Guest essay by Leo Goldstein
When something pretending to be a science cannot adequately define a quantity for its central subject, this something is inarguably a pseudo-science. This is certainly the case in the self-professed “climate science.” It proposes the hypothesis of a dangerously warming climate, but does it define a meaningful climatic temperature that can be robustly calculated from the observations at the current time? To the extent that it does define climatic temperature (meaningfully or not), does it pay much attention to this quantity? The answer to both these questions is a resounding NO.
The proper term climatic temperature is traditionally used in unapproved climate-related web publications. But IPCC and IPCC-aligned papers typically use the word “climatological” instead of “climatic” (possibly to overcome an insecurity about their status relative to science; like ‘scientology’), but the proper word is climatic.
IPCC AR5 fails to define either “climatological temperature” or climatic temperature. A Google search for “climatological temperature” on the IPCC website (ipcc.ch) finds only 3 results, none of which defines or explains the term. A Google Scholar search for “climatological temperature” finds 2,220 results from 2010, but none of the top results uses this term as defined above.
Per the World Meteorological Organization, climatological temperature is one of the climatological standard normals which are defined as follows:
“The general recommendation was to use 30-year periods of reference. The 30-year period of reference was set as a standard mainly because only 30 years of data were available for summarization when the recommendation was first made,” (WMO, 2011) and “Under the current WMO Technical Regulations, recognising the realities of a changing climate, climatological standard normals are defined as averages of climatological data computed for successive 30-year periods, updated every ten years, with the first year of the period ending in 1, and the last year, with 0.” (WMO, 2016).
The climatist practice of calculating climatological temperature once every ten years while yelling that “it is worse than was thought yesterday” every week is not relevant here. Climatological temperature is a centered simple average of the so-called global surface temperature over 30 years, and can be calculated for any time 15.5 years or more back. But “climatological temperature” is used very rarely. It’s been hardly used by the most notorious climate papers. Typically, these papers show plots of alleged annual surface temperatures with linear regression lines over the convenient time periods. Sensitivity to the selection of end points is a well-known shortcoming of the linear regression, and the “climate scientists” fully exploit this. Thus, failure to define and to use suitable climatic temperature doesn’t seem accidental but intentional, stemming from a desire to confuse scientists and the general public.
The science of climate variability will need to break away from the infamous climate pseudo-science and the influence of international bodies. As part of this break away, I propose the definition and calculation of climatic quantities as an exponential moving average (“EMA”) of the corresponding annual values with a smoothing factor α = 0.048. In particular, climatic temperature, at any time, should be defined and calculated as EMA with α = 0.048 of the appropriate annual global average land surface temperature(1) through the last year for which full data is available (usually the few weeks after the end of the year).
The smoothing factor is selected to match 30 years simple average α = 0.048 ≈ 1/(30*ln(2)). Thus, the present climatic temperature would approximately match 30 years average centered about 15 years ago. It will be calculated once per year, probably in February. EMA is a more robust statistic than simple moving average, and more responsive because it weighs recent years heavier. EMA of temperature has been frequently proposed in climate realist literature.
After the standardized climatic average enters a use, anybody showing plots of annual global temperatures shall be laughed out of the room.
________________________________
(1) Selection of the appropriate annual global temperature averaging method is a non-trivial problem (Essex, McKitrick & Andresen, 2007), and it is outside of the scope of this paper. Obviously, the method of climatic temperature calculation should not be changed after selection. Preferably, one of few methods widely used prior to the rise of climate alarmism should be used. Another non-trivial problem is finding and building a non-fabricated temperature data set.
References
Essex, McKitrick & Andresen, 2007. Does a Global Temperature Exist? Journal of Non-Equilibrium Thermodynamics, doi.org/10.1515/JNETDY.2007.001. Available from Eike-Klima-Energie
WMO, 2011. Guide to Climatological Practices. https://archive.is/Gto4o
WMO, 2016. Update to Guide to Climatological Practices. https://archive.is/IhLuw
” after all the ones which did not show any cooling had been culled” ??
