RSS Global Temperature for October: RSS revises data to improve quality

They working very, very hard to find a linear trend in that data.
If the temperatures are cyclical, why try to force-fit a single, simple, linear slope to sinusoid data?
Then again, maybe they don’t get paid as much for a cyclical curve ……

I see hardly any difference. The Ver3.2 minus 3.1 is basically a flat line.

Isn’t it funny when temps don’t go the want thy want they want to change the way temps are recorded.Also on noticed on your sea ice chart we are NOW ahead of all the past 7 years. I wonder if this will make the news as last year did with supposted low ice??

Southern Hemisphere has another negative temperature anomaly, which makes 7 out of 10 months negative so far this year.

Al Gore has written: The Climate for Change
New York Times, November 9, 2008
Following is the comment I submitted in response:

The critical existential challenge we are facing is not climate change, but the exploding gap between population driven economic growth and declining global light oil production. This requires massive investment into alternative fuels to replace all conventional fuel production by 2030.
Gore dismisses alternative fuels as too expensive or polluting, or, calls “clean coal,” “imaginary”. Yet Sasol has been making fuel from coal since 1955. South Africa survived the international Apartheid embargo from Sasol’s coal derived fuel.
Today, China is rapidly making fuel methanol from coal for $0.66 to $1.00 per gallon of gasoline equivalent. Running hybrid vehicles on such coal methanol is much cheaper than the photovoltaic and wind driven plug-in electric vehicles Gore advocates. His environmental foot dragging on permitting and funding alternative fuels will be the greatest delay directly causing very high fuel prices as global light oil production inevitably declines.
Gore calls for an “emergency rescue of human civilization from the imminent and rapidly growing threat posed by the climate crisis.”
However: Gore’s carbon taxes or Cap and Trade directly harm the poor.
They multiply irrigation and fertilizer costs causing starvation.
They dry up discretionary income and increase unemployment.
Humans have survived far greater temperature fluctuations than realistic temperature projections from conventional fuels. Gore omits the “inconvenient truths” of tropical fossils beneath Antarctic glaciers, and glaciers extending down to Kansas. Gore ignores the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) shifting from warming till 1998 to cooling for the next few decades of cooling. Solar cycles modulate cosmic rays which then cause clouds to fluctuate. Tropospheric temperatures have been cooling for the last decade, not warming. Climate models have yet to be statistically validated. Independent tests have found them seriously wanting. We must demand objective science with statistically verified climate models.
Funding climate control will directly deny funds urgently needed to develop alternative fuels. Carbon sequestration is a huge black hole consuming enormous funds with negligible returns. It would starve funds from critically needed alternative fuels, causing massive global economic depression and starvation. Ross McKitrick’s T3 Tax quantitatively linked to objective tropospheric satellite temperature measurements is far more realistic than the nightmare of cap and trade. China’s increase in carbon emissions by 2010 is projected to be 1,000% (ten times) greater than ALL Kyoto promised reductions, of which the EU has only achieved 25%. Pragmatically, constraining CO2 emissions to control climate will be ineffective to say the least.
Our critical need is to develop alternative fuels faster than declining light oil production.
Nepal, Eritrea, and Zimbabwe have run out of fuel causing massive economic damage. OPEC production cuts extorted far more from developing countries than from ALL developmental aid. The impact of climate change will be negligible by comparison.
We have a brief opportunity to extract ourselves from OPEC’s stranglehold over our oil jugular. Our first priority must be to rapidly develop the most cost effective alternative fuels. Developing plug hybrid vehicles will help but will be woefully insufficient. Other infrastructure projects would starve funding from the twenty some trillion dollars critically needed to develop alternative fuels over the next one to two decades.
I urge you first to prioritize feeding the poor and providing alternative fuel to sustain global economies from catastrophic decline – Not just our own, but especially for our “neighbor” in developing countries.”

David, problem is: Methanol is Poisonous. You think they raised a stink over 1.5% MTBE, just wait and see what they do over Methanol. Besides, I think something’s wrong with that number. The Plant is incredibly expensive. About 10 times more expensive per gallon than ethanol, and the process is very labor-intensive – maybe as much as 20, or 30 times.

Bill in Vigo, according to UAH 12 mo running mean 2007 came in at .282 Right now, 2008 is looking like .04. If this hold, and it seems quite possible, we would be looking at a difference of about 0.24 degrees.
Does that sound about right?

Is there a problem with the value for Sept in the RSS plot shown above in red?
I was looking for 0.241 but it is not there. What is shown is slightly above the 0.181 for October.
Not trying to be a pedant but the table and the graph seem to be at odds?
Now it could be that this has been raised in comments above but I will not be going through these right now. If so my apologies.

Thanks for the work you did on this, especially in the comparison between the two versions. I was just going to run a check myself with Excel {I’m a bit rusty and need the practice}. It looks like the difference you’ve shown confirms what eyeballing the first graph suggests — that most differences of note occur prior to 2003. Perhaps the analysts are becoming more sophisticated in processing the data.
The data for the next five years should show whether this past year was just a quick blip or the start of a downward trend from the temperature plateau of the past few years.

