Examination of CRU data suggests no statistically significant warming

I accept (reluctantly) your comments, Steven, about the gridded temperatures being more or less correctly calculated. I concede that Jeff Id would support this view. You guys are much more involved with the science than I am. I would love to hear you comment on where you think the big issues are with respect to AGW belief.
I guess my answer to my own question is that I don’t buy that water vapour has positive feedback only – I agree with Roy and also with H Svensmark on clouds being the earth’s sunshade and thermostat. In other words, I believe that much of the recent warming has been natural and perhaps we are moving towards global cooling for a while. I’m also concerned about UHI at the measurement end, and I’m very suspicious about raw data corrections though I don’t know where that ends and gridding begins. Perhaps from what you say, the data corrections are valid.
I would welcome your comments on the big picture, and I guess others may be interested also.

ScientistForTruth says:
November 26, 2010 at 9:49
I expect it is timed to align with the fact that the whole of UK is in the grip of severe winter weeks earlier than normal.
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Weird logic. Seems to be a re-run of the “its snowing in my backyard, so that means the whole planet must be entering an ice age” story line that was popular last winter.
And of course my favorite “how dare those scientists insult my intelligence by claiming the global temperatures are high when clearly it’s cold where I live”.

Surely all this misses the point – temperature especially ‘average temperature’ is the wrong metric.
The entire AGW hypothesis is based on trapping HEAT. Heat does not equal temperature in the atmosphere as due to the presence of water vapor which raises the enthalpy of a volume of air by nearly two orders of magnitude. Or simply put dry air changes temperature with far less heat than humid air.
What should be being measured is the ‘heat content’ of the atmosphere which requires knowledge of the humidity as well as temperature. Given hourly figures for humidity and temperature the hourly heat content could be totaled into a day’s heat content.
This would be far more reliable than temperature and would be far more easily linked to SST and GHG effects (if any).

I think the rest of the world that has been warmer than where all the people live is the sea surface and parts of the arctic with no temperature measurements (so, they, or at least GISS, extrapolate whatever they want to into the arctic while disregarding the dmi 80 north estimates, which are based on actual measurements, because they’re inconvenient).
Also, there was an El Nino. I seem to remember something about satellites biasing sea surface temperatures high in El Nino. If so, surely this is taken into account? Or, maybe they don’t use satellite data??? More likely, they use satellite data when it’s convenient.

I do not understand why the data is still being used to create arguments. My understanding reading the HARRY_READ_ME files (thank you Antony 18/11 post) is the the data collection (s) met few known standards. ie there was no hypothesis being test. Also noted IanW and David A evans comments.
http://www.anenglishmanscastle.com/HARRY_READ_ME.txt
Word search of 235 pgs HARRY txt
3 c**p : approx 15 h*ll : 3 f**k: 50 metadata: 73 try: >100 anomalies
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‘… then user decision TMin database to take precedence in terms of station metadata.’
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7. ….(we know the first number is the lon or column, the second the lat or row – but which way up are the latitudes? And where do the longitudes break?
There is another problem: the values are anomalies, wheras the ‘public’.grim files are actual values. So Tim’s explanations (in _READ_ME.txt) are incorrect..
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8. Had a hunt and found an identically-named temperature database file which did include normals lines at the start of every station. How handy – naming two different files with exactly the same name and relying on their location to differentiate! Aaarrgghh!! Re-ran anomdtb:
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I really thought I was cracking this project. But every time, it ends up worse than before.
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but I have an eerie feeling that I won’t experience joy when headers are compared between parameters :/
Wrote metacmp.for. It accepts a list of parameter databases (by default, latest.versions.dat) and compares headers when WMO codes match. If all WMO matches amongst the databases share common metadata (lat, lon, alt, name, country) then the successful header is written to a file. If, however, any one of the WMO matches fails on any metadata – even slightly! – the gaggle of disjointed headers is written to a second file. I know that leeway should be given, particularly with lats & lons, but as a first stab I just need to know how bad things are. Well, I got that:
crua6[/cru/cruts/version_3_0/update_top] ./metacmp
METACMP – compare parameter database metadata
RESULTS:
Matched/unopposed: 2435
Clashed horribly: 4077
Ouch! Though actually, far, far better than expected. As for the disport of those 2435:
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I am very sorry to report that the rest of the databases seem to be in nearly as poor a state as Australia was. There are hundreds if not thousands of pairs of dummy stations, one with no WMO and one with, usually overlapping and with the same station name and very similar coordinates. I know it could be old and new stations, but why such large overlaps if that’s the case? Aarrggghhh!
There truly is no end in sight. Look at this:
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This still meant an awful lot of encounters with naughty Master stations, when really I suspect nobody else gives a hoot about. So with a somewhat cynical shrug, I added the nuclear option – to match every WMO possible, and turn the rest into new stations (er, CLIMAT excepted). In other words, what CRU usually do. It will allow bad databases to pass unnoticed, and good databases to become bad, but I really don’t think people care enough to fix ’em, and it’s the main reason the project is nearly a year late.

