At virtually the same time NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies was correcting historical climate data with the assistance of Climate Audit's Steve McIntyre, a British mathematician discovered serious flaws in papers used and cited by the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in its most recent Assessment Report.
Douglas J. Keenan, a former Morgan Stanley arbitrageur and current independent mathematical researcher, identified "fabrications" in such studies that suggest a "marked lack of integrity in some important work on global warming that is relied upon by the IPCC" and that "the insignificance of urbanization effects on temperature measurements has not been established as reliably as the IPCC assessment report assumes."
"Fabrications"? Who do they think they are, Ward Churchill? Actually it is Wei-Chyung Wang, a professor at the University at Albany, State University of New York.
Mr. Keenan's paper can be found here (pdf thingy!), and the quoted material below is taken from it.
Once again we have the problem of climate researchers attempting to hide their data from outside investigation, as a UK Freedom of Information request had to be filed to obtain the list of Chinese meteorological stations used in the papers in question. How is that necessary? Why isn't that data made available as a matter of course?
In this case it seems such data was not made available because fraudulent claim were being made about it.
Regarding station movements over time, the papers of Jones et al. and Wang et al. make the following statements.The stations were selected on the basis of station history: we chose those with few, if any, changes in instrumentation, location or observation times. [Jones et al.]
They were chosen based on station histories: selected stations have relatively few, if any, changes in instrumentation, location, or observation times…. [Wang et al.]
Those statements are essential for the papers.
Each paper gives the same reference for its statement: a report resulting from a project done jointly by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS). The DOE/CAS report (available via http://cdiac.esd.ornl.gov/ndps/ndp039.html) resulted from concern over “possible CO2-induced climate changes”. Its purpose was to present “the most comprehensive, long-term instrumental Chinese climate data presently available”. It contains, in particular, histories of some Chinese meteorological stations, including the different locations of those stations and the dates on which they moved, if any.
The DOE/CAS report was formally published in full in 1991—Wang et al. and Jones et al. used a pre-publication version of the report. A revised version of the report was published in 1997, but the station histories are the same in the two versions.
Jones et al. and Wang et al. consider the same 84 meteorological stations in China. Regarding 49 of those stations, the DOE/CAS report says, “station histories are not currently available” and “details regarding instrumentation, collection methods, changes in station location or observing times … are not known” (sect. 5). For those 49 stations, then, the above-quoted statements from the two papers are impossible.
Regarding the remaining 35 stations that were analyzed by the two papers, I have prepared a summary of the relevant information from the DOE/CAS report. The summary is available at http://www.informath.org/apprise/a5620/b17.htm. As an example from the summary, one station had five different locations during 1954–1983, with the locations as much as 41 km apart. Two other stations each had four different locations. At least half the stations had substantial moves (two other examples, of 25 km and 15 km, were given above). Moreover, several stations have histories that are inconsistent, making reliable analysis unattainable.
(The station that moved five times during the study period, #54511, is discussed by Yan et al. [Advances in Atmospheric Sciences, 18: 309 (2001)]; the authors conclude that some of the moves affected temperature measurements by 0.4 °C. The authors also discuss another station, #58367, which had a single move of 4 km; the authors conclude that the move affected temperature measurements by 0.3 °C. The authors’ statistical analysis, though, is invalid—e.g. it does not consider significance—so the conclusions are unproven.)
Additionally, the following statement from the DOE/CAS report seems apposite: “Few station records included in the PRC data sets can be considered truly homogeneous [i.e. have no significant changes in location, instrumentation, etc.]. Even the best stations were subject to minor relocations or changes in observing times, and many have undoubtedly experienced large increases in urbanization.”
The essential point here is that the quoted statements from Jones et al. and Wang et al. cannot be true and could not be in error by accident. The statements are fabricated.
As Kennan's paper notes the entire idea of using measurements (supposedly) collected during the chaos of the Cultural Revolution in China as evidence of anything is fantastical enough. That these papers are used to "refute" the idea that urbanization is responsible for much of the measured temperature increase given their complete disregard of proper scientific method is a bad joke.
Unfortunately, this will be largely ignored by the media and the joke will continue to be on all of us.
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