by Judith Curry
Ted Cruz’s favorite temperature data set just got a lot hotter.
Sensitivity of satellite-derived tropospheric temperature trends to the diurnal cycle adjustment
Carl Mears and Frank Wentz
Abstract. Temperature sounding microwave radiometers flown on polar-orbiting weather satellites provide a long-term, global-scale record of upper-atmosphere temperatures, beginning in late 1978 and continuing to the present. The focus of this paper is the middle tropospheric measurements made by the Microwave Sounding Unit (MSU) channel 2, and the Advanced Microwave Sounding Unit (AMSU) channel 5. Previous versions of the RSS dataset have used a diurnal climatology derived from general circulation model output to remove the effects of drifting local measurement time. In this paper, we present evidence that this previous method is not sufficiently accurate, and present several alternative methods to optimize these adjustments using information from the satellite measurements themselves. These are used to construct a number of candidate climate data records using measurements from 15 MSU and AMSU satellites. The new methods result in improved agreement between measurements made by different satellites at the same time. We choose a method based on an optimized second harmonic adjustment to produce a new version of the RSS dataset, Version 4.0. The new dataset shows substantially increased global-scale warming relative to the previous version of the dataset, particularly after 1998. The new dataset shows more warming than most other middle tropospheric data records constructed from the same set of satellites. We also show that the new dataset is consistent with long-term changes in total column water vapor over the tropical oceans, lending support to its long-term accuracy.
Published in Journal of Climate [link to abstract]
Here is the main result, showing the difference between RSS v3.3 and v4
https://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2016/03/mears-new-rss-vs-old.jpg
The political significance of this paper is summed up by the title of this Guardian article: Ted Cruz’s favorite temperature data just got a lot hotter.
Lets dig in and clarify the scientific importance (or not) of this dataset, and its implication for the pause.
Roy Spencer
Roy Spencer has a post Comments on New RSS Pause-Busting Global Temperature Data Set, with numerous figures. Excerpts:
While the title of their article implies that their new diurnal drift adjustment to the satellite data has caused the large increase in the global warming trend, it is actually their inclusion of what the evidence will suggest is a spurious warming (calibration drift) in the NOAA-14 MSU instrument that leads to most (maybe 2/3) of the change.
Here I have included their Fig. 7 as an inset to show that they know there is a substantial trend difference between the old NOAA-14 MSU and the newer NOAA-15 AMSU measurements. That trend difference amounts to +0.20 C/decade…a large discrepancy.
Importantly, Mears and Wentz choose to leave this calibration drift in without adjustment for it. In effect they are saying, ‘we don’t know which of the two satellites is at fault, so we will leave both satellites in without adjustment’.
Here are the reasons why we believe we can blame the calibration drift on the NOAA-14 MSU instrument, and why we remove that spurious warming from the NOAA-14 data in our v6 LT and MT products:
- the old MSU instruments’ calibration did not have near the sophistication of the newer AMSU instruments (NASA AMSU design engineer Jim Shiue once told me the AMSUs had “Cadillac”-quality calibration)
- the NOAA-14 satellite orbit was drifting far beyond any of the other dozen satellites in the record, leading to warming of the instrument itself (which is why we cut the record short after 6 yrs, RSS uses all 10 years), while the NOAA-15 satellite had very little orbital drift during its overlap with NOAA-14.
We find it curious (to say the least) that RSS would treat these two satellites as equally accurate.
About a third of the trend difference appears to be due to a change in the RSS method for diurnal drift adjustment, as indicated by the dashed ovals in the second plot, above. (Diurnal drift is the result of the satellite overpass time changing over the years, so that measurements are made at a different times of day; over land in particular this causes a drift in measured temperature due to the day-night cycle, not climate). Their new adjustment appears to provide a stronger correction for the diurnal cooling of the NOAA-11 satellite (first oval) and the NOAA-18 satellite (second oval). RSS uses the diurnal cycle from a climate model (CCM3), with empirical adjustments. We (UAH) use a pure empirical adjustment based of the the observed drift between NOAA-18 and NOAA-19 (for the “1:30” satellites) and NOAA-15 and Aqua (for the “7:30” satellites).
After Carl made the new RSS data available to us, John Christy computed the level of agreement (explained variance) that three satellite datasets (RSSv4, UAHv6, NOAAv3.0) have with the corresponding values from various radiosonde and reanalysis datasets. The results indicate that, with the exception of one reanalysis dataset (MERRA-2, which has by far the warmest trend), the UAH anomalies have better agreement with other data sources than does the RSS (or NOAA) dataset
The evidence suggests that the new RSS v4 MT dataset has spurious warming due to a lack of correction for calibration drift in the NOAA-14 MSU instrument. Somewhat smaller increases in their warming trend are due to their use of a climate model for diurnal drift adjustment, compared to our use of an empirical approach that relies upon observed diurnal drift from the satellite data themselves. While the difference in diurnal drift correction methodolgy is a more legitimate point of contention, in the final analysis independent validation with radiosonde data and most reanalysis datasets suggest better agreement with the UAH product than the RSS product.
Chip Knappenberger has pointed out that, while the warming in RSS v4 versus UAH v6 might be as described above, when RSS v4 is compared to RSS v3.3, the increase in warming might be mostly due to their new diurnal cycle adjustment. In other words, the NOAA-14 calibration issue was also in their v3.3, but maybe it was obscured more by diurnal drift adjustment issues.
WUWT has a post with a brief interview of Spencer:
The paper is for MT, not LT…but I think we can assume that changes in one will be reflected in the other when Mears completes their analysis.
From what little we have looked at so far, it appears that they did not correct for spurious warming in NOAA-14 MSU relative to NOAA-15 AMSU…see their Fig. 7c. They just leave it in.
Since this spurious warming is near the middle of the whole time period, this shifts the second half of the satellite record warmer when NOAA-14 MSU (the last in the MSU series) is handed off to NOAA-15 AMSU (the first in the AMSU series).
Why do we think NOAA-14 MSU is at fault?
1) AMSU is supposed to have a “Cadillac” calibration design (that’s the term a NASA engineer, Jim Shiue, used when describing to me the AMSU design, which he was involved in).
2) NOAA-14 MSU requires a large correction for the calibrated TB increasing with instrument temperature as the satellite drifts into a different orbit. The NOAA-15 AMSU requires no such correction…and it wasn’t drifting during the period in question anyway.So, it looks like they decided to force good data to match bad data. Sound familiar?
UPDATE1: Given this sort of work has only two groups doing it, it is a very narrow field of scientific specialty, I asked Dr. Spencer this question:
I assume neither you or Christy were asked to review this paper?
There aren’t many satellite temperature data experts in the world.
Spencer replied:
Interesting question….
John reviewed their original paper submission to JGR, in detail, asking for additional evidence — but not advocating rejection of the paper. The JGR editor ended up rejecting it anyway.
Mears & Wentz then revised the paper, submitted it to J. Climate instead, and likely asked that we be excluded as reviewers.
2016
The big news so far in 2016 is that February was the record hottest month in the record. Details are provided by WUWT and Roy Spencer. The punchline is this figure from UAH:
https://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2016/03/uah-v6-lt-next-thru-feb-2016-2-768×576.jpg
By a statistically significant amount, February 2016 was the warmest month in the satellite temperature record, according to Dr. John Christy, director of the Earth System Science Center at The University of Alabama in Huntsville. Interestingly, however, that record might have as much to do with an extraordinarily warm month in the Arctic as it does with warming caused by the El Niño Pacific Ocean warming event. Temperatures in the tropics and the Southern Hemisphere were not at record levels in February.
While the Arctic temperature anomaly is large, big temperature swings in the Arctic region aren’t unusual, especially during the winter months. Those swings are also normally somewhat transient, so the extra heat represented in February could dissipate over the next few weeks. If that happens, it doesn’t appear the heat from the El Niño by itself will be enough to continue pushing temperatures to new records later in the year, in which case this February anomaly might stand out as a singular spike in the dataset rather than part of an ongoing trend.
Regarding what we can expect for the rest of 2016, Bob Tisdale provides some speculations:
As shown in Figure 2, the responses of the lower troposphere temperature data to the 2015/2016 El Niño are similar to the responses to the 1997/98 event.
In response to an El Niño, only a portion of the temporary upticks in global surface temperatures are a direct result of the warming of the eastern tropical Pacific (caused by the warm subsurface waters of the western tropical Pacific being shifted to the surface of the eastern tropical Pacific). There are also long-lasting responses to strong El Niños (Trenberth “big jumps”), when the leftover warm waters from the El Niño are redistributed around the surfaces of the global oceans.
On the other hand, the rises in lower troposphere temperatures in response to an El Niño are caused in two ways: first, by the increases in surface temperatures in the tropical Pacific and around the globe. Second, an El Niño releases a monumental amount of heat from the tropical Pacific to the atmosphere, primarily through evaporation. That additional warm and moist air rises into the colder atmosphere, cooling as it rises higher, and when the moisture condenses and form clouds, that heat from the tropical Pacific is released to the atmosphere…thus the additional warming of the lower troposphere.
As noted in the opening, if global temperatures respond to the 2015/16 El Niño as they had for the 1997/98 El Niño, we might expect to see a couple of additional upticks this year in the lower troposphere and surface temperature anomalies.
Will the evolutions of global temperatures this year mimic 1998? One wild card is The Blob, which was the primary cause of the “record” surface temperatures in 2014. The Blob continues to dissipate rapidly, but it might reemerge in 2016. IF (big if) The Blob continues to dissipate and doesn’t reappear later in the year, and IF (big if) it doesn’t have any long-term effects on the North Pacific, then its disappearance could suppress some of the additional El Niño-related warming in 2016. We just have to grab some popcorn and watch…better stock up, this is gonna take a while.
JC reflections
The climate models project strong warming in the tropical mid troposphere, which have not been borne out by the observations. The new RSS data set reduces the discrepancies with the climate model simulations.
Roy Spencer’s comments substantially reduce the credibility of the new data set. Their dismissal of the calibration problems with the NOAA-14 MSU is just astonishing. Presumably Christy’s review of the original submission to JGR included this critique, so they are unlikely to be unaware of this issue. The AMS journals have one the best review processes out there; I am not sure why Christy/Spencer weren’t asked to review. I have in the past successfully argued at AMS not to have as reviewers individuals that have made negative public statements about me (not sure if this is the case with Mears/Wentz vs Spencer/Christy).
There is a legitimate debate on how to correct for the diurnal cycle, but based on my assessment, the UAH empirically based approach seems better.
With regards to the ‘pause.’ The ‘pause’ in warming has generally been assessed using the lower tropospheric temperatures, which aren’t yet available from the new dataset. So it is not yet clear what impact the new data set will have on our interpretation of the pause.
With regards to the Feb 2016 spike, I think Bob Tisdale gets it mostly right. While a spike from the El Nino is expected, the Feb 2016 seems anomalous and largely associated with a warm spike in the Arctic (of ‘weather’ origin). I would expect a few more months of anomalously warm temperatures before the El Nino fades. I’m not sure what to make of the ‘re-emergent blob’ scenario.
We won’t know what the 2016 El Nino spike looks like until the end of the year. Then we can compare the 1997/1998 temperatures with 2015/2016 temperatures in a (cherry-less) apples to apples comparison, to assess the underlying trend in temperatures from 1998-2016. The trend will undoubtedly be positive, but most likely it will remain substantially less than the trend predicted by the climate models.
And what of the years following 2016? Will we see cooling and then a continuation of flat temperatures? Or continued warming? I suspect that there will be some cooling and continued flatness. I’ve stated before that it will be another 5 years before we have the appropriate prospective on the current temperature fluctuations and whether or not the early 21st century pause is over.
We just have to grab some popcorn and watch…better stock up, this is gonna take a while.
Adjust the data to fit the model, and call it science.
Or don’t adjust in this case ;)
Yes, I have always preferred UAH data for that reason. I rather liked the idea that warmists’ data was slightly cooler than the sceptics extraction for the same source. It was kind of reassuring that they were all making a fair and objective best effort.
This Carlisation seems just as biased at Karlisation corrupting SST with NMAT.
Monkton uses RSS because it gives him the longest pause. It seems that Cruz just followed on copying that.
He would have been better advised to go with UAH , at least he would have known it would not change overnight.
Greg,
You’re right. Let’s make that — adjust or pick the data to fit the model, and call it science.
“He would have been better advised to go with UAH , at least he would have known it would not change overnight.”
huh? UAH has had more dramatic changes.
Look. There are huge STRUCTURAL uncertainties in the satellite data.
RSS has published there estimate and the envelope is very large.
When UAH actually publishes V6 and their code folks MIGHT be able to do a solid comparison.
As it stands no skeptic is willing to go down to the raw bits of RSS or UAH.
Mosher sez:
“When UAH actually publishes V6 and their code folks MIGHT be able to do a solid comparison.”
I don’t think you need the code to do a comparison. You can compare it to the radiosonde data. Do you disagree with this approach? Seems it is better than having the UAH code. You have a completely independent data set and approach, that if Spencer is to be believed, suggests (kind of a weak word) a stronger match with UAH than RSS:
“. . . in the final analysis independent validation with radiosonde data and most reanalysis datasets suggest better agreement with the UAH product than the RSS product.”
Sonde data is not gold standard.
Take a look at it.
Are you serious? How many versions of their beta 6 are UAH up to now? Without even a published paper to explain their rather large adjustments? How many errors have they made in the past that had to be corrected by other scientists?
At lease Mears admits the uncertainty of satellite data. At least he has published a paper to explain the adjustments. Unlike Spencer and Christy.
I notice that Judith did not post Mears response to Spencer and Christy’s blog comments. And she posted comments by Bob Tisdale from WUWT? WTFUWT?
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Jeff Glassman,
Use a yardstick to measure the thickness of a piece of paper, and then call it science.
Or we could immobilize lab mice by placing them into plastic tubes for starters.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2016/03/07/study-bromances-may-help-buffer-men-against-stress/
To study and observe mankind. We are all so much alike, it is what science needs to do to solve this riddle, so bro up. Or we could just paint them OD for a few years, then send them to some foreign land and test them when you are done with them. The answer will be almost the same. TSISB.
Remember this is the King Rat study, not the Mice and Men study.
“Sonde data is not gold standard.
Take a look at it”
What is? Apparently not UAH or RSS. After all, RSS just admitted their previous data was really wrong. In the same direction most of these we were really wrong datasets seem to head in.
Meanwhile, I’ll take two independent agreeing datasets over one data set that says “Oh, we were wrong,” unless the we were wrong is globally applicable, and even then that has to be adjusted for the bias in finding how we were wrong.
I wonder, Mosher, if people really wanted to show we were getting too cool too fast, if a bunch of people would find that, too. With the same dataset. After all, that’s what all the cool kids are doing.
Interestingly, for the US, 2005 – 2014, UAH shows the least amount of cooling (-0.24C/d). CRN shows -0.27. USHCN shows -0.45.
USHCN was discontinued as the official ongoing record in 2014. Apparently NOAA is quite content to ride the spurious USHCN trends up, but less than willing to ride it down.
Temperatures in the tropics and the Southern Hemisphere were not at record levels in February…
So much for, global warming.
If I set you hair on fire and merely warmed your feet, would you argue that you were cooling?
we use the terms “on average” for a reason
If the DIJA rose 300 pts. and Madoff stole all your money, would you argue the stock market crashed?
No. But if the dow hit a record high and other stocks came close to record highs I wouldn’t argue that the stock market didn’t hit a record. The market of temperature hit a high. Not all stocks and not all sectors hit records.
I am surprised Steven, that when you set your hair on fire you did not feel the cold draft on your feet. Granted it would on be slightly cooler but at least we have the instruments scientists need to measure minor temperature variations. You I am sure, did not ‘dump’ the original data? Remember also that averages are still bad form. What your feet feel is what they feel. Fahrenheit will be a bit warmer in your mind.
“If I set you hair on fire and merely warmed your feet, would you argue that you were cooling?”
You’d need to be measuring the temp at all the different localities on your body to get an accurate measure of what was happening to you.
Andrew
“I am surprised Steven, that when you set your hair on fire you did not feel the cold draft on your feet. ”
Read what I wrote.
Slowly..
and then try again.
Chances are you still will miss it.
Pointless.
It’s not pointless. SM, despite his personal biases, is incapable of ignoring good arguments. Don’t believe me, CE skeptics could make one… for once.
““If I set you hair on fire and merely warmed your feet, would you argue that you were cooling?”
You’d need to be measuring the temp at all the different localities on your body to get an accurate measure of what was happening to you.”
Really?
If I put a thermometer in your mouth and it read 105
Would you demand that I put one in the orifice that you usually use to talk?
Or would that thermometer in your mouth be enough to get your attention?
Lesson for Arch
“I am surprised Steven, that when you set your hair on fire you did not feel the cold draft on your feet. ”
1. Notice what I said. “If I set YOUR hair on for and warmer YOUR feet?
Arch gets the following wrong.
1. He thinks I set MY hair on fire
2. He neglects to ask why I ALSO said I warmed YOU feet.
Arch Read harder.
Then try to make a cogent argument.
And try to avoid the trap that Wag stepped into.
dont text while driving
Notice what I said. “If I set YOUR hair on fire and warmed YOUR feet?
Arch gets the following wrong.
1. He thinks I set MY hair on fire
2. He neglects to ask why I ALSO said I warmed YOUR feet.
Arch Read harder.
