Guest Post by Bob Tisdale
UPDATE: The author of the post has now been listed at the end of the Initial Notes.
# # #
This is a repost of a blog post written by a well-known and well-respected climate scientist. To date, it is one of the best answers I have come across to the often-asked question, “Was 2014 the warmest year?” What sets it apart from most articles is its down-to-Earth discussion of probabilities.
INITIAL NOTES:
- This is not a discussion of why 2014 might be warmest. For that, you’ll need to refer to the blog post here.
- The data discussed in the following post is the old version of the NCDC data, not the newly revised NCEI data introduced with Karl et al. (2015).
- The topic of discussion is surface temperature data, not lower troposphere data.
- This is not a discussion of adjustments to surface temperature data. It is also not a discussion of the slowdown in global surface warming.
- The basis of the discussion is: given the surface temperature data we had in hand at the end of January 2015, could we say that 2014 was the warmest year?
I would like the content of the post to be the topic of discussion on the thread, not the author. If you know who the author is, or have taken the time to search for the blog in which the following post appears, please do not identify the author by name. Later in the day, I will provide an update with a link to the original post and let you know who the author is.
UPDATE
The author of the blog post in John Kennedy of the UK Met Office. He blogs occasionally at DiagramMonkey. The original of the post was published on January 31st.
[End preface. The repost follows.]
The question of whether 2014 was or wasn’t the warmest year has recently exercised the minds of many. The answer, of course, is…
No.
At some point in the past, the Earth was a glob of molten rock pummelled by other rocks travelling at the kind of speeds that made Einstein famous, dinosaurs late and a very, very, very loud bang. There have also been periods, more hospitable to life (of various kinds), where global temperatures were in excess of what they are today.
However, if we narrow the scope of our question to the more conventional and cosmically brief period covered by our instrumental temperature record – roughly 1850 to now – the short answer is…
Maybe.
This has been an answer to a Frequently Asked Questions on the Met Office website (http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadcrut4/faq.html) and has been the source of occasional ridicule.
That’s fine.
Obviously, one year was the warmest1. In other words, according to some particular definition, the global average of the temperature of the air near the surface of the Earth in 2014 or some other calendar year was higher than in any other. Unfortunately, we don’t know what that number is for any particular year. We have to estimate it1.5 from, sparse and, occasionally unreliable measurements. Some of them made with the help of a bucket.
That gap, the gap between the estimated value and the unmeasurable, might-as-well-be-mythical, actual global temperature is the reason for the “Maybe”. This is a common problem familiar to anyone who has attempted to measure anything2. If you are unfamiliar with it, ask a room full of people what time it is. You’ll get a range of answers3. These answers will be clustered close to the actual time, but not exactly on it. Most people are used to living in this chronological fog of doubt. They allow for the fact that watches and reality never line up precisely.
For global temperature (or any other measurement for that matter) we don’t know exactly how large that gap is, but we can by diverse methods get a reasonable handle on what kind of range it might fall within. Most people’s watches are within five minutes either side of the “right time”. Or, to put it another way, the right time is usually within five minutes either side of what most people’s watches say. That range is the uncertainty.
The good news is that, armed with this uncertainty information for global average temperatures, there are some years, for which the answer to the question “Well, what about this year, could this year be the warmest?” is, resoundingly, undoubtedly, 100%: No.
Non. Nein. Niet. Nopety, nopety, noooooo.
The number of years in the global temperature record which definitely aren’t the warmest is quite large. I would go so far as to say, it’s most of them. Here, for your enjoyment, is a list of definitely-not-the-warmest years.
1850, 1851, 1852, 1853, 1854, 1855, 1856, 1857, 1858, 1859, 1860, 1861, 1862, 1863, 1864, 1865, 1866, 1867, 1868, 1869, 1870, 1871, 1872, 1873, 1874, 1875, 1876, 1877, 1878, 1879, 1880, 1881, 1882, 1883, 1884, 1885, 1886, 1887, 1888, 1889, 1890, 1891, 1892, 1893, 1894, 1895, 1896, 1897, 1898, 1899, 1900, 1901, 1902, 1903, 1904, 1905, 1906, 1907, 1908, 1909, 1910, 1911, 1912, 1913, 1914, 1915, 1916, 1917, 1918, 1919, 1920, 1921, 1922, 1923, 1924, 1925, 1926, 1927, 1928, 1929, 1930, 1931, 1932, 1933, 1934, 1935, 1936, 1937, 1938, 1939, 1940, 1941, 1942, 1943, 1944, 1945, 1946, 1947, 1948, 1949, 1950, 1951, 1952, 1953, 1954, 1955, 1956, 1957, 1958, 1959, 1960, 1961, 1962, 1963, 1964, 1965, 1966, 1967, 1968, 1969, 1970, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1974, 1975, 1976, 1977, 1978, 1979, 1980, 1981, 1982, 1983, 1984, 1985, 1986, 1987, 1988, 1989, 1990, 1991, 1992, 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, 1999 and 2000.
