UAH Global Temperature for August – virtually unchanged from July

Maybe we could convince Roy to supply the data in kelvin or supply a climatology in addition to anomalies
I think that would be lovely for all of climate science, actually. Sadly, CAGW curves are singularly unimpressive when plotted on an absolute scale, especially if you plot them right next to e.g. CO_2 concentration. The hockey stick wouldn’t look the same plotted as the nearly invisible dust on the slightly dusty but otherwise almost perfectly smooth hockey ice. CO_2 concentration, OTOH, has gone up by 1/3. It sort of reduces the feel that there is actually a meaningful correlation, y’know?
Of course to do this creates lots of problems, not the least of which is that (as NASA points out explicitly) we don’t know HOW to renormalize the anomalies computed by the different ways to absolute temperature, not even within a single degree K. Different models and approaches yield different values ranging from 13 to 15 C to be added to the anomaly, and the various anomalies don’t agree to better than a few tenths of a degree and probably have larger error bars than that. A degree of uncertainty means that we cannot even positively resolve if any warming has occurred since the nineteenth century, although it is plausible and even probable that it has.
A second problem is that presenting anomalies instead of absolute results is an actual chapter in the lovely book How to Lie with Statistics (yes, this is a real book and a real topic in the book). It is a favorite trick of con artists, especially when conjoined with its friends, cherrypicking a (favorable to your con) range, and ignoring probable error (which means that one can always do a statistically neutral recomputation of almost any result and pick out one that is within statistically acceptable bounds but that shows a desired trend).
But hey, Roy is just doing as everyone does. Heaven forfend that anyone should just try to actually compute not anomalies — the second moment of an unknown distribution — but the FIRST moment, which is usually BETTER known. In fact, usually you have to know the first moment in order to compute the second moment (e.g. the variance). But hey, I’m sure everybody knows exactly what to subtract. Oh wait, no they don’t. Not to within a degree.
rgb

The Invariability of Global Climate

Version 5.6 is not positive for 62 months since July, 2008.
Version 5.5 is not positive for 107 months since October 2004.
RSS is not positive for 202 months since November 1996.
To the end of August, 2013 on UAH would rank 7th warmest if its average anomaly stayed that way for the rest of the year on version 5.5.
To the end of August, 2013 on RSS would rank 8th warmest if its average anomaly stayed that way for the rest of the year.

To John Mason: Excellent post. To illustrate by way of a graph, “Long Range Weather” has a graph covering 4,500 years showing exactly your point. Vividly the lows from the cold periods are getting deeper. We are in a drift down. Short term still coming out of the LIA. But the future “looks” stark. “The Ice Man Cometh.” Just Google that chart. The best chart I’ve seen that cuts to the bottom line.

rgbatduke says:
September 10, 2013 at 3:18 pm
////////////////////
At the time of the Copenhagen conference and the breaking of climategate, the MET Office has a chart on their site which included error bars. On a review of that chart, one could not say with certainty whether the temperature in 2009 was warmer than that of the 1880s!
Of course that was viewing the upper error of the 1880s temps with the lower error for the 21st century temps (ie., maximising the spread), but it does accord with your assertion that when one properly takes into account the margins of error, one cannot say definitively whether it has warmed since the 1880s, although it is likely that it has.
I am not sure whether the Met Office have taken down that chart since it is not particularly helpful for the message they are overly keen to promote.

kadaka;
Haha. In Mosh’s defense, he clearly means to eliminate the anomalies and show only absolute temps.

This summer it’s been a cold one in the Arctic. So, where is our Arctic amplification. Greenland is doomed.

12 year anniversary of September 11th today. You remember where you were.
There has been Zero warming in that time, while the climate models have about 0.3C of warming.
Daily UAH temperatures back to September 11, 2001.
http://s12.postimg.org/jgfch4ajx/Daily_UAH_Sept11_2001_Trend.png
Note that temperatures were declining throughout August, 2013 and ended the month at only 0.088C.
———————-
Regarding the solar cycle comments above. There really isn’t a solar cycle signal in the numbers, there is just barely a hint of one at certain times. Others have used it (and used improperly on purpose as in Foster and Rahmstorf 2011) so I leave it in but it doesn’t really affect the results at all).