Then try to make a cogent argument.
Mosher,
“dont text while driving”
You obviously were.
Please stop we don’t want to have baby killer added to your resume.
Here is an example of why people are concerned about the “modern” academic view of science as it relates to observations- there is, apparently such a thing as “postcolonial science studies”:
“Merging feminist postcolonial science studies and feminist political ecology, the feminist glaciology framework generates robust analysis of gender, power, and epistemologies in dynamic social-ecological systems, thereby leading to more just and equitable science and human-ice interactions.”
http://phg.sagepub.com/content/early/2016/01/08/0309132515623368.long
“Really?”
Really.
Andrew
The Dow is not the market, but it’s not too far from this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilshire_5000
The market is a number of things. Peoples opinions being one of them. It is confined to U.S. companies that admittedly are effected by their overseas operations. Experts will talk about the Dow, the market and tell us what it means. In most cases they’ll be right half the time and wrong the other half. They predict as people predict the future climate. I think in the end, their predictions have little value if they lack insider information. I’d guess most people here make their own investment decisions. I see no value from the experts predictive skill. Any parrot can tell you an index is at an all time or a two year low.
jeffnsails850,
“Human-ice interactions”?
I wonder, Is that what Professor Leonard Jeffries, who teaches at the City College of New York, was talking about in his theories about the “ice people”?
Jeffries, what with his unbridled speculation and theorizing, ought to be right down the climatariat’s alley.
Jeffries has elaborated his theories about the “ice people” and the “sun people.” The whtes, he argues, were forged in the Ice Age and thus bred for cruely and aggression; blacks come from tropical climes, which made them intuitive, loving, and nice (like Jeffries himself perhaps).
As unacceptable and ridiculous as Jeffries theories are, they nevertheless enter the mainstream when given a bit of scholarly gloss.
At Columbia University in 1992, for instance, the comfortingly named Committee on Race, Religion and Ethnicity concluded that white people “have negative stereotypes about others,” “take a paternalistic/patronizing attitude toward the targets of racism,” and “secure what they can do for themselves without concern for others.”
In other words, white people are selfish, uncaring, egotistical, paternalistic/patronizing, and inconsiderate.
Well, no doubt some are.
Overwhelming thought it may be, don’t let the complexity set your hair on fire…
Hey Steven and JCH,
Your hair’s on fire!
No wonder you and Naomi believe eveything’s getting hotter.
http://i.imgur.com/aH74Ivp.jpg
The understanding of climate is growing by leaps and bounds… and none of that growth in understanding is pointing toward any meaningful or significant misunderstanding of climate by James E. Hansen when he pushed the ‘run” button on his model in 1984.
JCH,
“Your hair is on fire” is a metaphor. It is used to signify the moment at which one realizes everything has gone terribly wrong.
For the climatariat, it’s gone so wrong that it now has to go back and use “alternative methods” to “construct” the “data records” such that “The new dataset shows more warming than most other middle tropospheric data records constructed from the same set of satellites.”
And then the climatariat hails this as some great victory?
Quite the opposite, what has happened is the uncertainty monster has raised its head once more. That 95% confidence level is now more unachievable than ever.
Cruz will have a heyday with the ephemeral and constantly changing data, and with the direction it invariably gets “reconstructed.” Could there be a more blatant and in-your-face example of purpose-driven “science”?
Not that things weren’t already bad enough, and Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway weren’t already running around with their hair on fire, as two-thirds of Americans have already tuned the climatariat and its fear mongering out. They do not believe that climate change will pose a serious threat to them in their lifetime.
http://i.imgur.com/JWHAA7b.png
It’s physics. Physics does not care a hoot about your silly notions.
Well JCH,
Granted the climatariat may be geniuses when it comes to predicting climate apocalypse on the flimsiest of data, and giving it a scholarly and scientific gloss.
And granted the climatariat may be geniuses when it comes to constantly cooking the data so as to make it appear the much-awaited and much-desired apocalypse is just around the corner.
But when it comes to baffling the great unwashed with BS, geniuses they’re not.
You are not talking about anything… just abject nonsense.
JCH,
I know that no reality and no common sense will ever penetrate the mind of a true believer like yourself.
But the political reality is that you and your fellow climate apocalypticists have been running around like a bunch of chickens with their heads cut since at least the 1980s, and to what avail?
You’ve only been able to bring about a third of the public around to your prophecy of radical social and political change through crisis. And there the revolution has stalled out.
Sorry, but that’s where the political chips have fallen, whether you and your fellow travellers in the climatariat like it or not.
No it isn’t. It’s chaos. And it’s your “silly notions” that chaos “does not care a hoot about”.
Yes, how is that stadium wave BS doing?
Half of the public is average or below; i am completely unimpressed by what percentage join you in your profoundly unintelligent beliefs.
JCH said:
I’m convinced that this sort of I’m-so-smart-and-you’re-so-stupid rhetoric is one of the main causes that has turned the American public against the climatariat.
As Angelo Codevilla put it, your class’s “fatal feature is its belief that ordinary Americans are a lesser intellectual and social breed.”
The climatariat’s increasing self-absorption, its growing contempt for whoever won’t bow to it, have led it to break the most basic rule of republican life: deeming its opposition illegitimate.
The ruling class insists on driving down the throats of its opponents the agendas of each of its constituencies and on injuring persons who stand in the way. This has spawned a Newtonian reaction, a hunger, among what may be called the “country class” for returning the favor with interest.
Ordinary Americans have endured being insulted by the ruling class’s favorite epitaphs—racist, sexist, etc., and, above all, stupid; they have had careers and reputations compromised by speaking the wrong word in front of the wrong person.
No wonder, then, that millions of Americans lose respect for a ruling class that disrespects them, that they identify with whomever promises some kind of turnabout against that class, and that they care less and less for the integrity of institutions that fail to protect them.
In Middle America voters who have had more than they can stomach of being patronised, nudged, nagged and basically treated as diseased bodies to be corrected rather than lively minds to be engaged are now putting their hope into a different kind of politics.
And the entitled Third Way brigade, schooled to rule, believing themselves possessed of a technocratic expertise that trumps the little people’s vulgar political convictions, are not happy. Not one bit.
So if you’d pull your head out of your posterior you’d see that there is a revolution going on. But it’s not the revolution you and your ilk had predicted.
http://i.imgur.com/3RISFSP.png
http://i.imgur.com/FAr0HMO.png
http://i.imgur.com/Bq2yOU4.png
Oh yeah. Two answers that I have seen create near riots in public gatherings :
1. Oh, climate change is too complicated to be understood by the people, so we best leave it to the scientists.
2. Your value system is not capable of understanding the vision we have for the world.
It’s easy to see why the movement has stalled.
I am a person of average intelligence, and have said so many many times.
Do you have anything?
Still no idea at all?
Can’t help but conclude that Global Warming is man made, and that we can attribute it to adjustments to the temperature record.
“adjustments to the temperature record”
There isn’t a temperature record to adjust here. There’s only a string of microwave readings coming from somewhere at some time, to some satellite instrument, which changes. They have to work out where they are coming from (messy optics), at what time, what the intermittent readings actually mean for a day (diurnal), how to combine the various platforms, etc. UAH made a big change to the way they did it last year; RSS is revising theirs. There is no reason to say the way you did it first time is sacrosanct. I think the real message is that satellite indices are wonky, especially TLT. I see that NESDIS offers TMT only, as does RSS v4 so far. Christy in his Senate testimony mentioned only TMT. I think the TLT we know and love will go the way of the Pause.
Nick
What is your opinion of the accuracy to fractions of an inch of satellites taking sea level measurements and of satellites measuring ice extent?
Tonyb
Tonyb,
I think sea level measurement is likely very accurate. The optics is simple; they use radar frequencies not affected by cloud. There is no equivalent of having to try to work out a daily average from just one or two readings. And there re reference points – shoreline etc.
Ice extent – again, simple enough optics. They can see the ice (this time clouds are a problem). And the ice doesn’t change fast. I track ice, and my experience is that while their estimate of a day’s change is shaky, the measure of the cumulative effect is stable.
Nick Stokes:
Care to convert “very accurate” to +/_ millimetres? I find the effort somewhat frustrating.
The latest satellite launch was the Jason-3 in January.
http://sealevel.jpl.nasa.gov/missions/jason3/
Jason-3 target accuracy should be compared to satellite capabilities in estimating wave heights. For Jason-2 data:
http://www.ospo.noaa.gov/Products/ocean/ssheight.html
Satellite sea-level data does not cover near-shore or ice-covered areas. The actual satellite data must be adjusted for tidal forces, orbital oblateness, gravitational anomalies, wave-top scatter, local weather/wind conditions, etc. After all of the various approximations are applied, a great deal of fancy maths produce a single average increase for the entire globe.
“will go the way of the pause”?? The ~18yr pause we have been following for the last few years is now permanently on record. It is still concrete evidence of the “discrepancy” in the climate models as per the NOAA “State of the Climate” 2008 report. The claim in that report wasn’t that a pause had to go for ever in order to demonstrate a “discrepancy”. The claim was that when the pause exceeded ten years then there was a discrepancy. The pause did that, and then added a lot more years, and still we get denial.
Could not resist chiming in for fun now that Opluso and MJ have done the heavy sat altimeter lifting. Analogy to competition markmanship. Neither accurate nor precise: bullet holes all over the target. Precise: nice tight grouping, but way off the 10 ring. (smallest bullseye). Accurate but not precise: splattered around the 10 ring. Might win something, but probably not. Accurate and precise: 10 ring is punched out.
Based on comparisons to reasonably geostationary tide guages, Jason 2 and Jason 3 are reasonably precise (give or take a mm) but not accurate- off by about 1.1 mm/yr. Hence the SLR closure problem: Sat alt SLR >> sum (ice sheet loss estimates + thermosteric rise estimates). By 1/3 to 1/2 depending on who is estimating what. No closure problem with geostationary tide guages. QED. Essay PseudoPrecision has a lot more fun with these concepts.
Mike Jonas,
” concrete evidence of the “discrepancy” in the climate models as per the NOAA “State of the Climate” 2008 report. The claim in that report wasn’t that a pause had to go for ever in order to demonstrate a “discrepancy”. The claim was that when the pause exceeded ten years then there was a discrepancy.”
I wish people would quote what they are talking about. Link it. Or at least look it up. The report is here. The section you are talking about starts at p 521. The quote (usually garbled) I think you are reaching for is
“The simulations rule out (at the 95% level) zero trends for intervals of 15 yr or more, suggesting that an observed absence of warming of this duration is needed to create a discrepancy with the expected present-day warming rate. “
So what is wrong?
1. They are talking about surface data, not troposphere.
2. Fifteen years, not ten
3. But critically, they are talking about period after adjustment for ENSO. That is what the whole portion is about. The actual “pause” they were investigating is described thus:
” The trend in the ENSO related component for 1999–2008 is +0.08±0.07°C decade–1, fully accounting for the overall observed trend. The trend after removing ENSO (the “ENSO-adjusted” trend) is 0.00°±0.05°C decade–1, implying much greater disagreement with anticipated global temperature rise. “
The trend was positive; they are investigating why, after ENSO adjustment, it was zero for ten years. And they found that such decades were common, but 15 years (ENSO-adjusted) would be a rarity.
There isn’t anywhere near enough surface coverage using thermometers to compute a global average temperature trend. If the satellite data isn’t trustworthy then all bets are off because we are left with no adequate record whatsoever to work with.
so…when you write in prior posts that you dont “average” what did you mean?
Of course words mean what you wish them to mean, no more no less.
the question who gets to decide…
So nick…a thermometer reading is what exactly?
its not a temperature..its a measure of the volume of a fluid.
Your point here is meaningless.
snark doesn’t become you.
nor does equivocation, BTW.
“a thermometer reading is what exactly”
It’s an instrument that produces output calibrated as temperature. So does, in the broad sense, a MSU. But with an MSU you have to go through a calculation and modelling process before you get to something that can be expressed as temperature. And it is that process that is being revised here, not the output.
Mosh says:
“I wish people would quote what they are talking about. Link it. ”
It’s a simple thing to grab some of the text, put it in quotation marks, and google it. A lot of websites don’t like links.
“It’s a simple thing to grab some of the text”
That was me. It’s an even simpler thing to just provide a link. Any WordPress site can handle it. For skeptic stuff, what you get from Google is a whole lot of people misusing the same text (as here), and somewhere in that, the proper source. Anyway, in this case, no text was provided.
And you need to quote; the referenced doc has about 80 pages. And most of all, actually knowing (and consulting, and quoting) the source helps to at least get it right.
Nick
For what its worth I generally grab the relevant piece of text, put it in speech marks then provide the link it came from. Just providing a link is not very helpful as it can often lead to pages of text, leaving the reader to have to search through it all in order to find the relevant bits.
Tonyb
Tony,
Indeed, a good and necessary practice. I appreciate that helpfulness in your posts.
NS, complied with your request. Fall 2014. Ebook. Essay PseudoPrecision. Nuff said.
“Can’t help but conclude that Global Warming is man made, and that we can attribute it to adjustments to the temperature record.”
the UNADJUSTED global SST record is WARMER before adjustments
There is no global SST record other than ARGO buoys which have been in operation a scant 10 years. There is no global land surface record at all. There has never been a network of thermometers across the entire globe. The only thing that can approach global coverage is satellite borne instruments. If that’s dicey then there’s nothing credible at all for instrument based global average temperature.
David Springer said:
David, we’ve seen this movie before.
http://i.imgur.com/dC1QMUM.jpg
“There is no global SST record other than ARGO buoys which have been in operation a scant 10 years. ”
Wrong Again.
“the UNADJUSTED global SST record is WARMER before adjustments”
Maybe the adjustments to SST, while making SSTs lower, make global temperatures higher. Everyone is looking to find ways to make global temperatures higher.
Looking at the adjustments, it’s hard not to see a human factor in there.
Mosher would you be so kind as to point to an SST record that is “global” and justify the global adjective by describing the spatial and temporal distribution of sample points across the global ocean?
I’m calling your bluff in other words.
ANY GLOBAL SST RECORD OTHER THAN ARGO IS “GLOBAL” IN NAME ONLY.
The Reynolds OIv2, AVHRR satellite analysis is global and continuous since 1981.
Better to eat popcorn than put it into a SUV!
It looks like the American people, voting with their feet and their pocketbooks, disagree.
I suppose that’s why there’s such urgency to rubber-stamp the mandarinate of the scientist kings so they can impose their dictatorship of virtue upon the great unwashed.
http://i.imgur.com/rNgirjy.png
The alarmists will not wait “5 years.” They won’t wait 5 seconds in their effort to proclaim more “evidence” of their doomsday CAGW scenario. the science be damned.
I am wondering if this El Nino is the marker for another step change up like the 1998 one was. Or, will average global temperatures move back down to the 1998-2015 average? It will take a couple or three years to find out.
The energy is already in the system. The energy cannot go backwards with 400ppm plus in the sky. There may be a brief respite in the SAT, but that never gets your side to anything except more foolishness… the pause made complete fools out of a lot of very smart people. That they rejoice that some scientists think there was a pause and some think there never was one is like sticking a dipstick into their well of understanding. It’s several quarts low. There is a very minor disagreement there among vast agreement.
Energy moves from hot to cold. So, the Earth’s temperature is hotter than a couple K. Therefore, based on simple physics, energy will tend to flow from Earth to space.
So by your theory, the earth’s temperature is approaching absolute zero.
Sorry, but you have missed off the simple fact that the sun is hot.
The amount of energy you’re referring to is a very tiny fraction of the amount that comes in and goes out every year. So, really, it isn’t “in the system.”
Yes it is. more is coming in than is leaving; it’s largely being stored in the oceans.
We’ll be glad enough for that soon enough.
================
Abject silliness.
No it isn’t. There may be more energy entering the oceans than leaving, perhaps (though there’s no good evidence of it, just anecdotal wishful thinking), but saying it’s being “stored in the oceans” is nonsense.
First, there’s no way we know of for it to get back out in a way that matters.
Second, the amount involved is an even tinier fraction of the total than of annual input/output.
Third, the whole idea of “storage” applies only to intentional behavior (humans, squirrels), it’s totally inapplicable to what the climate system does. A semantic bait-and-switch typical of CAGW types.
It won’t come out ’til glaciation; it’s shy.
==============
We could well be adding a decade of time to adapt to glaciation for every current year of fossil fuel use, but these numbers depend upon climate sensitivity to CO2 and to time and rate of glaciation, none of which we know. But we can be pretty sure we’ll get a good rate of return for all the heat we are storing up ahead.
===============
Heh, AK, we are well on the way to making this storage intentional behaviour. Isn’t it wonderful that we can store it in the deep, out of our harm’s way until we need it?
===============
Energy will leave the oceans very quickly when TOA imbalance goes negative.
ENSO takes place on the top of a column of ocean water. Makes a big difference.
LB – the point is that the Earth has a huge heat sink. It’s not a one way street as some numb nuts here seem to think.
And a rising carbon sink. Alas, we may not do much good after all, but our descendants will appreciate our little bit, as the cold descends upon human society.
===================
Storage is one of the three terms in the energy balance equations. It is the part that keeps the surface temperature from immediately responding to the forcing increase, and is mostly due to the ocean’s thermal inertia and is expressed as the rate of change of ocean heat content.
Energy will leave the oceans very quickly when TOA imbalance goes negative.
