An audit of the key temperature dataset used by climate models claims to have identified more than 70 problems which the Australian author said made it “unfit for global studies”.
Problems include zero degree temperatures in the Caribbean, 82 degree C temperatures in Colombia and ship-based recordings taken 100km inland.
“The primary conclusion of the audit is the dataset shows exaggerated warming and that global averages are far less certain than have been claimed,” the audit paper says.
“One implication of the audit is that climate models have been tuned to match incorrect data, which would render incorrect their predictions of future temperatures and estimates of the human influence of temperatures.
“Another implication is that the proposal that the Paris Climate Agreement adopt 1850-1899 averages as ‘indicative’ of pre-industrial temperatures is fatally flawed.”
The new paper argues even the most simple quality checks had not been done on the HadCRUT4 data which is managed by the UK Met Office Hadley Centre and the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia.
The Met Office says the data is based on an archive of monthly mean temperatures provided by more than 5500 weather stations distributed around the world.
It said estimates were made of the uncertainties arising from thermometer accuracy, homogenization, sampling grid boxes with a finite number of measurements available, large-scale biases such as urbanization and estimation of regional averages with non-complete global measurement coverage.
The audit is an extension of the Ph.D. thesis by Dr. John McLean awarded by James Cook University.
Dr. McLean has previously identified anomalies in the dataset which were acknowledged by the Met Office and corrected.
Dr. McLean said he had not sent a copy of the audit to the Met Office.
The new paper will be controversial because it has been released on the eve of the IPCC report on the aspirations target of limiting future warming to 1.5C below the start of the industrial revolution.
The audit has been effectively self-published with blogger JoNova at a newly formed publishing house, Robert Boyle Publishing. (SEE ALSO: First-Ever Audit Of Global Temps Finds Freezing Tropical Islands, More)
The publisher says “We do not regard it as our job to be “gatekeepers” of thought. We leave it to the wider community to make any decision about the merit of the materials we publish.”
Anomalies identified in the McLean paper, including at St Kitts in the Caribbean, the average temperature for December 1981 was zero degrees, normally it’s 26C.
For three months in 1978, one place in Colombia reported an 82 degrees Celsius average – hotter than the hottest day on Earth.
In Romania one September the average temperature was reported as minus 46°C.
Sometimes ships would report ocean temperatures from places up to 100km inland.
Mclean says one of the most serious flaws identified was the shortage of data.
For the first two years, from 1850 onwards, the only land-based reporting station in the Southern Hemisphere was in Indonesia.
Dr. McLean said there were some ship observations at the time but Australian records had not started until 1855 in Melbourne, behind Auckland which started in 1853.
According to the HadCRUT4 calculation of coverage, it was almost 1950 before there was data from even half of the Southern Hemisphere.
Dr. McLean points out how influential this data is: “The draft agenda for this year’s UN COP24 proposes that the HadCRUT4 average from 1850 to 1899 be used as an ‘indicative’ temperature.
“This is just nonsense; the average global coverage of the dataset from 1850 to 1899 was just 30 percent. In May 1861, the global coverage was just 12 percent”, he said.
He said the timing of the release of the audit at the same time as the IPCC report into 1.5C warming had been “partly coincidence”.
Read more at The Australian
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