In which case the five year running average concept makes no sense to me. You are just throwing away real data. I should add that I discarded the noisy option. so all those folks who say that the 2008 plunge doesn’t mean anything are implying that the numbers aren’t real.

I believe they are real numbers for whatever algorithmic ritual Hansen’s team and UAH go through; same for RSS, and HADcrut; but with those very rapid changes, I think it is fair to say they are certainly not the average temperature of the earth’s surface, which simply cannot change that fast.

If they were truly the average temperature of the earth’s surface, then you would have to say that any of the values is a real number and if the 2008 plunge says the temperature went back to its 1900 or its 1850 value or whatever, that that is a real effect, and whatever happens next will start from the latest low temperature value; it isn’t going to somehow know what the five year or ten year or whatever longer filtering you want to do, and try and return to that, it is going to move continuously form wherever it is at right now.

So the 1998 el nino peak, was a real uptick in whatever those algorithms compute from whatever data they input; but I don’t believe that the average surface temperature of the globe did anything like that.

On any midsummer day (north) the local temperature on the globe could be anywhere from as low as -90C (Vostock station) to maybe +60 in a northern tropical desert (surface temps), and actually everywhere between those extremes somewhere on the earth (due to that marvellous argument in Galileo’s “Dialog on the Two World systems”.

You could sprinkle thermometers around your house; in the freezer, and the oven, the attic, the TV set etc, and daily calculate your own house global temperature. Well you’d get some occasional “heat island phenomena, if your wife is baking a cake (or you are) when it is time to read the thermometers; but it will all average out over time. Of Course it won’t mean anything, because all of those locations have different thermal processes going on, that don’t simply relate to the local temperature; so averaging them makes no sense at all; they are supposed to be different.

Same goes for GISStemp of course; it doesn’t mean anything either, except with relation to all the previous GISStemp calculations, and all those yet to come. But it keeps a lot of scientists busy all round the world tending that thermometer in their local bat box or barn owl box.

George E. Smith:

Looks like enough material for a post to me. I was 4.0 in this data comm/transmission stuff and can say your analysis more than refreshed. ”

Thanks for the ratification Gary.

I don’t know beans about why the US climate is the way it is, and Africa’s the way it is; so I rely on the real Climatologists, like Singer, Lintzen, Spencer Christie et al; but when it comes to are we warming up or cooling down planet wise, and who’s in control of that; my thermodynamics, optics, and other aspects of Physics/Math incuding sampled data sytem theory are more than sufficient for me to comment intelligently (most of the time); and like a lot of other scientists, I take umbrage at these newspape “Science writers” who think that you can’t contribute if you don’t have a PhD in “Climate Science” (whatever that is). They don’t understand that basic physical principles operate in diverse fields from astronomy to semiconductors or particle physics. I could get a PhD in Ice cream making, but it never seemed useful to any of my employers; in some fields it’s mandatory .

All I care about is that they get the science correct, and nobody seems to mention that the whole of future energy policy the way things are going is predicated on the erroneous belief that CO2 is the devil incarnate. If that is not true; and I firmly believe it is not true, then suddenly the USA has more stored chemical energy than anybody else; if we just want to go get it. (responsibly of course).

The interesting thing about this ice business, is that the first polar orbit satellites went up circa 1979 to give us our first real look at polar ice extent. And it was that 1975/6 period, when the earlier fears of a coming ice age were rampant. so those early 1979 looks at the Arctic sea ice saw that ice at its most advanced stage in recent years, so everybody compares the 2007 meltback with not the normal ice, but the most advanced ice since the IGY in 1957/8.

But it is nice to see that all the Kayak adventure expeditions to the North Pole; had to be scrapped this year. I hate to wish a deep freeze on everybody, but taking a leaf out of James Hansen’s book, if that is what it takes to wake people up to the global warming scam; and get things back on a scientific footign then so be it.

George

No, it won’t. As corporate and private grant money dries up due to the economic crisis, the shrill cries of impending doom will become louder, more frequent, and more scary. Only the most critical-sounding scenarios will continue to get funding.

Looks like enough material for a post to me. I was 4.0 in this data comm/transmission stuff and can say your analysis more than refreshed.

