The Blackboard

So how does this work again?

14 Lucia 0.64 5 3.659 -1.341
15 Robert Leyland 0.64 3 1.533 -1.468

Surely if you bet more, you would lose more?

I see I am in good company anyway!
cheers,
Robert

Fun aside, the disconnection between the experience of the bulk of the northern hemisphere and the global temperature anomalies shows clearly that the global temperature anomaly is not a good proxy for what is happening with changes in local energy content, and that is what we feel in our microclimates.

Take a 10 degree temperature anomaly as recently seen in the arctic http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/meant80n.uk.php and average it with a -2 temperature anomaly in Europe ( equal areas), and you get heating, while Europe freezes.And it is all due to wind and pressure system circulation.

In this manner the march of the glaciers would start before anybody in climate science notices.

hm, according to the wood for trees UAH data (which i think is not updated yet), 1998 looked like this:

1998 0.582
1998.08 0.753
1998.17 0.528
1998.25 0.77
1998.33 0.645
1998.42 0.562
1998.5 0.51
1998.58 0.513
1998.67 0.432
1998.75 0.394
1998.83 0.19
1998.92 0.289

so 0.74 for feb 2010 would still only be the second hottest february on record.

———————————–

but apart from that, i have a simple question: can you imagine the outcry in the sceptic camp, when the IPCC team chose to make a correction like that? (the change produces a significant difference between the this february and the 1998 one. basically it cuts down this peak by 0.1)

———————

ps: the Spencer graph shows the data after the correction.

http://www.drroyspencer.com/20.....-unveiled/

basically 1998 looks like “nearly 0.8″, while current temperatures are now reduced to “about 0.6″.

quite a peculiar moment, to make changes to the dataset…

anna v (Comment#36640) March 6th, 2010 at 12:24 am

Fun aside, the disconnection between the experience of the bulk of the northern hemisphere and the global temperature anomalies shows clearly that the global temperature anomaly is not a good proxy for what is happening with changes in local energy content, and that is what we feel in our microclimates.

Your point is? My microclimate certainly seems to be ‘connected’.

Re: bugs (Mar 6 02:39),

My point is that we will not know whether the earth is cooling or heating until we stop playing with temperatures as a proxy for heat input output. In principle satellite data should be able to give us this.

anna v (Comment#36646) March 6th, 2010 at 3:08 am

Re: bugs (Mar 6 02:39),

My point is that we will not know whether the earth is cooling or heating until we stop playing with temperatures as a proxy for heat input output. In principle satellite data should be able to give us this.

Surely what you want is to see what evidence supports your case or not. The IPCC rely on more than temperatures.

# Changes in Atmospheric Constituents and Radiative Forcing
# Observations: Atmospheric Surface and Climate Change
# Observations: Changes in Snow, Ice and Frozen Ground
# Observations: Ocean Climate Change and Sea Level
# Palaeoclimate
# Coupling Between Changes in the Climate System and Biogeochemistry
# Climate Models and their Evaluation
# Understanding and Attributing Climate Change

sod (Comment#36642) –

> can you imagine the outcry in the sceptic camp…

Outcry would be justified when

* Transparency is low, and/or

* Mistakes are evident but not promptly acknowledged and corrected.

This is what leads to loss of trust.

Can you imagine the state of a science if such circumstances did not lead to loss of trust and subsequent outcry?

anna v (Comment#36640) March 6th, 2010 at 12:24 am

You can’t hide behind this supposed disconnect between local experience and global means, based on monthly weather fluctuations. There will always be monthly regional fluctuations with pressure differences and winds blowing whichever way, but if you look at long term trends, most regions are trending similarly to the global mean. Arctic and Ant Peninsula somewhat faster, East Antarctica and a couple spots of Pacific ocean maybe not , but most of the world is trending up with a slope that’s in the same ballpark.

Surface temperature trends are important in their own right, for many reasons. Yes, total heat content is useful as well; it’s mostly in the oceans and is estimated as well.

AMac (Comment#36653) March 6th, 2010 at 5:32 am

Doesn’t matter what you say; some people are given to conspiracy and those silly “blink” graphs. For example, there’s no lack of transparency on USHCN 2.0; the code is even out, yet we hear scare stories about that change, too.

carrot eater (Comment#36656) –

Yes, some people are given to conspiracy. What to do?

I suggest reforming procedures so that error detection and error correction are strengthened, and so that transparency is promoted.

