US record lows outpace record highs 127 to 4 this weekend

Amino Acids in Meteorites asked:

Speaking of fitting a narrative, why is GISTemp like this?

referring to the divergence in recent years of the 12-year linear trend between GISS analysis on one hand and, on the other hand, the HadCRUT3, UAH, and RSS data sets.
This divergence in the trends over recent 12-year periods is very likely due to two factors. One is the treatment of locations which are remote from locations for which there are measured data. This particularly concerns the polar regions, e.g. the Arctic ocean. The temperature anomalies are interpolated and extrapolated from surrounding stations in the GISS analysis. HadCRUT assumes that the anomaly at those locations equals the Hemispheric mean anomaly. The data sets based on satellite retrievals don’t cover the polar regions. So, if there is a warming in the polar regions larger than the global average, like in the Arctic in recent years, the other three data sets have a smaller trend in the global temperature anomaly than the GISS data set.
The second factor is the amplitude of the very strong El Nino of the year 1998 in the various data sets. The amplitude of this El Nino event is smaller in the GISS data sets than in the other three data sets. I suspect the difference to HadCRUT3 is again due to the larger weight of the Arctic data in GISS analysis. And the tropospheric temperatures data derived from the satellite measurements appear to be more sensitive to ENSO than the surface temperature data. Thus, the stronger El Nino signal in the other data sets strongly affects the results from the trend analysis for the recent 12-year periods. One has to keep in mind that these trends are not statistically significant. So there isn’t really any statistical difference between the trends despite the divergence.
The differences in the analyses on which GISSTEMP and HadCRUT are based are discussed by the scientists who do the analysis, here: http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/abs/ha00510u.html
Nothing sinister going on there. Anyone who wants to assert or suggest the scientists at GISS who do this analysis manipulate or forge the data and the results from the analysis for whatever non-scientific agenda of which they are being accused, and that there wouldn’t be such a trend in the global temperature anomaly w/o the allged forgery should feel free to show this at the code and the data, which are used for the analysis. It’s all public:
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/sources/GISTEMP_sources.tar.gz
HadCRUT4 is closer to the GISS analysis. HadCRUT4 includes more measurements from the Arctic than HadCRUT3.
REPLY: For the most part, there are few Arctic temperature measurements above the Arctic circle. GISS goes way overboard interpolating Arctic surface data where none exists. One only has too look at the station distribution in those latitudes, and then compare it with the interpolated output made by GISS to see this. – Anthony

It is mathematically trivial to find a decade, or even 13 years of temperature data from various sources that show no statistically significant cooling for the period.
Or significant warming or statistically significantly stability.
Claiming that temperatures have been ‘unchanged’ for eleven years in the GISS data or some other source is just as right, or wrong, as claiming that they show a continuing warming trend. The variance mainly caused by ENSO fluctuations that are around double the decadal trend render any short record incapable of distinguishing between stasis, cooling or warming.
The key indicator is what trend, or stasis appears when the record is extended to a length that DOES generate statistically significant results. It is notable that for all these records with no significant trend over a short period, as soon as that period is extended back a year or two the warming trend does become statistically significant and unequivocal.
The frequent claim that warming is not detectable in the last few years of data is rather like claiming that the advent of summer is not detectable in a week of temperature data.
But in the part of the climate that encompasses over 70% of the energy involved in warming, the oceans, and is not so affected by the ENSO fluctuations, a clear significant trend of warming CAN be seen in the last decade of data.
http://www.nodc.noaa.gov/OC5/3M_HEAT_CONTENT/

Bob Berwyn says:
August 20, 2012 at 12:27 pm
…..As for media coverage, I can assure you that, if we see a real and documented long-term trend toward lower temperatures, record lows, or if someone shows that global warming is NOT happening, it will get all sorts of media attention. Til then, stay cool!
___________________________________________
The media is a whore for the politicians, bankers (JP Morgan: Our next big media player?,) for General Electric (NBCUniversal) and the other large corporations (Advertising dollars)
The media knows which side they are on it it is not the side of the little guy. It is on the side of the guy who owns the press, owns the mortgages and pays for advertising.
This is a bit of background for the politically naive:

…Enron has given vast sums of cash to both Republicans and Democrats. While Democrats are presently attempting to link Enron and its chairman, Kenneth Lay, to President George Bush and Vice President Richard Cheney, they conveniently seem to have forgotten that Enron in 1997 contributed $100,000 to the Democratic Party immediately after President Bill Clinton directly intervened to help Enron gain a $3-billion project in India… http://mises.org/daily/872

