Add another one to the huge list of excuses for “the pause” in global temperature. Reader “Al Gorez” emails:
The climate alarmists have come up with a brilliant new excuse to explain why there has been no “global warming” for nearly 19 years: the satellite data is lying.
And to prove it they’ve come up with a glossy new video starring such entirely trustworthy and not at all biased climate experts as Michael “Hockey Stick” Mann , Kevin “Travesty” Trenberth and “I’d be tempted to beat the crap out of Dr. Pat Michaels” Ben Santer. (All of these paragons of scientific rectitude feature heavily in the Climategate emails) See more at Breitbart here.
Riiight. Because we all know how reliable their preferred surface temperature measurements are, as illustrated by these examples from NOAA’s USHCN climate monitoring network:
![Detroit_lakes_USHCN[1]](https://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2011/09/detroit_lakes_ushcn1.jpg?resize=480%2C360&quality=83)
![bainbridge_ga_ushcn[1]](https://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2011/09/bainbridge_ga_ushcn1.jpg?resize=480%2C360&quality=83)
Those and hundreds of other stations have been encroached upon by heat sinks and heat sources. And, the proof is in the fact that when you get rid of all the garbage temperature monitoring stations like those shown above (which comprise about 90% of the US monitoring network) and use only the unperturbed stations that don’t have biases that need corrections applied, what you are left with is a lower trend:
Comparisons of 30 year trend for compliant Class 1,2 USHCN stations to non-compliant, Class 3,4,5 USHCN stations to NOAA final adjusted V2.5 USHCN data in the Continental United States
What an act of desperation by these politically oriented climate proponents. NASA GISS, an agency founded to do planetary studies in support of the Apollo program, that should be making use of satellite measurements based on NASA’s strategic plan which has shifted heavily to remote sensing (notice that picture of Earth from space on the cover?), still uses this high polluted, highly adjusted surface temperature data…for one reason only: it supports their narrative, and when their narrative is flowing, so does the funding. I’d wager that NASA GISS would be pretty much out of business due to funding cuts if that hadn’t reinvented themselves after the cancellation of the Apollo program and many other missions in the 70’s and 80’s. They just weren’t needed as much.
Stay tuned, there’s more to this story coming. The full transcript of the video follows (h/t to Monckton):
Here is the video from the “Yale Climate Connections”
Transcript of How reliable are satellite temperatures?
Senator Ted Cruz [described in onscreen text as “Climate Denier”, displaying the graph below, shown onscreen in the video]: According to the satellite data, there has been no significant global warming for the past 18 years:
Dr Michael E. Mann, Pennsylvania State University [The following four terrestrial-temperature graphs, from GISS, HadCRUT4, Japan Met and Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature series respectively, were shown on the video for 1-2 seconds each]: When the full data are available, we will find that 2015 was the warmest year that the globe has seen as far back as we have reliable records.
Dr Mann [continuing]: And what’s ironic is, it’s really those satellite datasets that critics like John Christy hold up, that Ted Cruz was emphasizing in that Senate hearing a week ago …
Senator Cruz: The satellite data are the best data we have.
Dr Judith Curry, Georgia Tech: We need to look at the satellite data. I mean, this is the best data that we have.
Dr Mann: It is those datasets that are subject to the most adjustments – that have historically been found to have been biased, um, actually in the direction of too little warming.
Sinclair: For a decade during the 1990s and early 2000s, climate skeptics John Christy and Roy Spencer argued that their reading of satellite data showed no atmospheric warming … even a cooling. Finally, a series of studies showed that satellite data was not being correctly interpreted. The problem was friction. Even hundreds of kilometers above the Earth, atmospheric friction slows satellites down and they lose altitude. Every year they were falling about a kilometer closer to the Earth. To derive the temperature, scientists need to know the correct altitude, and without that the results were distorted.
Santer: For many years John Christy and Roy Spencer claimed, based on their analysis, that the lower atmosphere was actually cooling. They were wrong. They had gotten, literally, the sign wrong in adjusting for the effects of satellite orbit drift on the sampling of Earth’s large daily temperature cycle.
Sinclair: In addition, this meant that a satellite that started off measuring the temperature at 2 in the afternoon in a few years was measuring at 6 in the evening, making it look like temperature was cooling, when it had not. Although chastened by their repeated mistakes and failures, Spencer and Christy remain very active in questioning the mainstream science of global warming.
Spencer: I can tell you as a temperature monitoring expert, in 50 years we won’t be able to see the effect.
