A Tale of Two Thermometers

ARTHUR,
you must be related to the little boy who had the audacity to shout
“the king has no clothes.”
the specific heat capacity of water and of air are probably no more than one or two orders of magnitude apart, but the oceans are way more than a thousand times more massive and therefore your estimate of the oceans having a thousand times the heat capacity of the atmosphere is very conservative by orders of magnitude. an argument that’s valid even when grossly understated is a lawyers dream, easy money.
also while we are being worried by the retreat of glaciers does anyone report the ones that are growing or are they relegated to the retraction page that no one except recluses might read. does anyone really understand the complete causes of glacial advance and retreat. the factor that’s ignored is shifts in ocean currents and their effects on climate as well as other concomitant factors like precipitation.
water vs. air ; why didn’t i think of that? good observation.

Arthur, I’m with you. Sea based weather stations that measure sea temps are a better way of taking the earth’s temperature. In addition to the reasons you listed, such a system is immune to the Urban Heat Island effect and to siting issues. A land based station might be a CRN1 today. But what will it look like in 20, 50 or 100 years? Will it be next to a parking lot, or a building or an air conditioner?
But a weather buoy sits in the middle of the ocean surrounded by miles of water. Twenty years from now its still the same. A hundred years from now its still the same.

Just on the basis of one paper published in Nature last week – claiming *another* 7 year pause of global warming until 2015 – and lots of CO2-warmists are jumping on it, meaning they’re moving away from the skewed warmer data (and alarmist stance) reported by the UN, NASA/Goddard-GISS and all the other algorean chartologists.
The alarmist data and models didn’t predict the current temperature plateau since 1999 (and have yet to concede it even exists, even in the face of five other datasets that say otherwise) and certainly aren’t predicting a continued plateau until 2015.
The rest are hedging their bets and drifting away from the UN / GISS orthodoxy. That’s a change. If this means the moderate-warming scenario is coming into broader acceptance then it also means there was *never* a consensus, nor was the science “settled.”
But it gets better: The CO2-warmists claim is that this ongoing temperature plateau (15 years total by 2015) is due to “natural variations.” Problem is that includes a PDO that will have shifted twice since 1998, warm to cool between 1999 – 2003, to warm and cool again 2003 – 2007, with no discernable rise in temperatures (excepting of course the anthropogenically oscillating NASA/GISS dataset).
The widespread use of the adjective “natural” would put the lie to any human-caused variations so, as Pielke points out, is actually a misnomer. But it does belie back-pedaling.
The reason is that if “natural variations” can drown out the human signal for such a long period of 15 years, then the human climate signature must be minor compared to the signal from natural variations and the only trends worth analyzing are very long term ones.
With that it does look like there’s been a sea change (no pun intended) in climatology and we starting to see the front edge of it as professional researchers start repositioning themselves for the newer science (soot, solar, PDO, AMO, etc.) to shake out and cautiously see how it breaks either way (between small vs. moderate human influence).
The whole thing was shaky to begin with. The USA couldn’t possibly cut CO2 emissions by 8/10ths in 2050 if we tried, our population will be 33 percent larger, meaning we’d have to cut per capita carbon output below 18th century levels. Either we’d have to go all-nuclear (like France & Sweden) or all-hydro (like Switzerland, and that’s very unlikely). Japan, famous for being one of the most efficient energy consuming nations on the planet, can’t afford Kyoto. The reality is that the world couldn’t afford the USA to seriously blunt its capacity to drive the world’s economic engine with our record trade deficits, nor would anyone invite the risk of a carbon trade war – a concern that has already strained relations between the EU & India. It was never tenable or workable.
We can pity Al Gore a little bit while we laugh at his expense. He’s bet the farm on this. It was quite a gambit and he’s still hoping to jawbone the cause (with a $300 million campaign, no less) while he tries to sell his old position short to someone gullible enough to take all that confederate money of dead carbon credits. I don’t think anyone will be buying, so there goes the family fortune.
He and the rest of the camp followers will find themselves relegated to the landfill of forgotten pied pipers who banked on leading the blindfolded to the Climate Kahoutek with some dangerous and stupid magic koolaid. Apophis makes a close pass in 2013. I think Gore would make a good Bruce Willis.
Maybe he shouldn’t have followed Maurice Strong’s advice and stayed in tobacco instead.

I have been following Anthony’s blog for over a year now, nearly two. I have learned an immense amount about earth science involving climate. I have learned it is very hard to fine unbiased research, reporting of research, and funding of research. It appears that most of the funding is based on the preconditioned results, the conclusion of the research. We need professional scientists. What we do not need is professional politicians, they seem to have an agenda and they are the ones driving the funding. Most of the preconceived studies for the last 20 years seems to be following the funding and not the funding following the studies. I appreciate every one’s participation in the blog because nowadays it appears that the only way to get true results is to have non-funded research or investigation or independent research or investigation. This is what blogs like Anthony’s is driving, independent study.
It is a great shame.
old construction worker,
Yep I remember those predictions they said that the current la Nina would end in 2008 and serious warming would resume in 2009. I agree with the warmist in that they say that science is self correcting. I believe that it is currently correcting itself. I just hope that the science of the past 20 years hasn’t discredited itself so badly in the public eye that recovery of the science will be greatly diminished. We need good skeptical scientific study. We need to know what is happening, We need to know how it is happening, And most importantly we need to know how to adapt to what is happening. We might slightly change the rate of change but we will not be able to stop the change. For this reason we must learn to do what man has been doing for thousands of years. Adapt to the climate nature hands us to live in.
Bill Derryberry
PS. I do believe that there will be some prominent scientists and politicians that will be so discredited that their reputations may not recover. It would be a shame that brilliant minds would be wasted because of agenda driven bias. I really believe that this will happen. I just hope the sword doesn’t cut to deep.

[i]PS. I do believe that there will be some prominent scientists and politicians that will be so discredited that their reputations may not recover. It would be a shame that brilliant minds would be wasted because of agenda driven bias. I really believe that this will happen. I just hope the sword doesn’t cut to deep.[/i]
I honestly don’t think that any of these agenda driven politicians will be a loss. After all their screaming it will be obvious for the voters, what they really are. If you have a “brilliant mind” with no common sense, you don’t get very far…

Anthony,
Thanks for the link to the article and all the valuable data I have gathered from your site.
I’m thinking about doing a follow up piece focused on the 2000 USHCN adjustments, which seems to be the primary basis of the shift in GISS data. I haven’t been able to find much information about this, and from searching Steve McIntyre’s site it doesn’t appear that he has been able to find much detailed information either.
If anyone has any information from USHCN about what they did and why in 2000, I would be very appreciative if they could pass it on.
stevesgoddard at gmail

Bill in V: “I do believe that there will be some prominent scientists and politicians that will be so discredited that their reputations may not recover.”
Don’t count on it. Sylvia Browne is an example of one who hasn’t lost a step despite being constantly wrong. Those who believe and follow never let the facts get in the way.
How many careers were permanently damaged over the Global Cooling scare?
Al G. has made his own career of going whichever way the wind blows. During one of the preceding fuel crunches, it was Al who said in one of his books: “Everyone has a right to sufficient and inexpensive fuel.” Al hasn’t suffered the slightest for his about-faces.

Bob Wilson,
A further implication is that most of the sea’s response to a change in air temperature (or infrared re-radiation from CO2) would be in the top layer of the sea water with slower mixing to greater depths. Since the top three meters of sea water have nearly the same heat capacity as the entire atmosphere, there should be a direct and rapid response in the near surface water to air temperature/infrared radiation.