Improving the temperature record vs conspiracy theories at WUWT

Over the years, scientists in different parts of the world have worked hard to get a more accurate picture of the change in global surface temperature over time. This is slow painstaking work. Initially it would have meant working with written records, with people trying to decipher handwriting of the tens of thousands of people who wrote down readings of temperature and rainfall, and other weather indicators, from all the weather stations around the world. Over time the data was digitised - another extremely laborious task.

I'm not going to write about all that's been done. It's a mammoth ongoing effort involving people from all around the world. What I'm writing about are the ignorant scoffers. You know the people I mean. The ones who sit at their keyboards all day to snipe at the work done by scientists.

Anthony Watts has put up three articles from one chap who's been looking to see the extent of this careful work, as measured by adjustments to the original data. He's only looked at two data sets. One which is used by NASA and NOAA for global land surface temperatures. The Global Historical Climatology Network Data or GHCN. This was first developed in the early 1990s, with the current version 3 released in 2011. The other is the United States Historical Climatology Network (USHCN), which is the high quality dataset used by NOAA for USA temperatures since 1987.

Rud Istvan disputes Anthony Watts' surface station findings

I notice that Anthony Watts has posted an article (archived here) that disputes his surface station project paper, Fall et al (2011). To be more accurate, Rud Istvan seems to be misrepresenting Anthony's paper - by cherry-picking the bits he likes and ignoring the bits he doesn't. Then Rud gets some facts wrong while apparently trying to "prove" that the global surface temperature hasn't risen this much:

WUWT proposes harassment and lawsuits to stop climate research

Matt Manos is going great guns with his conspiratorial thinking over at WUWT (archived here). He comes across as a real nutter, albeit one who can manage to write an entire sentence with proper use of nouns and verbs. Flush with his success at flushing out all his fellow WUWT conspiracy theorists, today he's urging WUWT-ers to spam governments with FOIA requests. Matt wants to get to the bottom of what he thinks is a giant climate conspiracy. He wrote, using the same "sheeple" concept from his last article:

In my previous post, Why It’s So Hard to Convince Warmists, I introduced the concept of bellwethers and rational ignorance to explain why it’s so hard to convince warmists using empirical evidence. 

Denier Weirdness: A mock delegation from the Heartland Institute and a fake enquiry from the GWPF

The GWPF and the Heartland Institute are struggling to find a way to undermine The 21st session of the Conference of the Parties to the UNFCCC to be held in Paris later this year. (The GWPF is the main climate science denier lobby group in the UK, and the Heartland Institute is part of a network of denier lobby groups in the USA.)

The Mock Delegation from the Heartland Institute

The Heartland Institute claimed it was sending a delegation to the Vatican to persuade the Pope to become a climate science denier. Turns out they were just sending a bunch of deniers to hold a meeting in the Columbus Hotel in Rome, from which the "delegates" could get a view of St. Peter's Basilica, if they got a room with a view, but without any guarantee of a session with Pope Francis. There was no indication they'd tried to get an audience with the Pope - private or public.

The Heartland Institute website didn't even say who it was sending. When I clicked on the link for details, all I got was this "page not found".

The Fake Enquiry by the GWPF

The denier lobby group in the UK has taken a different tack to try to undermine the Paris talks. It has decided to set up a review into temperature records. It doesn't want to "believe" that ice is melting, that oceans are warming, that surface temperatures are going up and that climate change is happening. It also knows precious little about surface temperature, going by the terms of its review. And it doesn't care to, going by the people it has appointed to run its investigation.

Coincidentally at the same time another group has announced a review of the methods to remove non-climatic changes from temperature data, by the Task Team on Homogenization (TT-HOM) of the Commission for Climatology (CCl) of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). That review is headed by Dr Victor Venema. The terms of reference and membership are listed further down.

Compare the terms of reference of the GWPF review with that of the Task Team on Homogenization. The former is nothing but a political stunt by a denier lobby group, to try to get people to doubt that climate change is happening. The latter is aimed at improving the global temperature records.

Global surface temperature and homogenisation

There's not been much that was worth my writing about at WUWT lately. There hasn't been too much mocking of science - or no more than usual. And I haven't seen any Russian Steampipes or OMG it's insects rubbish this past few days either. There is a greed article (archived here) - strenuously objecting to helping less developed and poverty-stricken countries deal with climate change. Par for the denier course. As the headline suggests, when it comes to deniers it's "all about money".

Anthony Watts wrote two articles about why Steve Goddard was wrong when he claimed the US temperature data has been "fabricated" (archived here and here), which elicited some compliments but more protests. (During this Anthony's still promising to show why he thinks the US temperature record is all wrong. Part of his general protest at his previous paper on the subject which proved there was not much wrong at all with the US temperature record. He's still trying apparently without success so far.)

Which brings me to another thing I noticed, though not from anyone at WUWT, despite their apparent interest in the topic. While science deniers are busy denying the science, real scientists continue to do science. Victor Venema has a couple of articles about an initiative relating to a worldwide temperature record. The most recent article is here.  The paper looks interesting and is available for comment, if you are an expert in homogenisation algorithms. The paper is called: Concepts for benchmarking of homogenisation algorithm performance on the global scale and you can read it here.

The work was an international collaboration, involving 19 scientists from the UK, USA, Australia, Switzerland, Canada, Germany, Italy, Spain and Norway. No-one from Asia or Africa. You'll probably recognise some of the names.

The abstract describes it rather nicely (my paras):

The International Surface Temperature Initiative (ISTI) is striving towards substantively improving our ability to robustly understand historical land surface air temperature change at all scales. A key recently completed first step has been collating all available records into a comprehensive open access, traceable and version-controlled databank. The crucial next step is to maximise the value of the collated data through a robust international framework of benchmarking and assessment for product intercomparison and uncertainty estimation.

We focus on uncertainties arising from the presence of inhomogeneities in monthly surface temperature data and the varied methodological choices made by various groups in building homogeneous temperature products. The central facet of the benchmarking process is the creation of global scale synthetic analogs to the real-world database where both the "true" series and inhomogeneities are known (a luxury the real world data do not afford us). Hence algorithmic strengths and weaknesses can be meaningfully quantified and conditional inferences made about the real-world climate system.

Here we discuss the necessary framework for developing an international homogenisation benchmarking system on the global scale for monthly mean temperatures. The value of this framework is critically dependent upon the number of groups taking part and so we strongly advocate involvement in the benchmarking exercise from as many data analyst groups as possible to make the best use of this substantial effort. 

There's a comment by Blair Trewin from the Australian Bureau of Meteorology, who says the paper is sound and adds some suggestions.

If you're interested in records of global surface temperatures, this effort might be worth watching.

Update 

(10:42 am 27 June 14)

I was half an hour early. Victor has just tweeted me his latest article, in which he writes:

In our benchmarking paper we generated a dataset that mimicked real temperature or precipitation data. To this data we added non-climatic changes (inhomogeneities). We requested the climatologists to homogenize this data, to remove the inhomogeneities we had inserted. How good the homogenization algorithms are can be seen by comparing the homogenized data to the original homogeneous data. ...

...The main conclusions were that homogenization improves the homogeneity of temperature data. Precipitation is more difficult and only the best algorithms were able to improve it. We found that modern methods improved the quality of temperature data about twice as much as traditional methods. It is thus important that people switch to one of these modern methods. My impression from the recent Homogenisation seminar and the upcoming European Meteorological Society (EMS) meeting is that this seems to be happening. 

Go to Victor's blog to read more and, as a bonus, you can see a photo of the fat cat scientists, living in their towers made from elephant tusks :)