Did you mean ” after all the ones which DID show any cooling had been culled” ??
While you people are arguing about mathematical aspects the average housewife is being alarmed by headlines screeming “Global mean temperatures in July 2016 were the warmest on record not just for July, but for any month dating to the late 1800s, according to four separate newly-released analyses.”
Gausian distributions!!!. The % of the world’s population that can follow your arguments is been in decline since the introduction of social media, according to four separate newly-released analyses.
These discussions help us how?
Are you saying pepole are too uneducated to be spoken to intelligently? Do we just start shouting our ideas in an emotional, activist way and see who wins “king of the mountain”?
(Ignore people’s inability to spell, proofread and type, please.)
Why change?
Works for the alarmists.
So far it has been a good thread. Lots of good points have been made. Allow me to bring down the bar a bit. 🙂
Back in the beginning of the “CO2 will fry us all” delusion, we were told that “global warming” would not happen uniformly. We would see warming towards the poles and we would see warming at night. In other words. the coldest places would warm much more than the warmer places. New local high temperatures would not be the sign to look for — rather, milder than normal night time temperatures or milder winters in Canada. At some point that was all ditched as it just did not seem to be alarming enough.
I was also told in the 70s that since we were coming out of the “Little Ice Age” that we could expect a good deal of natural warming to occur. That idea seems to have gone away at some point.
I wonder if anyone can offer up a reason why most of the public believes there is catastrophic man-caused global warming going on right now when that is, at best, the plot of a cheap horror movie. (zombies are much more believable)
The media said so.
Or said differently, 7 Billion people demonstratively benefiting from higher CO2 levels in the atmosphere and 0 people demonstratively being harmed.
Markstoval: based on recent polls, I am not at all sure “most of the public believes there is catastrophic man-caused global warming … and if they do believe, they aren’t worried about it).
Most people I talk to are more concerned about their jobs, their children’s education, safety, housing, having time with family AND the politics of ‘stupid’ going on all over the world. In the last several years, I have had one short discussion about CAGW which was very short since we quickly agreed to disagree and went back to our family discussion.
It seems to be an issue for activists, grant seekers, applied scientists and people like those who read WUWT who are concerned that the issue is being used to drive an agenda that might end up taking us down a rabbit hole.
That said, in Canada, the propaganda and indoctrination starts in grade 2, so all students graduating in the next 10 years and beyond will completely believe in CAGW and the inherent “badness” of big business and humans themselves.
So, I sit out here 45 km from no where, (Faraway, Alberta, Canada). Once in a while I have a visit with my grandchildren to explain that virtually nothing has changed out here in 100 years. Sometimes the crops are good. Sometimes they aren’t. It’s called weather.
I think they get it in spite of the public school, political, and MSM brainwashing they have been subjected to. They know what 40C below is like. And they know that a 2C degree increase to 38C below isn’t a problem.
WUWT and other skeptic sites are important. I have squirreled away about 2000 articles for my children and grand children to read after I am gone – if they so choose (plus downloads and graphs of lots of Environment Canada data that just looks like weather. That has allowed me to say to my offspring: “What unusual warming? What unusual precipitation?” Natural variation? Trends are all over the place, up, down, and none.)
Mark, it’s remarkable(unintentional pun, sorry) but the UN has established through several world wide polls over several years that climate change comes up dead last in what people are concerned about. It’s a non-starter unless it is hyped endlessly, which it has been. It still doesn’t mean much to people across the globe.
Plus, most of them wouldn’t even contribute a dollar year for the cause(probably less in poorer countries).
@Wayne Delbeke & @philohippous
I fully understand what the polls say. People have more pressing concerns.
My point was that the majority believe that driving an SUV will add CO2 to the atmosphere and that addition will make the planet somewhat warmer. They just don’t think it will do all that much — or it will happen a century out and, well, who can worry about that with the rent due?
I agree with both of you on the issue — but the people still believe in the rGHE deeply. Since they believe, they are subject to being manipulated by the alarmists in government and the media. That was my point.
Global warming will CAUSE zombies, since global warming seems apocalyptic.