Right – the oceans tend to moderate temperature change.
TE, it is called the Planck response. This is what drives the cooling after an El Nino.
Is it just me that can’t make sense of JCH?
Regardless of inane semantic arguments about heat storage the bottom line is that the 0.5W/m2 imbalance measured at the top of the atmosphere isn’t enough to warm the ocean basin more than 0.2C in the next one hundred years.
The basic mistake made by global warming pundits is that 0.5W/m2 excess would accumulate in a shallow ocean layer where, due to far less volume, it would cause the upper ocean layer to warm much faster. Surprise surprise surprise. The heat mixes downward much faster than global warming pundits figured which in turns gives rise to much less surface warming than predicted by same.
Tough break boys. Better luck in your next lives because you screwed the pooch too badly to be taken seriously again in this life.
I’ve mostly focused on the difference between the individual models and the data acquired after the model is run forward.
I notice the climatologists like to use an ensemble average, and the anomaly. That’s unsound as far as I’m concerned. I would use individual models, the actual temperature (not the anomaly), ocean temperature 0 to 300 meters, total water vapor, and similar parameters to understand if a model is worth its keep.
But I come from a different model world, and we had less arm waving, simply because we ran about one million cell models, they were simpler, and they could be verified within 10 years.
TE, it is called the Planck response.
No.
Planck response is “Temperature moderates Temperature change”.
( E = sigma T ^ 4 )
Oceans moderate temperatures because of available latent heat potential and because of much greater heat capacity than air or land.
Jim D | March 6, 2016 at 7:06 pm |
“TE, it is called the Planck response. This is what drives the cooling after an El Nino.”
In a simple two dimensional model yes but since there are lots of dynamics involved, a huge variation in where radiant energy can be lost to space efficiently and where that energy loss can result in energy being stored, you need more than a simple 2D analogy buzz phrase.
The TMT tends to show there is more radiant loss in the NH with virtually no heat being retained so instead of a tropical troposphere “hot spot” there is a northern hemisphere warm region where most of the Planck response is happening. Since the NH oceans are about 3 C warmer than the SH they are less efficient in retaining additional heat and more efficient getting rid of heat. Land doesn’t store much so it would have the higher Planck response which is a negative feedback. So most of the “winter warming” is actually radiant cooling.
For simple 2D, this is a good reference
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/242279491_On_the_Confusion_of_Planck_Feedback_Parameters
When the ocean surface warms due to internal variations (e.g. ENSO), radiative cooling enhances because of the resulting imbalance. This is the Planck response. It responds to other variations, internal or external, and acts like a restoring force for the radiative balance. This is the reason that the El Nino warmth dissipates over time. Your interpretation of JCH’s comment got it backwards. Energy leaves the system after the ocean surface warms, and the mechanism is radiation.
captd, yes, there was a recent paper saying that the El Nino heat is not dissipated locally in the tropics, but transported to higher latitudes where it is lost more easily. While the hot spot would be part of the negative lapse rate feedback, its weakness relative to models implies that the heat is lost less efficiently from the tropics than the models do it.
Jim D
Planck feedback isn’t the big actor in this case. Planck feedback is based upon a non-linear increase in emitted power as temperature rises. What this means for global warming in general is that it requires a non-linear increase in power absorbed by the surface to move the temperature up by a fixed increment. This behavior is common in physics. For instance it takes more power to increase the speed of an automobile from 60 mph to 80mph than it does to increase from 40mph to 60mph. Same goes for temperature.
However, in the case of El Nino warming, the big actor is conduction not radiation. Planck feedback is black-body (radiation) physics. Normally the air temperature in the ocean boundary layer is very near the same temperature as the ocean surface. When a deep warm pool with a small surface area turns into a shallow warm pool with a large surface area, which is what happens in an El Nino, it drives up the temperature differential between air and water in the boundary layer. Conductive warming of the cooler air then occurs. No Planck feedback is involved in that.
There was not step change in 1998. You can conclude whatever you like if you start drawing straight lines on top of climate data.
The rise was probably a result of Mt Pinatubo and took about 7-8 years to settle in. I can be seen more clearly in stratospheric temps ( shown inverted here, for comparison ):
https://climategrog.files.wordpress.com/2014/07/tls_icoads_70s-20s.png
Detail on that graph :
https://climategrog.wordpress.com/2015/01/17/on-determination-of-tropical-feedbacks/
and here:
https://climategrog.wordpress.com/uah_tls_365d/
There was indeed a step change in 1998. Look harder.
https://i.imgur.com/H13id7f.png
I expect a logarithmic response to 20th century high insolation.
So if the post La Nina level is a little higher it wouldn’t surprise me.
Most global warmers failed at math and they draw logarithmic change curves pointing in the wrong direction.
I expect back to flat with negligible step up. Flat for several years, hopefully no decline after that.
We’ll see.
It depends on how strong solar influence is and how much NCDC/GISS/etc. tweak the data. 40% of the trend in GISS is NASA tweaking.
I’ve not seen the paper (please provide a link) that says that dead data that is 15 to 100+ years old data is a moving target. If it is a moving target please provide documentation of the time travel to install new stations or upgrade sensors.
Since accurate forcing attribution hasn’t been attempted the real climate trend could do anything between a gradual increase and a gradual decrease
Judy – you wrote
“The AMS journals have one the best review processes out there; I am not sure why Christy/Spencer weren’t asked to review.”
There are two scenarios.
1. Mears and Wentz requested that Christy and Spencer not be asked to review, but told the J. Climate Editor that their paper had been rejected by JGR where they could have been reviewers..
In this case, since the Christy and Spencer research findings are so central to the issue, as Editor, I would have rejected Mears and Wentz request. To do otherwise, is a clear abrogation of the responsibilities of the Editor to seek the input, as reviewers, from critically affected colleagues.
or
2. Mears and Wentz requested Christy and Spencer not be asked to review, but did not inform the Editor of the JGR rejection. This does not absolve the Editor from not choosing Christy and Spencer, but it would mean a violation of AMS policy. If this a case of “shopping around” for a favorable Editor, this is an even more serious concern.
I do not know which scenario is accurate, but urge Mears and Wentz to publish their submission letter so we can see what was actually told to the Editor when they submitted the manuscript.
The Editor of the J. Of Climate should also communicate his reasons to exclude Spencer and Christy as reviewers.
The publication of this paper, without properly vetting it, is yet another example of the deterioration of the climate science peer review process.
Indeed. the release of a news article on the paper [https://t.co/ukz0JnQIOW], with comments on the study by individuals such as Andrew Dessler and “NASA chief climate scientist Gavin Schmidt” (who are not experts on this subject) further illustrates the politicization of the climate issue. Gavin (or the reporter) even used his NASA title to add gravitas to his statement on the paper.
I have more of my comments on this paper on @RogerAPielkeSr
Roger Sr.
Thanks for these observations. A faulty peer review process angle that had not been fully obvious before.
There is yet another possibility which is that the editor(s) were looking for neutral parties to avoid the food fight you are seeking to ignite. You have no evidence of any of your assertions except that Spencer and Christy were not reviewers. If you chose to escalate the issue you may end up with egg over your face. Istvan, as usual is simply dealing off the bottom of the deck
Eli
How many people have the technical knowledge to peer review the mears paper? It is a highly specialised field
Tonyb
A note by Spencer over at WUWT made a number of points:
1. Since UAH and RSS staff are the only ones with a full command of the issues of satellite temperature analysis of the atmosphere (since they both do the same thing) good peer review inevitably includes people from the other team.
2. They did not recommend rejection to JGR but asked for evidence of some of the claims.
From this (unless you would like to question Spencer’s integrity) and the rejection by JGR it can be concluded
1. Requesting the other team be excluded is deliberately requesting shoddy peer review.
2. That the paper is spongy in spots and makes some claims or assumptions that were difficult to defend to JGR.
It appears that Dr Rabett is wrong. There IS evidence. The paper was reviewed by Christy and he neither accepted nor rejected it. However, the paper was subsequently rejected by JGR. The authors then, instead of fixing things with JGR, found an easier editor to deal with. Not a smoking gun, but obvious.
Richard
An interesting question might be – who is reviewing the Christy/Spencer V6.0 paper?
Nick
If there is competition/enmity/ between two groups of people, each of whom are the only qualified candidates to review the others papers, can there ever be a fair and transparent end result?
Tonyb
https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2016/03/05/roy-spencer-responds-to-rss-pause-busting-adjustments/
Chip Knappenberger has pointed out that, while the warming in RSS v4 versus UAH v6 might be as described above, when RSS v4 is compared to RSS v3.3, the increase in warming might be mostly due to their new diurnal cycle adjustment. In other words, the NOAA-14 calibration issue was also in their v3.3, but maybe it was obscured more by diurnal drift adjustment issues.
It will get sorted out. Right now for my money it looks like RSS had two errors that effectively canceled each other out. It is speculated that they mishandled drift and NOAA-14.
This would lend support to the “the new drift correction is superior” viewpoint but means they still need to clean up NOAA-14. Which will bring them back to a neck and neck race with UAH.
Is there any “enmity”? Until this recent divergence, they were both getting very similar results using different techniques. One model based , one observation based.
That has always seemed like proper scientific cross-checking. The recent Spencer / Christy change brought the two even closer. That all seemed fine, professional conduct.
Where’s the idea of enmity?
What if we we were to assume that both sides were honest?
Then it might mean that the evidence is not strong enough either way to settle the matter …
or to spend billions of dollars on mostly crony projects
or create constant anxiety in a misinformed public
or teach children that their existence is a threat to nature.
The authors then, instead of fixing things with JGR, found an easier editor to deal with. Not a smoking gun, but obvious…
This may not be true. JGR may have rejected the paper for reasons that had nothing to do with something needing to be fixed. Christy, presented here as an expert, did not ask for anything to be fixed, so, if something needed to be fixed, how did an expert like him miss it?
Are you sure his critique was not to corrections? Are you sure his recommendations weren’t acted on, at least in part?
=========
Eli calls the practice of good science guidelines a “food fight.” I think that tells us all we need to know about Eli.
The first rule of foodfights is to wait until everyone is full. We’ve not had enough science, yet, in the diet, so it’s premature, thus the acrimony.
========================
Tony,
“can there ever be a fair and transparent end result?”
Sounds like Mutually Assured Destruction. But that’s what editors are for. They are supposed to sort out what parts of the criticisms are valid, bearing in mind any animosities, but not sharing. It’s the editor’s decision.
“How many people have the technical knowledge to peer review the mears paper? It is a highly specialised field”
I would suggest:
Qiang Fu
and maybe :
Celeste M. Johanson Stephen G. Warren or Dian J. Seidel.
If you sit down with the data and code and the ATBD it’s not rocket science.
“Is there any “enmity”? Until this recent divergence, they were both getting very similar results using different techniques. One model based , one observation based.”
BOTH model based.
one based on a physical model.
one based on a statistical model.
But since the real diurnal range is itself uncertain and changing over time, both have substantial structural uncertainty.
Eli, the idea is to sort out problems BEFORE publishing.
All speculation and conspiracy theory Roger.
Are you, Judith or Bob Tisdale or Anthony Watts ‘experts on this subject’? Judith claims she has made an ‘assessment’ and thinks UAH methods are ‘better’. Yet didn’t even bother to find out what Mears and Wentz said in response to Spencer and Christy’s inaccurate blog criticisms.
Spencer and Christy have been using their beta versions for almost a year and STILL haven’t even published a paper about it.
Where’s all your harrumphing about that? The motivated reasoning, hypocrisy and confirmation bias on this blog is amazing.
Michael Crichton speculated at a Caltech lecture that, Aliens Cause Global Warming and now, we might speculate that nature caused an end to global warming and Leftists are causing an end to the end…
‘We choose a method based on an optimized second
harmonic adjustment to produce a new version of the
RSS dataset, Version 4.0. The new dataset shows
substantially increased global-scale warming relative
to the previous version of the dataset, particularly after
1998.’
… One must make things as facile as possible –
but no more facile.
“The new dataset shows substantially increased global-scale warming relative to the previous version of the dataset…”
It was like waiting for Death Wish V or Rambo IV. You knew somebody would eventually produce it, you knew why, and you knew who would win in the end.
Tony Heller (aka Steven Goddard, Real Science) had a post predicting this Mears RSS move almost exactly a year ago. Reposted a couple of days ago. Heller’s logic was RSS pause had Mears publicly disavowing his own RSS in favor of much more contaminated/suspect/adjusted surface datasets like GISS and NCEI. Since Mears could not disavow his own RSS pause completely, the only solution for Mears as a true warmunist would be to adjust it away somehow. Know we know how. Just use known bad MSU data.
And in the end, Bronson, Stallone and Warming win the day.
OH NO, Mears joined the conspiracy. Are Spenser and Christy next?
It’s not necessarily a conspiracy to misrepresent information. It’s unethical and not representative of scientific integrity. Your desire to paint it as a conspiracy is meant to diminish the reality of the action … the choice.
It’s a common tactic used to paint your detractor as crazy, an advanced form of ad hominizing and very similar to attempts made by abusers to cover their tracks.
With many “skeptics” it does seem like there is a conspiracy around every corner.
Conspiracy? Surely you have been reading too much Lew. Heller predicted a year ago that Mears would do what he did. And Mears new v4 is more at variance with radiosondes and reanalyses than before. Translation, his new version varies MORE, not less, from more direct observational crosschecks.
Reality bites. When it does, it is rational to conclude those are bite marks, not imagined conspiracy marks. You just bit, hard.
Plenty of abuse of skeptics, but the saddest thing is the abuse of climate scientists; bound they are, hand and foot.
=======================
They are dismissers, not skeptics, but they don’t own up to that more accurate description.
Rud.
But for the fact that Others had also found issues with AMSU, you might have a weak point. Citing heller has to be low point for you.
“And Mears new v4 is more at variance with radiosondes and reanalyses than before. Translation, his new version varies MORE, not less, from more direct observational crosschecks.”
I don’t believe that is true. Here is a plot of RSS V3.3 and V4 TMT, superimposed on Christy’s senate plot. My overprint, RSS4 is red, 3.3 is dark blue. Christy said he used a 5 yr smooth, so did I. So I lost 2.5 yrs at each end – not sure what JC did there. At least post-1995, RSS4 matches the balloons much better than V3.3.
http://www.moyhu.org.s3.amazonaws.com/data/freq/latestT/RSS4_JC.png
Oops, I made an error above. The blue curve is actually UAH V6 TMT, which makes an interesting point on its own. RSS V4 tracks radiosondes better than UAH v6.0 in the Pause region. But here is the one that actually bears on Rud’s claim. It’s still true that V4.0 tracks better than V3.3 in the Pause region.. But they are much closer.
http://www.moyhu.org.s3.amazonaws.com/data/freq/latestT/RSS4_JC3v4.png
I don’t believe that there was any malicious intent.
I prefer to believe that the RSS team, warmunism and all, is making an honest effort.
UAH has been telling RSS their drift adjustment was cr*p for years.
Mears decided to fix it. He apparently has.
It was masking another problem.
https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2016/03/05/roy-spencer-responds-to-rss-pause-busting-adjustments/
https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.files.wordpress.com/2016/03/rssv4vsuahmt1.jpg
Now with a clear indisputable difference in the data sets covering just one satellite period, somebody is wrong.
Which means a second update by one of the two parties (or both) will be coming along shortly.
Obvious, single issue discrepancies get fixed quickly.
the RSS change is WITHIN the structural uncertainty of satellite data.
To get a BALLPARK view of the structural uncertainty compare UAH 5.6 with UAH 6
“the RSS change is WITHIN the structural uncertainty of satellite data.”
This has nothing to do with the fact that the NOAA 14 period was handled differently.
http://images.remss.com/figures/missions/amsu/satellites_used.png
NOAA 14 and NOAA 15 overlapped for 4 years and NOAA 15 overlapped with a number of radiometers. And then there is radiosonde data.
So there is a “more correct” interpretation to the 1997-2001 period and available information to determine what correction to apply to the NOAA 14 data. And there is available information to determine any NOAA 15 bias.
PA. Sonde data is a dog’s breakfast.
Temperature is collected at two times. 0z and 12 z.
Utc. The satellite measures at different times.
Sonde collect data at discrete hPa. Satellites integrate the entire column.
Comparing them involves large uncertainty.
I bet you never looked at the real data.
But go ahead. Find Sonde data from the middle of green land and compare it to uah temperature..
Not anomalies but real temps
PA. Handling noaa 14 differently is a prime example of structural uncertainty.
Jeesh
The optics are similar to Karl at NOAA. Faulty adjustment followed by short circuited review (if what Rep. Smith says the NOAA whistleblowers said is correct). Paul Homewood plotted out the difference between RSSv4 and v3.3 on his blog, also reported at GWPF. Almost all the change is post 2000, another pause buster at least for the MT.
The optics make ‘climate science’ look bad. Real bad, as Pielke Sr. points out above.
What is interesting is that, as with Karl, it took the skeptical blogosphere just days to find and call out the likely flaw in something so highly technical.
Greater RSS divergence from radiosondes than before is the proof in the pudding of likely malfeasance. Did Mears not crosscheck the way UAH pointedly does? Or did he then choose not discuss the result thinking no one else would crosscheck? Either way, malfeasance and worse optics.
” Almost all the change is post 2000, another pause buster at least for the MT.”
That’s because AMSU is patched onto MSU post may 1998.
