NCDC omits inconvenient data in public climate releases?

Either the average changes monthly, or they’re running 12 separate “20th century long term averages” – one for each month.

It’s the latter.

Stan W.:
Your post at April 15, 2013 at 9:54 pm asks a silly question. It says

William Astley says:

It will be interesting to watch and listen to the creative explanations to explain global cooling.

What cooling?
There is no cooling (especially in the ocean, where 90+% of the heat goes).
Whatever led you to think the surface could not have a near-zero trend for 10-15 years?

I am at a loss as to understand how you think there could be near-zero trend for the most recent period of at least 16 years if the AGW hypothesis is correct.
We were told by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that the recent halt to global warming is not possible.
This is stated in IPCC AR4 (2007) Chapter 10.7 which can be read at
http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/ch10s10-7.html
It says there

The multi-model average warming for all radiative forcing agents held constant at year 2000 (reported earlier for several of the models by Meehl et al., 2005c), is about 0.6°C for the period 2090 to 2099 relative to the 1980 to 1999 reference period. This is roughly the magnitude of warming simulated in the 20th century. Applying the same uncertainty assessment as for the SRES scenarios in Fig. 10.29 (–40 to +60%), the likely uncertainty range is 0.3°C to 0.9°C. Hansen et al. (2005a) calculate the current energy imbalance of the Earth to be 0.85 W m–2, implying that the unrealised global warming is about 0.6°C without any further increase in radiative forcing. The committed warming trend values show a rate of warming averaged over the first two decades of the 21st century of about 0.1°C per decade, due mainly to the slow response of the oceans. About twice as much warming (0.2°C per decade) would be expected if emissions are within the range of the SRES scenarios.

In other words,
The IPCC expected that global temperature would rise at an average rate of “0.2°C per decade” over the first two decades of this century with half of this rise being due to atmospheric GHG emissions which were already in the system and as a result of the “slow response of the oceans” which you mention.
This assertion of “committed warming” should have had large uncertainty because the Report was published in 2007 and there was then no indication of any global temperature rise over the previous 7 years. There has still not been any rise and we are now way past the half-way mark of the “first two decades of the 21st century”.
So, if this “committed warming” is to occur such as to provide a rise of 0.2°C per decade by 2020 then global temperature would need to rise over the next 7 years by about 0.4°C. And this assumes the “average” rise over the two decades is the difference between the temperatures at 2000 and 2020. If the average rise of each of the two decades is assumed to be the “average” (i.e. linear trend) over those two decades then global temperature now needs to rise before 2020 by more than it rose over the entire twentieth century. It only rose ~0.8°C over the entire twentieth century.
Simply, the “committed warming” has disappeared (perhaps it has eloped with Trenberth’s ‘missing heat’?).
I add that the disappearance of the “committed warming” is – of itself – sufficient to falsify the AGW hypothesis as emulated by climate models. If we reach 2020 without any detection of the “committed warming” then it will be 100% certain that all projections of global warming are complete bunkum.
Richard

