[N_Fiddledog]

Lubos Motl is a physicist. He writes a blog which sometimes deals with issues of climate.

He has estimated what he thinks each of the world's temperature sets will be for 2009.

UAH, or the satellite temps is the important one. He guesses UAH will say 2009 was the 6th, or 7th warmest year, and will look like this over the last 15 next to the others...



Motl estimates RSS - which I believe are balloon radiosonde measurements - will say 2009 was the 7th warmest year

Lubos appears to suspect Hansen at GISS may try to pass 2009 off as the second warmest year. Whatever...who pays attention to GISS anymore, anyway? Oh right, the mainstream media does, so don't be surprised to see a big headline "2009 Second Warmest Year On Record"

Best guess for HadCRU comes in at 5th, or 6th.

-----------------

Using the satellite temps, you can put the trends together for the last 15 years, and they'll look like this.

1995-2009: +0.95 °C/century
1996-2009: +0.89 °C/century
1997-2009: +0.41 °C/century
1998-2009: -0.24 °C/century
1999-2009: +1.22 °C/century
2000-2009: +0.53 °C/century
2001-2009: -0.78 °C/century
2002-2009: -1.56 °C/century
2003-2009: -1.43 °C/century
2004-2009: -1.43 °C/century
2005-2009: -3.70 °C/century
2006-2009: -2.30 °C/century
2007-2009: -1.00 °C/century
2008-2009: +21.0 °C/century

Quote:

Of course, the last one must be taken with a big grain of salt.

Otherwise, you can see among these 14 trends, 6 are warming (generously counting the huge 2008-2009 trend as well) while 8 are cooling! I could be more quantitative but this is roughly what we mean by saying that there has been no statistically significant warming in the last 15 years.

http://motls.blogspot.com/2009/12/uah-m ... 9-and.html

[Zipperfish]

Here is the latest from the NASA GISS:



source

[BartSimpson]

Zipperfish wrote:

Here is the latest from the NASA GISS:



source

I didn't know NASA had been keeping data since 1880.

[N_Fiddledog]

So it looks like Hansen is going to try pass off 2009 as second warmest, eh?

Check out how much GISS is starting to diverge from other temperature sets...



Hansen has discovered another reality to measure. His graphs are becoming art not science.

[PluggyRug]

It looks odd.

Wonder what the red line would look like if Simpsons rule was applied?

[bootlegga]

N_Fiddledog wrote:

Lubos appears to suspect Hansen at GISS may try to pass 2009 off as the second warmest year. Whatever...who pays attention to GISS anymore, anyway? Oh right, the mainstream media does, so don't be surprised to see a big headline "2009 Second Warmest Year On Record"

Now you're preemptively dissing headlines no one has printed yet? Okay, whatever...

Please...feel free to attack someone for something they actually said, but this is just sad, desperate grabbing at straws.

[N_Fiddledog]

But if you're pissed off now, imagine how you're going to feel in a week, or so when the bogus headline I predict turns up on the front page.

Actually if I read Zip's graph right it may something like "tied for second".

You know what though? You may be right? They might kill that headline. I don't think they like to advertise the fact nobody else in the world thinks 2005 was the warmest year. All other temperature sets say 1998 was the warmest year. If you advertise the divergence, people start to say, "Hey? What's up with this Hansen guy at GISS?"

[ShepherdsDog]

Snake Oil

[Zipperfish]

N_Fiddledog wrote:

So it looks like Hansen is going to try pass off 2009 as second warmest, eh?

Check out how much GISS is starting to diverge from other temperature sets...



Hansen has discovered another reality to measure. His graphs are becoming art not science.

Not sure if its 2nd warmest or 7th. The trend is pretty clear though, over the entire temperature record.

Actually UAH and RSS are the same record (satellite microwave sounding) put through different interpretations. They both trend pretty clearly upward if taken from the start of the record set (1982) as opposed to using 1998 as the start.

Still, if AGW theory is correct you should start to see a positive slope on those records sets, even when starting from 1998. It'll take longer though, since you'd be starting from a local maximum.

[N_Fiddledog]

Zipperfish wrote:

Actually UAH and RSS are the same record (satellite microwave sounding) put through different interpretations. They both trend pretty clearly upward if taken from the start of the record set (1982) as opposed to using 1998 as the start.

I never did understand the difference between UAH and RSS. I know there are differences. I've read about them. I just didn't understand what I read. Maybe you can help me. With RSS sometimes they're talking satellites, and sometimes they're talking about balloons. I think I get it now though. The balloons are from the old days before satellites, right? A sonde is some sort of equipment that began with balloons, isn't it?