The heat is on in Georgia, Tennessee and Alabama.
Temperatures in six Southeastern cities, including Chattanooga; Atlanta; Athens, Ga.; Augusta, Ga.; Huntsville, Ala.; and Birmingham, Ala., ranked in the top 50 of cities across the country showing above-normal average temperatures.
“The climate has been warming. It’s pretty unprecedented,” said Stephen Konarik, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Peachtree City, Ga.
The trick here is these comedians are using 2007 data. They must have seen the 2008 summer numbers and decided it was time to throw up a smoke screen.
http://www.istockanalyst.com/article/viewiStockNews+articleid_2778499.html

The September 2008 number seems to be wrong – shouldn’t it be 0.194

Thanks for flagging this, Anthony. I’ve updated WFT to use the new 3.2 dataset and hence it is now up to date:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/wti/last:12/plot/hadcrut3vgl/last:12/offset:-0.15/plot/gistemp/last:12/offset:-0.24/plot/uah/last:12/plot/rss/last:12

I dunno, the RSS changes described seem above board and proactive to me as well as inconsequential re: long-term trends. Wish that were common practice, frankly.

Awfully cool October in England:
http://www.junkscience.com/MSU_Temps/Warming_Look.html#CET
I recall the BBC or someone predicting a record hot year for 2008 in Britain.

http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/current.anom.south.jpg
Looks to me like the trend down there is up!

I think the trend is only 0.158C per decade (which is what RSS has on their website as well.)
http://www.remss.com/msu/msu_data_description.html#msu_amsu_time_series
REPLY: Hmm, something is amiss for sure. In the PDF file they published to show the differences between 3.1 and 3.2 they show .180C/decade on their graph in the PDF document which I also used in the post.
The link you provide may or may not be current. But now we have two things pointing to .157 or .158C/decade, so at this point there must be an error or omission somewhere. I would tend to trust Paul Clark’s trend assessment since it comes from the raw data and his plots have been spot on. I don’t know the data provenance of the graphs in the RSS PDF report. Maybe there is a mistake there.
I have to travel today, but maybe somebody can pick up the ball while I’m on the road and inquire with RSS tomorrow?
– Anthony

Ron de Haan:
You can forget about 80 % efficient heat engines. To reach that kind of efficiency the initial (absolute) temperature would have to be about 25 times higher than the end temperature. Since the end temperature can’t be lower than ambient (say 300 K) the hot end of your engine would have to be at c. 7,500 K. That’s a lot hotter than the surface of the Sun.
It might just be feasible on Pluto though.

Curiouser and curiouser… Doing the same thing (1979 to end 2007) on the 3.1 data gives a trend of 0.183K/decade, which is what RSS say it was. I’ve validated this both in Calc and using my raw analyse tool:

analyse rss to 2008 trend < RSS_Monthly_MSU_AMSU_Channel_TLT_Anomalies_Land_and_Ocean_v03_1.txt
Read 357 months' values to 2008.67
#Time series (rss) from 1979 to 2008.75
#Selected data up to 2008
#Least squares trend line; slope = 0.0182593 per year
...

compared to:

analyse rss to 2008 trend < RSS_Monthly_MSU_AMSU_Channel_TLT_Anomalies_Land_and_Ocean_v03_2.txt
Read 358 months' values to 2008.75
#Time series (rss) from 1979 to 2008.83
#Selected data up to 2008
#Least squares trend line; slope = 0.0172291 per year
...

(unfortunately you can’t get at RSS 3.1 through woodfortrees.org any more, but you can fetch the source of analyse there and do this yourself from the original files)
So, if this is right, contrary to the report the changes from 3.1 to 3.2 reduce the trend from 0.183K/decade to 0.172K/decade, which feels like a more significant change…
If you include the 2008 (to Oct) data, as I originally did, you get:
3.1: 0.168K/decade
3.2: 0.158K/decade
So the trend appears to be falling both because of passage of time and quality control.
For comparison, the other sources (from 1979 to latest data) are:
UAH: 0.128K/decade
GISS: 0.161K/decade
HADCRUT3: 0.160K/decade
RSS used to be the highest 30-year (nearly) trend, but now it seems to have fallen back into line with the surface records. UAH is still the low outlier.

eventually all that cold water has to find its way up north.
Eventually will be of the order of a few years to a few decades, because the NH and SH are essentially separate climate systems over shorter timescales.
Hence my contention that the Global Warming hypothesis has to be true for both hemispheres. Irrespective of how much warming there is the NH, as long as the SH does not warm, and there has been essentially no SH warming for the last 30 years, the hypothesis is disproven.
And of course any global mean temperature is irrelevant to the GW hypothesis.

It’s going to be interesting to how the temps develop over the next few months
– if the temps begin to creep back up to the 0.3C anomaly range then that’s bad news for the skeptics
– but if they stay down in the 0.0 – 0.1C range then that’s good news for skeptics, and bad news for the AGW crowd.
– at the moment, I think it could go either way! (sorry!)

