tim walshaw from tim’s Newsletter
Since we discussed a philosopher, let’s go on to the acknowledged greatest philosopher in the 20th Century, Karl Popper. While he was famous in a number of areas, his greatest advance was his explanation for the meaning of “truth”. What is truth? This has been one of the most fundamental philosophical questions for millennia. Without going in for long words of what Popper said, he nailed the answer. He said “You can’t ever exactly define what is true, but you can always say what is NOT true.” Truth is in that little kernel, when you have chipped away around it what is not true. This definition had a major effect on the definition of scientific method, which until that date had been going down the rabbit hole of Baconian empiricism.
Yes, you have all been to college and studied philosophy. Why haven’t you heard of Popper? Because, he was one of the earliest victims of cancellation. No philosophers or academics will talk about him because 1. He trashed the philosophies of Plato. 2. He went on to trash the philosophies of Karl Marx, that are based on the philosophies of Plato. I won’t go on to explain the details. But try to obtain the books “The Open Society and its Enemies” Parts 1 and 2, if you are that way inclined.
What has this got to do with global warming? The reason is simple. If you use Popperian methodology to falsify the central theme of global warming beliefs – that global temperatures are increasing, then the whole gamut of global warming beliefs is destroyed. They are untrue. The vast superstructure of the global warming movement fails if its fundamental belief that data showing increasing global temperatures is proven false.
Let us start off with one of claimed global temperature records. The following is the global temperature record (above or below an arbitrary average) published by the National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). As can be seen, global temperatures moved up and down in roughly 60 year cycles, but then after 2000, (when again temperatures should have peaked), temperatures started trending up. To a suspicious minded person such as myself, someone seems to have grabbed the temperature trend and given it an upward angle. Or alternatively indeed, the globe at that point suddenly started warming. What actually happened?
To answer this question, it is necessary to look at alternative temperature records. Yes, they exist. When they are found, they can be compared to NOAA’s published temperature statistics. Given a few of these records from around the globe, and given Popper’s falsification method, it will only take a few contradictory sets of temperature data to falsify NOAA’s data set. Since the NOAA temperature statistics are the major source of statistics used by the IPCC to claim the existence of global warming (though many other issuers of temperature statistics around the world have been drawn into the confirmatory net), then the existence of global warming has been falsified!
Just before we start, before you start thinking that I am making this up. I would like to refer readers to the article “Australian fires: climate ‘truth bomb’ on https://judithcurry.com/2020/02/24/australian-fires-climate-truth-bomb/ one of many articles that discuss in detail the way the Australian Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) has been ‘adjusting up’ the temperature statistics of Australia. I will then go on to discuss the temperature data manipulation of NOAA. You will see that not only are these bodies are manipulating the temperature data, but that they are doing it in concert; though not to the same extent, which demonstrates that they are not reporting the same actual global warming, they just have the same timing.
I shall proceed to the temperature data provided by this article. Specially not the period around 1999, when the NOAA temperature statistics angled up. To quote the above article:
“The latest version, ACORN 2, of 112 selected stations, reports the BoM,“shows that Australia has warmed by approximately one degree since 1910. The warming has occurred mostly since 1950. The frequency of daily temperature extremes has also changed since 1910. The number of weather stations recording very warm night-time temperatures and the frequency with which these occur has increased since the mid 1970s. The rate of very hot daytime temperatures has been increasing since the 1990s”.
In the technical description of ACORN-SAT on the BOM site, I can find no explanation of the abrupt change in slope around 1950, nor does there appear to be any such change in the state of the relevant drivers of Australian climate: ENSO index, Indian Ocean dipole, or in the Antarctic Ocean. Concerning this change of slope, IPCC reviewers cite CO2-forcing as sole the source of increasing temperature and consequent drought.”
Yet individual data sets drawn from observations drawn from rural locations do not support this sudden upturn in temperatures in 1990.
The following set of temperatures is for Rutherglen, a rural township. Here are the GHCN-all data for Rutherglen.
But the original data have now been heavily revised by BoM. In particular, the series was broken at the 1939 maximum – which has disappeared – and a progressive warming has been imposed on the whole, based on homogenised data from other stations. The break was imposed because at that time the instruments had been moved ‘from one paddock to another’.
This pattern – and that of Rutherglen – is supported by yet another multi-station selection of unadjusted GHCN data, this time of a rectangle in NSW and Victoria; the pattern recalls the very long record from Adelaide, which is located in the same region. This provides further confirmation that the end of the 19th century was at least a warm as today in New South Wales in the original observations.