Out of a record, which currently runs to 165 years, 149 years definitely aren’t the warmest. To this we can add a few additional years that are distinctly unlikely to be the warmest.
1997, 2001, 2004, 2008, 2011 and 2012.
And, while we’re at it…
1998, 2002, 2003, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2010, 2013 and 2014.
Pick any one of those years and, more likely than not, it won’t be the warmest year either. Careful readers will have noticed that there is not a single year in all of those 165 years that is unaccounted for; the vast majority of years definitely aren’t the warmest, but even in the small remainder there is no year that is more likely to be the warmest year than not.
We really should have stuck with “maybe” because this is going to take a while to unpick.
Seriously, folks, consider maybe.
No? OK. This is on you.
According to a very good global temperature data set, 2014 was estimated to be 0.56° above the long term average. The uncertainty on that estimate is about 0.10°. In other words, according to that data set there’s about a 95% chance that the true global temperature will be between 0.46° and 0.66°. Likewise, we can consider 2010, with an estimated global temperature of 0.53°C and an uncertainty, again, of about 0.10°C. If these were the only two years and this was all we knew, we could calculate the probability that 2014 was warmer than 2010. It’s about 69%. We can also compare 2014 to 2005 (0.56 vs 0.52). In this case 2014 is about 75% likely to be warmer than 2005.
However, to work out the probability that 2014 is the warmest year on record, we have to compare it to all the other years at the same time. This is a slightly more involved calculation, so we’ll build up to it. First by asking what’s the probability that 2014 is warmer than both 2010 and 2005.
We’re going to do this using a Monte Carlo method. We’ll take the best estimates for 2014, 2010 and 2005 and use the uncertainties to generate possible “guesses” of what the real world might have done4. We’re going to do that thousands of times and count how often 2014 comes out on top.
The probability that 2014 is warmer than both 2010 and 2005 is about 60%, less than the probability that 2014 is warmer than either one or the other separately. If we add 1998 into the mix, then the probability drops even further, to 56%. The more years we add the lower that probability goes. Why does that happen? Simply, each year gets a crack at being warmer than 2014. The more years there are, the higher the chance that just one of them will be warmer. And one year is all it takes.
However, this process doesn’t go on indefinitely. As we move further down the list of warm years, the probability that a year is warmer than 2014 drops rapidly. Soon we get to the point that it’s so unlikely that a year was warmer than 2014 that we can drop it from our calculation and it makes no difference. The probability that 2014 is warmer than 2010, 2005, 1998 and 2013 is 50%. If we compare 2014 to the other nine of the ten warmest years the probability that it comes out on top is about 47%. If we go further down the list than that the probability doesn’t change. 47% is therefore the probability that 2014 is the warmest year on record.
If we do the same analysis for a different, but equally excellent data set, we’ll get a slightly different set of probabilities, but the basic pattern will be the same. In this case 2014 has about 39% probability of being the warmest year on record.
We can repeat these analyses focusing on other years (is 2010 the warmest? 2005? 1998?) and in each case the probability will be lower than for 2014. That was all a bit tedious, but based on this simple analysis it turns out that no year is more likely than not (greater than 50% probability) to be the warmest year on record. On the other hand, we know that one year has to be the warmest, which is, if you are so inclined, pleasingly paradoxical as questions of probability often are.
We can rephrase the question and ask which year has the highest probability of being the warmest year? The answer based on these two data sets is 2014. As one blogger (I can’t remember who) put it, no year has a better claim.
All of the above needs the rather large caveat: “based on these two data sets” and “based on this particular method”. The probabilities I calculated depend on the data set and on the method. Change either one, change the probabilities. We could look at other data sets, such as those produced by Berkeley Earth (who declared 2014 a tie with 2010 and 2005), or the ECMWF reanalysis (which had 2014 in the top 10% of years in their reanalysis, nominally third warmest). Cowtan and Way look poised to put 2014 in second place. There’s no way to rigorously combine all this information to get a single best answer to any of the questions we might want to ask, but it does underline the fact that there is uncertainty and that it is limited.
