WUWT Readers may remember in 2006 Al Gore announcing on national television one morning that:
The earth has a fever…
He of course was pushing his book, An Inconvenient Truth as the cure. Now, almost six years later, other symptoms have been reported, including spots, which might be from Chicken Little Pox.
Dr. Clive Best writes in with his findings on The Earth running hot and cold !
He writes: (updated 3/8 to fix some typos and clarify the time period for the map)
There has been quite a debate over at WUWT regarding temperature measurements and temperature anomalies. The AGW crew argue that only anomalies can be relied on to track global warming. These anomalies calculated at each individual weather station are the deltas between the measured temperatures and the mean temperatures over a fixed period – just for that station. The anomalies from ~4000 stations all over the globe are then combined to give one global anomaly, yielding the familiar graph we know and love which shows ~0.6 deg.C rise since 1850. Looking in more detail however we discover that some parts of the world are not warming at all and some are even cooling.
Thus motivated I went off in search of the “hot stations” and the “cold stations” from the Hadley/CRU provided station data.
Here we define “hot stations” as those yielding an average anomaly increase since 1990 > 0.4 degrees. “Cold stations” are defined simply as those with an average anomaly < 0.1 degrees. since 1990. Had/CRU anomalies are relative to the period 1960-1989 so they all measure warming/cooling relative to that baseline.
The map above shows in red the “hot stations” and in blue the “cold stations”. In both cases the larger the point the stronger the warming/cooling. This is an active flash map so you can zoom in by dragging a rectangle, and view the data by clicking on any station, (zoom out by clicking anywhere else).
It immediately becomes obvious that the bulk of observed warming is concentrated in the Northern Hemisphere : Eastern Europe, Russia, central Asia, India, China, Japan, Middle East, North Africa. These are all areas of rapid population increase, development and industrialisation. There is essentially no warming at all in the Southern Hemisphere. Bolivia, Peru, Paraguay and Argentina all appear to be cooling. Even Australia and Zealand are static or cooling.
More at The Earth running hot and cold !
– Clive Best
===============================================================
Hmmm, UHI Much? Maybe there’s a solution:
From the Uranus, 2007
Don’t understand “more cowbell” as it relates to fever? Read this.
Watch the SNL video here (low quality) and a high quality excerpt from NBC here.
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Anthony Watts said:
“Mr. Eadler, you can take and cite all the peer reviewed studies you want until you are blue in the face, but the fact is that data manipulations are going on, and the result is a trend greater than it would be due to lack of properly dealing with UHI issues, sattion issues, and homgenization. It stinks, and you are too weak minded (like many researchers) to care enough to look at what is being done to the base data, you are only interested in the results that fit your per-conceived notions. I’ve tossed you off WUWT before for constant mind-numbing trolling repeating the same things over and over again just like you are doing now. Why should I waste any more time on you, becaue I predict you won’t embrace any of what I’ve just shown you.
-Anthony ”
Your case is debatable. An impartial and new study by BEST has validated the land based temperature data results of GISS and HADCRUT.
In fact the latest study of this by BEST study,
http://berkeleyearth.org/pdf/berkeley-earth-uhi.pdf
showed that the UHI effect is not responsible for an increase in the global temperature. You welcomed this study and were enthusiastic about the method, until the results conflicted with your preconceived notions.
I don’t expect you to post this.
REPLY: Oh Why wouldn’t I? While you uncritically accept this without question, I do not. You see it hasn’t been published anywhere where peer review have been done on it. In fact, it seems the BEST publications are having some trouble in peer review. I have not seen any notice that this or any other of those papers they submitted have been accepted. And finally, I have the benefit of knowing many things that you do not, so I’m not the least bit worried about this stuff. Bring it on.
You’ll be eating crow and other unsavory birds soon enough.
– Anthony
Werner Brozek says:
March 8, 2012 at 8:08 am
“Eric Adler says:
March 8, 2012 at 5:28 am
“The heat capacity of the ocean is huge compared to the land. So the land will warm up faster then the ocean as a result of any heat flux imbalance.”
That makes an excellent argument for just using sea surface temperatures to see what is going on with global temperatures lately. See the graphs below that shows no warming for 15 years and cooling for 10 years.”