Reblogged this on TheFlippinTruth.
I updated my horse-blanket of upper air measurements.
RSS 4.0 is available only for the MT, so still 3.3 for the LT.
There are some variances with all of the data.
None of the data sets support any Hot Spot:
http://climatewatcher.webs.com/HotSpot.png
Never trust a new instrument. The instrument maker will always say it is the best and brightest.
Eli
How naive of you. Have you ever worked in the business of manufacturing instruments? Are you not aware of the multiple levels of quality control? Do you, for a moment, think that NASA would accept an instrument that does not meet its specifications? That it does not have its own professionals, on site, at the manufacturer?
Richard
richardswarthout: Do you, for a moment, think that NASA would accept an instrument that does not meet its specifications?
It can happen — recall the Hubble Space Telescope.
I don’t doubt NASA’s newer AMSU instruments meet specifications and have “more sophisticated calibration”. (I’m not sure exactly what more sophisticated means.) But is there evidence the newer instruments are more accurate in measuring change than the older ones, and if so, how much more?
Ever heard of the Hubble Space Telescope?
Matthew
The conversation went from “never trust a new instrument” to a notable NASA failure. Thank you for pointing that out. So you are now in the “never trust” column? What to do. Add more layers of quality control, or close NASA?
Richard
The rabett is an academic. He hops around in a nice protected environment.
“Are you not aware of the multiple levels of quality control? ”
When NOAA 10 left calibration the PRT was recording 700 counts for the cold space target.
After launch this drifted to 1800 digital counts.
are you not aware of this?
Tim, Pwofessor Wabetticus Halpernicus’s classes are known to be useful for recovering from late boozy nights. His droning puts his hapless charges to sleep in the first 3 minutes and the wittle wascal quietly hops out to the faculty lounge for carrot cake and lettuce juice.
Additional explanation found at:
http://www.star.nesdis.noaa.gov/smcd/emb/mscat/algorithm.php
Cool animation found at above link (do people still say “cool”?):
http://www.star.nesdis.noaa.gov/smcd/emb/mscat/images/sno_animation.gif
Audio would be cool.
=======
OPLuso!!!
Thanks for that. Trying to explain the nonlinear calibration problem to folks will not be a lot easier.
richardswarthout: Do you, for a moment, think that NASA would accept an instrument that does not meet its specifications?
Yes. I would think it for a moment, at least.
I think “never trust a new instrument” is good advice. The instrument may well be improved, but it ought to be independently tested and not “trusted”.
Oh crap.
Science progresses in part by new and better instruments.
As does dentistry, for example.
Yes. But the old problems of calibration drift persist.
Steve Mosher,
Drift from 700 to 1800 digital counts for the cold doesn’t mean much without knowing the number of counts for the warm target and for the full digital range. Is full scale count 2^12, 2^16, 2^20, 2^24?
“Roy Spencer’s comments substantially reduce the credibility of the new data set. Their dismissal of the calibration problems with the NOAA-14 MSU is just astonishing. Presumably Christy’s review of the original submission to JGR included this critique, so they are unlikely to be unaware of this issue.”
Thanks for the succinct observation Dr Curry. Astonishing is an excellent description. The astonishment holds true if scientific integrity is the standard.
Obviously it’s not, so those in the scientific community remain astounded. Meanwhile, the strategists of opinion making will gain substantial mileage out of promoting the poor science while the astonished play catch up. It’s been an effective strategy in the current political environment.
Thanks for clearly articulating what has occurred.
What’s not astonishing is the knee-jerk reaction of people who claim to be skeptics but are not. Skepticism is not taking a position. What we have here is people defending a position in the face of increasing evidence to the contrary. They are backing themselves into a corner.
Max
To my knowledge skepticism means being skeptical and offering reasons for the skepticism. I read nothing other than that.
Richard
Richard, your understanding of the meaning of skepticism is good as far as it goes, but it is not as fully developed as what you will find at the Skeptics Society
http://www.skeptic.com/about_us/
The following quote is from the Society’s web site: “Skepticism is a provisional approach to claims. It is the application of reason to any and all ideas — no sacred cows allowed. In other words, skepticism is a method, not a position. Ideally, skeptics do not go into an investigation closed to the possibility that a phenomenon might be real or that a claim might be true.”
A sacred cow (UAH accuracy) is being defended by attacking a threat (RSS), closed to the possibility the latter might be more accurate.
Max
Methinks you are overworking your neurons. Relax there are no wolves at the door; it will play out in the long run. However, a few weeks ago I read a Mears interview where he tried to defend his criticism of RSS; it wasn’t pretty.
Richard
Says you. Mears is a scientist; Spencer won’t show the code, and appears to be a political activist.
JCH
So defensive. I am also a scientist, and much smarter than Mears. So there!
Richard
Skepticism is not taking a position.
Well, that isn’t entirely true. But your position has to be guided by the facts you can trust.
The UAH and RSS corrections have sort of orbited each other for a while. It is nice to have two groups involved because they keep each other honest.
It is too early to get excited about this the dust clearly hasn’t settled. The change has exposed some issues that occur during specific satellites and that all has to be sorted out.
What the two groups report after all is resolved is what they report.
If the two groups have relatively similar trends that increases our confidence in their data analysis. Given the past history they will end up reporting trends that are more similar down the road.
Spencer has posted code
c…..(i’ll ignore the reg const for purposes of computing the diurnal cycle magnitude..very small error)
cc********************* AMSU DIURNAL CYCLE FIX WAS NEEDED !! ***************************************
C…CHECK FOR UNUSUAL TB GRADIENTS AT ENDS OF SCAN
c…..9/1/06…Fix since I “upgraded” the operational code in early July 2006, and apparently broke something since
c over Antarctica, lat bands 65,66 are too cold, and bands 67-70 are too warm, apparently from
c large Tb gradients near end of the scan….(these tests are analogous to the MSU LT tests
c for large gradients at the end of the scan lines)
c…compute LT (coefficients from Danny’s TIGR regression)……….
if(idsat.lt.21)then !…use a different LT kernel for NOAA sats (as of 2007, we were unable to find where these coeffs came from)
c………11/20/2007….ad-hoc footprint sampling adjust for Aqua being at a lower altitude………..
It’s probably best if folks wait until they update the code.
PA | March 6, 2016 at 7:07 pm |
Skepticism is not taking a position.
Well, that isn’t entirely true. But your position has to be guided by the facts you can trust.
———————-
PA, I have trouble imagining situation where it wouldn’t be entirely true. Can you help with an example?
“If the two groups have relatively similar trends that increases our confidence in their data analysis.”
Giss. Berlerkley earth, hadcrut, noaa, jma, cowtan and way…. Jeff I’d, nick stokes, zeke, me…
That is 10 groups doing land ocean.
PA, I have trouble imagining situation where it wouldn’t be entirely true. Can you help with an example?
Well, it is like this.
The acceleration of gravity in DC is almost exactly 9.8 m/s2 (9.801).
If the IPCC estimated the acceleration of gravity they would claim the confidence interval is 15 to 45 m/s2 and “highly unlikely” to be below 15 m/s2.
I have a 4 foot piece of 3/4 inch tool stock I sharpened for network installation (wind resistance almost zero). I would go to the local sports stands, drop it off the back of the stands and measure the distance and fall time. The result would be 9.7 m/S with an error of say +/- 0.2 m/s2.
This would inform me the IPCC is clueless. I wouldn’t know exactly what the acceleration of gravity is, but close enough to know they are wrong.
It is like with Antarctic melting and LOD. I have a measurement I know (in case of LOD very accurate) is accurate and I don’t know all the factors that influence it but they are relatively small in comparison to a pole to equator mass shift. I know there has been a net positive change in the earth’s rotation velocity (lower MOI) in the 21st century. This is difficult to explain particularly when “we all know” the sea level is rising.
So when people say the Antarctic is melting and the melting is accelerating, I don’t know the correct answer on the Antarctic mass balance, but it isn’t decreasing (and now NASA agrees).
http://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/nasa-study-mass-gains-of-antarctic-ice-sheet-greater-than-losses
PA, thanks for the examples. I suspect you didn’t take a position. I don’t see a position in either example. Now, using your first example, if you had said at the outset the IPCC is wrong and you were going to prove it, that would be taking a position.
BTW, it’s nutty to be skeptical about a patently absurd claim. For example, if I said I could could turn copper into gold, and you challenged me to prove it, you would be as nutty as me.
“I don’t see a position in either example.”
Well… f guess there is more truth to your original statement than I thought.
To stake out a hard position takes accurate precise data.
In the climate trend area it just doesn’t exist. Further, there is a lot we don’t know, and a lot we don’t know we don’t know.
Climate contrarians are now down to only one temperature metric they can believe in, and even that one (UAH) shows Feb. 2016 to be the warmest month since its record began. All their eggs are in one basket now, and that ain’t good.
Looks like the pause is a lost cause. Pause lovers are understandably upset.
They should cheer up. Remember, pauses are like buses. Another one will come.
This shows older (maybe last year’s) versions of these two datasets for the lower troposphere UAH and RSS that is still on Woodfortrees. Since this time, they have adjusted and a switcheroo has occurred with RSS now having a trend and UAH not since 1998. The skeptics continue to say this is the best they have, and perhaps those last adjustments makes it perfect (until the next one).
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/uah/from:1998/trend/plot/rss/from:1998/trend
WOW, the linear trends(OLS) since 1998 are way different !
Yes, but they were not skeptical of each other. They can hold these results together in their minds somehow. This is the “structural uncertainty” issue that the satellite scientists refer to. They know they are both wrong anyway, so who cares.
Wow! Trend lines are themselves a statistical product, and do not tell you much about data which are not well characterized as a linear trend! Who knew?
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/uah/from:1998/trend/plot/rss/from:1998/trend/plot/uah/from:1998/plot/rss/from:1998
Everyone but climate scientists, apparently.
“Skeptics” place a lot of emphasis on trend lines over this 18-year period, so this was for them. I normally wouldn’t bother, but this is what they have been writing about at every opportunity, and this is the data they base their arguments on. You can show it for what it is, but that won’t stop them from doing their trends.
Max,
Maybe I speak for many when I say that those who have followed the evolution of various temperature time series in the global warming context have seen many early patterns replaced with patterns that almost always fit what others have called the global warming narrative.
A realistic scientist, whether sceptical or not, should rightly be alarmed at the magnitude, frequency and direction of errors now claimed to exist in many earlier series.
The lesson must be, to trust nothing until stability of measurement becomes credible.
The rate of past errors seems to be increasing, not stabilising.
This is rather poor science.
Geoff.
What you see finally is that there is large undiscussed structural uncertainty. It’s always been there. And it won’t go away very soon. Folks need to curb their enthusiasm for their pet data sets
Steven,
I don’t have a pet temperature data set. I am waiting for one of adequate breed and quality to appear. It is striking how often some temperature series are used for decision making, found to be in error, but the decisions not revisited after the error was recorded.
As I say, it is poor, poor science.
https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.files.wordpress.com/2016/03/image26.png
The “Structural Uncertainty” in the land data introduced by the people compiling them is if anything greater than the satellite “Structural Uncertainty”.
Since 2008 a NASA-GISS computer jockey has increased the 1910 to 2000 trend 58%. Around 2020 the NASA “adjustments” to the 1910 to 2000 trend will exceed 100%.
The land temperature trends, with the included UHI, the station aging related warming, and the adjustments, are computer generated art and say little or nothing about global temperature trends.
Curb your enthusiasm, and scoop the product.
===============
Hello, Jeff
I don’t recall huge changes in any series as a result of revisions. All metrics indicate global temperature has been rising. I don’t have a count, but If most revisions result in a greater increase, I could see how that might arouse suspicion. I would not, however, see that as evidence of wrong doing.
max,
I did not mention wrong doing.
I mentioned the abundance of past errors and their seemingly increasing rate of correction.
In happy science, you get more confidence when the rate of your revisions drops lower over time.
Here, we seem to have the opposite for many data sets. When will they ever stabilise in revisions, enough to be confident with their use?
That is, apart from decisions of some magnitude already made on what are now seen as unreliable earlier data sets.
In good administration, you try to stabilise your understanding before you make decisions, especially when you can see a trail of earlier errors and revisions.
Geoff Sherrington,
Excellent comments.
Many climate scientists, and this is true whether they be warmists or not, place a great deal of faith in science.
They believe science posesses abilities to provide knowledge and insights way beyond what it actually does.
The phenomenon is not new. In the 17th century Pascal dubbed the new faith, for it soon took on quasi-religious characteristics, “scientism.”
And the new dogma was far from being benign. As Jacques Barzun explains in From Dawn to Decadence:
http://i.imgur.com/aTa7l6c.jpg
given the complexity…. its excellent science, geoff.
Way better than this….
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/03/04/the-magical-thing-eating-chocolate-does-to-your-brain/?tid=sm_fb
Steven Mosher said:
Nah.
What it amounts to is a bunch of wild-assed speculation.
Here’s how Hannah Arendt put it in The LIfe of the Mind:
http://i.imgur.com/gD6pcHg.jpg
Geoff Sherrington: In happy science, you get more confidence when the rate of your revisions drops lower over time.
Here, we seem to have the opposite for many data sets. When will they ever stabilise in revisions, enough to be confident with their use?
I agree.
Imagine (use your scientific imagination!) something that has not happened yer: imagine that over a 30 year period, say 2020 to 2050 (it was not 1985-2015), the many adjustments are about as often positive as negative That might imply that a system (or multiple systems) of measurement had at last been created and deployed that was in the main reliable. What we have had instead is a history of adjustments, mostly made by people who believe in the “catastrophic” version of AGW, not the “lukewarmer” version of AGW, that mostly make the record look as though the Earth has been warming more than was shown “two weeks ago” (or, paraphrasing Hamlet, while the leftovers from the last adjustment celebration were still fresh.) Karl et al, for example, adjusted the Argo series to more match the seafaring ship temperature series, rather than adjusting the ship based series to match the Argo series — an adjustment that looks contrary to good judgment. A long series of “balanced” adjustments would support more confidence in the temperature series than the history of revisions to date has done.
With or without the adjustments to date, the warnings of catastrophes past and yet to come, catastrophes produced by CO2-induced warming, are not supported by reviews of the evidence. The warmings forecast by Hansen and the GCMs have not occurred.
Steven Mosher: What you see finally is that there is large undiscussed structural uncertainty
That might have been made plain in Hansen’s 1988 testimony, but it is good to have it publicly discussed more than before. You could elaborate when discussing the BEST analyses and the apparent anomalies pointed out by critics. Some compelling adumbration of why the BEST adjustments reduce the mean temperature during the late 1800s (as emphasized by Brandon S, iirc). I think that the BEST reconstructions of the past are unlikely to be much improved upon, but when you (or Zeke Hausfather, or whoever) present the next updated report, you might detail the “structural uncertainty: as you deem it.
Glenn
I prefer Heidegger and Jaspers, to their student.
Quoting people gets you nowhere with me.
Geoff said
“In happy science, you get more confidence when the rate of your revisions drops lower over time.”
_____
Sorry, but I don’t agree. A drop in the rate of revision doesn’t necessarily mean revision wasn’t needed. Fewer revisions could mean a lack of attention.
If frequent revisions, or even occasional revisions, resulted in huge changes there would be cause for a lack of confidence in the measure. I don’t recall huge changes in any of the temperature metrics.
Frequent revisions of statistical series are not unusual. If you do a Google search for “statistics revisions” you will find lots of examples.
Sorry, but I don’t agree. A drop in the rate of revision doesn’t necessarily mean revision wasn’t needed. Fewer revisions could mean a lack of attention.
==============
Think about temperature measurement. Recent instruments are more accurate, measure more frequently, will be properly sited, etc.
So revisions to recent temperatures should be miniscule.
They aren’t. Hence the conclusion that most GW is anthropogenic and down to fiddling the temperature record and not CO2.
Steven Mosher said:
I’m sure that’s right.
For someone of your vast knowledge and wisdom, I’m sure what some of the greatest thinkers in the Western tradition had to say is beneath you.
“Frequent revisions of statistical series are not unusual.”
They are perfect for making your Just So Story a little So-er.
Andrew
“For someone of your vast knowledge and wisdom, I’m sure what some of the greatest thinkers in the Western tradition had to say is beneath you.”
Strange conclusion. See how well you do when you make your own arguments..
Quoting people will get you no where with me.
NOT because I regard their thoughts as beneath me, but rather
because the argument is more important than the person making it.
That Kant said something true, is less important than the truth itself.
So, make your own arguments. In your own words. Kant isnt here to answer for what he wrote. No conversation is possible. Hermeneutics
is fun, but real conversation beats it. That said, I prefer heidegger and Jaspers to their student.
You see? you made an assumption. You assumed I thought that the giants of the western tradition were beneath me. Quite the opposite.
It is because I respect what they thought, that I am interested in what YOU think, rather than what you quote. They are not here to answer. You are. If you respected them and learned from them you would not make silly assumptions.
Glenn dreams of heading up a new division at Hallmark by randomly combining sappy photos with out of context quotes from forgotten philosophers. “For those occasions when you need to appear deep”
LB | March 7, 2016 at 3:32 pm |
“Think about temperature measurement. Recent instruments are more accurate, measure more frequently, will be properly sited, etc.
So revisions to recent temperatures should be miniscule.”
___________
My miniscule may be larger than yours. What’s you miniscule?
