the horrific meme.
So a friend of mine sent the meme shown on the right. He said, “this is something my grandma's friend shared. Is this true, if not, can you debunk it? My grandma wants to know.” How could I resist this request for information?
Memes, in general, are an interesting side effect of social media, at least in my opinion. We all see them on facebook, twitter, etc. By design, they catch your attention, are composed of a short one or two lines (although this one sort of breaks that rule) and generally leave you either feeling verified or horrified. The ultimate goal of the meme is to get you to click like and share. And if you’re about to do the same regarding this post, first read it in full to make sure you agree (or mostly agree) with what I have to say and that you agree that I’ve proven my point.
I have to admit, that when a meme leaves me horrified, I am a lot more compelled to check the facts than when I’m left feeling verified. Of course this climate meme left me feeling horrified, and I needed to find out exactly what it was using as facts to arrive at their conclusion. This was as much to help my friend and his grandmother understand the truth, as it was for me to understand what people are thinking. Where does one start when faced with sort of mystery?
To begin, the meme my friend and his grandmother showed me originated with the Australian Tea party. If it is anything like our Tea Party, then I am already left felling that this meme is a half truth. A half truth where something is fact, but the conclusion derived at is done so in a misleading way. To me, the origin of this meme is a warning sign, mostly prejudiced by my observations in how our Tea Party is misleads people or abuses facts.
google search results for “NOAA radiosonde 58 years”
The following is an outline of what I did in order to dig deeper into this meme. Ultimately, I want to know why those 21 years of data are ignored and, being a scientist, understand whether there is a legitimate reasons to ignore or discredit these data. So, to find the truth, I begin by picking out some keywords from the meme and putting them into google. In this case it was “NOAA radiosonde 58 years.”
The screen capture on the left shows the results from the first page of hits. It may be a little hard to read, but 8 of the 9 hits have very similar titles. This, of course, is the job of google, so no surprise there. But the number of times the title reoccurs with such similar words might mislead someone to think this was some major story. If that were the case, how come I had never head it before? I’m willing to bet that you have also never heard this story. The other conclusion could be that this is some story that spread throughout the internet via sharing and copying. Given that none of the links are major news sources, the later scenario seems very likely. So, another red flag.
Since it hardly matters which link I look a first, why not look at the first one listed. I mean, it has ‘realclimatescience’ in the url. So what could go wrong? Those might be famous last words.
front page of first google hit .. deplorable
Well, to begin with you are greeted by the title “The Deplorable Climate Science Blog” so now you know for certain the territory you’ve walked into. This is the territory of a climate change denier. And all that white text in the black box, if you can’t read it here, hosts a number of links to stories that show climate change science is a “hoax”, “scam”, and the scientists are “busted.”
I will congratulate the original writer of this blog entry because they detailed their trail well enough that I could trace them back. Too bad they choose to use their powers for uselessness and not usefulness.
global warming conspiracy blog
In any case, the image on the left shows part of that blog, where they have screen grabbed something and provided a useful link to the original source. This makes me very happy.
That “something” is a presentation given by Gavin A. Schmidt (NASA) and Thomas R. Karl (NOAA). I will let you know that I do live on funds from NASA, however, none of them have to do with climate change, they largely have to do with exploration of icy bodies in the outer solar system. If you explore the presentation for yourself, you’ll see on slide 5 NOAA’s global average temperature going back to 1880. On the following slide, those results are compared with NASA and UKMO (if you’re unfamiliar with UKMO, as I am, it is the United Kingdom's national weather service).
Slide 6 from NOAA/NASA presentation.
That is very good agreement between the three sets of data (one is a uncorrected version of NOAA) if you ask me. And the general trend from 1880 to 2015 is an increase in global temperature. There is a spike in the 1940s, which makes me wonder if that has to do with WWII. But that is a story left to the climate scientists. According to the conspiracy theorists, NOAA is hiding data collected from 1958 to 1979. Yet, they do show data over that 21 year period in this plot. The results of NOAA are strengthened when compared with NASA and UKMO. I think we can agree that when several groups show the same results to a high degree of agreement, likely through different methods, the conclusion that the average temperature has increased, is quite robust, even undeniable. Nonetheless, slide 10 shows where the conspiracy page got their conclusion that NOAA is hiding radiosonde data. So what is going on here?
Let me just give you a hard truth. Scientists, myself included, are (generally) bad at communicating to the general public and better within our field. And depending on who the NOAA/NASA presentation was intended for, more or less information might be given. Your audience might already be familiar with the tricks and traps of certain datasets, and barely needs to be discussed. Or, your audience might be very unfamiliar with those tricks/traps, and providing that information might be more distracting than helpful in order to get ones conclusion across. Needless to say, this is what conspiracy theorists tack onto. So let’s dig deeper.
conspiracy theory grab results from Angell & Korshover (1978).
Back on the conspiracy theorist page, they provide a link to a paper by Angell & Korshover (1978) from the journal of Monthly Weather Review. They also show part of figure 4 form Angell & Korshover (1978). Indeed the abstract of this papers states how they see a global cooling trend in their data from 1958 to 1976.
The conspiracy theory’s post goes into great detail linking the Angell & Korshover (1978) results to the NOAA/NASA plots. It is nice to see some thought going into this, but there has got to be a good reason to neglect that older data. The conspiracy folks either ignore or fail to look at more recent papers. Certainly in 1978 these data were relevant and seen to be good. But with hind sight, comes 20/20 vision. The answer may be in this 2005 paper by Free & Seidel. This paper, titled, “Causes of differing temperature trends in radiosonde upper air data sets” outlines the reason. Free & Seidel (2005) say that “possible sources of these differences include spatial sampling differences, temporal sampling differences, differences in the original data, adjustments for inhomogeneities, and other differences in processing.” So basically comparing apples to oranges. A big no-no.
And then there is this presentation by Seidel from May 2010. In what appears to be the backup section of the presentation, on slide 38 Seidel shows that there is a change in the instrument in 1979! This seems to be the first of several changes. And on slide 40, Seidel lists “variable data quality across the network” as one of several drawbacks among the radiosonde data. Such changes in measurement techniques sounds like a big headache to me, and something we try to avoid. So that’s it. No big cover up, in my conclusion. The instruments and the measurement methods changed, making interpretation of the earlier data difficult or useless.
So bottom line, you never want to take data that compare apples to oranges and claim there is a cover up. Changes in instrument or the measurement technique are good reasons not to include data, especially when the larger body of evidence points to that data being flawed in some fashion. I hope you agree.