Limbaugh: I got a note today from our official climatologist, Dr Roy Spencer.
Christy: The regulations being established will do nothing to alter whatever the climate is going to do.
Trenberth: When they made corrections they were still underestimated, and they managed to do that at least three times, I think, which was unfortunate.
Dessler: So what does a satellite actually measure? A satellite doesn’t measure temperature: it measures radiance, which means it measures basically photons of energy that the atmosphere is emitting: in fact, what it really measures is a voltage on some detector, and from that it has to infer radiance, which is these photons, you know, that are coming out of the atmosophere.
Schneider: The problems that these photons are emitted not just from the – from the oxygen atoms as in proportion to their temperature but from the surface, from thick clouds, at different elevations.
Dessler: … and then from that they want to derive temperature. How do they do that? Well, they use a model. Now, they don’t call it a model: they call it a retrieval algorithm. But it’s a model. If you look at the history of the satellite data, the model that has been used has been shown repeatedly to be wrong.
Titley: Dr Christy and Dr Spencer, when they put this out, they have been wrong, I think, at least four consecutive times. Each time the data record has had to be adjusted upward. We used to have a negative trend, and then we had no trend, and now we begrudgingly have an upward trend.
Dessler: I don’t want to bash them, because everybody makes mistakes, and I’m going to presume everybody’s being honest, but I would just point out that – imagine the howls we would get if my model predicted it was warmer at night than during the day: you would hear people on the other side just screaming bloody murder: “How can you believe this? It’s, ah, these people are incompetent. How could you possibly believe this model that has the wrong sign of the diurnal cycle in it? The physics is obviously all screwed up.” But of course you don’t hear anybody talking about that with the satellite data. It goes to show you the amount of confirmation bias that’s actually going on in this debate.
Cruz: The satellite data are the best data we have.
Curry: We need to look at the satellite data. I mean, this is the best data that we have.
Dessler: That these people would accept the satellite data completely uncritically because it tells them what they want to hear …
Cruz [displaying the graph below, shown in the video]: You asked about the source of the data on the right chart: it’s actually not Dr Christy’s data, it’s the Remote Sensing Systems – the RSS – data that is up there.
Dr Carl Mears [keeper of the RSS dataset]: I guess it depends on which graph exactly you’re talking about. One of the ones that Senator Cruz likes to show actually uses the data that I make, which is a measurement of the temperature of the middle troposphere over time. The entire dataset actually starts in 1979 and goes to the present. But he probably likes to focus on the part really after 1998. He starts at that time for a very specific reason. And that’s because there’s a huge el Niño then, in ‘97/98, which puts a huge spike in the global temperature. And of course if you start at the top of a hill and you start driving you’re going to go downhill at least in the beginning, and that’s kinda the effect we’re seeing here. You start your time series at a place when it’s really high and it’s pretty easy to get no warming, or even cooling, if you do that.
Titley [at the Senate subcommittee hearing, 8 December 2015]: Ah, 1998, big el Niño, so it’s kind of interesting we start at 18 years: we don’t look at a 15-year dataset or a 10-year dataset or a 20-year dataset. We look at an 18-year dataset.
Cruz [replying to Titley]: I fail to see the significance …
Titley [The graph below is shown in the video]: Senator, it’s not. If you take up that top really big spike and you take that out you start getting the upward bias. And this is what people do when you start looking at these relatively arbitrary times, is you start with a really high number at the left-hand side and that kind of influences your – your, basically, your linear trend:
Titley [continuing: the graph below is shown in the video]: So, when you start looking at things like every decade, you have an upward trend in the data:
Mears [the graph below is shown in the video]: I think the longer the time period you look at the better, and if you look at the longer time period then you get a better idea of what the overall trend is. Senator Cruz focuses on one dataset (mine) from one type of instrument (satellites) and he ignores all the other evidence: for example, the surface temperature record …
Mears [continuing: the graph below is displayed in the video]: … you know, things like the Arctic sea ice declining …
Mears [continuing]: … things like the time of year that plants flower or leaf out or whatever.
Santer [the graph below is shown in the video]: … an increase in the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere, changes in sea level …
Santer [continuing: the graph below is shown in the video] … changes in the heat content of the global ocean …
Mears: All those things he’s ignored, and he’s just kind of glomming on to this one piece of evidence that supports the story he wants to tell.
Santer: Scientists are looking at moisture, at rainfall, at water vapor, at surface humidity, at the cryosphere, at snow and ice, and all of this is telling an internally and physically consistent story, and that story is, the planet is warming and, despite our best attempts to see whether natural causes can explain that warming, they can’t.
