Errors in IPCC climate science

A reference to this graphic would be great – downloadable pdf even better. It looks like a black & white version of the graphic in IPCC 2007 – link in comment 1 below.
Thanks
WSH

Over at the matchless blog Wattsupwiththat
Look for two comments by Mohib (21:33:01) on 1st Feb – I thought Mohib’s questions were important enough to try and explain the history .

Jones et al 1986 did indeed reject 38 stations from their Northern Hemisphere study. Note UHI not actually mentioned in the 1986 Table 1 – but no doubt covered under “non-climatic warming trends” – so a nuance there compounded by PDJ ref to “affected by urbanization” in the ClimateGate mails 1184779319.txt link at Watts.
Nth Hem Journal paper pdf downloadable. here.
TR022 Nth Hem documentation book partly online with 2 tables showing the breakdowns of their station numbers in each homogenization category.
38 stations UHI affected out of the thousands of NH cities is somewhat laughable and the paper should have been sent back by the editor or reviewers. But Jones could say that other UHI affected data were caught up in other checks of his and rejected for other reasons, eg. Category D maybe.
BTW Geoff Jenkins was one of the original 1990 IPCC authors and you might expect would know these things.
In the case of the Jones et al 1986 Southern Hemisphere Journal paper downloadable and TR027 book fully online. Jones et al found only 3 (yes three) UHI affected stations to reject. Even more surreal than 38 – 3 out of what, 120 plus major cities in the Sth Hem.
So there are a few “nuances” to comprehend in the statements such as “On the one hand in 1986 he knows UHI affects the temperature..”.
IMHO Jones et al 1986 spoke and did less than the bare minimum required to be able to claim that they had adequately dealt with the UHI in global T data.

There was presumably some disquiet remaining in climate circles after the 1988 publication of Wood’s critique of Jones et al 1986. Otherwise, how do you explain the need for the Jones et al 1990 Letter to Nature at al ?

In the 1990 Letter to Nature they compared purportedly rural series from 3 regions, Western USSR, Eastern China, Eastern Australia – with their grid point trends from those same regions and claimed to prove that negligible UHI effect remained in their grid point trends – a conclusion the IPCC and UKMO has quoted ever since.
In fact what happened IMHO (and I did share in a work checking what they did in Eastern Australia) – was that their Rural series contained significant UHI amplification in the trend – hence they were able to demonstrate tolerable agreement with their grid points trends which also carry UHI contamination. So Mohib, when you say above; “But then in his 1990 paper he takes the position with Wang that UHI is not a factor in temperatures.” Can you see now that is not a fair summing up of the situation. In fact Jones et al 1990 was purporting to demonstrate that Rural series had similar trends to his grid point series – ergo by their reasoning there can not be significant UHI effect in either. I hope that that explain it clearer.
Jones et al 1990 is now further unraveling helped along by Doug Keenans persistence and events revealed in Climategate emails. That all these prominent co-authors lent their names to the shoddy 1990 Letter to Nature is a classic case of IPCC science at work.

