Hacked E-Mails

I haven't had time before to comment on the hacked e-mail controversy.

As usual, the Global Warming deniers have taken comments out of context, and twisted facts to benefit the fossil fuel business.

They make a big deal out of references to using "tricks" on the data, saying that meant the scientists were falsifying the data. The same things could be called "adjustments" and "corrections" for the fact that the many series of temperature measurements are affected by local conditions. Eg., cities are hotter than areas with more vegetation. If you have a temperature station in a city which is growing, and you find the temperature is getting hotter with time, if you don't adjust the temperature readings to allow for the fact that part of the rise in temperature is due to heat from the city, your values will be less accurate in showing whether there is a general heating effect than if you use a "trick", or correction function. (Note that "trick" is much faster to write and say). When they found that the change in position of a satellite was giving misleading readings, a correction was necessary to get meaningful results.

I saw a comment by someone who described himself as having more than 30 years experience as a computer programmer objecting to the adjustments. I'm not surprised. I have more than 30 years experience as a computer programmer/analyst, and I have not found IT people to be particularly knowledgeable about science. Most IT work has nothing to do with analyzing the output of natural phenomena.

I have had mostly the kinds of IT jobs as most, but I have also had some jobs analyzing scientific data, and I know that correction factors are necessary.

Eg., I wrote programs that analyzed the output of electron-capture gas chromatographs. I believe the test tubes were filled with tiny glass beads. The same test tube could be used for a series of tests, but eventually it needed to be refreshed with clean beads. When this happened, we had to do a run to get a base line reading, a calibration, because each time we refreshed the test tube, there were slight differences, due to tiny differences in the exact size and numbers of the little beads. The calibration was used to adjust the data to be comparable to the previous set of data. This was a "trick", but it did not falsify the data, it made it more accurate.

Any device which makes precise measurements will have to be calibrated to get accurate measurements, including thermometers.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/12/091215173021.htm

ScienceDaily (Dec. 15, 2009) — NASA researchers studying urban landscapes have found that the intensity of the "heat island" created by a city depends on the ecosystem it replaced and on the regional climate. Urban areas developed in arid and semi-arid regions show far less heating compared with the surrounding countryside than cities built amid forested and temperate climates.

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Scientists first discovered the heat island effect in the 1800s when they observed cities growing warmer than surrounding rural areas, particularly in summer. Urban surfaces of asphalt, concrete, and other materials -- also referred to as "impervious surfaces" -- absorb more solar radiation by day. At night, much of that heat is given up to the urban air, creating a warm bubble over a city that can be as much as 1 to 3°C (2 to 5°F) higher than temperatures in surrounding rural areas.

The impervious surfaces of cities also lead to faster runoff from land, reducing the natural cooling effects of water on the landscape. More importantly, the lack of trees and other vegetation means less evapotranspiration -- the process by which trees "exhale" water. Trees also provide shade, a secondary cooling effect in urban landscapes.

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In a quirk of surface heating, the suburban areas around desert cities are actually cooler than both the city center and the outer rural areas because the irrigation of lawns and small farms leads to more moisture in the air from plants that would not naturally grow in the region.

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