For example, there’s no data set of global surface temperature that places 2014 outside the top four years based solely on best estimates. Based on those data sets that have uncertainty estimates, it is very unlikely that 2014 is outside the top 10. It’s quite unlikely that it’s outside the top 5.
So, 2014 was a very warm year. Was it a top 10 year? Yes. A top 5 year? More likely than not. The warmest?
Maybe.
1. Unless the thought-provokingly-fine tuning of various fundamental parameters stretches as far as global-mean temperature. On earth. In the 21st century. This has not, to the best of my knowledge been previously suggested. You saw it here first, folks.
1.5. There are lots of different estimates of global temperature and, obviously, in each of those there will be a year that is warmer than any other.
2. The textbook example is the carpenter’s maxim: measure twice, cut once.
3. Usually. The exception would be if a large fraction of them recently had cause to synchronize their watches, something that Hollywood would have me believe occurs a short, and presumably well-measured, period before it all kicks off
4. To do this we assume that the distribution of errors is Gaussian – the famous bell curve – with mean equal to the best estimate and standard deviation equal to the estimated 1-sigma uncertainty. Errors are considered to be independent from year to year. This is a lot simpler than the real world is, but it will give us an intuition for what’s going on and how uncertainty interacts with rankings. This analysis is a lot simpler than NOAA used too. Consequently, the probabilities I get will be somewhat different.
[Update: 4/2/2014 corrected 2005 global temperature anomaly for NCDC’s data set. Was quoted as 0.54 now, more correctly, 0.52]
[Update: 6/2/2015 First, the date immediately above this one is wildly wrong. Second, Lucia pointed out that the mystery blogger who said no year has a better claim was, in fact, Nick Stokes. Third, Significance has reposted this here.
I think all of this (above), while mildly entertaining to the tempdata set cognoscenti, is a bit like arguing how many angels fit on the head of a pin after a large set of assumptions are agreed to and swallowed as the starting point.
It is a head-fake deflection of the skeptics into the weeds. We lose sight of the fact that the AGW-vested interests will continue to make whatever dubious adjustments needed to erase the pause and at least make the appearance of an upward global T trend. If you don’t think so, go back and read Initials notes #5 and then #1. Head fake. A tabloid scandal to keep people distracted while the AGW vested interests and their politicians plan the sheep slaughter.
The only real questions are those related to CO2’s role in Earth’s climate temperature control. These are the questions that Lord Monckton and others ask concerning sensitivities and what that is to within even +/-0.5 degC (compare that to differences argued in the above essay) are at heart of exposing the Climate Hustle.
Then that CO2 sensitivity discussion requires understanding why there are so many hard and undeniable reasons the CMIP GCM-derived outputs are utter garbage (tuned with implicit circular logic, amplification of total error by propagation-iteration of many small errors, non-uniqueness of results, post hoc Cherry picking subsets of outputs, etc).
And even this doesn’t even begin to delve into the likely role of solar variability since 1850.
No, the ?? of 2014 is simply a red herring distraction.
OK, so what was the point of this post?
Was it just a trivial introduction to the statistical uses of the Monte Carlo simulation?
In measurement, we take a few givens: A = 15.55, B=15.57.
We say B is greater than A, they were measured with the exact same instruments, with the same suite of possible errors, with the same mix of uncertainty and certainty. Whatever you say about the uncertainty of A applies *exactly* to B. B measured larger than A, on an empirical, quantitative scale, so we say B is larger.
If you want to talk about about anything in the real world, a few points come up.
1) Why are we talking about probabilities (in this context) now. The issue has never come up before. The argument outlined above, has always held sway.
2) Was the data set corrupted. If you accept the data as given, for any argument, you *imply* that you agree with the data, as given. You have just allowed the person who provided the data to frame the debate.
Oh dear, I am off topic.
3) Why the *huge* divergence between surface and TLT. Not just actual, but even the trends diverge radically. This has never been such a huge issue, but now it is too large to ignore, and no explanations have been offered.
I seem to be off topic again.
Analysis is a lot more than throwing some statistical methods at some random data set, and then making claims. Some of you by now, may have discerned that I have a big problem with applying analysis effort to anything as corrupted as the surface record.
TonyL asks “OK, so what was the point of this post?”