You cherry picked a short period of time, so that internal variability will obscure a trend.
On the other hand if you look at the 30 year trend the sea surface temperature has an increasing trend of about 0.13C/decade.
When BEST came out, it was trumpeted as confirming GISS etc. temperature reconstructions and the warmists were doing their high fives. The hoopla obscured the fact that about one third of the records showed a cooling trend. Excuse me, but does this not ring alarm bells in the minds of climate researchers? To me, it means that until you explain the “divergence” in the various station records, the any finding from BEST that the global average temperature has increased tells us nothing about climate change.
Eric Adler says:
March 8, 2012 at 5:54 pm
See the graphs below that shows no warming for 15 years and cooling for 10 years.”
You cherry picked a short period of time, so that internal variability will obscure a trend.
On the other hand if you look at the 30 year trend the sea surface temperature has an increasing trend of about 0.13C/decade.
I would not call 15 years short. Did not Santer say 17 years was all that was needed? But why stop at 30 years? That 15 year period perfectly explains the 60 year cycle in the following that goes back 130 years:
http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2009/03/akasofu_ipcc.jpg
Robert Austin says:
March 8, 2012 at 6:13 pm
“When BEST came out, it was trumpeted as confirming GISS etc. temperature reconstructions and the warmists were doing their high fives. The hoopla obscured the fact that about one third of the records showed a cooling trend. Excuse me, but does this not ring alarm bells in the minds of climate researchers? To me, it means that until you explain the “divergence” in the various station records, the any finding from BEST that the global average temperature has increased tells us nothing about climate change.”
If you look at the graph of statistics of trends in the BEST paper in figure 3 on page 8,
http://berkeleyearth.org/pdf/berkeley-earth-uhi.pdf
you will see a bell curve with a dispersion that is large. The range of the data is -15 to +15C per century. Because of the large number of stations used the the global average trend is 0.98+/- 0.04C, so the uncertainty in trend is very small despite the range. Global averages are real, but not the whole story as you say, but the evidence of a trend is quite solid.
Werner Brozek says:
March 8, 2012 at 7:47 pm
“I would not call 15 years short. Did not Santer say 17 years was all that was needed? But why stop at 30 years? That 15 year period perfectly explains the 60 year cycle in the following that goes back 130 years:
http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2009/03/akasofu_ipcc.jpg ”
The 60 year cycle is a curve fitting exercise with no physical basis presented as justification. Recovery from the little ice age is an empty meme.
Physical mechanisms, not curve fitting are the proper way to understand the science behind climate change. Measurements of the driving forces underlying climate, and an understanding of the physical equations which dictate the evolution of the parameters of climate, including the sources of internal variation of surface temperature, have been increasingly successful at explaining the recent evolution of climate observed in modern times. In recent studies have shown that pauses in the increase of surface temperatures are associated with the transfer of heat into the deep part of the oceans during La Nina cycles.
https://www2.ucar.edu/atmosnews/news/5364/deep-oceans-can-mask-global-warming-decade-long-periods
Philip Bradley says:
March 7, 2012 at 11:28 pm
//////////////////////////////////////////
I beg to differ. Asia/China etc has had a substantial increase in aerosols.
I was referring specifically to China, but care to present some evidence for that claim.
One of those hotspots is Perth and I happen to know that when the Perth station was relocated from a position opposite an irrigated park to a non-irrigated field the nighttime temperatures went up by 1.5C.
The urban irrigation effect – spray water into the air and you greatly increase its thermal capacity and temperatures drop.
The UHI enthusiasts don’t take into consideration the urbanisation of hot dry places.
And as for Mosh, I’m still waiting for an explanation of how BEST isn’t derived from min/max temps.
Mr.D.Imwit says @ur momisugly March 7, 2012 at 6:07 pm
Is this true or B.S.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2111618/The-new-Atlantis-Entire-Pacific-nation-plans-relocate-rising-sea-level.html.
