Is Spencer Hiding the Increase? We Report, You Decide
by Roy W. Spencer, Ph. D.
One of the great things about the internet is people can post anything they want, no matter how stupid, and lots of people who are incapable of critical thought will simply accept it.
I’m getting emails from people who have read blog postings accusing me of “hiding the increase” in global temperatures when I posted our most recent (Dec. 2009) global temperature update. In addition to the usual monthly temperature anomalies on the graph, for many months I have also been plotting a smoothed version, with a running 13 month average. The purpose of such smoothing is to better reveal longer-term variations, which is how “global warming” is manifested.
But on the latest update, I switched from 13 months to a running 25 month average instead. It is this last change which has led to accusations that I am hiding the increase in global temperatures. Well, here’s a plot with both running averages in addition to the monthly data. I’ll let you decide whether I have been hiding anything:
Note how the new 25-month smoother minimizes the warm 1998 temperature spike, which is the main reason why I switched to the longer averaging time. If anything, this ‘hides the decline’ since 1998…something I feared I would be accused of for sure after I posted the December update.
But just the opposite has happened, with accusations I have hidden the increase. Go figure.
J. Peden says:
I think that you are continuing to misread and misunderstand with Trenberth is saying. He is saying that they can’t close the energy budget. You can read his paper here, by the way: http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/cas/Trenberth/trenberth.papers/EnergyDiagnostics09final2.pdf ) I.e., they know that energy has to be conserved but the data aren’t accurate enough to show the energy transfers in detail…and to the extent they try to see where the energy is going, they can’t.
So, the problems with the empirical data is that they do not support energy conservation, something so fundamental that it would be quite ludicrous to abandon it because of data with known issues. If climate scientists tried to say that energy is not conserved then they would rightly be laughing stocks in the scientific community. Abandoning or not abandoning AGW has nothing to do with it.
“”” Boulderfield (10:47:23) :
“One of the great things about the internet is people can post anything they want, no matter how stupid, and lots of people who are incapable of critical thought will simply accept it.” “””
So now I’m confused; you mean there are actually two of those straight red lines; with my eyes there could be a dozen and I would never see them.
Now don’t tell me; you really think that any difference in those two lines you evidently can see is actually real and significant ?
tfp (19:35:51) :
Roy Spencer didn’t splice differing data sets together to create a graph. ClimateGate scientsts did.
Roy Spencer is practicing science. ClimateGate scientists were, and still are, practicing deception.
I think that you are continuing to misread and misunderstand with Trenberth is saying. He is saying that they can’t close the energy budget.
Why would Trenberth call it a “travesty” if it didn’t relate to CO2 AGW, which it obviously does? For example, since I don’t have to be so completely tied to CO2 AGW, I don’t see it as a “travesty”. I don’t have to immediately claim that the Ceres data must be “wrong” or that there must be more hidden energy somewhere.
I don’t even believe that GW has been proven to be a net disease, or that CO2 is causing any significant warming, while I do know with some certainty that the proposed AGW alleged cure to the alleged disease would be worse than the alleged disease – by simply applying the Precautionary Principle to the alleged cure. So failure to “close the energy budget” doesn’t come anywhere close to bothering me enough to call it a “travesty”.
photon without a Higgs (17:30:17) :
Roy Spencer didn’t splice differing data sets together to create a graph. ClimateGate scientsts did.
Spencer and/or his team have not spliced diverging data, they have disposed of a whole series that was showing massive warming.
Without an explanation for this he is hiding the incline in a totally unscientific manner.
All I have asked was what has happened to the 1km temperature that used to be on the AMSU site This showed a rapid rise but then the CHLT data was discontinued in Nov. 2009:
http://img69.imageshack.us/img69/2104/amsutemptrends.png
rise is about .1degC/year!
He may not be deliberately trying to hide the incline but he has still not explained the removal of this 1km measurement.
by simply applying the Precautionary Principle to the alleged cure
The “Precautionary Principle” should probably be replaced with “risk-benefit analysis” or even “safe and effective” compared to the problem, so that people are not misled into thinking the “precautions” don’t have to be evaluated as to their own “risks”, and in comparison to the alleged problem the precautions are supposedly trying to address. I think most people have been assuming that the ipcc, enc., have made this kind of analysis, but they haven’t.
I’ve been using “Precautionary Principle” as applied to “cures” only to make the point which the AGWers unscientifically seem to want people to ignore when they invoke the Precautionary Principle, that any course of action has risks and is not made noble or reasonable merely because it might be a “precaution”.
If the EPA functioned like the FDA in regard to its analysis of “cures” or treatments for an established disease, that would probably bring the EPA out of the Dark Ages, and also prevent a “human caused disaster” resulting from an alleged attempt to prevent a completely unsubstantiated “disaster”.
Never “wasting a crisis” by creating a worse one is not rational – it’s not ethical.