This is not a panacea. It wll not cause people who are convinced of “not-X” to revise their beliefs to “X”. Still, others have come to distrust climate science and climate scientists because of the way that the norms of this profession have evolved. They (“we”, actually) can be reached.

My platform has the side benefit of being aligned with core scientific values.

Re: Robert Leyland (Mar 5 22:21),

Oddly enough, we both “won” some of our money back– Tat’s the “gross”. What happens is that the amount we win is the product of a multiplier ‘x’ and how much we bet. So, gross= x*bet.

The multiplier depends on our rank. I must have entered my bet before you, so my rank is just above you. So, my multiplier, x, is larger than yours. In fact, it must be somewhat greater than 0.7318 for me– because I bet 5 and won 3.659 quatloos. But, of course, my ‘net’ is a loss because that’s less than I bet.

The multiplier is lower for you… x=0.511. So you “won”, 0.511*3 – 1.533. But… since you bet 3, your net is negative. It does look weird to see I bet more but my net loss is less when we both entered the same number for the UHA– but that’s the slight advantage of betting sooner!

Re: anna v (Mar 6 00:24),
You’re right. Oddly, EXCEL sometimes gets “stuck” when you set it to refresh manually. (It won’t even fully re-calculate when you tell it to!) I forgot to set it to automatically refresh, and I had January months highlighted except for the final few.

It’s the second hottest Feb. (I was going to tell sod he might get to start saying it’s breaking “record after record” now, but he can’t yet!)

Re: sod (Mar 6 01:42),

(the change produces a significant difference between the this february and the 1998 one. basically it cuts down this peak by 0.1)

Do we know that yet? Maybe it will knock down 1998 too. If you have a link to the full V5.3, I’d love to get that data, plot it and show the difference. Spencer posted the long term trend– seems about the same.

I suspect the outcry will be muted by the fact that Spencer and Christy told people they were working on a new version. Plus, after all, Deep Climate has been complaining that their Febs were too hot recently. . .

Re: carrot eater (Mar 6 06:02),

Actually, carrot eater, I am talking about physics. I am a physicist and I am appalled at the cavalier fashion basic physics is used in climate studies.

The true meaning of temperature is as a proxy for heat energy. It is energy that is conserved, not temperature, not anomalies of temperature. There is a convoluted connection through the j=CxT^4 equation that correlates energy flux with temperature for a heated black body, BUT:
a)the planet is not a black body but a many faceted gray body, which means different C and different radiation spectrum for each type of surface. Sand for example has a 0.75 smaller C than black body.
b)the true temperatures that should be used for radiative balance, input energy output energy from the planet, should be the ground temperature. It is the ground that radiates a la gray body. The surface temperatures measured are at two meters in the atmosphere, and the difference can be as big as 10C and more between air at 2meters and ground. Even over water, the water is several degrees cooler or hotter than the atmosphere.
c)The anomalies are one more convolution away from the heat budget. Look at this map http://nsidc.org/images/arctic.....igure4.png

When averaging Russia with a -4C anomaly, with the pole, with a +14C anomaly it is worse than apples and oranges.
All that has happened is that the wind circulation has brought warmer than average air to the pole and taken cold air down. According to the anomaly map the north hemisphere is in a heat wave. This is an artifact of adding apples and oranges and making averages. The real radiative budget is on what the temperature is on the surface, which nobody measures. The differences could be as big as 70 and 100 watts/meter^2, much larger than the puny contribution of CO2 that has started the stampede of “the sky is falling”.

It is the heat content and the energy balance that will tell us if we are heading for warmth or cold. Not the anomalies.

anna

Most of what you’re saying is true so far as it goes, but it’s totally missing the point.

Yes, energy is conserved, not temperature. That doesn’t mean that measuring temperature isn’t useful (it’s a very necessary step to even calculating changes in energy..). And as I said, the ocean heat content has been estimated for a while now. Your statements are ignoring that fact. The lion’s share of the climate’s energy content is in the oceans. If that’s what you want to stare at instead, stare at that, I don’t care. Or try to calculate the radiation imbalance at the TOA; that’ll give you the direct thermo as well. And yes, the ground absolute temperature sets the surface emission (which by the way is measured at the CRN stations). Which is relevant for modeling. Doesn’t mean the surface air isn’t interesting.