Nyquist says you can completely reconstruct a continuous function f(x), if and only if f(x) is a “bandlimited” function, and you sample f(x) at a rate at least twice the maximum frequency present in the band limited signal. So if the bandlimited signal contains no signals at any frequency greater than (B), then sampling at a rate of 2B is sufficient to enable complete reconstruction of the original continuous function f(x) from the samples.
If however your signal contains a component with a frequency that is B+b; and you sample that at a rate 2B, then the reconstructed function will contain a spurious signal at a frequency of B-b ; and that signal is now inside the pass band of your desired signal strethcing from zero to frequency B; so no amount of filtering can remove the erroneous “noise”. this “Aliassing noise” will prevent you from accurately reconstructing the original continuous function f(x).
Note that if you violate the Nyquist criterion by a factor of two, so your signal contains components at 2B frequency, the same as your sample rate, you now get aliassing noise at a frequency of B-B, whcih is zero frequency, and is a polite name for the average value of the continuous function f(x).

So now you have the essence of the problem with GISS or anyone else. They don’t read their thermometer once a second or anything like it; maybe max and min for the day which is twice a day, and you can easily show that is not often enough to avoid aliassing of the temporal variable. then the temperature changes much faster spatially than the gaps between these owl boxes, so in temrs of the spatial variable of the continuous function F(s,t), you have gross violation of both the spatial and temporal Nyquist criteria, and there is no way to reconstruct that function so that you can properly determine even the average value.

What GISS gives you or anybody else is the numerical result of performing some algorithm on some set of raw data, and comparing the result with the result of the same process performed at some other time; like last year, on presumably the data from the same ssytem, that was apporpriate for last year. So you have a number, which is meaningless except in the concept of the previous computations of the same number using the same algorithm; which also don’t mean anything; let alone the mean surface temperature of the earth.
I have to go and eat, so I’ll tell you tomorrow, why the number doesn’t mean anything, even if you measure it correctly (which you can’t).

You’re right – I haven’t read the book, I only have what the press put out, and some info from my own “unidentified highly placed sources”. Therefore I only have part of the story.

The issue that makes me angry is after causing the “event” NASA hasn’t removed the cause, simple arrogance – “We’re the rocket scientists – and you’re not”. This CO2 caused global warming fiasco, at least NASA’s part in it, stems from the same mindset that sent the Challenger to it’s doom, and brought the Columbia to it’s firey end.

Sadly the NASA noise is drowning out legitimate voices doing good science that presently are on both sides of the fence.

The UN’s issue, I think stems from an entirely different mindset altogether.

Just maybe those who are saying the economic downturn will “help the environment” are correct. By slowing some of the overblown and downright dangerous fooling with the climate, the ol’ mudball might just be able to prove it’s in control, not NASA, not the UN, and certainly not us’ns.

<They’ll probably have to hide all the Antarctic ice now as well…

Since you refer specifically to the Antarctic, I wonder why you didn’t link to the Southern Hemisphere charts.

http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/current.365.south.jpg
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/current.area.south.jpg
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/current.anom.south.jpg

Yessir, mighty impressive trends there!

She then added that this might take 3000 years!! to occur.

http://global-warming.accuweather.com/2008/10/drastic_action_now_needed_with.html#comments

Strange that Hansen talks about centuries for this to happen – but I suppose 3000 years are only 30 centuries

You didn’t read the book on Challenger that I did. I’ve lost it and can’t even remember the title, but based on what I read Dr. Fletcher, the head of NASA at the time, should have at least been charged with lying to congress about the shuttle when it was proposed and should have be charged with negligent homicide for shuttle design and construction.

http://solarcycle24com.proboards106.com/index.cgi?board=globalwarming&action=display&thread=12&page=13#2373

Graph link:
http://www.ijis.iarc.uaf.edu/seaice/extent/AMSRE_Sea_Ice_Extent.png

It seems like the ice extent may reach a 7 year record any month if the global temperature stays low, at average 1980th temperatures. But 7 year record is only like …7 years ago and far below ice extent average since 1979, but the trend may be broken!

On the other hand, let’s not forget what August was, a mean of means of means of means of derived sampled global readings, and it only changed .11 Folks, we’re only talking about .11 And then we can ask the question; what type of margin of error does each month have?

More than .11 I’d guess.

But what about the trend? Well. I have a chart from 1945 up here, where I removed the persisting +.2 from 1959-present and another +.2 from 1992-present. So indeed, we have seen the anomaly sitting on a .4 platform for the last half “real climate” period of 30 years.

Rejoice!