The new server hardware I built for Climate Audit was deployed in the co-location center today in California, I hand delivered it myself. This new server has much over the old one from a tech spec point of view, including faster CPU, dual core, error corrected memory, and hi speed SATA2 drives. It’s biggest advantage is that it’s not near a flood zone 😉 nor an earthquake zone for that matter. Multi-homed fiber to the backbone, DDOS attack filtering at two levels, instant UPS, automated backup, and remote administration by multiple methods will improve its uptime compared to the old server and location.
The DNS/domain name issues should now have been resolved worldwide, and http://www.climateaudit.org should now be reachable anywhere. The brief issue today with incomplete page loads had to do with the server temporary configuration at a fixed iP address for setup and testing and JohnA made the needed edits while I was on my way back from the COLO facility.
I think we are good to go. Onward.
Climate Audit 
51 Comments
That’s right Anthony, just invite the curse of Murphy.
Excellent, pleased to see you back and running.Climateaudit is the one of the few sites I trust to address climate change without personal political agenda.
I had trouble submitting a comment a few hours ago but it worked just now. Don’t know why.
I think the database needed a restart related to some final changes that were made late today just before JohnA retired for the evening. I had just completed that restart a minute before you made comment 3.
I hope CA is up to stay and remains open to all on topic and polite discourse regardless of being pro or conthe position of the lead in. I have experienced nothing but frustration in trying to post at Real Climate. Apparently the positive use of Steve’s name get’s you “moderated” out.
Thank God. I was suffering from withdrawl.
Congratulations Steve & John.
You were up. Disappeared for a while and then came back.
No error message – just a white screen.
Hope that helps.
I have a question for the stop global warming crowd. The mantra is stop global warming. Now since the planet is always changing, does stop global warming mean, cause global cooling? Or is it please maintain global perfect (whatever that is)
And since the “solution” to global warming is to stop emitting the major greenhouse gas which is water vapor, how do we do that? One way would be to lock up all the water in glaciers and ice. Now there is a solution.
I am from the ‘climate changes get used to it’ crowd myself. Adapt or die. Because there ain’t ‘nutt’n you can do about it. Reduce man made CO2 emissions to zero, and guess what the earth will still get warmer or cooler depending on what it happens to be doing at the time.
You guys here are a lot smarter than I. So how does the scientific community account for factors like, 100 temperature stations in a country like the US, and say they all measure 100 degrees. And then there is this lone temperature station in the Antarctic that is measuring -100 degrees. What weight is given to the station in Antarctic vs the 100 in the US. Is the average temp 98.01 ((100*100) + (-100)) / 101 or is it 0 (100-100)/2
When calculating averages how do they account for the density of the observation stations? Are there stations all over the oceans too? How many are up in North West Territory?
Or does actual average temperature not matter and what is really being measured is the average relative temperature of x number of stations scattered about.
How is weather factored in as compared to climate?
The more I think about it the more it is whatever one wants it to be. Kind of like politics. You can make bad news out of good or vice-versa.
PS: Glad to see your new server up. It seems to be pretty quick.
Steve,
I have been inspecting Australian sites that are supposed to have supplied data to IPCC
and have asked the Bureau of Meteorology to supply me with details of that data.
Has anyone done this to date?
t.
t – you might try searching the site for “Louis Hissink”; not sure exactly what all he’s done.
Thanks and congratulations to John A and Anthony for their very hard work over the last week!
Good to see you back and self-confident. Is the server in California? Won’t it be destroyed by global warming over there? 😉
Dasher:
This is based on my reading of the papers available at http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/references.html
For the gridded anomaly data, station anomalies are considered to be representative of an area within 1200 km of that station. The globe is divided into grids and all stations within 1200 km of the grid center contribute to the calculation of the average anomaly for that grid. Then, those averages are averaged. So, IIUC, for the final calculation of average annual global anomaly, each grid gets the same weight regardless of the number of stations contributing to that grid’s data.
Corrections welcome.
Sinan
Could you please adjust the server so that the pages are identified with the UTF-8 encoding? When I switch to UTF-8 Unicode, everything looks fine, including the “hacek” above “s” in my first name as well as more complicated quotes etc., but it is not automatic. I suspect that you haven’t set the encoding somewhere in the server etc.
In other words, I would like to assign you a task to make “s” in my name be displayed OK without any action of the client.
Lubo, I suspect it may be a browser settings issue, as your name appears here in IE7 and in Firefox with the hacek above the “s” in your last name.
All looks good from my end.
Does anybody not see the hacek in Lubo in this sentence?
There is an extensive article in the DER SPIEGEL in German language.
Date 16. 8. 2007
It is more in favour of Steve, especially also on the Hockey-Stick.
