Image Credit: Compo et al., 2013
From the Huffington Post:
The thermometers got it right. The Earth is warming, another study is reporting.
Climate scientists recognize that changes in weather observation stations’ immediate surroundings — such as neighboring trees being replaced by heat-absorbing concrete — can eventually throw data from such stations into question.
But now, a new study directed by a researcher at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that recreates climate history without the use of land-based observation systems shows the same thing that thermometers have been reporting.
“This shows that global warming over land is real,” said Gilbert Compo, a scientist at NOAA’s Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences at the University of Colorado.
“It is not an artifact of the observing system,” said Compo, lead author of the study, which he presented to the European Geophysical Union on Tuesday in Vienna. “It is happening.”
Compo and his colleagues used an alternate method to review the planet’s temperature history from 1871 through 2010.
They deployed what is called 20th Century Reanalysis (20CR), a physically based, state-of-the-art data assimilation system using barometric pressure records, ocean surface temperatures and other factors independent of land-based readings that can be skewed by changes in their surroundings.
Compo’s team came to a conclusion that supports land-based instruments’ reporting that, since 1952, the Earth has shown a 1.18 degree Celsius increase in air temperature over land.
Compo, in an email, stated that the actual number the 20CR analysis showed for warming since 1952 was 0.78 degrees Celsius, which he termed “statistically indistinguishable” from 1.18 degrees Celsius.
Here’s the associated study; Independent Confirmation of Global Land Warming without the Use of Station Temperatures and abstract.
I’ll leave it to WUWT’s readers to do their own distinguishing…
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Greg Goodman, Great idea, using your logic you can rewrite the above paper as ipcc massively wrong on global waming by up to 0.80 centigrade !.
Alex says: Did they just say that roughly 50% of the temp record is UHI?
Their independent dataset reproduces both annual variations and centennial trends in the temperature datasets, demonstrating the robustness of such a conclusion. 😉
The figure of 0.13C / decade seems to be fairly consistent no matter what the measurement method (satellites, CR20 etc).
Why do I always think of “Last of the Summer Wine”, a scruffy little unshaven fellow, wearing wellies, old trousers held up by string, a patched jacket and a knitted green hat?
What my research indicates is that, yes, there has been warming over land.
But it also demonstrates that the warming is at least 50% exaggerated, and, more likely, doubled. The study period is from 1979 – 2010. Siting and equipment appear to bear most of the blame.
sparky says: Greg Goodman, Great idea, using your logic you can rewrite the above paper as ipcc massively wrong on global waming by up to 0.80 centigrade !.
Hey, it’s not my logic it’s _theirs_.
” global waming ” , great term, is that one ‘m’ or two? 😉
That will do nicely once they get tired of pushing “weird weather”.
NotTheAussiePhilM says: The figure of 0.13C / decade seems to be fairly consistent no matter what the measurement method (satellites, CR20 etc).
for what period are you making that comment?
The whole idea of a linear rate of change is meaningless in terms of climate which is anything but linear.
http://climategrog.wordpress.com/?attachment_id=209
Once you fit a “linear trend” to something that is not linear, there is always the implicit and false assumption of ” if the current trend continues.. blah, blah, blah”, when of course it’s not linear and there is no reason to even conjecture that particular ‘what if’ because the system does NOT conform to a linear model.
Inappropriate models lead to false conclusions.
How many studies this year have shown recent warming? You can almost smell desperation in the air. If CAGW isn’t real, these scientists might actually have to *gasp* earn their paycheck. Using the same logic of studies such as these, if the present trend continues I predict there will one study every day telling us the global warming is real by 2050.
The graphs title indicates the data span 90N – 60S which leaves out the world’s 5th largest land mass Antarctica. Why was this done? Perhaps it was for lack of data or perhaps it was for convenience because including the Antarctic may tend to bend the curve downward some consistent with the observed trend of increasing Antarctic sea ice.
So, it’s real. We know that and this paper doesn’t add anything but sources of confusion about the reality. The question, however, is why it warmed. This paper is significantly less than useful about that question.
===========
The question is also how much it has warmed.
“Significant digits” is another critical anomaly in the AGW equation. The albedo is effected by type and percent of cloud cover, percent of ice/snow pack, percent and state of vegetation and all of these reflection variables are also governed by the solar incidence azimuth angle. There can be no proxy for this value prior to satellite measurements, which are then averaged to 0.3, with high statistical deviation. Any ‘derivation’ with this degree of deviation would be invalid beyond one half of a degree in temperature variation….unless….you are a scientific deviant.
