Category Archives: Hansen

Hansen and the “Destruction of Creation”

Hansen has followed up his “Lights Out Upstairs” outburst with another outburst dismissing critics as “court jesters” with whom he will have no truck. (Lights Out is now cited on the NASA website.) His new jeremiad re-iterated the position of NASA spokesman Gavin Schmidt that U.S. errors “didn’t matter” because the U.S. was only 2% […]

Does Hansen’s Error “Matter”?

There’s been quite a bit of publicity about Hansen’s Y2K error and the change in the U.S. leaderboard (by which 1934 is the new warmest U.S. year) in the right-wing blogosphere. In contrast, realclimate has dismissed it a triviality and the climate blogosphere is doing its best to ignore the matter entirely. My own view […]

“Lights Out Upstairs”

Hansen has published an online letter entitled A Light On Upstairs? The letter concludes by saying: My apologies if the quick response that I sent to Andy Revkin and several other journalists, including the suggestion that it was a tempest inside somebody’s teapot dome, and that perhaps a light was not on upstairs, was immoderate. […]

A New Leaderboard at the U.S. Open

There has been some turmoil yesterday on the leaderboard of the U.S. (Temperature) Open and there is a new leader. A little unexpectedly, 1998 had a late bogey and 1934 had a late birdie. (I thought that they were both in the clubhouse since the turmoil seemed to be in the 2000s.) In any event, […]

Will the Real USHCN Data Set Please Stand Up?

The GISS homepage formerly said: The NASA GISS Surface Temperature Analysis (GISTEMP) provides a measure of the changing global surface temperature with monthly resolution for the period since 1880, when a reasonably global distribution of meteorological stations was established. Input data for the analysis, collected by many national meteorological services around the world, is the […]

Quantifying the Hansen Y2K Error

I observed recently that Hansen’s GISS series contains an apparent error in which Hansen switched the source of GISS raw from USHCN adjusted to USHCN raw for all values January 2000 and later. For Detroit Lakes MN, this introduced an error of 0.8 deg C. I’ve collated GISS raw minus USHCN adjusted for all USHCN […]

Hansen’s Y2K Error

Eli Rabett and Tamino have both advocated faith-based climate science in respect to USHCN and GISS adjustments. They say that the climate “professionals” know what they’re doing; yes, there are problems with siting and many sites do not meet even minimal compliance standards, but Hansen’s software is able to “fix” the defects in the surface […]

On to Gridded Data

Gavin Schmidt recently told Anthony Watts that worrying about station data quality was soooo last year. His position was a bit hard to follow but it seemed to be more or less as follows: that GISS didn’t use station data, but in the alternative, as defence lawyers like to say, if GISS did use station […]

Gavin Schmidt: station data "not used" in climate models

Gavin Schmidt has told Anthony Watts that the problematic station data are not used in climate models and any suggestion to the contrary is, in realclimate terminology, “just plain wrong”. If station data is not used to validate climate models, then what is? His point seems to be that the climate models use gridded data. […]

Karl and Hansen Condemn Poor USHCN Metadata

Karl and Hansen have condemned poor USHCN metadata and, perhaps anticipating the need for something like surfacestations.org, gave a stunning endorsement to dramatically improving the collection and dissemination of photographs and other detailed site information for U.S. weather stations. In a statement, they said: Are we making the measurements, collecting the data, and making it […]