RUSSIA claims CRU cherry-picked Siberia temp data

[marchesarosa]

Today another example of CRU having their foot on the scale, Russian papers are reporting that the Russian surface station
data was sorted by CRU to use only the highest warming stations.




WHAT RUSSIAN PAPERS SAY

Russia affected by Climategate

"A discussion of the November 2009 Climatic Research Unit e-mail hacking incident, referred to by some sources as
"Climategate," continues against the backdrop of the abortive UN Climate Conference in Copenhagen (COP15)
discussing alternative agreements to replace the 1997 Kyoto Protocol that aimed to combat global warming.

The incident involved an e-mail server used by the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia
(UEA) in Norwich, East England. Unknown persons stole and anonymously disseminated thousands of e-mails
and other documents dealing with the global-warming issue made over the course of 13 years.

Controversy arose after various allegations were made including that climate scientists colluded to
withhold scientific evidence and manipulated data to make the case for global warming appear stronger than it is.

Climategate has already affected Russia. On Tuesday, the Moscow-based Institute of Economic Analysis
(IEA) issued a report claiming that the Hadley Center for Climate Change based at the headquarters
of the British Meteorological Office in Exeter (Devon, England) had probably tampered with Russian-climate data.

The IEA believes that Russian meteorological-station data did not substantiate the anthropogenic global-warming theory.

Analysts say Russian meteorological stations cover most of the country's territory, and that the Hadley Center
had used data submitted by only 25% of such stations in its reports.
Over 40% of Russian
territory was not included in global-temperature calculations for some other reasons, rather than the lack of
meteorological stations and observations.

The data of stations located in areas not listed in the Hadley Climate Research Unit Temperature UK
(HadCRUT) survey often does not show any substantial warming in the late 20th century and the early 21st century.

The HadCRUT database includes specific stations providing incomplete data and highlighting the global-warming
process, rather than stations facilitating uninterrupted observations.
On the whole, climatologists use the incomplete findings of meteorological stations far more often than
those providing complete observations.

IEA analysts say climatologists use the data of stations located in large populated centers that are influenced by
the urban-warming effect more frequently than the correct data of remote stations.

The scale of global warming was exaggerated due to temperature distortions for Russia accounting for
12.5% of the world's land mass. The IEA said it was necessary to recalculate all global-temperature data
in order to assess the scale of such exaggeration.

Global-temperature data will have to be modified if similar climate-date procedures have been used from other
national data because the calculations used by COP15 analysts, including financial calculations,
are based on HadCRUT research."





Thanks to vboring on ClimateAudit for the following:

N.A. Pivovarova and A.N.Yllarionov are the authors of this paper. In the paper, they discuss how data covering
40% of the Russian surface area is completely removed from the record. Not massaged, not treated.
Just ignored and replaced with estimates from CRU’s models.

The crux of the argument is that the CRU cherry picked data following the same methods that have been
done everywhere else. They ignored data covering 40% of Russia and chose data that showed a warming
trend over statistically preferable alternatives when available. They ignored completeness of data, preferred urban
data, strongly preferred data from stations that relocated, ignored length of data set.

One the final page, there is a chart that shows that CRU’s selective use of 25% of the data created 0.64C more
warming than simply using all of the raw data would have done. The complete set of data show 1.4C rise
since 1860, the CRU set shows 2.06C rise over the same period.

climateaudit.org/2009/12/16/iearussia-hadley-center-probably-tampered-with-russian-climate-data/#comments

[marchesarosa]

On Mar 31, 2004 Jones emailed Mann as follows:

"Recently rejected two papers (one for JGR and for GRL) from people saying CRU has it wrong over Siberia. Went to town
in both reviews, hopefully successfully. If either appears I will be very surprised, but you never know with GRL."

Phil Jones of CRU, acted as a reviewer of the CRU data used in the HadCRU gridded temperature and
“went to town” to block the publication of criticisms of his handling of Russian data.

I call that a conflict of interest. Surely reviewers should be independent and not in either the same camp or the
opposite camp? We find examples of both kinds of behaviour with the CRU reviewers.

[marchesarosa]

[marchesarosa]

3.bp.blogspot.com/_rqH4fUbko2U/SylPw6ygrHI/AAAAAAAAPj8/CD3YrVV-25Q/s1600-h/Ruussian+data.jpg]



I don't understand Russian but this data looks to me like the temperature plots of several long-lived measuring stations.

Does anyone see an upward trend in the temperature?

(That would be measured up the y-axis, specialpeople, or, the left hand side, as you might call it.)

[marchesarosa]

Here is the century long data for several Polar Urals thermometer stations.

Eyeballing them, I can only see one that could be called an upward centennial trend.

[marchesarosa]

Cooking Kirensk


Earlier today (22DEC 2009) Steve McIntyre posted a paper drawing attention to a discrepancy in the CRU's treatment
of Siberian temperature series may have a tendency to overstate the warming trend.

It turns out this was one of those papers that Phil Jones went to town on to keep critical papers out of the
published literature. In that paper it mentioned the rural station of Kirensk as one that should be looked
at because it has a long record and isn't subject to urban heat island effects. This is interesting because
this station is one that the CRU released as part of their subset of recently released data and it is available in the GHCN records.

So I downloaded the data for both and compared them:





As you can see the GHCN and CRU versions agree fairly closely from about 1950 but CRU has a noticeable warming trend
because it is significantly colder in the past. How they justify this sort of adjustment is interesting but
unknown since they don't release their methods. I assume this is some sort of homogeneity adjustment that
aligns the trend of this station with neighbours (which may be increasing due to urban effects).

Also note that GHCN also has an "adjusted" series for this station, but those adjustments are minor -
usually less than 1/10 of a degree.

That graph provides no less than three temperature series for one station, but it doesn't tell us which one (if any)
are actually right. There is actually one more series for that station, and that is the GHCN Daily measurements.
The other series are already monthly averages, and have been processed somewhat. The daily observations,
on the other hand, are supposedly completely raw, recording exactly what Ivan wrote down on his form as he
trudged out into the Siberian winter to read the thermometer.

Unfortunately, that data is missing the records for the early part of the century, but plotting it is interesting nonetheless.





The station reliably reported from about 1935 to about 1999, after which it has a large number of missing values,
which would explain the larger variance from the year 2000 on. Presumably CRU and GHCN estimate the
missing days from neighbouring stations and calculate the monthly values from a mix of real observations and estimates.

But both CRU and GHCN show smaller variances from 1935 to 1999, too, even though there are essentially
no missing values to estimate. So it appears that even the GHCN "raw" data isn't really raw, but has been
subjected to a degree of homogenization.

So what is the "real" temperature trend of Kirensk and, by extension, southern Siberia? It looks like it can be
whatever you want it to be.


From Small Dead Animals blog
www.smalldeadanimals.com/

[marchesarosa]

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