But measuring the surface air temperature is still useful. It’s going to correlate with the ground temperature, anyway. It is a part of the big picture, along with ocean at different depths, and the atmosphere at different altitudes. You’d like to know all of these things, to see how heat is moving around the system, and they are indeed measured in different ways. As it is, the thermal energy content is increasing everywhere, which is a check on the idea that the change is forced, and not just an internal redistribution.

But most of all, the trends in surface air temperature matter. This directly affects all manner of things relevant to agriculture and biology. It’s what we see as humans.

carrot eater (Comment#36667)
“As it is, the thermal energy content is increasing everywhere, which is a check on the idea that the change is forced, and not just an internal redistribution.”

An internal redistribution and/or change of cloud cover (a change in earths albedo) is imaginable, isn’t it? I don’t think such a change (see E. Pallé) has to be anthropogenically or cosmically “forced”.

Re: carrot eater (Mar 6 08:32),

Note, I was talking of the irrelevance of averaging anomalies in 5degreeX5degree grids, and then calculate world anomalies, to what is really happening about warming and cooling.

Of course temperatures are very important, because they are the only proxy to energy balance we have at hand outside direct radiation measurements by satellite. In addition they are very important for planning human life on the planet. This latter function is what all those thermometers were laid out for, not for energy budgets.

Averaging anomalies presupposes that all the temperatures against which anomalies are measured are moving in the same direction, positive or negative. The rational is that averaging temperatures is misleading for what is happening in cooling or warming, whereas anomalies are of similar percentage to the temperature and can be averaged. This is a fallacy for the real world where huge currents of circulation exist moving air with atmospheric temperatures with values irrelevant to what the ground is radiating . Only on completely windless days is there might be an equilibrium reached between ground temperature and surface temperatures measured at 2m height. How many of those are there?

So yes, all the data is useful, the question is about the use that is made of them which I believe is erroneous.

Do spikes in satellite temperature readings as is the case during this El Nino tell us the globe is heating up or that it is releasing heat that results in a net loss of heat?

The latest OHC estimate to me suggests there is a net loss of heat occurring. No?

DG–
I have no idea what spiks in the satellite temperature readings during El Nino tell us about the global heat balance. I’m fairly sure you can’t determine that by looking at the TLT measurements in isolation.

Which is the latest OHC estimate?

Ahem… I like Spencers UAH version 5.3 much better. If we were using version 5.3 for betting I would be simply rolling in quatloos right now. Rats!

DG (Comment#36675) March 6th, 2010 at 10:43 am
“Do spikes in satellite temperature readings as is the case during this El Nino tell us the globe is heating up or that it is releasing heat that results in a net loss of heat?
The latest OHC estimate to me suggests there is a net loss of heat occurring. No?”

This is still poorly understood according to the IPCC. My personal belief (without supporting data) is that ENSO is a part of our grand climate system that simply moves heat around with little significant gain or loss. It has a moderating effect on climate over time. El Nino releases ocean heat to the atmosphere at a time when solar irradiance is typically low. La Nina absorbs heat from the atmosphere when solar irradiance is typically high. Our recent long solar minimum has thrown this solar/oceanic relationship a bit out of synch though. For ocean heat to radiate out to space it must first pass through our atmosphere. An oceanic release of heat such as El Nino would be required for a net loss of heat in our Earth climate system.

Caveat: I am in the field of Water Resources Management and not Oceanography. Perhaps someone from Scripps or WHOI could chime in.

Re: comment 36642, 36662,

Sod, lucia,

My understanding is that their “seasonal correction” is basically adding to the data a periodic function, with zero average, and a period of exactly twelve months. Therefore all the running twelve-month averages will be completely unaffected, and so will all long-term trends, provided you calculate them over a whole (i.e., integer) number of years.

DG (Comment#36675) March 6th, 2010 at 10:43 am

Do spikes in satellite temperature readings as is the case during this El Nino tell us the globe is heating up or that it is releasing heat that results in a net loss of heat?

The Canard explosion (implosion) provides sufficient information when observing that there was a dynamic mechanism at play,namely a breakdown in the dissipative thermostat.

This was seen very clearly in the 2009 record in the SH,Where the effects of an enhanced polar vortex (due to ozone loss) that was greater then 2008.

The Canard explosion was typical in the Austral-pacific record in spring with the stationary blocking highs,the correction (relaxation oscillator) or overshoot is also clearly seen.

