February 2013 Global Land+Sea Surface Temperature Anomaly Update

I would also like to mention something I saw on another skeptic blog- Chiefio, I believe.
He showed a temperature reconstruction of the past century (give or take), and it appeared (to me) that there was a large temperature spike right before each cooling period.
Rather like the el-nino of 97/98.
It may just be an artefact. But it seemed significant……?

Great work. Would you consider adding a ‘trend of the trend’ from any fair start point, for those convinced that the latest temperature additions are not adding to ‘warmist’s’ fears?

Nice article. It may have been illuminating to see another set of graphs grouping the satellite data together as a contrast to the three sets you wrote about. I do not feel thel land based data represents the true surface temps due to siting/homogenization issues, and so anyone reading the article will believe the Earth temps are actually that high they should be, even if it is flatlined recently.

Roughly speaking, the first third and last third of the data look flat, while the middle third looks like it could be represented by an upward trend. Isn’t that more suggestive of some sort of oscillation rather than an overall upward trend?

There it goes again: The sinoidal kurve with an 11-year-interval between highs and lows is visible in all these curves.
Sounds familiar? That’s because it is: “IT’S THE SUN, STOOPIDS!”
And by that I don’t mean neither the WUWT-authors nor it’s readership.

Thanks, Bob. Good work!
It was surprising to find that even http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs_v3/Fig.A2.gif shows no warming since 2002. But given the flawed methodology and adjusted data this adds nothing to what is available.

@mwhite
The BBC have published this article on the right day!

Not sure why Steven Mosher pubilshed this 1979 to 2014 Woodfortrees plot above as Bob Tisdale has already demonstrated the upward trend since 1979 above combining Hadcrut, Giss and NCDC.
“Steven Mosher says:
April 1, 2013 at 9:22 am
http://woodfortrees.org/plot/wti/from:1979/to:2014/plot/rss/from:1979/to:2014/plot/wti/from:1979/to:2014/trend/plot/rss/from:1979/to:2014/trend”
We can all play with Wood for Trees and at this particular juncture the key issue is surely that there is a temperature standstill whilst CO2 emissions continue to go up. I can play as well changing Mosher’s graph to start with 1998 and I get a clear linear trend pointing in the opposite direction or
straight. The key is (in my humble opinion) that Gavin Smith suggested 10 years without a temperature increase in the face of increasing CO2 could be a problem. Noaa extended this to 15 years and then Santer produced a peer reviewed paper with 17 years. We are now at the point where Santer or whoever have to come up with another paper to avoid the “warmers” or “lukewarmers” having to concede that their AGW or CAGW theories are falsified. That is the issue. Perhaps Steven Mosher as a prominent “lukewarmer” (I think) could address this issue of global temperature standstill and attribution. I would appear that as time goes by the CO2 forcing at doubling of CO2 is creeping down towards Lintzen and Spencer’s 1C near enough. That is rather less alarming I think.

Chris says:
April 1, 2013 at 10:18 am
“Is it just me, or do I see the apex of a peak and the start of a downwards trend?”
No! There’s still more warming “in the pipeline”. /cagw
(I find it amusing that the warmists use the imagery of a “pipeline” given their virulent opposition to ALL oil and natural gas production…)

Bob Tisdale says:
April 1, 2013 at 5:42 am
…
It’s quite remarkable how the linear trend line obscures the recent flattening of rise in global temperatures.
=============
Absolutely. Just as it hides the flat-line for Jan ’80 thru Feb ’93 {roll eyes}.
This ubiquitous image never rang more true → http://www.skepticalscience.com/graphics/Escalator_2012_500.gif

The perfect article… ahead of AR5, with the sea level rise fearmongering to boot!
http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/ngeo1767.html
R. Bintanja
G. J. van Oldenborgh
S. S. Drijfhout
B. Wouters
& C. A. Katsman
Abstract: “Changes in sea ice significantly modulate climate change because of its high reflective and strong insulating nature. In contrast to Arctic sea ice, sea ice surrounding Antarctica has expanded1, with record extent2 in 2010. This ice expansion has previously been attributed to dynamical atmospheric changes that induce atmospheric cooling3. Here we show that accelerated basal melting of Antarctic ice shelves is likely to have contributed significantly to sea-ice expansion. Specifically, we present observations indicating that melt water from Antarctica’s ice shelves accumulates in a cool and fresh surface layer that shields the surface ocean from the warmer deeper waters that are melting the ice shelves. Simulating these processes in a coupled climate model we find that cool and fresh surface water from ice-shelf melt indeed leads to expanding sea ice in austral autumn and winter. This powerful negative feedback counteracts Southern Hemispheric atmospheric warming. Although changes in atmospheric dynamics most likely govern regional sea-ice trends4, our analyses indicate that the overall sea-ice trend is dominated by increased ice-shelf melt. We suggest that cool sea surface temperatures around Antarctica could offset projected snowfall increases in Antarctica, with implications for estimates of future sea-level rise.”

