Category Archives: Data and observations

Back to the Greenhouse Future

by Judith Curry

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

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Three new papers on interpreting temperature trends

by Judith Curry

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

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Causes(?) of ocean warming

by Judith Curry

Yesterday, I started writing a post on air/sea fluxes.  A new paper just published in Nature Climate Change  changed my mind about what I want to write about.

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On the adjustments to the HadSST3 data set

by Greg Goodman

**UPDATE at end of thread**

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

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New version of the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature data set

by Steve Mosher and Zeke Hausfather

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

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Assessing climate data record transparency and maturity

by Judith Curry

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

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Missing(?) heat isn’t missing after all

by Judith Curry

Earth’s “missing heat” might not be missing after all.

That’s the conclusion of a new study that examines how accurately satellites and floating ocean instruments track the flow of energy from the sun to Earth and back again.

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The long, slow thaw?

by Tony Brown

A warming trend can be observed from 1659, the start date of Central England Temperature  (CET)- the oldest instrumental record in the world- to today.  It would be a notable coincidence if the warming started at the exact point that this record began. The purpose of this paper is to reconstruct CET from its current start point, through the use of diverse historical records, to 1538, in order to see if the commencement of this centuries long warming trend can be identified from within this time frame.

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Ludecke et al. respond: Part II

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

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

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Two new papers vs. BEST

Guest Post by Lüdecke, Link, and Ewert

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

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Harmony of the climate: isolating the oscillations in many climate data sets

by Vaughan Pratt

Paul Clark, the developer of the immensely useful WoodForTrees website that plots climate data, has kindly joined the discussion at Climate Etc., to clarify the meanings of ‘From:’, ‘To:’, and ‘Isolate’ which had been giving some people trouble. In this post I’d like to focus on the third of these, ‘Isolate’, whose utility may not have been fully appreciated.

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Pause (?)

by Judith Curry

Question of the week:

Has the rate of warming continued unabated, or has there been a  pause in the warming?

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Tropospheric and surface temperatures

by Donald Rapp

Santer et al. (2005) emphasized that “a robust feature” of climate models is that increasing greenhouse gas concentrations will amplify warming in the middle and upper tropical troposphere (compared to the surface). It was then with some consternation that they noted that the data do not support this prediction; indeed, surface warming typically exceeds tropospheric warming.

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Best of the BEST critiques

by Judith Curry

The new Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature product and the accompanying papers have generated considerable discussion.  Lets focus on the technical criticisms.

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Berkeley Surface Temperatures: Released

by Judith Curry

The new surface temperature dataset developed by the Berkeley group is now available, along with four manuscripts that have been submitted for publication.

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Does the Aliasing Beast Feed the Uncertainty Monster?

by Richard Saumarez

Many continuous signals are sampled so that they can be manipulated digitally.  We assume that the train of samples in the time domain gives a true picture of what the underlying signal is doing, but can we be sure that this is true and the signal isn’t doing something wildly different between samples?  Can we reconstruct the signal between samples and, more important, can we tell if the signal has been incorrectly sampled and is not a true representation of the signal?

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Trends in tropospheric humidity

by Garth Paltridge

It is difficult these days to get a paper published in a mainstream climate journal if it emphasises the uncertainty associated with some basic aspect of global warming.

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On torturing data

by Judith Curry

although very few researchers will go as far as to make up their own data, many will “torture the data until they confess”, and forget to mention that the results were obtained by torture….

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Cosmic ray discussion thread

by Judith Curry

The publication last week of results from the CERN CLOUD experiment on cosmic rays is generating significant buzz, with substantial debate on the implication of these results for climate change,

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reanalyses.org

by Judith Curry

How do you estimate the state of the global atmosphere and ocean when observational data sets are incomplete, imperfect and noisy?

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Critique of the HADSST3 uncertainty analysis

by Judith Curry

On the previous sea surface temperature thread, I stated “Do you for one minute believe that the uncertainty in global average sea surface temperature in the 19th century is 0.3C? I sure as heck don’t.” Sharper00 challenged me to further support this statement, which provides the motivation for this thread along with the recent release of the latest version of the Hadley Centre SST dataset (HADSST3).

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Unknown and uncertain sea surface temperatures

by Tony Brown

Over the years I have become intrigued at the manner in which historic surface temperature records- that were never intended to be more than a broad reflection of the micro climate around them- have been used as if they were highly accurate scientific data and subsequently used to inform policy. I have written two articles about their historic accuracy, both of which can be accessed through this link.

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Sea Level Hockey Stick

by Judith Curry

A new paper on sea level variations over the past two millennia is receiving substantial attention.

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Tropospheric Temperature Trends

by Judith Curry

A comprehensive history of the controversy surrounding tropospheric temperature trends has recently been published in WIRES Climate Change (h/t WUWT and Lorne LeClerc).

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Reactions to Muller’s Testimony

by Judith Curry

Last week, Richard Muller testified at the U.S. House of Representatives Hearing on Climate Change: Examining the Processes Used to Create Science and Policy [see here].

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