Tony Heller - Smoking Gun or Blowing Smoke?

As mentioned before, Tony Heller, aka Steve S Goddard, has his own back of an envelope method for determining the temperature history of the USA. In the past he's insisted that this is the only real temperature record, and that any organization, such as NOAA or NASA, that produces a different version must therefore be wrong and fraudulent. He also suggests that any changes made in different versions of temperature records are also evidence of fraud; if the temperature data produced in 2017 is different to that produced in the 1970, it can only mean the 1970s version is more accurate.

But those arguments have been destroyed by none other than Tony Heller, who has now come up with a different algorithm for calculating USA temperatures which produce very different results than his earlier algorithm. In his post, Smoking Gun? Or Software Bug?, archived here, he says:

My new UNHIDING THE DECLINE software shows that US summer temperatures never recovered after the fall following the eruption of Mt. Pinatubo in 1991. I’m using a new, fairer algorithm for calculating this which weights all stations equally, regardless of how many days they report in a month. It also shows a 120 year cooling trend. My previous software showed 1992 cooler than 2004. I believe the new algorithm is more accurate.

Here's the graph he produces using this adjusted method, as usual only showing summer maximum temperatures.

Source - The Deplorable Climate Science Blog

Note the big drop in temperatures since the 1990s, which was not present in his previous version. In a later post, Long Term Effects Of The Eruption Of Mt. Pinatubo, archived here, he again put's forward the hypothesis, or as he calls it a fact that this cooling was caused by Pinatubo, and interestingly also blames the eruption for the observed warming in summer minimum temperatures - something he usually avoids mentioning.

My new algorithm, which weights all stations equally every month regardless of the number of days recorded that month, has exposed an important climate fact. Since the eruption of Pinatubo in 1991, summer maximum temperatures dropped off sharply and never recovered. But summer minimum temperatures increased. That would indicate the atmosphere is still blocking incoming SW and outgoing LW radiation.

At the end of the first article he does admit the possibility of this being a bug, but not before he's spent most of his time attacking NOAA for releasing fake data.

It is possible that I have a bug in my new software. It is also possible that I am closing in on nailing down how their temperature data racketeering works. It appears that they are replacing cold readings with fake hot ones.

In the next post I'll be looking at Heller's new improved method, and giving my reasons why I suspect his latest version is wrong. I'm not sure if it's due to a bug or just a wrong assumption, but I just don't get the results he claims - unless I deliberately mess up the calculations.

Stop Press

And whilst I was writing the above, Heller has confirmed there was a bug in his new version. He spells it out in this article Bug In UNHIDING THE DECLINE : Please Update. Interestingly, the bug he found was rather different to what I thought was his mistake, but the corrected version of the graph is pretty much the same as mine, and pretty much identical to the original unweighted version.

Source - The Deplorable Climate Science Blog

Here for the record is my version

The average daily maximum temperatures for all HCN stations during summer months, weighted by the number or days reported by each station. Note that this graph is intended to mimic one produced by Tony Heller, and should not be considered an accurate time series.

Correction

An earlier version of this post used the unweighted version of the above graph. This has now been corrected.

Tony Heller - Right Where He's Always Been

More of Tony Heller / Steve Goddard's seeming inability to read graphs.

In Arctic Summer Crashes And Burns he claims, amongst other things, that

Arctic sea ice extent is right where it always is this time of year.

Illustrated with this graph.

Ocean and Ice Services | Danmarks Meteorologiske Institut

On that graph, current sea ice is marked with a red dot, clearly showing it very similar to where it was this time last year, below where it's been for the two years before that, and way below (almost 2 million km² below) the 1981 - 2000 average. In fact it's not even within 2 standard deviations of the average.

The Pause In 2017 - Part 5-ish: Nigel Lawson

As everyone has already mentioned, ex-Chancellor of the Exchequer and chairman of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, was on the BBC Radio 4 Today program. He made a number of claims, none of which were questioned by the interviewer, and none of them particularly true. Carbon Brief have a transcript and fact check on the interview.

The part I'm most interested in is where he claimed there had been a pause (without using the term) for the last ten years:

And as for the temperature itself, it is striking, he [Al Gore] made his previous film 10 years ago, and according – again – to the official figures, during this past 10 years, if anything, mean global temperature, average world temperature, has slightly declined.

The interviewer, Justin Webb, was quick to ask him to justify this patently absurd claim,

Yeah, well, which is an argument on both sides ...

Which sums up the whole false-equivalence issue. No matter how poor, or lacking in evidence, a claim is, it can be used to give the impression that there are two sides to every argument.

