Category Archives: Data and observations

by Judith Curry

Kevin Trenberth famously stated in the CRU emails:

The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t.

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by Rud Istvan

This instantly ‘famous’ 2013 Science hockey stick paper derived from Marcott’s 2011 Ph.D thesis at Oregon State University, available here. His thesis doesn’t show a hockey stick ‘blade’ projecting above its anomaly baseline NCDC 1961-1990. H/T to Jean S, posted at Climate Audit. Something changed after the thesis was published to produce the new ‘blade’ in Science. That something was significant, since the Science paper’s Supplementary Information discussion said it did not enable discriminating such a temperature variation (i.e. a ‘blade’) on such a short a time scale.

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by Rud Istvan

On March 8, 2013, mainstream media around the world carried headlines trumpeting a new study in Science, the gist typified by NBC News:

Warming fastest since dawn of civilization

Except that is not what the paper was about.

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by Steve Mosher

It has been a while since we’ve done an update and there is much to report on, including an update to the web site, some additional memos/papers to discuss and an update on the papers. Let’s start with the web site.

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by Judith Curry

The demand for climate information, with long observational records spanning decades to centuries and the information’s broad application for decision making across many socioeconomic sectors, requires that geophysicists adopt more rigorous processes for the sustained production of climate data records (CDRs). Such processes, methods, and standards are more typically found in the systems engineering community and have not generally been adopted in the climate sci- ence community. – John Bates and Jeffrey Privette

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by Steven Mosher and Zeke Hausfather

Today the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature Project released a major update to their temperature data. The update includes:

• Global and regional land temperature estimates back to the 1750s, with estimated uncertainties.
• Temperature figures and data for every country, state, city, and individual station.
• New estimates of the effect of early volcanoes as well as CO2 on the temperature record.
• Globally gridded min, max, and mean anomalies for 1×1 lat lon cells for each month for land areas.

The link to the new paper from the Berkeley Earth group is [here].

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by Judith Curry

How confident can we be in our current and (recent) past observations of atmospheric composition and its impact on the Earth’s radiation balance?

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by Judith Curry

What do these three papers share in common?  All were written by scientists well outside the fields of atmospheric and climate science.

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by Greg Goodman

**UPDATE at end of thread**

The effect of the adjustments introduced in Met. Office’s HadSST3 release are compared to the original ICOADS data to evaluate their effects on the frequency content of the data. The relative merits of making a simple adjustment for the war-time glitch in ICOADS are also investigated. It is demonstrated that the various adjustments made in preparing Hadley SST versions combine to effectively removing long term variations from the climate record. Frequency analysis shows the adjustments generally disrupting, rather than improving the data.

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by Steve Mosher and Zeke Hausfather

Today the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature Project publically released their accumulated minimum, maximum, and mean monthly data.

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by Judith Curry

This proposal by John Bates of NOAA NCDC nails what is needed in terms of climate data records.

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by Horst-Joachim Lüdecke, Rainer Link, Friedrich-Karl Ewert

It is nearly impossible to answer more than 1000 comments that the previous three threads [here, here and here] on the surface temperature data records have generated. Most technical comments and errors would settle themselves if the commentators better understood the methods applied.  This large number of comments demonstrates the interest in the BEST and the LU, LL publications.

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Guest Post by Lüdecke, Link, and Ewert

Our two papers [1], hereafter LU, and [2], hereafter LL, were published almost simultaneous with the release of the BEST papers. The basic objective of all of these papers is the same – to document reliably the surface temperature of the Earth from the beginning of the 19^th century until the present.

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