Enlightenment would be appreciated…
________________________________________
You might want to look at:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/01/27/floating-islands/
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/12/28/the-fishes-and-the-coral-live-happily-in-the-co2-bubble-plume/
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/10/25/the-reef-abides/
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/12/26/sea-cucumbers-dissolving-coral-reefs/
Reefs can be disrupted but it is usually from humans hands on messing it up. Selling coral to tourists, coral that is harvested by dynamiting, killing of fish…
From Willis Eschenbach in Floating Islands:
“…..What goes unremarked is the loss of the reef sand, which is essential for the continued existence of the atoll. The major cause for the loss of sand is the indiscriminate, wholesale killing of parrotfish and other beaked reef-grazing fish. A single parrotfish, for example, creates around a hundred kilos of coral sand per year. Parrotfish and other beaked reef fish create the sand by grinding up the coral with their massive jaws, digesting the food, and excreting the ground coral.
Beaked grazing fish are vital for overall coral health, growth, and production. This happens in the same way that pruning makes a tree send up lots of new shoots. The constant grazing by the beaked fish keeps the corals in full production mode. This greatly increases the annual production of coral for sand and rubble……” http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/01/27/floating-islands/
From Eric Adler on March 9, 2012 at 4:10 am:
The BEST papers were made for peer review and publication, trumpeted on their release as soon to be published, and have not yet cleared peer review nor been officially published in a peer-reviewed journal. Thus they haven’t even passed the standards the BEST team themselves set for those papers to be cited authoritatively. Thus functionally they don’t even exist. Thus they shouldn’t be cited as proof of anything, except perhaps mistakes and other errors that should be corrected before publication.
From Eric Adler on March 9, 2012 at 4:46 am:
The physical basis of the 60 year cycle is the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, a real and measured phenomenon. There’s a noted pattern of warm periods, notably the Minoan, Roman, Medieval, and Modern ones, with periods of colder temperatures between them as with the Little Ice Age being between the Medieval and Modern Warm Periods. Temperatures go down, they return to the high periods. There is nothing “empty” in referring to a recovery from the Little Ice Age.
You have trouble accepting obvious reality. Perhaps you should seek psychiatric help.
Eric Adler says:
March 9, 2012 at 4:46 am
Your site talked about masking for “decade-long periods”. According to RSS, Hadcrut3 and hadsst2, it has been one and a half decades already and counting. For RSS for example, the January and February anomalies would rank these first two months as 26th warmest. You may have heard about the recent book in German: “The cold sun”. Before we spend too much money, do you no think it would be wise to see if we are in for a continued cold spell?
kadaka (KD Knoebel) says:
March 9, 2012 at 7:52 am
“The BEST papers were made for peer review and publication, trumpeted on their release as soon to be published, and have not yet cleared peer review nor been officially published in a peer-reviewed journal. Thus they haven’t even passed the standards the BEST team themselves set for those papers to be cited authoritatively. Thus functionally they don’t even exist. Thus they shouldn’t be cited as proof of anything, except perhaps mistakes and other errors that should be corrected before publication.”
By that standard, I should ignore a large majority of the blogposts on this web site, including the one we are commenting on now. Do you agree?
“The physical basis of the 60 year cycle is the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, a real and measured phenomenon. There’s a noted pattern of warm periods, notably the Minoan, Roman, Medieval, and Modern ones, with periods of colder temperatures between them as with the Little Ice Age being between the Medieval and Modern Warm Periods. Temperatures go down, they return to the high periods. There is nothing “empty” in referring to a recovery from the Little Ice Age.”
There is no evidence that the PDO is 60 year cycle. The data is quite irregular and only 90 years worth of data exists.
http://www.nwfsc.noaa.gov/research/divisions/fed/oeip/ca-pdo.cfm
“You have trouble accepting obvious reality. Perhaps you should seek psychiatric help.”
Insulting posts are a sign of a weak argument.
Werner Brozek says:
March 9, 2012 at 9:30 am
“Eric Adler says:
March 9, 2012 at 4:46 am
Your site talked about masking for “decade-long periods”. According to RSS, Hadcrut3 and hadsst2, it has been one and a half decades already and counting. For RSS for example, the January and February anomalies would rank these first two months as 26th warmest. You may have heard about the recent book in German: “The cold sun”. Before we spend too much money, do you no think it would be wise to see if we are in for a continued cold spell?”
