UAH global temperature anomaly – hitting the slopes

The scientific data and anecdotal stories (“cooler and wetter than previous years”, etc.) reinforce each other. Same pattern in general between the temperate and tropical countries.

Dear Anthony,
Lubos is not a mathematician, but physicist, working on string theory.

Add me to those experiencing an unusually cold and wet May-early July here in New England. What I gather from the informative post is that to project a warming trend, one must carefully select the particular time period to compute the moving average. I doubt that such cherry picking data selection methodology exhibits statistical significance. Another great guest science post in a fine science blog.
Given that CO2 levels are higher this decade than the decades of the last half of the 20th Century, should we not be seeing readily measurably higher temperatures according to IPCC dogma?

The 0.4C rise is the same as that suggested by Dr Roy Spencer & “The Diatribe Guy” in their blogs.
Three identical results from 3 different methods, better than the IPCC models can do.

I am surprised temperatures are not much cooler than they are, given that the sun has been remarkably quiet of late. Surely one would have thought that temperatures should be much lower than the 1979 average by now?

Not to belabor the point, but a squirrel to an elephant is about three orders of magnitude. A horse to an elephant would be about right.

# Stefan.
Cited from H.H. Lamb, ‘Climate, history and the modern world’, 1995, page 11:
” … A step in the direction of standardization was taken at the 1935 conference of the International Meteorological Organization (forerunner of the present World Meteorological Organization) when use of the observations of the years 1901-1930 for all climatic purposes was recommended as the so-called ‘climatic normal period’. Choice of the world ‘normal’ turned out to be unfortunate, but it has persisten in climatological practice. It spreads the impression that nature recognizes such a norm and the conditions should continually return to the regime of the chosen period. Wenow know that 1901-1931 was a highly abnormal period, though it was surpassed by the following thirty years 1931-1960, which were in due course substituted as the ‘new normal period’. Globally these were probably the warmest, and in many regions the moistest, regions periods of such length for centuries past. …”
See more here.
http://books.google.nl/books?id=0Nucx3udvnoC&dq=climate+definition+thirty+years&source=gbs_navlinks_s
With a special thanks to William Kininmonth – former head of Australia’s National Climate Centre, who explained this to me earlier this year.

I could think of two reasons to say that “climate” is a 30 year period. One would be that with a sample of 30 years of data you could say the sample was “large” in statistical terms, but really this isn’t a physically motivated rationale. The other reason could be the existence of underlying physical cycles that had length of 15 years.

Summer isn’t AWOL in the Phoenix, AZ area. We’ve been a bit below normal lately in the mid 100’s, but the forecast for Saturday is 116. That’s somewhere between the normal and the record for that day. This is the time of year where we expect more 115-118F days. Where are these frost warnings again? Is there gainful employment available? 🙂

noaaprogrammer (09:50:13) : Is there a formal meteorological/geological definition for the number of years encompassed by the term, “climate?
I think 30 years is the minimum used by researchers in the field. I also thought the years 1951-1980 were the baseline used in the RSS and UAH temperature graphs provided by this site? Can someone confirm or correct this assumption?
For example the 1st point plotted, Jan 1979 is ~ -.15 C (on the UAH chart). I thought that indicated it was .15 C below the 1951 – 1980 average global temperature? If not what is it indicating?

I am pretty sure those graphs representing the trend over various periods looks a lot like the graph of trends in a random data set;
It flails about wildly on a small sample set, switching signs less and less frequently as sample size increases, then somewhere between 50 and 200 events, it picks a sign and diminishes to zero over about a thousand events such that x=n and y = RND(+1 or -1).
Try it out in excel if you want, it’s a simple statistical experiment. I am reasonably confident there’s some interpretation to be made, depending on the number of y intercepts and the sample size, but I haven’t looked much deeper than that.
Sorry if that is too pedestrian for the fully engaged scientific mind, but I found it useful.
Hmmm. . . . Statistics 201 to the rescue!

