UAH prelim – January temp may be below normal globally

Dr. Lurtz says: The radical shift in temperature anomaly points to the issue of temperature measurement. It would be a violation of Physical laws for that much heat to be radiated into space that quickly without a massive change in Global temperature; therefore, either the heat must be going somewhere, or, the temperature measurements do no represent the Global temperature!!
You’ve got it! THE basic problem, one that folks on all sides regularly ignore, is that a Global Average Temperature simply does not exist. It is at best a massive confusion and at worst a deception.
The reasons for this are, unfortunately, founded in 2 rather arcane bits of understanding, so I suspect that just about everyone (including Ph.D. “Climate Scientists” at NASA) just ignore them rather than take the time to think about it.
They are:
1) You can not average an intensive property and have it mean anything. Temperature is an intensive property.
2) Temperatures are driven by processes, such as land form (mountains) that are fractal in nature. Every single ‘surface’ has it’s own temperature. I assert temperatures are fractal in that the size of a fractal varies with the size of ruler you use to measure it (and we are constantly changing our rulers / thermometers).
Because of these two things, the idea of a Global Average Temperature is simply wrong.
Note that this is different from measuring the infrared signature for an entire planet from a single view of the whole place. Then you have fixed your ‘ruler size’ at ‘one planet’ and so #2 drops out. Further, you are not averaging temperatures, you are counting total photons of IR. That count is then DEEMED to be the same as certain black body temperature, but it is not saying the surface IS that temperature (as it is not). It is a leap of assumption, then, to say that the “average of surface temperatures” would be the same as that hypothetical black body. So you can get an IR measurement from space that is useful; you just can’t say that is the average of surface temperatures (only that it is the same IR as a Black Body of a certain temp would have emitted). You can see this pretty clearly if you assume a BB of 100 pixels all at 100 K, then ask “What if I raised ONE to 200 K?”. You now get 2^4 more IR from that one pixel. But ((99*100)+(1*200))/100 will not give you the same ‘temperaure’ as that IR image… If we assume the IR count at 100 K is “1” for our counter, then we would have 16 + 99 = 115 IR Count and map that to 115 K; where the former temp average gave 101. So which is it, 101 K (average of temperatures) or 115 K (count of increased IR photons)?
Now say only 1/2 of that pixel was actually doing the radiation. Increase the pixels count to 200. We’ve now got ((199*100)+(1*200))/200 = 100.5 for our “Average of temperatures”. Yet our IR count stays the same…
(There are two variations on that last ‘change’. One is to say that the hot pixel was made of one hot and one cold, so the x16 was really x32 from 1/2 of the pixel… that is, it was not a 200K pixel, it was one at 100k and one a bit hotter. 2^1/4 hotter, or about 238 K if I’ve done the math right. That gives ((199*100)+238)/200 = 100.69 K “average of surface temperatures”. The other variation is to say that the half pixel was in fact 200 K, and you need to redo your IR photon count. That would give (199 x 1 + 16)/2 or 107.5 K for our hypothetical ‘temperature’. In both cases (which ever set of assumptions you want to make) you get divergence between the IR Count as temperature proxy and the “average of temperatures”. 100.69 K vs 107.5 K in the last case or 101 K vs 115 K.)
And yes, I ‘left out some bits’ in this example to make it more useful for illustration. The basic point is that IR rises as a 4th power of temp. But an average of temperatures flattens everything linearly. To assume the IR count is an average linear increase in temperatures requires that the IR be evenly distributed, but we know it is not.
Back on Intensive Properties:
Here’s the wiki on intensive vs extensive properties:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intensive_and_extensive_properties
OK, a simple example. Two pots of water, one at 10 C the other at 20 C. Mix them. What is the final temperature? You can’t know.
It depends on how big the pots were. Relative mass. We assume the masses being heated and cooled are constant and of the same average specific heat for the planet to change temperatures, but that isn’t true. Oceans overturn and different water comes to the surface. Snow falls in the mountains, now we’re not heating rocks with the sun but heating snow.
If those pots of water were 0 C and 100 C the problem is much much worse. Is that 0 C water in the form of ICE or not? Is that 100 C water vapor, or not? Heat of fusion and heat of vaporization. No temperature change, lots of heat flow.
So are we measuring, on average, the change of vaporization from the ocean? The change of condensation from the air? The rate of melting of snow and ice (that consumes heat) or the rate of snow fall (that liberates heat)? And in what masses?
As a simple example, a acre of mountain desert drops from 1 C to 0 C. In the first case, it is just bare sand. It stays that way for one week. An “average of temperatures” would say nothing happened in days 2-6. Yet cold soaked into the sand to some depth. Some heat flowed. It was, in fact, constantly cooling (heat flowed out of the sand and into the air but the air did not warm, as the heat was leaving on to space, cooling).
Now put 1 inch of snow on that ground. Still 0 C. Yet that snow has a much higher heat content than the inch of air it replaced. Have it snow each day. Now, each day, you have taken 1 inch of snow worth of ‘heat of fusion’ and dumped it to space. That is one heck of a lot more “cooling” than the dry example. Yet the thermometer says “nothing happened”… You did not account for mass and heat of fusion.
OK, that’s the ‘nickle tour’ of intensive vs extensive variables and why you can’t average them and have any meaning left.
The “fractals” one is a bit harder. (Please, don’t groan like that… I’ll try to make it easy). This is related to an interesting issue of measuring coastlines. If you measure the coastline for California from Mexico to Oregon by taking a speed boat straight up the line off shore, you get a short number. If you follow each in / out of every major bay, it’s a longer ride. Follow every little estuary in, even longer. Get down to measuring the distance around each grain of sand on the beach it becomes gigantic. About 1000 miles to 80,000 miles. Your choice. As you make the ruler shorter, you measure more curves on more things and get a longer total.
For temperatures, we know that it varies down to the size of a single pebble. An IR image shows that. We assume that a white box about 3 feet off the ground sort of averages them all out to something usable. So far so good. We are fixing our ‘ruler’ size at whatever area of scope a single Stevenson Screen averages. BUT, then we scatter them all over the place with random distances between them and change the number of them by a factor of 10 (or more) over the period of time we are measuring. We are changing the area each of these is expected to measure, changing our ruler length. We have a very dynamic “rubber ruler” measuring a fractal surface.
No wonder the numbers keep wandering around!
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2010/11/22/an-example-of-fractal-temperatures/
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2010/07/17/derivative-of-integral-chaos-is-agw/
And these properties are Not Negotiable. They are fundamental properties of nature. Yet all of “Climate Science” is predicated on strictly ignoring them and in fact on abusing them in ways that are non-physical.
So yes. “the temperature measurements do not represent the Global temperature!!”

