Thursday, October 22, 2015

The Earth Needs More Cowbell


It's time for our monthly check on global temperatures, which remain at record setting levels.  The National Centers for Environmental Information released the numbers through September and we are running well ahead of previous globally averaged temperatures, as shown in the plot below of January-September temperature anomalies since 1880.


An all-time calendar year record has been anticipated now for several months and at this point is virtually assured.

12 comments:

  1. By how much are these records being set? What is the degree of uncertainty? If you look closer into the data you will find many of these so called "Records" are by LESS than degree of uncertainty in the data! To call something a new record when it is less than the degree of uncertainty is disingenuous. To be clear I'm not calling you disingenuous but the people at NOAA/NASA that put out these kind of charts leaving out very important details.

    Looking at the chart you have posted from NOAA it is clear that the global land and ocean temp trend is still rising. Do a google search for "NOAA manipulated climate data" and you will find iron clad sources that show that the NOAA global surface temperature data has been manipulated! There is a reason that the Space and Science Research Corporation and others no longer use NOAA/NASA global surface data records and have turned to HADCRUT surface data and RSS and UAH satellite data.

    When records are being set that are less than the degree of uncertainty from data that is proven to be manipulated what do you really have in the end? You are better than this Jim.

    Would love to see you post the other side of the story from time to time. How about the RSS satellite data which I agree has flaws but sure paints a different story.

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    1. Ah yes, the other side of the story. That would be the one where thousands of scientists have been perpetuating a grand hoax on the world for decades, cooking the historical temperature record and arranging for arctic ice to decline, glaciers to shrink, plants to bud early, and sea level to rise. Now that I think about it, you're right. That is going to make one hell of a story and I suspect the book and movie rights will buy me a much nicer house that I have now.

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    2. I see that this NOAA press release is all over in the news, here and abroad. In fact, anyone who has been paying attention knows that all 3 major surface records will almost surely declare 2015 as the warmest year whereas it will be far from the warmest in both of the satellite records. Nothing surprising, especially since all the surface records decided to immediately accept the Karl et al 2015 SST reanalysis, which (once again) warmed the present relative to the past.

      While this new adjustment may look suspicious to the unbiased observer, it's probably a bit of an exageration to speak of NOAA "manipulating" their data. However, I do agree that ignoring the satellite data is difficult to understand from a purely scientific point of view (as opposed to the point of view of those who spread press releases around the world). There is a reason why the CERN data are analyzed by independent groups of researches. One wouldn't expect any finding related to particle physics to be anounced unless all groups had detected the same signal. For some reason, it seems that climate science is far from operating with this sort of standards.

      Incidentally, I moved to Utah six months ago and, as a weather and mountaneering freak, I have decided that my best source of weather information (apart from this blog) is the NOAA forecast discussion: http://www.wrh.noaa.gov/total_forecast/getprod.php?prod=XXXAFDSLC&wfo=SLC These people not only use data from *several* models to produce their forescasts but are totally open to admit their uncertainties, which is also valuable information. Perhaps the NOAA global climate department has a thing or two to learn from their forecaster colleagues.

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    3. Mikel, the impact of human emissions on global climate has been documented in many datasets, and warming has been observed unequivocally in many parts of the earth system. Multiple climate models are also used to make future projections and confirm current trends, so the climate science community actually does gather data from many different sources, and if you read the IPCC reports (http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar5/syr/AR5_SYR_FINAL_SPM.pdf), there are very clearly statements of where we have more or less certainty in our projections

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    4. Hi Peter, I'm not sure how your reply ties in to anything that I wrote and it's also difficult to figure out what you mean by the human emissions being documented in the (global temperature?) datasets. A simple temperature dataset cannot possibly document *why* it went up or down.

      Indeed, all temperature datasets show unequivocal warming (including the satellite-based ones) and it would be an unlikely coincidence that this has nothing to do with the observed anthropogenic GHG increase. However, one should perhaps not lose from perspective the fact that the surface-based ones start their record at the end of the LIA, which many paleoclimate studies show to be the coldest period of the Holocene, with the exception of the 8.2 ky event.

      The last IPCC report openly accepted the existence of a recent hiatus in global warming and many papers have appeared in the scientific literature discussing it. A GW hiatus is not a very important development in itself but the problem is that the models and the temperature records (including the surface ones with their latest adjustments) are diverging increasingly over time. It would also be interesting to find out why the satellite and surface records show different results. Both show a remarkable correlation in most features so they must be measuring approximately the same thing but the trends and year rankings are quite different.

      In any non-politicized scientific area of study bringing up this kind of issues should not cause any major controversy.