KO, it was to instruct readers on the meaning of “uncertainty” and methods of calculating probabilities while assigning meaning to the outcomes of these calculations.
It is likely to fail to please very many people most of whom wish for something more certain, even though as the writer portrays, most people are perfectly comfortable with a degree of uncertainty in their lives. A wristwatch that is within 5 minutes of the correct time (as assigned by NIST/NBS for instance) is acceptable for most ordinary purposes.
When digital watches first came out I was meticulous in setting it to the exact second according to the time hack on WWV. I was still late for church but at least I knew exactly how late (within a second or so anyway) and assuming the meeting started exactly on time, which is usually not the case.
Does anyone know if recent adjustments to the NOAA temperature data set exceed the error bars on their original data set? If so, does NOAA have an explanation?
Yes. Yes. No. Essay When Data Isnt.
Your question has two answers.
A) YES, original error bars were exceeded in the late 1990s. Unfortunately, no longer provable, as the record has been scrubbed.
B) NO. Corrections have errors associated with them as well, and pile up. After all the corrections and adjustments, nothing could exceed the error bars. You could take the icy cold of outer space, or the heat of the inner depths of hell itself, and you would not be outside the range of estimates. As an added bonus, no matter what happens, you can always claim “just what the model predicted” without telling a lie.
Let’s say you have 2,000 watches, stopped randomly. You go through all the same math as above and you will have found that depending on when you ask what time it is, the probability is quite good the calculated result will be within 24 hours of exact.
Are we all tired of this guesswork yet?
For the analog watches commonly used, I’d say the result would be within 6 hours of exact. E.g. a worst case would be that the stopped watch shows 3, the actual time is 9.
That’s interesting Ric, I was going to cut it down to within 12 hours but, for my watch, you are correct. It is always within 6 hours of the right time.
on this
“the Earth was a glob of molten rock pummelled by other rocks travelling at the kind of speeds that made Einstein famous, dinosaurs late and a very, very, very loud bang”
the meteor that impacted at Chicxulub was probably not traveling faster than 30km/s relative to earth, which is Earth’s orbital speed around the sun.
Wikipedia has the Chicxulub impactor at 4×10^23 J, and 11km in diameter. For simplicity lets assume a cube 10km per side, which is 10^12 cubic m. Iron has a density of 7 ton per cu m.
so we are looking at 7 x 10^15 kg, so this means velocity is approx. 10^4 m/s
which is hardly relativistic (some non-negligible fraction of 3×10^8 m/s)
Definitely non-relativistic. I usually present estimates of impact velocity as equal to escape velocity as a reasonable lower bound. This is convenient because the escape energy is very close to 64 MJ/kg. This is nice because it is the blast equivalent of 20 kg of TNT. So to convert any falling mass to “tons of TNT” equivalent explosive, one simply multiplies the falling mass by 20 (or more, if you want assume 30 km/sec instead of 11 km/sec) and divide by 1000 (for a metric ton). So this mass would be 1.4 x 10 ^17 kg of TNT, or roughly 10^14 to 10^15 metric tons of TNT. The largest nuclear explosion set off by mankind was around 5 x 10^7 tons of TNT (the Tsar Bomba, at around 50 MT). This is order of 10 million Tsar Bombas exploding all at once (or as much as an order of magnitude or two more, depending on what speed you want to assume and how you treat the last order).
A 10 km cube is right around the size likely to cause serious mass extinction. Just a bit larger and the only things likely to survive are the microbes living deep in the Earth’s soil and life forms at the bottom of the sea that are pretty much disconnected from the state of the surface.
rgb
The Met Office, GISS, NOAA, Hadley all have an agenda and have manipulated the data to show warming.The evidence for this now is overwhelming. NONE of their data is the slightest bit credible. Yes Goddard was right, Yes Homewood was right, Mahorasy ect, J Nova, Giever, Dyson ect How much more must we go before the Lukewarmers get it?
Thanks, Bob. A very interesting post.
I don’t think it is very important to know if 2014 was the warmest year if it is by a very small amount. With the ongoing El Niño I would expect it to be the warmest in the plateau of temperatures after 1998, or shortly thereafter.
What I would not like too see is a definite cooling trend.
Informative and entertaining at the same time, just a touch of that wry British humor. You could almost imagine this a “Monty Python” skit.
Yes, rehashing 2014’s harbinger status is a distraction. Just 5 days ago the media was sizzling with articles alerting the world that Germany’s all-time record high temperature had been shattered by a staggering 0.1°F. That is currently all you need to know about climate change.