Gore’s Inconvenient Enron
Al Gore obfuscates, downplays and refuses to discuss the role that CEOs have played in crafting his Cap-and-Trade C02 trading schemes and carbon swapping systems.
Al Gore tries to put a lid in Congressional committee testimony on a little reported but vitally important subject in the global warming, carbon-tax ‘debate’- the new derivatives bubble in the emerging green-energy credit-swap market….
…. I left my law firm to accept a position that had rather unexpectedly fallen in my lap with a phone call from Enron, asking me to be their Director of Federal Government Relations. Everyone polled suggested it was a great opportunity, a company admired throughout town, not just by the current (Clinton-Gore) administration with which it was very close, but by Republicans, too….
…the next day I was tasked with sitting in for “Kenny Boy” [Ken Lay] at a meeting in fancy New York law firm offices (in DC), around a table of Baptists and Bootleggers, rent-seekers and green puritans, discussing how to ensure a global warming treaty came about, of our collective design, and how to rope the U.S. in.
So, seeing very measured groups like Union of Concerned Scientists on my immediate left, I turned to one of the rent-seekers’ officers on my right, among whom I recall being the American Gas Association, Niagara-Mohawk Power, and BP, among others. In response to my query, “what are we doing sitting around a table with a bunch of people who want to put us out of business?”, I was told with a laugh, “they want to put coal out of business first.”
…So I fired off a “Houston, we have a problem” missive to my boss asking if Enron knew what it was getting into in this group. That’s when they explained the specifics of their business plan to me – which did include setting up a trading business with Goldman [Sachs], by the way, as one of Goldman’s energy practice chiefs at the time also roared to me in joy about about all of the money they were going to make. This cannot conceivably be news to Gore and his VC partner and former Goldman [Sachs] Pooh-Bah Blood [David Blood] discussed in the linked item.
… fast forward… I’m gone, and Enron and the greens are continuing on their way with what happens to be Congress’s current agenda….
The intervening event? An August 4, 1997 Oval Office meeting with Kenny Boy, (then-) Sir John Browne of BP, and the President and Vice President of the United States….
As revealed by the August 1, 1997 Kenny Boy briefing memo subsequently aired after the unpleasantness, in this meeting Kenny Boy was to demand that the Senate be ignored, that the administration agree to Kyoto, and most important that it contain a cap-and-trade scheme.
I leave you with key excerpts from the “what I did in Kyoto” memo by Lay’s Kyoto aide (yep, he had one), John Palmissano, hailing Enron’s success:

* “This treaty [Kyoto] is exactly what I have been lobbying for”
* “This agreement will be good for Enron stock!!”
* “Enron now has excellent credentials with many ‘green’ interests including Greenpeace, [World Wildlife Fund], [Natural Resources Defense Council], German Watch, the U.S. Climate Action Network, the European Climate Action Network, Ozone Action, WRI, and Worldwatch.”
* “This position should be increasingly cultivated and capitalized on (monitized).” (sic)
“if implemented, this agreement will do more to promote Enron’s business than will almost any other regulatory initiative outside of restructuring of the energy and natural gas industries in Europe and the United States.”

http://www.globalwarming.org/2009/04/28/gores-inconvenient-enron/

So who is David Blood? He [Al Gore] is a founder of Generation Investment Management, based in London and run by David Blood, a former head of Goldman Sachs Asset Management
So what was in it for Al Gore? Gore Pocketed ~$18 Million from Now-Defunct Chicago Climate Exchange via Generation Investment Management. Didn’t someone say a sucker is born every minute? seems like Gore found a whole bunch of them.
Al Gore, the former US vice president, could become the world’s first carbon billionaire after investing heavily in green energy companies.
Also see “Red Hot Lies: How Global Warming Alarmists Use Force, Fraud, and Deception to Keep You Misinformed“.
Quotes and links from the history of the scam: ‘Green’ groups worked with Enron to make billions in CO2 trading schemes with made up global warming
I do find it incredible how warmists continue to ignore all the evidence that this was a money making scheme from the get go and the Energy Corporations, bankers, politicians and the Media were all in on it. You do not have to be able to follow the science, all you have to do is Follow the Money.
More on Follow the MONEY follow the links. Full Report in pdf

@- Gail Combs
“BULL, I saw similar weather in the 1950’s – 1970’s You’re probably just too young.”
No, I remember the cold winters of the fifties.
And you certainly did not see similar weather in the 50s-70s to the recent record heat waves that were hotter than ANY recorded.
Or the Arctic ice loss and polar warming that is also greater than any seen in the historical record.