What’s truely remarkable about that is when you introduce a trend of 1 per 100 (i.e. 1 ‘degree’ per century or .01 per ‘n’) there’s two intercepts at less than 10 events, and after about 35 events, there is no doubt that it’s not trending toward zero, or even remaining constantly in the vicinity. If there’s a trend, it shows up for real over any large data set. I imagine there’s a probability distribution somewhere here as well.
There’s something in this line of thinking that could prove disasterous for the AGW crowd if they want to claim 1 or 2 or even 5 degrees of warming per century. (Although the proprietor of this website and the regulars here have provided more than a few disasters for the warmists already).

“Is there a formal meteorological/geological definition for the number of years encompassed by the term, “climate?” Roughly how many years does it take to shift from one set of climate averages to another, and how is that related to the duration of the “stable” climate periods? ”
Benoit Mandelbrot, who is a mathematician, and who knows something about chaotic systems, considered that question and there is a summary of his conclusions at Climate Audit. To over-simplify: its Weather, all the way down.
http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=396

With the 10 years moving average used in most publications, the trend is still positive, and we can unfortunately expect 10 years more before the AGW hypothesis is definitely discarded.

and another great prediction from METOFFICE:
Precipitation during summer will be below average in eastern Europe!
If you take a look, almost today in most of this regions more rain was fallen, than during an average meteo-sommer (06-09).
Now, we saw this time again, that all of this medium (long) range forecasts from metoffice have been very wrong.
There is nothing else to say!

Unbelievable denialism here. Those of you who are actually still considering the issue, rather than wedded to one side of it than the other, please consider the following paragraph from the Hadley Climate Research Unit for a moment before resuming this counter-constructive online banter:
The time series shows the combined global land and marine surface temperature record from 1850 to 2008. The year 2008 was tenth warmest on record, exceeded by 1998, 2005, 2003, 2002, 2004, 2006, 2001, 2007 and 1997. This time series is being compiled jointly by the Climatic Research Unit and the UK Met. Office Hadley Centre. The record is being continually up-dated and improved (see Brohan et al., 2006). This paper includes a new and more thorough assessment of errors, recognizing that these differ on annual and decadal timescales. Increased concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere due to human activities are most likely the underlying cause of warming in the 20th century.
The 1990s were the warmest complete decade in the series. The warmest year of the entire series has been 1998, with a temperature of 0.546°C above the 1961-90 mean. Thirteen of the fourteen warmest years in the series have now occurred in the past fourteen years (1995-2008). The only year in the last fourteen not among the warmest fourteen is 1996 (replaced in the warm list by 1990). The period 2001-2008 (0.43°C above 1961-90 mean) is 0.19°C warmer than the 1991-2000 decade (0.24°C above 1961-90 mean).
Analyses of over 400 proxy climate series (from trees, corals, ice cores and historical records) show that the 1990s is the warmest decade of the millennium and the 20th century the warmest century. The warmest year of the millennium was likely 1998, and the coldest was probably (but with much greater uncertainty) 1601.
We should all remember having read that, when we consider how we will justify our inaction to our grandchildren.

Well if I were you I would read that very carefully yourself and note both the non sequiturs and the inherent contradictions. Not to mention the mays, the might bees, and the unsupported assertions.
Kindest Regards

steven mosher: “One would be that with a sample of 30 years of data you could say the sample was “large” in statistical terms”
Only if 30 years’ AMSU data is a statistically representative sample. But it is not – it does not give us the randomness/diversity required to capture all the information required to summarise climate behaviour. If this data is used to produce measures of significance, such measures would need to be expanded to account for the shortcomings of the inferior sample.
Juls: “.. we can unfortunately expect 10 years more before the AGW hypothesis is definitely discarded.”
Right now, the AMSU LT series has a large spike in 1998. As this sits toward the right hand end of the series, it contributes to the apparent positive trend.
If the new data over coming decade or so does not challenge the 1998 peak, the spike will transition to the middle, and then onto the left-hand end of the growing series. Without large new positive anomalies, 1998 will act as a pivot, and the apparent trend would reduce to zero and eventually turn negative. If this happens, it will show that 30 years is arbitrary and will be a practical demonstration of statistical insignificance.

