NASA Data

NASA uses a process they call “homogenization” to calculate the values that they call global temperature anomalies and they publish those numbers in their Land Ocean Temperature Index (LOTI) each month. These values which are hundredth of a degree Celsius are deviations from a base they set as 14.0 degrees Celsius, which then becomes zero on their charts. This base represents, according to them, the global temperature average from 1951 to 1980 and you can see that the plots in the chart here for those years are very close to zero on the y axis.

The chart below contains 8 plots broken into two sets, one set of four 2011 and earlier (brown and orange) and the other set of four 2012 and later (blue and green). This chart was constructed after observing major shifts in the numbers sometime in early in 2012. Clearly there is a major difference between the two sets of plots which should just not be there; red ovals on the chart.

NASA publishes the LOTI table each month and it contains anomalies by month from January 1880 to the present month and that represents 1599 values as of March 2014. Because the values were placed in a column in a spreadsheet for analysis beginning in 2006 at some point the shift in numbers became noticeable and a review was made in 2012. Unfortunately most of the old tables were not saved and so the older set 2009-10 though 2011-10 is not complete containing only 4 out of 24 issued monthly tables. However when placed side by side and seeing how the larger set (not all shown) of more recent values were reasonably stable there is no reason to think that the missing months were any different than the sample available. Previous version of these observation were plotted but were not easy to interpret and so a new method was derived in April 2014 and that is what is shown here.

The process that NASA uses to determine the anomaly results in variability in the data table and so to remove that we looked at blocks of ten years which would then contain 120 values for each month in that set and an average was determined. From 2009 to the present the average was determined by using the actually number of values available for each of the monthly tables. That gave us 14 points to plot from 1880 through 2009 for each of the eight monthly NASA releases being reviewed. The Chart has the ten year time blocks on the X axis and the value of the anomaly on the Y axis. The anomalies are in hundredths of a degree so the total range in degrees Celsius on the chart is 1.6 degrees Celsius.

The values of the anomalies from the first set dropped significantly from 1900 to 1940 and again from 2000 to the present and it was not a gradual change but first one way and then the other way, indicating a programming change.

My take on what happened cannot be proved but it would make some sense with the management in place at NASA when the change was made sometime between November 2009 and October 2011. To those reviewing the data, at NASA, it would have been obvious by say 2005 that temperatures had stopped moving up and that was not possible according to the logic used in the anthropogenic climate change belief. The IPCC and their cohorts had stated many times that the science was settled and the debate was over.

If we look at the periods in the brown – orange set that are around 1920 to the present time the movement up appears to be about 100 (-20 to +80) or 1.0 degree Celsius; however the published values were not reflecting what people were seeing in the real world even though they were what should have been seen according to the IPCC reports. So somewhere a decision was make to reprogram the program that did the homogenization and what they did was lower the 1920 period and the present period about the same amount but set to give about the same upward movement in temperature as previously existed prior to the change. In other words they can say there was no change in the increase in global temperature “so what difference does it make.”

The result is that other set, blue – green shows an upward movement of about 95 (-35 to +60) which matches the older set but ends up at a much lower value that is closer to what the real temperature is even though they don’t like that. The difference between the sets is close to .25 degrees Celsius which is not inconsequential.

Whether this was the reason or not the change is major and that puts into question the process used by NASA to determine the global temperature. This process must be reviewed in detail so we can be sure of what is being published.

What really going on with the Climate?

The analysis and plots shown here are based on the following: first NASA-GISS temperature anomalies (converted to degrees Celsius) as shown in their table LOTI, second James Hansen’s Scenario B data, which is the very core of the IPCC Global Climate models which was based on a CO² sensitivity value of 3.0 degrees Celsius, lastly, a plot based on an alternative climate model designated the ‘PCM’ climate model based on a sensitively value of .65 degrees Celsius. To smooth out large monthly variations a 12 month running average is used in all the plots. This information will be shown in four tables and updated each month as the new data comes in.

The first plot, UL is a plot of the NASA temperature anomaly converted to degrees Celsius shown in red with a black trend line added. There has been a very clear reversal in the upward movement of global temperatures since about 2001 and neither the UN IPCC nor anyone else has an explanation for this. Since CO² has continued to increase at what could be argued an increasing rate this raises serious doubts about the logic programmed into all the IPCC global climate models.

The next plot UR, also in red, shows the IPCC estimates of what the Global temperature should be, based on Hansen’s Scenario B, with the NASA actual temperatures’ subtracted from them. Therefore this plot represents a deviation from what the Climate “believers” think the temperature should be; with a positive value indicating the IPCC values are higher than actual and a negative value indicating the IPCC values are lower than actual. A black trend line is added and we can clearly see that the deviation from expected is increasing at an increasing rate. This makes sense since the IPCC models project increased temperatures based primarily on the increasing level of CO² in the earth’s atmosphere. Unfortunately, for them, the actual temperatures from NASA are trending down since other factors are in play, therefore each year the gap between them widens. Since we have 12 years of observations’ showing this pattern it becomes hard to justify a continuing belief in the climate models, there is obviously something very wrong.

The next plot LL shown in blue is based on the equations in the PCM climate model described in previous papers and posts here and since it is generated by “equations” a trend line is not needed. As can be seen the PCM, LL, and the NASA, UL, trend plots are very similar the reason being that in the PCM model there is a 68.2 year cycle that moves the trend line up and then down a total of .30 degrees Celsius (.0044 degrees Celsius per year); and we are now in the downward portion of that trend which will continue until around 2035. This short cycle is clearly observed in the raw NASA data in the LOTI table going back to 1880. Because there is also a long trend, 1052.6 years with an up and down of 1.36 degrees Celsius (.0013 degrees Celsius per year) also observed in the NASA data; there is a net cooling of .0031 degrees Celsius per year going up right now. After about 2035 it will reverse and be a net increase of .0057 degrees Celsius. These are all round numbers as both curves are sine curves.

