Tony Heller on Radiosonde Data

Radiosonde Data Since 1958

Sometimes it's difficult to believe the stuff that Tony Heller says. In one of his blogposts[1] from 2016, Heller claimed that NOAA has been hiding radiosonde data in “their latest attempt to defraud the public.” According to Heller, NOAA is hiding this data because they don’t want to tell you that there has been no warming since 1958. As he writes, “Here is why they are hiding the rest of the data. The earlier data showed as much pre-1979 cooling as the post-1979 warming.” He then goes on to haphazardly splice a graph from a paper in 1978[2] with another graph showing radiosonde data from 1979 on (from NOAA’s 2015 climate report).[3]  From this he concludes that there has been no warming in radiosonde data for the last 58 years.

However, careful observers will note that Heller just slapped one graph on top of the other. He didn't even bother to find the data and graph both together properly. He literally just lined up 0 C on both graphs, but the problem is that the two graphs have two different baselines. The first one is from 1958-1977 and has no overlap with the 1981-2010 baseline in NOAA’s later graph from 1979 on. They are two different baselines, but Heller lined them up as if they were the same.

Heller Slapped Together Two Graphs with Different Baselines

But wait, there's more! It turns out that the two graphs Heller slapped together don’t even measure the same things. The 1978 graph presents an average temperature of the surface to 100 mb (that is, 0 to ~53,000 ft). The 2015 graph presents individual trends ranging from 5,000 ft to 40,000 ft. Both of these include part of the stratosphere. But since the stratosphere is cooling, this means that the 1978 graph will show a lower trend since it mixes the troposphere with more of the stratosphere. The 2019 report, however, shows radiosonde data within the troposphere since 1958.

This Radiosonde Data Was Cleverly Hidden in Plain Sight[4]

So it turns out that climate scientists have been doing a really crappy job of “hiding” this data as Heller imagines. In fact, they seem more than willing to publish it, and you can find a proper graph showing radiosonde data from 1958 to 2019 in a 2019 State of the Climate Report above.[4]. A proper graph with a proper baseline shows a warming trend in radiosonde data since 1958.It just goes to show that when a blogger says that pretty much the entirety of climate science is looking to defraud the public, it's best to check up on his claims. It's far more likely that the blogger is incompetent than it is that rest of the world is lying. So in the spirit of full disclosure, I provided links to all my sources so you can check up on what this blogger has to say.

Resources:

[1] Tony Heller. “NOAA Radiosonde Data Shows No Warming For 58 Years.” https://realclimatescience.com/2016/03/noaa-radiosonde-data-shows-no-warming-for-58-years/

[2] Angell, J. K., & Korshover, J. (1978). Global Temperature Variation, Surface-100 mb: An Update into 1977, Monthly Weather Review, 106(6), 755-770. Retrieved Sep 6, 2021, from https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/mwre/106/6/1520-0493_1978_106_0755_gtvsma_2_0_co_2.xml

[3] NOAA/NASA Annual Global Analysis for 2015. https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/briefings/201601.pdf

[4] Dunn, R. J. H., D. M. Stanitski, N. Gobron, and K. M. Willett, Eds., 2020: Global Climate [in “State of the Climate in 2019"].Bull. Amer. Meteor., 101 (8), S9–S127, https://doi.org/10.1175/BAMS-D-20-0104.1
https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/bams/101/8/bamsD200104.xml?tab_body=pdf






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