So, the evidence is good that the climate of the vast inland regions of Australia changed very slowly during the 20th century, cooling progressively from the warm end of the 19th century and then gently warming again from the 1970s until the present time – which probably remains cooler than in 1900.
The effect of the growth of the urban, coastal population, that started seriously around 1900 after the gold rush, is very clear: an almost linear warming trend in which nights once again warm faster than days. In the rural regions, air temperatures exhibit no response to increasing CO2 contamination.
As can be seen, urban temperature recording sites seriously distorts the total picture. Cities are warming up due to artificial heat sources, but the rural temperature records indicate that air temperatures have not changed at all in the past 100 years. There appears to be regular cold periods, but there is no warming trend from 1990 onwards for rural weather stations.
If the reader has questions about my use of second hand charts of temperature statistics, I suggest that they go to the website of the Global Historical Climatological Network, https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/products/land-based-station/global-historical-climatology-network-monthly that provides monthly climate summaries for thousands of weather stations around the world. This raw data can be accessed by computer experts and made into charts.
Now we go to American temperature statistics. First, I would like to refer to a paper by Anthony Watts in 2010 titled “a new paper comparing NCDC rural and urban US surface temperature data”. He compared the raw rural and urban temperature data with data that NOAA had blatantly adjusted.
Here is the comparison of raw rural and urban data:
And here is the comparison of adjusted rural and urban data:
Note that even adjusted urban data has as much as a 0.2 offset from adjusted rural data.
Dr. Long suggests that NCDC’s adjustments eradicated the difference between rural and urban environments, thus hiding urban heating. The consequence:
“…is a five-fold increase in the rural temperature rate of increase and a slight decrease in the rate of increase of the urban temperature.”
The analysis concludes that NCDC
“…has taken liberty to alter the actual rural measured values”.
Thus, the adjusted rural values are a systematic increase from the raw values, more and more back into time and a decrease for the more current years. At the same time the urban temperatures were little, or not, adjusted from their raw values. The results is an implication of warming that has not occurred in nature, but indeed has occurred in urban surroundings as people gathered more into cities and cities grew in size and became more industrial in nature.
Since 2010, did NOAA retract its blatant adjustment (falsification) of its data? Not a bit of it! It went blithely along, totally ignoring these criticisms and continued to publish its temperature data in its ‘adjusted’ form. Instead there is lot of talk about ‘homogenisation’, adjustment of the temperature records, all upwards. From the long and complicated answers, NOAA does not like the results from rural provided by mercury thermometers, or even the more recent electronic types, and adjusts them upwards, blah, blah, blah, to closely match the city temperatures. As a result, these temperatures closely match the desired result of increasing since 1980 (a somewhat arbitrarily chosen date).
The basic question is, should raw data, how imperfect it is, be ‘adjusted’? Noother empirical science ‘adjusts’ raw data. You are not allowed to. Yes, data can be imperfect, but you use it as it is. You cannot decide that you don’t like the data, especially you don’t like its direction, and change it to what you like. Not in physics, chemistry, medicine, or any other science. Yet NOAA happily says, “I don’t like these results. The observations are imperfect. These results will be adjusted. And by the way, I like these adjusted results, politically, metrologically. They confirm what I like”.
I have attempted to obtain British Met Office archived rural temperature stats, but they make it really difficult to access. Later, when I have obtained a selection of rural temperature stats from various countries I shall publish them in a later blog. Remember what I said at the start, that truth is what has not been falsified. In this case, it is already clear that these published temperature statistics that show an upward trend from 1990 are clearly false when you compare them to actual rural temperature statistics. How or why these bodies do it is irrelevant. These upward trending statistics are clearly false and untrue. Thus, the whole basis for global warming claims are false and untrue. The globe is NOT warming. It is as simple as that.
On the question of homogenisation, will the FDA now allow medical researchers homogenise their data? “While the original data said there was no improvement in health due to this drug, our homogenised data shows a massive improvement in the survival rate.”
For a humorous ending, the following is a re-write of a small part of the bard’s play. It should be familiar to all.
“Homogenise or not to homogenise, that is the question.
To fake the data and be progressive,
Or be cast out from the body of global warmers,
To be reviled and be disparaged,
The attacks by CNBC and the IPCC are too much wish.
Will I support the actual data, and say the recorded temperatures are correct?
Or will I adjust up the warmth to meet the wishes of the comrades?
Who will bear the whips and scorns of time,
The media’s wrong, the leftists’ contumely?
This dogma that makes cowards of us all
And thus the native hue of resolution is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought,
And intention not adjust the temperatures
With this regard their currents turn awry
And lose the name of truth.”