like to read a peer reviewed scientific article showing the adjustments, the influence of the adjustments on the global mean temperature is also shown in Karl et al. (2015).

NOAA's benchmarking study: Claude N. Williams ,Matthew J.Menne, Peter W. Thorne, 2012: Benchmarking the performance of pairwise homogenization of surface temperatures in the United States. Journal Geophysical Research, doi: 10.1029/2011JD016761.

On my benchmarking study: New article: Benchmarking homogenisation algorithms for monthly data.

Corporate war on science

The Guardian on the CEI report and their attempt to attack the endangerment finding: Conservatives are again denying the very existence of global warming.

Another post on the CEI report: Silly Non-Study Supposedly Strengthens Endangerment Challenge.

My first post on the Red Cheeks Team.

My last post on the Red Team idea: The Trump administration proposes a new scientific method just for climate studies.

Great piece by climate scientist Ken Caldeira: Red team, blue team.

Phil Newell: One Team, Two Team, Red Team, Blue Team.

Why doesn't Big Oil fund alternative climate research? Hopefully a rhetorical question. They would have had a lot to gain if they thought the science were wrong, but they fund PR not science.

Union of Concerned Scientists on the funding of the war by Exxon: ExxonMobil Talks A Good Game, But It’s Still Funding Climate Science Deniers.

The New Republic on several attacks on science by Scott Pruitt: The End Goal of Trump’s War on Science.

Mother Jones: A Jaw-Dropping List of All the Terrible Things Trump Has Done to Mother Earth. Goodbye regulations designed to protect the environment and public health.

The IPCC underestimates global warming

A month ago the New York Times insulted its subscribers with a climate change column by Bret Stephens, their new hire from the Wall Street Journal. The bizarre text was mostly a sequence of claims that did not follow from the arguments presented.

The column also contained one fact. Which was wrong and later corrected. Stephens claimed:

Anyone who has read the 2014 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change knows that, while the modest (0.85 degrees Celsius, or about 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit) warming of the Northern Hemisphere since 1880 is indisputable, as is the human influence on that warming, much else that passes as accepted fact is really a matter of probabilities.

As a dutiful watcher of Potholer54, which any real skeptic should be, you know that it is a good idea to check the source and Stephens helpfully provided a link to the Summary for Policymakers of the 5th assessment synthesis report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). This summary mentions the number "0.85" in the sentence:

The globally averaged combined land and ocean surface temperature data as calculated by a linear trend show a warming of 0.85 [0.65 to 1.06] °C over the period 1880 to 2012, when multiple independently produced datasets exist (Figure SPM.1a). {1.1.1, Figure 1.1}

Figure SPM.1a. Annually and globally averaged combined land and ocean surface temperature anomalies relative to the average over the period 1986 to 2005. Colours indicate different data sets.

Thus Stephens confused the global temperature with the temperature of the Northern Hemisphere. Not a biggy, but indicative of the quality of Stephens' writing.

A related weird claim is that the "warming of the earth since 1880 is indisputable, as is the human influence on that warming, much else that passes as accepted fact is really a matter of probabilities."

As quoted above the warming since 1880 is not exactly known, but probably between 0.65 and 1.06 °C. That it was warming is so certain that a journalist may call it "indisputable". There is thus no conflict between probabilities and certainty. In fact they go hand in hand. When scientists talk about uncertainties, they are quantifying how certain we are.

However, I did not want to attack the soft target Bret Stephens. The hard target IPCC is much more interesting. They put some thought in their writing.

More precisely I have problems when they write in the summary for policy makers: "temperature data as calculated by a linear trend show a warming of 0.85". That means that they fitted a linear function to the data — using [[least squares regression]] — and used this trend and the length of the period to estimate the total warming over this period.

This is a problem because calculating the total amount of warming using a linear trend underestimates global warming.* I show this below for two global temperature datasets by comparing the linear warming estimate with a nonlinear (LOESS) warming estimate. The linear estimate is smaller: For NASA's GISTEMP it is 0.05 °C smaller and for Berkeley Earth it is 0.1 °C smaller.



