Real Climate Science

My name is Tony Heller. I am a whistle blower. I am an independent thinker who is considered a heretic by the orthodoxy on both sides of the climate debate.

I live in Columbia, Maryland – an amazing city where I can ride my bicycle everywhere through the forest, and never need to get in a car.

I am a lifelong environmentalist. I testified at my first Congressional subcommittee hearing at age 15 in Kanab, Utah, in support of  a wilderness area – very close to the one which President Obama recently set aside. I worked to get the Clean Air Act passed. I worked as a volunteer wilderness ranger for two summers in the Cibola and Santa Fe National Forests in New Mexico. I worked on the Safety Analysis Report for DOE’s nuclear waste disposal site in New Mexico. I probably have the smallest electricity bill in Columbia, Maryland because I am very careful not to waste. I have never turned on my heat or air conditioning.

I have degrees in Geology and Electrical Engineering, and worked on the design team of many of the world’s most complex designs, including some which likely power your PC or Mac. I have worked as a contract software developer on climate and weather models for the US government.

Continue reading →

Here is a simple example of how NOAA manufactures station data. The station at MORRISVILLE 6 SW in New York stopped reporting data in February 2013.  The raw data file is shown below (click for a larger image.) Missing monthly data is marked by -9999.

USH00305512.raw.tavg

The manufactured data (shown below) continues through the present and is marked with an “E”

USH00305512.FLs.52i.tavg

We know that temperatures can vary several degrees within 50 yards, but they are pulling data in from stations tens of miles away, and reporting it to a precision of 0.01 degrees.

NCDC then releases temperature graphs to the public showing warming, with no mention that about 40% of the current station data is manufactured, without any underlying measured station data.

On this blog, Zeke said two days ago that NOAA always assumes that the current measured temperatures are correct, and that the older data gets adjusted downwards relative to the present. So the Y-offset of the adjustments isn’t important.

On WUWT yesterday he was bragging that the adjustments for the current year are very small.

You can’t make this stuff up.

Over the past 15 years, NASA and NOAA have turned a long term US cooling trend into a warming trend. But it is even worse than that, because almost every year they make the past cooler and the present warmer.

The animation below starts at the NASA 1999 version, and progresses through 2013 – showing how they year after year tweak the measured cooling data to create the appearance of a warming signal – which does not exist in the thermometer data.

What is really ugly about this is that they overwrite the data in place, don’t archive the older versions, and make no mention of their changes on the web pages where the graphs are displayed. There should be prominent disclaimers that the actual thermometer data shows a 90 year cooling trend in the US, and that their graphs do not represent the thermometer data gathered by tens of thousands of Americans over the past 120 years.

Fortunately, their data has been archived by other people over the years, so the history of these alterations is not lost. The web addresses shown below are the original addresses where the data was archived from.

1999 version : www.giss.nasa.gov/data/update/gistemp/graphs/FigD.txt
2001 version : www.giss.nasa.gov/data/update/gistemp/graphs/FigD.txt
2012 version : data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs_v3/Fig.D.txt
2013 version : data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs_v3/Fig.D.txt

NOAA does have discussions on obscure web pages describing their thought process behind the alterations, but few people know about this. The alterations are highly subjective, and could just as easily go the other way – making the present cooler due to urban heat island effects.

These alterations are being made by government employees with a strong vested interest in  global warming, who should recuse themselves because of their overt conflict of interest. Their boss, the President of the United States, has made it clear that he will not accept any data which does not promote global warming theory. That is pretty strong motivation to generate warming data.

Barack Obama took aim Wednesday night at Republicans who have blocked global warming legislation, saying they ‘pretend’ they ‘don’t read’ science. But the president ignored the latest claims that threaten to destroy the U.S. climate change movement.

As he tries to rally public support around new White House rules aimed at coal-burning power plants, however, the president hasn’t yet addressed a brewing scandal in the scientific community.

Global warming specialists inside the scientific community are buzzing about revelations first made Friday, which show how the the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s official graph of historical U.S. surface temperatures records has been quietly altered for years.

