[Vision2020] The Great Thermometer Die Off

[Paul Rumelhart]

Some of you know that I was at one time playing around with graphing 
global temperature data in order to satisfy my curiosity on a number of 
points related to global warming.  I wish I'd stuck with it.  It turns 
out that someone else (probably many others) has been doing the same 
thing.  A programmer named E. M. Smith has done some work with the GISS 
dataset (I've been using the NCDC one).  He has found that many of the 
measuring stations which are used for temperature reconstructions across 
the globe have been removed from the global temperature data sets for 
recent years.  In fact, the data drops off quickly starting in the 80's 
(at least in the dataset I've been working with).

He has done some research into which stations have been removed, and has 
apparently found that lots of higher altitude stations have been 
removed, which would have shown cooler temperatures - leading to a 
corresponding rise in the average temperatures over the years.  He has a 
blog which covers this (he goes by the alias "chiefio").  Here is an 
entry in the blog giving an overview of this topic: 
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2009/11/09/gistemp-a-human-view/

I have not tried to analyze the stations that drop off of the NCDC data 
set yet, perhaps I can get a little work done on that soon.

I'm also attaching a couple of graphs that I created from the NCDC data 
which graph the station counts by years.  These are from the global 
minimums data sets, both normal and adjusted.  I hadn't yet gotten to 
graphing station counts for the global means and global maximums data 
sets.  All uniques stations and sub-stations are counted, which will 
mean that some sub-stations are counted twice if the thermometer is 
moved or something in that year.  I was at one point trying to find out 
why these counts dropped off so quickly.  It makes sense that the number 
of stations would increase over the years, but why the dramatic decrease 
in station counts?  I had originally thought that perhaps there are 
delays in collecting data together, but 20-30 year delays?  That doesn't 
seem plausible.

By the way, I learned of this work that E. M. Smith has been doing by 
watching John Coleman's hour long news special titled "Global Warming - 
The Other Side".  You can find links to the various parts of this here: 
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/01/14/john-colemans-hourlong-news-special-global-warming-the-other-side-now-online-all-five-parts-here/

Even I thought this video was a bit high in the sensationalist and 
propagandist categories, but it did cover many of the standard skeptical 
viewpoints that I've run into.  It might be worth watching, even if 
you're completely convinced we're cooking ourselves with carbon dioxide.

Paul
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