Wednesday, October 21, 2015

The Paris COP Nears

And it is getting warm out there.  Today, Kevin Drum turns his graphical skills to global temperature using Texas sharpshooter rules and comes up with this


For years, the more dimwitted of the climate denialists have been yammering on about a pause in global warming. This is not based on the measurements and models that even some climate scientists are puzzled about. It's based on using a chart that begins in 1998, which was an unusually warm El Niño year. By using a very warm starting point and a more ordinary ending point, they make it look like nothing much has been going on for over a decade. It's all nonsense. But two can play at that game.
Drum points out that it's even warming faster if you start with 2011.  Feel free to use and abuse

13 comments:

david lewis said...

The rate is faster still if you start at year 2013. Is playing the same game as the deniers going to help anyone understand what is happening?

cRR Kampen said...

david lewis, what else works, except for confrontation?
Let us amuse ourselves with the climate revisionists, if nothing else is to be had from them.

Fernando Leanme said...

I can add an interesting observation: the UAH and RSS lower troposphere temperature data isn't showing a strong El Niño warming. The surface data is going offscale. But El Niño is supposed to heart the lower troposphere more than the surface. The divergence between the two data sets is getting spooky.

By the way, did you guys and gals see The Martian? Did you get an urge to visit Mars?

Anonymous said...

Sounds like Spencer and Christy released version 6.0 just in the nick of time...

mike roddy said...

Eli, please let me know if you got my email, if not I need to hear from you at mike.greenframe@gmail.com

We are having a party in the Sierras next month that should interest you. Bill McK will be appearing via Skype.

MarkR said...

Fernando, the satellites lag the El Nino indices by more than the surface temperatures. Typically they respond 2+ months later (e.g. Foster & Rahmstorf, 2011).

However, their eventual response is bigger, so we should see a more drastic spike in the satellite temperatures over the coming months.

caveat emptor said...

"The rate is faster still if you start at year 2013"

Bahh I got an even better trend by starting in 2014. What's more BOTH points are EXACTLY on the trend line, so it must be true.

OTOH, we had a touch of frost a few nights ago so perhaps this whole CAGW thing is overblown.

Fernando Leanme said...

Mark, surface temperature anomalies have been soaring since the aborted 2014 El Niño. The corresponding troposphere increase just isnt there. Mi not a climatologist but i did develop a good eye for trouble shooting dynamic models, If I had the ability to supervise climatologists I would have the data sliced and diced to understand what's happening to the lapse rate.

And I don't mean the model outputs, I mean the real world data. It shouldn't be too difficult to grab the latest Argo data, grid it properly in reanalysis and check the differences with the atmosphere, then dig into water vapor and clouds. Something just doesn't add up.

Anonymous said...

If I had the ability to supervise climatologists, I would ride those fools at UAH like the asses that they are. I suspect an honest approach to translating their datasets would be illuminating.

Anonymous said...

(And as for Fern's sure-to-be-indignant follow-up about RSS, Woy's own oft-quoted words bear repeating:

"[M]y UAH cohort and boss John Christy, who does the detailed matching between satellites, is pretty convinced that the RSS data is undergoing spurious cooling because RSS is still using the old NOAA-15 satellite which has a decaying orbit, to which they are then applying a diurnal cycle drift correction based upon a climate model, which does not quite match reality.")

E. Swanson said...

FL, the so-called "satellite temperature data" from the MSU/AMSU instruments is actually a measure of microwave emissions at TOA. The original claim from UAH that this data represents temperature and that it may also be used to construct a valid time series is based entirely on theory. Spencer and Christy's work has been shown to be wrong by several other researchers over the years, including me. I found a clear difference in the annual cycle between the UAH v5 data and radiosonde data over the Antarctic. S & C have not responded to this finding, to my knowledge. RSS decided to exclude data poleward of 70S in their time series construction, claiming that the high surface elevation over the Antarctic was a serious problem. S & C originally warned in a "READ.ME file" about the influence of higher altitude terrain on the MSU, but that warning has disappeared from their web site.

S & C have come up with a new approach to develop the v6 time series. Spencer posted a description of v6 on his web page a while back and some of what he claimed to be doing appears reasonable. Last I heard, they have not published their methods, so v6 is still to be considered a BETA product. I would expect that they are still relying on the same theoretical construct which they used to derive their algorithm for v5, which I think may be flawed...

Brian said...

Eli beat me to it, I love Kevin's graph. I really like the idea of making denialists discuss the concept of cherrypicking.

Anonymous said...

(Thank you, E. Swanson, for your insight.)