UAH global temperature posts warmest January

Henry Poole, first of all it is irrelevant that Co2 is a trace gas, it’s climatological effects are greatly disproportionate to it’s percentage amount of the atmosphere.
Secondly, it has increased by far more than 0.01% in the past 50 years. In 1950 Co2 was at around 270-280ppm in the atmosphere, today it is approaching 390ppm, an increase of around 40%.
Thirdly, you are asked to ignore all the other main drivers of climate because these things have been more or less static, or have at least not been significantly anomalous to the extent that they could be the cause of the observed warming. Co2 levels have not been static.
Water vapor is completely ignored because first of all, we are not pumping water vapor into the atmosphere that has been out of the system for millions of years as fossil fuels, thus it is not accumulating in the atmosphere in greater amounts, and also because water vapor actually falls back out of the sky as rain, and doesn’t stay there for hundreds and hundreds of years like Co2 does.
The argument that Co2 is not a cause for warming is absurd.

I guess you can not argue that it is warmer at 14,000 ft above sea level. I mean, how many population centers or surface temperature stations are there at 14K.
Satellite data does not lie, only man made algorithms and adjustments can do that. And calibrated thermometers on board a satellite stay calibrated for the life of the satellite and prove what, that the temperatures being directly measured on board are accurate?
More important, what does a temperature anomaly of 0.72 deg at 14,000 ft mean to heat at the surface. Given the lower density, an equivalent heat increase at the surface equals a temperature increase of 0.36 deg.
I have to imagine that cloud variability at this altitude has to be adjusted for. How accurate are these adjustments.
The data is spliced from many different satellites over 30 years, so I guess intercalibration of the various satellites data is a possible issue.
In any event, when data does not match observation, it should be questioned.
None of this means squat anyways, the issue is not whether we are warming or cooling, but is more to do with what is causing it. Natural variation or mans CO2?.

I have yet to see anything in the way of a sampling strategy for these temperature reconstructions. Specifically, a sampling strategy which ensures these signals are not aliased.
This point covers both spatial and temporal aliasing. I feel slightly more relaxed about the temporal sampling frequency, but very uncomfortable about spatial sampling and the scope for aliasing across each sample of the temperature field.
Design of a sampling regime needs to kick off with a detailed survey of the temperature field and to determine the temporal and spatial “bandwidth”. Theoretically, we can sample at a minimum of twice the bandwidth, but in practice the sampling rate needs to be about 10 times the bandwidth.
Until this quenstion is convincingly answered, my inclination is to dismiss all trends in the global temperature reconstructions as being unreliable and possibly completely misleading.
A nasty feature of aliasing is that it can produce a plausible-looking signal. And averaging does not help – there is not a lot of purpose in taking the average value of a signal which has been completely distorted by aliasing.
This is not a question of statistical sampling error. It is firmly in the realms of discrete signal processing, and is well based in mathematics.
Two short videos to help illustrate the phenomenon:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fy9dJgGCWZI&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LVwmtwZLG88&feature=related

SNRatio (03:44:44) :
John Finn: “but all 4 have warmed at virtually the same rate over the past 20 years ”
Yes, but looking the 1980-2009 trends for GISS and UAH, the UAH rate is somewhat slower. Contradicting hypotheses about the troposphere warming faster than the surface.
The UAH warmed at a lower rate than all other datasets between before 1990. That is true. Whether that’s a problem with UAH or the other datasets is not clear. You are correct that the very close agreement contradicts the troposphere amplification hypothesis for the time being .
Which simply may indicate that transport phenomena are more important than we thought – typically, UAH reacts more to strong El Nino episodes than GISS.
I accept that UAH responds more sharply (and a bit later) to ENSO hence we sometimes get ‘mismatches’ in the anomalies. With this in mind, though, I don’t know why people don’t accept that the surface may sometimes be more sensitive to certain events than the troposphere and that GISS readings may be genuine and not ‘fudged’ to show warming.
My main point is that if GISS were really fudging data to show warming they’re not doing a particularly good job.

@Frederick Michael (20:23:22) : Why shouldn’t the recovery from the Little Ice Age still be ongoing? If sunspots are the driver, there may be a huge lag.
Well, how long does it take to cool a few quadrillion gallons of water?

Well, reading through this thread just proves to me that no-one has the foggiest idea how this weather and temperature thingy works. All speculation and guesswork. Here in Cape Town we seem to have had a very mild summer/January. Some deciduous trees appear to be already donning autumn colours, which seems way too soon. I have needed the AC in my home office (normally a sauna at this time of the year) only once or twice. My daughter in UK has had scary cold weather, as has much of the northern hemisphere. Does anyone have any idea where exactly have sufficiently warm temperatures been recorded on the ground to offset all the cold? Seems to me this temperature measurement is just totally unrelated to what happens on the ground. Quite frankly, I trust it no more than any off the other questionable “science” that has been thrust down our throats of late.

AnnaV: “I think that the satellites should give energy balance plots: energy in energy out, if they can. It is the only way we could see if we are heating up or cooling down really.
Well said.
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA

Come on you guys!
There is 70% of the ocean by area,where most of the El-Nino is from.While the 30% of the land surface has unusually favorable blocking patterns that funnel cold air farther south than usual,mostly staying on the continental areas.
I do not think Dr. Spenser’s data release for January is bad,just indicative of a strong release of energy from the ocean (it is cooling because of it).
In all this there is obviously no discernible AGW effect going on.
Calm down.

“Hay Mutt, what’s everybody so concerned about?”
“Jeff, I think it has something to do with a satellite.”
“But… I don’t understand Mutt, who cares about a stupid satellite.”
“Not sure Jeff. Maybe it cost a lot of money?”
“Mutt, these folks sure like to talk and worry about nothing. Don’t they?”
“Jeff, they’re bored and have nothing better to do.”
“Mutt, why are some of them more worried than the rest?”
“That’s easy Jeff, the people who are most worried think the satellite is telling them something important. The people who aren’t worried know the thing is just telling them something.”
“Mutt?”
“Yes, Jeff”
“Want to go get something to eat at the Dinner?”
“No, Jeff. There’s a Nor’easter out there that’s going to knock the city’s socks off. Let’s have some fun and order a pizza, we’ll bet on how long it takes the kid to get here. The one off by the most pays for the pie. OK?”
“OK!”

As Mr. Spock would say “Fascinating”. What this really shows is that we really don’t know as much about how the climate works as we think we do. I just finished a book by Arnd Bernaerts about the warming in the Arctic between 1919 and 1939. What stood out was that during this time of warming, the southern oceans, Indian Ocean and Atlantic actually cooled. Records of the past suggest that periods of “cooling” have been associated with stormy, extreme weather in Northern America and Eurasia but I haven’t found much on the proxy records of the oceans during these climate shifts like the cooling episodes of the “Little Ice Age”. One of the benefits of the AGW hysteria has been the development of the network of monitors (land based CRU, NOAA and GISS temps currently excepted) that allow us to observe temperatures, sea levels, clouds, ice etc. Only with accurate data over a period of time and minds open to the observations can we say we understand our climate.