Zombies always seen to be the outcome in those apocalyptic movies, you know.
Except the “Climatologists” don’t use “average Global temperature” no matter how you derive it. They use “anomaly” for just about everything. What should be required is both, that way you can know how the “average Global temperature” number has been changed to derive the “anomaly”. That’s the only way you’ll know that the “average Global temperature” for 1936 isn’t the same in 2017 as it was in 2000 for instance. Allowing the 2 to be used in isolation opens the door for all sorts of shenanigans.
using bowling as an example if you take my 6 series over 800 as the baseline then every other game i bowled in my life was UNDER that line, if you take the first 5 games i bowled as the baseline then every game since was OVER that baseline…an anomaly from a selected baseline tells you NOTHING when it comes to science…..it does show the bias of the person selecting the baseline.
Bill, say you wanted to know if cornflakes affected bowling performance using 100 players. You would give them cornflakes and set them off to bowl. You would then get back a load of numbers. How would you go about making sense of those numbers? Some are good bowlers and others not so good. It would not be good to just add up all the numbers.
I suggest a good way would be to use an anomaly. Take their average for the season, then subtract their performance during the test matches with the cornflakes. A positive value means they are doing better than normal, a negative figure means they were doing worse. You could then add up the anomalies to see if the cornflakes had led to a general improvement.
Allow me to expand your “example” so that it reflects the “current state of the art” in Climate Science: your 6 series is over 800 when you bowl them in 1936. In the year 2000, your 6 series are only 750 due to “adjustments”. Surprisingly, your 6 series (that you bowled in 1936, 81 years ago!) are only 600 in 2017. It’s truly amazing how poor a bowler you were back then, and we are only realizing it just now!
This is an excellent reason to use climatic temperature in all graphs, plots, and datasets
Leo, thanks for the reply. To be honest…. it really doesn’t matter what “average” you use. What’s important is that “anomaly” must also be accompanied by whatever “average” was used to generate it. That provides the needed context to determine just what is being done to the underlying data. When you realize that the underlying “averages” have been so completely fiddled with as to be meaningless, that’s when you tune out this whole debate as I have done for the most part. It’s all complete BS.
Ah, yes! The tyranny of the average!
Leo, thanks for an interesting post. However, you say:
“IPCC AR5 fails to define either “climatological temperature” or climatic temperature. A Google search for “climatological temperature” on the IPCC website (ipcc.ch) finds only 3 results, none of which defines or explains the term. A Google Scholar search for “climatological temperature” finds 2,220 results from 2010, but none of the top results uses this term as defined above.”
I fear that there is a simple explanation—you are searching for the wrong term.
The term that the IPCC uses in place of your “climatological temperature” is “climatology”. A Google Scholar search for “climatology” yields about half a million results. A search on the IPCC website yields a couple of thousand results.
w.
So, I’m not sure that thousands or hundreds of thousands of definitions are much more helpful than 3 undefined definitions. So what is your point?
cli·ma·tol·o·gy
ˌklīməˈtäləjē/
noun
noun: climatology
the scientific study of climate.
Willis your turn again
Jim G1 June 19, 2017 at 9:50 am
My point is that the author claims that the IPCC ignores climatology when in fact he’s just searching for the wrong term.
Ian W June 19, 2017 at 9:51 am
Thank, Ian. “Climatology” is what is called a “term of art”. This means a word or phrase which is used in an unusual way in a particular field. In the field of climate, the “climatology” of a location generally means the average climate of the location. Do a search on “the climatology of”, you get tens of thousands of things like “The Climatology of the St. Louis Area – National Weather Service”.
Despite your lovely definition, they are totally ignoring your dictionary and using “climatology” the way it is usually used—to mean the average of the local weather over some given time period.
w.
It’s not a unique term of art in the way you imagine. People can just as easily say “the chemistry of the atmosphere”, “the physics of baseball” or “the geology of Arizona”. In each case, the word for a whole scientific discipline is used to elucidate a specific case.