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    5. You bring up good points. It is important to keep in mind that the "hiatus" refers to global average surface (or in the case of satellites, lower tropospheric) temperature, where atmospheric warming has accounted for <3% of the climate system warming. The oceans exhibit much more consistent warming over time, and constitute >90% of the climate system warming. One reason that global climate models struggle with predicting interannual and interdecadal change in temperature is that they were not designed for that. We have virtually no predictability in ENSO, which dominates interannual variability and we have very little knowledge of decadal ocean circulations that shift between taking up heat to releasing it. There is a lot of research that needs to be done in these areas and in regional climate prediction, which remains very poor. Another reason that models that were run over a decade ago diverged from recent observations is that the solar flux at the top of the atmosphere ended up being lower than what was assumed in the models. Again, this is something that is poorly predicted. When models are re-run from a decade or two ago with the measured solar fluxes, observed temperatures end up being within the spread of models. Regarding surface temperature vs. satellite lower tropospheric temperatures, I agree that more research is needed.

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  2. With regards to the comment above that these are not records and that the differences are less than the degree of uncertainty to the data, there is a very nice writeup on these issues at http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2015/01/thoughts-on-2014-and-ongoing-temperature-trends/ (see in particular "odds and statistics, and odd statistics"). Amongst complete calendar years to date, 2014 is statistically the "most likely" warmest year on record, even though it can't be said unequivocally that it is the warmest given the uncertainties. However, 2015 is running a whopping 0.11ºC warmer than 2014, compared to an uncertainty estimate of 0.05ºC, so if that gap continues through the end of the year, 2015 will easily take over the "most likely warmest year" mantle.

    I'm not inclined to discuss these details in most posts.

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  3. To Mr. Chipman, if you are saying that we should use HADCRUT instead: http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/temperature/HadCRUT4.pdf, it shows the same spike in global temperature. Unless you can show that the Karl et al. (2015) correction to the NOAA data is unfounded, you have no leg to stand on. The satellite datasets have also been adjusted many times as errors have been found several times over the last couple decades. Would you call these "manipulated"? I would call them corrected. Furthermore, different techniques used by different research groups, especially related to the satellite diurnal drift correction, have produced quite different results. For example, see this new publication from the UW group: http://www.atmos.uw.edu/~qfu/Publications/jtech.pochedley.2015.pdf, which shows more warming in their retrieved satellite tropospheric temperatures than retrieved by UAH, primarily from differences in correcting for satellite diurnal drifts. I agree that discrepancies in different datasets need to be examined more, however we shouldn't be looking at any one or two year period for the global warming signal, especially using atmospheric temperatures alone, which are strongly influenced on interannual and interdecadal timescales by ocean circulations. Even the recent air temperature warming "hiatus" has been recently shown to be statistically insignificant: http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10584-015-1495-y. If you look at the long-term trend over the satellite era, all surface and satellite datasets show a robust global warming signal, and ocean heat content, representing 93% of the climate warming compared to <3% for the atmosphere, has continuously increased since the 1980s: http://www.skepticalscience.com/global-warming-not-slowing-its-speeding-up.html. There is zero evidence that the global climate system has stopped warming. That is the story. There is no other side.

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  4. Geez Louise - I'm tired of all this global warming crap. Yes, the earth is warming. Yes, glaciers are melting. Yes, sea level is rising. But this has been going on for 10,000 years. Nothing will stop it. Is this caused by "man"? Probably do some degree, but not totally. The problem is, 7 billion people will do that to a planet. You can turn off the lights in the developed world, park all of the cars and you will still have global warming.
    Is it a good idea to cut carbon emissions? In general, Yes. But I do not ever see the developed world as a whole giving up their standard of living which depends on emitting carbon. And I do not see the developing world giving up their opportunity to better there lives, which also depends on carbon.
    Hell, its Friday, I've had enough. I'm going fishing.

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  5. For those interested in how NOAA manipulates data read this http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/06/04/noaancdcs-new-pause-buster-paper-a-laughable-attempt-to-create-warming-by-adjusting-past-data

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    1. That link does not describe how and why NOAA corrects for ship and buoy sea surface temperature (SST) biases. It is an opinion piece about how NOAA and the NCDC are perpetrating a conspiracy with the rest of the groups around the world. Their evidence seems to be that the bias correction in the SST dataset created faster warming in the past couple decades than the older dataset and thus there must be a conspiracy to erase the "hiatus". The other thing that confuses me is that the January-September global average surface temperature over land is also at record highs: https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/service/global/glob/201501-201509.gif. How does a SST bias correction amplify the land surface temperature so much?

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