In 50 years will anyone even care? http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/07/20/the-really-big-one Spending billions of $$ merely analyzing the nits and nats of temperature surely could be put to better use in preparing to adapt to a very dynamic and unforgining environment.
In 50 years we may well regret the push to go “paperless”. Without that push we’d have more to burn to stay warm.
But second hand smoke would just kill us from cancer.
It seems most people lose sight of the fact that whether 2014 was the hottest year on record or not, it provides no guidance as to why it might have been. Attributing it to the rise in CO2 levels is still post hoc ergo propter hoc.
If you look at the highest recorded temperatures for the 7 continents and Oceania, then get an average of the year recorded, it comes out to 1939.25. (Hey, I never had a course in statistics).
http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0001375.html
Of the 51 “states” including the District of Columbia, 10 of the record highs were posted in 1936. 23 of the states had record highs somewhere in the 1930’s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._state_temperature_extremes
Also most of the record highs in Canada were in the 1930’s
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_extreme_temperatures_in_Canada
But then again there were record cold temperatures in the 1930s – so who’s to say?
But if 2014 was the warmest year ever since 1850, shouldn’t at least one of the continents, or one of the states, or provinces, have recorded an all time record high temperature?
I’ll vote for 1936 as the hottest year since 1850. (or maybe 1934)
There were three all-time state high temperature records set in 1994, in AZ, NV, and NM. They were all set at recently-opened stations in the hottest parts of their state (in the case of NM, at a nuclear waste dump). Since then, extreme highs have been declining at all three.
1934 stands out in western station records and is hottest yearly average for some stations. California’s yearly average in 2014 was 2°F hotter than previous hottest of 1934 and 1996 (tied at 60°F), but there were zero all-time extreme record highs.
Yet once again I am reminded that we don’t know what the average temperature of the planet earth really is. Our best efforts of today with all the technology we have and all the money spent might be within a couple of degrees of the answer. After all, huge parts of the planet do not have a thermometer reading temperature and those ground stations that we have are way too often located in an airport or otherwise poorly sited.
And what if we could read the temperature accurately today? What about the past that we know was hit and mIss? How in the hell does anyone think we can put together an historical data set that is supposedly accurate to hundredths of a degree? Madness! Foolishness! Idiocy!
All of that is on top of the fact that temperature of the surface air is the wrong metric anyway. The total energy of the system needs to be measured and we are not even trying to do that. What is the point of it all? Seemingly all we are trying to do is convict our industrialized society of climate murder.
Surface data are corrupt, as stated, due to UHI and un-verifiable adjustments.
Rejecting known bad data by sampling a few known good rural data shows zero warming.
Eg Antarctica shows zero warming since 1958.
NOAA and GISS data could not withstand any independent audit.
Accepting the rgb error estimate for older temp data, here is a plot of land data. With satellite data added to illustrate the divergence since 1979.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/best/scale:3/from:1840/plot/rss-land
The y-scaling is used to give a crude estimate of the errors in land data relative to satellite data.
The 1930s are know to be the warmest decade in the 20th century. There is no evidence that the 2001 to 2014 global temps are significantly warmer than the 1930s
” … Eg Antarctica shows zero warming since 1958. … ”
I wonder why we are trying to measure the temperature of the whole planet anyway. The Team told us long ago that we could expect heating at the poles to happen first. Why are we not measuring the temperatures at the poles to see if Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming is happening or not?
They got no “hot spot” and they got no “warming at the poles”. What do they got?
A complex model of interpolated temperature estimates based on a fraction of the earth’s surface temperature.
Here’s what the surface stations measured.
The original question is stupid: Debating whether 2014 was the hottest year or not is a waste of time.
99.999% of the past 4.5 billion years of “average temperature” data are unknown.
So there are very little data to compare 2014 with.
The ONLY data for comparison are from measurements made during a warming trend.
So of course there will be new records set, as long as the warming trend is still in progress.
That’s the definition of an uptrend.
Maybe not new temperature records every year, but there will be many “hottest year” records until the warming trend ends.
Saying 2104 was the hottest year on record is a deceptive way to report the average temperature — it is a degree or two F. warmer than in 1880, if you can trust the haphazard, frequently “adjusted”, data = so what?
There is no reason to expect the average temperature to be the same when the measurements are made 135 years apart, because Earth’s climate is ALWAYS changing.
