March 2008 RSS Global Temperature Anomaly Data: slightly above zero

Forgive me for asking the probably well covered question, but it’s been on my mind for a few weeks now. Since many are notiing this divergence of the NH vs SH temp anomalies, do we have a case that world temps, as presented, favor NH vs SH – in other words, when we take an average of peak high temps, do we get a higher ratio of NH highs vs SH. Hope I’m asking this right – had a bottle of wine 2night (Rex Goliath Cab Sav) and not thinking clearly.

@Robert Vick,
I can’t imagine there being a connection between the Sun and the earth’s climate, do you?
After all the temperature of the Earth’s atmosphere is about +14°C.
Without greenhouse gases (mainly water): it would be -18°C.
And without the Sun: it would be -273°C.
So, as you’ll appreciate, the Sun, and any variations therein, have little impact on the earth’s climate.

I recovered an earlier version of BBC story with the “Global Warming” headline from Google Cache and sent it and a now current copy to Anthony in the Microsoft Web Archive Single File MHT format. When is very interesting is that the date/time stamps of both versions of the story are identical.
Version #1
Page last updated at 00:42 GMT, Friday, 4 April 2008 01:42 UK
Global warming ‘dips this year’
Version #2
Page last updated at 00:42 GMT, Friday, 4 April 2008 01:42 UK
Global temperatures ‘to decrease’
Unless we can capture images of the BBC “news stories” as they are generated we have no way of knowing how many altered realities the Ministry Of Truth is producing. The date/time stamps are forgeries.
Try your own recovery with this URL and compare it to the current page.
http://64.233.169.104/search?q=cache:JngdkduFPPgJ:news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7329799.stm+site:http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7329799.stm&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=us
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7329799.stm
Whenever you find something interesting on the Internet be sure to same a copy using the IE “Save As” option and select the MHT file format. Try it with the above URL’s.
Try this Microsoft Live search which shows both versions of the story but only returns the current one.
http://search.live.com/news/results.aspx?q=Global+warming+%27dips+this+year%27&go=Search+News&mkt=en-us&scope=&FORM=LIVSOP
I no longer trust Google and would strongly recommend that several unrelated search engines be used.
Mike
REPLY: I agree, Google has issues, so make a screencap or HTML save of interesting stories

Mike Rankin,
If you have EXCEL, I can send you a sheet with a macro to change the row/column data into column data. I broke down and coded that because otherwise, repeating these things is just too much of a pain in the neck.
(I need to learn to formalize the script into an add-in and make it available. But what with teaching myself statistics, and posting, well… 🙂 )

I am a retired experimental particle physicist. I have been working with computer models and comparing predictions to data since 1966, as a graduate student.
This thread is interesting as it concentrates on the data and projections of this measure of ” global temperature”. I would like to present here a wider range of disagreement of data with the IPCC model outputs, a disagreement that for any physicist who is familiar with computer models, would send the IPCC models back to the drawing board.
I started reading this subject last November and have spent on average an hour a day on this.
I did not have any particular bias on warming. I had believed the “consensus” business, that was tooted subliminaly, and was looking into alternate solutions, for example seeding intentionally the atmosphere with aerosols to control the amount of energy coming in, ( a suggestion in the 90’s by Tailor of the atom bomb) rather than impose hardship on economies with CO2 cutbacks. Also on the feasibility of damming up Gibraltar to keep the water levels in control.
I was surprised when I looked at the last IPCC tables that the huge predictions of inundation by Gore that caught the interest of the media( I have a summer cottage by the sea) turned out to be 20 to 40 cm in a century. The sea goes down 40 cms every winter here. I started getting a fishy smell. Reading more carefully and critically I found that the claims of the IPCC report were all computer simulations used as real data. I was appalled at the bad use of scientific methods to disseminate a political point of view: Using comparison between models as if they were data, not testing the models on data not used to extract the parametrisations, obfuscating plots with multiple model predictions so that the eye would think that the models fit the data In addition use of bad data from unchecked locations etc.
I have come to three clear points where there is disagreement between the IPCC models and the data, even if we ignore all the sloppy use of data and models as explained above, and accept IPCC models at face value.
1) The ice age record shows that for the past ten cycles of cold to warmth CO2 lags the heat rise by 800 or more years. This means there is no innate atmospheric mechanism ( a la CO2greenhouse) that will precipitate heating from a small increase:the curves would have locked step immediately as far as the accuracy of the measurements go. The models are modeled on years and decades, not aeons.
2) The global temperature the past ten years is flat statistically, whereas the CO2 curves are climbing at the same and worse rate. There has not been any great increase in volcanic activity or dust storms that has been reported, and thus the ostensible correlation and “projection” becomes nonexistent.
3) The lack of what the IPCC itself calls the greenhouse signature, (plots in
http://nzclimatescience.net/images/PDFs/devansco2.pdf)
is deadly for the greenhouse model. The core of the greenhouse model is that the higher atmosphere traps heat and radiates it back to the ground, and the plots of IPCC models show this happens only with CO2 feedbacks included.
(Greenhouse Signatures (IPCC AR 4, 2007, Appendix C)
The real data show no heating in the upper atmosphere. (Observed Warming (US CCSP 2006 p.116 fig. 5.7, confirmed by more
measurements published in 2007)
Here is also a peer reviewed measurement ( for those who harp on peer reviews), which I consider deadly for the IPCC models: decadal temperature trends of the last thirty years, comparison of satellite data and IPCC models:
http://www.nsstc.uah.edu/atmos/christy/2007_Dougless_et al.pdf
The disagreement of IPCC models with data is irrefutable.
How can one believe the projections of models for the future when the data falsify the basic premise of the CO2 feedback greenhouse model : higher temperatures in the upper atmosphere ?
I think particularly point 3 should make everybody pause and reexamine recommendations to policy makers, otherwise science is turning into a farce.
This should be extra ammunition to stop this AGW stampede before it does more damage and causes more deaths in the third world than any global warming would.