Such linear estimates are well suited for comparing different datasets because it is well defined how to compute a linear trend and the bias will be similar in the different datasets. That is why linear estimates are used a lot in the scientific literature and scientists reading this know that a linear estimate can be biased when the curve itself is not linear.

But this was a warming estimate for the summary for policy makers. Policy makers and the public in general should get an unbiased estimate of the climatic changes we have seen and are before us.

Tending to underplay the problem is quite typical. There is even an article on climate Scientists Erring on the Side of Least Drama and also The Copenhagen Diagnosis gives several examples such as the very low predictions for the decline in sea ice or the increase in sea level.

When it comes the warming found in station data, we did study the main possible warming bias (urbanization) in depth, but hardly did any work on cooling biases that may lead us to underestimate the amount of warming.

In a recent study to define what "pre-industrial" means when it comes to the 2 °C warming limit, the authors suggest a comparison period with relatively few volcanoes, which is thus relatively warm. This underestimates the warming since "pre-industrial". The authors wanted to be "conservative". I think we should be unbiased.

I understand that scientists want to be careful before crying wolf, whether we have a problem or not. However, when it comes to the size of the wolf, we should give our best estimate and not continually err on the side of a Chihuahua.

Related reading

Climate Scientists Erring on the Side of Least Drama

Why raw temperatures show too little global warming

The NY Times promised to fact check their new climate denier columnist — they lied

* The linear estimate is typically smaller, sometimes a lot, whether the actual underlying function is convex or concave. I had expected this estimate to be always smaller, but noticed while writing this post that for polynomial functions, f(t) = t^p, it can also be a few percent higher for p between 1 and 2. Below you can see 4 example curves, where the time runs between zero and one and thus also f(t) goes from zero to one. The total "warming" in all cases is exactly one. The linear estimates are generally less than one, except for the f(t) = t^1.5 example.

The bottom graph shows these linear estimates as a function of exponent p, where you can see that for an exponent between 1 (linear) and 2 (quadratic) the estimates can be a little higher than one, while they are generally lower. Probably Carl Friedrich Gauss or at least Paul Lévy already wrote an article about this, but it was a small surprise to me.




** Top photo of a Chihuahua is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.
Bottom Chihuahua photo by Inanishi is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0) license.


*** The R code to generate the plots with the linear and nonlinear warming from two global temperature datasets is on GitHub. The R code to study the influence of the polynomial exponent on the linear estimate is also on GitHub.

Global warming in the original Celsius scale

A short post with a question of counterfactual history.

The Celsius temperature scale developed by Anders Celsius (1701–1744) himself had 0 °C at the boiling point of water and freezing was 100 °C.

It had the advantage that negative numbers would not occur in normal use. Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit (1686–1736) achieved this for his temperature scale by choosing the lowest temperature in his village or a brine mixture as zero. Negative numbers may well have been controversial at the time. Only in the 17th century the idea of negative numbers was accepted by western mathematicians.

The forward scale we are used to was independently developed by several of Celsius' contemporaries. What would have happened if we had kept to original Celsius scale?

In forward degrees Celsius global warming produces an upward curve. In our current culture that is associated with progress and growth.



In the original Celsius scale the same plots would look more depressing like this.



If the temperature graphs had looked like the graphs of Arctic sea ice would that have changed the course of history? Would we have taken the problem seriously in the 1990s?



Tweet

David Rose's alternative reality in the Daily Mail

Peek-a-boo! Joanna Krupa shows off her stunning figure in see-through mesh dress over black underwear
Bottoms up! Perrie Edwards sizzles in plunging leotard as Little Mix flaunt their enviable figures in skimpy one-pieces
Bum's the word! Lottie Moss flaunts her pert derriere in a skimpy thong as she strips off for steamy selfie

Sorry about those titles. They provide the fitting context right next to a similarly racy Daily Mail on Sunday piece of David Rose: "Exposed: How world leaders were duped into investing billions over manipulated global warming data". Another article on that "pause" thingy that mitigation skeptics do their best to pretend not to understand. For people in the fortunate circumstances not to know what the Daily Mail is, this video provides some context about this Murdoch "newspaper".