David (14:30:01) :
Here’s the underpinning of the information you just regurgitated;
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/img/climate/research/ushcn/ts.ushcn_anom25_diffs_urb-raw_pg.gif
Can you see what that is? Do you understand what it means? The raw data show’s no (or only very slight) warming. This is all a facade.
So go ahead, give us that old argumentum ad misericordiam sham argument; Do it for the Children! In lieu of any real evidence to the contrary. We don’t know, so just to be safe, we’d better stop using fuel! Talk about a way to screw up our kid’s lives!
The powers that be have chosen to ignore the facts, have subverted the science, and would appreciate it greatly if we would now surrender our freedom.
You go first.

When Dr. Roy Spencer released the June UAH results, I was intrigued by his statement, “The decadal temperature trend for the period December 1978 through June 2009 remains at +0.13 deg. C per decade.” This was nicely explained by Motls’ regression analysis. The positive decadel trend results from a little bump on Motls’ regression curve (second figure) between 113 months (9.4 years) and 123 months (10.2 years).
Also, as Motls observed “You see that according to the last 30 years of the data, the IPCC overestimates the warming trend by one order of magnitude!”
I would add to Motls’ comments that there is a clear warming trend over the last 310 years. Why? Because the year 1699 was near the end of the Maunder Minimum, in the frozen depths of the Little Ice Age!

dennis ward (11:00:12) :
I am surprised temperatures are not much cooler than they are, given that the sun has been remarkably quiet of late. Surely one would have thought that temperatures should be much lower than the 1979 average by now?
Be patient Dennis,
You are not the only warmist who is “surprised”!
We live on a resilient planet that takes it’s time to warm up and cool down.
It’s because all that water you know.
I personally am not disappointed at all.
We are cooling fast and nobody can stop it.
Looking forward to the coming winter which will start about 2 months earlier.
From Seablogger comment by Steve Sadlov:
“Sunday, a dry cold front passed through. I thought, maybe, just maybe … this is our harbinger of climatic autumn, in this region. The earliest ever. Of course, there is no way to know this now. Only retrospectively, perhaps 2 months from now, will we know for sure. Interestingly, and, hauntingly, a northerly flow has settled in. The marine layer is once again mixed out. Cold air from aloft has worked its way to the surface. We’ve been flirting with the upper forties the past two mornings. I will neither rule in nor out the possibility that climatic autumn has arrived here. If true, it is indeed a year without a summer”.
WATER VAPOR IMAGERY IS INDC A DEEPENING TROUGH OFF THE PACIFIC NW COAST. THIS TROUGH WILL MOVE TO THE COAST DURING THE WEEK…BRINGING NEAR TO SLIGHTLY BELOW NORMAL TEMPS. HAVE KEPT TEMPS UP A BIT IN THE NORTH BAY VALLEYS AS THE NORTHERLY FLOW SHOULD INCR…LEADING TO SOME DOWNSLOPE WARMING. THIS TROUGH WILL REMAIN ALONG THE COAST THROUGH THE WEEKEND. THE LARGE RIDGE IN THE SOUTHERN PLAINS WILL BUILD A LITTLE TO THE NORTHWEST…HOWEVER UNLIKE EARLIER MODEL RUNS IT WILL NOT PUSH INTO THE DISTRICT. THEREFORE…ANY WARMING OVER THE WEEKEND WILL BE MODEST. ANOTHER TROUGH DEEPENS OFF THE PACIFIC NW COAST EARLY NEXT WEEK FOR SOME ADDITIONAL SLIGHT COOLING.
=========================================
If our “typical summer pattern” is not established soon, it will never be established, and “the fall pattern” will be the innate default value.
http://www.intelliweather.net/imagery/intelliweather/templine_nat_640x480_img.htm
and
http://www.iceagenow.com/Record_low_temperatures_in_46_states_during_June.htm
No Dennis, I am not disappointed.

