By Steve Goddard
GISS tells us that it was the hottest May on record. Just looking at that map makes me perspire. It must be wicked hot at the North Pole!
But wait a minute! The DMI record doesn’t look so hot in the Arctic.
What could be wrong? Could it be the fact that GISS has almost no coverage in the Arctic? We often hear the question”what if CO2 were pink?” Answer : it would still be almost invisible at 0.0004 concentration.
Now, let’s turn that around and see what GISS coverage holes would like if they were pink.
Shocking pink, that is. GISS is claiming a global temperature record based largely on the Arctic – in which they have less than 10% coverage. Hansen explains the growing gap between GISS and Had-Crut as being due to the fact that GISS has better Arctic coverage.
Judge for yourself.
GISS has 2010 at #1. Had-Crut has 2010 at #4. Thanks to GISS’ extensive Arctic coverage.
.
Owen says:
June 15, 2010 at 8:56 am
The notion that a trace component like CO2 can have only a negligible effect due to its ultra-low concentration is an incorrect one, and I find it odd that it is perpetuated here. The absorption by CO2 of outgoing longwave thermal radiation is based on the absorptivity coefficient of the gas and on the optical path length. The actual absorption of radiation by atmospheric CO2 in its frequency range is therefore quite large.
_______________________________________________________________________
That argument does not work here because
A) the energy is reradiated in all directions not just towards the CURVED surface of the earth
and
B) If we were going to have “runaway” Global W arming” WATER in all its various forms wins the race hands down. Sort of a race between a supersonic jet and a snail.
Take a good look at this graph before you try out that argument again.
I see the etiquette police have arrived.
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/
Owen says: “…CO2 in the atmosphere has risen from ca. 0.028% in 1800 to 0.039% today, and this 39% increase rise parallels the increase in the consumption of fossil fuels by our industrial society.”
Parallels? Sorry, nice try, but correlation doesn’t prove causation.
> We often hear the question “what if CO2 were pink?”
You may, I never have. Google has six references, five are related to Andy Revkin’s blog, one is this post.
If we could shift the wavelengths our eyes respond to into the IR spectrum where the Earth radiates, then CO2 would absorb a fair amount of “red” light and you wouldn’t be able to see the ground from Earth orbit. Water vapor would absorb more, including pretty much all the “red” and the shorter “blue” wavelengths. So CO2 would be a pastel “cyan” or “blue green”, and water vapor would be a purer “green”.
However, both would be glowing in the wavelengths they absorb! It’s a good thing that our eyes are sensitive to sunlight instead.
I cringe whenever people point to CO2 as colorless when they try to dismiss it as a trace gas. Sure it’s a trace gas, but in the first 100 ppm it absorbs about all that it can, so additional CO2 doesn’t do much but fill in the “edges” of the window and capture photons in a shorter distance.
Sure, it is a trace gas, but it and water vapor (not so much of a trace gas) both play important roles. Their effects as greenhouse gases are overstated, to be sure, but to refer to CO2 as transparent or pink is not informative and only serves to encourage the “it’s only a trace gas” folks.
hedrat says:
June 15, 2010 at 9:37 am
> The Mercator projection doesn’t hurt them either.
We’ve been through that before – these maps are not Mercator projections, if they were, they wouldn’t reach the poles. They do distort things, and there are better choices for public display that aren’t as misleading.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/03/23/why-joe-bastardi-see-red-a-look-at-sea-ice-and-gistemp-and-starting-choices/#comment-351865
GISS holes in Africa and the Arctic are 90% concentration. You could say that GISS data in those regions is “trace data”, though not quite as rare as CO2.
Anu
If CO2 equals climate – then there is no need for models, funding or research.
Sounds like you think you can boil the entire field of climatology down to a single linear equation.
I live in +1 to +2 deg anomaly area. I can only say that I can hardly remember a colder month of May, and I’m soon to be 60.
Maybe they extrapolated the temperatures. Still had to wear sweaters though.
John Finn says:
June 15, 2010 at 9:36 am
Huh? The RSS anomaly is not 4 degrees, or anything like that. It is available here. The anomaly is given as 2.113°C …
According to buoy 25593 and 48684, it is currently 247.5 units Kelvin at the north pole- June 16 0600.
http://www.sailwx.info/shiptrack/shiplocations.phtml
or
http://coolwx.com/cgi-bin/findbuoy.cgi?id=48684
2.113 degrees C!