In reply to:
Stan W. says:
April 15, 2013 at 9:54 pm
William Astley says:
It will be interesting to watch and listen to the creative explanations to explain global cooling.
What cooling?
There is no cooling (especially in the ocean, where 90+% of the heat goes).
Whatever led you to think the surface could not have a near-zero trend for 10-15 years?
William:
Hi Stan,
There is in the paleoclimatic record a pattern of warming and cooling. The specific regions that warmed in the past in the paleoclimatic record are the same as specific regions that warmed in the 20th century. This is interesting as the regions that warmed in the 20th century – higher latitude regions – does not agree with the extreme AGW theory. The AGW theory predicted the most warming would occur in the tropics and that there would be tropical troposphere hot spot located at about 10 km above the surface of the planet. The tropics did not warm in the 20th century and there was no observed hot spot at roughly 10km above the surface in the tropics. Pattern recognition, is one of the methods that can be used to determine which mechanism caused what is observed.
There is the start of observed cooling in higher latitude regions of both hemispheres. Based on the mechanisms – the sun is changing from the most active series of magnetic cycles in 8000 years to a Maunder minimum – the cooling will be as rapid as the 8200 BP present cooling event and will last for a minimum of 50 to 150 years.
This graph, Greenland ice sheet temperature, last 11,000 years (roughly determined from ice core analysis, Richard Alley’s paper shows nine (9) Dansgaard-Oeschger (D-O) cycles of warming and cooling. The D-O warming and cooling cycles have a periodicity of 1450 year plus or minus 500 years. The late Gerald Bond was able to track 23, D-O cycles through the current interglacial which is called the Holocene and into the last glacial period the Wisconsin Glacial period. (The last glacial period is called the Wisconsin glacial period as a 2 mile thick ice sheet covered Canada and the Northern US states down to Wisconsin at it greatest extent.)
Similar to crime scene investigation, observational clues can be analyzed determine what caused the 20th century warming. The warming that we observed in the 20th century has occurred before. The warming period ends when the sun goes into a deep Maunder minimum. The planet then cools for a period of 50 to 150 years. The warming is caused by an increase in the solar magnetic cycle that changes the amount of planetary cloud (Low level clouds reflect sunlight off into space. Less low level planetary clouds, planet warms. More low level clouds planet warms. All else being equal, unchanged.) via the following two mechanisms (there is a third mechanism):
1) Forcing change: Solar Heliosphere (Mechanism, GCR ion mediated cloud formation): The solar wind carries pieces of the magnetic flux from the sun off into space to form the solar heliosphere which extends out past the orbit of Pluto when the sun is very active. The pieces of magnetic flux deflect galactic cosmic rays (GCR). The GCR are mostly high speed protons. GCR strike that atmosphere and create cloud forming ions. All else being equal (i.e. No other changes in ions in the atmosphere), less GCR, less clouds, less radiation reflected off into space and the planet warms. GCR can be high and the cloud forming ions can be removed by electroscavenging.
2) Forcing Change: Solar Wind bursts (Mechanism: ‘Electroscavenging’): Planetary cloud cover is also changed by solar wind bursts which create a space charge in the ionosphere. The space charge differential removes ions by a process that called ‘electroscavening’. When the solar magnetic cycle is very active there is also an increase in solar wind bursts.
http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2003/2003GL017115.shtml
Timing of abrupt climate change: A precise clock by Stefan Rahmstorf
Many paleoclimatic data reveal a approx. 1,500 year cyclicity of unknown origin. A crucial question is how stable and regular this cycle is. An analysis of the GISP2 ice core record from Greenland reveals that abrupt climate events appear to be paced by a 1,470-year cycle with a period that is probably stable to within a few percent; with 95% confidence the period is maintained to better than 12% over at least 23 cycles. This highly precise clock points to an origin outside the Earth system; oscillatory modes within the Earth system can be expected to be far more irregular in period.
This graph, Greenland ice sheet temperature, last 11,000 years (roughly determined from ice core analysis, Richard Alley’s paper shows nine (9) Dansgaard-Oeschger (D-O) cycles of warming and cooling. The D-O warming and cooling cycles have a periodicity of 1450 year plus or minus 500 years.
The warming that we observed in the 20th century has occurred before.
http://www.climate4you.com/images/GISP2%20TemperatureSince10700%20BP%20with%20CO2%20from%20EPICA%20DomeC.gif
http://www.climate4you.com/
The following is a link to the late Gerald Bond’s paper “Persistent Solar influence on the North Atlantic Climate during the Holocene”. Bond published this paper in 2001.
http://www.essc.psu.edu/essc_web/seminars/spring2006/Mar1/Bond%20et%20al%202001.pdf
Excerpt from the above linked paper:
