The RSS Microwave Sounder Unit (MSU) global temperature anomaly data has been published this morning by RSS (Remote Sensing Systems of Santa Rosa, CA).
For March 2008 it has moved a little higher, with a value of .079°C for a change (∆T) of 0.081°C globally from February.
2008 1 -0.070
2008 2 -0.002
2008 3 0.079
RSS data here
Reference: RSS data here (RSS Data Version 3.1) click for larger image
The interesting news is the divergence between northern and southern hemispheres, and the plunge seen in the continental USA. I’ll have more on that coming up.
Curiously, at almost the same time the BBC has published an article today headlining: Global temperatures ‘to decrease’
On a related note:
Lucia over at The Blackboard just posted a very well done analysis that takes ENSO into account in falsifying the IPCC AR4 projection of +2.0C/century. Here is her graph showing IPCC AR4 projections compared with observations and best fit trend:
Click for larger
I’m waiting for the physicists to tear the above announcement apart…
Jeff Alberts
I think my valuation of your intelligence was right after all, you should go back to you Buck Rodgers comics,
When one of the most respected Professors of the Russian Academy of Sciences with over 400 published papers is all, how did you say “garbage , gobbledygook” I cannot but think that he who passes such criticisms is an idiot. But perhaps I am wrong and you really are intelligent, in that case I apologize.
But then, looking through you posts on this blog I can only see continuous ignorance.
or pronouncement, rather…
I heard something interesting on ABC radio news last night. The reporter was talking about the big fight in Kansas over coal fired power plants. The comment that i found surprising…. “Coal plants produce CO2, which SOME scientists believe causes global warming.”
Was I hearing things?
Alan C., Jeff A.:
I believe Alan is confusing the expected collision of the lovely Andromeda (M31?) and the Local Group, headlined by our home Milky Way, in 2or 3 billion years. Following some hundreds of millions, the two are expected to coalesce into an irregular.
Pierre AKA scoffer:
The G&T paper anna v. referenced casts doubt, rather persuasively, on Svante Arrhenius’ calculations re: the 33 degree Celcius contribution to a ‘global temperature’. The AGW TSI and GHG calculations are really useful only for middle-school (years 7-9) science class heuristics.
anna v
In a nutshell (a couple of sentences), exactly what “nitty gritty” made you realise it’s a “whole farce”? Just curious.
Wow the physicists are coming out of the woodwork….me too! 20 years ago and without much knowledge I had accepted the AGW idea. I taught an energy and the environment seminar a few yearsback wich force me to delve into the primary literature. Shocked is the best way to describe my reaction. Lik the others mentioned, the disconnect between the data and the models/conclusions is beyond anything I’ve ever seen.
My small contribution: some of the statistical analysis being applied by people here are interesting. For my own amusement I’ve been keeping a record of local high temperatue anomoly for about 10 years now. My idea was to get enough data and apply an FFT. I could see in the raw data “beats”, etc. and the initial FFT shows frequency components of several weeks to a couple of years with the largest “harmonic” around the 15 month interval.
Anyone tried an FFT with global temp data? I guess I could do a lit. search, but I figure te people here are tuned into this area.
REPLY: Yes, several people have been able to find signals using FFT in HadCRUT surface temp data.
A 410% increase in natural disasters since 1963?
Well….. When did the first satellites go up, which were able to show hurricanes we usually never saw?
When did electronics become sensitive enough, to pick up on disturbances we were not aware of?
I’m betting, as in other areas, that the vast majority of the ‘increase’ in disasters, is just an increase in the ability to Report on what has always been.
So, Jeff, alan may well be right- but for the wrong reasons 😛
Just my two cents.
btw, alan, your hubris is showing. Did not Anthony speak of this to you about a score of times, some weeks ago?
I have been looking at solar flare data and have noticed a within year beat, not quite matching 6 months. The short term temperature graphs show beats but are far more complex. The solar flare data could be considered the “treatment” and is much easier to interpret because we are looking at a single or near single mechanisms, IE solar flare signal strength and number. Short term temperature fluctuations are complex (seasonal tilt, biosphere mechanisms, long term solar affects, etc) and are dirtied by calibration problems. This data would be considered to be the combined effects from which we want to extrapolate just the short term solar signature.
This leads me to consider that temperature fluctuations need to be scrubbed of the components that affect it from long term solar trends, oceans, cloud cover, dust, CO2, etc. Flare data (which appears much smoother anyway) can be left as it is.
I have only worked with filters that cancel random noise that is bigger than the signal I want to see above and below that small signal, or filters that narrow a sharply gated frequency band on either side. What sorts of filters could be used to scrub “internal” temperature fluctuations one known component at a time?
I would like to see a series of smoothed graphs with several kinds of filters used to tease out these various known contributers, possibly finding a smoothed temperature graph that appears to be affected by unknown contributers. My curiosity is that would this smoothed graph of unknown contributers appear as a lag behind solar flare data?