“Climatology” is no different from these usages. It’s the name of a scientific discipline, like astrophysics, oceanography, what have you. The important distinction IMO is the difference between the science climatology, practices by scientists, and the GIGO computer game “climate science”, perpetrated by at best math and computer “science” charlatans.
The term “climatology” is used by IPCC frequently. In some cases it does mean “climatological standard normals,” including temperature. Nevertheless, even when it is used as “climatological temperature,” it is rarely (or never) studied or even shown by itself. They use it either to show “anomaly”, or to calculate delta between it and models’ “predictions”.
Your solution doesn’t appear to address what I think is the central stupidity of the entire global warming theory. Namely, how can anyone possibly derive an accurate global average when the globe is not uniformly covered with temperature reading stations and the number and locations of said stations has done nothing but change radically over time? Would the number and location of stations have some impact on the computed average? Of course it would! Back in the 1950’s to 1980’s from which they derived their 30 reference mark where were most of those stations? Mainly in the US? And where are all these stations now? Did they compensate for this as they calculated their averages? From what I have seen the answer is no. It looks to me they devised their methods and spent their money to get the answers the wished for. Or finding that answer they were satisfied and looked no further.
These things are said to be taken into account. Unfortunately, a lot of interpolation and extrapolation occurs in the process. I haven’t found many studies on how accurate these procedures are, but looking at a temperature map of a state, the temperature variation within even a small area is often quite large. Getting any kind of accurate estimates seems unlikely.
Sheri- the “accuracy” of interpolation in temperatures at widely distant places can’t be done. There are no real thermometers in between. If there were they could just look at them. There have been some limited studies that show that interpolation(by skipping over some stations) that the inbetween temperatures generally aren’t ridiculously out of line. When it’s cold in Red Deer, Alberta it’s usually just as cold in Saskatoon, Sascatchewan or Kindersley in between.
The NOAA practice of using one notably warm location in northern Canada to estimate temperatures across the arctic to Russia does push the boundaries a lot, though.
This is a subject I have done a fair amount of work on. I think my conclusions are rock solid, but I am living in my own echo chamber. I have an enormous amount of data down loaded from various places. One of these data sets is raw station data from the NOAA. I have found there is just as strong of a correlation between the number of temperature monitoring stations active per year and their bogus annual temperature average as there is with CO2. On my blog I explore both of those correlations. The CO2 temperature correlation breaks down but the correlation to the increase in monitoring station does not. I then demonstrate a very straight forward example of why that may be.
http://bubbaspossumranch.blogspot.com/2017/06/humans-may-have-created-global-warming.html
I have additional work in process examining the number and locations of stations in the years 1950, 1980, and 2000 which is as yet unpublished. While incomplete as yet, the results indicate the cumulative effects of opening and closing stations induced a cooling trend from 1950 to 1980 and a warming trend from 1980 to 2000.
Let me put it this way. I could solve the crisis on their books by closing stations in the tropics and adding stations in colder climes gradually over the next 5 years. I could show the global average going down every year. Just give me a trillion bucks each year and control over the program. I will come up with some BS algorithm to justify those moves. At the end of 5 years I will collect my Nobel price and retire.
It is hard to say which stupidity of the global warming theory is central. The global average temperature can be defined (in many ways) and calculated. A “problem” (using quotes because the solutions have been looking for a suitable problem for long time) is that variability of climatic temperature is comparable with the calculation errors.
Problem is define warming. Is it rise in temperature at surface? Rise in energy at surface? Or rise in total energy? Or rise in average temperature of all parts?
Each one of these is separate from the other.
There are still so many signal processing issues with this article – but it is still better than what the alleged science of climatology is doing.
Let me enumerate a few:
1. There are known 70 year cycles in the climate. Nyquist says you need a 140 year period to even see them at all, and since there are overlapping 70 year cycles with different phases, you probably need 5x oversampling – 350 years. (I ran a monte-carlo analysis on this several years ago).
2. The choice of exponential moving average filter is still wrong. What’s wrong with a reasonable blackman moving window? Heck a gaussian filter is also perfectly reasonable.
