The Temperature claims of 2010

Meanwhile scientists have proved that feeling warmer makes you more likely to believe in AGW
http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-02-people-global.html

No, 2010 wasn’t even really close to the hottest. But the precipitation bouncing from wet to very dry was difficult for crops.
World food prices reach new record
http://www.france24.com/en/20110203-world-food-prices-reach-new-record

OUCH !!!!
Way to many numbers for me to follow/keep track of !!
This is what I come away with:
“These five temperature databases I examine give the monthly temperature to thousandths of a degree which is superfluous. When rounded up to a more physically sensible 0.1 deg almost all of the differences between the years of the past decade go away, …..”
Not to mention whatever superfluous adjustments are made !!!
Good post !!

Well you have to distinguish between “feeling warm” and “being warm” as in a higher temperature range.
So you’ve had a nice hot day (locally) and plenty of sun, and a good bit of humifity, and around sundown clouds start to condense at higher altitudes; and you have a nice balmy night.
So you do your morning calisthenics, and then set off to work. The sun has just risen over the horizon, and already you feel overly warm. But what does the Thermometer say; is it really warm, or do you just feel warm.
When the humidity is up, you are going to feel warm regardless of whether the temperature is high or not. You body is trying to get rid of excess heat after your big breakfast and quick workout; but because of the humidity, your evaporative cooling system just doesn’t work.
The subjective feeling of warmth, is no indication of increased temperatures. It is almost a certainty that the early morning Temperature is well down from what it was the night before at sundown, yet you still think it is hot.

How would yearly temp data compare if one used data from Oct 1 to Sept 30?

I have no idea (except for political ideologies and scientific grants) why we should be worried about warming temperatures anyway. As any farmer and fisherman can tell you, warmer weather and higher CO2 has given us far more benefits over the last 12 years with regards to improved yields and quality of primary produce.
Our quality of life is also much better when it is warmer, which is why there are so many ‘grey nomads’ traveling the north in OZ during winter, and people moving to Queensland. Even Florida and Spain where Northern Hemisphere nomads retire, seem much too cold the last couple of winters.
I live in the tropics, and the warmer weather (resulting from warmer East Indian Ocean temps) has been a huge benefit, with many more ‘good’ wet seasons than the past, despite little change in long term temperature averages.

There is an old saying that if you have a clock, you can tell what time it is. If you have two clocks, you’re not really sure of the time. With five or six clocks (or thermometers) you are even less sure of the time (or temperature.)
So, the holders of multiple measurement devices tend to drift off and allow their biases to govern their opinion of actual values.
Dr. Whitehouse has come closest I’ve seen to coming up with probable actuals.

The whole notion of “warmest year” strikes me as irrelevant. Somebody didn’t suddenly turn up the furnace (sun) so if the insolation didn’t change the temperature increase that was seen in the atmosphere and the sea surface came from the oceanic heat sink. At the end of the year if the temperature was lower then the heat went “somewhere” and there are only two places it could go: radiated away or reabsorbed into the oceanic heat sink. Hence the real question is what was the total heat content of the atmosphere/aquasphere at the beginning of the year and what was it at the end. If it was equal to or less than the heat at the beginning then the temps in between are irrelevant. All that would have been measured by temperature is “noise” with heat being transferred from one sink in the system to another or radiated away.

to thousandths of a degree which is superfluous. When rounded up to a more physically sensible 0.1 deg
If you round everything up from top to bottom in the process you can make several years ‘hottest ever’. Or, if you start with few rounding ups and incrementally add more rounding ups year by year you can, conceivably, create continual warming. If you are an environmental activist with access to the data it is possible you would do this.

This is what “skeptics” look like when they are desperate. The world is warming. The past decade was the hotted on record. 2010 was, on average, tied with 2005 as the warmest year on record. DW’s bizarre data twisting is irrelevant, although he may well be able to start a new career as a contortionist.

Charles S. Opalek, PE says:
February 3, 2011 at 4:50 pm
Why is it big news that today’s temperatures are a few hundreths or tenths of a degree warmer than last year or last decade
================================================
Charles, odds are that today’s temperatures are colder….
Facts are:
Old glass thermometers can account for all of the recorded warming – glass shrinks
UHI is adjusted up, not down
Stations have been dropped
Past historical temps have been adjusted down
Recent temperatures have been adjusted up
With all that adjusting, and still admitting temps have flat lined, actually decreased, in over a decade…
….odds are that temps have actually gone down

Oh I forgot 1659 was during the “little Ice Age”

Sunspot cycle undercutting the Dalton Minimum but no word from the news media or government at all about it. Why? Because if it gets out, they lose money and the global warming debacle is done. If the sun doesn’t come to life soon we could very well be heading into another little ice age over the next 50 or so years.