Anyway, I've no idea where Lord Lawson got the idea from that temperatures have slightly declined over the last 10 years. He's probably just half remembering something he read on a blog years ago - which wouldn't matter if he wasn't being presented as an expert. To see the truth behind the official figures you can go to the Skeptical Science - Trend Calculator, or any similar site, and see that from 2006 to mid-2017 all figures show not just raising temperatures, but rising at a faster rate than the long term trend. (Not that any credence should be put on a short ten year period.) All the main data sets, including the satellite data, show a warming rate between 2.7°C and 3.1°C per century.

But the real irony is that Lawson only had to look at his own GWPF site to see that its header shows a graph of temperatures, clearly warming over the last ten years.

Clearly the official figures do not show temperatures slightly declining over the last 10 years.

Update

The hole gets deeper. The BBC have defended the Lawson interview. Regarding the slight cooling over last 10 years claim, they sort of defend Lawson, whilst admitting that NASA say 2016 was the warmest year on record, they say:

Data from the UK Met Office Hadley Centre suggests there has been a slight cooling of surface temperatures since 2003, although there is some dispute over whether this gives the full picture.

This is plainly wrong as the GWPF's own graph of Met Office temperature shows.

Even more bizarrely the BBC new article links to a New Scientist article to justify this claim.

According to the dataset of the UK Met Office Hadley Centre (see figure), 1998 was the warmest year by far since records began, but since 2003 there has been slight cooling.

New Scientist - Climate myths: Global warming stopped in 1998

The only problem here being that the New Scientist article was written in 2008 - only two years after the start of the period Lawson was talking about. If Lawson is pointing the BBC to this article, it confirms my suggestion that he is partially remembering something he read 9 years ago.

2017 - Mid Year Forcasts

As we now have temperatures for the first half of 2017 for all the data sets, I thought I might again try my hand at some simplistic statistical analysis - trying to forecast the final 2017 temperature. Last year I was trying to estimate the probability of a new record being set. This doesn't make much sense this year as there was never going to be a realistic chance of that this year. Therefore this year I'll be putting more emphasis on what the final total will mean for the ongoing warming.

This year, I'm using a slightly different, hopefully improved, model which takes into account the underlying trend as well as the temperatures for the year so far.. Using the same model as last year would be forecasting the satellite data as slightly cooler, by around 0.05 °C, and surface data as almost unchanged.

Will 2017 be a record warm year?

Short answer, no. Or at least I'd be very surprised if it is - and pretty worried. For all the satellite data it is all but certain 2017 won't be warmer than 2016. My model puts the chance as zero to two decimal places.

For surface temperature data the situation is a little more uncertain, as statistically I still give all sets a small chance, but I doubt even that small chance is realistic. GISSTemp is least likely to set a record, with only around a 2.5%, around 1 in 40. Other data sets have slightly more chance, but apart from HadCRUT all are under 7.5%. HadCRUT is the odd one out with a surprisingly high ~12.5%.

The usual caveats about these not being based on any climate models, and could be very different if a new La Niña, El Niño, or nuclear war develops.

The Graphs

Here are some of the forecasts in context. Each graph shows the annual temperature from 1979 to 2016 in blue, with the forecast for 2017 in red. The red circle shows the expected anomaly, whilst the red line shows the 95% prediction interval. That is there should be only a 1 in 20 chance that the actual value will be outside the red line.

Note the anomalies shown are all using the respective base period for each set, and the scales of each graph may not be identical.

UAH 6

I'll start with the UAH 6 satellite data. This is the data that will be used by anyone wanting to believe in a pause as it shows the least warming.

It is most likely UAH 6 will finish 4th warmest, but could be 5th or 3rd. It definitely won't be warmer than either of the strong El Niño years and will more likely than not be cooler than 2010. However, it's still looking like 2017 will be a warm year, and there seems little chance we will see a return to Monckton's Great Pause this year.

RSS 4

RSS has now updates their Lower Troposphere data to the new 4.0 version. This is also likely to show 2017 as 5th - 3rd warmest, but with more likelihood of being at the top of that range.

What both satellite sets suggest is that 1998 will have been far more of an outlier than 2016.

GISSTemp

Moving onto surface data, here's GISSTemp. In this set, 2017 is quite likely to be the second warmest, and almost certain to be at least the 3rd warmest.

HadCRUT

I'll finish with HadCRUT as it shows the most likelihood of setting a new record. There's a curious difference between the last two years here and in the GISS data, and this means that whilst HadCRUT has more chance of finishing as the warmest, it also has more chance of finishing 3rd. It's very unlikely to finish 2nd because the last two years were so close together.

For context here's HadCRUT since 1850>

Conclusion

Regardless of the ranking, it is clear that 2017 is on track, in all data sets, to be another very warm year. Those arguing the pause is real and only temporarily disappeared because of the 2016 El Niño may have to change their minds - though more likely they will just start claiming a pause started just before 2016.