3. As noted in some other comments, trendlines on time-series data is almost always the wrong thing to do. Nyquist fail, and with 1/f noise also the noisiest part of the signal to look at with effectively a sample size of 1 for that low frequency bin.
Everyone involved needs to take 2 courses – signal processing for EEs and DSP for EEs, the first is an undergrad course and the second is a first-year grad course.
Peter
To study everything that affects the Earth’s weather, the concept of a 30 year average simply fails. If you look as successive 30 year periods, you lose the shorter solar cycle effects. And the longer ones, like a 200 year cycle that shows up in long term data won’t have much influence in 30 years.
Like energy sources and models, they all have pluses and minus. It’s a messy field and always will be, at least as long as we have an atmosphere.
Thank Ric. The 30 year thing picked by the WMO just blows me away. It certainly wasn’t the “definition” of climate we got when I went to school 60+- years ago.
And when designing structures and facilities, we sure as heck didn’t look at 30 year periods. We looked for extremes and then added a bit for safety because you don’t know WHEN an extreme will occur.
And that is one of the reason’s averages have always bothered me. And average is where 50% of your information is less extreme; and 50% of your data is more extreme. No one designs to the average. That’s why we have adjustable seats in cars.
Based on the WMO concept; I have lived through over 70 climate “cycles”. Sure.
Enjoy your comments, among others.
Time to go spray some pastures.
The Guardian dated 19th June 2017 presented a report by Danian Carrington, Environmental Editor titled “Global Warming brews big trouble in coffee birth place Ethiopia” —
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/jun/19/global-warming-brews-big-trouble-coffee-birthplace-ethiopia
This report is based on an article published in nature Plants, Vol. 3, Article 170081 titled “Resilience potential of the Ethiopian coffee status under climate change” by a group of authors — https://www.nature.com/articles/nplants201781.epdf?
In early 1990 I travelled all around Ethiopia including Sudan bordered coffee growing region. My rainfall study showed 36 year cycle with high rainfall. Gore rainfall data showed around 2006-07 started below the average 18 years pattern. It is a part of natural variability part of climate change but nothing to do with global warming part. With the low rainfall during this period, has resulted high temperature regimes during these years?
It is most unfortunate scientists without studying the climate of the region make statements with pre-conceived mind set. Media give hype to such reports.
WMO 1966 “Climate Change” mannual: To study spectral analysis, we need more than twice the cycle. But to understand the cyclic nature even with less than this data one can follow two procedures, namely (1) moving average technique — to understand the trend in global temperature anomaly a report presented 10-, 30- and 60-year moving averages. The 60-year moving average showed the clear cut trend after eliminating the 60 year cycle from the data and (2) by simply plotting the data around the mean. I followed this in the case of Ethiopia where clear cut cyclic pattern is evident. Then using curve fitting procedure defined the cycle length.
30 year is suggested by WMO to compile the averages and extremes in meteorological parameters uniformly for the same period. These are defined for a location.
Dr. S. Jeevananda Reddy
Peter, I disagree. This is not a filter processing problem, like amplifying a signal and suppressing noise. One of the purposes of studying climate variability is to find out what is the signal (or signals). Proposed EMA would preserve cycles, while suppressing high frequency noise.
Leo,
Something that needs to be addressed, but wasn’t, was just what are you going to average? Not uncommonly, the only data that are available are daily highs and lows. Do you average those before taking a monthly average and then an annual average? More properly, one should be using hourly temperatures through the whole day, but those are probably only available with modern, automated weather stations. My preference is to keep the diurnal lows separate from the set of diurnal highs.
There is a question in my mind whether the averages being reported are actual temperatures, or the interpolated grid-cell temperatures from the nearest 1200 Km station. What happens when the different stations are in different climate zones or just different elevations? Far too much is being claimed based on far too little rigorous data.
An honest climatologist would say, “This is our best estimate, based on data known to be less than optimal, and should be taken with serious reservations.”
My thoughts exactly. Are there published articles which examine the value of daily high-low temperatures as a proxy for the overall daily average energy or heat content?