Peter Sinclair [Voice-over out of shot, to Mears onscreen]: Now, you were recently – er – doing some fact-checking for the Daily Show, is that correct?
Mears: That’s correct.
Sinclair: What did they want to know?
Mears: They just wanted to know, you know, they wanted to fine-tune their statement about, you know, whether , you know, the surface temperatures are more accurate or the satellite temperatures are more accurate, and initially they wanted to say something like “But you really shouldn’t trust the satellite temperatures, you should go with these surface temperatures”, and I said, “Well, what I would like to emphasize, you’d really want to look at all the different datasets, so you don’t want to trust only the satellite temperatures, you want to look at the surface temperatures, and – and that sort of thing.
Sinclair: OK, er, has Senator Cruz called you for any fact-checking?
Mears: No, he has not.
Sinclair: OK.
Credits
A production of
Yale Climate Connections
With support from
The Grantham Foundation for The Protection of the Environment
Produced at
Greenman Studio
Midland, MI
Editing, Script, Camera
Peter Sinclair
Interviews
Peter Sinclair
Thanks to
American Geophysical Union
Ben Santer PhD
Livermore National Lab
Andrew Dessler PhD
Texas A&M University
Michael Mann PhD
Pennsylvania State University
Admiral David Titley PhD
Pennsylvania State University
Carl Mears PhD
Remote Sensing Systems
Kevin Trenberth PhD
National Center for Atmospheric Research
Judith Curry PhD
Georgia Tech University
Video
BBC
NASA
CSPAN
Stanford University
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This is stunning! Imagine you want to win a war. You have been telling the masses that you have powerful aerial weapons and powerful ground based weapons to fight this war, and so people have been voluntarily signing up to fight for your side because they trust in the accuracy of your claims.
Some civilians start pointing out that your aerial weapons and your ground weapons aren’t in sync, and that trying to use both at the same time is actually preventing troops on the ground from completing any campaign against the enemy successfully.
Some of those civilians also know that a handful of men and women have already spent years proving that the ground based weapon system is flawed and broken and ineffective in it’s current condition. So all you really have left, is your aerial based assault weapon. And no one can really, effectively prove it’s broken or flawed because its incredibly hard to get to both its hardware and its software, and so the civilians can be easily tricked into believing that it works.
And then you make a video detailing how flawed and untrustworthy that aerial weapon really is….???
The Generals of the AGW Army basically just disarmed the troops completely!
Now RSS is non-PC, because it isn’t a direct measure of temp (what? how can you directly measure energy content?), but I remember the time when the alarmists were parroting the big spike pf the year 98, with RSS.
This guys have no face.
Correct there is no such thing as a direct measure of temperature. Liquid thermometers measure the thermal expansion of a liquid. Prop thermometers measure voltage drop due to resistance (this is how MMTS sensors work).
There are two electronic devices used to measure temperature. thermistors and thermocouples. Thermistors us a temperature sensitive meterial, Typically a semiconductor, and measure the resistance of it.
Thermocouple have two different metals joined together. When exposed to heat a small voltage is generated by the thermocouple.
As is typically the case you get what you pay for. The most expensive devices are typically very accurate. If you spend even more you get a very accurate sensor that has had a calibration check done.
It is my understanding that the sattilites HAH and RSS use have platinum based thermocouples which are some of the most accurate temperature sensors available. Platinum based thermcouple are very expensive because of the scarcity of the metals used. In addition to excelent accuracy they are also usable at very high tmerpatures and are highly resistant to corrosion.
About time they got a proper job. Grow something and feed somebody.
jimheath
“Grow something and feed somebody.”
They are – unfortunately it’s bs.
Not on my farm. They do not deserve the priviledge of working there. Based on the climate evidence, they would slack off, probably steal milk, and maybe even wreck my tractors.
If the Mods will please indulge me,
I would like to make the point that the satellites are now counted among the list of climate deniers.
As well as from balloons because they confirm the satellite temperature data.
And Carl Mears. Since his RSS data agree with UAH.
It comes down to this: climate alarmist temperature data from UHI effect locations VERSUS denier temperature data from satellites and air-born balloons. Which one is more reliable? Gee, what a quandary.
The RSS and UAH datasets look nearly identical, and have very similar long- and short-term trends. It’s ridiculous that the video makers try to tear down the UAH and build up the RSS.
