WTF is this guy prattling on about?

[hootinholler]

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/earth/environment/globalwarming/11395516/The-fiddling-with-temperature-data-is-the-biggest-science-scandal-ever.html

When future generations look back on the global-warming scare of the past 30 years, nothing will shock them more than the extent to which the official temperature records – on which the entire panic ultimately rested – were systematically “adjusted” to show the Earth as having warmed much more than the actual data justified.

Two weeks ago, under the headline “How we are being tricked by flawed data on global warming”, I wrote about Paul Homewood, who, on his Notalotofpeopleknowthat blog, had checked the published temperature graphs for three weather stations in Paraguay against the temperatures that had originally been recorded. In each instance, the actual trend of 60 years of data had been dramatically reversed, so that a cooling trend was changed to one that showed a marked warming.

This was only the latest of many examples of a practice long recognised by expert observers around the world – one that raises an ever larger question mark over the entire official surface-temperature record.

It goes on, but there's nothing really of substance there. Anyone know what this nutter is really talking about?

[hatrack]

1. What he's talking about is FUD, and that's what The Torygraph does

It's like the Daily Mail for people who think they're smart (but they're not).

[hootinholler]

2. I understand that about the Telegraph

I clearly know this is FUD spreading.

I am wondering more about what specifically the writer was twisting into bullshit.

[DetlefK]

3. I guess, the "correction" he is talking about...

Climate-scientists have admitted to tweaking old data because it was recorded decades ago on instruments and in circumstances that are considered badly calibrated by today's standard. Basically, if an old instrument says "1 degree" that doesn't mean the same when a contemporary thermometer says "1 degree".

For example: Electronic thermometers use senors called "thermo-couples". If the battery is too weak or if the thermal insulation is shoddy, then the thermometer will give a bad result.

[hatrack]

4. RealClimate has a really good extensive thread demolishing this entire article

EDIT

The records show that the recent high temperatures on Iceland are unprecedented, contrary to the main message from the Telegraph. And the evidence is not just in the temperature, but in a wide range of observations. I like to look at the numbers myself, especially since the journalist responsible for the Telegraph story, Christopher Booker, bases some of his allegations on climate records with which I have some experience. Booker dismisses the data records and claims that

weather stations across much of the Arctic, between Canada (51 degrees W) and the heart of Siberia (87 degrees E). Again, in nearly every case, the same one-way adjustments have been made, to show warming up to 1 degree C or more higher than was indicated by the data that was actually recorded.

It is implied that such adjustments have been made to the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) data as well as the data from the National Climate Data Center (NCDC).

The purports about systematic one-way adjustments can easily be tested by comparing the trends in the GISS data with the independent North Atlantic Climate Data (NACD) or a more recent temperature analysis for Svalbard by Nordli et al. (2014).

It is straightforward to test Booker’s claim with open-source methods and data (see R-srcipt), and when we compare the independent Svalbard temperature from Nordli et al (2014) with GISS, we see that the GISS data has a smaller annual mean trend than the independent Norwegian data set for the same years (Figure 1).



But is Svalbard representative for the this part of the Arctic? We can repeat the exercise for the most important temperature records from this region, and it is clear that there is no one-way adjustment, as purported in the Telegraph (Figure 2). In other words, our inspection of the actual data shows that Booker’s claim is false.



EDIT

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2015/02/noise-on-the-telegraph/