We have known for decades that the DoE has funded Jones et al research from day one – probably in 1979; download the original papers and see the DoE contacts acknowledged.
I have not yet found out what the annual payments were from 1979-1994 but we know from DoE web pages that payments were in the 175-$200,000 range each year for the 12 years from 1995-2006.
Register Number: ER62601
Title: Climate Data Analysis and Models for the Study of Natural Variability and Anthropogenic Change
Principal Investigator: Jones, Phil D
Institution: University of East Anglia
Institution Address: School of Environmental Sciences
Awarded Amount to Date and B&R Code :
FY 2006 $178 k KP120101
FY 2005 $175 k KP120101
FY 2004 $173 k KP120101
FY 2003 $180 k KP120101
FY 2002 $180 k KP120101
FY 2001 $180 k KP120101
FY 2000 $180 k KP120101
FY 1999 $174 k KP120101
FY 1998 $170 k KP120101
The three previous years are at this page (I have cut out years post 1997 which recorded zero or nominal funding.
Register Number: ER60397
Title: Detection of Greenhouse-Gas-Induced Climate Change
Principal Investigator: Jones, Phil D
Institution: University of East Anglia
Institution Address: School of Environmental Sciences
Principal Investigator: Wigley, Tom M
Institution: University of East Anglia
Institution Address: School of Environmental Sciences
Awarded Amount to Date and B&R Code :
FY 1997 $200 k KP120101
FY 1996 $198 k KP120101
FY 1995 $192 k KP120101
We also know that Brohan et al 2006 acknowledges grant DE-FG02-98ER62601 so it is likely the DoE has funded Jones et al post 2006. I have asked questions of the DoE but I think it is time all this information was widely known.
In my opinion it is vital the DoE cease funding Jones et al, CRU or the UKMO directly or indirectly. I believe that in time this 30 year waste of USA taxpayers money will be seen as an example of the WRONG model for the funding of science.
Remember that the DoE has provided this circa $5million + of funding amazingly WITHOUT requiring that Phil Jones provide data back to the DoE.
Can you believe that !!
Here is an extract from an email from the DoE to me from October 2005.
Date: Wed, 12 Oct 2005
Subject: Re: Station data required for 1856-2004 Jones et al
Dear Warwick,
Unfortunately, our data center does not have any of the six
requested items. You will need to contact Phil directly. I spoke today with the DOE program manager who indicated Phil was not obligated under the conditions of past or present DOE proposal awards to provide these items to CDIAC.
I regret we cannot furnish the materials you seek.
Regards,

The counter IPCC blogosphere has been dining out lately on eight short weeks of snowballing good news post the mid November leaking of the sensational CRU emails from the University of East Anglia. Since then we have had Copenhagen crash and burn, three inquiries announced, CRU, Penn State and now a UK Parliamentary Inquiry – while in the background critics are closing in on the IPCC Chairman Pachauri over dodgy references to melting glaciers plus finance issues.
Comparing the current landscape IPCC critics find themselves – to where we were in early November – and we have to concentrate to keep our feet on the ground but we must admit that certainly in Australia – little of this IPCC meltdown is getting exposure in the GreenLeft dominated MSM.
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This webpage from the Danish Centre for Ocean and Ice has interesting graphics showing the temperature of the arctic above 80 north since 1958 using the climate reanalysis ERA40.
I have made an animation with 2 second frames.
I can add 2010 later.

The NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) has just updated their global temperature land station data to the end of 2009 – so we can make decadal anomaly maps to check on the Australian Bureau of Meteorology (BoM) claim that the decade 2000 through 2009 was the hottest ever in Australia.
Eyeballing the area of the various colour ranges should give us an idea if GISS analysis agrees with the BoM. Here are my observations – and I am happy to have readers send in their opinions.
If you Read the rest of this entry, I have the global map for 2000-2009 including the colour scale.
1990-1999 map of decadal temperature anomalies compared to 1951-1980 – the GISS default

2000-2009 map of decadal temperature anomalies compared to 1951-1980 – the GISS default

[1] First the Brown warmest regions (1 to 2 degrees) are similar in area – I have not counted the pixels. I note that these are mainly in regions where temperature data would not be the greatest.
[2] Pale Brown areas (0.5 to 1 degrees) I think are larger in area on the 1990-1999 map.
[3] The 2000-2009 map has a much larger area which cooled (-0.2 to -0.5 degrees), the Pale Turquoise colour.
Weighing it all up, surely it is fair to say that at the very least, there is no ringing endorsement here for the BoM’s claim.
I think a fair statement would be that given the data quality in the outback – it looks unlikely the 2000-2009 decade could be warmer than 1990-1999 in a statistically significant sense.
I am asking – what is the BoM doing wasting our money making dubious lineball claims like this ?
At a time when there is so much more important real work to do.
For example better weather forecasting one to 2 months ahead.
Fixing the scandalous deterioration of the rainfall and temperature networks.
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On the night of the 11th-12 of Jan 2010 Melbourne sweated through an uncomfortably hot night. Just a couple of media refs will give you the gist but Google could find more no doubt. There is talk of Melbourne’s “..equal hottest night ever.” But I see no sign of balancing statements which should have refered to two facts.
[1] The record equal temperature was measured in the centre of the Melbourne urban heat island (UHI) which has grown at night by 2 degrees centigrade in the last 60 years.
[2] The BoM should have stated that there was little sign the hot night was a record breaker outside of Melbourne.
This BoM map shows the minimum temperature anomaly for the 12th Jan.