Try to translate it.
http://www.spiegel.de/wissenschaft/natur/0,1518,500274,00.html
Re: 17
Online translation fun:
😉
Sinan
Anthony,
“Lubos Motl says” comes out like “Lubo/ Motl says” in my browser.(slash for the s) Where you started your post with his name it looks like Lubo|(something like a bold capital I with no serif). Same character surrounds the word hacek in your post.
I had no problems here before the changeover. Haven’t changed any of my settings in months. I use the Opera browser.
Anthony,
Just noticed you used the word hacek twice. Only the first copy has the special character. Were those supposed to be quote marks?
I’m on Firefox already set to UTF-8. The s in Lubos is coming out as a little black diamond with a ? in it.
Seems to me I remember there being a similar problem for a few days when John first switched to the Tiga theme.
I put my browser encoding on US ASCII and all seems well now. I was getting the same annoying black diamond with a ? in it previously, while using UTF-8 encoding.
Mark
I’m seeing the same thing as fFreddy (also running latest Firefox).
I have Firefox, too.
Go to View -> Character Encoding -> Auto Detect -> (off)
then
View -> Character Encoding -> English (US ASCII)
until John gets it worked out would be my best guess.
Of course, I’m not sure if the settings stick, nor do I know what it will do with other sites.
Mark
Mark T is right: I put Firefox on “Western (ISO-8859-1)”, and now it is behaving properly.
Dang, nope, they don’t stick when I change pages. Grrr. Well, it’s still better than IE anyway.
Mark
Same problem. Setting it to us ascii works on this page and for Lubos, but then on the Hansen Error thread there are lot of characters not coded right, and changing to utf8 or us ascii or 8859-1 doesn’t help. Does change the error. Same thing happens with Konqueror and Epiphahy (this is on Linux).
Yup, that one works too, but I can’t get Firefox to stay with it. As soon as I go to another page, it switches back to UTF-8.
Mark
Well like I said, its a browser issue.
Hi Anthony,
Here from France, CA works flawlessly, after several days off. Nice job !
It’s an annoying browser issue. I should be able to set my encoding and leave it there if I turn off the “auto” feature. Grrr. I absolutely REFUSE to go back to the virus formerly known as IE. 🙂
Mark
IE6 with “Western European” encoding is fine. (On Blogger it switches to UTF-8 because for some reason a lot of it is in Japanese in IE6, Firefox is fine….)
And Dasher: The short answer, from what I understand of the process, is that the stations track the temperatures, but the anomaly (the change from “normal”) is reported, say +/- .3 for the month. Then that’s adjusted, normalized, homogenized, corrected or whatever as it’s combined with other appropriate stations in the 5×5 degree grids (which worldwide are somewhere between 75 and 555 square kilometers, depending on latitude). Then you’re just dealing with boxes of different sizes that have a number associated with them. Like this square is -.3 and this square is +.3 I don’t know what else they do to them if anything. I suppose I could read their pages again…
Go here:
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/research/ghcn/ghcngrid.html
I get a question mark.
On Lubos’ blog it shows up correctly.
I’m using Netscape 9.0b2 (soon to be 9.0b3). Despite being a beta version I haven’t had any problems.
BTW I have note similar problems with Moveable Type sites.
B. Stroeher asked for a translation of the Spiegel report from 16 August 2007.
I degvoted some of my time to to the task. Here it is.
————–
Spiegel Report Translation: Nasa muss Klimastatistik korrigieren
NASA Forced To Correct Climate Statistics
>
—————————————-
I’d say Spiegel is playing down both the errors from NASA snd the hockey stick, and tells its readers to look at the overall trend.
Again few of us are disputing that it is getting warmer. The dispute is about the cause of the warming.
P. Gosselin
It seems that this blog does not want the Spiegel translation to appear. What a pity. All that work for nothing.
Sorry!
Pierre Gosselin,
The blog software interpets the ‘less than’ symbol as the start of an HTML tag. If one is embedded in the text not as HTML it usually chokes on that and cuts off the rest of a post. You may wish to try reposting the link or text but replace any occurance of ‘<’ with the text ‘&_lt’ (but without the underscore). This only applies to any ‘<’ that is part of the text and not enclosing an HTML tag.
Re #38
Well that’s interesting. The text preview interprets < as a less than symbol but the blog doesn’t. I understand if my post above causes confusion.
Testing the interpretation of a raw less than symbol now:
Let’s try again…
Spiegel Report Translation: Nasa muss Klimastatistik korrigieren
NASA Forced To Correct Climate Statistics
An error in US temperature statistics resulted in making 1998 the warmest year since 1880. But in truth the warmest year was actually 1934. Even though the calculation error does not change the overall global temperature trend, it hasnt kept opponents of climate protection from using it as ammo for their cause.
