Introducing the WUWT Global Temperature Page

Nothing more than fakery. It is impossible to measure Earth temperature.

@roger Knights
“GISS global temp anomaly for June is 50. The first half of the year’s average is about 48, which is below average for the last decade.”
Is this La Nina? No! It MUST be Global Cooling!

Suw you can take the earth’s temperature … I believe the proper place to insert the thermometer is approximately near Dallas, TX. 🙂

[Snip. Discussions of HAARP are off-limits on WUWT. Please see the site Policy under “About” on the mast head menu. ~dbs, mod.]

I’m sorry to sound dumb but where is the link to all the WUWT Reference Pages, please?

Global cooling confirmed:
“Earth may have formed more than 4.5 billion years ago, but it’s still cooling. A new study reveals that only about half of our planet’s internal heat stems from natural radioactivity. The rest is primordial heat left over from when Earth first coalesced from a hot ball of gas, dust, and other material.”
http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2011/07/earth-still-retains-much-of-its-.html?ref=hp

Seriously, a “global temperature” is completely and absolutely meaningless. All it can possibly tell us is the average temperature AT THE MEASURING POINTS. Anyone who has even so much as a thermometer in their car knows how variable temperature can be in even small areas. The very fact that an “average” has such dramatic spikes should tell you this, unless you believe the overall energy balance of the planet is so rapidly variable.
Unless you actually enjoy the concept of chasing rainbows, don’t bother trying to correlate today with 60 or 100 years ago. Temperatures are measured differently, and often at airports or similarly non-representative locations, not to mention the massive difference in number of measuring stations just in the last 20 years.
I’m somewhat amused, and often amazed, at the credence given to these numbers. Any credibility, other than as a broad index, is misplaced. And I say this whether the month is higher or lower. The numbers are essentially random and should be recognized as such.

Ric Werme says:
July 17, 2011 at 4:58 pm
“Before I forget ….
See the bottom of my Guide to WUWT for more details and more characters. Like the degree sign, which I use a lot.”
Most appreciated – didn’t know how to conjure them up!

@ Just the facts: I see there is already a graph relating lower stratospheric to tropospheric temperatures and showing a zero trend. But hidden behind this zero trend, a very interesting development is going on. Figure 10 of the late Noor van Andel’s draft on “CO2 and climate change” shows each of these temperatures separately, with the tropospheric temperatures becoming warmer all the while the lower stratosphere is getting colder in almost equal proportions. Because it is the temperature difference between these two which provides the energy for thunderstorms, it would be very interesting to relate and display this difference along with the “Accumulated Cyclone Energy” diagram created by Ryan N. Maue.
See here: http://climategate.nl/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/CO2_and_climate_v7.pdf. Van Andel linked the metoffice page at http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadat/images.html as the original source. However, be aware that “the crown” is claimed to hold a copyright on these diagrams (and data?).

Does anyone know why RSS TLS (lower stratosphere temperature) is so weird? It stays constant until el-chicon, then steps down, then stays constant until pinatubo, then steps down again, and again stays constant ever after. What is up with that?

Well the highest global Temperature is about +136 deg F, and the lowest global Temperature, is about -138 deg F, so one could say that the average of the earth’s extreme Temperature range, is about -1 deg F, which is about 60 deg F LOWER than what people claim the true average Temperature is.
I have NO idea, what any of that implies; but I tend to line up with those who say, we have no idea what the earth mean global Temperature is.
I’m prepared to accept that Dr James Hansen’s GISSTemp is an accurate record of GISSTemp.
I’ll even accept that the UEA CRU’s HADCrut, is an accurate record of HADCrut. I just don’t think either of them has anything much to do with what the mean global Temperature of the earth is. And so long as Dr Hansen, doesn’t move all his owl boxes around, or re-position the Weber grills, I’ll continue to accept his GISSTemp plots, as an accurate record of GISSTemp; but if he starts mucking with the system, and turning stations on or off, or changing their hardware, etc, then I would have to become suspicious of the validity of his GISSTemp graphs.

I love the references. Thanks.
Even IF the average global temperatures could be “normalized” into ONE number which could be believed, what does it say? How do we react to it?
This may not be the place to ask, but I always wonder WHY something exists. I wonder WHY our government is spending sooo much of our money on this. What is the reason? WHY are most of the temperature graphs going up?
I grew up in Seattle; my father always told me not to go outdoors if the temperature ever got up to 80 degrees F — it’s way too hot.
So, now I live in Connecticut and the temp is over 80 all the time. I got used to it….

Looking at the UAH satellite temperature curve at the start of the article I see two things wrong with it. First, he uses a 13-month running average to smooth the curve. A running average destroys data and should not be used. A non-destructive and more informative way to look at these temperatures is to use the “magic marker” method – a transparent colored overlay that utilizes the human ability for pattern recognition. The second thing wrong is an erroneous identification of the 1982/83 La Nina as “Pinatubo cooling.” Pinatubo cooling stayed in the stratosphere and had no influence on the tropospheric temperature as he imagines. It did not even start until two years after the eruption. This misidentification started with Self et al. who had no idea what satellite temperature oscillations actually mean and thought that the temperature dip was due to volcanic cooling overriding an El Nino warming at that point.That of course is pure nonsense but it keeps being repeated ad nauseam by people who do not understand the temperature oscillations in the satellite record. Roy Spencer who creates the data apparently does not understand it either. The Pinatubo story is fully explained on pages 17 to 21 of my book “What Warming?” All the temperature curves in that book also use the magic marker method which makes otherwise hard to recognize features jump out at you. If you don’t use that method you are not making maximum use of the available temperature data.

The objective, according to GISS scientists, is to provide an estimate of temperature change that could be compared with predictions of global climate change in response to atmospheric carbon dioxide, aerosols, and changes in solar activity.