Is it just more of my arithmetical idiocy to wonder how they got four-digit precision for that RSS anomaly? Can one make a direct measure of temperature to one part in 300,000? Or are there tens of thousands of accurate readings to be averaged, and then the difference taken between two sets? Exploring pseudo-precision in this science could be a rewarding exercise.
Took a lok at those figures from RSS, one has to admit it seems to be pretty “hot” in the Arctic, third highest montly anomaly ever recorded by RSS in the Arctic, highest was in January 1981 2,582 degree C, so still 0,5 deegree C from the record.
I just checked som of the Buoys around the North Pool, air temp -20 to -25 degree C there this morning, water temperatur around freezing point.
I too am wondering which stations are laoded into the DMI average: If more than one, it would be more accurate than GISS.
Then again, if Hansen does not keep his Arctic temperatures “hot” he has no life, no meaning for subjugating the earth’s residence to poverty and short, unproductive lives, and his cause (his religion ?) will not be the purpose of his president’s worldwide TV conference tonight on combating the Gulf oil leak by a 1.3 trillion cap and tax energy restriction nationwide.
But that’s no reason to suspect Hansen is biased in any way.
By the way, I vote for lack = no data.
Western Cape, South Africa, was the first snow in almost 20 years. Brazil x 1.6 C. Temperature Korea . Cold very cold …
Western Cape, South Africa, was the first snow in almost 20 years. Brazil x Korea, World Cup, temperature 1.6 C. Cold very cold …
….the cold would have killed at least 500 African penguins newborns in a national park.
Ric Werme says:
June 15, 2010 at 5:54 pm
hedrat says:
June 15, 2010 at 9:37 am
> The Mercator projection doesn’t hurt them either.
We’ve been through that before – these maps are not Mercator projections, if they were, they wouldn’t reach the poles. They do distort things, and there are better choices for public display that aren’t as misleading.
Agreed, fortunately GISS provides a nice Java app that will transform it into other more appropriate forms.
http://www.giss.nasa.gov/tools/gprojector/
paulo arruda
Between the noise and the winter, South Africa seems like a poor choice of venue. Other than Germany, everyone seems to be having a lot of trouble putting the ball in the back if the net.
Vieras says:
June 15, 2010 at 11:31 am
So apparently there were two organizations, who should have noticed the error but who didn’t. That speaks volumes about the quality control these two organizations have – or lack thereof.
Errors of those magnitudes should never slip through both NOAA and NASA, not even once.
You’re talking about automated programs that accept data from a source and display it, they’re subject to input errors which propagate down the line. Most of such sites point out that the data is provisional and subject to later corrections.
Spencer’s UAH website suffered from a similar problem today, in apparently switching to the AQUA channel 5 from NOAA-15, they made a mistake which results in the statement ‘the temperature is 457 deg F warmer than this day last year’. Embarrassing, sure but no big deal I’m sure they’ll sort it out promptly.
stevengoddard says:
June 15, 2010 at 1:37 pm
Phil,
I am assuming that you understand the difference between a map and a graph?
Yes I do, however I don’t understand why you think this constitutes an answer to either of my questions. Try again.
Willis Eschenbach says:
June 15, 2010 at 11:54 pm
Huh? The RSS anomaly is not 4 degrees, or anything like that. It is available here. The anomaly is given as 2.113°C …
Not quite what I wrote. The key phrases being “arctic regions” and “up to”.
John Finn says:
June 16, 2010 at 10:56 am
The RSS anomaly I gave is for the “arctic regions”. Yes, the map shows “up to 4 deg” warmer than the mean, but that does not mean that “GISS arctic temperatures are perfectly consistent with satellite measurements”.
“Vieras says:
June 15, 2010 at 11:31 am
Errors of those magnitudes should never slip through both NOAA and NASA, not even once.
Phil. says:
June 16, 2010 at 9:24 am
You’re talking about automated programs that accept data from a source and display it, they’re subject to input errors which propagate down the line.
”
How about giving those “automated programs” an automated consistency check or automated plausibility check? And if that’s too hard, how about not automating it?
Z said: There are 385 atoms of CO2 in every 1,000,000 atoms of “air”. Atoms divided by atoms cancel (not that they were really a unit in the first place). The rest becomes a decimal fraction. So one atom in two would be 0.5 – no units.
¿What makes you think you can cancel atoms of carbon with atoms of air (and what is that, by the way? That’s like saying 4 apples between two kids is 2 – no units. It’s different, dude, concentration certainly has units. You don’t have three fifths of something, you have three of something into five of something.