To: Brumar89 who wrote (764188 ) 1/17/2014 12:02:28 AM From: Wharf Rat Read Replies (1) | Respond to Oh, yeah... it's a new year. 2012 was the record by a degree.2012 broke the record for the hottest average annual surface temperature for the contiguous United States by a wide margin – a full degree Fahrenheit (Figure 1). Given that this is a very inconvenient fact for certain groups, we should perhaps not be surprised that the NCDC has come under attack for reporting this year's record.Fox News ran a story quoting Roy Spencer (a contrarian climate scientist at the University of Alabama at Huntsville [UAH]), Anthony Watts (a blogger and broadcast meteorologist), and Steven Goddard (a pseudonym for a climate blogger who goes to the extreme in denying human-caused global warming), all of whom directly or indirectly accused the NCDC of somehow fudging the data to introduce a false warming trend and make 2012 the record hottest year. 2012 is the hottest year on record for the USA in Spencer's own UAH lower atmosphere temperature dataset , and yet just a week after this announcement he accused NCDC of improper adjustments when their results matched his own. Without those adjustments, the NCDC record would not match Spencer's UAH dataset nearly as closely. The UAH continental USA warming trend from 1979 to 2012 is 0.24°C per decade, while the trend in maximum daily unadjusted NCDC data over the same timeframe is just 0.11°C per decade. Once the adjustments Spencer criticizes are implemented, the NCDC trend becomes much closer to the UAH trend, at 0.21°C per decade (Figure 1).Figure 1: UAH continental USA lower troposphere temperature product (version 5.5; blue) vs. NCDC continental USA maximum daily surface temperature unadjusted (black) and adjusted (version 2.5; red), with linear trends from 1979 to 2012 (dashed). http://www.skepticalscience.com/2012-us-temp-record-fox-denial.html