“A solar influence on climate of the magnitude and consistency implied by our evidence could not have been confined to the North Atlantic. Indeed, previous studies have tied increases in the C14 in tree rings, and hence reduced solar irradiance (William: Total solar irradiance, TSI does not change. The sun does not get hot or colder. The solar magnetic cycle goes into a Maunder minimum and the planet cools due to an increase in planetary clouds), to Holocene glacial advances in Scandinavia, expansions of the Holocene Polar Atmosphere circulation in Greenland; and abrupt cooling in the Netherlands about 2700 years ago…Well dated, high resolution measurements of O18 in stalagmite from Oman document five periods of reduced rainfall centered at times of strong solar minima at 6300, 7400, 8300, 9000, and 9500 years ago.”
https://ams.confex.com/ams/pdfpapers/74103.pdf
The Sun-Climate Connection by John A. Eddy, National Solar Observatory
Solar Influence on North Atlantic Climate during the Holocene
A more recent oceanographic study, based on reconstructions of the North Atlantic climate during the Holocene epoch, has found what may be the most compelling link between climate and the changing Sun: in this case an apparent regional climatic response to a series of prolonged episodes of suppressed solar activity, like the Maunder Minimum, each lasting from 50 to 150 years8.
The paleoclimatic data, covering the full span of the present interglacial epoch, are a record of the concentration of identifiable mineral tracers in layered sediments on the sea floor of the northern North Atlantic Ocean. The tracers originate on the land and are carried out to sea in drift ice. Their presence in seafloor samples at different locations in the surrounding ocean reflects the southward expansion of cooler, ice-bearing water: thus serving as indicators of changing climatic conditions at high Northern latitudes. The study demonstrates that the sub-polar North Atlantic Ocean has experienced nine distinctive expansions of cooler water in the past 11,000 years, occurring roughly every 1000 to 2000 years, with a mean spacing of about 1350 years.
Each of these cooling events coincides in time with strong, distinctive minima in solar activity, based on contemporaneous records of the production of 14C from tree-ring records and 10Be from deep-sea cores. For reasons cited above, these features, found in both 14C and 10Be records, are of likely solar origin, since the two records are subject to quite different non-solar internal sources of variability. The North Atlantic finding suggests that solar variability exerts a strong effect on climate on centennial to millennial time scales, perhaps through changes in ocean thermohaline circulation that in turn amplify the direct effects of smaller variations in solar irradiance. (William: At the time Gerald Bond wrote this paper, 2001, it was not known how changes to the solar magnetic cycle caused the planet to warm and cool. The mechanism is not an increase in the total solar irradiance (TSI), the sun does not get warmer or colder. The planetary temperature changes is caused by mechanisms that decrease and then increase the amount of planetary cloud cover.)
http://arxiv.org/abs/physics/0612145v1
The Antarctic climate anomaly and galactic cosmic rays
Borehole temperatures in the ice sheets spanning the past 6000 years show Antarctica repeatedly warming when Greenland cooled, and vice versa (Fig. 1) [13, 14]. North-south oscillations of greater amplitude associated with Dansgaard-Oeschger events are evident in oxygenisotope data from the Wurm-Wisconsin glaciation[15]. The phenomenon has been called the polar see-saw[15, 16], but that implies a north-south symmetry that is absent. Greenland is better coupled to global temperatures than Antarctica is, and the fulcrum of the temperature swings is near the Antarctic Circle. A more apt term for the effect is the Antarctic climate anomaly.
Attempts to account for it have included the hypothesis of a south-flowing warm ocean current crossing the Equator[17] with a built-in time lag supposedly intended to match paleoclimatic data. That there is no significant delay in the Antarctic climate anomaly is already apparent at the high-frequency end of Fig. (1). While mechanisms involving ocean currents might help to intensify or reverse the effects of climate changes, they are too slow to explain the almost instantaneous operation of the Antarctic climate anomaly.
Figure (2a) also shows that the polar warming effect of clouds is not symmetrical, being most pronounced beyond 75◦S. In the Arctic it does no more than offset the cooling effect, despite the fact that the Arctic is much cloudier than the Antarctic (Fig. (2b)). The main reason for the difference seems to be the exceptionally high albedo of Antarctica in the absence of clouds.

There is little mystery for why the wording for the monthly updates is chosen to maximize alarm. You need only look at the top of the organizational chart to see what the problem is: http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sites/default/files/attachments/NCDC%20Org%20Chart%202013_0123.pdf
It would be interesting to know when Dr. Karl plans to follow James Hansen into a retirement of blissful green advocacy. The sooner the better.