Results from the surface temperature outlier races, just in time for AR5

Great characterization Bob!
Maintaining the original data will prove very interesting in the future, too – if it can be recovered and kept as originally taken.

When I see science unravelling cellular complexity or superconduction, I feel pride in the human race, but then when I see such amateurish deceptions as these grid tricks paraded as if it were actual climate science, I wonder how these two extremes of quality can coexist in the same magazine. The word ‘schizoid’ seems unbearably apt.
In the long run this kind of shoddiness will inevitably spread like a cancer over the rest of science, in effect killing it off. But then killing off science always been an inseparable part of the Leftist project.of truth-destruction, with the Team and their AGW mob as eager executioners.

A question. How many incarnations of HadCrut will we have until they just give up and simply apply an algorithm which increases the temp readings in the present and gradually decreases the values as it moves further away from the present? I think GISS’ method is much easier to apply. Why waste all that time?

Thanks Bob. Isn’t it lovely that they all match so well! We can only wonder what the unadjusted data would have looked like……
http://images.clipartof.com/small/103500-Border-Or-Colorful-Wavy-Lines-Stars-And-Circles-On-White-Poster-Art-Print.jpg

Dr. Jay Cadbury, phd. says:
April 17, 2012 at 11:29 am
Hi everyone. I’m trying to put together a team to comment blast over at Rabett Run. They maintain that there is big consensus about global warming so let’s put it to the test.
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Would this require interacting with that idiot who refers to himself in the 3rd person and his regulars as sycophant bunnies? Here, you might find this useful….. http://suyts.wordpress.com/2012/04/08/anderegg-et-al-revisited/
In my view, that destroys any thoughts to a scientific consensus. ….. as to the public,….
http://www.gallup.com/poll/153875/Worry-Water-Air-Pollution-Historical-Lows.aspx
7 out of 10 people who bothered to answer say they global warming is a non-issue.

GISS and Hadley are going to have to better than this. Latest US Gallop poll shows global warming last in eco-concerns, and falling.
http://sas-origin.onstreammedia.com/origin/gallupinc/GallupSpaces/Production/Cms/POLL/94pfnrbxveiiamtlzbennw.gif

Berényi Péter says:
April 17, 2012 at 12:07 pm
….
Fortunately we can always add an arbitrarily steep linear function to our data, because no one, not even deniers can deny the fact that old thermometers were manufactured earlier than new ones.
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The older ones were likely better.

How much of this warming is man made (anthropogenic) and how much is natural (modern warm period) ?

On the subject of data manipulation, anyone know whether the Icelandic Met Office got a proper reply from GHCN re the outrageous reworking of the Reykjavik temperature data? It’s been 10 weeks now. Did I miss it?
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/01/25/another-giss-miss-this-time-in-iceland/

“Dr. Jay Cadbury, phd. says:
April 17, 2012 at 11:29 am
Dr. Jay Cadbury, phd.”
I think this is a troll trying to gen traffic for his site.

Next year, last year will be colder than you thought, although next year will be hotter than last year by a lot more than you thought …sheez where was I.

AS usual a good and interesting post.
Last night I watched a TV programme on BBC 4 entitled Ancient Apocalypse. It was about the demise of the Old Kingdom or First Kingdom of Egypt in about 2200BC. It was an extremely interesting programme since it spent more than 1/2 hour discussing significant natural variability to climate over a period of about 7000 years.
What was clear from this programme was that there was very significant climate change both to temperatures and rainfall over this period and sometimes the changes could be dramatic and could occur in a short period, may be in just a few decades.
Anyone watching that programme could not have come away with the impression that climate is constantly changing.
No one discussed the role of CO2 in those changes. The impression gained was that the changes were simply natural variability of the climate itself.
Further of interest, the impression given was that these changes were not restricted to just the Norther Hemisphere around Greenland or Mediterranean or North West Africa but that there was evidence that they were more global in nature.
Further, the impression was given that it was cold, or more particularly cold and dry that was the significant problem for humans.
As said, it was a very interesting programme and well worth watching on BBC iplayer.
If you had seen that programme, you would not be unduly concerned about the temperature changes that BOb notes in this post. Just natural variation and warm is good.

firetoice says:
April 17, 2012 at 11:50 am
James Sexton @ April 17, 2012 at 11:36 am,
I am sure your are familiar with the KISS method. (Keep it simple stupid.)
I am familiar with the GISS method. (Get it sloped stupid.)
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Absolutely. Other than putting on a show and giving people something to do, I can’t imagine why HadCrut wastes their time with their revisions….. just do what GISS does simply lower the past and raise the present and call it good. They’ve already incorporated the imaginary temps of the poles. Why not just go all the way and be done with it? Heck, they can cut staff by half in both and simply update each other’s “independent” (giggle) data!