[UPDATE: David Rose' source says in an interview with E&E News on Tuesday: “The issue here is not an issue of tampering with data”. So I guess you can skip this post, except if you get pleasure out of seeing the English language being maltreated. But do watch the Daily Mail video below.

See also this article on the void left by the Daily Mail after fact checking. I am sure all integrity^TM-waving climate "skeptics" will condemn David Rose and never listen to him again.]



You can see this "pause" in the graph below of the global mean temperature. Can you find it? Well you have to think those last two years away and then start the period exactly in that large temperature peak you see in 1998. It is not actually a thing, it is a consequence of cherry picking a period to get a politically convenient answer (for David Rose's pay masters).



In 2013 Boyin Huang of NOAA and his colleagues created an improved sea surface dataset called ERSST.v4. No one cared about this new analysis. Normal good science. One of the "scandals" Rose uncovered was that NOAA is drafting an article on ERSST.v5.

But this post is unfortunately about nearly nothing, about the minimal changes in the top panel of the graph below. I feel the important panel is the lower one. It shows that in the raw data the globe seems to warm more. This is because before WWII many measurements were performed with buckets and the water in the bucket would cool a little due to evaporation before reading the thermometer. Scientists naturally make corrections for such problems (homogenization) and that helps make a more accurate assessment of how much the world actually warmed.

But Rose is obsessed with the top panel. I made the graph extra large, so that you can see the differences. The thick black line shows the new assessment (ERSST.v4) and the thin red line the previously estimated global temperature signal (ERSST.v3). Differences are mostly less than 0.05°C, both warmer and cooler. The "problem" is the minute change at the right end of the curves.

The mitigation skeptical movement was not happy when a paper in Science in 2015, Karl and colleagues (2015), pointed out that due to this update the "pause" is gone, even if you use the bad statistics the mitigation skeptics like. As I have said for many years now about political activists claiming this "pause" is highly important: if your political case depends on such minute changes, your political case is fragile.



In the mean time a recent article in Science Advances by Zeke Hausfather and colleagues (2016) now shows evidence that the updated dataset (ERSSTv4) is indeed better than the previous version (ERSSTv3b). They do so by comparing the ERSST dataset, which comes from a large number of data sources, with data that comes only from only one source (buoys, satellites (CCl) or ARGO). These single-source datasets are shorter, but without trend uncertainties due to the combination of sources. The plot below shows that the ERSSTv4 update improves the fit with the other datasets.



The trend change over the cherry-picked "pause" period were mostly due to the changes in the sea surface temperature of ERSST. Rose makes a lot of noise about the land data, where the update was inconsequential. As indicated in Karl and colleagues (2015) this was a beta-version dataset. The raw data was published; that is the data of the International Surface Temperature Initiative (ISTI) and the homogenization method was published. The homogenization method works well; I checked myself.

The dataset itself is not published yet. Just applying a known method to a known dataset is not a scientific paper. Too boring.

So for the paper NOAA put a lot of work into estimating the uncertainty due to the homogenization method. When developing a homogenization method you have to make many choices. For example, inhomogeneities are found by comparing one candidate station with multiple nearby reference stations. There are settings for now many stations and for how nearby the reference stations need to be. NOAA studied which of these settings are most important with a nifty new statistical method. These settings were varied to study how much influence that has. I look forward to reading the final paper. I guess Rose will not read it and stick to his role as suggestive interpreter of interpreters.

The update of NOAA's land data will probably remove a precious conspiracy of the mitigation skeptical movement. While, as shown above, the adjustments reduce our estimate for the warming of the entire world, the adjustments make the estimate for the warming over land larger. Mitigation skeptics like to show the adjustments for land data only to suggest that evil scientists are making global warming bigger.

