Big drop in global surface temperature in February, ocean temps flat

It would appear that January was a bit of an anomaly then… an outlier as it were.

“Encouraging” for skeptics is data that backs their position. All else needs to be questioned as “unreliable” (like the Jan figures were because they were up).
Its one months data, consistent with short term variations and it shows a +0.18C anomaly cf the 1981-2010 mean for satellite sensing of the lower troposphere.
Look at the 13 month running mean – far more instructive.

Clearly, this temperature plot is like looking at brownian motion around a fixed point.
Adding estimated error bars of +/- one degree swamps the “signal”
The SST y-axis is almost 3 times more sensitive than the UAH anomaly.
Increase the Y-axis range by a factor of 10 and you will get a better picture of the real global trend.
For example, the following plot is an example of a realistic global trend line.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/best/to:1980/plot/rss-land/plot/uah-land
If real ocean temps were shown on the same scale, then you would see a flat line.
However, real global SSTs were not measured before the recent technologoy explosion. Even today I would be sceptical of any claim of precise SST measurements on a global scale.
If anyone with any engineering experience regarding signal/noise ratios looked at these charts, they would give a similar response. No trend, or a trend of zero slope.

James Abbott is quite correct. We should not take individual months or even years as indicative of overall trends. Unfortunately that is exactly what happens here in Australia as our chief climate commissioner, Tim Flannery, tries his best to keep the lie alive. Hottest summer screamed the BoM but overlooked the blocking high which caused much of the hot weather. After Tim told us we would have a permanent drought we have had three years of rain, rain which according to Tim would not fill our dams because the soil would be too hot. So James the warmists are very adept at using one-offs to “prove” their point. BTW the running average since 1998 looks pretty flat and according to the alarmists that wasn’t an option back in the 90s and earlt 2000s.

007 says:
March 4, 2013 at 4:10 pm
Mr Abbott,
Has the lower troposphere warmed in the last 16 years?
That too is instructive.
Er – yes – the plot clearly shows warming. Not a lot, but warming. As others have said it depends on the margins of error, but that why I said look at the running mean which smooths the monthly variations.
BTW the debate on whether the US has had its hottest month/year
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/03/03/a-note-about-temperatures/
can now turn to Australia:
The Bureau of Meteorology has confirmed the three summer months ending February 28 were the hottest season ever recorded in Australia, leading the government’s Climate Commission to label it the “Angry Summer” in a new report. “The Australian summer over 2012 and 2013 has been defined by extreme weather events across much of the continent, including record-breaking heat, severe bushfires, extreme rainfall and damaging flooding,” the report said.
Australia experienced its hottest ever average national maximum temperature on January 7 of 40.30 degrees Celsius (104.5 Fahrenheit), while 44 sites, including Sydney and Hobart, recorded all-time high temperatures in the summer. The report said there have only been 21 days in 102 years where the average maximum temperature for the whole of Australia has exceeded 39 Celsius and eight of these happened in the summer just gone.

The head of the Australian Climate Commission Prof Tim Flannery also says….
“90 per cent of the heat that is trapped by the greenhouse gases goes into the ocean, and you look at the whole of the Earth, we’re seeing a very strong warming trend. The atmosphere, you know, it’s a very volatile organ of the planet. Sometimes we get cooler average temperatures, sometimes warmer, it bounces around a little bit on the graph. And you can pick any period in that to show anything you want. But if you look at the whole Earth system, you can see that strong warming trend. And indeed, if you look at the atmospheric record for a long enough period, you see exactly the same trend.”
Flannery is flogging a disgracefully alarmist report on Australia’s “Angry Summer” to account for his previous dud prediction that global warming would stop rivers from flooding and dams from filling. He is clearly spending most of his time in Lala land.

braddles says (March 4, 2013 at 4:15 pm)
The 20-year starting point was during the Pinatubo cooling. Expect the 20-year figure to fall over the next couple of years as the Pinatubo effect (1992-94) drops out of the 20-year window.
——
Or: Expect the 20-year figure to be cited by the alarmists over the next couple of years until the Pinatubo effect (1992-94) drops out of the 20-year window. Then they’ll cite something else.

That’s the trouble with BoM, it insists on weighting to average over the entire continent. If it didn’t do that or if they recognised the blocking high and took that two weeks out of the equation, the summer wouldn’t have looked nearly as hot. It’s just fiddling with the data.
Anyway from the look of the chart we are entering a cold phase. Given the arctic ice recovered this past few months, the next few years will start getting really cold before the world ices up again.

Stealey says…
“bw, Here is a chart showing a normal y-axis. Not so scary, eh?”
-I say: stealing a trick from Mann – only showing data up to 2005!