Stop the presses! Warming is real! Call me gobsmacked. Who knew? Next they’ll be “telling” us that climate change is real. Warmists do love their straw man arguments. Of course, the clientele for this new load of climate bilge are those without much gray matter, and without the ability to distinguish actual science from propaganda.
A grin for Greg:
clueless…suspect…could…probably….is likely….ROBUST…significant…with 95% confidence…irrefutable…sell everything and put it all on red…”the tricorder shows it’s dead, Jim”
As for myself, I usually refer to weeds in a garden as “robust.”
I always think of “robust” as an adjective describing tomato sauce, like in Italian cooking.
So, global warming is “real” according to this. Again, tell us something we don’t know. There was slight warming over a certain, statistically insignificant time frame. The next step is to correlate that factoid with causation. Which nobody can. Oh, if only all the research dollars had gone to actually trying to figure that out.
And for the record, if I’m searching for something online and any of the results say “huffington”, I never, ever click them. There’s more fluff on their servers than even SciAm or NatGeo.
This paper had no correction for Urban Heat Island effect in the temp record and thus does nothing to address the UHI in the temp record.
Conclusion: this could be a simple confirmation of a data artifcat (UHI) and say nothing of warming.
If their gray bars are that big….
…then global warming is indistinguishable
Greg Goodman, Sorry about missing r, wasn’t having a go at you, merely suggesting that all we need is a catchy headline, correct the conclusions and then we really can re release this to the the press.
If I move my sitting-room thermometer closer to the fire will the instrumental record show that my house has warmed? If a brick and concrete city is built around an established temperature recording device will the recent record show that the Earth has warmed? No and ditto.
We never use the “r” word when describing our stats.
(We prefer “robobust”.)
Greg Goodman says:
April 13, 2013 at 3:01 am
============
Correct. This paper is mathematically misleading. If the trend changes when you change the end points, then what you are showing is not the trend. What you are showing is the sensitivity of the trend – which tells you how reliable (robust) the result. In this case, the trend is not reliable, because it changes as you change the end points, which tells us that a linear trend is not an appropriate way to estimate the trend. Which tells us the result is not robust.
Back when I was in high school (during an earlier period of the Holocene) I was taking some kind of math class. Trigonometry, sociology, algebra, calculus; I couldn’t tell you which math class it was. And I was tortured by a teacher who insisted on giving us tests, not once in a while, no, every single damn day. The least she could’ve done was make them multiple choice so I would’ve had at least a prayer at guessing at the right answer. No, she couldn’t even offer that salvation. Day after day I handed back blank tests. Then one day the Angel of Mercy appeared in the form of a question on one of the tests. The question was: When x [or whatever it was (owiw)] is divided by the square root (owiw) of (owiw) where does the 0 lie on the graph? Now, I know that’s all pretty vague (Like you expected it wasn’t gonna be?) but the important point is the last part, “where does the 0 lie on the graph?” Finally, a god did indeed exist, for I did not have to hand in a blank test again. I had an answer. So I wrote it on the test. This is true.
Oh where, oh where does the ‘0’ lie?
Oh where, oh where can it be?
Ok, I didn’t pass that test. But I’ve just gotten to thinking. Why can’t Trenberth and all the others who are just as clueless as I was back then, just simply write a poem? They could even copy mine.
Oh where, oh where does that missing heat lie?
Oh where, oh where can it be?
They can go ahead. I won’t sue. But no, they’re now relying on Compo to dig ’em out. Jeez, I had more character as a teenager.
The other thing that is “indistinguishable” is the difference in the rate of warming between the 1920’s-1940’s warming and the 1970’s-1990’s warming. In fact, it appears the earlier warming was MORE rapid.
Well, we definitely do think it has warmed. That’s going by TOBS-neutral, well sited MMTS stations.
We do not ascribe cause (though we currently believe there are both anthropogenic and natural influences). But it does appear to have warmed. Our study occurs during a warm PDO phase (1979 – 2008), though, so during that period, at least, a significant portion of the warming is natural.
More BS.
IPCC4 gives 0.76°C [0.57°C to 0.95°C].
If 0.78 degrees Celsius, is “statistically indistinguishable” from 1.18 degrees Celsius (so what?) from 1850-1899 to 2001-2005 , how does this differ?
Have these “researchers” ever heard of the concept of significant figures?
Who pays for this BS.