Anthony,
too many zeros in “The anomaly was +0.001…” ? The original article shows only +0.01…
Bob

You must be pulling my leg Ron de Haan, I do not doubt what that honest person says about what cooling is in store weather-wise, but please tell me it won’t mean an early freeze here in Wichita despite some sunflowers at my transition school blooming, the reason is we have a tomato and cucumber plant growing in two upside-down planters and I hope my parents and others can enjoy a bumper crop of them before the first freeze kills them, we’re just about to get a big wave of little tomatoes and cucumbers in addition to the 5 already seen, so it’d be nice if the first freeze waited until…………oh should I say the average date somewhere in October so we have time to actually pick a bunch.

Lubos is wrong when he says that what he calls the “mid-tropospheric data” (and is technically known as T2) should show a higher trend than the T2LT data that one usually talks about. The problem with T2 is that, while the weighting function is centered in the mid-troposphere, it has a considerable tail going into the stratosphere. Since the stratospheric cooling trend is considerably larger in magnitude than the tropospheric warming trend, this causes a large contamination of the trend in T2 from the stratospheric cooling.
Spencer and Christy created the synthetic T2LT channel to try to eliminate this contamination. There is still some argument about how successfully their T2LT channel does this and whether there is a better way to do this (see http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/research/nature02524-UW-MSU.pdf and http://ams.allenpress.com/perlserv/?request=get-abstract&doi=10.1175%2FJTECH1840.1 ), but I don’t think anybody claims that T2 itself gives a good measure of tropospheric temperature trends because of the issue of considerable stratospheric contamination.

“”” David (14:30:01) :
Unbelievable denialism here. Those of you who are actually still considering the issue, rather than wedded to one side of it than the other, please consider the following paragraph from the Hadley Climate Research Unit for a moment before resuming this counter-constructive online banter: “”””
Should take a dose of your own advice David.
For a start, there isn’t any reliable global temperature data dating back before the deployment of the Argo Oceanic Bouys, that established in 2001, that oceanic water temperatures, and air temperatures are not correlated (why on earth would anyone expect them to be). That means the believable climate data era begins about 1980, around the same time that polar orbit satellites were launched.
Secondly, the Data reported by the Hadley Climate Research Unit; comprises only the data gathered by the Hadley Climate Research Unit; much as the GISStemp reports only the data gathered by the GISStemp network of sensors.
Neither one of those data gathering networks complies with the Nyquist Sampling Theorem on Sampled Data Systems; either in spatial sampling or in temporal sampling, and in both cases the violation is by factors large enough to corrupt even the zero frequency value of the recovered function, which is the average being sought. So garbage in; garbage out !
Thirdly, it is widely acknowledged that since the IGY in 1957/58, and more recently in the post cooling frenzy of the mid 1970s, there was a very brief period of warming lasting til about the mid 1990s save for that anomalous 1998 El Nino; that was so short lived; but ever since and certainly since 2000, the trend has gone cooler, and decidedly so in the late 2000s, so the data shows we have definitely gone theorugh a climate temperature peak; which is now behind us.
Mathematicians have a habit of placing all of the higher values of any function in the vicinity of a peak; and conversely, by convention, we place the lower values ina region around the minimum; it sort of works out more fairly that way.
So you are merely stating the obvious in pointing out that 2008 was one of the warmest recent years; somewhat akin to saying that the higher elevations on earth can generally be found up in the mountains; we like it that way.
But the causal CO2 of course has not ceased its inexorable climb; nor even paused.
But we have gone from cold scare to cold scare in a mere 30 years; passing through a hot scare on the way.
Don’t you think you are just over dramatising things a bit much ?

The 30 year period is consistent with the Akasofu Wave Theory with oscillations of approximately 30 years since about 1880.