I love the smell of desperation in the morning. You really have to have blinders on to think a statement like “Or the Arctic ice loss and polar warming that is also greater than any seen in the historical record” has any truth to it whatsoever. Why the qualifier “in the historical record”? In order to set the parameters of the discussion. Outside these parameters, they are sunk. The qualifier tells me who the real (d-word)s are. The statement does not stand without the qualifier.

izen
Your vexation is the result of assuming that the increased humidity will have a dominant effect at all spatial and temporal scales of reducing the extremes. But the greater variance with higher temperatures can override that.
Do you have a source? A) There is greater variance with higher temperatures? B) If A, then is there evidence that temperatures do override the dampening effect of high humidity?
Query: what dampens temperatures if it isn’t water vapor? Like in: Desert? Polar? Tropics?
On the Dessler 2010 reanalysis reference. I went back to Steve McIntyre’s blog and re-read the discussion on monthly centering and the subsequent dialogue with Nick Stokes. What I took away from that exchange, the statistical use of monthly centering could and did give spurious increase in tropospheric moisture and that the Paltridge’s weather balloon data showing a decrease in tropospheric moisture had not been refuted by Dessler’s reanalysis.
A last point, your: rising temperatures disrupt previously stable weather patterns (short term time scale). I thought the weather was unpredictable more than 10 or so days out because weather is chaotic. Is chaos stable? It seems that earth’s stable temperature range is due to its oceans and moist atmosphere. Again, moisture trumping all sorts of calamities over 3 to 4 billions of years (long term time scale).

Entropic man says:
August 21, 2012 at 9:59 am
That would not exclude a rise of 0.6C or a decrease of 0.6C over the 15 year period. Your claim is not justified by the data.That is why noone is getting too excited.
The data also would not exclude no change over the 15 year period either. I really wish it were true that no one is getting exited. But that is not the case. Under the circumstances, I would think it would be prudent to NOT spend a billion dollars on carbon capture as they plan on doing here in Alberta. For political reasons, some people are very excited over a warming that does not seem to exist. Would it be too much to ask that people NOT spend a lot of money on a perceived problem which may not materialize?
As for the error bars, you would have to take that up with WFT. It only does that for BEST.

Werner Brozek you wrote:

While RSS has the longest time of zero slope, Hadcrut3 and Hadsst2 are right behind and are also over 15 years of no warming. Even GISS has no warming for 11 years and 5 months. And yes, there is noise.

Well, I suppose you don’t know what to reply to my argument regarding the relevance of such technical information. Otherwise you wouldn’t just ignore it.

This puts it at 90.7% of the way to Santer’s 17 years.

What are “Santer’s 17 years”? What is supposed to happen at 17 years?

Anthony Watts wrote:

REPLY:“as a citizen”? I call BS on that. He wouldn’t be invited to these protests if he was “just a citizen”

For what reason someone invites Hansen is irrelevant with respect to his civil rights. He is a citizen and it is his private business to engage in political activism, whether you like it or not. It’s news to me that scientists, even if they are employed by the government, are not allowed to have political views and to express them in their free time.

He’s your boss

I’m not a federal employee. Jim Hansen is not my boss.

James Hansen has blown his trust with the public, he should be fired for violating the Hatch Act IMHO. Be as upset as you wish. – Anthony

Oh, I’m not upset. I’m glad that you reveal here what you think. I just see this alleged violation of this Hatch Act as wishful thinking on your side. Jim Hansen, being a federal employee, is not forbidden to engage in political activism in his free time. Being the director of NASA GISS doesn’t change this. I think you have some problems with the concepts of democracy and civil rights.

REPLY: Oh, please. Prove then that Dr. Hansen did these things in his “free time” from GISS, lets see the evidence. Prove that he was totally detached from NASA. Show us the requests for leaves of absence, and the approval of them, or your concept is one of opinion and not of fact. And while you are at it, let’s see where you are then in the tree structure so we know exactly who we are dealing with then.
If you aren’t a Federal employee, why then are your listed on a federal website:
http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/authors/janperlwitz.html
???
I think you are full it it, because your actions say otherwise. When you first started commenting on this blog, you were using your at work network infrastructure. Now that has disappeared, replaced with a local ISP, and you have stopped commenting during GISS working hours. I think you’ve realized that doing such things could in fact get you in trouble, just like the things Hansen is doing will probably get him in trouble someday when NASA has an administrator who isn’t afraid to hold people accountable.
What’s next or your plan, an arrest record like Jim Hansen? Seems that based on your emotional issues you’ve been displaying you are headed down the path of activism just like him.
– Anthony