Christy was at the Cruz hearing. Mears wasn’t. Christy is a scientist who understands the surface temperature data problems, and prefers weather ballons and satellites. Mears is a warmunist who liked his RSS until it showed the pause, then switched to preferring shonky surface records to his own work.
The video shows how politically potent warmunists think the pause is in hands like Cruz.
However since version 6 they don’t measure the same quantities so there is no reason to expect them to be identical, in fact to the contrary.
Evidence for Precipitation of Energetic Particles by Ionospheric «Heating» Transmissions
The paper reports observations made in 1970 by the first prototype dynasonde in the form of a time-lapse movie, http://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/stp/IONO/Dynasonde/SpEatHeating.htm
If they had any credibility left, I would have said they’ve lost the last of it.
Possible ‘video countering’ political sound bites are now needed. Suggestions:
1. Satellite global coverage is good. Land coverage is not (Africa, Polar regions, eastern Siberia, parts of South America). Until ARGO (~2005) ocean coverage was not. Much of the global surface –even since 1979 when sat coverage began, is just some infilled guess.
2. Issues like satellite obital drift and aperture are known and tractable. UHI and microsite issues are not.
3. Weather balloons and regional surface stations without UHI/microsite issues both confirm satellites, and both show the pause also.
4. If the satellite detected near 20 year pause is not real, why have so many warmunist papers been written trying to explain it in various ways? Including by ‘missing heat’ Trenberth of climategate and now video infamy.
Wouldn’t the detector moving closer to the heat source cause it to record an increase in temperature, as opposed to a decrease? Wouldn’t increased atmospheric friction on the satellite also have the effect of increasing the recorded temperature, as opposed to showing a decrease?
Chris, wrote about this in The Arts of Truth climate chapter. Even put in a chart showing most weather satellites and their degree of orbital drft over time. The big issue is not altitude decay, it is orbital drift that, for example, changes the timing of equator crossings for these near polar satellites. A growing mismatch between real location and signal location. But this is known and can be corrected. The essence of Christy’s ‘fixed 20 years ago’ comment to Breitbart.
> Wouldn’t the detector moving closer to the heat source cause it to record an increase in temperature, as opposed to a decrease?
It probably would if the satellite were somehow using an incredibly sensitive thermometer to measure near surface temperatures. (I don’t think that could possibly work for a lot of reasons) What the satellite borne Microwave Sounding Units actually measure is the temperature sensitive frequency of vibrating atmospheric Oxygen molecules radiating in the 60GHz range. see https://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/ch3s3-4-1-2.html
“Wouldn’t the detector moving closer to the heat source cause it to record an increase in temperature, as opposed to a decrease? Wouldn’t increased atmospheric friction on the satellite also have the effect of increasing the recorded temperature, as opposed to showing a decrease?”
Um…Chris…Earth, the planet, is not a heat source. The sun is. Using your rationale (and the false idea that satellites use thermometers or sensors that detect HEAT…which they don’t) then by launching it into the sky…and getting it closer to the SUN than the surface of Earth is, the detector would definitely record an increase in temperature.
DonK and ristvan have already addressed the friction/drift issue.
“Wouldn’t the detector moving closer to the heat source cause it to record an increase in temperature, as opposed to a decrease?”
Yes and the sattilite data was corrected for this yeas ago.
“Wouldn’t increased atmospheric friction on the satellite also have the effect of increasing the recorded temperature”
Yes friction does generate heat. However the ammount of friction they are talking about is extremently small.
So, then basically the claims about the satellite drag and drift causing false readings are a total crock.
Not necessarily. The data being collected by the satellites is affected by both of those things. Changing the position of the satellite height wise brings it closer to Earth and Earth’s gravitational pull. That increase in gravitational force, causes more friction on the actual satellite and slows it down some. This means that the times the data is recorded and the way it’s processed have to be changed over time to compensate for the changes in distance and speed. According to the video (and who knows if what was said is true/accurate) Christy and Spencer weren’t aware of, or ignored etc these effects and were not adjusting the RSS data to compensate for either one, and so that is why the RSS data was often “close to” but not an exact mirror of, the other satellite results.
Either way, the actual data taken by the satellites is not temperature readings. They calculate the temperatures by collecting data about how light is absorbed and reflected by Earth, and the atmosphere and use mathematical formulas to change that data into temperature. Clouds, water vapor, and particulates in the air alter the data because they prevent a “clear sky” shot of the surface of the planet from orbit, so all those have to be taken into consideration too. It’s a difficult process, and modeling the data HAS to be done because there’s no way it can be done manually by humans in any efficient way. But HOW they adjust that data is different between organizations and that makes it even harder for people on the outside to understand how accurately (or not) it’s been processed.
