Climate Model Madness--Why Radiosonde Wind Data Blows

Imagine if you will what would happen if the manmade (anthropogenic) global warming theory turned out to be false. It would be a political and economic disaster for proponents of the theory. What will they do with all that free time on their hands? How will the International Panel on Climate Change survive if the governments of the world stop sending money to its trust fund?

Each of us will more likely be killed in an auto accident on the way to a Green Peace meeting than suffer the effects of global warming, but that is neither here nor there. What matters most is keeping the legend alive.

One sure fire method of keeping any legend alive is to go data fishing. If your climate model does not jive with the data, don't be a jerk and adjust your model to fit the data, but measure and record the data in different ways until you get the result you want.

Let me give you a real example of data fishing. Here is an excerpt from
http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/v1/n6/abs/ngeo208.html

"Climate models and theoretical expectations have predicted that the upper troposphere should be warming faster than the surface. Surprisingly, direct temperature observations from radiosonde and satellite data have often not shown this expected trend. "

Wow! Our climate models don't prove Man causes global warming! What do we do? Adjust the models to fit the data (admit we were wrong)? No! Here's the answer:

"However, non-climatic biases have been found in such measurements."

Yeah! Yeah! That's the ticket! There are non-climatic biases!

"Here we apply the thermal-wind equation to wind measurements from radiosonde data, which seem to be more stable than the temperature data."

The answer is blowin' in the wind. Gee that sounds swell! I wonder if the suckers...er...public will buy it? We sure hope no one reads this:

"The radiosonde data, while having the advantage of being a direct measurement of temperature, have two major disadvantages. First, most of the radiosonde stations are located in northern hemisphere land areas, leaving large regions of the world's oceans and the southern hemisphere essentially unmonitored....Many tropical radiosonde stations show substantial inhomogenities, which may be under corrected, leading to a cooling bias (Thorne et al 2005, Sherwood et al 2008) though the amount of this bias in unknown. Source: http://www.remss.com/msu/msu_data_validation.html

A cooling bias? That is not good! What will we do? What...will...we...do?!"

"We derive estimates of temperature trends for the upper troposphere to the lower stratosphere since 1970. Over the period of observations, we find a maximum warming trend of 0.650.47 K per decade near the 200 hPa pressure level, below the tropical tropopause. Warming patterns are consistent with model predictions..."
http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/v1/n6/abs/ngeo208.html

Phew! Now that's what we like to hear, isn't it? Warming patterns are consistent with model predictions. If at first your climate model does not succeed, simply change the way you measure and record the data until it does.

Here are some more fun quotes from those rascals who like to play with the data:

From the Yale Radiosonde Analysis Project http://earth.geology.yale.edu/~sherwood/radproj/

"Recent analyses of radiosonde, surface, and satellite temperature trends have produced discordant results, which have caused some to question the reliability of our current estimates of global warming...We have produced a new dataset following the iterative universal Kriging procedure described in Sherwood (1999) and Sherwood (2007)... Wind homogenization had only a small effect, so we are not proposing that our homogenized wind data are significantly better than the raw data."

Wind homogenization had only a small effect and the homogenized wind data are not significantly better than the raw data?! That really blows! So much for manmade (anthropogenic) global warming. We'll just have to find a new cause.