Bob K. (15:37:19) : said:
“Anthony,
too many zeros in “The anomaly was +0.001…” ? The original article shows only +0.01…”
Bob, these two numbers are from different files on the UAH website. They are both global lower troposphere temperature anomalies for June 2009.
I asked:
“On the UAH website the file
http://www.nsstc.uah.edu/public/msu/t2lt/tltglhmam_5.2
shows the June global temperature anomaly at 0.001, but the file http://www.nsstc.uah.edu/public/msu/t2lt/uahncdc
shows the June global temperature anomaly at 0.01.
Could you please explain why these files show different values?”
John Christy, Director, Earth System Science Center, UAH responded:
“The uahncdc.XX files are produced from gridded maps which interpolate farther into the polar regions (to 86.25) where as tXXglhmam_5.X are produced from programs that deal only in zonal anomalies (higher signal to noise) and go only to 83.75. Also, the grid-based datasets have some screening for high elevation which are then interpolated, but the zonals do not have this done (i.e. high elevations included). Also too, uahncdc.XX files are rounded to 0.01 and the zonals are rounded to 0.001. The differences between the two are well below any significance values and can be used interchangeably.”

a few great temperature links:
review of all 4 main temps
http://www.climate4you.com/GlobalTemperatures.htm#Recent%20global%20satellite%20temperature
the measurement of global temperatures – National Climate Data Center
http://www.appinsys.com/GlobalWarming/GW_Part2_GlobalTempMeasure.htm
WoodForTrees -flat from 1997. go play.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/rss/from:1997/plot/rss/from:1997/trend
Historical Climatology Network – Check out where you live. but these use suspect surface data
http://cdiac.ornl.gov/epubs/ndp/ushcn/usa_monthly.html#map

@David (14:30:01) :
Though satellite data does not fully support your list from the Hadley Center, who still refuses to make their algorithms public, a temperature increase has taken place since the little ice age.
The millenium record stuff, however, is a wild guess and unsupported by science andin pure contradiction to various historical reports, especially higher historic sea-levels and smaller glaciers.
For an introduction to this topic, I would recommend you to read this http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=2322 and this http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=4866 .
After that, how can you justify towards your grandchildren, that you helped in wasting their resources, prosperity on the basis of bad science ?

This is july? Where is the heat.
http://www.iceagenow.com/Where_is_the_heat_Record_low_temps_in_Kentucky.htm

Regarding the statement from Hadley Center. According to their data, it has been cooling since around 2004. But even with that cooling, we are still at the warm end of a long-term warming trend. It isn’t a surprise that it is warmer now then it was when it was cooler. The last time I checked their site, they did not mention the approximately 5-year cooling trend that their own data is showing. Do they really consider that to be irrelevant?
Bruce Richardson
Houston, TX

Lubos wrote: “Global mean temperature according to UAH MSU for the first 8.5 years i.e. 102 months of this century. Linear regression gives a cooling trend by a hefty -1.45 °C per century in this interval. So if someone tells you that the trend is “of course” positive as long as we omit the year 1998, you may be very certain that he or she is not telling you the truth.”
Come on Lubos, we are skeptics alright, but we shouldn’t resort to the deceptive tactics of the AGW crowd. To cherry-pick 8.5 years to show a negative trend is also spurious. Add another 1.5 years and the trend is positive again. http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/uah/from:1999/plot/uah/from:1999/trend
Even a starting date on the other side of 1998, for instance 1996 so including 1998, you get a positive trend: http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/uah/from:1996/plot/uah/from:1996/trend

rogerkni (00:47:56)
Here’s an overlay of Akasofu’s plot with the GISTEMP data:
http://i44.tinypic.com/33pf41z.png
As you are citing Akasofu, could you please explain to me how his smoothing algorithm (he is smoothing the gray 5-year mean line of GISTEMP, not the annual data) resulted in a major deviation from the data in the period 1905 to 1935 and shifts in the maximum of the peaks at 1900 and 1945? Or how he interpolated the beginning and the end, where the GISTEMP 5-year mean has no data at all? Can you name a reasonable smoothing algorithm that will reproduce Akasofu’s smooth? Free hint: it’s not a running mean.
Oh, and please note, how his plot relies on the above distortions to give the impression of oscillations superimposed on a linear trend.