Kum Dollison (22:00:35) :
“David, problem is: Methanol is Poisonous.”
Gasoline is similarly poisonous. See below. Its just not “NEWS”. Its a matter of training the public.
Thanks Mike McMillan for: “Ethanol is poisonous, too, and probably kills more of us than methanol does (especially at frat parties).”
Kum: “You think they raised a stink over 1.5% MTBE, just wait and see what they do over Methanol. …”
Lack of fuel and consequently lack of jobs and food is much more deadly. Some 2-3 million people starved in North Korea 1995-96 due to food shortages caused by shortage of diesel fuel and fertilizer consequent to the collapse of the Soviet Union. Failure to provide adequate transport fuels to compensate for the pending rapid decline in light oil exports will likely cause hundreds of millions of deaths due to starvation.
Kum: “I think something’s wrong with that number. The Plant is incredibly expensive”.
You must be reading environmentalist propaganda, not commercial reports. See:
China Mobilizes Methanol While the U.S. Remains Mired in Oil
Methanol from coal is currently the cheapest fuel available. DOE expects methanol costs of $0.50/gal equivalent to $1/gal gasoline.
UCG Syngas: Product Options and Technologies
The thermal efficiency is about 70% for coal to methanol vs 60% for Gas to Liquid Fisher Tropsch.
We need to critically focus on what can be implemented rapidly on a large scale most cost effective.y
Fuel Hazards
Gasoline: Occupational Exposure Limits:
TLV: 300 ppm as TWA
500 ppm as STEL A3 (confirmed animal carcinogen with unknown relevance to humans); (ACGIH 2004).
Methanol: Occupational Exposure limits:
NIOSH REL: 200 ppm (260 mg/m3) TWA, 250 ppm (325 mg/m3) STEL [skin]
Current OSHA PEL: 200 ppm (260 mg/m3) TWA
1989 OSHA PEL: 200 ppm (260 mg/m3) TWA, 250 ppm (325 mg/m3) STEL [skin]
19931994 ACGIH TLV: 200 ppm (262 mg/m3) TWA,
250 ppm (328 mg/m3) STEL [skin]
Ethanol OCCUPATIONAL EXPOSURE LIMITS:
TLV: 1000 ppm as TWA A4 (not classifiable as a human carcinogen); (ACGIH 2004).
MAK: 500 ppm 960 mg/m³
Peak limitation category: II(2); Carcinogen category: 5; Pregnancy risk group: C; Germ cell mutagen group: 5;
(DFG 2004).
OSHA PEL: TWA 1000 ppm (1900 mg/m3)
NIOSH REL: TWA 1000 ppm (1900 mg/m3)
NIOSH IDLH: 3300 ppm 10%LEL See: 64175
IDLH: “Immediately Dangerous to Life or Health air concentration values”
REL Recommended Exposure Limits” TWA Time Weighted Average
PEL Permissible Exposure Limits
TLV Threshold-limit value
STEL Short Term Exposure Limit
“Symptoms
Irritation eyes, skin, mucous membrane; dermatitis; headache, lassitude (weakness, exhaustion), blurred vision, dizziness, slurred speech, confusion, convulsions; chemical pneumonitis (aspiration liquid); possible liver, kidney damage; [potential occupational carcinogen]”
Methanol (Methyl Alcohol)
“Symptoms
Irritation eyes, skin, upper respiratory system; headache, drowsiness, dizziness, nausea, vomiting; visual disturbance, optic nerve damage (blindness); dermatitis”
Besides, I think something’s wrong with that number. The Plant is incredibly expensive. About 10 times more expensive per gallon than ethanol, and the process is very labor-intensive – maybe as much as 20, or 30 times.

Great post and insight as ever.
Together with your UAH release, it just shows how competing dataseets improve the quality of temperature measurements. It looks like I have to revise the synoptical view and trend of 5 datasets again, once Giss, NCDC and HatCrut are out. Their land-ocean-indexes have just been revised as well.
All in all, it looks as if this increases the bias between surface stations and satellite units

Ecotretas (12:21:01) :
CO2 going high by the biggest value for any month since the beginning of Mauna Loa measurements. If temperatures go up next month, the AGW crowd will find a justification!
Must be the way they do their running averages. The end point goes up because of the previous peak. If I add the last 6 red points and divide by 6, I get a lower point, 385.5. They say the black line is “seasonally corrected data”, so anything is possible.
Of course there could be some extra CO2 belching from the local volcanoes at Mauna Loa.

@Paul Clark
Great tool you have.
I actually agree with your statement. What I had in mind was the average of the satellite units RSS and UAH versus the average of the surface networks (land-ocean-indexes). I did a slope of the satellite era in Excel. Excel returns a satellite era trend of:
RSS + 0.159K/dec. (September + 0.169)
UAH + 0.127K/dec.
Average for the two satellite units:
+ 0,142K/dec. (vs.+ 0,148k in Sept.),
which is now well below the land-ocean-idexes of + 0,161K in average.