It would be more useful to know what the energy budget was over those 13 years. Did the planet gain or lose net energy?

We will see what comes of crops around the globe. Maybe a better measure of climate than the constant minipulation of data crunching statistical bias.

George E. Smith said
“…When the humidity is up, you are going to feel warm regardless of whether the temperature is high or not. You body is trying to get rid of excess heat after your big breakfast and quick workout; but because of the humidity, your evaporative cooling system just doesn’t work.
The subjective feeling of warmth, is no indication of increased temperatures. It is almost a certainty that the early morning Temperature is well down from what it was the night before at sundown, yet you still think it is hot.”
———————————–
Without disagreeing with the general thrust of your comment, I would take issue with your observation that high humidity will make you feel warmer in all circumstances.
Perspiration is obviously a cooling mechanism, but it doesn’t occur until it’s necessary.
It may be that living in California has spoiled you (you do, don’t you?) but since we only have Global Warming and not, regrettaby, Canadian Warming, many of us have to rely on vigourous activity to induce sweating.
Below the perspiration threshold ( a lamentably protracted period in these climes) all we need to do to avoid overheating is step outside, remove one layer of down-filled clothing or dilate the blood vessels close to the surface of our skin. The efficacy of this last measure is greatly enhanced with the ingestion of ethanol.
It’s my contention that we humans are not immediately sensitive to atmospheric humidity, although, with prolonged exposure to very dry air, mucous membrane of lips and nose may feel effects.
We don’t have nerve endings that can differentiate one atmospheric gas from another, and even liquid water at the same temperature as our skin is only detected as mild pressure.
It’s common to hear people declare, as they step into a toasty, wood-heated house from outside conditions of 5C and 90% humidity, how humid it is inside, because their glasses fog up.

Paul Martin Feb 3rd 5:12pm-
“I wonder if this Dr David Whitehouse is the noted astronomer and former BBC science correspondent.”
Yes he is. From the GWPF Academic Advisory Council webpage –
Dr David Whitehouse
David Whitehouse, who has a doctorate in astrophysics, was successively BBC Science Correspondent and Science Editor BBC News Online. He is the author of a number of books on solar system astronomy and the history of astronomy.

The public doesn’t understand data sets, but quickly figures out how many times the driveway fills with snow.
Our blue-bird winters in SWFL have turned to overcast fog, near everyday … the Gulf is below normal.

Yes this is the Dr David Whitehouse, science PhD, who used to be the BBC science correspondent in the days when it mattered that science correspondents knew something about science.
Nowadays the BBC no longer regards this as important – Roger Harrabin’s degree was in English and David Shukman’s was in Geography. But they both believe in global warming, and that’s what matters.

The warmest year on record thing gets two reactions out of me.
1. Well, its been warming up for several centuries now, its SUPPOSED to be the warmest. Unless of course the warming has ceased and we’re at a peak which would be signified by a decade or so of flat temps followed by… an ice age! panic! panic! Its the 1970’s again!
2. Its the warmest by how much? Let’s scale that down to something humans can relate to. Let’s say it is late spring and the warmest day got to a high of 20 degrees. Then the next day it was even warmer, 20.1 degrees. And the day after that, even WARMER, 20.13 degrees. OH MY GOSH! And then the next day… 20.134 degrees, catastrophe! Warmest day so far by 00.004 degrees! Can’t you people see what’s happening here? Are you stupid? Don’t you know what all those decimal places MEAN? We might be at FOUR decimal places in just one more day! Yes! We could hit 20.1344 degrees within the next 24 hours! Do we have to get to FIVE decimal places before you oil company bought propogandists with all your error bars and statistics and demands for actual measurements and actual science finaly get the message? Have you not seen what is happening to the decimal places? They are increasing by one a day! We’re all gonna die! The death rate could very well hit 1.000000 per person! Why can you morons not see what is happening here? Decimal places ARE science you blithering idiots!
sarc/off
OK, I feel much better now.

“Finally, the temperature anomalies for the past 13 years”
should be like this after rounding:
Year–Met Office Hadcrut– CRUHadcrut– CRUTem–Giss– NOAA.
2010–0.5–0.5–0.7–0.6–0.6.
2009–0.4–0.4–0.6–0.6–0.6.
2008–0.3–0.3–0.5–0.4–0.5.
2007–0.4–0.4–0.7–0.6–0.6.
2006–0.4–0.4–0.7–0.6–0.6.
2005–0.4–0.5–0.8–0.6–0.6.
2004–0.4–0.4–0.6–0.5–0.5.
2003–0.5–0.5–0.6–0.6–0.6.
2002–0.5–0.5–0.7–0.6–0.6.
2001–0.4–0.4–0.5–0.5–0.5.
2000–0.2–0.3–0.4–0.3–0.4.
1999–0.3–0.3–0.5–0.3–0.4.
1998–0.5–0.5–0.8–0.6–0.6.
Do these numbers say there has been no global warming since 1998?
Note some unusual higher values (e.g., 0.7 and 0.8) under CRUTem.