@ David (14:30:01) :
“Unbelievable denialism here.”
I think a better word would be ‘scepticism’. I’m a sceptic and I’m proud of it. It means that I don’t accept something to be true simply because it comes from authority, and that I try to ask awkward questions. If a theory is sound then it should be able to answer awkward questions, and therefore honest scientists should have no fear of scepticism. In fact scepticism is – or should be – the very foundation of science. Galileo was one of the great sceptics, and there are many, many more such as Einstein and Wegener. Oh, yes, and Buzz Aldrin!
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If some people believe that most of the warming is caused by CO2 and that we’re doomed unless we slash our emissions, I can respect that belief – provided, of course, that their data and arguments are sound and honest. Unfortunately, much of the ‘science’ that underpins the strong AGW theory is so bad that it verges on willful deception.
.
You present a statement from Hadley as if it were some profound revelation that will have all the sceptics instantly recanting their beliefs. Maybe you’re a newcomer to WUWT (and Climate Audit) but if not you will be aware of the enormous amount of discussion that goes on about the claims emanating from Hadley and all the other pro-AGW organisations. This is precisely what the debate is about, so to give that quote as if it might be news to us is a little odd. It’s also relying on authority, which can be very dangerous.
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The Hadley statement effectively refers to the Hockey Stick, which claims that the 20th century warming is ‘unprecedented’. You must be aware that McIntyre and McKitrick published a devastating criticism of the original Mann paper (MBH98). Among other things they were able to demonstrate that Mann’s algorithm would generate hockey sticks even if you fed in red noise. Others have reproduced this claim and, as far as I’m aware, no one has been able to disprove it. If the claim stands then MBH98 is dead in the water and, worse, is close to scientific fraud.
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Apart from bad science, MBH98 (and all the other copies of the Hockey Stick) is contradicted by a huge amount of ice core and proxy data and, perhaps just as important, by history itself. MBH98 is a particularly bad example, but sadly much of climate science has been corrupted by money and politics, and the behaviour of some prominent climate scientists reflects this. For example, they often fail to make public their data and methods, as required by the rules of virtually all scientific organisations, and people have been forced to use freedom of information laws to try to obtain this information. This isn’t how science is supposed to operate in the 21st century. Maybe these scientists are simply lazy or incompetent. But at the very least it gives grounds for suspicion that they have something to hide.
.
“We should all remember having read that, when we consider how we will justify our inaction to our grandchildren.”
The Hadley statement is so bogus that I doubt if it’s of any significance to anyone. But you were making a more profound statement. If we really are doomed by our emissions then, yes, we should take action. But that action will be unimaginably expensive and will actually make our grandchildren significantly poorer, and will be the cause of increased poverty in other parts of the world. If dangerous climate change does eventually happen (it certainly hasn’t yet) then we will have robbed them of the resources that could have helped them protect themselves against the climate change.
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But if climate change is primarily natural, as the evidence increasingly indicates, then the warming will come to an end and we will enter an era of global cooling. We will then see politicians around the world throwing away trillions of dollars trying to make the world cooler when the world is actually becoming – umm, cooler. I hope you agree that this, possibly hypothetical situation, would be about as barking mad as it’s possible to imagine.
.
Very often it’s not floods or droughts or starvation that kill enormous numbers of people. It’s poverty that kills. The best thing we can do for our grandchildren is to drive up prosperity while protecting the environment in a sensible way. Through foreign aid and investment, prosperity in developed countries will – or certainly should – translate to increased prosperity in less developed regions such as Africa. The tragedy is that this obsession with CO2 may lead to a distinct fall in global prosperity. Yes, climate change may already be killing hundreds of thousands. But it’s not the climate itself that is causing the damage. It’s the almost demented belief in man-made and destructive climate change that is causing the damage. This belief has caused the US to switch a third of its grain production to bio fuels. It caused a big spike in food prices which probably led to death from starvation. I regard this as obscene, almost as if filling up a gas tank is more important than filling stomachs. But this is an almost inevitable result of the AGW delusion, and things will get much worse if it continues unchecked. Of course, AGW is built on delusions within delusions. For example, there is good reason to believe that over the next few decades, a switch to biofuels will actually increase CO2 emissions, as a major cause of emissions is land use change.
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Probably like many others here, I feel we have been very fortunate to have lived during a warming period. History repeatedly shows that mankind prospers when the world gets warmer. It’s when the world gets colder that people starve and civilisations fail. With this in mind, and after trying to understand the arguments on both sides, I have come to the conclusion that, probably due to the effects of dominant negative feedback mechanisms, carbon dioxide has a negligible effect on the global temperature, both in the 20th century and in the entire history of the earth. With this in mind, the present policies of politicians around the world can only be described as barking mad. Hopefully we are at the high tide of strong AGW, and that good sense will eventually prevail. But there is one promising sign apart from science itself: opinion polls in the UK and US show that a healthy majority of people believe that the warming is natural, and there is also a strong trend of increasing scepticism.
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With this in mind, I would say that the denialism here – or rather, scepticism – is totally believable. Because, among people who live in the real world, we are in the majority.
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If you want to engage in reasoned debate here then I’m sure you’d be most welcome. But quoting Hadley like that wasn’t a good start, as you were simply relying on authority. For sceptics that’s a bit like showing a red rag to a bull. But if you quoted actual scientific research it would be another story. According to New Scientist there is ‘overwhelming’ proof of strong AGW, but strangely they resist the temptation of telling us what it actually is. If you know what this ‘overwhelming’ proof is I’m sure we’d like to hear!
Chris

