I am proud to add Dr. Jan Zeman's authoritative addendum to substantiate the claims made in my Czechgate article. With Dr. Zeman's permission I have edited and revised his paper slightly for publication.

THE KLEMENTINUM RECORD - UHI AND LOCAL WARMING
by Jan Zeman

The "global warming agencies" literally raped the data from Prague Klementinum. On the graph we see the data from GISS although the NOAA and CRU versions are very similar. What has been stripped out from the record is the most valuable part going from the 1770's to the latter half of the 19th century. Thereafter, it is cut again in 1939 so that the decade of the 1940's is also left out. Then GISS cynically attached a wholly different record from another station at Prague Ruzyne airport. The "amputations" have then been renamed.

Image
© GISS
All this has been done despite the fact that the record of temperatures in Klementinum is still active and it is one of the oldest uninterrupted instrumental temperature records in the world. There is no scientific reason to have perpetrated such data rape as the original Klementinum was of exceptional value to science because it very much supported a skeptical scientific view contrary the prevailing orthodoxy in climatology.

Because John O'Sullivan's original article was partially based on my research, I am taking this opportunity to offer a more detailed explanation of how I perceive Klementinum has been influenced by the urban heat island effect (UHI). I then conclude that there is a net warming figure of <0.25°C in Prague for the total of the last two centuries. This, in my opinion, casts a serious doubt over all the internationally promoted global warming scares.

There is a profoundly important example here of 'cherry-picking' whereby climate scientists have dumped a historically invaluable record to cheat us from knowing the truth about past temperatures. We may form Klementinum decadal1 temperature averages thus:
1960-1969 : 9.68°C
1970-1979 : 10.08°C
1980-1989 : 10.11°C
1990-1999 : 10.74°C
2000-2009 : 11.34°C
If we then factor in the average temperature for the entire record in Klementinum we find an overall average of 9.61°C - immediately suggesting the warming in the recent decades was very high, at 1.66°C above the 1960's average, or 1.73°C above the historical mean.

But if we go, in terms of the relatively short history of the instrumental temperature measurements, deep into the past, we can then also, in the very same Klementinum record, discover the quite warm decade 1790-1799. The average temperature during this decade was 10.32°C.

The average temperature during the ancient decade 1790-1799 was 10.32°C - which is more than the average temperature in 1980's (even without factoring any possible UHI. But if we did it would above even the average of 1990's).

Image
© Unknown
Then, by basic math, we can state that the temperature difference between decadal averages of our last decade (2000-2009) and the older decade of 1790-1799 is +1.02°C so that the warming, in absolute values of temperature during the last 200 years in Prague was 0.51°C/century. This is significant but remember, it's for 200 years, and clearly not as much as the IPCC proposes for our planet in just the past century.

But is this figure really true?

Prague, the capital of the Czech Kingdom, has a marvelous history; for centuries it was the independent capital of The Holy Roman Empire and a renowned center of culture and scholarship with one of the oldest Universities in the World.

Blighted by centuries of religious conflict Klementinum always endured as a religious center before the advent of cars, trains, underground rail, airplanes, electricity, gas, oil, central heating, etc. At the beginning of the industrial age, in 1791, the population of Prague was about 75,000.

Image
© Unknown
But today Prague has 1,290,000 inhabitants - 17 times more than in the 1790's, with numerous other towns in the metropolitan area, electricity everywhere, central heating, fridges, computers, microwaves, cars, trams, trains, underground, airplanes - how much does all this impact our 1.02°C temp. rise?

Because of the flaws in the process of the global temperature record kept by at NOAA in USA and in CRU in UK - paradoxically - we can only estimate.

I now ask that you remember how GISS (and CRU and NOAA, too) scandalously connected the Klementinum record with the record from the Prague Airport at Ruzyne and erased the important name Klementinum from the climatic history because this is the key!

Let's use GISS's data and methodology and compare mean temperature in last decade against the baseline.

As we already know, the Klementinum record showed that there is a +1.73°C difference in the last decade against the average temperature of the whole record. Now if we go to the dataset of Ruzyne - an airport outside Prague and do the same - the difference for the decade 1999-2008 (the CRU dataset has no 2009 data) mean from the (courtesy of CRU homogenized2) "Ruzyne" baseline is 1.24°C.

Thus, 1.73-1.24= +0.49°C - that is our present UHI for Klementinum - if we would pretend there is no heat island at all at the Prague airport Ruzyne.3

Now we get to my grand finale: The difference between the decade 1790-1799 and the decade 2000-2009 is 1.02°C. Now we subtract our Klementinum UHI:
1.02 - 0.49 = 0.53°C
That is our warming between the decade 1790-1799 and our last decade 2000-2009.

0.55 divided by two (centuries) and we have our "local warming number":
+0.265°C/century
I don't know if the globe is undergoing "catastrophic global warming" in the last century but for Prague, in central Europe? Not really.

Footnotes:
  1. for purpose of this analysis I count decades arbitrarily from zero year - the reason is pragmatic - to not have a need to wait another year with this paper until the decade 2001-2010 ended.
  2. The CRU is source of the Klementinum/Ruzyne dataset homogenization. The CRU datasets from Czech stations - as probably the only temperature records from CRU officially publicly available at the time - were recently published by the Czech climatologists who obtained them from CRU despite Phil Jones declaring the data "missing", "lost during the moving". The CRU datasets of the Czech stations can be downloaded here.
  3. Otherwise it would be even more - and I estimate it will add another at least 0.1°C to the Klementinum UHI. But I omit it, because I also know that there was at least some artificial heat in Prague in the 1790's - when Prague had the 75,000 inhabitants -although I seriously doubt it would produce even nearly the same heat power dispersed in the surrounding areas as would loads of jet planes at Ruzyne airport every day and night in modern times.
NOTE: Other examples of the unique historical temperature records of the world can be found here and I leave it to others to find out what the notorious NOAA, GISS and CRU have done to them and maybe even find out, what the possible estimated UHI subtraction from the recent trend would do with the by Nobel prize laureated anthropological global warming "consensus". The hint: Check out St. Petersburg.

© 2010 Jan Zeman, working draft, all rights reserved