You sketpics just do NOT get it. You think 0.07 degrees per decade is insignificant? Do the math! that’s 7 degrees per millenium! Seven! Per millenium! In ten milleniums that’s 70 degrees! SEVENTY! That’s almost to boiling point in ONLY TEN THOUSAND YEARS!
Impending doom in 10,000 years!
Uunless a giant asteroid, or giant solar flare, or massive volcanic eruption, strange new disease or misguided idiotic politicaly motivated policies get us first. If I was a betting man…

It never ceases to amaze me the so many of the people in the camp opposed to the consensual view of AGW think that sitting down with Excel opened up in front of them and punching out a few graphs somehow even qualifies as science, let alone gives their lay opinion equal weight with experts in the field. I do however find great amusement in this constant assertion that somehow the data has been manipulated to fit some preconceived idea. The people making these assertions are actually claiming scientific fraud and doing so without actually understanding the seriousness of such an accusation and doing so with absolutlely no scientific expertise to put them in a position to actually understand the subject they are talking about let alone undertake any meaningful reevaluation of the data further than the aforementioned excel spreadsheet. Amazing. I wonder how many of the tradespeople commenting here would appreciate someone unqualified in the trade coming behind them and telling them they are doing it wrong? I wonder if any instrument control engineers (whatever that is) would appreciate me, an ecologist, critiquing his instrument control engineering? I would like to think that if I had the audacity to reach well beyond my field like that I’d be put firmly in my place. But all that aside, my challenge to anyone here who thinks the climate hasn’t warmed is to explain the tens of thousands of species that have undergone rapid range shifts inline with warming. Birds, insects, plants, fungi, viruses, bacteria etc don’t have political agendas, don’t know about data or models, but they do respond to climate change.

Really, ENSO is a pattern of warming. OK, then what causes ENSO. GHG doesn’t cause warming either. Obviously the sun causes the vast majority of global warming. So then, what’s your point?

Mike;
It never ceases to amaze me the so many of the people in the camp opposed to the consensual view of AGW think that sitting down with Excel opened up in front of them and punching out a few graphs somehow even qualifies as science>>>
What do you call coming up with a 1000 year temperature reconstruction based 50% on a single tree? Is that science? Do you support Dr Briffa’s work in that regard? What do you call doing a 1000 year temperature reconstruction using some of the data inverted from the rest? Do you support Dr Mann’s methodology? What about Dr Mann’s computer program that demonstrably drew a hockey stick graph regardless of what climate data is was used on? Is that the type of science that you support? Do you support truncating 50 years of tree ring data because it didn’t match the temperature record, while insisting that for the 900 years previous when there was no temperature record to compare to, it was accurate? Do you support that science too?
Sadly Mike, Excel happens to be a useful tool for drawing graphs. It makes sloppily assembled data based on poor data gathering practices and bogus analysis techniques look credible. If you think the criticisms of AGW “science” are just from punching out some graphs in Excel, you misunderstand both Excel and the comments about the science.

“Surely to have 1998 as the warmest year after 12 years was intolerable.” Should be 14 years I guess.

John Peter says:
April 17, 2012 at 11:35 pm
Surely to have 1998 as the warmest year after 14 years was intolerable.
Good point! But why did all the polar amplification just amplify the years from 2001 to 2010 but neglect to amplify 1998? That is what I find puzzling. Are we now going to believe records with UHI issues, surface station issues and adjustments or the satellite data?
According to the two satellite records.
RSS
1 {1998, 0.55},
2 {2010, 0.476},
3 {2005, 0.334}.
UAH
1 {1998, 0.428},
2 {2010, 0.414},
3 {2005, 0.253}.

A couple of TV points:
richard verney says (April 17, 2012 at 6:09 pm)
I watched te same BBC documentary on climate change and the Old Kingdom, and heartily recommend it. What was most interesting was the scientists talking about a natural 1500-year cycle for Little Ice Ages, and the brilliant way they found evidence by looking at how far south in the Atlantic melting icebergs had dropped Icelandic volcanic ash to the seabed. This was joined-up climate reconstruction at it’s best.
Mike says (April 17, 2012 at 10:07 pm)
“Amazing. I wonder how many of the tradespeople commenting here would appreciate someone unqualified in the trade coming behind them and telling them they are doing it wrong?”
In the UK we have programs (such as ‘Rogue Traders’) where honest experts expose the shenanigans of their less competent or ethical fellows with the aid of hidden cameras. Enough said.