Mr W.atts:
You essay reports Dr Mann of saying of the temperature time series obtained from microwave sounding units (MSUs) mounted on orbital satellites
The actual measurements show good agreement with data obtained from radiosondes mounted on weather balloons but there is no possible calibration standard for global and hemispheric temperature compilations because there is only one Earth.
In other words the radiosonde data suggests the MSU data is correct but there is no possibility of a scientific determination which could indicate the MSU data have “been found to have been biased” in any direction.
Richard
A new set of excuses could only mean one thing. More people have been doing some fact checking.
Why do the crooks keep trying to deflect attention away by claiming that the pause only works by cherry picking 1998 as a start point.
Even the Met Office had to admit that the 1999/2000 La Nina cancelled out the 1998 El Nino, and that the pause was real. (This was in 2013, before the current El Nino started in 2014)
https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2016/01/15/climate-alarmists-invent-new-excuse-the-satellites-are-lying/
One would think they had something to hide!
Just as the most transparent administration is US history, they have nothing to hide. Just LOTS they don’t want you to see.
Has Mann released those UVa emails yet?
And they will use the current El Nino warming to claim the “pause” is broken, only to have a much lengthened “pause” reappear as the temperatures drop as the El Nino dissipates.
As we drop down towards 1979 temperatures, the pause length will grow rapidly and could even reach to the whole of the satellite record. Wouldn’t that be fun to watch 😉
… the divergence between reality and the already farcical model projections will turn those climate modellers into a world wide laughing stock. 🙂 (even more than now)
Discrediting the satellite data is the current trend among Internet trolls, that post under alarmist stories on line. There’s one guy – tends to post on ‘The Hill’ under the name ‘Kirk’ – who will make upwards of fifty posts per story – which suggest to me that he is a paid shill – I have a day job and usually can’t spend that kind of time commenting on line. Suffice to say he and a few other trolls, flooding the comments with all the alarmist spin, are easy to pick out because they make so many posts. And it’s all out of the warmist playbook.
Basically, this all seems to be fallout from a hearing congress held after one of Obama alarmist speeches from about three years ago – a hearing which was touted at the time as a skeptic victory, as the President’s own hand-picked experts seemed floored to explain the Pause, lack of extreme weather (or connections to C02 forcings), etc. But of course, it got no play in the press and, as I said at the time, the real purpose was to get the skeptic cards on the table so the administration’s propaganda hacks could develop sufficient spin to discredit them. Like the entire AGW scare itself, it doesn’t matter what’s true, just so long as you can get enough people to believe.
Many of those ‘frequent’ posters also vanish after working hours and tend to be absent on weekends and holidays.
As you note, they’re paid shills.
When looking at the graphics, it looks as if the latest decade is about 0.17 C warmer than the previous one. However that certainly is not the case with RSS. With RSS, 2006 to 2016 averaged 0.236. And 1996 to 2006 averaged 0.231. This gives a difference of 0.005. See:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/rss/from:1996/to:2006/plot/rss/from:2006/to:2016
Don’t forget the error bars! 0.005 C is not statistically significant. Probably any thing less than 1 C is not statistically significant either – there is 100 C temperature range, 10-20 C diurnal range, some places have 60 C seasonal ranges.
So don’t forget to consider the uncertainties while you quibble over +/- 0.1 C differences.
Good point! So if we assume that the numbers are within 0.10, 95% of the time, the last two decades on RSS are statistically equivalent.
The average from 1997-2007 is around .25. When we get through the next La Nina I’d be surprised if the value wasn’t quite a bit lower (2007-2014 is only .215)
The next 8 months will be very interesting! The big question in my mind is whether the 18+ year pause will end before the anomaly goes below 0.25.
We may even get a very good indication which way the wind is blowing after the next two months.
hmmm, things must be going badly wrong for them if they are now having to damn the satellite data.
Cool, huh? 🙂
A preeeh-tty big problem, indeed.
Bwah, ha, ha, ha, haaaaaaaaaaa!
What is curious; aren’t some of these alleged scientists on government payrolls or operating on government funds?
This is all very well, but has anyone photographed the satellites lately?
How do we know someone hasn’t actually parked a fridge next to them?
The transcript of “How reliable are satellite temperatures?” reads rather like a Monty Python Comedy Script with cartoons from the “Battle of the Graphs”.