My own view is that any slight warming stopped after 1998 and that the plateau in temperatures that followed are a sign of a swing in climate regime which will result in a cooling world for the next 30y or so.
The coincidence of this climate oscillation with a very quiet sun makes me worry that we are heading towards another LIA. Should temperature drop a couple of degrees Celsius the NH won’t be a nice place to be! Hope I’m wrong…

The bottom line is that the IPCC cabal cannot prove its AGW hypothesis because it is not being tested for faults. The modelling parameters increasingly look like something Goebbels would endorse. The question marks keep stacking up. The cabal believes it is not necessary to address the lack of public confidence in its hypothesis. So Jones, Hansen and co keep “adjusting” the data. How much longer before the science community starts demanding the restoration of its credibility, as the climate science fiasco is affecting trust in the other disciplines. The sceptics would go away if the hypothesis could be proven.

It is simply an attempt at deception to speak of ‘record temperatures’ in the hope and expectation than most people will take that to mean that science does not know of a hotter time in human history. Fossil records, ice records and the sediment records are no less sources of knowledge than thermometers.
Shame on those that practice such deception.

Sharperoo,
Your analysis only holds up if you accept the homogenization that NOAA, HadCrut, and GISS use in their temperature databases. Past temps consistently get adjusted downward, while temps in recent years get adjusted upward.
In any event,even HadCrut shows little if any warming since 1998.

It is an excellent, cool, rational and clear analysis by Dr Whitehouse.
Yes he is the former BBC Science correspondent and noted astronomer and writer.
He was the best BBC Science reported they ever had because he knew what he was talking about, unlike the bluff of Harrabin and Shukman.
I head, on good authority, that he was ‘creatively dismissed’ from the BBC when radio and TV news merged a while back, because his scientific analysis of news was different from his then TV counterpart with whom he was expected to work.
Instead of asking the TV science correspondent to ‘step up’ and match the quality, output, and scientific knowledge of Dr Whitehouse, BBC management decided (in a move worthy of the Soviet Union) to sack the better guy and keep the poorer one as the TV guy was too close to retirement to choose. In fact he did retire a few months after Dr Whitehouse left.
That’s what I heard from a friend in the BBC. I wonder if the truth will ever come out.

Thousandths of a degree? I can’t quite manage those on my thermometer. I can make a pretty fair guess at halves.

Oops. I see that robert alredy drew attention to Cooks analysis.
Bears repeating though.

robert and Philip Shehan – if you look at closely at Cook’s graph, you will see that if the temperature time series had ended at 1945, it would have looked like “temperatures were not only increasing, but that the rate was also increasing” – all without the help of CO2. The reason Cook is even able to drag his “fitted curve” flatter for longer before exponentially increasing is because of that flat period between 1945 and 1980. However, the observed temperature profile could be explained without CO2: urban warming from 1910 to 1945, “apparent cooling” from 1945 to 1980 because stations moved from cities (urban) to airports (rural), and then urban warming again as development occurred around the airports.

About this temperature anomaly:
Just went outside, and I couldn’t tell if it was 39 or 39.1 degrees.
I doubt if any human could tell the difference in the tenths of a degree they tell us the temp has gone up.
And, on another post, Robert says “With all due respect Smokey you couldn’t be more incorrect. Mann’s 1998 and 1999 data are on NOAA’s paleoclimate data website (easily found) as well as the majority of the other reconstructions. His methodologies are well known and have been emulated in the literature multiple times. His code for matlab is also readily available. This idea that this stuff is not available right now is an outright distortion of the truth. That graph is over 10 years old. A whole decade has passed and better reconstructions have come about (Moburg et al 2005, Mann et al. 2008 …etc…) please stop rehashing old arguments.”
Yet when you ask people if Mann’s use of the Tiljander proxies was correct (knowing there was recent contamination, and using them upside down), they suddenly become very quiet…

henrythethird says:
February 5, 2011 at 12:50 am
Just went outside, and I couldn’t tell if it was 39 or 39.1 degrees.
I doubt if any human could tell the difference in the tenths of a degree they tell us the temp has gone up.
Really you can’t tell? That’s interesting. A little about my. I am an Inuit from Northern Canada. We can tell pretty well. Where I am originally from was over 3 standard deviations outside of the mean this year. Baffin Bay had winter temperatures over 10 degrees above normal. You wanna know where we notice it? Our lifestyles. Can’t travel on sea ice or the lake ice like we used to even 10 years ago.
Pertaining to the Tiljander proxy. It makes no large difference in the reconstruction, you can check his supplementary material for evidence of this if you like? You wanna make claims that aren’t supportable, go right ahead. Note Kaufmann also used it wrong but when he fixed it, it didn’t make any difference in his overall reconstruction…

