“If the result is confirmed, then it would be a shocking development. The warming in the USA over the last years would be far less rapid than what has always been assumed. And because similar errors are supected elsewhere, the issue could quickly gain global relevance.”
German geologist Dr. Sebastian Lüning and chemist Prof. Fritz Vahrenholt react to Anthony Watts’s press release concerning the quality of US temperature data at their blog. Unlike myelf, Sebastian Lüning and Fritz Vahrenholt find the implications of the new findings to be potentially devastating. They write (excerpt):
Anthony Watts did not disappoint. Indeed it is about the release of an important new publication that involves the warming trend of the last 30 years. We had already introduced that problem here at this blog a few days ago (see our blog article “The wonderful world of temperature data corrections: And suddenly the trend reversed…“). It gets down to how justified are ‘corrections’ to the official data? We had reported that the data changes oddly always produced a signficant acceleration in warming with respect to the raw data, even though factors like the urban heat island effect intuitively suggest the oppsite correction is needed.
Authors in addition to Anthony Watts included Stephen McIntyre and John Christy. McIntyre is known because of his impressive error analyses of the famous hockey stick digram. Christy is a renowned expert for satellite temperature data at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. The manuscript will soon be submitted for publication by a journal. […]
The result of the new study is shocking: Instead of correcting downwards temperatures that were heated by the urban heat island effect, the official US administration offices apparently corrected data from qualitively reliable stations upwards, which appears to be unjustifiable. If the result is confirmed, then it would be a shocking development. The warming in the USA over the last years would be far less rapid than what has always been assumed. And because similar errors are supected elsewhere, the issue could quickly gain global relevance.”
I asked Dr. Lüning to comment more on why this could have global implications. He kindly replied by e-mail:
“Bit by bit others who might jump onto the train will now use the same methodology worldwide and will probably find that it really affects the global curve.”