Hmmm….so a system designed from the start to measure global temperatures must be wrong because it doesn’t agree with a bunch of surface stations designed for local temperatures? And those surface stations had to adjusted to give numbers that agreed with a few tree rings and upside down lake cores?
And the computer models are the proof?
“Excluding stations with known moves”. How do I get the list of these stations? The station in Canton, NY at the Cornell Cooperative Extension farm was moved probably 18 years ago, and I want to make sure that it’s in the list.
I do notice, however, that http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cdo-web/datasets/GHCNDMS/stations/GHCND:USW00014743/detail shows its current location. If you ask for older data when it was at the old site, …. you get the new location. It used to be here: 44.564349575244364, -75.10140167154246 which you can see is substantially different in character, and 1.6km apart.
In general, if you can identify errors in something based on your personal experience, it’s the case that there are many many more errors. Ever seen a news story where they got significant details wrong because the story lies within your field of expertise? Well, you should then assume that every other story outside of your expertise has similar errors.
Am I right to be angry at this?
Russ Nelson, depends on what you are angry about.
Yes, I’ve noticed that. Sometimes I was personally involved.
Will Rodgers once said, “All I know is what I read in the papers.”
One of his kids regarding that said, “Yes, but he never said he believed it.”
(The quotes are paraphrased. They are from my sometimes faulty memory.)
If there wasn’t so much money being misappropriated and diverted into underwriting this non-existent problem of CAGW this would all be a marvellous joke, like the emperor’s new clothes, but sadly for us all who are forced to pay for the bs these warmists keep peddling and worse for the poor folks in undeveloped countries who are being denied funding for more essential access to clean water, access to electricity, access to medicine, etc, and a fair chance of employment and economic development. The whole scam is a crime against humanity!
The objection that satellites measure voltages an not temperature has to be one of the stupidest arguments I have every heard.
A mercury in glass thermometer does not measure temperature directly – it measures the expansion of the column of mercury.
A thermocouple also does not measure temperature directly, it also measures voltage.
A platinum resistance thermometer measures temperature much more accurately (to within a few hundredths of a degree C).
The argument about the satellite orbit decay is also fatuous, since the effects were corrected once noticed.
GPS satellites were also gave inaccurate measurements of position until it was discovered that the clocks needed to be adjusted to account for both special and general relativity effects.The fact that they were once wrong does not mean that we should not expect to get accurate measurements of position now.
It takes a lot of processing to produce an MRI/NMR scan or a CAT scan. Does this make them less reliable than a simple X-Ray.
Satellites DO NOT measure earth or atmospheric temperature changes like ANY of the devices you mentioned Walt D. In order for all of those devices to work, they have to be IN CONTACT WITH the gas, liquid, or surface they are measuring. No matter how accurate your thermometer is Walt D, if you want to measure the temperature changes in your living room, you need to be IN YOUR LIVING room to do that, and you must also correct for any biases like your thermometer being over a heat register or near the air conditioner. You cannot measure temperature changes on the surface of the earth from space period.
“Dessler goes to pains to announce that satellites measure voltage”
He doesn’t go to pains. He explains the process. Voltage is just a step along the way. The key issue, as he makes perfectly clear, is that it is measuring radiance, and interpreting that as temperature (of where?) is hard.
Thermistors measure voltage too. But you know what it represents. Temperature in that conductor, which reflects temperature in that enclosure. When you have a measure of radiance, you still have the problem of what that means as a temperature, and where, and of what.
The ‘voltages’ measured by the satellite sensors are directly proportional to the energy of the photons that hit each specific cell of the CCD device capturing the LWIR image. The processing required to turn this into a radiance is well known and similar software can be found in any digital camera. Since only photons can enter or leave the planet, the satellite sensors are far more accurate at measuring this flux in both directions than any estimates based on sparse land measurements.
The delta voltage between pixels is exactly proportional to the delta radiance. Converting this radiance to a surface temperature is trivial for the clear sky and simply requires running a line by line 3-d simulation of the clear sky atmosphere which is affected primarily by GHG absorption and emission. This is then calibrated to known surface temperatures at the time the image was taken. Since the linearity between voltage and radiance is nearly perfect and the non linearity between radiance and temperature follows T^4 per the Stefan-Boltzmann LAW (independent of the effective emissivity) accurate temperatures for the entire surface of the planet can be far more accurately obtained by weather satellites than by extrapolating sparse surface measurements. The only useful purpose for sparse surface measurements is to center the range of satellite temperatures and they we can use actual data for the rest of the planet, rather than homogenized interpolation.