With UAH they measure radiance in the mid-troposphere, and above to get temperature, don't they? Do they need microwaves to do that? Why do they sometimes say RSS/MSU? Doesn't MSU stand for Microwave Sounding Unit? Is MSU separate from RSS the way Had is separate from CRU? I always assumed that meant the Microwave thing was a separate process. You're saying it's not? Are you saying both UAH and RSS rely on microwaves alone to measure radiance somehow?

[Zipperfish]

N_Fiddledog wrote:

Zipperfish wrote:

Actually UAH and RSS are the same record (satellite microwave sounding) put through different interpretations. They both trend pretty clearly upward if taken from the start of the record set (1982) as opposed to using 1998 as the start.

I never did understand the difference between UAH and RSS. I know there are differences. I've read about them. I just didn't understand what I read. Maybe you can help me. With RSS sometimes they're talking satellites, and sometimes they're talking about balloons. I think I get it now though. The balloons are from the old days before satellites, right? A sonde is some sort of equipment that began with balloons, isn't it?

With UAH they measure radiance in the mid-troposphere, and above to get temperature, don't they? Do they need microwaves to do that? Why do they sometimes say RSS/MSU? Doesn't MSU stand for Microwave Sounding Unit? Is MSU separate from RSS the way Had is separate from CRU? I always assumed that meant the Microwave thing was a separate process. You're saying it's not? Are you saying both UAH and RSS rely on microwaves alone to measure radiance somehow?

The satellite data infers temerpature from microwave radiance. For example, the origianl satellite was calibrated to measure microwaves emitted by O2 molecules, which has a direct relationship to temperature. They use microwaves becasue clouds are almost transparent to microwaves (and virtually opaque to infrared). MSU is Microwave Sounding Unit (crica 1978) and AMSU is Advanced Microwave Sounding Unit (circa 1998). Bascially the data all comes from polar-orbiting NOAA satllelites.

It's great for O2 and CO2 whihc tend to be unifromly distributed in the troposphere, but not for water vapour which varies widely in spatial distribution. They have to use a weighting function to determine the height of the various absorbances. And then there's the various biases, such as the fact that different satellites have different instruments.

RSS (Remote Sensing Systems) is contracted by NOAA to do the analysis of the MSU/AMSU data, I think:

http://www.ssmi.com/msu/msu_data_description.html

The UAH (University of Alabama Huntsville) is basically Dr. John Christy and Dr. Roy Spencer who took it upon themsleves to use the satellite data to infer global climate.

http://www.uah.edu/News/climatebackground.php

The radiosondes are weather balloons. The radiosonde dataset is pretty polluted, I gather, as well as being local. I haven't seen it used much.

[BartSimpson]

I'm still tweaked at the hubris of whoever it was who put together the "global land ocean temp index" that went back to 1880. Considering that absolutely NO data was collected for the interiors of Africa, Antarctica, and South America in 1880 and that absolutely NO data was collected for the Arctic and Antarctic Oceans in 1880 I'm wondering where the hell they got the gall to call their guesses a "global" data set.

[N_Fiddledog]

Thanks Zip, I think I'm starting to get it.

Do you know when RSS started measuring temps? It was after UAH, wasn't it? I read some place one the reasons for measuring global temps from RSS was to double-check UAH. In fact, isn't that how they first discovered the problems with either orbital drift, or orbital decay in UAH? Isn't that why Spencer, and Christy made the adjustments?

That link from Christy was good. I get a clearer picture of exactly how he thinks concerning the whole AGW question. There was some interesting bits there, like how he sees a CO2 signature over the NH, yet how Arctic temperatures were warmer in the 30s. He's juggling contradictions like everybody else, but he also appears to be on the "Yes there's AGW, just not enough to worry about bandwagon".

Spencer posted a kind of short, end of year update at Watts.

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/01/05/d ... n-by-almos

There's a graph...



It's interesting when you compare it to Hansen's above. Spencer's only covers the years of the spike after 78, of course, but even though the trend up is not that different (Christy says a difference of .3 for the next century) they look so different. It's a good example of how 2 graphs can show pretty much the same information, yet one's scary, and the other is not. It's a matter of how you display it.

And Bart...yeah...I hear ya.

[N_Fiddledog]

BTW Zip the GISS graph is updated to the end of November 2009, isn't it? So providing December at GISS doesn't make any major changes, GISS is going to say 2009 is the second warmest year, isn't it? I don't see anything beyond third if I'm right about that graph.

[ASLplease]

It sucks that the world just happens to be at that critical threshold where a .2 degree rise in temperature is going to destroy humanity