– The past 150 years have been a warming trend called the MODERN WARMING.
– All measurements were made during that warming trend.
– Until the Modern Warming ends, the most recent decade is always going to be the “hottest decade on record”, even if the temperature stopped rising a decade ago.
Climate proxy studies strongly suggest there have been hundreds of mild warming / mild cooling cycles between the ice ages.
There’s no reason to believe we will never have another cooling trend — it could have already started, giving the lack of warming in the past decade.
I’m waiting for the “warmists” to explain how multiple ice ages came, and went, without any manmade CO2 present … since they claim CO2 is the “Climate Controller”.
Oh, I guess we’re supposed to believe Earth’s climate has been changing for 4.5 billion years from natural causes … and then suddenly in 1940 — EVERYTHING CHANGED !
Magically, in 1940, the warmists claim (and fools believe) manmade CO2 suddenly, with no known explanation, became the ONLY “climate controller”, and natural climate variations forever stopped !
CO2 is the “climate controller”?
Isn’t is funny how CO2 rose, and the average temperature fell, far more often than both variables rose at the same time (since 1940)
1940 to 1976 = CO2 up and average temperature down
1998 to 2015 = CO2 up and average temperature down
For leftists, there is ALWAYS an environmental “crisis” coming, and the “cure” is ALWAYS more government regulations, and more taxes on the private sector … but the crisis never comes … and it eventually stops scaring people … and then a new crisis is invented
Climate blog for the average guy:
http://www.elOnionBloggle.Blogspot.com
Anecdotal evidence is always worth a read. On July 13th, 2015 a 10 km wide ice flow sits in the middle of Frobisher Bay. “in the past 10 years we had been out boating since July 1st”. But thanks to an ice breaker…
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north/in-iqaluit-icebreaker-paves-way-for-season-s-supply-ships-1.3149098
I forgot to add a reminder that warming is greater at the poles.
warming is supposed to be greatest at the poles but the south pole has not cooperated at all.
Yes, yes, we get it. It was the highest measured and adjusted temp on a couple of terrestrial datasets, within measurement error.
The “tie with 2010 and 2005” thing almost implies that temps have oscillated between a range without rising for a decade, sort of like pausing.
By other measures, such as near record freezing of Great Lakes, snow in Greece and Cairo, record snow in North America etc (oh and the long-term decline in satellite measured temps) it wasn’t. NASA launched the RSS and then refuses to acknowledge its existence.
Short answer: No. 2015 was.
(At least it will after a few tweeks….)
Has anyone developed a simple test in which concentrations of CO2 to O2
of different amounts, and subjected to sunlight and housed in an air tight containers been measured for temperature differences? Or is this just a dumb question?
They will tell you so, but no, it’s not a dumb question.
But you will also be told that a cold object can make a hot object hotter and that you should do a degree in climatology to understand how, as well, so don’t expect any rational answers
This simply isn’t true. A cold object can without question make a heated volume of space hotter, simply by slowing the flow of heat out of that space. One doesn’t need a degree of any sort to understand this, as it happens every time you put on a jacket. It is fundamentally incorrect to refer to the Earth as if it is a passively cooling, unheated object. It is an object that is in between a very hot place indeed (the surface of the sun) and outer space, which is very cold. Its surface temperature is very much determined in all sorts of ways by the colder air above the surface.
Beyond that, one can come up with a rather long list of colder objects that can slow the cooling of a hot, passively cooling object and that can raise the dynamic equilibrium temperature of an object that is being heated and cooled at the same time (like the Earth).
rgb
Yes it is a dumb question. For the opposite reason you might expect. And no, I can’t explain the theory to you in simple terms because it isn’t a simple theory. But it is almost certainly a sound one.
If you want to understand the theory (and understand enough physics to understand the theory) you can read Grant Petty’s book “A First Course in Atmospheric Radiation”. Chapter 6 contains a comparatively simple explanation of the theory in the form of a single layer model. If you really care, I can direct you to some review papers of the theory as well, but they require some understanding of quantum mechanics.
rgb
“2014 was estimated to be 0.56° above the long term average. The uncertainty on that estimate is about 0.10°.”
If most of the data had a RECORDING accuracy of +/- 0.5 deg C, how can you claim any are highest? A claim of 0.10 deg C is ridiculous.
http://www.srh.noaa.gov/ohx/dad/coop/EQUIPMENT.pdf page 11
Taking all the years that the author claims “deifinatetly were not the hottest”, is pseudo science in itself. Ignoring the fact that the error margins given for today are also completly arbitrary, it’s completely irrational to assign the same error margin to years further back in history that had less accurate instruments more sparcely distributed.