The temperatures of the cloudy sky surface can be determined on a pixel by pixel basis by interpolating between clear sky samples with an appropriate average diurnal adjustment applied. This can then be cross checked against estimates based on cloud optical depth which is proportional to the amount of surface radiation passing though the clouds and this can also be calibrated to surface measurements. Note that in general, most of the world is continuously covered by geosynchronous satellites while each polar orbiter (there are usually 2 of these), covers the entire planets surface twice per day.
Isn’t that what I just said to Walt D, only simpler? The devices he mentioned specifically measure temperature by being in physical contact with the thing being measured-be it gas, or liquid, or solid. My point was specifically directed at HIS comment about the video comment about satellites not measuring temperature. They don’t. They INFER temperature indirectly.
“Satellites do not measure temperature. They measure radiances in various wavelength bands, which must then be mathematically inverted to obtain indirect inferences of temperature.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satellite_temperature_measurements
Aphan.
Yes it is. except that you did not mention that the voltage measured is directly convertible into a temperature based on the linear relationship between radiance and total photon power, the linear relationship between photon power and the measured voltage and the T^4 relationship between radiance and temperature (independent of emissivity). Understanding these relationships is crucial to understanding why temperatures extracted from satellite data are far more robust then temperatures extracted by processing, homogenizing and extrapolating temperatures from sparse surface measurements.
Aphan,
Another crucial point is that a satellite sensor measures radiance across a large fraction of the planet. Polar orbiters measure the entire surface while each geosynchronous sensors measures about 1/4 of the surface and few sensors need to be cross calibrated with each other. Despite this, ISCCP blew the cross calibration by relying on continuous coverage by polar orbiters, which was not always true and added too much noise to the calculated temperatures in order to extract a tiny trend much smaller than the introduced noise.
Surface measurements are made through 1000’s of unique sensors that must be cross calibrated to each other and this is the source of the many bogus adjustments made by GISS and NOAA. Since they could not even get this right dealing with about a half dozen satellite sensors, the chance that they got this right across 1000’s of unique ground sensors is nearly zero.
The opportunity to add degrees of freedom to the analysis (i.e. the many adjustments) isn’t as easy to hide when processing satellite data. As anyone who has dealt with modelling knows, if you add enough degrees of freedom, you can get whatever behavior you are looking for and this is why GISS and NOAA rely on surface sensors to extract trends, rather than using satellite sensors that provide much better data.
“They don’t. They INFER temperature indirectly.”
I want to see you put a thermometer in the thermosphere and do a DIRECT measure the very high temperature in the “coldness” of space nearly perfect vacuum without “inference”.
LOL
“Converting this radiance to a surface temperature is trivial for the clear sky and simply requires running a line by line 3-d simulation of the clear sky atmosphere which is affected primarily by GHG absorption and emission. This is then calibrated to known surface temperatures at the time the image was taken. Since the linearity between voltage and radiance is nearly perfect…”
You are completely missing the point here. They aren’t measuring LWIR, but microwaves. These are not emitted from a surface, but from a gas (O2). And they aren’t measuring surface temperature, although surface emission is a confounding factor. When you look along a single direction, you get one voltage, representing the total radiance from that direction. AMSU has several frequency channels, but for TLT, it’s mainly just one (5) with 2 bands. So from that you have to work out what radiance comes from each level in the atmosphere.
Walt D,
“The objection that satellites measure voltages an not temperature has to be one of the stupidest arguments I have every heard”
Well, it may be, but who made it? Sounds like you are mis-quoting Dessler, who said:
“A satellite doesn’t measure temperature: it measures radiance, which means it measures basically photons of energy that the atmosphere is emitting:”
And Schneider goes on to explain why that is important. The instruments can probably measure the radiance accurately. But it comes from all kinds of sources (clouds, surface etc). And so you have to work out what the radiance might tell you about not only a chunk of air (somehow excluding those others) but also exactly which chunk of air. There is a lot of modelling involved there. An attribution problem.
But then why does it agree with the radiosonde data if it is a problem? Also, you might see a consistent problem which would in no way affect the trend. After all, it is not the exact value we really care about, it is the trend.
Imagine that Nick? Such sophistry…
Dessler goes to pains to announce that satellites measure voltage, a point you deliberately misquote by only providing a small portion of his response.
The full quote:
I highlighted that small “in fact” portion of the quote you chose to ignore. Walt D, correctly rephrased what Dessler did state.
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The old thermometer measurements that NOAA in it’s many regressive forms just loves to adjust, and adjust ad nauseam, until those NOAA practitioners of data inquisition achieve their goals.