The last plot LR in blue uses the same logic as used in the UR plot, here we use the PCM estimates of what the Global temperature should be with the NASA actual temperatures’ subtracted from them. A positive value indicates the PCM values are higher than actual and a negative value indicates the PCM values are lower than expected. A black trend line was added and it clearly shows that the PCM model is tracking the NASA actual values very closely. In, fact since 1970 the PCM model has rarely been off by more than +/- .1 degrees Celsius and has an average trend of almost zero error, while the IPCC models are erratic and are now approaching an error rate of +.5 degrees above expected.

The IPCC models were designed before a true picture of the world’s climate was understood. During the 1980’s and 1990’s CO² levels were going up and the world temperature was also going up so there appeared to be correlation and causation. The mistake that was made was looking at only a 20 year period when the real variations in climate move in much longer cycles. Those other cycles can be observed in the NASA data but they were ignored for some reason. By ignoring those trends and focusing only on CO² the models will be unable to correctly plot global temperatures until they are fixed.

The purpose of this post is to make people aware of the errors inherent in the IPCC models so that they can be corrected.

Sir Karl Raimund Popper (28 July 1902 – 17 September 1994) was an Austrian and British philosopher and a professor at the London School of Economics. He is considered one of the most influential philosophers of science of the 20th century, and he also wrote extensively on social and political philosophy. The following quotes of his apply to this subject.

If we are uncritical we shall always find what we want: we shall look for, and find, confirmations, and we shall look away from, and not see, whatever might be dangerous to our pet theories.

Whenever a theory appears to you as the only possible one, take this as a sign that you have neither understood the theory nor the problem which it was intended to solve.

… (S)cience is one of the very few human activities — perhaps the only one — in which errors are systematically criticized and fairly often, in time, corrected

New paper showing CO2 sensitive being .68 degrees C

Last week Professor William Happer from Princeton sent me a newly issued paper describing a new method of calculating the climate sensitivity value of Carbon Dioxide; I finished reading it last night and found it very insightful.

The paper Advanced Two-Layer Climate Model for the Assessment of Global Warming by CO₂ was written by Hermann Harde from the Helmut-Schmidt-University in Hamburg, Germany and it was published on March 14, 2014. As the title suggests Harde shows how he developed a method of analyzing the interaction of the Earth Atmosphere system (EASy) to determine the real sensitivity value of Carbon Dioxide (CO₂). Since the accuracy of this value is critical to determining what effect CO2 will have on the global climate the results of this paper should put the last nail in the coffin containing the corpse of the theory called Anthropogenic Climate change.

The IPCC in all their assessments uses a climate sensitivity value of 3.0 degrees Celsius for a doubling of CO₂. According to Wiki this value came from the 1979 National Academy of Science Report Carbon Dioxide and Climate: A Scientific Assessment Report of an Ad Hoc Study Group on Carbon Dioxide and Climate; Jule Charney chaired the study group and the report has since been referred to as the Charney Report. Also according to Wiki they took James Hansen’s high estimate of 4.0 C and added .5 degrees C to it and then took Syukuro Manabe’s low estimate of 2.0 C and subtracted .5 from it and then average the two which then gives us 1.5 Low 3.0 expected and 4.5 high which is what the IPCC is still using today as shown in AR5 thirty five years later. Much if not all of this theoretical work was done in the mid 1970’s which makes it 40 years old now; so the question is, is it still valid.

Since 1979 there have been a lot of studies made on this issue the graphic below shows some of the 29 most recent studies. The most current are on the left and the oldest on the right and each one shows the low the expected and the high value that each archer believed to be the correct value for CO₂ sensitivity. The range in these studies is from about .2 degree C to 10.0 degree C with an estimated average of around 1.9 degrees C. However since they are listed by date we can see that the older values are higher than the newer values as shown by the cyan trend line that was added to the expected value for each.

In my work on this subject it was my belief that the lower values were the real ones and I had been using values around 1.0 degree C until the 2011 paper by Richard Lindzen and Yong-Sang Choi showed that a value of .64 degrees C was the right one. Since then as shown in the graphic the published papers continue to drop the sensitivity value lower with none of them sowing 3.0 degrees C as the right one. Yet the IPCC clings to this value for they know if it is lower than 3.0 degrees C that their climate models are wrong and the Anthropogenic Climate change belief is not valid.

The next Graphic shows a range of Carbon Dioxide sensitivity values ranging from Harde’s .68 degrees Celsius to the IPCC’s 3.0 degrees Celsius. The red box on the red line for the 3.0 C plot is centered on where we are now at 400 ppm CO₂. From that point a black arrow points to the right and anything above that is an increase in global temperature for the CO₂ value on the X axis. That shows large increases in temperature in the near future and is what all the alarm is currently about.

The cyan box on the cyan line for the .68 C plot is also centered on where we are now at 400 ppm CO₂. From that point a black arrow points to the right and anything above that is an increase in global temperature for the CO₂ value on the X axis. That shows that there will be almost no increases in temperature in the near future and this matches to what the current NASA monthly published world temperatures are; and NASA temperatures are moving down now not up giving further proof that the IPCC theory is wrong.

The Harde paper goes a long way to settling this issue as it is well written and well documented. In my opinion the climate issue is now settled but its settled on the truth now not the past lies. Unfortunately, the politicians and the media will not accept this they have too much time and money invested in the false theory, so the battle is not ended — but the momentum is now on our side and we will prevail.