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.