Click for the full Australian map.
You can make those maps here.
To test how widespread record breaking temperatures were that night I checked 11 sets of station data and found only one with a record high minimum on the 12th. Note my daily data is only updated to April 2007, so the true rankings might be even lower if there have been notably hot nights in the 32 months since then.
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Canberra/Queanbeyan is a sprawling collection of suburbs population 300,000 plus – which extends over 30km north south and nearly 20km east west. Canberra was selected as the Australian Federal Capital early last century and urbanisation would have started after the “old” Parliament House started operating in the late 1920’s. The post WWII boom in Australia plus increasing migration accelerated the addition of new suburbs to Canberra, a process which continues to this day.

There are monthly maximum and minimum temperature data from the Airport starting March 1939 running complete to the present time. During 1996 the ACT Govt in conjunction with the BoM (Bureau of Meteorology) installed an air-monitoring station at Tuggeranong in Canberra southern suburbs where there are air quality issues.

As part of this instrumentation, temperature is recorded and the BoM publishes monthly mean max and mean min at this website, look for Site name: TUGGERANONG (ISABELLA PLAINS) AWS Site number: 70339 and you can download the data for yourself. Canberra Airport data is Site name: CANBERRA AIRPORT Site number: 70014, and I understand the BoM instruments are on the Fairbairn RAAF Base side of the airport, that is several hundred metres across the runways, NE of the main passenger terminal . See GoogleEarth map thanks to MartinH of Canberra

View Larger Map

The difference between Canberra Airport and Tuggeranong is 0.3 degrees C per decade – a very significant indication of urban effects in the Canberra data. Remember too that the Tuggeranong data will have some UHI contamination too, so the true UHI at Canberra Airport could be in excess of 0.3 degrees C per decade.

This site shows how even small urban areas can be significantly affected by the UHI effect.
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After getting questions from people about the BoM claim that 2000-2009 was Australia’s hottest decade I have started updating my 1992 25 station series for Australian – time consuming with 50 other things to do.

Here is the result of an experiment to fit my 1993 25 station series to the Spencer and Christy lower troposphere satellite data for a block of lats-longs forming the Australian region.

(Sorry Tasmania is missed out. Not worth including all that ocean just to get the Apple Isle.)

For a larger chart and station list.

The BoM does not use pre-1910 data, I expect they would claim that Stevenson Screens were not in use before that date and the old open thermometer stands read warm. I think they are wrong about that – see my published paper.

The BoM published trend 1910-2009 uses “stroked and tweaked” data, which I also think is wrong.

My 25 station series would incorporate a small quota of urban warming from the town sites. Like all temperature time series, mine would get less reliable the older the data is – but I put this up as the best Australian series of its length.

Perhaps somebody knows of proxy records that cast light on late 19C warmth in Australia.

While experimenting with BoM raw Canberra Airport data I was surprised to find the UKMO have corrected the data here and there. It is noteworthy that Jones et al 1986 rejected Canberra (WMO 949260) with an 80 code which translates as “Non-homogenous and uncorrectable” – after comparing it with Sydney.

Canberra was “pardoned” and included in Jones 1994 station data – but oddly it never made the cut for the 1226 station 1996 update, which is confined to stations still reporting.

For larger graphic.

In the newly discovered Jones 1999 station data CANBERRA-AIRP 949260 is included again, with different “corrections” – all undocumented now of course and secret until ClimateGate.

Then the UKMO version just released under pressure of ClimateGate has a different set of “corrections” again and of course their reasons for the corrections are so far – secret.

The trends in degrees C per decade vary as follows: UKMO09 0.1, BoM 0.13, Jones94 1951-80 0.1, Jones99 0.057