Santer and Schmidt (and IPCC) were only kidding when they stated:

Tropospheric warming is a robust feature of climate model simulations driven by historical increases in greenhouse gases (1–3). Maximum warming is predicted to occur in the middle and upper tropical troposphere.

http://climateaudit.org/2008/12/28/gavin-and-the-big-red-dog/
Where’s the hot spot?
The “basic physics” also states the stratosphere should be cooling.
How about it Mosher, what’s wrong with the “theory”?

beesaman says:
April 18, 2012 at 4:27 am
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In addition, do noy forget that data based upon land temperature measurments does not tell us anything of importance since (i) without taking into account, it is not a metric for energy, and (ii) ot does not tell us what the average temperature was over a sustained period of 24 hours was.
Just because there might have been a change to Tmax and/or Tmin, it does not necessarily mean that the averafe temperature throughout the day has changed.
The data sets are not fit for purpose. This is not surprising since the temperature stations and the measurements that they record were never intended for climate research
If back in the 1970s there concerns as to global warming, step 1 should have been to completely redesign and redeploy a new spatially designed monitoring system which was properly sited and with proper instrumentation which was calibrated to a known standard and which measured temperature and humidity every 5 minutes and which reported its output additionally in Joules.
Of course, the satelitte system comes nearest to this, nut the warmists generally do not like the satellite data..
Finally, if one is concerned as to the possibilty of global warming, one would only bother with the oceans. THis is where the energy is. There can be no global warming if the oceans are not warming.

Glad you wrote a book – but why the extra long title? Hate to say it but an extremely long title like that is really going to cut into your book downloads. In a nutshell, your book will be largely ignored except by the readers of this blog. The title you used should have been a subtitle, with a short phrase that catches people’s attention quickly used as the title. I know it sounds shallow but that’s the reality of the publishing business.