I haven’t heard about the recent book. It is true that the last 15 years have been very noisy. Part of the noise is solar cycles, and part of it is El Nino/ La Nina . Despite this there is a positive trend to the last 15 years, but clearly less than 95% significant.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1996/to:2012/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1996/to:2012/trend/plot/none
The GISSTEMP plot will show a significant trend over the past 15 years, while HADCRUT Doesn’t because it doesn’t fill in the Arctic region, where the greatest warming trend occurs.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/gistemp-dts/from:1996/to:2012/plot/gistemp-dts/from:1996/to:2012/trend
I googled “Cold Sun” and found the book. Based on the quotes and statements, it seems to me like quackery to me.
From Eric Adler on March 9, 2012 at 4:26 pm:
Your lack of reading comprehension is noted. You even quoted the relevant qualifications of my comment in your reply:
“The BEST papers were made for peer review and publication, trumpeted on their release as soon to be published, and have not yet cleared peer review nor been officially published in a peer-reviewed journal. Thus they haven’t even passed the standards the BEST team themselves set for those papers to be cited authoritatively.”
Said blog posts are not made for peer review and publication in a peer-reviewed journal, thus they are not judged by that standard. They are made for publishing on the internet, and as seen on skeptic sites such as WUWT the peer review occurs after publishing. The results of the crowdsourced peer review determine the suitability for citing authoritatively.
And because there are only 90 years of data, the following site can display 111 years of data with a PDO graph currently showing 1900 to 2011, with links to PDO reconstructions from 1856 to 1991.
http://jisao.washington.edu/pdo/
This information and site is found by clicking on “Pacific Decadal Oscillation” at the very start of the very first sentence at the link you provided. Indeed, that sentence is:
The Pacific Decadal Oscillation is a climate index based upon patterns of variation in sea surface temperature of the North Pacific from 1900 to the present (Mantua et al. 1997).
There it is, from the link you provided. From “1900 to the present” you have deduced there only exists 90 years of data?
The PDO is not a fully independent phenomenon, there are other confounding factors, the determining of the exact stages of the index is problematic. Yet “60 years” is a good approximation of the cycle. Try reading this for information as to how it correlates with many other things.
You have clearly shown difficulties with comprehension. You have shown you didn’t understand the first sentence of a source you linked to. Modern psychiatry also diagnoses and treats functional issues such as reading comprehension problems. My point and my suggestion stands.
Eric Adler says:
March 9, 2012 at 6:59 pm
“The GISSTEMP plot will show a significant trend over the past 15 years, while HADCRUT Doesn’t because it doesn’t fill in the Arctic region, where the greatest warming trend occurs.”
The GISSTEMP is no longer a observation based data set any more (so I don’t use it), it makes up data in the same regions where there is none all the time other than DMI. But, it doesn’t even use DMI because this also doesn’t show the warming that only GISSTEMP does. Regurlarly changing station history to show steeper trends and making up data in regions where there is none ever, has ruined this data set to become no better, than trash. Finally for such a small region to cause those temperatures increases globally, requires a lot of warming over the entire area that no observed data stations or data points including buoys DMI uses, reflect.
Eric Adler says:
March 9, 2012 at 6:59 pm
From 1996 to date is 16 years and not 15. For exact times see the following:
Following is the longest period of time (above10 years) where each of the data sets is at least slightly negative (or flat for all practical purposes). NOTE: * There are no February values yet for 2, 5 and 6. Once these are in, I expect AT LEAST one month to be added to each of the times below.
1. RSS: since December 1996 or 15 years, 3 months
2. HadCrut3: since March 1997 or 14 years, 11 months*
3. GISS: since May 2001 or 10 years, 10 months
4. UAH: It never quite reaches a negative value but I expect it to with the March numbers.
5. Combination of the above 4: December 2000 or 11 years, 2 months*
6. Sea surface temperatures: February 1997 or 15 years, 0 months*
See the graph below to show it all.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3gl/from:1997.16/trend/plot/gistemp/from:2001.33/trend/plot/rss/from:1996.9/trend/plot/wti/from:2000.91/trend/plot/hadsst2gl/from:1997.08/trend
Matt G says:
March 10, 2012 at 5:59 am
Finally for such a small region to cause those temperatures increases globally, requires a lot of warming over the entire area that no observed data stations or data points including buoys DMI uses, reflect.