The damning graphs published on the ‘Real Science’ blog by Steven Goddard, the nom de plume of a self-described ‘lifelong environmentalist’ with graduate-level scientific credentials.

They show the impact of replacing the real measurements with computer-generated estimates, in an alleged scheme to de-emphasize temperature readings from earlier decades while giving added weight to more recent numbers.

Obama mocks GOP global warming skeptics and says they ‘pretend’ they ‘can’t read’ | Mail Online

No doubt I will get an invitation to the White House to discuss this with the most transparent pro-science president in history.

Since 1990, New York has lost 18 out 57 USHCN stations – but NCDC still reports monthly temperatures for those 18 non-existent stations. They appear to have adopted the standard Democratic voting philosophy of allowing dead people to cast multiple ballots.

Below are the 1990 and 2014 station lists. USHCN still reports data for all 57 of them, with 18 of the stations being completely imaginary.

This is what NOAA climate experts consider good practice. My approach of using actual data from thermometers is considered bad practice by experts on both sides of the debate.

On June 1, I sent a graph to Anthony and several other people, showing that USHCN has been exponentially losing station data since 1990, and the data was over 40% fabricated so far in 2014.

Anthony replied 26 minutes later, saying that my claim was “utterly bogus” and that I “need to do better.” He said that one of his co-authors would have known this if it was true.

I responded back that there was nothing wrong with the data, and I sent him my source code so he could reproduce it.

A few days later, he posted on his web site that I was wrong, and that he had told me I needed to do better.

I have been working tirelessly for years to get the story out that NASA/NOAA data is being adjusted,  and is vastly altered from previous versions. I even picked a job in DC specifically in order to make the story happen. This week the story went mainstream and was a massive win for the skeptic community.

Anthony then shows up on the scene and undermines the whole story, causing many people to believe that my story is incorrect, and that the data really hasn’t been altered. They have been quoting his “you need to do better” comment.

Well my data is correct, and tonight someone else posted on his web site that they had confirmed my numbers. Anthony responded by saying that he “will look into it”

So after trashing me all over the Internet and undermining a huge win for all skeptics at a critical time, it turns out that Anthony has not looked at the source code or made any effort to confirm or deny my claim.

So how do we resurrect the data alteration story? We can’t.

Anthony could start with an apology to the entire community.

sunshinehours1 says:
June 26, 2014 at 2:52 pm

Anthony, there are 1218 stations. That means there should be 14,616 monthly records for 2013.

There are 11568 that have a raw and final data record = 79%. of the 14,616

There are only 9384 of those 11,568 that do not have an E flag. 64.2% of the 1,4616

There are only 7374 that have a en empty error flag. 50%. of the 14,616.

36.8% is close enough to 40% for me.

And yet the NOAA publishes press releases claiming this month or that is warmest ever.
====
REPLY: Thanks for the numbers, I’ll have a look.< Anthony

Someone was claiming last night that the high frequency of 100 degree readings during the 1930s was due to TOBS double counting. While I find it difficult to believe that anyone could be stupid and irresponsible enough to reset a Min/Max thermometer at the heat of the day, and then leave it until the next day – that isn’t the issue here.

I looked through the metadata for all of the stations in Wisconsin, and only found one which lists a morning time of observation for much of the 1930s. This should cause the temperatures to be recorded too low.

This what I found. They had quite a few 100 degree readings prior to 1960, and none since. Suppose they were double counting. What is two times zero? No matter how you look at, the 1930s was much hotter.

This is just my first shot across the lame TOBS excuse. I plan to generate lots more data.

I am doing a TOBS experiment, but can no longer find the USHCN station metadata file on the NCDC web site. Does anyone know where it is?

Update : I found some archived versions here :

web.archive.org/web/20050709081800/http://cdiac.ornl.gov/ftp/ushcn_monthly/station_history

web.archive.org/web/20090713090128/http://cdiac.ornl.gov/ftp/ushcn_monthly/station_history