Where could the heat be going??
Must it? Was it ever there? Since our method of measuring in broken fundamentally, we don’t really know where the heat went, or if it was there to begin with. All we have are temperatures and IR counts. Those are NOT heat.
IMHO, the heat leaves each day. We warm during the day, and cool at night. The net change in temperatures over the seasons are not “accumulating” heat, they are changes in heat applied as our axial tilt changes an wind blows in from somewhere else. There is no heat stored other than what gets trapped under a cloud layer waiting for the next cold clear night. Then it is gone.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/01/23/frostbite-falls/
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2010/12/28/ignore-the-day-at-your-peril/

My thoughts are that the oceans can not absorb heat that fast; therefore, the sudden change in temperature anomaly is due to the inability to correctly measure the Earth’s Global Temperature.
In this sentence we can see the impact of decades of “Climate Science” at work confounding things. I’m not picking on you, Dr. Lurtz, the same sentence will be made by millions of folks for the same reasons.
First, we have “oceans absorb heat” then we have “change of temperature”. We treat these as fungible goods. They are not. Heat is a flow of energy. Temperature is a pressure to flow, but may or may not have a flow, and certainly does not have a size of flow. We can have massive heat flow with no temperature change. Happens every day and all the time in weather. Tons of snow falls, at 0 C. Then it melts and flows away as water, at 0 C. Air rises and water condenses as rain, the heat movement showing as a phase change again. Winds blow down a mountain range, getting hotter as they go, but not from the sun warming them nor from their velocity; then they blow across a valley and rise up the opposing moutains, cooling as they go. Lots of temperature changes, heat not so much…
Then we come back to “measure the Earth’s Gobal Temperature”. Yet there is no such thing to measure. It is a fantasy of arithmetic. And a broken one at that.
We can measure the total IR Emissions from a point in space. But that is NOT the “Global Average Temperature”.
We can measure a sample of temperatures on the surface, but averaging them has no meaning. None. Not a scrap.
And then we desire to mix these broken things together into a conceptual model of how the earth is changing… and where the heat is “stored” and “going”. Every day you can see this same broken parade wandering down these same streets, again and again and again….
What we ought to do? Put a single satellite in orbit with the whole disk of the planet in view and just do a gross energy out measure. IR photons and visible. Have a similar count of solar flux. Compare the two over about 120 years. THEN we would have a clue how our energy balance shifts over time.
But measuring airport tarmac today and comparing it to cow fields in 1850 with no attention to how many spots are measured, where they are, and how they changed, then averaging them; that has no relationship to heat flow at all, and precious little to reality in general.