The inability of the “Global” records to capture this information is problematic,We can understand why UEA does not,as the eastern seaboard of NZ and the SST towards the longitudinal meridian is excluded, as the UEA code uses constants for longitude,and latitude (reducing the earths surface by 5mkm^2) GISS who knows.

http://i255.photobucket.com/al.....st2009.jpg

Do we know that yet? Maybe it will knock down 1998 too. If you have a link to the full V5.3, I’d love to get that data, plot it and show the difference. Spencer posted the long term trend– seems about the same.
.
we know that yet, because Spencer has posted a graph.
.
http://www.drroyspencer.com/20.....-unveiled/
.
while i don t have the data, ( AND I WANT THE RAW DATA, AND THE DATA HE USED FOR THAT SPECIFIC GRAPH!!!!!) a look at the graph shows that 1998 was not changed at all. ( i think the change to AMSU was in 2008 or 2009???)
.
Re: comment 36642, 36662,

My understanding is that their “seasonal correction” is basically adding to the data a periodic function, with zero average, and a period of exactly twelve months. Therefore all the running twelve-month averages will be completely unaffected, and so will all long-term trends, provided you calculate them over a whole (i.e., integer) number of years.
.
as i told lucia above, the change does not affect the whole record.
.
as deep climate shows, the problem with UAH is a DOWNWARD error in the may temperature.
.
http://deepclimate.org/2009/06.....s-in-2009/
.
why they chose a downward correction to february data is at least slightly suspicious, until they post some more detailed analysis.
.
denialists and sceptics would simply call it fraud, if anything even remotely similar was done by any other dataset. (notice how tiny downward adjustments to older data cause this reaction. this is basically a 0.2°C change to this january and february in UAH).

Do spikes in satellite temperature readings as is the case during this El Nino tell us the globe is heating up or that it is releasing heat that results in a net loss of heat?
.
basically these random spikes are irrelevant. they become important, because “sceptics” prefer to point out, that the 1998 temperatures are unbeaten. (some even call this “cooling”.)
.
a moderate el nino is currently at least challenging the 1998 super el nino temperature records. during the time of a solar minimum.
.
It’s the second hottest Feb. (I was going to tell sod he might get to start saying it’s breaking “record after record” now, but he can’t yet!)
.
shall we try to do a el-nino correction to the data? or will it not be raw enough then?

God sod is nuts.

First, the first AMSU went up May 1998:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A.....nding_Unit

Second, UAH’s seasonal issue was not with regard to one month as one suggest but rather the different annual cycle in the AMSU’s, and therefore the error doesn’t have a particular sign, as it was upward in months like this and downward in other months. The net result is no change in the trend. What crazies seem to come out of the woodwork whenever they believe they have an opportunity to act all self righteous.

Lastly, if you want the raw data you could ask for it. Not that someone like you would know what to make of the data.

This is what the differences come out to:

http://www.drroyspencer.com/wp.....s_v5.3.pdf

God sod is nuts.

First, the first AMSU went up May 1998:

while i am definitely< nuts ( i am actually responding to you), here is what Spencer says about AMSU:

The UAH global temperatures currently being produced come from the Advanced Microwave Sounding Unit (AMSU) flying on NASA’s Aqua satellite.
.
Aqua has been operational since mid-2002, and is in a sun-synchronous orbit that crosses the equator at about 1:30 am and pm local solar time.
.
i can t really remember when the UAH changed, but it wasn t that long ago.
.
Second, UAH’s seasonal issue was not with regard to one month as one suggest but rather the different annual cycle in the AMSU’s, and therefore the error doesn’t have a particular sign, as it was upward in months like this and downward in other months. The net result is no change in the trend. What crazies seem to come out of the woodwork whenever they believe they have an opportunity to act all self righteous.
.
as the deep climate post that i linked above demonstrates, the UAH data does not only have a bigger anual cycle, but is also diverging in trend from the other data sets during certain months. and it is a DOWNWARD divergence.
.
Lastly, if you want the raw data you could ask for it. Not that someone like you would know what to make of the data..
.
i was obviously making fun about “sceptics” with my shout. i will remember to tell you, when i am making obvious jokes in the future.

This is what the differences come out to:

http://www.drroyspencer.com/wp…..s_v5.3.pdf

thanks for the link. so obviously the change was in 1998. but the 1998 spike remains unchanged.

sod (Comment#36690)-”UAH data does not only have a bigger anual cycle, but is also diverging in trend from the other data sets during certain months. and it is a DOWNWARD divergence.”