Its always a bit embarrassing whenever one has to admit to an error in scientific calculation. For James Hansen, one of the gurus of climate research, its not only a matter of an annoying correction of temperature statistics for the USA its also a little about the credibility of his claim, and the claim of numerous other climate experts, that the world is right smack in the middle of climate change.
And nothing better confirmed Hansens and his NASA colleagues claim of climate change than 1998 being the warmest year in the USA since weather records have been kept (since 1880). The 1998 temperature was 1.24°C above the long-term average a record and thats how it stood in the statistics of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies.
But, as it turns out, the truth is that the warmest year in the USA for the period from 1880 until today was actually 1934. In the calculation, which researchers made using measurements from hundreds of stations located all over the country, there were a few small mistakes.
Cities warmed up the stations
Measurements taken from once rural weather stations, which long have since been swallowed by urban sprawl, were accepted without adjustment. And at some locations, temperatures were taken at the wrong time of the day. Result: The temperatures, especially those from the year 2000, were statistically higher than in reality. Scientists from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) had already noticed the error years earlier but no corrections were made in NASAs calculation.
The calculation errors were uncovered by Canadian Stephen McIntyre, who runs the blog Climateaudit.org. Mr. McIntyre had informed NASA researchers of the errors, and the errors were corrected. The US scientists even thanked the Canadian for pointing it out, thus preventing an artificial jump from occurring in the year 2000 data, as is now mentioned on the Goddard Institute website.
The correction in the temperature statistics is more than one one-hundredth of a degree Celsius only during the period from 2000 to 2005, see table below. Hansen explains that the last 6 years were 0.15 degrees Celsius colder than previously stated. But the new calculation has greater ramifications on at least one front: the question concerning which year has been the warmest since the keeping of records. According to the new calculation, 1998 temperatures were only 1.23 (and not 1.24) degrees Celsius above average. The result: Now 1934, with a plus of 1.24° C is now Americas warmest year since 1880.
Hockey Sticks, Corrections and Politics
McIntyre, a former mining executive, is not an unknown figure when it comes to climate change. He made a name for himself together with Ross McKitrick in pointing out flaws in Michael Manns hockey stick diagram. Mann, a climate researcher, published with his colleagues in 1999 a temperature diagram of the last 1000 years that looked like a hockey stick. McIntyre expressed doubts on Manns methods of calculation, which later turned out to be well founded. Environmentalists went on to accuse McIntyre of casting the entire notion of climate change in doubt, and thus playing into the hands of the oil and coal industries.
“They simply did sloppy work”, commented the blogger concerning the NASA statistics error. “Where I come from, you have to publish negative things too”, he told the British newspaper “The Guardian”. NASA refused to provide him with the complex calculation methods used to produce the statistics.
Climate change skeptics and opponents of actions to protect the climate used the flawed temperature statistics as ammo. “Manmade global warming in truth comes from NASA itself”, said conservative talk-radio host Rush Limbaugh. Climate change can be traced back to flawed data from the scientific community.
“The corrections change nothing in our understanding of climate change”
Sterling Burnett from the National Center for Policy Analysis (NCPA), a conservative think-tank, accused Hansen of lying. Climate researcher James once wrongly claimed that most of the record warm years have occurred since 1990. “While flawed data have provided for headlines, the corrections are largely ignored”, said Burnett. Many of the current fears of global warming are based on flawed statements from NASA scientists.
Hansen immediately rejected the accusations. His critics are making a mountain out of a mole-hill. “The corrections change nothing in our understanding of climate change “, he told the “Washington Post”. Concerning the long-term trend, nothing has changed. Indeed the corrections are mainly for the last six years and not the last one hundred or one thousand years.
Let’s try again…
Nasa muss Klimastatistik korrigieren
NASA Forced To Correct Climate Statistics
An error in US temperature statistics resulted in making 1998 the warmest year since 1880. But in truth the warmest year was actually 1934. Even though the calculation error does not change the overall global temperature trend, it hasnt kept opponents of climate protection from using it as ammo for their cause.
Its always a bit embarrassing whenever one has to admit to an error in scientific calculation. For James Hansen, one of the gurus of climate research, its not only a matter of an annoying correction of temperature statistics for the USA its also a little about the credibility of his claim, and the claim of numerous other climate experts, that the world is right smack in the middle of climate change.
And nothing better confirmed Hansens and his NASA colleagues claim of climate change than 1998 being the warmest year in the USA since weather records have been kept (since 1880). The 1998 temperature was 1.24°C above the long-term average a record and thats how it stood in the statistics of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies.
But, as it turns out, the truth is that the warmest year in the USA for the period from 1880 until today was actually 1934. In the calculation, which researchers made using measurements from hundreds of stations located all over the country, there were a few small mistakes.