This is not science.
Why not use the actual observational records of US, UK, Canada, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, India, Pakistan and South Africa, as all would be available with notes and comments in English, as the basis? Of course they will be wrong but at least we can honestly and honorably expect the error(s) are random and accidental. Such records may well be pretty complete back to the 1880s. If 2014 wins the contest it would likely win back to 1850.
Perhaps use records from French speaking countries to be unAngloCentric.
A real answer, however much an educated guess. At least a WELL educated guess.
So the conclusion is…. 2014 is probably the warmest on record. Most datasets show 2014 is number 1, many countries had record warm in 2014. And forget about satellites if you want a precise temp : how would check your local temp, with a satellite ?
You can’t check your local temp with a satellite. In fact satellites don’t measure surface temperatures, they measure the temperature of the lower troposphere.
Indeed, that’s what I was trying to say… What I mean is that satellites are not a good way to have a precise temp.
Satellites have a calibration source – something that radiates at a well calculable temperature that the microwave imager can view. They can check their calibration much more frequently than NWS Co-op sites ever do.
From http://www.drroyspencer.com/2010/01/how-the-uah-global-temperatures-are-produced/ :
Are you checking you local records before or after they’ve been adjusted?
My local high and low records have been adjusted.
Try using TheWayBackMachine to see if a past list for your area has been archived and compare it to the latest official list for changes to past. I did. Mine were.
How long is the ‘record’ and what much of that period can honestly be judge against the current period ?
That we can measures accurately to two decimal places now , in no way effects or inability to to do this in the past , nor does the current level of coverage magical effect the past lack of coverage , no matter what ‘adjustments’ are made.
In short even if we stick to the just the record , we find that across its history it may have changed so much we may simply not be able to use it in any meaningful way.
Then we can deal with if we actually even have enough measurement of the right type to currently make this judgement in a scientifically meaningful sense . And that if far from ‘clear’
Ok, if you believe global estimates are not reliable, you can check by station and you would see a warming trend in most of them also. Some records are very old, like the one in Austria (247 years), but it’s only since 1880 that you can get a reliable global temp.
Johan Lorck
only since 1880 that you can get a reliable global temp.
even if that time frame you have to question what is meant by ‘reliable ‘ , how is is defined today in numbers terms , may be different to how it was defined 100 years ago when you simply could not get the same level of accuracy.
It is not the case that old data has no value but that old data cannot be viewed in the same light has new data becasue the means of collection that old data was different.
Its like saying that you use a accuracy from a clock in 1860 in the same way you can use a modern atomic clock , because they both measure the same thing. That we have got better at taken such measurements, although with still fall short , does not mean we can forget past problems , no matter how much ‘adjustments’ are throw at it especial when you do not know what you ‘adjusting’ for and how much adjustment you need.
A lot of this is really basic stuff when doing experimental design, you know what is you need to measure and you know what it takes to measure it, if you cannot do the later your value judgements on the former are questionable. No amount ‘faith’ in climate ‘science’ changes that.
Significant digits.
In the field I work in there is such a thing as an “MDL”, that is “Minimum Detection Limit” for a particular test done in that particular lab on a particular parameter.
To make a long story short, to determine a labs “MDL” for a particular parameter the test is rerun several times using the same sample. (I think it’s 50 or so runs?) The most accuracy (decimal places) that can be claimed is that which (I think) is is returned by 95% of the runs.
Some labs have a lower MDL than others. (Some might measure using a graduated cylinder. Some a volumetric flask or pipet. All can effect accuracy.)
How many decimal places could be claimed by turn of the century or even 1930 instruments? What were their or even today’s “MDL”?
Oddly most labs probable did have a good idea of this on a day to day basis , however this is the type of thing that is never kept over time.
Older data is corrected just because it has not been collected the same way, for example recent NOAA corrections for buoys and ship measurements. It is possible to test that.
Johan Lorck
So why have recent (1992 – 2014) NOAA measurements been changed every year the past 4 years? Why has no one ever been able to specifically issue a specific SINGLE correctin for TOBS validation to EACH INDIVIDUAL temperature station whose measurements have been tampered in the past.
If ship bucket surface water measurements are more accurate than calibrated scientific buoy sensors, which is what you are claiming, then we should use hardware tape measures to set the international standards for length and surveyor’s points.