Uh, no. You’ve got it backwards, the other dataset shows an upward divergence from UAH. The differences between RSS and UAH have been described in a large number of papers. I’d start with:

Christy, J.R. and W.B. Norris, 2006: Satellite and VIZ-Radiosonde intercomparisons for diagnosis on non-climatic influences. J. Atmos. Oc. Tech., 23, 1181 – 1194.

Which explains exactly why RSS shifts away from UAH and it is clearly a RSS error.

sod (Comment#36685) March 6th, 2010 at 2:23 pm

basically these random spikes are irrelevant. they become important, because “sceptics” prefer to point out, that the 1998 temperatures are unbeaten. (some even call this “cooling”.)
a moderate el nino is currently at least challenging the 1998 super el nino temperature records. during the time of a solar minimum.

1998 was also solar minimum,the difference between then an now is the ozone minima and enhanced polar vortices were symmetrical as opposed to asymmetrical at present,as the arctic was also involved. one conclude that the disorderly behavior of the child (el nino) was the result of a bi-polar disorder.

Sod–
Are you referring to this graph by Deep?

If Deep was right, then January& Feb would be “too hot” and may “too cold” in V5.2. Taking out that annual cycle would knock the current January down and raise May up. So, we’d expect the more recent Febs in V5.3 to be lower than in V5.2. The change isn’t suspicious– it’s just what you’d expect if Spencer and Christy agreed with Deep.

Sod

shall we try to do a el-nino correction to the data? or will it not be raw enough then?

Go ahead. Tells us what your team finds.

Andrew_FL (Comment#36688)

Thanks! So it is more or less like I thought, except that they phased it in. So, as I said, the annual averages are all unchanged, the long-term trends are unchanged, and the 12-month running averages may only show a slight divergence around 1999 and 2001. (Of course, since Dr. Spencer apparently does his smoothing with a 13-month running average, there may be a very slight change in his smoothed line as well.)

Niels A Nielsen (Comment#36673) March 6th, 2010 at 9:41 am

Yes, those things are imaginable; they’re the variations associated with ENSO.

It’s rather harder to get those things to give you 30 years of a sustained trend in warming or cooling, globally. When the oceans, surface and troposphere are all warming or cooling for that long, you pretty much need a radiation imbalance.

anna v (Comment#36674) March 6th, 2010 at 9:57 am

“Averaging anomalies presupposes that all the temperatures against which anomalies are measured are moving in the same direction, positive or negative. ”

What on earth does this mean? It presupposes no such thing. When you average, you get the average. That’s the whole point.

Re: carrot eater (Mar 6 15:55),

Go to
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/cl.....index.html

pararaph 6 where it says why average anomalies are used instead of average temperatures.

It says that DT is a better measure of cooling or heating because temperatures might be drastically different but the change in temperature in the same direction, so averaging anomalies shows up the trend.

If the signs are the same, i.e. all increasing or all decreasing, it makes some sense.
It stops being an argument for averaging the change in temperature instead of the temperatures when the signs are opposite, imo, because the presupposed mechanism, “all are rising/falling but with different absolute values” does not hold for opposite signs , a further mechanism must be involved of “why opposite signs”, making the substitution for temperature apples and oranges.

http://arctic-roos.org/observa.....e_area.png what is happening LOL

http://arctic-roos.org/observa…..e_area.png what is happening LOL
.
typical denialist approach. we are experiencing something like the hottest winter on record, during times that should NOT produce a hottest winter.
.
so let us point out that arctic sea ice is reaching the lower end of the long term average interval.

anna v (Comment#36741) March 6th, 2010 at 11:40 pm

Re: carrot eater (Mar 6 15:55),

Go to
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/cl…..index.html

pararaph 6 where it says why average anomalies are used instead of average temperatures.

It says that DT is a better measure of cooling or heating because temperatures might be drastically different but the change in temperature in the same direction, so averaging anomalies shows up the trend.

If the signs are the same, i.e. all increasing or all decreasing, it makes some sense.
It stops being an argument for averaging the change in temperature instead of the temperatures when the signs are opposite, imo, because the presupposed mechanism, “all are rising/falling but with different absolute values” does not hold for opposite signs , a further mechanism must be involved of “why opposite signs”, making the substitution for temperature apples and oranges.

