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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Brumar89 who wrote (914966)

1/17/2016 10:03:56 AM

From: Wharf Rat

Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 1574854

You (and Watts and Goddard) are trying to keep the con going. It's not working.

Anthony Watts heroically defends cool satellites

Sou | 3:48 PM

Not long ago I wrote about how the satellite lower troposphere data diverged from the surface temperature trends some time earlier this century. I put it around 2006, just going by the charts. Tamino took a different approach and compared satellite data with that from thermometers on balloons (which I missed at the time, I'm embarrassed to say). It used to be just RSS that was the outlier, now with the latest UAH beta, both are.

There have been recent papers on the subject as well (see below), but so far the satellite researchers have not identified what is the cause (or not to my knowledge, yet).

This is not cool
Now Yale Climate Connections has posted a YouTube video by Peter Sinclair of Climate Crocks, called as part of the "This is Not Cool" series. (H/t metzomagic)

Anthony Watts has discovered the video and wrote an article about it (archived here, with latest, and cached here). He doesn't seem to have disputed what anyone said in the video, except for his misleading headline (which didn't really reflect what was in the video). His headline was: The Climateers new pause excuse born of desperation: ‘the satellites are lying’. Anthony lied. Nowhere in the video did anyone accuse the satellites of lying. Nor did they accuse any of the scientists of lying with the satellite data.

Then he wrote an ad hominem comment from one of his readers ( Serengeti-style) followed by five photos of poorly sited US weather stations (of the thousands of weather stations in the USA), and wrote:

Riiight. Because we all know how reliable their preferred surface temperature measurements are, as illustrated by these examples from NOAA’s USHCN climate monitoring network:Why didn't he put up any photos of defunct satellites or satellites with a decaying orbit? You ask. A very good question, I say.

In any case, since no-one has found any significant problems with the US temperature record, and refinement of the global surface temperature records are an ongoing process, one wonders why he said that. (Anthony has said he has a new paper in the works that shows something or the other, but his claims so far don't seem to be reflected in what little he has revealed about his work. We'll have to wait for his paper, if it ever sees the light of day.)

Then, somewhat surprisingly, for the remainder of his article Anthony posted some of the transcript, including the segment with Carl Mears of RSS. What Dr Mears is saying is that deniers only want to pick the temperature set that has the smallest trend. What they should be doing is looking at all the temperature data, on the surface as well as up in the air, and they should also take account of other signs of global warming such as:

melting ice
earlier spring
rising sea levels
increasing ocean heat content.

Figure 1 | Arctic sea ice minimum, sea level trends and ocean heat content. Data sources: NOAA, NSIDC, U Colorado,

And it's not just temperature changes. As Dr Ben Santer said, scientists are also looking at other changes in the climate, such as rainfall, surface humidity, the cryosphere, snow cover and more. He explained that "all of this is telling an internally consistent story. And that story is that the planet is warming, and despite our best attempts to see whether natural causes can explain that warming, they can't."

Anthony followed up his article about the video with what he called a "funny" (archived here). It was a cartoon depicting someone rejecting the satellite data as biased. He wrote:
And it seems so true, these folks keep holding on to an antiquated and highly corrected and adjusted metric (the surface temperature record) which is full of bad data, while at the same time saying essentially the same thing about the satellite record. It is the ultimate science based case of the pot calling the kettle black.I don't know of anyone calling automatic weather stations "antiquated". Nor do I know of anyone calling satellites "antiquated", except perhaps for the ones that are no longer in operation. However it's quite telling that he seems to think that the satellite record is "full of bad data" (pots and kettles are both black).

All the data is corrected and adjusted - both satellite data and weather station data. It has to be or there'd be no way of estimating global surface temperature or air temperature. Temperature data for surface records are derived from thermometers. That is, the instruments measure temperature directly, so fewer adjustments are required. By contrast (sorry for the pun), temperature data for air records are derived from measures of brightness, which then have to be converted into temperature estimates after lots of adjustments.

Comparing UAH lower troposphere with GISTemp surface temperature
Below are some comparisons. First, UAH version 5.6 and 6.0 beta 4. The new version is closer to RSS but is lower than version 5.6 in recent years.

Figure 2 | Lower troposphere temperature - UAH versions. Data source: UAH

Next UAH beta version with GISTemp - global. You can clearly see that it diverges in the early 2000s.

Figure 3 | Lower troposphere and surface temperature - global. Data sources: UAH and GISS NASA

Next a comparison of the northern hemisphere only. This time the divergence is even more marked, at around 2000/01. (The hemispheric GISTemp record is only available to 2014 at this time):

Figure 4 | Lower troposphere and surface temperature - Northern Hemisphere. Data sources: UAH and GISS NASA

Now the southern hemisphere. In this case UAH is a tad higher than GISTemp:

Figure 5 | Lower troposphere and surface temperature - Southern Hemisphere. Data sources: UAH and GISS NASA

So I'd first look at the northern hemisphere to see if the divergence between the lower troposphere and the surface was real or was because of something odd in the satellite data. The difference could be real, the air above doesn't necessarily have to follow the exact same trend as the surface at the same time. Still, it's odd that it's only diverged in recent years, particularly in the northern hemisphere.

Update: I nearly forgot to add this readme file to the article. It documents changes to the UAH datasets from 1999 up until March 2015 (just before version 6 beta was released).

blog.hotwhopper.com

To: Brumar89 who wrote (914966)	1/17/2016 10:06:24 AM
From: Wharf Rat	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1574854

Did yiou expect these adjustments? This documents changes to the UAH datasets from 1999 up until March 2015 (just before version 6 beta was released). Update 4 Mar 2015*********************** Version 6 is still under construction but considerable progress has been made. We are seeing consistent results as we refine the adjustment method to be as straightforward as possible. The trend in TMT will likely increase from its current value (+0.054 C/decade) while the trend in TLT will likely decrease from its current value (+0.138 C/decade). The correction for NOAA-15 makes a noticeable difference for TLT by removing some spurious warming. http://vortex.nsstc.uah.edu/data/msu/t2lt/readme.04Mar2015