Wednesday, December 9, 2009

Charts And Graphs


Over at The Volokh Conspiracy, Jim Lindgren has a post about ClimateGate.

Jim links to a blogger who wonders exactly what kind of adjustments were made to the raw data in order to "homogenize" it. So he made a nice series of graphs showing the raw data and the adjusted data and calculated the adjustment factor from the former to the latter.

The results are disquieting. The raw data shows a slight cooling trend of 0.7 degrees Celsius per century. The adjusted data shows a warming trend of 1.2 degrees Celsius per century. The difference is entirely due to the "homogenizing" adjustments.

The graph of the adjustments shows some unusual changes in 1920, 1930, and especially 1940. The average "slope" of the adjustments from 1940 to about 1995 is actually greater than the slope of the warming trend, almost as if the scientists added a larger and larger adjustment to each year's data - preferring consistency over accuracy.

I'm an agnostic about global warming. But one thing I learned in college was the difference between temperature and heat. Trying to measure warming of an entire planet is a huge challenge. Close to Chaos Theory.

2 comments:

Old NFO said...

Excellent post and a good link!

Borepatch said...

I'd like a much better explanation about why the adjustments were made they way they were.

And why you almost never see downward adjustments, at least after 1960.

But I'm some sort of bitter clingy denier or something.