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Wry Heat - by Jonathan DuHamel

NOAA accused of fabricating temperature data

by on Jan. 24, 2012, under Climate change

A strange thing has been happening to the historic temperature dataset.  NOAA/NCDC have been frequently revising the temperatures, and not just for recent data, but for temperatures going all the way back to 1880.  The folks at C3Headlines have been keeping track of temperature data sets for several years.  They noticed that NOAA has been revising the dataset almost monthly, and noted that there were six revisions in December and three so far in January.  The revisions have a particular pattern.  Temperatures from dates before 1940 are being gradually made cooler, while temperatures since 1951 are being made warmer.  The effect is to make recent warming seem more alarming.  Other agencies that keep temperature data sets rarely make revisions.  See the story from C3Headlines here.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 24th, 2012 at 10:13 am and is filed under Climate change. Tags for this post: , , , . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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  • Dr. John Parsons

    I tried diligently to make some sense out of the material at the C3headlines blog that Jon linked to. The two figures presented are both attributed to the same IP address which does not link to NOAA or NCDC. It did however pop up at practically every site dedicated to the denial of AGW. Jo Nova, WUWT…. all the usual suspects. I did find this NCDC link that explains the how and why of revised data sets:

    http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/research/ushcn/

    I have an email request into C3 asking for their sources. I did notice that the C3 chart shows 41 revisions out of 1,584 months. That’s positive as well as negative revisions. Given that, and the size of the revisions, how they could possibly come up with the trend line they show defies logic. After reviewing their archives, I get the impression that’s the point. Additionally, they show the trend as a linear regression which makes no sense.

    I await their response, although I plan breathing normally in the interim. JP

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