Sorry, that is Edward Teller who suggested jets be equipped with gadgets that would release appropriate aerosols to compensated for the warming.
If I believed in anthropogenic global warming I would be all for this solution.
REPLY: Anna, thank you for your discourse here. I’d also point out that Dr. Teller may very well single handedly be responsible for the demonization of coal.
Astute readers may recall that Dr. Teller was on the board of the U.S. Atomic Energy commission in the early 70’s. The goal of the agency was peaceful use of atomic energy, i.e. nuclear power plants. Teller was aware that the Soviet Venera 4 probe had penetrated the Venus’ atmosphere in 1967 and showed it was mostly CO2, and that among other factors led to the role of CO2 being figured into the “greenhouse effect”.

In a 1971 paper, James Pollack argued that Venus might once have had oceans like Earth’s It seemed that such a “runaway greenhouse” could have turned the Earth too into a furnace, if the starting conditions had been only a little different.
From Spencer Weart’s Discovery of Global Warming.

Teller wanted to push for more nuclear power in the USA, CO2 became a tool to accomplish that. Readers may recall that in the mid to late 1970’s there were a series of magazine ads in major U.S. magazines that had a picture of a lump of coal. The gist of the ad was “coal is dirty, it produces CO2 and soot, harming our atmosphere. Nuclear power is the clean fuel”. If I recall correctly, they were paid for by the Atomic Energy Commission.
So if my memory serves me correctly, it appears the CO2 movement may have been started in part, due to a U.S. Government funded advertising campaign.
I’ve been searching for that ad, and have been combing old magazine sources for it. If anyone can find a copy, I’d be very grateful.

I’ve been trying to find out the answer to this question for a while now and it sort of fits in with this story so I’ll ask it here!
How does El Nino / La Nina change the “Earth’s temperature”? No new energy enters the system as they are normal weather cycles which don’t correlate with increase solar / geothermal output. Therefore any energy released from the oceans must have been there originally and was simply stored away from our thermometers.
Is it not therefore correct to say that any “Earth’s temperature” increase / decrease caused by El Nino / La Nino is simply an error caused by us not being able to record temperature properly and, furthermore, that this gives us a better idea of how large error bars should be on the temperature record?

Chartist type analysis of the stock market (also known as “technical analysis”) has been discredited for a long time. You can find a good debunking in Malkiel’s “A Random Walk Down Wall Street.”
To me, the more interesting question is whether climate modeling by the likes of James Hansen is, at bottom, any better than technical analysis of the stock market.

The wikipedia link was accidently inserted.
Irony: an encyclopedia article about scientific citation flagged for lacking citation.

@Anthony
Thanks for the helpful analysis. Not being a climate expert, I try to do the best I can to understand the arguments on each side but with something this complex I like to have some more informed opinions to help.

“1) The ice age record shows that for the past ten cycles of cold to warmth CO2 lags the heat rise by 800 or more years. This means there is no innate atmospheric mechanism ( a la CO2greenhouse) that will precipitate heating from a small increase:the curves would have locked step immediately as far as the accuracy of the measurements go. The models are modeled on years and decades, not aeons.”
This was the red rag for me also. The ice core data shows a strong correlation between temp and CO2, with temp leading CO2. QED there is a strong positive feeback from temp to CO2. But the system is continuously oscillating, it is quasi-harmonic. It is therefore simply not possible for there to be a significant feedback from CO2 to temperature. If there was then there would have been a vicious circle of feedback and we would have moved to snowball earth or venus the first time the mechanism worked. If CO2 did influence temp, then the best you could hope for is a bistable system with dramatic changes to stable long lasting extremes. QED any feedback from CO2 to temp must be negligible.
I agree wholeheartedly with the other points noted. I also have a degree in physics, and find it noteworthy that we “deniers” are largely composed of physicists and meteorologists. In both cases people for whom the data is absolute. Mechanisms and models are secondary.
Unfortunately, as I have said before, if we want to kill AGW properly we need to find positive data proof of the solar mechanism. Cosmic rays and UV have been suggested. We need to look for a big change in UV, cloud cover, etc that shows a clear step change linking the step change in solar activity to the recent step change in temp. Until we find this proof, we will be ignored.

James S (08:46:46)
“How does El Nino / La Nina change the “Earth’s temperature”? No new energy enters the system as they are normal weather cycles which don’t correlate with increase solar / geothermal output.”
I am not a climate scientist but I am a physicist, so I will give it a go:
Climate is chaotic : many dynamical systems contribute to its creation, ocean, land , atmosphere, clouds, trade winds, and of course over all the SUN. The great majority of the energy on earth is from the sun( a bit from the hot magma in the interior). Ocean stores energy not only thermally but also as currents and plants, the same is true for the atmosphere and the land . Heat into kinetic energy and plant energy. Think of a bowl of soup. You can set up currents in it that continue moving long after you remove the spoon. The currents in the ocean have patterns driven by various other dynamical features which I would have to research to understand, but the energy is coming from the sun.
I would think that El Nino and La Nina modify the air currents which then modify the cloud cover which then affects how much of the heat from the sun becomes temperature or is stored in some way or is reflected back into space.
The error bars on the temperature record have to do with the accuracy of the thermometers. It is the interpretation that is affected by the dynamics that produce the temperature.