I’m not aware of any revisions in recent surface temp series that were significant enough to change the story. Do you have any in mind?
Steven Mosher said:
What an odd couple to prefer.
Their political philosophies certainly didn’t have much in common, not to mention the enormous personal enmity which existed between the two.
There’s Heidegger the Nazi, and Jaspers the liberal democrat, though granted Jaspers advocated an elitist form of democracy.
Just what is it you prefer about these two very divergent philosophers?
Horst Graben,
Not everyone shares your anti-intellectualism, so maybe you should try lightening up a bit.
Glenn: What you are posting is anti-intellectual as Mosher told you. You admit that the fundamental basics of climate are beyond you. You do not make an effort to learn more when pointed to a cornucopia of bite-sized chunks of real, undisputed science. Then you continue to debate by using sound-bytes from dead guys because you have nothing to say. I am pretty certain you are not a pot smoker, but you present yourself as one with that sort of meta pipe-dream wish it so mentality.
I’ll grant you the WUWT crowd eats that stuff up because it is easy to swallow and is generic enough for them to use it to justify their conspiracy ideas and magical thinking. It’s sorta like the appeal to teh Dronald. Obviously your target audience… however, to gain their attention, you need to be nicer to Rud as he is your main competitor for their hearts, minds and spare change.
Oh Max, tsk!. ‘Climate contrarians’ what can that
possibly mean? Weather’s variability? Shakespeare’s
Lear knew it, farmers depending on the seasons knew it,
seamen sailing stormy seas knew it. why even Samuel
Pepys recording in his diary knew it, Feast and famine,
see-saw-climate -shifts of Little Ice Age and Medieval
Warming Period? Serfs ‘n church congregations noticed,
gave thanks for bumper harvests and perished when crops
failed, offered prayers to stay encroaching glaciers … climate
contrarians -not!
Say then, who might have the luxury of bein’ a climate
contrarian? Peut-etre, climate scientists whiling away
the tenured hours (in cloud towers) contriving with their
modelling to erase the MWP and LIA…. History chucked
down
the
memory
whole.
You are doing it again. Abusing freedom of speech.
Oh RICO !
If I were King, would demand that you wear mittens,
A cat may look at a king. )
good one, beth
Knappenbergers’s criticism discounts almost everything Spencer said. The paper only changed the way they do the diurnal calculation and reported on that. In science you only change one thing at a time, which is what they did. Spencer did not criticize their new diurnal adjustment, and so missed the point of the paper. Ask him whether he thinks the new diurnal adjustment is better than the old one or his own one. That would be more to the point.
The debate between camps has been going on for some time. Still not sure which is closest to being correct.
Excerpt from “Correcting the MSU Middle Tropospheric Temperature for Diurnal Drifts” by Mears, et al. (2002):
http://images.remss.com/papers/msu/Correcting_MSU_Channel_2_Temperature_for_Diurnal_Drifts_IGARSS.pdf
“In science you only change one thing at a time”
Not true. You can use statistical methods and experimental designs that allow several variables to be changed simultaneously, which is the way the real world works. Unfortuneatly it is near impossible to use such methods in observational science. It could be done with models though.
This paper was about the effect of changing one thing. That makes it more informative than one that changes several things at once.
Knappenbergers’s criticism discounts almost everything Spencer said.
Huh? How do you get that from the following:
Chip Knappenberger has pointed out that, while the warming in RSS v4 versus UAH v6 might be as described above, when RSS v4 is compared to RSS v3.3, the increase in warming might be mostly due to their new diurnal cycle adjustment. In other words, the NOAA-14 calibration issue was also in their v3.3, but maybe it was obscured more by diurnal drift adjustment issues.
For people that failed the “reading comprehension” section of the “Iowa Tests of Educational Development” it means the following:
1. The new diurnal drift adjustment (4.0) results in a warming trend compared to the original diurnal drift adjustment (3.3).
2. The positive bias of NOAA 14 was in both.
3. The lower diurnal adjustment in 3.3 concealed the NOAA-14 issue.
Adding a negative (relative to 4.0) adjustment trend to a positive NOAA-14 bias in version 3.3 resulted in a trend similar to UAH so it wasn’t obvious there was a NOAA-14 problem.
Please explain how that conflicts with anything Spencer said.
Yes, this paper is nothing to do with which satellites were used. That part was kept constant, so Roy was off the mark, and acknowledged that by posting his update about Chip. It was only about improving the diurnal cycle correction methodology, as in the title of the paper.
Jim D: Yes, this paper is nothing to do with which satellites were used. That part was kept constant, so Roy was off the mark, and acknowledged that by posting his update about Chip. It was only about improving the diurnal cycle correction methodology, as in the title of the paper.
How does that support your claim? Knappenbergers’s criticism discounts almost everything Spencer said.
Spencer was talking about NOAA-14 versus NOAA-15. The paper was about diurnal adjustment methods. NOAA-14 might have needed more adjustment, but it was all about the new method, and Spencer seems not to have commented on that.
“Yes, this paper is nothing to do with which satellites were used. “
What you are claiming makes no sense.
SM likes to say “read more” or “think harder” or something at this point.
1. The original satellite analysis had a false positive data trend, say 0.09°C for example introduced by the handling of NOAA-14
2. The Diurnal correction in 3.3 in our example has a 0.09°C negative trend relative to 4.0.
3. The net result is a more or less correct 3.3 series because the errors canceled.
If the Spencer/Knappenberger analysis is correct, RSS 4.0 is technically better (has one less or at least one reduced error) but the trend isn’t as accurate as 3.3 because the handling of NOAA-14 in 3.3 and 4.0 is the same and still wrong.
Claiming “this paper is nothing to do with which satellites were used” is an irrelevant red herring on the subject of problem with NOAA-14 in both series.
Using the 0.09 °C trend in our example, if NOAA-14 is corrected the RSS 4.0 trend will more or less match UAH and RSS 3.3 trend will be 0.09°C negative instead of more or less matching UAH as it does now.
Let’s answer that with a sentence from the abstract.
“The new dataset shows more warming than most other middle tropospheric data records constructed from the same set of satellites.”
Mears, however, argued the “spurious warming” in the new data is from overlapping satellite coverage of the atmosphere. Even if they wanted to make the correction Spencer argues for, Mears says it doesn’t make much of a difference in the overall trend.
Advertisement
“We do not know if the problem is due to NOAA-14 or NOAA-15,” Mears told TheDCNF. “If we assume that all the drift is due to NOAA-14, as Dr. Spencer would like us to do, we can eliminate the use of NOAA-14 after 1999 so that its (potentially erroneous) trend during the overlap period does not affect the overall results.”
Mears noted there’s “no evidence that NOAA-14 drifts for time periods before 1998” as it agrees with other satellite measurements made over the ocean. Mears said: “So we can not assume that the problem is with NOAA-14.” …
Jim D | March 7, 2016 at 12:43 pm |
Let’s answer that with a sentence from the abstract.
“The new dataset shows more warming than most other middle tropospheric data records constructed from the same set of satellites.”
Let’s review original point I was responding to:
<i<Knappenbergers’s criticism discounts almost everything Spencer said.
Anything to do with Mear’s statements or abstract quotes has “jack” to do with the point being discussed.
I ask again, please explain how the Knappenberger quote conflicts with anything Spencer said.
“The new dataset shows more warming than most other middle tropospheric data records constructed from the same set of satellites.”
The RSS dataset 3.3 “allegedly” has about the same amount of spurious warming and spurious cooling errors. They eliminated the spurious cooling in 4.0. If you add spurious warming to a dataset (the spurious warming was previously “neutralized” by spurious cooling) sure you are going to set records.
Much like the Land data sets use homogenization and related techniques such as “break on change” to maximize the UHI and capture all the instrument aging related warming to set new temperature records.
If you deliberately (or carelessly) introduce spurious warming the data set will set records. Much like GISS adding on average about 0.025°C/decade (and counting) of spurious warming since 2008 to the data set allows them to set records.
“In science you only change one thing at a time, which is what they did.”
Thanks, that brought a smile to my face. It is what they tell 6th graders, and it’s even probably true in introductory high school chemistry…. but not much beyond that. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_of_experiments and a hundred other examples) I do enjoy reading the perspectives of non-scientists about science.
You only have to read the title of the paper to see what it was about. As I mentioned, the abstract also mentions the result of just changing that one thing. You’re welcome.
From the RSS web site:
http://www.remss.com/missions/amsu
I expect that when El Niño waters dissipate, they will reinforce/form a new warm blob. We’ll see a very, very warm year especially in data sets that use sea surface temps to estimate atmospheric surface temps. But the warm North Pacific will transfer a lot of heat to the northern latitudes troposphere through cloud formation and precipitation, leading to increases in arctic ice mass for several years. Really warm Arctic upper troposphere and surface temps in winters, but less warming and melt in the summers.
A few questions:
1) When UAH v6 was released, does the lesser trend compared to 5.6 indicate that Spencer and Christy are adjusting their data to give them the answer that they want?
2) Does the promotion of this data product despite no peer review at all reflect poorly on Spencer and Christy?
3) Do the constant changes to v6 (currently beta 5) indicate the error prone nature of this unfinished and un peer reviewed product that they have chosen to promote?
Just wondering if the answers to these questions will be intellectually consistent with the criticism expressed here.
cce… how could you say this rotten stuff? A scientist follows the truth and testifies for the Republicans, and Lush and John Stossel. Testifying for the Republicans is how it’s proven to be true. Write that down.
Ted Cruz’s favorite temperature data set just got a lot hotter!
http://www.hortonhotsauce.com/media/catalog/product/cache/1/image/1000×1000/9df78eab33525d08d6e5fb8d27136e95/1/1/1194.jpg
There’s plenty of reason for doubt about all the data sets.
But they are more similar with one another than they are with the GCM forecasts in the Hot Spot area.
The hot spot exists in Po-Chedley 2015 and RSS V4 has even higher trends.
Have you read Po-Chedley? A joke.
The hot spot exists in Po-Chedley 2015 and RSS V4 has even higher trends.
No, RSS 4.0 ( the middle chart ) doesn’t indicate a Hot Spot either:
http://climatewatcher.webs.com/HotSpot.png
From the Po-Chedley abstract:
“Using a homogenized TMT dataset, the ratio of tropical tropospheric
temperature trends relative to surface temperature trends is in accord with the ratio from GCMs. It is shown that bias corrections for diurnal drift based on a GCM produce tropical trends very similar to those from the observationally based correction, with a trend difference smaller than 0.02 K decade.”
The hot spot exists over ocean, not land, and pulling out a “spot” from a wide band of atmosphere that is simultaneously warming and cooling is nontrivial.
The hot spot exists over ocean, not land, and pulling out a “spot” from a wide band of atmosphere that is simultaneously warming and cooling is nontrivial.
It’s even less likely that the Hot Spot is hiding somewhere over the oceans. Of the RATPAC stations clearly surrounded by ocean, 19 of the 25 have a lower trend at 500mb than at 700mb.
Now, what exactly this means is open to conjecture.
Is the lack of a Hot Spot due to natural variation that will reverse?
Is the lack of a Hot Spot a result somehow of CO2? Wouldn’t seem likely.
Does the lack of a Hot Spot mean that water vapor is not feeding back as expected?
Does the lack of a Hot Spot mean that surface warming would be less if it did occur ( by providing the lapse rate feedback which is now evidently missing )?
We can only continue to watch and wonder.
One other reason that the Hot Spot might not be appearing is that the Eastern Pacific and Southern Ocean indicate a cooling trend, which is also subject to an uncertain origin and future.
RSS v4 TTT definitely demonstrate a hotspot. The TTT-trend (1979-2016) for 25 N-25 S is 0.186 C/decade. The surface trend of HADCRUT4 for the same zone and period is 0.128 C/decade
This suggests that the temperature trend in the tropic free tropsphere is 40-50% higher than that at the surface.
Similar hotspots are shown by RAOBCORE, ERA-interim and IUKv2..
physics says likely yes; politics could say no
At how many partisan hearings has UAH appeared in the hopes of perhaps causing an authoritarian solution? (Fire the scientists.)
RSS v4 TTT definitely demonstrate a hotspot.
No – look at the chart again. I added TTT. ( may need to clear your browser history and click on the image ).
Turbulent Eddie, RSS TTT can’t show a hotspot alone because it has no vertical resolution. It has to be combined with a surface near data set.
Have you tried to make such graphs with RAOCORE or ERA-interim? They have the most accentuated hotspots I’ve ever seen (ie trends at 300 mbar vs 850 mbar level).
Te..
Now just convince ur buddies to drop the conspiracy stuff and focus on the hot spot
Wait… I thought you were my buddy.
It’s a decent segue though.
Lukewarmers don’t have buddies, because they contradict the opinions of most others, and as such need to correct and criticize most others ( with the evidence they analyze ).
For my part, I did push back against “CO2 can’t cause warming” comments ( both from posters and Tim Ball ) @ Lucia’s recently in addition to my more usual global warming is exaggerated meme.
So we’ll set ’em straight Steve – you and me.
Though as I’ve contended previously, group identity of any kind is a trap – the only pure motivation one can have is of personal curiosity. Even the I’ll prove those bastards wrong with this evidence is bad news, because it loads up ego bias.
And even posting on blogs probably indicates some of this we’ll never escape. But still, we try.
The “drop the conspiracy” stuff is good advice.
Stupidity, greed/careerism, or ideology makes a lot better explanation.
https://i.imgur.com/aIwMbNz.gif
However, there is evidence of “temperature drift” in the last year of the Clinton administration. And the recent stuff started after Obama took office. Too much of a coincidence isn’t a coincidence.
Democrats aren’t (at least the liberal ones) honest so it wouldn’t be a surprise they are twisting the data to match policy. Karl did.
The changes didn’t start happening until NASA started getting the billions in climate change stimulus money so it looks like quid pro quo.
If a tree falls in the forest….
If the “pause” ends, and is subsumed by a longer-term trend of increasing SATs, is it really a pause? Or was it merely noise within a longer-term signal?
IMO, what makes sense is to look at the longer term (post-industrial) trend, in terms of a number of metrics (SLR, OHC, SATs, etc). To the extent that the “pause” in SATs (as just one metric) was/is meaningful, it will show up in the longer-term trend by virtue of reducing the rate of increase in the longer-term trend.
It’s always fascinating to watch smart, knowledgeable people engage in such dubious reasoning.
To the extent that the “pause” in SATs (as just one metric) was/is meaningful, it will show up in the longer-term trend by virtue of reducing the rate of increase in the longer-term trend.
Yes, somewhat reduced trends:
http://climatewatcher.webs.com/Trends30.png
Your graph is oddly PDO like… except the big surge at the end. It’s coming.
Your graph is oddly PDO like… except the big surge at the end. It’s coming.
I’ll make a note of that.
On today’s horoscope.
I love it when delusions get a swift kick in the rear.
“If the “pause” ends, and is subsumed by a longer-term trend of increasing SATs, is it really a pause? Or was it merely noise within a longer-term signal?”
“If the “pause” ends, and is subsumed by a longer-term trend of decreasing SATs, is it really a pause? Or was it merely local maximum within a longer-term signal?”
If a tree falls in the forest….
http://www.weknowtheanswer.com/q/if-helen-keller-falls-in-the-forest-and-she-s-not-there-to-hear-it-does-she-make-a-sound
If Helen Keller falls in the forest and she’s not there to hear it, does she make a sound?
I’m not sure the trees are relevant.
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2016/02/25/1514036113
Challenges in constraining anthropogenic aerosol effects on cloud radiative forcing using present-day spatiotemporal variability
The problem, besides the taking the year of the moment and claiming victory for warming or anti-warming forces, is the “all other things being equal” assumption that past trends predict the future.
If the clouds are actually changing (as well as other parts of the atmospheric system) modeling past behavior to predict future behavior is largely a waste of time. Until the effects of the various changes to the atmosphere and the contributions of individual effects is accurately accounted for, let alone the changes in contributions and effects in the future accurately predicted (where the RCPs are woefully wrong), wasting computer cycles on future projection is simply a government sponsored “make work” project.
These “predictions of the future temperature” are bad guessing and resemble playing darts more a scientific forecast.
I started hinting at victory around 2012 – 2013… when it was becoming obvious the PDO was about to jet upwards.
PA says
These “predictions of the future temperature” are bad guessing and resemble playing darts more a scientific forecast.
————-
PA, have you looked to see or are you just guessing?
max1ok | March 6, 2016 at 11:32 pm |
PA says
These “predictions of the future temperature” are bad guessing and resemble playing darts more a scientific forecast.
————-
PA, have you looked to see or are you just guessing?
The RCPs are a bad joke. The 2014 absorption hit 701 GT. The RCP 4.5 show 4.2 GT emissions causing a 0.5 PPM rise in CO2 in 2100. 4.2 GT today would cause a 1.31 PPM decrease. At the 538 PPM level in 2100 it could be charitably argued that this is a gross underestimate. Up to a 4.1 PPM decline is easily defensible.
RCP 8.5 is a greenpeace fantasy and not worth looking at. We are already below the RCP 4.5 CO2 level. even though emissions are almost at RCP 8.5. The divergence of the CO2 level from RCP4.5 is following a 0.1, 0.2, 0.4 pattern (exponential separation from the RCP prediction) and that isn’t good news for global warming.
Professionals from industry who jobs depend on being right should have written the RCPs. Modeling to the RCPs is a waste of time.