This is no longer the case. A recommendable overview paper by Philip Jones, The Reliability of Global and Hemispheric Surface Temperature Records, analyzed the new NOAA dataset. The results for land are shown below. The new ISTI raw data dataset shows more warming than the previous NOAA raw data dataset. As a consequence the homogenization now does not change the global mean appreciably any more to arrive at about the same answer after homogenization; compare NOAA uncorrected (yellow line) with NOAA (red; homogenized).



The main reason for the smaller warming in the old NOAA raw data was that this smaller dataset contained a higher percentage of airport stations. That is because airports report their data very reliably in near real time. Many of these airport stations were in cities before and cities are warmer than airports due to the urban heat island effect. Such relocations thus typically cause cooling jumps that are not related to global warming and are removed by homogenization.

So we have quite some irony here.

• Rose never mentions that the adjustments make our estimate of global warming smaller; that would not have fit into the conspiracy he is trying to sell.
• The "pause" is based on bad statistics and cherry-picking a specific period, which is bad "science". With good statistics, there is no evidence of any trend change.
• The "pause" hype assumes that climate data is perfect. I have warned against that over and over again; for example in 2013. Well before the Karl and colleagues (2015) paper showed these uncertainties indeed cannot be ignored for such a short period.
• With the last 2 years of data in it is clear that there never was any pause, you no longer need any statistics to see that.
• Recent new evidence makes the case stronger that the new ERSST.v4 dataset is an improvement.

Still Rose sees a scandal in these minute updates and dubs it Climategate 2; I thought we were already at 3 or 4. In this typical racy style he calls data "wrong", "rogue", "biased". Knowing that data is never perfect is why scientists do their best to assess the quality of the data, remove problems and make sure that the quality is good enough to make a certain statement. In return people like David Rose simultaneously pontificate about uncertainty monsters and assume data is perfect and then get the vapors when updates are needed.

Rose gets some suggestive quotes from an apparently disgruntled retired NOAA employee. The quotes themselves seem to be likely inconsequential procedural complaints, the corresponding insinuations seem to come from Rose.

I thought journalism had a rule that claims by a source need to be confirmed by at least a second source. I am missing any confirmation.

While Rose presents the employee as an expert on the topic, I have never heard of him. Peter Thorne, who worked at NOAA, confirms that the employee did not work with surface station data himself. He has a decent publication record, mainly on satellite climate datasets of clouds, humidity and radiation. Ironically, I keep using that word, he also has papers about the homogenization of his datasets, while homogenization is treated by the mitigation skeptical movement as the work of the devil. I am sure they are willing to forgive him his past transgressions this time.

It sounds as if he made a set of procedures for his climate satellite data, which he really liked, and wanted other groups in NOAA to use it as well. Was frustrated when others did not prioritize enough updating their existing procedures to his.

For David Rose this is naturally mostly about politics and in his fantasies the Paris climate treaty would not have existed with the Karl and colleagues (2015) paper. I know that "pause" thingy is important for the Anglo-American mitigation skeptical movement, but let me assure Rose that the rest of the world considers all the evidence and does not make politics based on single papers.

[UPDATE: Some days you gotta love journalism: a journalist asked several of the diplomats who worked for years on the Paris climate treaty, they gave the answer you would expect: Contested NOAA paper had no influence on Paris climate deal. The answers still give an interesting insight into the sausage making. What is actually politically important.]

David Rose thus ends:

Has there been an unexpected pause in global warming? If so, is the world less sensitive to carbon dioxide than climate computer models suggest?

No, there never was an "unexpected pause." Even if there were, such a minute change is not important for the climate sensitivity. Most methods do not use the historical warming for that and those that do consider the full warming of about 1°C since the 19th century and not only short periods with unreliable, noisy short-term trends.

David Rose:

And does this mean that truly dangerous global warming is less imminent, and that politicians’ repeated calls for immediate ‘urgent action’ to curb emissions are exaggerated?

