Brown Shirts and Green Lands

Another example of Tony Heller alleging criminal fraud at scientists in his post If The Data Doesn’t Match Theory, Change The Data from the 25th April. The headline makes it clear he's them of changing their data to fit a theory. But the whole post makes it obvious he doesn't have the slightest piece of evidence to back up the very serious charges, so instead he just gets more hysterical - finishing up by comparing scientists to Nazi brown shirts.

The Data

The target of his bile in this post are the Danish Meteorological Institute (DMI). This is an organization he usually regards as accurate and frequently prefers their data to that of American institutes. Given that he's not completely clear in this article if he thinks the DMI are part of the climate conspiracy, or if they have been forced to collaborate with them.

The data he thinks has been altered to fit the theory is their model of Greenland Ice Sheet Surface Mass Budget. This is described on their website:

Here you can follow the daily surface mass balance on the Greenland Ice Sheet. The snow and ice model from one of DMI’s climate models is driven every six hours with snowfall, sunlight and other parameters from a research weather model for Greenland, Hirlam-Newsnow. We can thereby calculate the melting energy, refreezing of melt water and sublimation (snow that evaporates without melting first).

The part that Heller uses a lot is this graph showing the cumulative annual ice balance.

Heller uses this a lot to distract from record or near record low sea ice in the Arctic, and gives the impression he doesn't fully understand what it's showing.

One possible confusion is that the graph always shows the final balance as being positive - that is it appears Greenland has gained more ice than it's lost. This could give the impression that Greenland has been gaining ice, but this balance does not take everything into account. As DMI website says:

Over the year, it snows more than it melts, but calving of icebergs also adds to the total mass budget of the ice sheet. Satellite observations over the last decade show that the ice sheet is not in balance. The calving loss is greater than the gain from surface mass balance, and Greenland is losing mass at about 200 Gt/yr.

DMI

In an earlier post, Heller was pointed to this part of the DMI description, and retorted:

Let me fix that for you : flawed interpretations of satellite observations, done by people whose funding depends on climate alarmism

The Deplorable Climate Science Blog - 10 February 2017

Record Breaking

However, the main point he's been making is that this year has shown a well above average ice gain. He was claiming in February that it was blowing away all records. There's a problem with that claim - it's not possible to tell from the graph if any level is a record. More importantly, the big ice gains don't say very much about temperature in Greenland as at this time of year the ice gain is almost entirely due to heavy snow falls. There's never any melting during the winter.

The reason you cannot tell if the current level is a record just by looking at the graph is because it only shows a few years - the current year and 2012, which had a very low cumulative balance. The graph also shows the average balance for the 24 year reference period of 1990 - 2013, and a gray band showing the distribution about the average, but it isn't entirely clear what the grey band exactly represents. The web page says it shows 2 standard deviations from the average, but the text under the graph says it shows the difference from year to year, but with the lowest and highest values of the 24 years left out. In either case it isn't showing the full range of values. It's missing of the highest value(s), and it doesn't include any data from before 1990. The fact that the current value is above the gray area does not prove it's a new record.

The Changes

So, as Heller noticed they changed the graph slightly on the 25th. DMI explain this on their site:

The model has been updated in 2014 to better account for meltwater refreezing in the snow, and again in 2015 to account for the lower reflectivity of sunlight in bare ice than in snow. Finally, it has been updated again in 2017 with a more advanced representation of percolation and refreezing of meltwater.

DMI - Current Surface Mass Budget of the Greenland Ice Sheet

Here's what the new graph looks like:

The DMI have a lengthy article explaining the changes - Liquid Water Flow and Retention on the Greenland Ice Sheet in the Regional Climate Model HIRHAM5: Local and Large-Scale Impacts . Here's a brief extract from the conclusion of the article to give a sense of scope of the improvements:

The subsurface scheme of the regional climate model HIRHAM5 has been extended to include firn densification, grain size growth, snow state-dependent hydraulic conductivity and irreducible water saturation as well as retention of water in excess of the irreducible saturation and superimposed ice formation. Sensitivity experiments have been performed to gauge both small- and large-scale effects of these additions as well as the impact of different parameterization choices.

But none of this matters to Heller - changes never have an explanation, they can only be fraud, and those making the changes criminals.

But in making these allegations Heller is completely wrong on just about every count. He claims they have altered the data, when it's the model that has changed. He's implying they've made the changes to reduce the ice gain - in fact the changes have resulted in more gain.

Despite Heller's framing of this being about altering data, the only thing he actually seems to be complaining about is that they've changed the reference period used for the average figures. Before they were showing the average of 1990-2013, now they are using the period 1981-2010. As a result the current year is (as of 25 April) slightly inside the gray area, whereas in the old graph it was slightly outside. This has nothing whatsoever to do with changing data and actually just demonstrates that Heller was wrong to claim that it was beating all records. If the gray area has moved over the current year it can only be because their were one or two years prior to 1990 that were higher than the current value and were not being included in the older reference period.

From these minor changes Heller reaches the darkest conclusions - DMI, he says, changed their graph out of a fear of being shot by climate alarmists, and he finishes

Climate alarmists are Brownshirt thugs. They don't represent science. They represent the darkest side of human evil.

Postscript

And then five days later Heller changes his mind again. On the 30th April he writes an article Arctic Fraud By Government Scientists Reaches A Tipping Point, using the same chart he was objecting to on the 26th, now claiming it shows Greenland blowing away all records. How me manages to reach this conclusion is bewildering. It might well have been the case in February when the balance was well above average, but now his graph of the 30th April shows the current balance inside the gray area, so there has to be at least one year with a greater balance, and even if it was a record it could hardly be claimed to be blowing away all other records.