The empirically measured forcing is below the IPCC estimate. Recent estimates of aerosol forcing are low.
Lets recap.
1. Hard to make the case BAU will hit 500 PPM of CO2 let alone 538 PPM. The RCP8.5 460 PPM in 2033 is a crock.
2. Forcing low – much lower than IPCC.
If the parameters/data used by the simulations are flat out wrong the results of the simulations are valueless.
PA, actually it is very easy to make a case for 700+ ppm by 2100 under BAU. Population increases by 50% and global emissions per capita increase by 50% by 2100, 50% stays in the atmosphere, equals well over 700 ppm. Both the population and per capita assumed rates are slowdowns of past rates of increase, so they are conservative.
True, but PA is impatient. He tastes the pudding before it’s done, then says it doesn’t taste good.
Jim D | March 7, 2016 at 6:44 pm |
PA, actually it is very easy to make a case for 700+ ppm by 2100 under BAU.
Population increase and emissions per capita increase?
What does population increase have to do with emissions? They don’t burn the excess people…
US per capita energy use is falling.
There is nothing to support population = emissions or steady per capita emissions growth. China’s population is still growing and their emissions have been flat for 3 years.
Just because global warmers can throw out fantasy scenarios with unfounded and/or irrational assumptions doesn’t mean reasonable rational people have to be gullible enough to be fooled.
1. Higher CO2 levels means higher annual absorption. At 460-500 absorption becomes higher than amount of fossil fuel (and emissions) that people can afford. It is basically a hard cap on CO2.
2. The will stop the US from burning more coal.
3. There are few other countries that can afford buy shipped coal in any volume and the producer of 6% of exported coal is tapped out.
4. China and the rest of the world are going nuclear in a big way. China is doing more development on nuclear right now that the US has done in the last 30 years.
5. The rise in CO2 is more dependent on rainforest burning than emissions and Indonesia is about done clear cutting their island to produce biofuel. Biofuel – yet another brilliant piece of eco-environmental sustainable thinking. I guess the eco- didn’t think the rainforests were all that necessary.
Fossil fuel production based estimates say the maximum CO2 level will be around 460 PPM and that is about right.
BAU means 460 PPM. By 2025 the flattening of the CO2 increase rate will kill global warming as a scare tactic if it hasn’t died before then.
But keep spinning your disaster fantasies if it makes you happy.
2.
PA,
Just to explain.
Emissions=Population X Emissions per capita
Both are projected to be increasing through 2100 in BAU scenarios. Want to rethink your answer? The main reason emissions per capita increases is through the development of less developed countries which overrides the benefits of advanced countries stabilizing emissions if that development is still based on fossil fuels. Also ~50% remains in the atmosphere based on the ratio of increase to emissions over history.
Emissions=Population X Emissions per capita
Huh? I hope you didn’t crib that talking point from your global warmer cheat sheet.
https://i.imgur.com/j6xAg8w.gif
http://www.mappi.net/img/energie/Consommation_mondiale_energie_habitant_2010.jpg
Smart rich countries consume more energy. Once they are developed their energy use declines.
http://www.leonardo-energy.org/sites/leonardo-energy/files/root/Images/2012/ENER10-Fig2_0.png
There are few smart countries left to develop. China appears to have capped its fossil fuel consumption and is going nuclear. India is going mostly nuclear but will increase coal use a little, and its upward consumption trend is much less steep than China’s was. So global fossil energy use isn’t going to change much. Nuclear is going to be the preference for much new Installation.
There isn’t much connection between population and fossil fuel consumption.
The one long term noise signal we can be sure exists is the whole of your commentary here Josh.
Amazing and revealing by Gavin Schmidt and Doug McNeall in a “like” of my tweet. To them it is a game. They abuse their positions of authority and provide even further evidence that they are using Trump’s tactics.
How did climate science get into such a dysfunctional state?
“Gavin Schmidt and Doug McNeall liked your Tweet
5h: @ClimateOfGavin 1/ Remarkable You do not see parallel between your behavior and that of Donald Trump. I am not going to play that game.”
Well, if Hillary gets indicted then Trump is elected president. A game I would not play, were I them. Stand tall as you always have, and be counted yet again. Highest regards.
Speaking of Gavin, how does GISS remove the false warming trend due to aging of CRS and MMTS stations?
Inquiring minds want to know…
GISS ingest GHCN and Scar data.
The only adjustment they make is an adjustment to urban stations.
There is no data to suggest that there is a false warming trend of MMTS or CRS. There is a speculation but no data.
If CRS and MMTS do deteriorate and create a false warming trend it would show up in a comparison of CRN with the Rest of the network.
Since the start of CRN ~2001, the “bad” stations track the CRN with near perfection.
rpielke said:
Because of the crude power grab and intellectual snobbery of the “scientist kings” as Reinhold Niebuhr called them, or the “culture of technical control” as Daniel Yankelovich called it?
As Yankelovich explains in Coming to Public Judgment:
Yankelovich predicted that back in 1991, and now it’s coming true.
So the scientists and other technocrats sowed the wind, and now the American people must reap the Sanders/Trump whirlwind.
Looking at “pause”, i.e.: after the last el Nino spike, there is a slight increase in the gradient, although hardly dramatic.
I would interpret this as there may be, or may not be, a pause but our instrumentation is insufficiently accurate to tell.
Irrespective of whether it is a “pause” or not, it remains a barely detectable rate of warming and still doesn’t fit with model predictions.
RCS
Irrespective of whether it is a “pause” or not, it remains a barely detectable rate of warming and still doesn’t fit with model predictions.
———–
RCS, I’m not so sure. Have you looked at predictions made 20 – 30 years ago?
http://climatewatcher.webs.com/Hansen.png
TE, thank you for the chart. I’m not sure, but believe Hansen’s historical series was GISS, so I would compare the projections with GISS observations.
TE, thank you for the chart. I’m not sure, but believe Hansen’s historical series was GISS, so I would compare the projections with GISS observations.
All observed trends since 1979, including GISSTEMP, are less than the low end trend of Hansen’s 1988 testimony.
All observed trends since 1979, are less than the IPCC AR4 guarantee for all scenarios for the first decades of the twenty first century.
All observed trends since 1979, are at rates less than the IPCC AR4 best estimate of the Low Scenario for the twenty first century.
Hansen’s 1988 Predictions
Hansen’s 1988 Predictions
Hansen’s 1988 Predictions
Yes, we know how wrong they were.
TE, the link from JCH shows that the projections by Hansen back in 1988 have turned out better than you thought.
You claim IPCC AR4 projections are above observed trends, but you don’t say by how much. If we are evaluating the projections it’s important to know how much.
IPCC AR4 is relatively recent (2008 ?). The projections presented in previous IPCC reports
give longer projection horizons for comparisons with observations. For example, I think the base year for AR2 projections was 1990 or 1995.
max10k: TE, the link from JCH shows that the projections by Hansen back in 1988 have turned out better than you thought.
Tamino’s post, linked by JCH, shows that Hansen’s prediction can be revised to be different from what it was, revised in light of the things that made it so wrong, and that the revised prediction is not as wrong as what Hansen predicted. Nevertheless, Hansen’s prediction was wrong, and the revised prediction remains inaccurate. Hansen’s prediction, and the “revised Hanson” prediction, have been among the predictions that run “too high” and missed the “early 21st century slowdown” in warming.
It was nice of Tamino to show that Hansen was merely “inaccurate” and not totally foolish. But the bottom line is still that Hansen was wrong, and his forecast does not justify alarmism (catastrophism, “urgency”, whatever.)
I’d love to see one of the climate skeptic’s predictions from 1984.
You do not know that.
Comparison from 1988:
http://climatewatcher.webs.com/Lukewarming1988.png
Since 1988, observed trends all less than Hansen/IPCC long term trends.
Comparison since 1979 ( giving Hansen’s models a 9 year head start ):
http://climatewatcher.webs.com/Lukewarming1979.png
So for the satellite era observations compared to Hansen satellite era and IPCC near term and long term predicted rates, that’s:
Prediction: ( 4.0 K/century ) – IPCC AR5: RCP8.5
Prediction: ( 4.0 K/century ) – PCC AR4: Best Estimate High
Prediction: ( 3.2 K/century ) – Hansen ‘A’
Prediction: ( 2.9 K/century ) – Hansen ‘B’
Prediction: ( 2.3 K/century ) – PCC AR5: RCP6.0
Prediction: ( 2.0 K/century ) – Hansen ‘C’
Prediction: ( 2.0 K/century ) – IPCC AR4: ‘All Scenarios’ – ‘next decades’
Prediction: ( 1.8 K/century ) – IPCC AR5: RCP4.5
Prediction: ( 1.8 K/century ) – IPCC AR4: Best Estimate ‘Low’
————————————————————————————–
Observation: ( 1.5 K/century ) – Surface land/ocean ( GISS & NCDC )
Observation: ( 1.3 K/century ) – RAOB ( mean RATPAC 850, 700, 500 )
Observation: ( 1.2 K/century ) – MSU MT & TT ( mean UAH & RSS )
Observation: ( 1.2 K/century ) – MSU LT ( mean UAH & RSS )
Observation: ( 1.0 K/century ) – Sea Surface Temperature ( NCDC )
Notice anything about observations with respect to predictions?
JCH, I doubt you’d find any as there was no Skeptic groups in 1984.
Here is an analysis of those that made early predictions:
https://www.quora.com/Climate-Change-and-Global-Warming-2010-11/Which-groups-predictions-have-proven-more-accurate-human-caused-global-warming-skeptics-or-supporters.
It looks like this one in 1975 gets the blue ribbon:
Broecker’s 1975 prediction
In 1975, Wallace Broecker published a paper that contained a prediction of global warming that is remarkably close to observed measurements.http://www.skepticalscience.com
http://www.skepticalscience.com/lessons-from-past-climate-predictions-broecker.html
I would argue that Hansen’s 1981 Science prediction, not on that list, was as good as Broecker’s. At that time his model had a sensitivity of 2.8 C per doubling which is closer to the current consensus.
Re post by Turbulent Eddie | March 7, 2016 at 4:23 pm
_______
I don’t know why you are comparing Hansen’s projections to a lot of series he never projected in addition to comparing them with the GISS series. Stick with apples to apples, oranges to oranges. A simple chart showing his three projections along with GISS observations would be straight forward. If Feb 2016 temp is available it might make the projections look better, which would be fair to Hansen.
Broecker anticipated the actual increase in CO2 very closely, predicting 373 ppm in 2000 and 403 ppm in 2010 (actual values were 369 and 390 ppm, respectively). Broecker also used an equilibrium climate sensitivity of 3°C for doubled CO2; however, his model’s transient climate sensitivity worked out to be 2.4°C for doubled CO2. Current climate models put equilibrium sensitivty at 1.5 times transient sensitivty, so Broecker effectively underestimated the thermal lag of the climate system, and the equilibrium sensitivity in his calculations was approximately equivalent to 3.6°C for doubled CO2 – a bit higher than today’s best estimates of 2°C transient sensitivity, 3°C equilibrium sensitivity.
JCH: I’d love to see one of the climate skeptic’s predictions from 1984.
Everybody was wrong, or at least inaccurate. That does not make Hansen right, though he gets credit for trying.
I did not know that computer models existed in 1880. Good to know. Also, those who don’t believe that this all powerfull trace gas that can magically control climate all by itself were not making predictions back in 1984 – just asking questions, asking for the raw data, code, etc. After who knows how many foia requests, most of which were not honored, we get climategate and understand why. The level of dishonesty, data manipulation, and coverup in climate “science” is breathtaking, yet you and others advocate for decarbonizing the world using green energy “$olutions” that are not even possible without fossil fuels, and would prevent developing countries from realizing the countless benefits from rhem that we all now enjoy.
<i"Stick with apples to apples, oranges to oranges. A simple chart showing his three projections along with GISS observations would be straight forward."
In fact, he was projecting the GISS Ts (met stations only) index, which was developed by Hansen and Lebedeff in 1987, and shown in the paper. Land/ocean indices came later.
TE has shown a general muddle of surface and troposphere, and trends for all sorts of different time scales.
matthewrmarler,
Yep.
http://izquotes.com/quotes-pictures/quote-it-s-tough-to-make-predictions-especially-about-the-future-yogi-berra-324537.jpg
Moyhu’s Hansen 1988 tool
I’m using a 12-inch Macbook, so I had to command minus until Hansen’s 1988 graph appeared with menu bar to its right.
I should say, until the menu bar on the right appeared. Then you click on the clear all button,and Hansen’s 1988 graph appears. Then you pick the series you want to look at.
As Yogi would say, you can observe a lot by observing.
JCH said:
Well, as Big Brother said, “who controls the present contols the past.”
It seems, though, that you and your fellow travellers in the climatariat are having a bit of trouble controlling either one.
Yogi and the climate, and the American people, just haven’t cooperated.
matthewrmarker said
“It was nice of Tamino to show that Hansen was merely “inaccurate” and not totally foolish. But the bottom line is still that Hansen was wrong, and his forecast does not justify alarmism (catastrophism, “urgency”, whatever.)
______
Do we really expect a forecast of global temperature to be right on target? If that’s what’s meant by “accurate,” a forecast would have to be lucky to be accurate.
I think the range covered by Hansen’s three 1988-2020 temperature projections are in the ballpark compared to observations.
But you think that’s “wrong,” I would ask wrong compared to what? A projected decline or a projection of no change?
Whether Hansen’s projections alone “justified urgency” back when they were made over 25 years ago is a difficult question to answer. I don’t think we know yet. But if it turns out in the decades ahead that the
projections did justify urgency, a no action policy could be regrettable. And there is more evidence for taking action than just Hansen’s projections.
I think the range covered by Hansen’s three 1988-2020 temperature projections are in the ballpark compared to observations.
All temperature trends are lower than even Hansen ‘C’.
Hansen ‘C’ was the one in which CO2 emissions completely ceased in 2000.
Think about that.
Doing nothing (continuing to emit ) has actually turned out better than doing everything ( halting everything ). So, yeah, Hansen was wrong.
Observed trends are all less than all Hansen/IPCC predicted rates ( both near and long term ).
TE , you haven’t shown the one thing you need to show to make your point. That would be a chart showing Hansen’s three 1988-2020 projections and GISS observations from 1988 to the most recent available.
max10k: Do we really expect a forecast of global temperature to be right on target? If that’s what’s meant by “accurate,” a forecast would have to be lucky to be accurate.
Admitting that models have been wrong is the next step in correcting them. Indeed, Tamino’s post is a step in that direction. The corrected model is still running hot. Someday, forecasts based on research and modeling may be reasonably accurate a century in advance; it won’t happen by luck. Luck is required now because the models are not reliable.
max10k: And there is more evidence for taking action than just Hansen’s projections.
The more I have learned, the more I have come to doubt and dispute claims that urgent action is needed. I think that the most recent reviews of the literature support what I have taken to calling “benign (possibly antrhopogenic GHG-induced) global warming.” B(A)GW.
matthewrmarler March 7, 2016 at 11:53 pm
“Someday, forecasts based on research and modeling may be reasonably accurate a century in advance; it won’t happen by luck.”
__________
I don’t see how you could know a 100-year forecast made today would be accurate 100 years from today, unless you had a time machine like in that movie “Back to the Future.”
Life requires forecasts. We forecast all the time, frequently without even being aware we are doing it. We then make decisions to act or not act based on these forecasts.
If you don’t want to act on climate, you are basing this decision on a forecast. What is your forecast and why is it more compelling than those by Hansen and the IPCC?
“If you don’t want to act on climate, you are basing this decision on a forecast. What is your forecast and why is it more compelling than those by Hansen and the IPCC?”
No wonder your profession is struggling to make its case w the public. Do you furrow your brow and stare down your audience too ?
https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-C2FrrxaVH-4/Vr8zd8ernfI/AAAAAAAAMd4/ZnchtR1ZEr0/s1600/CMIP5%2Band%2BGISTemp%2BFeb16.png
Putting aside the dodginess of all measurement (min/max = temp record? gimme a break), it does not matter a fig if the planet is warming or cooling somewhat, or doing neither. Because that’s all it can ever do. Three nag race, as thrilling as a molasses spill.
The lucky thing about our present epoch is that it doesn’t cool enough to wipe us out (Younger Dryas, Bond Events, LIA not withstanding). Some bloody Anthropocene. They were whimpering over a little ice and chilliness not forty years ago.
Abolish the climatariat. Hurry up please, it’s time.
– And Then There’s Cloud
mosomoso said:
http://i.imgur.com/sf5c839.jpg
So, comparing last years to today’s navy nowcast of Arctic sea ice thickness indicates a distinct area of negative anomaly from about 20E to about 70E, all the way to the pole.
Sure enough, the February temperature anomalies indicate the striking maximum ( around +16C anomaly for the month! ). The sea ice anomaly appears to be dynamic ( ice blown poleward ) and the result has been a lot more heat into the atmosphere, not from the tropical pacific, but from the Arctic. I’m wondering if the same happened during past El Ninos.
http://www7320.nrlssc.navy.mil/hycomARC/navo/arcticictn/nowcast/ictn2015030418_2015030200_040_arcticictn.001.gif
http://www7320.nrlssc.navy.mil/hycomARC/navo/arcticictn/nowcast/ictn2016030518_2016030300_041_arcticictn.001.gif
http://www.drroyspencer.com/wp-content/uploads/UAH-LT-vs-CFSv2-Tsfc-Feb-2016-2.jpg
“Their dismissal of the calibration problems with the NOAA-14 MSU is just astonishing.