“If you eliminate 1998, the trend (in temperatures) is clearly upward.”
If you eliminate 1927, Babe Ruth would have hit 654 homers, rather than 714. Don’t even get me going on the subject of A-Rod.

Bluegrue;
Further; TOBS and SHAPS should tally to near zero in the aggregate. Period, end of story.
Unless one assumes they are adding an unaccounted UHI back into SHAPS, thereby maintaining a UHI effect they were not adjusting out in the first place. (That would be a spurious argument at best.)
Here’s a thought; if their sites are so great (despite literal documented evidence to the contrary), why are there ‘necessary’ adjustments? To think that there is anything other than deliberate fraud at this point is to ignore massive amounts of evidence to the contrary, and assume incompetence at a level unprecedented since Easter Island.
SInce there funding doesn’t come from ‘big oil’, I guess their integrity is beyond reproach?
And the ‘we really don’t know everything we need to yet’ crowd is the side that’s in denial?
Beam me up Scotty, there’s no intelligent life down here.

Hank Hancock (01:14:47) :

The AGW argument strongly rests on a specific length of measurement with a specific beginning point.

You have it the other way around, you need to cherrypick short periods to get negative trends. Here’s monthly GISTEMP data running mean over 1, 10, 20 and 30 years. Could you please point out, where exactly there is a cherrypick in the length of the smoothing period? Take any 15 to 50-year average and you’ll get more or less the same result. Of course the longer averages will smooth out detail. No, it’s not the satellite record, but ground-based and satellite data agree reasonably well.
The 30 year average smooths out most of the weather but still allows one to observe changes in climate. It was adopted about 75 years ago!