No, but thanks for asking.

Post Scriptum. Sorry that I cannot talk about all errors in the article of David Rose, if only because in most cases he does not present clear evidence and because this post would be unbearably long. The articles of Peter Thorne and Zeke Hausfather are mostly complementary on the history and regulations at NOAA and on the validation of NOAA's results, respectively.

Related information

Buzzfeed (October 2017): This Is How A Bogus Climate Story Becomes Unstoppable On Social Media

New York Times (September 2017): British Press Watchdog Says Climate Change Article Was Faulty

2 weeks later. The nailing New York Times interviewed several former colleagues of NOAA retire Bates: How an Interoffice Spat Erupted Into a Climate-Change Furor. "He’s retaliating. It’s like grade school ... At that meeting, Dr. Bates shouted that Ms. McGuirk was not trustworthy and belonged in jail, according to an internal log ..." Lock her up, lock her up, ...

Wednesday. The NOAA retiree now says: "The Science paper would have been fine had it simply had a disclaimer at the bottom saying that it was citing research, not operational, data for its land-surface temperatures." To me it was always clear it was research data, otherwise they would have cited a data paper and named the dataset. How a culture clash at NOAA led to a flap over a high-profile warming pause study

Tuesday. is a balanced article from the New York Times: Was Data Manipulated in a Widely Cited 2015 Climate Study? Steve Bloom: "How "Climategate" should have been covered." Even better if mass media would not have to cover office politics on archival standards fabricated into a fake scandal.

Also on Tuesday, an interview of E&E News: 'Whistleblower' says protocol was breached but no data fraud: The disgruntled NOAA retiree: "The issue here is not an issue of tampering with data".

Associated Press: Major global warming study again questioned, again defended. "The study has been reproduced independently of Karl et al — that's the ultimate platinum test of whether a study is to be believed or not," McNutt said. "And this study has passed." Marcia McNutt, who was editor of Science at the time the paper was published and is now president of the National Academy of Sciences.

Daily Mail’s Misleading Claims on Climate Change. If I were David Rose I would give back my journalism diploma after this, but I guess he will not.

Monday. I hope I am not starting to bore people by saying that Ars Technica has the best science reporting on the world wide web. This time again. Plus inside scoop suggesting all of this is mainly petty office politics. Sad.

Sunday. Factcheck: Mail on Sunday’s ‘astonishing evidence’ about global temperature rise. Zeke Hausfather wrote a very complementary response, pointing out many problems of the Daily Mail piece that I had to skip. Zeke works at the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project, which produces one of the main global temperature datasets.

Sunday. Peter Thorne, climatology professor in Ireland, former NOAA employee and leader of the International Surface Temperature Initiative: On the Mail on Sunday article on Karl et al., 2015.

Phil Plait (Bad Astronomy) — "Together these show that Rose is, as usual, grossly exaggerating the death of global warming" — on the science and the politics of the Daily Mail piece: Sorry, climate change deniers, but the global warming 'pause' still never happened

You can download the future NOAA land dataset (GHCNv4-beta) and the land dataset used by Karl and colleagues (2015), h/t Zeke Hausfather.

The most accessible article on the topic rightly emphasizes the industrial production of doubt for political reasons: Mail on Sunday launches the first salvo in the latest war against climate scientists.

A well-readable older article on the study that showed that ERSST.v4 was an improvement: NOAA challenged the global warming ‘pause.’ Now new research says the agency was right.

One should not even have to answer the question, but: No, U.S. climate scientists didn't trick the world into adopting the Paris deal. A good complete overview at medium level.

Even fact checker Snopes sadly wasted its precious time: Did NOAA Scientists Manipulate Climate Change Data?
A tabloid used testimony from a single scientist to paint an excruciatingly technical matter as a worldwide conspiracy.

Carbon Brief Guest post by Peter Thorne on the upcoming ERSSTv5 dataset, currently under peer review: Why NOAA updates its sea surface temperature record.