Friday’s post principally reported on the recent (February 8, 2022) article by O’Neill, et al., in Atmospheres, “Evaluation of the Homogenization Adjustments Applied to European Temperature Records in the Global Historical Climatology Network Dataset.”

In the piece, O’Neill, et al., dramatically demonstrate that the NOAA/NCEI “homogenization” algorithm is wildly off the mark in its intended mission of identifying and correcting for supposed “discontinuities” or “breakpoints” in weather station location or instrumentation in order to provide a more accurate world temperature history.

At the same time, although not mentioned in O’Neill, et al., the NOAA/NCEI algorithm is wildly successful in generating a world temperature history time series in the iconic hockey stick form to support the desired narrative of climate alarm.

What should be done?

This is the 29th post in a series going all the way back to July 2013.

For newer readers, what I refer to as “The Greatest Scientific Fraud Of All Time” is the systematic alteration of world temperature history records to create and/or augment a warming trend, and thereby support a political narrative that the world’s energy economy needs to be completely transformed by government command in order to avoid catastrophic human-caused climate change.

A U.S. government agency called the National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI, in turn a part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which is part of the Department of Commerce) is the most important source for world historical temperature information. NCEI collects data monthly from a network of several thousand ground-based weather stations both in the U.S. and around the world, and reports the results in various “global time series” going back to 1880.

When graphed, the NCEI data show the classic “hockey stick” formation, with rapid, and seemingly alarming, temperature increases in recent years.

But the NCEI data as presented have been subject to extensive massaging, referred to as “homogenization,” before being finalized and presented to the public as the alarming hockey stick.

Curious citizens, seeing the governmental threatening the reliability and cost of the energy system, might reasonably ask, what is the level of accuracy of the temperature presentation, and how much of the presented temperature increase is real versus an artifact of adjustments made by bureaucrats with a vested interest in getting the “right” outcome?

What I refer to as the “Greatest Scientific Fraud Of All Time” is the systematic alteration of historical world temperatures to make it appear, falsely, that the most recent months and years are the “warmest ever.” The basic technique of the fraud is the artificial lowering of previously-reported data as to world temperatures in earlier years, in order to erase earlier warmth and amplify the apparent warming trend. This is the 28th post in this series. The previous post in the series appeared on October 5, 2020. To view all 27 prior posts, you can go to this composite link.

The deliverable products of the temperature fraudsters are purported charts of world temperatures derived from a thermometer-based surface record (called GHCN, or Global Historical Climate Network), generally going back to about 1880. The charts are engineered to appear in an iconic “hockey stick” shape, with relatively flat earlier years followed by a sharply rising “blade” in the most recent years.

Every few years the government (this is a joint effort of NASA and NOAA) comes out with a new version of these data. The latest version is called GHCN version 4, which began in 2018.