[Vision2020] The Great Thermometer Die Off

[Paul Rumelhart]

I'm replying to myself because I got to wondering if Windows and/or most 
people's email clients natively handle png files, since it is an open 
source format.  So I'm attaching the same files after converting them to 
..jpgs.

Paul

Paul Rumelhart wrote:
> Some of you know that I was at one time playing around with graphing 
> global temperature data in order to satisfy my curiosity on a number 
> of points related to global warming.  I wish I'd stuck with it.  It 
> turns out that someone else (probably many others) has been doing the 
> same thing.  A programmer named E. M. Smith has done some work with 
> the GISS dataset (I've been using the NCDC one).  He has found that 
> many of the measuring stations which are used for temperature 
> reconstructions across the globe have been removed from the global 
> temperature data sets for recent years.  In fact, the data drops off 
> quickly starting in the 80's (at least in the dataset I've been 
> working with).
>
> He has done some research into which stations have been removed, and 
> has apparently found that lots of higher altitude stations have been 
> removed, which would have shown cooler temperatures - leading to a 
> corresponding rise in the average temperatures over the years.  He has 
> a blog which covers this (he goes by the alias "chiefio").  Here is an 
> entry in the blog giving an overview of this topic: 
> http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2009/11/09/gistemp-a-human-view/
>
> I have not tried to analyze the stations that drop off of the NCDC 
> data set yet, perhaps I can get a little work done on that soon.
>
> I'm also attaching a couple of graphs that I created from the NCDC 
> data which graph the station counts by years.  These are from the 
> global minimums data sets, both normal and adjusted.  I hadn't yet 
> gotten to graphing station counts for the global means and global 
> maximums data sets.  All uniques stations and sub-stations are 
> counted, which will mean that some sub-stations are counted twice if 
> the thermometer is moved or something in that year.  I was at one 
> point trying to find out why these counts dropped off so quickly.  It 
> makes sense that the number of stations would increase over the years, 
> but why the dramatic decrease in station counts?  I had originally 
> thought that perhaps there are delays in collecting data together, but 
> 20-30 year delays?  That doesn't seem plausible.
>
> By the way, I learned of this work that E. M. Smith has been doing by 
> watching John Coleman's hour long news special titled "Global Warming 
> - The Other Side".  You can find links to the various parts of this 
> here: 
> http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/01/14/john-colemans-hourlong-news-special-global-warming-the-other-side-now-online-all-five-parts-here/ 
>
>
> Even I thought this video was a bit high in the sensationalist and 
> propagandist categories, but it did cover many of the standard 
> skeptical viewpoints that I've run into.  It might be worth watching, 
> even if you're completely convinced we're cooking ourselves with 
> carbon dioxide.
>
> Paul
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> =======================================================
>  List services made available by First Step Internet, 
>  serving the communities of the Palouse since 1994.   
>                http://www.fsr.net                       
>           mailto:Vision2020 at moscow.com
> =======================================================

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: station_min_counts_adj.jpg
Type: image/jpeg
Size: 30826 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://mailman.fsr.com/pipermail/vision2020/attachments/20100116/2b6dcfb1/attachment-0002.jpg 
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: station_min_counts.jpg
Type: image/jpeg
Size: 32046 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://mailman.fsr.com/pipermail/vision2020/attachments/20100116/2b6dcfb1/attachment-0003.jpg