Leo, re non fabricated temperature records, I offer the following: some months ago, a South African commenter supplied the raw long record from Capetown. I was struck by its similarity to the raw temperature trace for the United States. Similarly I noted like patterns for Canada, Greenland, Siberia and, IIRC, Scandinavia from threads on WUWT several years ago. A couple of years ago, Paul Homewood of “Not a lot of people know..” blog reported raw records of similar pattern from Paraguay and Ecuador. I’m sorry I don’t have links handy but someone here will.
I also believe that these similar patterns by their nature, contain within them a robust corroboration of the records’ cosistency, as is, for the purposes of evaluating climate change. Moreover, I also believe it puts to rest the idea that major changes (MWP, LIA, etc. ) can be local. It would seem that first the warming folks altered the data strongly for the US (1937 was the record high for the Lower 48 until it was pushed down below 1998s by GISS) , and then egregious adjustments were made with the rest of the world. Checkout Paraguay temp for an idea how brutal the changes were.
Re the “pushing down” of pre 1998 temperatures to bury the 1937 record for the lower 48 states, GISS did this only in 2007! – I believe they were waiting for a new record to develop naturally (they even built another station in Death Valley in a parabolic embayment in the toe of a mountain range to try to break the old DV record without success. They discredited the real long standing world record high in Morocco to make it easier to break the temp record (the French were adequate to make a decent weather station. After all, scientific weather forecasting was one of Napoleon’s many contributions, along with canned food, all to give his military campaigns any advantage).
The Global average temperature?
http://notrickszone.com/2017/06/17/what-a-mess-spiegel-reveals-scientists-dont-know-real-temperature-of-the-planet/#sthash.0F3mlXbn.dpbs
“In 1995 it was 15.4°C. Today we are told it is 14.8°C – a new record!”
In case you missed my earlier post, Same sort of ‘Fiddled’ Data here.Blessed by Hansen,Mann and the IPCC.
Climatological temperature means the statistical study of temperature, that is, the probability of a given temperature. Climatic means peak, so climatic temperature is peak temperature over some period of study. Climatological comes from climatology, the study of weather over a period of time sufficient to derive a probability of various atmospheric measurements, and standard deviation from that mean. Weather is point data of some type, and climate is the probability of that data value occurring. Climatology is statistical study of weather. Climate science is a term for anyone who is not a climatologist wanting to pretend an involvement for purposes of research funding.
Project: Calculate the Average Annual Temperature of the Earth.
OK, looks tricky, can we do something simpler first just to check we have got the science and mathematics correct. Say something a lot lot lot smaller. Like the average temperature of my house and garden. No? Still too difficult. What about the average temperature of my kitchen, just one room, OK its got some things that are hot (back of my fridge), some things that are cool (inside of my freezer), some things that vary a lot in temperature (inside of my oven) and don’t forget the kettle.
So what are we going to do? AND, more importantly, how do we check our result. If I tell you that the Mean Annual Temperature of my kitchen is 18.47 degrees C how can you possibly contradict me, especially when I tell you I have taken all the hot/cold things previously mentioned and used a data set of over 10,000 individual readings correctly weighted for significance. Readings were taken EVERY day. How dare you suggest that the fact they were taken at 7 pm after I had eaten my dinner and done the washing up are important.
This … just … in … killlllllllerrrrrrrr ayyyyyyyyyyyyy geeeeeeeee doubleeeeeeee youuuuuuuuuu! Evennnnnnnn morreeeeeeeee killlllllllllerrrrrrr nowwwwwwwwww! Morrrrrrrrreeee killlerrrrrrrrrr heat-T …. huhwayyyyyyyyyyves! (Like this “NEWS” article!) 🙂
In case you thought I was merely making a fanciful “what if” post …. here’s the real McCoy:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2017/06/19/a-third-of-the-world-already-faces-deadly-heat-waves-it-could-be-nearly-three-quarters-by-2100/?utm_term=.55f6aee4e68b
“Killlllllllerrrrrrrrr … Ayyyyyyyyyyy …. Geeeeeeeee …. Doublllllllllle …. YOOUUUUUuuuuuuuuu! Read all about it!”
