Comments on: HadSST3

By: P. Solar

P. Solar — Thu, 16 Feb 2012 09:11:37 +0000

Manfred: How do you “correct the uncertainty” by making an unproven assumption ?

This is a very good point. I just spotted that phrase while rereading the paper. By definition you cannot correct an uncertainty.

What they are in fact doing is _increasing_ the uncertainty by questioning the reliability of the metadata and suggesting this could require a wholesale change to the record.

By: P. Solar

P. Solar — Thu, 16 Feb 2012 08:58:08 +0000

I have just plotted the hadSST3 adjustment against the original ICOADS data.

http://i43.tinypic.com/mijm9w.png

by scaling to 67% the game becomes clear. They have quite simply engineered this adjustment to remove the early 20th c. rise that is problematic for their hypothesis.

The late 19th c. fall similarly gets a 50% reduction.

That is why the arguments seem so contrived.

By: AJStrata

AJStrata — Thu, 21 Jul 2011 20:27:05 +0000

Mr. McIntyre,

There is proof positive the 1941 ‘adjustment’ is false conjecture. Many should recall that prior to the US being in WWII, we were supporting Britain in the North Sea with massive convoys and pre-positioning forces in response to Japan’s earlier invasions.

The number of hulls in the oceans did not dramatically jump in 1941, they were growing rapidly throughout the 1930′s and in response to ever increasing tension due to the expansion of Nazis and Japan.

Just more AGW fudge baked into the mix

By: harry

harry — Fri, 15 Jul 2011 21:28:12 +0000

I wasn’t trying to prove or disprove anything. It is a genuine question. If the oceans aren’t storing as much energy as expected, then it must mean the CO2 forcing is lower, or the energy is being stored elsewhere. This doesn’t disprove AGW, in fact it presupposes it since we are talking about a CO2 forcing. It just means that the scale may be lower, which does have consequences. I’d expect one of those consequences is that it provides an avenue for UHI to take a greater role in surface temperatures as an explanation of the disparity between the expected energy balance and measured retained energy (i.e we got the energy inbalance wrong). This too might lead to an overall reduction in the estimate of CO2 forcing, but that doesn’t disprove AGW, it just makes it a tad less worrying.

I expect you want to fix up my previous comment. I have it listed as “awaiting moderation” and “snipped”. I don’t think it can be both.

Steve- nothing wrong with the question. However, I’ve long ago made the editorial decision that if I allow debates about AGW from first principles on every thread, then every thread looks the same. This thread is about specific adjustments – let’s stick to that.

By: harry

harry — Fri, 15 Jul 2011 20:01:44 +0000

Why is it unrelated?

snip – unrelated to this specific issue here and blog editorial policy is to discourage attempts to prove or disprove AGW in 3 sentences.

By: ferd berple

ferd berple — Fri, 15 Jul 2011 19:45:12 +0000

If there was an instrumentation problem after 1945, then the climate models using data up to 1945 should have predicted unexpected warming/cooling after 1945 as compared to the instrument records.

Why wasn’t any unexpected warming/cooling reported by the climate models after 1945? This should have alerted climate scientists to a likely data error.

By: Sean

Sean — Fri, 15 Jul 2011 18:20:05 +0000

Steve Mosher, any chance you could summarize the question and the answer? I listened tot he link you posted but I couldn’t hear the question and so didn’t really understand the answer.

By: harry

harry — Fri, 15 Jul 2011 13:30:25 +0000

I have 3 questions to ask in follow up to this change, it’s nice that Gavin’s here, I’d ask at his website but they seem to always have technical issues and lose my posts.
1) Is it common in “settled science” for something as fundamental as SST trends over 50 years to be out by 30%, isn’t kind of like announcing that you got the speed of light wrong and it is now only 2×10^8m/s?
2) Are there many papers in “peer-reviewed journals” that depended on the previous figures for their results and conclusions? Is it common for these papers to be withdrawn? I understand the bar is pretty low in climate science, i.e. you get to use contaminated data upside-down and not a single climate scientist complains, but I’m guessing this is a tad more fundamental.
3) Is the reduction by 30% going to lead to more of Trenberth’s missing heat or less? You’d think they’d be a little more careful about losing all that heat, next they won’t be able to locate data and confidentiality agreements. [Steve: this last is totally unrelated]

By: HaroldW

HaroldW — Fri, 15 Jul 2011 11:27:37 +0000

From Gavin’s response at RC: “…for 100 different realisations of HadSST3 the range of trends is [0.0458,0.0928] deg C/dec[ade, for 1950-2006]…”

Is it correct to read this as: given the HadSST3 values and error bars, our estimate of the temperature trend, even with 50 years’ data, has a 3-sigma width of around a factor of 2?

By: Bob Tisdale

Bob Tisdale — Fri, 15 Jul 2011 10:55:25 +0000

Timetochooseagain: The EOF/PC analysis at the KNMI Climate Explorer cannot be used to determine the effect on the PDO of the changes from HADSST2 to HADSST3, at least not back to 1900. The EOF/PC analysis through the Climate Explorer requires at least 75% of the valid points and HADSST3 data for the North Pacific north of 20N does not reach that threshold in the 1940s, so there’s a decade gap.

The PDO is a odd dataset anyway. It was originally calculated (and still is) until 1981 using UKMO SST data, which is obsolete—replaced by HADSST released in 2001, HADSST2 released in 2006, and HADSST3. From 1982 to 2001, JISAO uses the obsolete Reynolds OI.v1 SST data for the PDO. It’s only since 2002 that the PDO is made up of a current dataset, Reynolds OI.v2