Appendix

Here are the figures for all the predictions. This shows the forecast anomaly for each set in °C along with the upper and lower bounds for the 95% probability. As with the graphs, all anomalies are given using the respective data set's own baseline.

Data Set	Forecast	Lower	Upper
UAH 5.6	0.39	0.30	0.49
UAH 6.0	0.30	0.21	0.39
RSS 3.3	0.40	0.30	0.49
RSS 4.0	0.57	0.48	0.67
NOAA	0.88	0.79	0.96
GISSTemp	0.91	0.82	0.99
HadCRUT	0.72	0.63	0.81
BEST	0.90	0.81	0.99

And here's the data as an anomaly of the 1981 - 2010 base period.

Data Set	Forecast	Lower	Upper
UAH 5.6	0.39	0.30	0.49
UAH 6.0	0.30	0.21	0.39
RSS 3.3	0.30	0.21	0.40
RSS 4.0	0.44	0.35	0.54
NOAA	0.44	0.35	0.53
GISSTemp	0.48	0.39	0.56
HadCRUT	0.43	0.33	0.52
BEST	0.52	0.42	0.61

Tony Heller Against the Globe

Another post in which Tony Heller (aka Steve Goddard) explains how researchers would be wrong, if only they used his own blinkered worldview. His post Climate Science – The Fact and Data Free Science , (archive), attacks a paper from April 2016, Emergence of heat extremes attributable to anthropogenic influences . Or rather he quotes an extract from a Climate Central article on the paper, Scientists Trace Climate-Heat Link Back to 1930s .

The paper's behind a paywall, but from the abstract and the Climate Change article it seems they modeled the likelihood that any given record breaking global temperature year would have been a record without human influence. They conclude that whilst it's almost certain that most of the records set after 1980 would not have been set without increasing CO₂, there is also a good probability, greater than 50%, that the records from 1937 through the 40s, would not have been set without human influence. As the abstract says:

We find a significant human contribution to the probability of record-breaking global temperature events as early as the 1930s. Since then, all the last 16 record-breaking hot years globally had an anthropogenic contribution to their probability of occurrence.

Emergence of heat extremes attributable to anthropogenic influences

Scientists Trace Climate-Heat Link Back to 1930s

I not sure about the emphasis on record breaking years, and it is surprising that the relatively small CO₂ rise in the late 30s had a detectable effect on temperatures. I think it's clear that CO₂ was not the main reason for the high temperatures. But the paper is not claiming it was - just that it would have been less likely to get a record high temperature without the additional boost of CO₂.

Tony Heller, naturally, thinks the whole report is not just wrong but insists the authors hadn't looked at any data, and were unaware of what the CO₂ levels were in the 30s. Both claims that are obviously wrong. He then makes the claim there is no correlation between CO₂ and temperature.

Had these scientists actually looked at any data, they would have known that the heat of the 1930's peaked at 310 PPM CO2, and the heat has declined as CO2 increased. There is no correlation between CO2 and heatwaves.

There may be an attempt to move the goalposts here, by quietly shifting to talking about heatwaves, when the paper is only talking about temperatures. He's also failed to notice that temperatures did not peak in the 30s, but in the 40s. He illustrates his claim about the lack of a correlation between CO₂ and temperatures with this graph.

Source: Climate Science – The Fact and Data Free Science

To get this he's had to exclude most of the data. First he's limited the graph to just the US, when the report is clearly talking about global temperatures. This has the usual problem that temperatures were much warmer in the US during the 30s than they were in the globe as a whole.

Secondly, Heller limits the graph to just summer months. The US heat of the 30s were mostly associated with summer, later warming more with winter. NOAA's figures show annual US temperatures increasing at almost twice the rate as US summer temperatures.

Thirdly, he only looks at maximum temperatures, rather than average daily temperatures. NOAA's figures show minimum summer US temperatures increasing at twice the rate as maximum temperatures.

Finally, he uses his own naive calculations rather than relying on official data such as from NOAA. His calculations seem to just take an average of all stations, which has many potential problems. NOAA's own figures still show a slight rise over the entire period in US Summer Maximum temperatures, whilst Heller's figures show a slight decrease. This is what the graph looks like if you use NOAA's figures rather than Heller's.

Comparison of US Summer (June - August) Maximum temperatures with CO_{2 (ppm)}

In both cases the correlation is not statistically significant, but the one using NOAA data is positive - the one using Heller data is negative.

If we look at the data that actually matters as far as the research goes, global annual mean temperatures, the correlation with CO₂ is obvious and statistically significant.

Comparison of Annual Temperature Anomalies (in °C) with Atmospheric CO_{2 (ppm)}

Of course, this doesn't prove CO₂ is the cause of global warming - just that the correlation exists.

Tony Heller does this all the time. He makes his own crude calculations based on a limited selection of the available data, and then claims that any research that doesn't agree with his figures is not just wrong, but a lie.