That is very true!
Is GISS more accurate?
I have read that GISS is the only record that is accurate since it adequately considers what happens in the polar regions, unlike other data sets. I have done some “back of the envelope calculations” to see if this is a valid assumption. I challenge any GISS supporter to challenge my assumptions and/or calculations and show that I am way out to lunch. If you cannot do this, I will assume it is the GISS calculations that are out to lunch.
Here are my assumptions and/or calculations: (I will generally work to 2 significant digits.)
1. The surface area of Earth is 5.1 x 10^8 km squared.
2. The RSS data is only good to 82.5 degrees.
3. It is almost exclusively the northern Arctic that is presumably way warmer and not Antarctica. For example, we always read about the northern ice melting and not what the southern areas are gaining in ice.
4. The circumference of Earth is 40,000 km.
5. I will assume the area between 82.5 degrees and 90 degrees can be assumed to be a flat circle so spherical trigonometry is not needed.
6. The area of a circle is pi r squared.
7. The distance between 82.5 degrees and 90.0 degrees is 40,000 x 7.5/360 = 830 km
8. The area in the north polar region above 82.5 degrees is 2.2 x 10^6 km squared.
9. The ratio of the area between the whole earth and the north polar region above 82.5 degrees is 5.1 x 10^8 km squared/2.2 x 10^6 km squared = 230.
10. People wondered if the satellite record for 2010 would be higher than for 1998. Let us compare these two between RSS and GISS.
11. According to GISS, the difference in anomaly was 0.05 degrees C higher for 2010 versus 1998.
12. According to RSS, it was 0.074 degrees C higher for 1998 versus 2010.
13. The net difference between 1998 and 2010 between RSS and GISS is 0.124 degrees C.
14. If we are to assume the only difference between these is due to GISS accurately accounting for what happens above 82.5 degrees, then this area had to be 230 x 0.124 = 28.5 degrees warmer in 2010 than 1998.
15. If we assume the site at http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/meant80n.uk.php can be trusted for temperatures above 80 degrees north, we see very little difference between 1998 and 2010. The 2010 seems slightly warmer, but nothing remotely close to 25 degrees warmer as an average for the whole year.
Readers may disagree with some assumptions I used, but whatever issue anyone may have, does it affect the final conclusion about the lack of superiority of GISS data to any real extent?
Werner Brozek says:
March 10, 2012 at 8:15 am
Good post, is does reflect what I have found out before.
The graph below shows the divergence difference between GISSTEMP and RSS using the 1981-2010 baseline.
http://img854.imageshack.us/img854/7658/gissvrss19812010.png
The following graph shows the temperature needed above 82.5N to justify the difference between GISSTEMP and RSS, supporting that the only difference is the extra Arctic data.
http://img829.imageshack.us/img829/5412/gissvrssextarc.png
The temperature needed to warm above this mean (1981-2010) on occasions to support this claim, need to be above 100c. Therefore this data backs up the evidence that the extra Arctic data causing the difference in trends is false. Either the Arctic above 82.5N needs to be extremely hot (shown above) or combination between the rest of the planet and still ridicously warm values above 82.5N are needed to support the warming from GISSTEMP. This supports that the extrapolations are making up hot temperatures that don’t exist on the planet Earth, neither the station data furthest north or DMI come even close.
Where is the beef from Arctic data observations?
http://www.uni-koeln.de/math-nat-fak/geomet/meteo/winfos/synNNWWarctis.gif
Forgot to mention that the difference in divergence between GISSTEMP and RSS is increasing generally during the timeline shown. (1998-2012)
Thank you Matt. Some may argue that RSS and GISS measure different things. However Hadcrut3 and RSS seem very much alike in many ways. I know that some people are expecting Hadcrut4 and BEST to overturn some things, at least with respect to 1998 versus 2010. I just cannot believe that everything that may have been missed with Hadcrut3 was much warmer on the average. We may have to keep our pencils sharp when they finally come out!