Care to name them? Or just 100 of the tens of thousands? How about ten?
An amusing anecdote associated with this observation. Alligators are a very interesting indicator of local average temperature, because nests cooler than 30C produce all females, nests warmer than 34C produce all males, in a window that is 1 to 3 weeks long during incubation. Given their breeding season, this places strict limits on how far north alligators can range as a self-sustaining population. North Carolina happens to be that limit — native sustaining populations of alligators can be found (in otherwise suitable habitat) roughly from Kitty Hawk in northeast NC to the southeast of an invisible line that cuts diagonally southwest across the state, roughly paralleling the coast (there are rarely alligators seen all the way up to the Virginia border and maybe beyond in the Dismal Swamp). It is close to, but not quite identical to, the line demarking the range of plants like oleander and beugonvillia that are sensitive to frost (and hence die if not protected during a winter in which temperatures regularly drop below freezing). A shaded map of their approximate range can be seen here:
http://www.herpsofnc.org/herps_of_NC/crocodilians/Allmis/All_mis.html
I live in Durham about 60-70 miles the west of that line (which is around Goldsboro to the Southeast of here, with a major waterway that extends all the way to the coast (the Neuse River) that runs right beside it and a second one not far away. Raleigh is more like 40-50 miles from it.
Alligators actually behave like teenagers at some point in their lives — they are inclined to wander far from where they are born to seek out new territory. The westernmost part of their range is thus already beyond the range where they can successfully reproduce as a locally sustained population as nests will produce all females, but there are enough males and females that “diffuse” west before settling on a habitat that you can still find a few gators in the lakes, backwaters and swamplands in the Neuse watershed. I fish in several of waterways around Raleigh and Durham that are directly in line to the coast in this way.
In 2010 it was big news when a gator was seen swimming in Hope Mills Lake, in Fayetteville NC (again, 80 or so miles to the southeast) but as the article noted, this is in their natural range where they are rare (probably immigrants that can’t sustain a natural population) but not unknown. The reason it was big news was that the lake is in a heavily inhabited area and is used for recreation with lots of swimmers and fishermen, not because it was “unlikely”. If humans didn’t surround the lake it might harbor a permanent (but small) population over time.
Surveys of their population show that alligators are most common and go farthest inland in the Cape Fear and Neuse waterways, probably because they tend to be surrounded by protected game lands and swampy areas that are natural habitat.
Back in the 1980s — I can’t do better than that because not even Google can retrieve a contemporary account — it was big news when not one but two alligators showed up in ponds at a golf course in Raleigh. This was before “CAGW” had become a world religion, but there were a couple of summers in the 1980s that were scorchers and a couple of very mild winters as well, and the mild conditions plus the aforementioned wanderlust apparently encouraged these two good sized gators (not babies, these were the real thing) to wander further west than usual looking for new territory. Eventually they were removed.
Here we are some 30 years later — the 30 years that have supposedly raised global average temperatures by some 0.5 C over almost exactly that interval. That sort of increase would correspond to a westward push of the natural habitat of at least 40 or 50 miles — all that one needs is for one winter in four or five to be in the range that produces both sexes, there is plenty of swampland and waterway (most of it protected) all the way to the coast up the Neuse and Cape Fear watersheds). I keep hoping to see alligators in the lakes I fish in, in the waterways I hike along — and I keep an eye out for them because they are a species that could just turn up by chance far out of place, like the pair at the Raleigh golf course. So do a lot of people. Basically, if anybody spotted a gator in Jordan Lake or Falls Lake or on the Eno river or in the New Hope Creek that runs within a few miles of my house or… it would be huge news, not because it was “proof” of CAGW but because everybody would think it was so cool. Usually one has to go at least near to the coast to have any chance at all of seeing a wild gator in NC, and one really has to get ON the coast or into the swamps on the major waterways OF the coast to have a “good” chance, or to see one casually hanging out on golf courses. Bald Head Island, for example, has a nice population in its golf ponds and sometimes spotted hanging our right on the roads or grassways. There aren’t a lot of them (that I know of) near Beaufort where I teach in the summer but I tend to hang out and fish in the saltwater side of things and they seem to prefer fresh, or at most brackish.
Anecdotal evidence, to be sure, but still, pretty negatory. We still have frosty, cold, occasionally very snowy winters in my part of NC. Less than a decade ago NC experienced a 100 year record for snowfall with a single fall over 20 inches in Durham. Last winter we started out very cold early, then had a fairly “normal” winter with a few very light snowfalls, then had an arguably unusually warm March (after a normal February). April, if anything, has been normal to cool — we danced along the edge of a late frost last week 2 or 3 nights running, but really it has been unremarkable. There is nothing in this to attract even an unruly alligator teenager — they might be able to build a nest and hibernate through the cold (although it gets quite cold, with temperatures down in the teens F or lower at least a few times most winters) but in most springs — even this “warm” one — the probability of a cool enough stretch to drop average nest temperatures to < 30C (86 F) for a week or more is near certainty. No possibility of a breeding population here, little possibility in Raleigh or even Smithfield or Goldsboro. And we are, sadly, too far upstream for even the most enterprising of alligator pioneers to travel seeking a new home, not even with an exploding beaver population and plentiful fish and reptile and bird population to feed them on the creeks and waterways.
There are similar bellwethers in many other streams and habitats. Clams that live only in selected waterways, for example. These populations are often at risk, but the risk is from agricultural runoff, other pollution, or land use changes, not so much from significant changes in climate. There are definitely decadal trends in the date of the last frost and so on, but anyone who believes that they are "safely" earlier than they were 30 years ago is an idiot who deserves to lose the tomatoes (totally frost intolerant) they put out too early. As I have remarked on other threads, a mere 15 or 16 years ago (right in the middle of the supposed "warming trend" last frost at MY house in NC was at the end of the first week in May! This was so late that it killed off my azaleas, let along wiped out my tomatoes, my fruit crop, and damaged the newly leafed trees. April 15th is the usual “last frost” day for the area, but there are years where it occurs in the last weeks of March (and I’ve gotten away with putting tomatoes in 4/1) and years where it occurs in the last weeks of April or even into May as noted.
Anyone who isn’t an idiot in statistics can guestimate the variance of the date of last frost even from this (still anecdotal) data. The actual date of last frost is distributed around the mean date with a standard deviation of perhaps ten days or even two weeks, making two week excursions either way unremarkable. This also means that resolving the motion of the mean by days or even a week over 30 years of data is basically impossible. Trends are lost in an indistinguishable from noise on all time scales, especially when the secular trends themselves are probably signal from long period secular variation due to e.g. the phase of the PDO and state of the Sun.
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