That is a very weird argument, are you a lawyer? Because you have just taken an attempt to explain something in laymans terms so it is easily understood, as something that can be misunerstood if you take the literal wording and squint at it sideways, to mean the exact opposite of what they were saying.

Why don’t you write to them and ask them to rephrase it so it cannot be misinterpreted.

It does not in any way depend on all the anomolies being rising ones.

sod (Comment#36748) —

“Denialist” is an offensive term. It is designed to connote “Holocaust denier,” in a way that’s just barely subtle enough to pass in conversation.

I could spend my time thinking up ways to insult people with whom I am discussing science or math or policy, at a party or online. But why would I.

.

anna v (Comment#36741) –

> It stops being an argument for averaging the change in temperature…

You are trying to build a common-sense case that it isn’t meaningful to establish a “temperature anomaly” and track it over time.

I don’t understand what the central thrust of your argument is.

* Asserting that some other parameter (e.g. ground temperature) would be useful doesn’t alter the merits, whatever they may be, of tracking air temperature.

* You discuss “all”, for instance “i.e. all increasing or all decreasing”. But everyone agrees that temperature is heterogeneous and noisy over space and time, and that widespread changes to the system in one direction (wetter, windier, warmer) can lead to local changes in the other direction. Thus, “all” will rarely be an applicable description of any given trend.

Let me ask two “toy planet” questions.

1. Suppose you had a way to determine air temperature 2 meters above the surface at every point on toy planet — a SuperSatellite, perhaps. You could then perform an integration and determine the average air temp, and plot it over time. Set a baseline period, determine the mean, subtract that number from “average air temp,” and you have an anomaly trace. Would that be meaningful?

2. Consider Lucia’s 5-continent mountain/valley toy planet from the Spherical Cow post, with all 10 thermometers operational. Over 100 years, toy planet enters a Medieval Warm Period (or descends into a Little Ice Age). Would you think that an anomaly trace built from those 10 instruments would be informative or uninformative, as to the general climactic trends?

Re: AMac (Mar 7 06:32),

Noisy means stochastic, and is taken care of statistically, if the only mechanism for changes in temperature is heating and cooling by radiation. IF though there exists a mechanism that reverses the temperature trends ( as wind currents often do), the change is not stochastic, and it defeats the purpose of using average deviations from an average in situ temperature (anomaly).

1. Suppose you had a way to determine air temperature 2 meters above the surface at every point on toy planet — a SuperSatellite, perhaps. You could then perform an integration and determine the average air temp, and plot it over time. Set a baseline period, determine the mean, subtract that number from “average air temp,” and you have an anomaly trace. Would that be meaningful?

There is always a meaning in a measurement. The question is, what meaning?
To take this average world temperature, put it in a gray body formula ( as if for a star) and use the changes in time to gauge whether the planet is heating or cooling, one would have to convolute it with a) a planet wide function that would turn the 2m height temperature to surface temperature,
b) a planet wide function that would have the gray body constants, and c) a planet wide function that would have the radiation spectrum for those gray body constants, in order to see what is happening with radiation over time. It is radiation changes that determine whether the planet is cooling or heating.

Though, as for a star, one could take averages for a) b) and c) these are time dependent ( think albedo), and one cannot offhand say that if the T ( at 2 meters) rises (falls), the planet heats ( i.e. retains more heat than it radiates) (or cools) by X watts/m^2 without doing the calculations.

Temperature is a proxy for energy and the energy balance can be extracted given enough information about a) b) and c).The anomaly, as a proxy of a proxy, has little meaning in energy balance.

for 2) see above. one would still have to go through a) b) and c) with the estimated temperatures. I believe the anomaly will be meaningless, if the toy planet has wind and pressure etc patterns.

carrot eater (Comment#36702)

“Yes, those things [internal redistribution or change of cloud cover - a change in earths albedo] are imaginable; they’re the variations associated with ENSO.

It’s rather harder to get those things to give you 30 years of a sustained trend in warming or cooling, globally. When the oceans, surface and troposphere are all warming or cooling for that long, you pretty much need a radiation imbalance.”

No, data reported by Pallé (earthshine project) indicates large decadal variations in earths albedo NOT associated with ENSO.

