land temperature record

One of the best sources for the land temperature record is the Historical Climatology Network (HCN). This is a record produced by thousands of individuals all across the globe that visit meteorological weather stations each and every day and dutifully record the min and max temperatures, along with precipitation levels. And they have been doing this for over a 100 years. To my way of thinking, this is the definitive source for the historical perspective on temperature.

USHCN - US Land Temperature Data

The USHCN is just a subset which only includes stations for the US. You can start your research into the USHCN at the following location.

https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/ushcn/introduction

Data Source

You can pull the raw datafiles from their FTP and perform your own analysis.

ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/ghcn/daily/

Data Tampering

Here is a graph produced by taking the data, calculating the average TMAX for all the stations and turning it into a time series. This graph is the official temperature statement published by NOAA. The following comes from the work of Tony Heller and these are his graphs but I have corroborated his findings with my own analysis. I may post my Python software and resulting graphs for these in another blog post after I clean it up.

Lets dive in.

There is one problem with that graph though. It is the “FINAL” result after tampering with the data. You can find several versions of the data on their site because these data adjustments have gone through several iterations in the last 20 years. Setting aside the reasoning behind the adjustments for now, I want to first address what they have done and what was the result. So, here is a result of the original data before any adjustments were made to it. Totally different message. Clearly, the USA has been cooling since the hot 30's. But this does not fit the narrative of CO2 causing global warming.

If you subtract the original raw measurements from the final, or adjusted measurements you can derive the temperature offset that was applied to the data. If you now plot that against the year, you get the following graph. The results of adjusting the data, have cooled much of the past by 1.5 and warmed recent records by a degree. That is fully 2.5F. Sound familiar?

Now, if you then map that data against the co2 levels for those years, you get this graph. The adjustments, map very nicely to the growth of CO2. How is that for making the data fit the narrative?b

Another confirmation. So here is a graph that Nasa released back in 1999. 1998 was hot but not nearly as hot as 1934 and pretty much a cooling trend from 1934-1998.

Now here is the same date range that Nasa has recently released, 20 years later. Compare what has happened to 1934 and 1998 in both graphs.

GISTEMP

This is release 1.0 of the new gistemp code revised by Avi Persin from NASA GISS; it is based on version 0.6.x of the Clear Climate Code GISTEMP project (ccc-gistemp).

URLs for further information:

https://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/

http://clearclimatecode.org/ Clear Climate Code website and blog.

https://github.com/ClimateCodeFoundation/ccc-gistemp ccc-gistemp

code repository.

Nasa takes data from the GHCN and adjusts it to produce the GISS. This has gone through a number of iterations and they are currently at GISTEMP V4 (as of fall 2019)

https://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/faq/index.html#q206

Here is another look at what Nasa has done to the temperature record since 2000.

https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/WG1AR5_all_final.pdf

Fabrication of data

Wood for Trees

This website has been around for a long time and also confirms something that I found interesting. There seems to be clear and distinct 30 year periods of warming and cooling.

This is just speculation on my part but I thought it was interesting that there were periods of warming and cooling that seem to last 30 years. So I sliced up the period from 1880 to present to draw out the semi-cycles.

Cooling from 1880-1910

https://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3nh/from:1880/to:1910

Warming from 1910 to 1940

https://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3nh/from:1910/to:1940

Cooling from 1940-1970

https://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3nh/from:1940/to:1970

Warming from 1970 to 2000

https://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3nh/from:1970/to:2000

Cooling from 2000

https://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3nh/from:2000

Selection of time period

The careful selection of the time period can greatly affect the impression. Notice how much different the two graphs look just by altering the starting and ending dates. Both graphs cover a span of 100 years, but they give a totally different impression.

100 year Span 1850-1950

100 year Span 1918-2018

Not much warming since 1998

Heatwaves - Increasing or decreasing?

CO2 lags temperature

I plotted CO2 and Temperature for a 30 year period (1980-2010) and you can clearly see that CO2 lags Temperature. Going from left to right is moving forward in time. You can see in several places that Temperature (GREEN) first goes up then down, and then a year later CO2 (RED) goes up and down nearly the same. I have no idea why it would go up, then go down over a 5 year period (like it did in 1985-1990). Although that does seem similar to the El Nino/La Nina period.

Here are the settings that I used to make the plot.