CAGW…alphabet soup error.

richardscourtney says:
April 1, 2013 at 12:20 pm
John@EF:
I enjoyed your All Fools Day joke at April 1, 2013 at 11:58 am. Very funny.
{link to tisdale’s petty analysis}
Thanks for the laugh.
Richard
=============
Now that is funny. You link to an ultra-petty analysis indicating one of the five mini-trends was slightly askew???? In my mind it was always a spot-on parody of cherry-picked “skeptic world” mini-trends within noisy time series data … that’s what makes it funny. Now I know it’s even more spot-on. Thanks for the laugh, Richard.

Gary Pearse says:

Bob, if March also shows anomalous warming over Feb 2013, then I have to protest. It has been a very cold winter and spring across the NH; it even snowed in Tripoli, Libya last week. Has it been particularly hot in the SH? I don’t think so – the sea surface is much greater in the SH and we had record Antarctic ice there last winter and the lingering of nearly a million sq km over climatology at minimum extent. How soon can we tease out March 2013′s figure.

Gary, I’ve been protesting since Dec that something is wrong with all the data–Satellite and other wise both here and on Dr. Spencer’s site–not that I don’t trust him, I do–but you are right–it has been a bitterly cold winter in the NH. You can’t have as many record breaking colds–it was 91 F below zero in Russia for heaven’s sake–weeks and months of record breaking cold all over the NH and we keep hearing that the we are above the anomaly for the globe. Jeef’s explanation is one that I keep hearing:
Jeef says:

I suspect the increase in Feb is down to the stunning Summer in New Zealand. Our seven official surface stations cover tens of thousands of square kilometres of southern ocean once gridded. All hail the magnificent seven.

BUT–the anomaly is also for the NH in Spencer’s readings. I am protesting. I think the data reporting is wrong and at some point we’ll find out about (too late to make a point) –we also have that satellite that just went down–how long has that data been compromised?
No Gary–don’t wait for March to protest–we are facing this problem with the data readings since December 2012–some thing is wrong….

richardscourtney says:
April 1, 2013 at 1:35 pm
John@EF:
I am replying to your post at April 1, 2013 at 1:19 pm.
I admit to being bewildered. I enjoyed your All Fools Day joke which presented the SkS escalator as though it were serious. And I said I enjoyed it.
=======
Did you really enjoy it, Richard … Of course it’s parody. It was Tisdale who went thru the petty exercise of trying to make it seem serious in a technical sense. What makes parody funny is kernel of truth within. SkS was mocking the use of cherry-picked time lines to provide nonsense support, or self-deception, re: a dogmatic POV.
A great example in your link is the silliness of selecting a temperature trend staring in 1880 in an attempt to lend weight to the “discovered” trend in the scrutinized PARODY mini-trend segment. Of course that was just nuts ‘cuz he was serious, and in so doing justified the parody all the more. Do you know how many years it took for many “fake skeptics” to pull back from pointing at temperature trends for timelines starting in 1998???! … several.
… nilyisoeopbbtjy

The standstill; Statistically speaking there isnt one.
By that I assume you mean tell people the standstill isn’t statistically significant. Which is of course utterly false. The temperature trend of the last 15 years is based on millions of observations, and assuming those observations aren’t massively biased, any change or lack of change, even over a much shorter period, would highly statistically significant.
When Santer published his 17year number, I said the real number should be around 25. Attribution? attribution is a meaningless exercise. We know NET increased forcing causes increased warming. We know that C02 increases forcing. If one could hold other variables constant increased C02 would lead to an increased NET forcing. In reality as c02 goes up other forcings ( solar, aersols, ozone, UV) have changed.
We don’t know that net increased forcings causes increased warming. The forcings theory predicts this, but the empirical evidence is weak. A strong correlation between forcings change and temperature (or heat content) is needed, and that has never been demonstrated.
As forcings become better quantified over time, one would expect predictive accuracy to improve. This hasn’t happened, and over the last 15 years predictive accuracy has got markedly worse. Suggesting the forcings theory is seriously flawed.

Theories are never falsified. They are typically amended to make sense of new information.
This is partly true, but more accurately stated as,
Most theories are never falsified. They are typically amended to make sense of new information, until a superior theory gains acceptance.
Both Popper and Kuhn were correct. A theory can be falsified, or simply replaced by a superior theory. Superior meaning greater explanatory power or utility.
One of the problems I see in climate science is the forcings theory can’t be falsified by any feasible experiment (Trenberth’s missing heat being an example where when the predicted heat wasn’t where it was supposed to be, the argument from the theory’s proponents is, it must be somewhere else), and other theories of climate change have very limited acceptance.
As Kuhn pointed out, scientists have to have a paradigm (theory) to work within, and most scientists don’t question the paradigm.