From Philip Shehan on February 5, 2011 at 5:55 am:

The CO2 signal did not arise out of the “natural” variations until the 80′s. Climatologists have been able to account for the ups and downs with purely natural factors up until that point. After the 80′s they find they cannot account for the observed temperature rises without including the effect of increasing atmospheric CO2 concentration.
One of the main natural factors is solar radiation, and the following graph (from Cook again) shows how the observed temperatures matched pretty well with solar out putuntil the 80′s and then solar activity dropped but temperatures kept rising.

This is fascinating. So in a time of a warm Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO), which lasted from 1977 to (at least) 1998 (Ref. 1, general PDO info), with dropping solar activity, the CO2 signal arose out of the noise (“natural” variability). Such variability would (should?) also include the 1998 Super El Nino, and its impressive rise in global average temperatures (see first graph, Ref.2 ). This would indicate the CO2 signal is very strong indeed.
The CO2 atmospheric concentrations continued to rise.
Now the PDO is in a cool phase. More in-depth and recent info at Ref. 3 places the shift to cool phase at 2008. [Note: At the first graph at Ref.3, “PDO Index 1900 – September 2008,” you can see the short drop starting around 1998, which is apparently related to the Ref.1 speculation of the warm phase extending to “(at least) 1998.”] The esteemed Prof. Phil Jones of UEA-CRU confirmed there was a cooling trend from 2002 to 2009 (eight years) although not statistically-significant, apparently due to the short period. In the article above we can see how 2010 fared, also discussed elsewhere on WUWT, as well as the dropping of ocean heat content. As found at Ref. 3 and mentioned elsewhere, with the shift we have about 25 to 30 years of cooling global temperatures coming.
At Ref. 3 in the “PDO Links to Climatic Effects” section is found the abstract (and paywall link) to: Tropical Pacific Decadal Variability and Global Warming (Amy J. Bratcher & Benjamin S. Giese, Department of Oceanography, Texas A&M University, Geophysical Research Letters, 29(19), 2002):

An analysis of ocean surface temperature records show that low frequency changes of tropical Pacific temperature lead global surface air temperature changes by about 4 years. Anomalies of tropical Pacific surface temperature are in turn preceded by subsurface temperature anomalies in the southern tropical Pacific by approximately 7 years. The results suggest that much of the decade to decade variations in global air temperature may be attributed to tropical Pacific decadal variability. The results also suggest that subsurface temperature anomalies in the southern tropical Pacific can be used as a predictor for decadal variations of global surface air temperature. Since the southern tropical Pacific temperature shows a distinct cooling over the last 8 years, the possibility exists that the warming trend in global surface air temperature observed since the late 1970’s may soon weaken.

The PDO weakened prior to the shift, cooling global surface air temperatures were predicted, they happened.
Ref. 4 also highlights the importance of the PDO, with its about 60-year total pattern thus about 30-year warm and cool phases. As seen in Ref. 5, the above quoted abstract, and elsewhere (see Ref. 3), the warm phase of the PDO accounted for much of the global warming that was seen.
And now, the mighty CO2 signal, detectable above the noise in the 1990’s which included above the PDO, when the solar activity was dropping… Where did it go? The PDO shifted, the planet is cooling, and the mighty CO2 signal that was detectable against the PDO warming, is apparently AWOL. The CO2 atmospheric concentrations kept increasing, the CO2 signal should have kept getting stronger, and instead it looks like the mighty CO2 signal has wimped out. Have other factors proven so powerful, the noise of “natural” variability, they have (temporarily) overridden the mighty CO2 signal?
As the CO2 atmospheric concentrations keep rising, what’s going to happen? As the PDO shifts back to a warm phase after about 2035, will the mighty CO2 signal, which heralds (C)AGW, with all the “hidden” global warming building up somewhere in the climate systems, again be clearly detectable?
References:
1. http://cses.washington.edu/cig/pnwc/aboutpdo.shtml
2. http://www.drroyspencer.com/2011/02/uah-update-for-january-2011-global-temperatures-in-freefall/
3. http://www.appinsys.com/GlobalWarming/PDO.htm
4. http://www.drroyspencer.com/global-warming-background-articles/the-pacific-decadal-oscillation/
5. http://www.drroyspencer.com/research-articles/global-warming-as-a-natural-response/
(And apologies to Richard S Courtney, I spent considerable time researching and writing this comment, then noticed yours. Sorry about this.)