No.
instead, you “wave your magic wand” over the entire series of every station and mumble the magic formula “TOBS” and verily every station gets changed. WHEN was each station’s time changed – if it even was changed! – and why is that individual station’s time change not visible as a distinct single event in the record?
Rather, TOBS is used to change every record over every location over a 25 year period. TOBS either happened one time, or it did not happen at all. TOBS did not – could not! – affect every temperature measured from 1880 through 1979.
Yes it can because we are talking about anomalies relative to a mean.
Hopefully, NOAA doesn’t get stick to its firt estimations and correct them anytime it is possible.
You might ask : “why these corrections are always in the warming direction ?”. But it is not, you may not notice when it occurs but NOAA and NASA have corrected recent temps in the cooling direction also.
Another explanation is the week coverage of the poles and we know north pole has warmed fast. Correction was necessary and you could not contest that ocean heat content has pretty much increased.
We know no such thing, there are not a lot of stations in the arctic and in the high north, most are on the coast, so what they see is water temp when it’s melted.
I think this should work, surface station >66N Lat
https://www.google.com/maps/d/edit?hl=en&authuser=0&mid=zFc6ZVuRjl0U.kzWuvcmwCDwA
micro6500
KAP MORRIS JESUP_GL
Station=043010,WBAN=99999 Lon= -033.367, Lat= 83.650, Elev= +00040
I have the hourly weather data for Kap Morris Jesup station (latitude 83.65 north) for the years 2010 – 2011 – 2012 – 2013 available. That is too short a period to claim any trends, but …
DMI provides a daily weather (temperature) record for 80 north from all station data up north from 1959 through 2015 at their web site.
NO CHANGE IN SUMMER Arctic AIR TEMPERATURES AT ALL SINCE 1959! If plotted over time, there actually has been a slightly cooling effect at 80 north since 2000 for summer temperatures.
Winter temperatures? Yes, they have increased from -28 deg C to -24 deg C. Therefore, the climastrologists can claim an AVERAGE Arctic temperature increase. But only when the sun don’t shine, where the sun don’t shine!
I have the stations from NCDC north of 66Lat, and it’s just like everywhere else I dig into to, warming is exaggerated manure.
While it doesn’t have 2014 data, and some of my newer fields, you can find reports for 20 some thousand stations here http://sourceforge.net/projects/gsod-rpts/
“Corrected”? No. It’s been changed (“adjusted” if you prefer).
Just because a computer program can take old numbers (from before the digital age) and arrive at a different value or add a few more decimal places to the old one does mean the computer program’s result is a “correction” or the added decimal places are more significant.
There are two points that I think are of interest here
1/ Was 2014 the warmest? – Answer since we are coming out of the Little Ice Age I would not be shocked if we were. Isn’t that what is the term “Little Ice Age” implies? A period of time when it was colder, and now it isnt. Does the Met Office want to go back to the “Little Ice Age”?
2/ Is the period 1850 to 2014 in any way significant in the context of even recent geological history? – The geological record sugest that the global temperature has oscillated within a fairly narrow range over the last 3.5 billion years and the current golbal tempertures are not the least remarkable. Its all very well to bed-wet about the current climate because we are living in it – but a scientist should be able to step back and look at the ups and downs of the bigger picture.
-Does the Met Office want to go back to the “Little Ice Age”?-
Apparently they are great fans of idea of ice staking on the Thames.
Which not surprising as they appear childish in so many other ways.
-2/ Is the period 1850 to 2014 in any way significant in the context of even recent geological history?-
Yes, more humans live in larger cities. For instance in 1801 London population was about 1 million
and in 2011 it was about 8 million.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demography_of_London#Population_change
In 1801, London would been regarded as significant city in the world for having a large population of 1 million people , whereas a city of 1 million people is fairly common today.
And addition of larger cities, people live more in urban areas than than rural area:
“Today, 54 per cent of the world’s population lives in urban areas, a proportion that is expected to increase to 66 per cent by 2050.”
http://www.un.org/en/development/desa/news/population/world-urbanization-prospects-2014.html
Considering the general characteristic of politician leaders throughout human history, and the dependency urban dweller upon them, a higher percentage of people have become more mad- which is manifested as general yearning not to live in urban areas, but also desiring to live in urban areas {for many practical reasons}.
Therefore tendency to worship global warming and other mad ideas as coping mechanism to ignore actual problems.