Pallé: “Traditionally the Earth reflectance has been assumed to be roughly constant, but large decadal variability, not reproduced by current climate models, has been reported lately from a variety of sources.”
http://solar.njit.edu/preprints/palle1379.pdf

Radiation imbalance – yes. Is it forced anthropogenically or cosmically – not necessarily.

Re: anna v (Mar 7 07:24),

I believe the anomaly will be meaningless, if the toy planet has wind and pressure etc patterns.

Your discussion points out that average surface temperature is especially useful for getting estimates of changes in heat content in some particular volume or for estimating out going radiation. Both points are true. But you go much to far in decreeing it “meaningless”. Surface temperature is important for biological processes at the surface. Knowing it is going up or down on average is a useful thing. Average surface temperature is a good proxy for detecting general warming or cooling — both of which are worth knowing since I, for one, would like to know whether Chicago is likely to end up under a glacier or Florida underwater. The average over the surface is also useful for testing our predictive ability.

Does it have “meaning”? I don’t know. It’s a useful quantity to monitor, and we do. If it weren’t obviously useful, we wouldn’t have quite so many people arguing about whether data products like GISS might be biased.

Things can be useful without

Re: Stephan (Mar 7 02:22),

The Arctic-ROOS graphs are problematic. First, the data are smoothed so the endpoint of the current data can move a lot depending on the value of the last few points. Second, the relative positions of the graphs for recent years do not agree with the other published Arctic ice extent data sets like JAXA, NOAA and Uni-Bremen.

I would like to see some recovery of Arctic ice extent, but I don’t see it happening yet. The monthly averages for the thirty years of NSIDC satellite data are fit very well by straight lines with negative slopes.

Yes Jaxa is also looking very solid thanks

If you look at Christy’s latest Readme, he clearly states that the 5.3 version will reduce the annual cycle, but not change the overall trend. If you look at Roy Spencer’s chart for 2009, you will see that the adjustments balance out over the year. So, yes, May 2009 goes up and May 2010 will also be warmer than it would have been.

I should point out that the annual cycle was pointed out by Atmoz and Tamino, and before that by Eric Swanson (in a little noticed paper in 2005, discussing high latitude trends in the southern hemisphere). I may have been the first to plot the monthly trends.

Apparently all of the AMSU (newer) satellite-based anomalies will be adjusted in 5.3 (or more precisely, there will be less adjustment than there was). I’m not sure how far back that will go. It will be interesting to see the new data set.

What the heck are “times that should not produce a hottest winter”? Surely not during an El Nino, which are times which would produce a warm anomalies.

Deep Climate (Comment#36777)

I should point out that the annual cycle was pointed out by Atmoz and Tamino, and before that by Eric Swanson (in a little noticed paper in 2005, discussing high latitude trends in the southern hemisphere). I may have been the first to plot the monthly trends.

The high and important southern latitudes are also discussed in Carvalho et al 2007

Anti-persistence in the global temperature anomaly field (2007)

Abstract
In this study, low-frequency variations in temperature anomaly are investigated by mapping temperature anomaly records onto random walks. We show evidence that global overturns in trends of temperature anomalies occur on decadal time-scales as part of the natural variability of the climate system. Paleoclimatic summer records in Europe and New-Zealand provide further support for these findings as they indicate that anti-persistence of temperature anomalies on decadal time-scale have occurred in the last 226 yrs. Atmospheric processes in the subtropics and mid-latitudes of the SH and interactions with the Southern Oceans seem to play an important role to moderate global variations of temperature on decadal time-scales.

This allows us to pose some questions,

1)What is the underlying natural variation?

2)What are the mechanisms that attenuates and amplifies the natural variation.

3) Is the null hypothesis a correct question,or do we require another ?

)

Re: lucia (Mar 7 08:20),

Lucia, I was contrasting the meaning of temperature versus temperature anomalies the way they are calculated. The way the global anomaly is calculated there is not a one to one correspondence with temperature, the way there is if one uses a single measuring station. The anomaly is calculated in a 5degreeX5degree grid and then averaged as anomaly over the globe with the rational being that this enhances trends.

I am pointing out that averaging an anomaly of 10C in the arctic with a -4C in Russia is meaningless because more than one mechanism of energy transfer is involved.
http://nsidc.org/images/arctic.....igure4.png
The -4C in Russia,( or Chicago at that), has a meaning that that winter was colder locally. The average of +3 ((10-4)/2) anomaly tells Russia it is in a heatwave, which is not very helpful . It explains why even though for the majority of people in the north hemisphere the winter has been colder than any recent ones, the anomaly says it is hot. The arctic sent down its cold winds and took up our warm ones in a non linear process.

