The Northern Europe Land Surtace Temperature Fraud

Prof. Wibjorn Karlen, Professor Emeritus of Physical Geography and Quaternary Geology of Stockholm University, has questioned much of the land surface temperature data providing the primary basis for the UN IPCC AR4 report of 2007.  His questions in e-mails to Kevin Trenberth and Phil Jones were among those in the recent dump of e-mails, documents, and programs of ClimateGate.  He has painstakingly sought out the raw temperature data from many regions of the world and found large discrepancies with the data used in the UN IPCC AR4 report in region after region.  One of these areas is that of Northern Europe including the Scandinavian countries and Finland.

Here is what he says in an e-mail in 2008 [Al Gore, you are very wrong that all of the e-mails were more than 10 years old.]:

In my letter to Klass V I included diagram showing the mean annual temperature of the Nordic countries (1890-ca 2001) presented on the net by the database NORDKLIM, a joint project between the meteorological institutes in the Nordic countries. Except for Denmark, the data sets show an increase after the 1970s to the same level as in the late 1930s or lower. None demonstrates the distinct increase IPCC indicates. The trends of these 6 areas are very similar except for a few interesting details.

Taking this cue from Prof. Karlen, Willis Eschenbach, sought out the raw temperature data for the Nordic countries and Finland.  He says:

I cannot find the NORDKLIM graphic he refers to, so I have calculated it myself. I used the NORDKLIM dataset available at http://www.smhi.se/hfa_coord/nordklim/data/Nordklim_data_set_v1_0_2002.xls. I removed the one marine record from “Ship M”. To avoid infilling where there are missing records, I took the “first difference” of all of the available records for each year and averaged them. Then I used a running sum to calculate the average anomaly. I did not remove cities or adjust for the Urban Heat Island (UHI) effect. Here is the result:

Note that despite not correcting for an increasing urban heat island effect, the recent temperatures are no higher than those of the 1930s.  The recent rate of temperature increase from about 1980 does not look very different than say 1915 to the mid-1930s.  In terms of the extent of change, the increase from the early 1880s to the mid-1930s looks more remarkable than that at the end of the 20th Century.  This result is very much like that described by Prof. Karlen when he examined the data.

Now, let's examine the Northern Europe land surface temperature data used in the UN IPCC AR4 report of 2007:

Eschenbach comments:

This claims that there is a full degree temperature rise from 1970 to 2000, ending way warmer than the 1930s. You can see why Professor Karlen is wondering how the IPCC got such a different answer.

 It has become very clear that the reason the land surface temperature data shows temperature increases much larger in the late 20th Century according to the UN IPCC and CRU, NOAA, and NASA GISS is due to heavy handed manipulation of the raw data to make it tell a story of man-made global warming.  In reality, there is no evidence for this in the raw temperature data in area after area around the world, now that inquiring scientists are carefully examining this data.

Prof. Karlen has also raised objections about the UN IPCC AR4 data used for arctic areas and in Africa, in addition to his objections about Australia, which I discussed in an earlier post.  Prof. Karlen is a hero we should all admire.

As we have now seen, the raw temperature data for Russia, Australia, and Northern Europe does not look at all like the data the UN IPCC AR4 claims and says supports a major climate effect due to man's use of fossil fuels and the CO2 generated by that use.  We also know that much of the data from the U.S. is corrupted by bad siting of the smaller and smaller number of weather stations being used to produce the temperature record.