Nothing regarding their fiddling of climate data is any longer astonishing. Their problem is that greenhouse gases like water vapor and carbon dioxide actually cool rather than warm, as you may notice with a stroll through a rain forest. Actually, correct physics and studies of real world temperature data also confirm this.
The pause will continue for another 13 or 14 years as we are just over half way through the 30-year downside of the overlaid 60-year cycle.
The pause has made complete fools of a lot of very smart people. The last time the natural 60-year cycle actually worked, as in, caused a significant cooling of the earth…
was the 19th century.
We just have to grab some popcorn and watch…better stock up, this is gonna take a while.
It’s like the movie “A bridge too far”
If the pause ends in 2016 it does not make the existence of the pause any less important. The pause was bound to end at some point. The next obvious question is what is the direction of the subsequent trend?
There is disagreement over whether there was a pause, but yes, what happens next is an obvious question.
More warming would be as beneficial as the last warming, and cooling would be both harmful and ominous. So, of course, we should hope for warming, and further rise of the seas.
================
Reptiles and fish might agree with you, but I am neither. I would prefer cooler times.
Warming cannot be experienced by us in a global sense because we are regionally based creatures. We can, however, simply move further south in Australia to live in cooler climes (or further north if you live in the NH) or we can migrate to places where we can live well with what financial resources we have accumulated as well as enjoying pleasantly warm days and cool nights.
Warming booms the whole biome; it is always net beneficial.
=============
Back on the farm we never prayed for an unusually hot summer. Crops grow best in the climate they are accustomed to.
Greenhouse operators boost plant growth with C02 while controlling temperature with heating and air-conditioning so greenhouses don’t get too cool or too warm for optimum plant growth. Other conditions that contribute to growth are also controlled.
Greenhouse grown tomatoes don’t taste as good to me as tomatoes grown outside. I don’t know whether that’s because of the added C02.
The year: circa 30 A.D. The place: Rome. Royal physicians have warned the ailing emperor Tiberius that he must eat a cucumber every day. So begins construction of a specularium, a house dedicated to growing plants. Constantly maintained fires outside the stone walls heat the air inside. A translucent roof crafted from thin sheets of mica allows sunlight indoors. The greenhouse is born! ..
No AC; no CO2 enrichment… yes fires.
It’s the MIDDLE troposphere measurements what got its trend adjusted from 0.08C/decade to 0.125C/decade!
Cruz’ favorite trend is the LOWER troposphere.
The lower troposphere trend is 0.125C/decade already. So now the lower and middle troposphere trends match. Big f*cking deal. The middle troposphere has never been the one held out for public consumption.
Mears carried out an evaluation of RSS V3.3 against UAH v5.5 and several balloon data sets in 2011/12.
http://www.remss.com/measurements/upper-air-temperature/validation
This evaluation showed that the UAH data was running warmer than the RSS and this was fixed by UAH in v6.0 Mears concluded:
“The excellent agreement between all TLT datasets in the northern extratropics should put to rest any doubt that there is significant warming of the troposphere in this region. This level of agreement is likely to be due to the high quality of most of the radiosonde stations in this region, the dense sampling of radisondes (which increases the likelihood that neighbor-based homogenizations techniques are successful), along with the relatively small diurnal adjustments needed for the satellite datasets.
In the tropics, the agreement between TLT datasets is not as good, with RSS typically showing more warming than either the UAH or radiosonde datasets. Both the radiosonde and satellite datasets may contain errors in this region. Many tropical radiosonde stations show substantial inhomogenities, which may be under corrected, leading to a cooling bias (Thorne et al 2005, Sherwood et al 2008) though the amount of this bias in unknown. The differences between the satellite datasets in the tropics are likely to be due to differences between the corrections both groups make for diurnal drift.
In the southern extratropics, the two satellite datasets are again in good agreement with each other for TLT. This, combined with the very small diurnal adjustments needed due to the small amounts of land present, gives us confidence in the satellite data in this region (at least more than a few degrees from the edge of the Antarctic Continent – see discussion of problems at the Antarctic edge in Mears et al, 2009). Radiosonde data in this region is sparse, making the southern extratropical radiosonde averages prone to error. Also note that the different radiosonde datasets have very different sampling in the southern extratropics – for example, HADAT does not include the radiosonde stations along the Antarctic coast, which the other datasets do include.”
What has changed from 2012 to 2016?
Spencer & Christy vs Mears & Wentz
Pause vs No Pause
Pause creator vs Pause Buster
NOAA-15 is right and NOAA-14 wrong vs Both are equally right (or wrong)
Belief in anecdotes (Cadillac calibration) vs Sound scientific respect of uncertainty
Whether UAH or RSS is right can be validated by validating their satellite products against radiosondes and reanalyses.
Here is a comparison of troposphere trends during the alleged “Pause” period:
http://postmyimage.com/img2/510_Tropospheretrends.png
The low trends of UAH v6 TLT and RSS 3.3 TLT can not be verified. The new RSS v4 TTT is slightly less “pause-buster” than UAH v5.6 TLT, and both are lower than the trends suggested by radiosondes and reanalyses.
All TMT datasets use NOAA-14 until 2001. Christy & Spencer claim that RSS (and NOAA STAR) are wrong when they use NOAA-14 until 2005-2006, and that this cause a spurious warming.
This claim can also be examined in detail by radiosonde validation:
http://postmyimage.com/img2/931_TMTvalidation.png
After 2001 when UAH 5.6 and 6 cease to use NOAA-14, they diverge more strongly from RATPAC than RSS and STAR.
When UAH 5.6 cease to use NOAA-15 in he middle of the period, it doesnt drop vs RATPAC and RSS anymore.
STAR uses NOAA-15 until now, but RSS only to 2011. STAR drops markedly from RSS after 2011
These validations suggest that Spencer&Christy are wrong and that NOAA-15 is wrong, causing a spurious cooling in the datasets, directly proportional to how much it is used.
RSS have done a decent work with version 4, but there is probably still some spurious cooling left, caused by NOAA-15.
There is a way to avoid AMSU channel-5 (TMT) on NOAA-15 (or to validate this channel). Channel 5 can be replaced with a weighted average of channel 4 and 6. Doing this with NOAA STAR’s AMSU-only dataset increase the TMT-trend (1998-2011) from 0.037 to 0.094 C/decade. Note that NOAA-15 is not the only satellite in this dataset, but the dominating one due to its long service..
So, when do we expect them to start corrupting the radiosonde balloon data as well? Given that that too refuses to comply with the models. They must take us for idiots.
sonde data is a dogs breakfast. But skeptics always point to it as proof of something..
Until they find out that it is heavily adjusted..
Read climate audit
We have a sensitive method of measuring instrument drift if we assume that there’s no temperature change.
Olof R says:
“These validations suggest that Spencer&Christy are wrong and that NOAA-15 is wrong, causing a spurious cooling in the datasets, directly proportional to how much it is used.”
But you only give the comparison to RATPAC where Christy in his response compares UAH v6 and RSS 4.4 with nine balloon data sets of which RATPAC gives the worst relationship to UAH v6.0 :
“Radiosonde and Reanalysis Comparisons
After Carl made the new RSS data available to us, John Christy computed the level of agreement (explained variance) that three satellite datasets (RSSv4, UAHv6, NOAAv3.0) have with the corresponding values from various radiosonde and reanalysis datasets. The results indicate that, with the exception of one reanalysis dataset (MERRA-2, which has by far the warmest trend), the UAH anomalies have better agreement with other data sources than does the RSS (or NOAA) dataset:
Graphic:
http://www.drroyspencer.com/wp-content/uploads/GL_MT_r2_vs_roab_and_reanalysis.png
Peterazlac, I have seen that correlation chart at Roy Spencer’s blog. He can’t really explain it, but I think it is more about good short-term and spatial correlation, ie weather-patterns and not climate trends.
The present discussion is about long-term trends, more precisely the alleged pause in the troposphere since the end of 1990ies. I have validated “the pause” by other freely available radiosonde and reanalysis datasets as well, but always with the same conclusion, the pause can not be verified.
IMO the pause seems to depend very much on a single instrument, the AMSU5 onboard NOAA-15, which likely has some unknown drift that no research team has been able to fully eliminate, not even the most recent RSS v4..
Good presentation Olof. Maybe you should be a journal reviewer.
“the pause can not be verified”
Nothing in climate science can be verified.
Andrew
Olof R: IMO the pause seems to depend very much on a single instrument, the AMSU5 onboard NOAA-15, which likely has some unknown drift that no research team has been able to fully eliminate, not even the most recent RSS v4..
Thank you for 2 informative posts.
peterazlac: The results indicate that, with the exception of one reanalysis dataset (MERRA-2, which has by far the warmest trend), the UAH anomalies have better agreement with other data sources than does the RSS (or NOAA) dataset:
Could you elaborate, and try to repost that graph? which I am unable to open.
JCH said at March 6, 2016 at 9:54 pm |
“I started hinting at victory around 2012 – 2013… when it was becoming obvious the PDO was about to jet upwards.”
In 2008, I used historical proxy data to predicted that the PDO would flip into full positive mode roughly eight years after the maximum in the asymmetric motion of the Sun about the Solar System’s Bary-centre in 2007. That would indicate that the full positive mode should have been established by ~ 2015. I predicted in emails at that time that I was worried that the NATURAL warming that this would produce would be used by the warming alarmists to falsely claim that their models were right after all.
The tragic thing is that both my predictions have come true.
It is not natural warming as the PDO can no longer produce natural cooling.
Both the PDO and GMST should look like the red cycle. When one goes up, so does the other; when one goes down, so does the other.
In the 20th and the 21st centuries, that has not been the case, which is why they have to detrend to get it to look like a cycle.
The ocean cycles, before the trend is removed, look like the dark blue cycle. The ups and downs are there, but background warming is sending the cycle upward.
The pale blue trend represents the GMST. There is mid-century “lukecooling”. There is no downside to the natural cycle: the pale blue series does not follow the dark blue into its cooling trench. There is a large upside when background warming and cycle upside are working together.
The last time natural variation actually caused a significant cooling, a prolonged downward trend, of the GMST was in the 19th century.
Below are:
RSS ( LS33, TT40, LT33 ),
UAH ( LS,MT,LT all r6b5), and
RATPAC ( 100mb, 500mb, 700 mb )
RSS LS(3.3) is a little higher than RAT100.
RSS TT(4.0) is higher than RAT500, UAH MT is lower than RAT500.
RSS LT(3.3) is in close agreement with RAT700 and UAHLT.
http://climatewatcher.webs.com/Strat1979.png
http://climatewatcher.webs.com/MidTrop1979.png
http://climatewatcher.webs.com/LowerTrop1979.png
Olof R
Euan Mearns has a good post on RATPAC in which one commentator -javier- compares RSS and UAH with other balloon data sets:
@RATPAC is only one of the several radiosonde databases around. Others are:
– HadAT (Thorne et al., 2005) Hadley Centre, UK Met Office
– RAOBCORE (Haimberger, 2007) University of Vienna
– RICH (Haimberger et al., 2008) University of Vienna
– IUK (Sherwood, 2007; Sherwood et al., 2008) University of New South Wales
RSS has a page claiming very good agreement with all four but curiously, RATPAC is not included.
http://www.remss.com/measurements/upper-air-temperature/validation
He comments:
“The differences in RSS are due to the poor coverage of radiosondes, so for a fair comparison RSS is sampled for same coverage.
http://images.remss.com/msu/msu_amsu_radiosonde_validation.html
All the differences are within ±0.025 °K/decade.
I would conclude that the not matching between radiosondes and satellites is mainly specific for NOAA RATPAC dataset, or more recent than 2011.”
I have no skin in this game but it is good to have alternative views!
http://euanmearns.com/ratpac-an-initial-look-at-the-global-balloon-radiosonde-temperature-series/
Yes, sondes, particularly the reliably launched sonde, have much sparser coverage than MSU:
http://images.remss.com/figures/measurements/upper-air-temperature/validation/RSS_TLT_subsampled_for_HadAT.png
That’s why co-located sonde comparisons are better, but even then, just because MSU might be valid in the sonde region doesn’t necessarily mean the non-sonde regions have valid MSU readings. Sonde stations are predominantly over land ( and a few island stations ), so ocean/land discriminators matter.
Turbulent Eddie: I would say that the radiosonde stations in most datasets (e g RATPAC) have a maritime dominance, with a majority of the stations in coastal areas and islands…
Peterazlac: Of course, Subsampling of Satellite data to correspond with the radiosonde locations gives more accurate comparisons. RATPAC A is a globally weighted index and cannot be used for that.
RSS have done validations with subsampling using different radiosonde datasets. A while ago I digitized the graph comparing RSS 3.3 TLT and HadAT, and computed the difference:
https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B_dL1shkWewaM1E1Z28zRzZBYXc
The divergence between RSS and HadAT from year 2000 is quite evident, but that has now has been mitigated with the new v4 TTT. Here is a comparison of new and old TTT vs RICH:
https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B_dL1shkWewaLS1LVTVOczR5Qlk
About the radiosonde datasets, only Ratpac is continuosly updated and conveniently presenting zonally and globally weighted averages.
HadAT and IUKv2 were discontinued in 2012.
RICH and RAOBCORE update once per year, with data in netcdf only, and leaves it to the user to construct global averages. However it is relativelly easy to calculate global indices weighted by latitude. This is similar to the Ratpac B global averaging method. RATPAC A is more elaborate with weighting both by latitude and longitude, etc, giving the oceans a more fair representation. Ratpac A has a slightly higher trend than B in recent years, probably because the troposphere over oceans has warmed faster than the troposphere over land
OlafR:
As shown by your second graph, the old and new trends cross around 1998, with 3.3 running warmer before and cooler after. All of the hubbub seems to concern the post-1998 “pause” period but the new “divergence” has been pushed back to the beginning of your record.
What explains that?
Opluso, that is a very good question. I agree that it is disturbing that radiosonde trends are lower than satellite trends in 1979-1999, and that reaanalysis trends are essentially flat during that period.
My explanation for that discrepancy is that raw radiosonde data had more pronounced inhomogeneity issues in the pre-2000 period.
Raw radiosonde troposphere data are quite flat in 1979-1999, and with adjustments the trends increase to about 0,1 C/decade, but still 0.05 lower than satellite data. Reanalyses ingest raw radiosonde data, and therefore produce relatively flat trends during this period.
After 2000 the trends of raw and adjusted radiosonde data are quite similar. I guess that the radiosonde operators now have better equipment and procedures, more suitable for climate studies. Regarding reanalyses, after 2000 they ingest raw radiosonde data with a trend, and with the introduction of AMSUs the reanalyses can also ingest satellite data with unprecedented vertical resolution in the troposphere.
That was the long story. The short story is that the trend difference between Ratpac and UAH is not statistically significant before 2000 (about 1.6SE), but highly significant after 2000 (more than 8 SE) See:
https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B_dL1shkWewaNDVmS0t1bjZjQXM
There is one radiosonde dataset that diverge from the others, IUKv2, which produce trends as large as those of surface and satellite datasets during 1979-1999. The trend (1979-1999 is 0,19 C/decade and the trend 2000-2012 is 0.17 C/decade. Maybe the iterative kriging procedure of Sherwood et al have fully fixed the inhomogeneity issuses in the early decades? Hopefully they will update their data set til now
Good humor.
He doesnt know that Global warming from c02 has a SIGNATURE
stratospheric cooling.
skeptic own goal
Steven Mosher: He doesnt know that Global warming from c02 has a SIGNATURE
Who?
Has the rate of stratospheric cooling been correctly predicted? It would be interesting to know if, for example, the rate of stratospheric cooling was correctly predicted whereas the rate of surface warming has not been correctly predicted.
Given what is known about the physics of heat transfer from troposphere to stratosphere (mechanisms, including advection/convection; and rates), is it possible to model correctly the simultaneous warming of the upper troposphere and cooling of the stratosphere? Capt Dallas referred me to some papers on this topic, but I have not come across a thorough review.
matthewrmarler | March 7, 2016 at 2:50 pm |
Steven Mosher: He doesnt know that Global warming from c02 has a SIGNATURE
And there is a dedicated group at NASA, NOAA et. al. that seem dedicated to “spoofing” the electronic signature of CO2.
Which means the “signature” is basically pointless.
According to the IPCC “can’t be below” mantra the empirically measured CO2 forcing was signed by somebody else.
PA: And there is a dedicated group at NASA, NOAA et. al. that seem dedicated to “spoofing” the electronic signature of CO2.
I do not know what you are referring to. Could you elaborate?
I do not know what you are referring to. Could you elaborate?
https://i.imgur.com/Fdb1eMG.gif
https://i.imgur.com/EbSWtcz.gif
I am open to alternative explanations. I will concede the GISS group has far more chutzpah.
Is this a rehash of the Rep. Smith conspiracy? They are conspiring to fool the public?
mosher, “He doesnt know that Global warming from c02 has a SIGNATURE
stratospheric cooling.”
That is a good one, unfortunately, it appears that volcanic aerosols appear to be a signature of stratospheric warming. Since the first half of the stratospheric temperature record (satellites) is contaminated with volcanic aerosols, there are smudges in the fingerprints. Can’t really get enough matches to convict.