All I can garner from pope’s comments is that the Met office don’t know if its warming or not, and openly confess that they don’t know what’s going on in the sea. The cooling, which they claim isn’t known without revising data) is perfectly consistent with the models, just as warming was perfectly consistent with the models. The necessary a-priori conclusion is that this provides even stronger evidence for man-made global warming.
Presumably, the models are adjusted down and up and down again and up again, according to the -what can only be described as arbitrary global temperature average, a posteriori, so that it can be claimed that the models predicted the cooling that should have been warming, that after revisions, showed up as not so cooling as originally thought, but not as warming as originally projected, and on this basis, the blame can only be given to the fact that co2 causes this pell mell that the models were so consistent over…
Ms Pope, we are a little confused, though it was an English poet (not Pope) who said
“His notions fitted things so well, That which was which he could not tell”

Roy says:
November 26, 2010 at 4:32 pm
the Met office seem obsessed with the hottest on record, or the near hottest on record, among hottest, and the predicted hottest. Especially in the case of the latter, regarding prognostications of barbecue summers and extremely mild winters, which turned out to be extremely cold winters and cool wet summers, it could be reasoned that after the events, it was all “perfectly consistent with the models”

Steven Mosher wrote:
“One reason you cannot merely take the P2P of various countries and average them is this:
A. country A is huge. It has 1200 stations it covers millions of square miles.
B. country B is small. It has one station, it covers a few square miles.
To handle this challenge people perform area weighting.”
What is the “coverage area” of one station, Steve, from physics standpoint?
For example, the Weather Station Handbook requires distances from obstacles and paved surfaces to be about 100ft from sensors. I would infer that this is the actual physical radius of “coverage”. Outside this area you have no information and have no rights to extent anything over wider area. Area weighting has no physical justification. I think this “dealing with challenge” is pure self delusion.

2010 could be one of the warmest years ever! Part of one of the warmest decades ever!
Statements like these just kill me. The earth has been warming since the Little Ice Age. Take any year or decade since then, and that statement is likely to be true. If we were in say 1800AD, we could say it was the warmest year, decade, century, AND millenium on record. I picked that out of the air, someone will probably nit pick based on actual numbers, but the point is that you could pick almost any year since the LIA and that statement is going to be pretty much correct,
So it is no surprise to me that the various data sets and various methods give very similar results. Not also that we’re using the wrong scale for the discussion. An average temperature of 15 C with a 0.03 warming trend sounds a whole lot different than 288 K with 0.03 warming trend, doesn’t it? Degrees C is a relative scale and is nearly meaningless. When you consider the absolute scale of degrees K, the wonder is not that the various methods diverge at all, the wonder is that they are as close as they are. The wonder ALSO is the incredible stability of the global temperature over hundreds of years.
Given all the variables that could push global temperatures one way or the other, one can assume that they on average pretty much cancel each other out, or that the physics that governs the planetary system is comprised of feedbacks that work in opposition to stimulus, or a combination of the two. Bottom line is that given several centuries of warming in a row, this would most likely be the warmest year/decade/century ever just like it was in 1910, 1810, 1710…
The question is how much of the trend is “natural” and how much is caused by CO2? If the thought that varius variables are mitigated by feedbacks of the opposite sign is correct, then extracting CO2’s effects from the entire chaotic system with millions of variables isn’t even on par with looking for a needle in a haystack. Its more like searching the world for a haystack with a needle in it.
And yet, I don’t care. Just as accelerated warming from CO2 increases should be most pronounced, ocean heat content is falling and atmospheric temps have levelled off. Explain it by off setting feedbacks or natural variables cancelling out CO2 if you want, but my point on CO2 is, and this cannot be repeated often enough, CO2 is logarithmic.
What ever effects CO2 actually has after all feedbacks, the 100 ppm we have added to the atmosphere over the last 100 years would require another 200 ppm to cause the same increase as we saw from the first 100, and 400 ppm more for another. And 800 ppm for the one after that. We’re at 390 or so now, up just over 100 from “natural” at 280 from a century of burning as much fuel as we could. The amount of fossil fuel we would have to burn to cancel the law of diminishing returns that CO2 warming is subject to is staggering. If the planet is in fact entering a long term cooling period leading to an ice age, there isn’t nearly enough fossil fuel on the planet to even dent its progress.