By agreement adopted by the former International Metereological Organization at its meeting in Warsaw in 1935 recent 30-year averages of weather observations are defined as climatic ‘normals’. The original standard period so adopted was 1901-30; […]

“Climate” by H. H. Lamb, Methuen (August 1977), ISBN 0064738817, Footnote 1 on page 684. A simple look at the MetOffice site or the IPCC glossary would have revealed to anyone interested, that the 30 year period goes back to a definition by the WMO. If find it curious that most readers seem to prefer to speculate rather than investigate. So the “30 year weather average = climate” was around quite some time before Hansen.
For completeness sake: If you continue to read the footnote you will note, that the author is not happy with this definition as the normal period is updated every 10 years and he further contends, that 10 to 15 year averages are more useful to predict the next year or two.

year 2008 was tenth warmest on record, exceeded by 1998, 2005, 2003, 2002, 2004, 2006, 2001, 2007 and 1997.
I also point out that “tenth warmest” out of ten can also be called “coldest.”
That the warm temperatures are clustered around the peak is no surprise. That’s why it’s called a “peak.”
It’s usually preceded by a run up of temperatures before the peak, as occurred from roughly 1978 to 1998.
It’s usually suceeded by a steady decrease of temperatures after the peak, as has occurred from 1998 until now.
These, too, would be defining characteristics of a “peak.”
The problem with its “peakiness” is that CO2 has not peaked; it continues to rise. Thus absolving CO2 as a driver of temperatures – at least for me.
Meanwhile, solar activity seems to be related to the “peakiness”; cycles 19, 21,22,23 were among the most active ever recorded. That these occurred during the run up to the peak makes the peak as no surprise – at least for me.
Nor will cooling from a less active sun be a surprise to me. Although some AGW true believers will find their faith shattered…

Bob Kutz (05:58:46)
Are you even aware that you compare the numbers in degree Fahrenheit to others in degree Celsius? Ever heard of conversion factors? Are you further aware that TOBS and SHAP are applied to US48 only? As US48 is just 2% of the Earth surface the global impact of these corrections is minimal. Furthermore your assertion that “TOBS and SHAPS should tally to near zero in the aggregate” is simply that, an assertion, and a baseless one at that.

David, speaking of unbelievable denialism…
In 2005 two Russian solar physicists bet James Annan $10,000 that the earth’s temperature would be cooler, not warmer, ten years from then. The Russians were probably thinking of their grandchildren. 🙂
But the ten year length of the bet, short by climate standards per above comments, indicates that both sides of the bet were confident. Nearly halfway through the bet, the Russians are looking good.

TJA,
“I don’t know what your point is”
Simple factual correction. I didn’t mean to suggest “he is not climate scientist or statistician”, but simply to correct the information Anthony offered. I think Lubos is one of the best and mathematically most capable commentators of climate change I am aware of. If you know something about string theory, you should also know those guys have to be damn good mathematicians in order to do that science. 🙂

After reading much of the above, I guess there are two kinds of people: those who can believe in a worldwide decades-long conspiracy of postdocs, journalists, data collectors, and policymakers, and those who can’t. Oh, and I guess the ocean and the sun would have to be in on it, too, since they don’t seem to be cooperating.
As a published peer-reviewed scientist, I suppose I’ve been hoodwinked by my colleagues.
As for the fellow that asserted that the years Hadley names as the warmest are the product of regression, here are the raw 20 warmest years since 1850 in that series, with no adjustments:
1998
2005
2003
2002
2004
2006
2001
2007
1997
2008
1999
1995
2000
1990
1991
1988
1987
1983
1994
1996
Must be all of those crummy thermometers.
REPLY: Interesting thing about Hadley, they have steadfastly refused to share any techniques, formulae, or code that is used to come up with their temperature dataset. Science without transparency or replication opportunity is not science. Further, it only takes a couple of people and computer code to produce the dataset they offer, so your “decades-long conspiracy of postdocs, journalists, data collectors, and policymakers” really doesn’t apply when it is in the hands of of couple of people.
I challenge you. Ask Hadley to share the techniques, formulae, and code as many of us have. FOI requests have been made and ignored. If you are truly a man of science, it should be no problem whatsoever for you to obtain what nobody else has been able to.
Let us know when you have it. Or let us know when you are rebuked. I’ll be happy to provide the contact information for Dr. Philip Jones there if you wish and I’ll even grant you a full on guest post for you to share what you’ve learned. – Anthony Watts