It was fun researching though :)
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2004/12/why-does-the-stratosphere-cool-when-the-troposphere-warms/
Get rid of the pre-2000 contamination and things are pretty flat in the stratosphere. Solomon et al. managed to eke out a bit of cooling IIRC after massaging away some of the ozone and stratospheric water vapor issues.
My understanding is that the stratosphere cools because energy that would be available to warm the stratosphere is “blocked” or “delayed” by CO2 between the “surface” and the stratosphere in the “atmospheric window” band of wavelengths but I have always been curious how the water vapor continuum and the fact that half of the “atmospheric window” that is supposed to be available from the “surface” not existing would impact that “signature”.
The stratosphere responds extremely well to variations in solar intensity since there is solar energy available to be absorbed in the stratosphere and I believe those bandwidths appear to vary more than was once assumed.
Perhaps the Mosh would like to do a post on the current state of the stratospheric cooling signature :)
Oh, Skeptical Science does have an update on the subject that might need to be re-updated.
http://www.skepticalscience.com/Stratospheric_Cooling.html
My understanding is that IR active gasses cool the stratosphere due to the lower pressure. The low pressure allows the molecule to emit a photon before hitting another molecule and relaxing that way. Because of that, the stratosphere is radiating away its energy and cooling.
jim2, “My understanding is that IR active gasses cool the stratosphere due to the lower pressure. The low pressure allows the molecule to emit a photon before hitting another molecule and relaxing that way. Because of that, the stratosphere is radiating away its energy and cooling.”
That is part of it, but you have a normal cooling versus an enhanced greenhouse effect change in the rate of cooling which is supposed to be the signature. So more CO2 molecules should increase the rate of cooling in the stratosphere plus reduce the bandwidth available from the “surface” to warm stratosphere CO2 molecules through spectral broadening in the lower higher pressure portion of the atmosphere.
The problem for the “signature” fans is to explain why something that should be so obvious is so hard to find.
mm:
“Has the rate of stratospheric cooling been correctly predicted?”
It would appear so.
Here is what I calculate for cooling rates for a 2x CO2 from an analyzed atmosphere:
https://turbulenteddies.files.wordpress.com/2015/05/hr_2xco2_instantaneous_2010-03-21_00z.png
Here are the MSU stratospheric channels for the satellite era:
http://www.mdpi.com/atmosphere/atmosphere-04-00132/article_deploy/html/images/atmosphere-04-00132-g002-1024.png
The precise rates may very ( it’s not likely that the dynamics are captured to a high level of fidelity ), but the pattern ( cooling at all levels and much greater cooling at the top of the stratosphere than the bottom of the stratosphere ) verifies.
Turbulent Eddie: Here is what I calculate for cooling rates for a 2x CO2 from an analyzed atmosphere:
Thank you, but I can’t get predicted cooling rates of the stratosphere from that display. Sorry. Could you explain it more?
Are those different stratospheric channels at different altitudes? I infer so from your last paragraph.
Thank you, but I can’t get predicted cooling rates of the stratosphere from that display. Sorry. Could you explain it more?
Sorry about the scale – ( it makes discerning to top layers difficult )
The light blue shades around 100mb are from 0 to -0.1 K/day cooling.
The dark blue shades around 50mb are from -0.1 to -1.0 K/day cooling.
The purple shades around 5mb are from -1 to -10 K/day cooling.
Are those different stratospheric channels at different altitudes? I infer so from your last paragraph.
Yes, the MSU4 is the MSU LS ( lower stratosphere ) channel
MSU 36 is near the upper stratosphere.
The mutli-colored strands on the chart are model runs.
Those not careful with how their biases appear to others probably like the MSU data in the stratosphere where it confirms the models but not in the troposphere where it contradicts the models.
TE, thank you for the response.
No warming for 58 years:
…
n their “hottest year ever” press briefing, NOAA included this graph, which stated that they have a 58 year long radiosonde temperature record. But they only showed the last 37 years in the graph.
…
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.
…
http://realclimatescience.com/2016/03/noaa-radiosonde-data-shows-no-warming-for-58-years/
Here’s what I get plotting RATPAC since 1950:
http://climatewatcher.webs.com/RaobEra.png
Lower levels indicate warming, more or less consistent with surface.
Rates do fall off above 300mb.
So, by these measurement, 2.8 C or so per century.
Sorry – labeling fail
The trends are K/century
Well, obviously the rate would be the same. But the article has a lot more to it than the one chart. It appears to be accusing NOAA of doctoring the data to an even greater extent.
OK, thanks. I’m not familiar with the different versions of radiosonde data.
Hellot Turbulent Eddie,
could you please send me the correct baseline for RATPAC? I would like to complete this little chart:
fs5.directupload.net/images/160312/i5447cfe.pdf
with their series.
All data in it is baselined to UAH (1981-2010).
Some details I forgot:
– do all RATPAC series (A, V, V2) have the same baseline?
– is it possible to obtain monthly series? Until now I could manage to download either yearly or seasonal.
“NOAA included this graph, which stated that they have a 58 year long radiosonde temperature record. But they only showed the last 37 years in the graph.”
It’s typical Goddard distortion. He says “But they only showed the last 37 years in the graph.”. But what he does is not to show NOAA data for 58 years, but to splice on to the NOAA data a graph from a 1977 paper by Angell. It isn’t NOAA data at all. And what he doesn’t say is that the 1977 paper was based on just 63 sites around the world.
Is the NOAA data for the 58 years available? If we go with Mosher’s view, if there are only 63 sites, it’s the best we have so we use it.
“Is the NOAA data for the 58 years available?”
TE showed the RATPAC plot.
Moved to the right place:
OK, thanks. I’m not familiar with the different versions of radiosonde data.
Note also that Goddard is showing radiosonde plots of surface to 100 mb level which includes contributions from the (cooling) stratosphere compared to tropospheric-only layers. He does this in spite of pulling from data sets that have directly comparable layer data.
In fact the stratosphere has a well-known hiatus too – since 1995. So that fingerprint or signature of global warming has been missing for a while. That should have been regarded as yet one more falsifier of the hypothesis before post-normal science adjusted data to match models.
“Study examines hiatus in lower-stratosphere cooling rates….Experts from the University of Exeter have studied why the lower stratosphere – the layer of the Earth’s atmosphere found above 10km – has stopped cooling since the turn of the 21st Century.”
http://emps.exeter.ac.uk/news-events/news/title_453024_en.html
Of course the zealots found a convenient post-hoc excuse and they’ll probably adjust this hiatus away at some point too…if they haven’t already done so by now. So much easier than doing real Science!
You believed the authors up until they said something you didn’t like. I hate it when that happens,
“Scientists found stratosphere has not cooled recently as expect”
Yay, honest scientists at last!
“They found the reason was…
Liars!
To copy the scurrilous racehorse tactic..
“Skeptics says stratospheric hiatus exists so fingerprint missing”
Well you can’t believe skeptics! Real scientists say the stratosphere is cooling so it must be cooling.
“Believers in CO2 warming confirm hiatus exists against expectations”
This means nothing because they have an excuse. Probably the data is wrong anyway.
The logic fail of dogmatic warmers is quite massive. Folk can speculate anything but the only fact is that the hiatus exists which means either there was no fingerprint in the first place, or that there is little to no CO2 warming, or that the previous cooling was not due to CO2 anyway. What an honest person cannot do is say, ‘there was cooling due to CO2′ but now we have a hiatus due to something else’. That is not scientific or objective.
Jas Garnier
from the paper: The study queries why this flattening of the cooling trend is taking place at a time of increasing carbon dioxide concentrations – which should enhance the cooling of the stratosphere by increasing infrared emission.
However, the team of scientists have shown that recent changes to ozone concentrations in the lower stratosphere, primarily brought about by a decrease in the use of harmful CFC’s, has led to a pause in the stratospheric cooling.
The “fingerprint” of CO2 is considerably smudged. We await confirmation of their hypothesis by other researchers.
Does their hypothesis imply that previous cooling was not caused by CO2 accumulation?
mattstat, “The “fingerprint” of CO2 is considerably smudged. We await confirmation of their hypothesis by other researchers.”
That’s post modern science I believe. You can ignore smudges since the true test is a preponderance of evident but unlike court you don’t have rules of evidence like a minimum number of matching features required for submission.
Also in post modern science you are allowed to adjust evidence. As noble as it may be to “improve” accuracy, claims of a “signature” need to be judged against a consistent reference.
Take Flint City water or any “contamination” issue where the “standard” was created or changed after the fact. Right now ~100 ppb Arsenic in rice is an issue even though Arsenic has always been in rice grown in paddies and there is zero evidence that Arsenic in rice has ever posed a health problem.
The press release doesn’t seem to capture the real point. The lead author wrote a blog post which explains things better.
The key thing to understand is that CO2’s effects are largely in the mid and upper-stratosphere, not in the lower stratosphere, where Ozone is the dominant factor. The cooling lower stratosphere since 1979 was partly due to CO2, but mostly Stratospheric Ozone depletion. With the Stratospheric Ozone plateau and slight recovery of the past decade or so the two factors are pushing in opposite directions, hence a “hiatus”.
Should note this is not a post-hoc explanation. Models were predicting a shift from negative to flat/slightly positive trends for the lower stratosphere at least over ten years ago, for well-understood reasons. See this presentaton from 2007, covering model runs made circa 2005, showing projected 2000-2050 trends at different atmospheric levels – Slides 19, 31 and 32 among others. For reference, satellite TLS centers just above the 100hPa mark.
Think I forgot the pdf presentation link: http://www.atm.damtp.cam.ac.uk/shuckburgh/AGU/pdf/cordero.pdf
CFC’s were replaced by HFC’s which are even leakier and are greenhouse gases of equal strength. Hence there was no effective reduction in greenhouse gases whatsoever. this is a well-known fact which is why HFC’s are mandated to be replaced asap; probably by high-pressure CO2. Hence there are good reasons to be sceptical about that excuse.
Paulskio
10 years ago was indeed post-hoc. They observed that it happened and produced several plausible reasons, not just one. But they predicted nothing and just ignored the implications that CO2 cooling was now inseparable from natural effects. Meanwhile others just ignored the pause altogether as a glitch that didn’t mean anything for the CO2 warming hypothesis. Well that is confirmation bias writ large – they just prefer not to see it that way.
Jas Garnier,
I said at least ten years ago. That’s as far back as I could find Ozone-inclusive model predictions for different atmospheric levels. I suspect it would have been predicted even earlier but can’t find any documents to confirm or refute.
In any case, there was no apparent lower stratospheric “hiatus” evident in the record at the time so there would have been no reason to come up with a post-hoc explanation. It’s only really become clear above the variability since about 2010.
Addendum:
Searching for earlier model predictions I found this, the first graphic reporting modelled vertical atmospheric temperature profiles for three different levels of CO2 concentration, from a 1967 paper. Again, TLS centers around 100mb level, and it can clearly be seen that the change there from 150ppm to 300 and 600ppm is very small compared to cooling in the mid and upper-Stratosphere.
So it can be seen that the predicted vertical profile effects of CO2 in the Stratosphere are basically the same now as they were fifty years ago.
The rate of change of CO2 is a proxy for temperature anomaly which confirms the “pause”, and matches the pre-update RSS version better.
http://woodfortrees.org/graph/esrl-co2/derivative/mean:12/scale:4.5/offset:-0.6/from:1979/plot/uah/plot/rss
Some Bad News from today’s NYTIMES (March 7, 2016)
“Facing a six-year barrage of increasingly large earthquakes, Oklahoma regulators are effectively ordering the state’s powerful oil-and-gas industry to substantially cut back the underground disposal of industry wastes that have caused the tremors across the state.”
______
Damn! First prices drop, now this. Why can’t people just replace their china with plastic dishes.
Good god, I knew it would come to this!
http://thepeoplescube.com/current-truth/anthrpogenic-continental-drift-an-incoherent-truth-t1668.html
New to me.
According to the JRA-55 reanalysis RSS was doing just fine (see fig. 14)
https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/jmsj/93/1/93_2015-001/_pdf
…To further evaluate the quality of surface air temperature of JRA-55, Fig. 34 compares global distributions of long-term temperature trends in HadCRUT4 (Morice et al. 2012, see also Section 2.2), ERA-40, JRA-55, and the NCEP/NCAR reanalysis for the period 1958 to 2001. The spatial distribution of the long-term temperature trend in JRA-55 seems to be the closest to HadCRUT4.
Olof R
I accept that RATPAC us a global dataset though it involves a process somewhat akin to homogenisation/kriging to get that coverage from 85 stations. But is it really representative of the global atmosphere?
Roger Andrews ina follow up article at Euern Mearns site points out that the rate of warming over land is twice that over the oceans.
http://euanmearns.com/surface-versus-satellite-the-temperature-data-set-controversy/#more-12364
He gives these details and graphic:
“We begin with HadCRUT4. HadCRUT4 supposedly measures the Earth’s “surface temperature”, but the two surfaces at which it measures temperatures are quite different. About 30% of HadCRUT4 comes from surface air temperatures measured a nominal 5ft above the land surface (CRUTEM4) and the remaining 70% from sea water temperatures measured anywhere from a foot to maybe 50 ft below the sea surface (HadSST3), and as one might expect temperature trends in these two contrasting environments are quite different (Figure 2). Trend line gradients in fact show the global land warming by over twice as much as the global oceans (0.97°C vs 0.44°C since 1979)”:
http://s27.postimg.org/b4n4mdz03/temp.png
Figure 2: CRUTEM4 “land” vs. HaSST3 “ocean”
Given that the ocean surface is around 70% of the globe yet RATPAC only has on my count 18 out of 85 stations over oceans (21%) would you expect UAH or RSS with near total global coverage to show the same trend as RATPAC? Mears apparently did not think so as he did not use RATPAC in his evaluation referred to previously.
Sorry that I do not have success in posting graphics at this site.
Peterazlac,
Strange, when I go through the station inventory of Ratpac I find that less than 20 stations are continental, ie far from coasts/ no maritime influence. There might be fewer stations out in the open sea, but hopefully they are weighted more heavily. The Gistemp dTs is an index that tries to estimate the global 2 m temp, based on meteorological stations only. The extrapolation is stretched thin over oceans of course, but it is not that bad.
In the following figure I have masked Sea and Land of Gistemp dTs, and also pure SST, and compared those three with corresponding all-model average:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B_dL1shkWewaeEc0MVdSZTFLX1k/view?usp=docslist_api
Quite good fit for all of them. By coincidence a mixed globalindex (71% SST and 29% land 2m) follows 2 m temp over sea very well, that is true for both observations and models. I have and old graph here, demonstrating that (bad choice of coulors, but it is the yellow and dark line that virtually overlap):
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B_dL1shkWewabVZ4dzR4cEE4Uk0/view?usp=docslist_api
Long story, but I think that my point was that an index based on coastal and Island stations only, may give a fair representation of the whole world, at least for surface temps..
Could you take coastal/island stations and extract corresponding gridpoints from model output and then compare the two? Or, more interestingly, you could pull out those gridpoints and then run them through GISTEMP, BEST, TempLS, etc and see how close they are to a “meteorological-only” version of those indexes.
The point is, is that there is a definite discontinuity around the time of the NOAA14 to 15 change-over in the RSS 3.3 vs RATPAC comparison.
Something happened at that time and it surely wasn’t that the 85 sonde stations were putting up duff instruments.
https://tamino.files.wordpress.com/2015/12/compare_all.jpeg
https://tamino.files.wordpress.com/2015/12/diff.jpeg
RSS has posted some comments on the new data sets and responded to recent discussion on some issues examined above.
http://www.remss.com/blog/RSS-TMT-updated
Page begins…
This change to the RSS air temperature TMT product represents a major upgrade. There are 4 important changes to the methods used to construct the dataset.
1. The method used to make adjustments for drifting satellite measurement time was changed. In the new method, the model based diurnal cycle climatology used for these adjustments was optimized so that it more accurately removes intersatellite differences due to drifting local measurement times. This is the most important change, and leads to substantially more warming during the 1999-2005 period when the NOAA-15 satellite was drifting rapidly.
2. Intersatellite offsets are now calculated separately for land and ocean scenes. This prevents errors in the much larger land measurement time adjustments from adversely affecting ocean measurements, where the adjustments for measurement time are much smaller.
3. More fields of view are now included in the dataset. This serves to reduce spatial noise due to gaps between the satellite swaths.
4. Two new satellites, NOAA-19 and METOP-B have been added to the dataset.
Since the paper describing this V4.0 upgrade appeared online, we have received a number of questions concerning its contents. Below is an attempt to answer some of these questions, and to provide some details about the upgrade for users that do not have access to the early online release. (The paper will be open access once it is officially published by the Journal of Climate).
They also discuss NOAA-14/15 challenges.
http://www.remss.com/blog/RSS-TMT-updated
Reblogged this on I Didn't Ask To Be a Blog.
think i would prefer satellite data for Africa- one fifth of the world’s land mass- than estimated temp data that can just be made up-
WMO – “Because the data with respect to in-situ surface air temperature across Africa is sparse, a one year regional assessment for Africa could not be based on any of the three standard global surface air temperature data sets from NOAANCDC, NASA-GISS or HadCRUT4 Instead, the combination of the Global Historical Climatology
Network and the Climate Anomaly Monitoring System (CAMS GHCN) by NOAA’s Earth System Research Laboratory was used to estimate surface air temperature patterns”
Reblogged this on Climate Collections.