(Gary G) Otter
” btw, alan, your hubris is showing,” You got the wrong alan, I am Alan and I sell flowers. I have never criticized anyone on this site, I ask questions, leave compliments, add my 2 cents, but when a professional critic starts on me I am old enough to reply.
addendum:
Maybe the data doesn’t need to be smoothed at all. Maybe what we want to do is filter out certain cyclic peaks that are thought to have been caused by a volcano here and there, seasonal temps, etc. We could also cancel out random peaks that fall outside a cyclic pattern. Just brainstorming here.
lol, well, he’s not right because there’s no proof of such an increase, only an improvement in our ability to detect, as you said. Doesn’t make him right, just means he’s touting invalid numbers.
Pierre Gosselin (aka AGWscoffer) (07:42:03) :
“anna v
In a nutshell (a couple of sentences), exactly what “nitty gritty” made you realise it’s a “whole farce”? Just curious.”
In my post on the 5th april ” anna v (04:58:43)” I condensed my pov to the deadly, in my opinion, disagreements of the IPCC models with real data.
Now by nitty gritty I mean looking at the “evaluation” ( that is data not included in the adjustment of parameters) figures and trying to decipher data and models. Systematically a multitude of model runs are overimposed like a diffuse cloud around data curves. This fools the eye as if it is an error bar, and not disagreeing projections. If one follows a model line consistently one sees that some fit somewhere and are very bad in other places, but the optical illusion is that more or less there is a fit. Now this is nasty. Raised my hackles.
It is very simple to fit a posteriori any data given enough parameters. Take Fourier transforms, as an easy example. One does not need many orders to fit any function adequately for the eye. There is no predictive power in this though, otherwise Fourier functions would be the theory of everything. That is about the level of of the IPCC models with the many explicit and hidden parameters.
I was also disturbed that in order to fit 1000 year data, they had to massage the data to fit the models. I am speaking of the (in)famous hokey stick graph and the miraculous disappearance of the middle age warming period. Procrustean logic.
These are just the tip of the iceberg.
When I was a graduate student, back in the beginning of the 60’s I had to prepare a lecture for the institute on a paper given to us as an exercise. When I finished the lecture an older mathematician took me aside and advised me: the lecture was good, but try not to make it so clear next time, not everybody has to understand everything!! That is the feeling I got perusing the hundreds of pages of the IPCC reports. Obfuscation.
Julian Williams in UK (05:04:45)
Yes, there is an ALICE experiment for the LHC. My group had joined the CMS experiment.
A main reason I am trying to speak up is because of the foreseen hardship that will be imposed on the poor of the world by all this CO2 budgeting. The tragedy will be greater if the solar predictions materialize after all this budgeting. I live in Greece, and I am trying my best to spread the knowledge that there is no consensus and the research should go on.
Francois’ riff on CO2 uptake, ocean biology etc, did remind me of this fascinating little snippet on Science Daily.
Entitled “Startling Discovery About Photosynthesis: Many Marine Microorganisms Skip Carbon Dioxide And Oxygen Step”, it turns out these little creatures don’t absorb CO2, but O2.
How many is ‘Many’? Well, these here organisms are only the dominant phytoplankton species, and then only about in about half of the marine environment. Move along. Nothing to see here….
The money quote:
“This discovery impacts not only scientists’ basic understanding of photosynthesis, but importantly, it may also impact how microorganisms in the oceans affect rising levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide.”
Ya reckon?
BTW Error bars …. anyone?
Pierre Gosselin
“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.”
Excellent. Bon mon ami 🙂
Mike Chappel, are you telling us that we are all going to die?
And whether oil is solely biotic in nature.
” Robert Wood (16:14:00) :
BTW Error bars …. anyone?”
If this includes my comments above, error bars on data are important because they determine whether there is any meaning in fitting a theory to data. If the theory fits the data because the error bars of the data have been massaged to such large numbers that the theory can dance a tango within, the exercise is meaningless. It just says that the theory is not inconsistent with the data. Such a theory has little predictive power, and certainly not the predictive power given to the (in)famous hockey stick plot, and to the apocalyptic pronouncements of the IPCC that want a CO2 straight jacket imposed on the world. It means that the science is open to lots and lots more of data gathering with smaller error bars before any meaningful statement about the future can be made.
and here is global warming made simple for those asking
http://www.weatherquestions.com/Roy-Spencer-on-global-warming.htm and the role of the precipitations systems.
Looks like so far 2008 is running at an anomaly really close to 0. It will take an extreme warming event (El Nino) to get 2008 into the top 10, IMO. A record breaking year is absolutely out of the question.
Piggybacking my last comment, I quickly glanced at the overall anomalies for the first 3 months for the past several years. It looks like Jan-Mar ’08 is colder worldwide than any Jan-Mar since 1997.
Make of that what you will, but that’s what the data says.
The Grand Poobah of AGW, addresses the media.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20080407/sc_afp/usclimateenvironmentnasa_080407051048
The tide is turning, and he has to ‘con’vince the faithful, to remain calm, and ignore the man behind the curtain.
Another “beautiful theory” is about to be destroyed by a “nasty little fact”.
I guess my link was too long. Here is a shorter link, that shows more of the Al Gore propaganda machine in action:
http://news.yahoo.com/i/1539
To the untrained eye, they have the appearance of news reporting.
It makes me want to break out in song. I just can’t decide between “We don’t get fooled again” or “Baby it’s cold outside”.