I seem to remember Patrick Moore in his presentation to a skeptic conference a few years ago said the average global temp for the last billion yrs was 22.5C and it’s now 15C ……we are in an ice age!
Robert of Texas:
June 19, 7:08 pm. You wrote, “So, we know that the climate has been warming, on average, for over 100 years. We don’t know why”.
Actually, the control knob for Earth’s climate is simply the amount of dimming sulfur dioxide aerosols in the atmosphere. This is true now, and throughout Earth’s history, where Ice Ages were caused by periods of intense volcanism, the Little Ice Age being a weak example.
Global anthropogenic SO2 aerosol emissions peaked circa 1975 at approx. 130 Megatonnes, and Clean Air efforts have been reducing that amount ever since. The increased insolation resulting from the cleaner air is responsible for all of the anomalous warming that has occurred since then; there has never been any warming due to greenhouse gasses.
World-wide, probably a trillion dollars have been wasted in attempting to control CO2 emissions, a harmless gas with no adverse climatic effects.
Google “Climate Change Deciphered” for proof of the above.
One subject that never seems to be addressed, and I’d like to understand it more, is amount of heat (i.e.. BTUs) versus temperature. A higher amount of heat in one system versus another does not necessarily correspond to the temperature of the first being higher than the second. Usually because of water – vapor, liquid, ice – but possibly because of other factors. Measuring temperature at a surface does not necessarily tell you how much heat is in the system.
Does anybody try to account for this?
There was one article on WWW that did. Your proof of this by the way is how el-nino/nina can change global temps by 10X decadal “warming” averages. Moving energy from one point to another shouldn’t destroy it.
Sorry that was not clear WuWT had article
The article, sorry to say, was written most inappropriately by the author.
The traditional text books on meteorology & oceanography presented the terminology used in this field of science.
Climatology, Meteorology, Hydrology, geology, ecology, etc: The term climatology is used to refer to the science of climate.
Specific adjectives refer to specific field of climatology. Agroclimatology or Agricultural Climatology, Agrometeorology or Agricultural Meteorology, etc: The former refers to climatic condition, for example: Climate of Hyderabad, Climate of India, Rainfall Climatology of India, Rainfall Climatology of West Africa, etc; and the later refers to how climate impact agriculture: Crop phenology [growth stages] & Crop Growth – See my book [1993]: Agroclimatic/Agrometeorological Techniques: As Applicable to Dry-land Agriculture in developing countries”, http://www.scribd.com/Google Books, 205p [Book Review Appeared in Agricultural Forest Meteorology, 77:121-125 [1994] – this is recommended as reference book to students of Agricultural Meteorology at post-graduate level.
Thornwthwaite’s Climatic Classification, Agroclimatic Variables: Derived parameters based on climate data of a location or region or country or globe.
IPCC used a term “Climate System”, which refers to factors that influence climate at any given place.
The most important parameter that is widely misused is climate change. Though people talk of temperature, but they are shy of using Global Warming. They invariably use the term climate change that refers to a system.
Dr. S. Jeevananda Reddy
Thanks everybody for their comments. Sorry that I was not able to answer to everyone. This discussion looks to me like an open peer review.
What are some examples of cherry picked endpoints? Kerry Emmanuel published a Power Dissipation Index for hurricanes that starts in early 1970s.
Still a garbage measurement. At what pressure and at what humidity!!! Are you measuring from!! The average temperature is shown to change by degrees based on wind patterns aka el-nino/nina so using it alone is nonsensical. What is important is energy! Here is some real highschool physics temperature is not a unit of energy nor a measurement of energy nor does it have a linear relationship to it.
How do you know many subtle wind patterns didn’t cause that rise or fall over thirty years of 0.3 degrees? You have no clue if it is even important because you don’t know if energy increased or decreased in the atmosphere. No less the oceans or land. To restate temperature is an almost meaningless measurement at these magnitudes.
DonM- In any case, it’s certainly not Rocket Science. << LOVE this retort.. you are my hero of the day!