Cities warmed up weather stations
Measurements taken from once rural weather stations, which long have since been swallowed by urban sprawl, were accepted without adjustment. And at some locations, temperatures were taken at the wrong time of the day. Result: The temperatures, especially those from the year 2000, were statistically higher than in reality. Scientists from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) had already noticed the error years earlier but no corrections were made in NASAs calculation.
The calculation errors were uncovered by Canadian Stephen McIntyre, who runs the blog Climateaudit.org. Mr. McIntyre had informed NASA researchers of the errors, and the errors were corrected. The US scientists even thanked the Canadian for pointing it out, thus preventing an artificial jump from occurring in the year 2000 data, as is now mentioned on the Goddard Institute website.
The correction in the temperature statistics is more than one one-hundredth of a degree Celsius only during the period from 2000 to 2005, see table below. Hansen explains that the last 6 years were 0.15 degrees Celsius colder than previously stated. But the new calculation has greater ramifications on at least one front: the question concerning which year has been the warmest since the keeping of records. According to the new calculation, 1998 temperatures were only 1.23 (and not 1.24) degrees Celsius above average. The result: Now 1934, with a plus of 1.24° C is now Americas warmest year since 1880.
Hockey Sticks, Corrections and Politics
McIntyre, a former mining executive, is not an unknown figure when it comes to climate change. He made a name for himself together with Ross McKitrick in pointing out flaws in Michael Manns hockey stick diagram. Mann, a climate researcher, published with his colleagues in 1999 a temperature diagram of the last 1000 years that looked like a hockey stick. McIntyre expressed doubts on Manns methods of calculation, which later turned out to be well founded. Environmentalists went on to accuse McIntyre of casting the entire notion of climate change in doubt, and thus playing into the hands of the oil and coal industries.
“They simply did sloppy work”, commented the blogger concerning the NASA statistics error. “Where I come from, you have to publish negative things too”, he told the British newspaper “The Guardian”. NASA refused to provide him with the complex calculation methods used to produce the statistics.
Climate change skeptics and opponents of actions to protect the climate used the flawed temperature statistics as ammo. “Manmade global warming in truth comes from NASA itself”, said conservative talk-radio host Rush Limbaugh. Climate change can be traced back to flawed data from the scientific community.
“The corrections change nothing in our understanding of climate change”
Sterling Burnett from the National Center for Policy Analysis (NCPA), a conservative think-tank, accused Hansen of lying. Climate researcher James once wrongly claimed that most of the record warm years have occurred since 1990. “While flawed data have provided for headlines, the corrections are largely ignored”, said Burnett. Many of the current fears of global warming are based on flawed statements from NASA scientists.
Hansen immediately rejected the accusations. His critics are making a mountain out of a mole-hill. “The corrections change nothing in our understanding of climate change “, he told the “Washington Post”. Concerning the long-term trend, nothing has changed. Indeed the corrections are mainly for the last six years and not the last one hundred or one thousand years.
Re #40
Pierre Gosselin,
Thanks for the translation!
Dear Earle Williams,
Thanks!
That worked well.
PS
Disclaimor: I accept no liability for possible misunderstandings arising from the translation work of the Spiegel report.
One last comment,
When you take into consideration that global temps are going up about 0.07 degrees Celsius per decade, I would not call a 0.15 degree Celsius error insignificant. That represents two decades worth of temperature change! I know some of us are in a big hurry to see Greenland melt, but let’s hold our horses here! 😉
Why are they reporting to hundreths of a degree when Hansen himself says the data is only good to tenths? They’re implying an accuracy they don’t have.
Anthony,
The problem with the characters is not completely a browser problem. Somehow the content doesn’t state the charset. IE will then use ISO-8859-1 (or most likely Windows-Latin-1) while firefox uses utf-8. If you can somehow state the charset as ISO-8859-1 in either the HTTP header or in the metadata of the HTML all browsers will show the correct characters.
Yeah, it seems like my browser is automatically reading the defined character set, and adjusting every time I switch pages.
Mark
Anthony,
If it is possible to add
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1">just after<head>then the characters should show correctly. I just tried this with a saved copy of this page.RE48 I’ll see what I can do
Earle : you have to use < – all HTML entities start with an ampersand and end with a semi-colon. I don’t know why the preview ignores the need for the semi-colon. It shouldn’t and it causes a lot of confusion.
Anthony,
I noticed in http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=1943 that the character problem is not only a display problem but also an input problem. #4 show ok in IE but not in Firefox, #17 shows ok in Firefox but not in IE, most likely depending on the browser used for the comments. You can check this by switching the encoding (view->encoding) between ISO-8859-1 and UTF-8). So somehow the input has to be forced to one encoding, for an international site UTF-8 would be the best option. Alas I don’t know how, but if I find something I will let you know.