Not that NOAA shows any reluctance to torture modern state of the art thermister stations into submission.
From: Real Science
Schnieder points out one of the misconceptions of consensus climate science, which is the idea that O2 and N2 in the atmosphere contributes to the photons leaving the planet in proportion to their kinetic temperature. In the clear sky, the photons arriving at the satellite sensors come from only 2 sources. One are surface BB emissions passing through the transparent portions of the spectrum and the other are surface emissions delayed by GHG’s. In the cloudy sky, fewer surface emissions pass through and the predominate emitter becomes the water in clouds, which generally emit at a temperature lower than the surface and is why clouds appear colder in IR imagery. And of course, some of the emissions by the water in clouds is subject to the same delay arising from GHG’s. In fact, even emissions by the water in clouds can also be equivalently modelled as delayed surface emissions owing to the tight thermodynamic coupling between the water in clouds and the water in the oceans, which are the predominate source of surface emissions.
This is connected to another false idea which is that GHG absorption directly increases the kinetic temperature of the O2 and N2 in the atmosphere via collisions. From a Quantum Mechanical perspective, collisional broadening spreads across both sides of a lines resonant frequency where there is a probability that a small amount of photon energy will be converted into kinetic energy and and equal probability to convert the same amount of kinetic energy into photon energy. Measuring temperatures just adds confusion because both photons and molecules in motion are detected by conventional temperature sensors, yet only photons contribute to the radiative balance of the planet.
Nick Stokes, If you have a problem with honest science and scientists because of your belief system, and, can not tell truth from propaganda, I would suggest deprogramming.
You add nothing to the debate except that you are a serial pest.
wayne Job
“Nick Stokes, If you have a problem with honest science and scientists because of your belief system, and, can not tell truth from propaganda, I would suggest deprogramming.
You add nothing to the debate except that you are a serial pest.”
Sorry but that is unfair and rather childish. Nick is very patient in stating the facts as they are or as he sees them. If you disagree with what he is saying then tell him why. Don’t just sit there throwing stones. Be a grown up and play the ball not the man.
If the satellites are wrong because they’ve been “adjusted” and they don’t deny that the surface station data has been “adjusted” then why the “war on coal”?
Just because “The Storm Channel” calls some Arctic air moving into the Midwest an “Arctic Invasion” doesn’t mean Man keeping warm caused it.
This video is itself tainted with graphic fraud. It’s hilarious in its hypocrisy.
Look at the screen grab of the graph above with the red line, in relation to testimony:
If you take up that top really big spike and you take that out you start getting the upward bias. And this is what people do when you start looking at these relatively arbitrary times,
Look at the red line. It stops at 2011. More devious, the purported “Cruz” graph itself is cropped two or three years. Look at the text of the graph, seriously truncated.
Problems:
1. Red line stops at 2011. Precluding at least a year upon the screen grab.
2. Reproduction of graph blatantly crops its years 2012-2014 or 2015.
3. Red line does not include 1998 el Nino, true, but also crops 1997 lower temps.
I suspect there is no or very little incline from 1999 to 2014 or 2015 in this data set. That is why the Yale peeps are committing this graphic chicanery. It seems to be their original video trick, not from the testifier. Or did the testifier present such a line?
I would like much to see someone take this particular point on—graphically. It’s blatant hiding. Thanks.
More, the video graph is a precise reproduction of the Cruz graph, as posted elsewhere above. That graph shows data to almost the end of 2015. Therefore, the Yale truncated reproduction of the graph about four years of data represented, ie., Five years missing from the end of Yale’s red line.
The underlying graph represents data from 1997 to the end of 2015. The Yale red line only a linear trend of the data from 1999 to the end of 2010. How is Yale’s conduct here anything but “arbitrary?” The truncation of the original graph is in the area of fraud in my opinion.
the agw issue has to do not with temperature but with the relationship between fossil fuel emissions and temperature.
https://youtu.be/vUvLoE5v0yQ
Jamal Munshi-
“the agw issue has to do not with temperature but with the relationship between fossil fuel emissions and temperature.”
If there has been no significant increase in temperatures at the same time there has been a significant increase in fossil fuel emissions, then there IS NO significant RELATIONSHIP between fossil fuel emissions and temperature. Correlation does not establish causation, so even if there is a perfect correlation between two things, it does not, and cannot, prove a “causal” relationship exists.
Even worse, there is no objective way to tell which is the cause and which is the effect.
It can show lack of such causality quite decisively, however. “No causation without correlation.“