Friday’s post primarily reports on a recent paper (February 8, 2022) by O’Neill, et al., On Atmospheres, “Evaluation of Homogenization Adjustments Applied to the European Temperature Profile in the Global Historical Climate Network Dataset.” In this section, O’Neill, et al., significantly demonstrated that the NOAA/NCEI “homogeneous” algorithm actually fails in its intended task of identifying and correcting ” breakpoints” or “breakpoints” are assumed to be in the location of a weather station or instrumentation to provide a more accurate world temperature history. Also, although not mentioned in O’Neill et al., the NOAA/NCEI algorithm is very successful in creating time series of world temperature history in the form of iconic hockey sticks to support the desired narrative of climate alarm.
What should be done? O’Neill, et al., for reasons I couldn’t quite understand, thought it would be better to let a group of government-paid experts revise the temperature records using a “homogenization” algorithm. is a good idea; so we just need to tweak this attempt a bit to get it right. From O’Neill, et al.:
[W]e certainly do not criticize the overall temperature homogenization project. We also highlight the efforts of Menne & Williams (2009) in the development of PHA. . . to try and correct for both undocumented and documented non-climate biases is commendable. The long-term temperature profile is known to be frequently contaminated by various non-climate components arising from station migration. . ., changes in instrumentation. . ., seat quality. . ., times observed. . ., urbanization. . ., etc… Therefore, if we are interested in using these records to study regional, hemispheric or global temperature trends, it is important to calculate deviations accurately. this.
Sorry but not. This statement betrays hopelessly naive about the processes by which government administrative agencies operate. Or perhaps the inclusion of this claim in the paper is the price of having it published in a peer-reviewed journal that, like all academic journals in the field of climate today, would prevent any paper that openly challenges “consensus” climate science.
Whichever one of the two, the reality is that any collection of government officials, tasked with ‘regulating’ temperature data, will ‘tweak’ that data in such a way that best enhance the staff growth prospects and the budget of the administrative apparatus. . The chance that the integrity and accuracy of science could compromise the process is essentially nil.
Is there any chance that a future Republican administration with a healthy skepticism about the climate alarm movement could do anything about this?
For starters, note that President Trump, despite his climate skepticism and focus on what he calls “energy dominance,” has never even fully withdrawn a drops of water out of this particular corner of the swamp. Trump takes until September 2020 – just a few months before the end of his term – finally appointed two climate skeptics, David Legates and Ryan Maue, to NOAA to see what they’re up to. Before they really started, Trump was out and so were they.
Even if a new Republican President in 2025 starts on his first day, the idea is that he could quickly – or even within four years – get a “uniform” temperature record. ” honesty from NOAA/NCEI, is a myth. The current bureaucracy will turn against him at all times and consider all efforts “unscientific”. Those officials mostly have civil service protection and cannot be fired. And there aren’t even enough climate skeptics with the expertise needed to faithfully re-implement a homogenous algorithm.
But here are some things that maybe made:
- Do an audit of existing “homogenization” efforts. Issue a report that shows five or ten or twenty glaring flaws in the current algorithm. There are at least many. O’Neill, et al., offer a good starting point. In addition, there are many stations with a good record of long-term cooling that have been “homogenized” to long-term heating. Put the “uniformer” on the hot seat to try to explain how that happened.
- After the report was released, it was announced that the government had lost confidence in the people who had been doing this work. If they can’t be fired, move them to some other function. Don’t let people stay together as a team. Move some to one place, and some to another, preferably in different cities far apart.
- Also after the report is released, please announce that the US government is no longer relying on this temperature series for policy-making purposes. It’s too inaccurate. Remove the website in its current form and all the advertising of the series as something of a scaremonger about the “hottest month ever” and the like. Leaving only a link to the hard data in its raw form is only useful to those “experts” with infinite time on their hands.
- Stop reporting the results of the USHCN/GHCN temperature series to the hundredth of a degree Celsius. The idea that this sequence – much of which comes from thermometers that only record to full accuracy – is accurate to one percent. degree is completely absurd. Reporting with one-hundredth of a degree accuracy is what gives NOAA the ability to declare a given month “warmest ever” when it says temperatures have gone from an anomaly of 1.03 degrees to 1.04 degrees. I suggest only reporting with an accuracy of 0.5 of a degree. That way, the series will have the same abnormal temperature for months or years afterward.
- Place error bars around any reported metrics. Designate a task force to find the appropriate width of error bars. Some kind of complex statistical modeling is required to generate this, but I think the error bars of +/- 0.5 degrees Celsius are perfectly legitimate. Again, that would make it impossible for us to claim that a given month is the “hottest ever”, unless there’s some really significant jump.
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