Lies, Damned Lies, And Government Climate Statistics

Check out this whopper from 1977 :

ScreenHunter_1027 Mar. 25 23.55

http://news.google.com/newspapers

The “once every 10,000 years” event occurred again in 1978 , 1979 and 2014.

ScreenHunter_1012 Mar. 25 15.23

About Tony Heller

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19 Responses to Lies, Damned Lies, And Government Climate Statistics

  1. Brian H says:

    Time is accelerating!

  2. tom0mason says:

    Oh no, someone made climate less predictable!
    It must be you! …you naughty people.
    🙂

  3. Jason Calley says:

    “The “once every 10,000 years” event occurred again in 1978 , 1979 and 2014.”

    That is VERY impressive for the The-Ice-Age-Cometh crowd, but for sheer imagination the CAGW crowd still holds the record. The heat wave that hit Moscow a few years ago was a “once in 15,000 years” event.

    One gets the feeling that whoever is coming up with these “once-in-a-blah-blah-blah-years” descriptors has neither access to historical records, nor understanding of non-Gaussian distributions.

    • Billy Liar says:

      You don’t understand. They quote these ridiculous figures so that in a few years when it happens again they can say, ‘we told you this extreme weather was so rare it shouldn’t have happened for another 14,990 years’.

      • Jason Calley says:

        You are, of course, correct, they do it on purpose. It is just that I still sometime slip and accidentally speak as if the CAGW promulgators are making honest mistakes based on their poor understanding.

  4. Andy DC says:

    Some of the extreme events during 1977, such as snow in Miami were very rare. Also -20 temperature departures along the Ohio River during January 1977. February 1977 moderated, so the winter as a whole was overall no colder. But one in ten thousand for even the rare and extreme events? That seems a bit over the top.

  5. ccglea says:

    Here in SW Ohio, it snowed yessterday breaking the all time record for snow fall in a year. ODOT has used more salt than any other winter on record. The temperataure this morning came within 2 degrees of an all time low.

    My question, is this cold cold, warm cold or real cold? I’m still confused?

    • Gail Combs says:

      Just wait until Obummer’s EPA is done shutting down all your coal plants and forbids wood stoves. Ohio is the state hardest hit with shut downs and with the highest cost for replacement electric.

      …The market-clearing price for new 2015 capacity — almost all natural gas — was $136 per megawatt. That’s eight times higher than the price for 2012, which was just $16 per megawatt. In the mid-Atlantic area covering New Jersey, Delaware, Pennsylvania, and DC the new price is $167 per megawatt. For the northern Ohio territory served by FirstEnergy, the price is a shocking $357 per megawatt.

      Why the massive price increases? Andy Ott from PJM stated the obvious: “Capacity prices were higher than last year’s because of retirements of existing coal-fired generation resulting largely from environmental regulations which go into effect in 2015.” Northern Ohio is suffering from more forced coal-plant retirements than the rest of the region, hence the even higher price.
      (wwwDOT)hyscience.com/archives/2012/05/as_obama_promis.php

      Map of shutdowns and explanations: http://www.instituteforenergyresearch.org/2012/08/01/generating-companies-are-shuttering-coal-plants-at-record-rates-eia-reports/

      Given the information in that article with the map, if I were a power systems engineer, I think I would be calling in sick for the next couple years or taking a sabbatical or looking for another job some time before the Nov 2016 elections. Once the ‘renewables’ get over a certain low percentage, the grid becomes increasingly hard to balance. link Unfortunately the base load that keeps everything stable is getting taken out a lot faster than the US government anticipated.

      The “Smart Meters” that were supposed to make renewables work aren’t ready for prime time yet and forget storage.
      “The Energy Department is investing in strategic partnerships to accelerate investments in grid modernization….” The smart grid lets them turn off consumer energy while they keep the government and corporate power on. That is going to go over real well with the spoiled brats in the cities. (Now you know why DHS is buying Ammo.)

      It looks like the EPA got the timing wrong and instead of the shut downs (and the blame) landing on the next president it is going to hit Obummer and the Demi-rats on election year. (Snicker) In 2011 coal generated 44.6 percent of our electric it was down to 36 percent by 2012 with a lot more closures planned. Nuclear energy generates 19 percent, if all 38 units at risk are retired, about one-third of our nuclear fleet will also be shut down. Hydro-electric is also targeted with dams being taken out. So there goes the baseload and you can not just build a power plant in a year or so. Not with the NIMBYs and activists protesting anything and everything and Sierra Club suing at the drop of a hat.

      **Update June 12, 2012**
      According to EPA, their modeling of Utility MACT and CSAPR indicates that these regulations will only shutter 9.5 GW of electricity generation capacity.….

      This report is an update of a report we issued in October 2011.[3] Last October the original report, we calculated that 28.3 GW of generating capacity would close as a result of EPA’s regulations. At the time, we warned that “this number will grow as plant operators continue to release their EPA compliance plans.” Unfortunately, this statement has proven to be true. This update, a mere eight months later, shows that 34.7 GW of electrical generating capacity will close—a 6.4 GW increase….
      http://www.instituteforenergyresearch.org/epa-powerplant-closures/

      OOPS…
      The regs will also close the rest of the plants for 18 months for retro-fitting that takes out another 1/3 to a half of the remaining plants during the three year retrofit period….

      … NERC estimates that nearly a quarter of our coal-fired capacity could be off-line by 2018 and that as many as 677 coal-fired units (258 gigawatts) would need to be temporarily shut down to install EPA-mandated equipment.[ii] These EPA regulations must be implemented within a 3-year window and the mandated equipment takes about 18 months to install. Because EPA’s three year timeline is so tight and the regulations affect so many units, utility companies are not sure that they can meet the standards and ensure reliability of the electricity system at the same time….
      (wwwDOT)instituteforenergyresearch.org/2012/08/01/generating-companies-are-shuttering-coal-plants-at-record-rates-eia-reports/

      Time to invest in alternate energy like a big generator and maybe a EPA wood stove or Geothermal. The next decade is looking a wee bit rough.

  6. Shanna M says:

    I’ve found your graphs of observed temperatures vs reported temperatures to be really fascinating. I decided to look up why these organizations are changing the temperature record. One of the reasons I found was that they adjust temperature results based on inconsistencies in the reporting stations, such as some stations reporting temperatures in the morning and others reporting in the afternoon.

    This seems like a legitimate reason to adjust the data to me, to eliminate variables. That being said, though, it seems obvious that the adjustments are extreme when you look at other sources of data (those newspaper/magazine clips from the past are strong evidence of this).

    Is there an adjusted temperature record out there that you feel is the “most accurate” (one that accounts for station inconsistency but also agrees with the observed events documented in old papers)? Or do you feel that the raw data is the most accurate?

    • TOBS adjustments are not not what you think they are, and are not being used the way they claim they use it.

      • Shanna M says:

        Fair enough, but then what temperature record out there is accurate? If the raw data is suspect because it hasn’t been adjusted to rule out inconsistent stations, and the published adjusted data from the usual sources incorrectly adjusting the data to match their hypothesis, where does that leave us? Is there no record out there that has been adjusted properly?

        • There is no reason to do any adjustments. Normal technique for large data sets is to assume a Monte Carlo distribution of error and do nothing.

          Adjusting data introduces confirmation bias at best, and outright fraud at worst.

    • Shazaam says:

      Worst case on Time Of Observation (TOBS) (i.e. recording min-max for 24 hrs) is that a record high or record low gets recorded on the adjacent day. Given that seasonal changes are gradual, there is no possible harm in that.

      In the long term, TOBS cannot possibly bias to the overall temperature record up or down. Thus, any attempt to “adjust” data based on TOBS is, in my opinion, just an excuse to commit fraud.

      Synthetic temperature analyses never seem to report the sampling error of the raw data either. Many temperature calibrations are done to only +/- 1 degree.

      Thus averaging many stations to report an increase of 0.05 deg and neglecting to report the raw data was only accurate to +/- 1.0 degree (or maybe +/- 0.1 degree with a very accurate calibration) is disingenuous at best.

      Just because the calculator can report the fractional part of the average to 7 figures does not mean the fraction has any meaning when the raw data accuracy is much less. I don’t think they teach such things in the Climatology curriculum or if they do, it is ignored in the race for grant money.

      • Gail Combs says:

        The min-max thermometer called a six thermometer was invented in 1782 and has been in use for two centuries. The Tobs is not the problem they make it out to be.

        The biggest part of the hoax is the ‘Accuracy and Precision’ reported. Even today the reported date is rounded or worse truncated to the nearest whole digit.

        Statistically you are actually looking at a sample size of ONE not hundreds since each time period and each instrument is unique. Therefore the error is at least +/- 0.5C. In other words all they are reporting is NOISE! (Other Quality Engineers picked up on the same sample size problem.)

        A. J. Strata went into the problem of error in detail HERE.

      • Shanna M says:

        Thanks for the explanation! I appreciate it.

  7. catweazle666 says:

    “One in a million chances happen nine times out of ten”

    Terry Pratchett.

  8. Bill says:

    They may have been wrong in 1977 about the every 10,000 years part but at least they got the part about the imminent ice age correct, right?

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