Of course there is a meaning of temperature measurements for the biosphere, and temperature is a measure by proxy of the energies involved. It is the anomalies that are one more level of complexity removed from the real physical mechanisms.

[...] Phil Jones caught out lying – again!, variations in CO2 measurements, Tomato cold, UAH temperature variations. [...]

Correction to my note on previous discussion of UAH annual cycle; Swanson was there in 2003 not 2005.

From my comment at WUWT at the time:

An interesting footnote: I see that Eric Swanson had already detected an annual cycle in the UAH antarctic temperature record back in 2003 (GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH LETTERS, VOL. 30, NO. 20, 2040, doi:10.1029/2003GL017938, 2003)

Of course there is a meaning of temperature measurements for the biosphere, and temperature is a measure by proxy of the energies involved. It is the anomalies that are one more level of complexity removed from the real physical mechanisms.

Accumulating those anomolies over the long term gives us an insight into climate trends.

Anna-
If you mean that the anomaly for the grid box is imperfectly correlated with temperatures were an individual lives: Yes. You are right. No one should try to diagnose the weather in their city using the temperature computed for the grid box that contains their city. There are all sorts of reasons these can be wrong. This is especially true if you try to examine something over a short period of time.

If you mean that many people (like me) experienced a cold winter despite the warm global anomaly: Yes. I’m one of them. Chicago has been freakin’ cold. No one should use the global anomaly to describe the recent temperatures in Chicago. They should use the temperatures in Chicago. One metric means one thing; the other means another. Both are meaningful– but must be used appropriately. This is pretty standard in science, engineering, cooking, life etc.

Anna V

You seem to be overly concerned with a problem that no one else cares about, namely, using temperature measurements to infer the total radiative flux. Indeed this might be a problem… if we didn’t have satellites! We can measure the emission spectrum of the atmosphere (which is all that matters since the atmosphere mediates the radiative flux at the relevant wavelengths) and the incoming spectrum. We don’t need the temp. measurements (expressed as anomalies or not) to determine this.

You also express the opinion that anomalies due to shifting of airmasses cannot be averaged due to other energy transfers. Presumably here you are talking about radiation or conduction. But convection is by far the principle method of heat transfer. Indeed the example you cite is just this effect.

To use the Arctic vs. Midlatitude example. Before the switch suppose that the arctic airmass has an anomaly of +3 and for the midlats -2. If for the sake of argument the airmasses have the same mass and water content (in a practical sense these can be measured and accounted for) then we take the average anomaly we would get +1, no matter what the baseline temps. are. Now switch the position of the airmasses. It’s clear that when we average the new anomalies we will get the SAME average anomaly because the new anomalies are merely offset by the difference in the baselines.

No matter the movement of the air we still have a good measurement of the trends of the temperature and energy content of the atmosphere.

Having a look at your graph above, (the red, green and blue lines), can it be said that the temperature trend is decreasing? If not why not? After all the lines are progressively less steep.

If not, can it be said that the temperature trend is not increasing? As has been claimed by Al Gore and the warmists.

bugs (Comment#36651) March 6th, 2010 at 5:09 am
” The IPCC rely on more than temperatures.
Climate Models and their Evaluation”

The IPCC 2030 A1(Do nothing) emissions scenario for 2030 is 60 Gigatons/Yr. We are currently at 30 Gigatons a year.

Exxon Mobil would truly like to know where they can lay their hands on an extra 80 million barrels of oil a day and an extra 7 Billion tons of coal per year. Exxon Mobil believe their is room to accommodate 35% fossil energy growth by 2030, THe world energy organization believes 45% is possible. The IPCC believes 100% is probable.

“AND I WANT THE RAW DATA, AND THE DATA HE USED FOR THAT SPECIFIC GRAPH!!!!!”

And I want all e-mails sent or received, dental records, and his long form birth certificate.

I assure you that all this is expected of professionals in my field of expertise, which is not science, so obviously a scientist who refuses to abide by the rules of my profession is hiding something.

Link

Re: Tom W. (Mar 7 16:51),

I am concerned on whether we know if the earth is heating or cooling by looking at trends in global anomalies. That is what the panic is about, and yes, we have satellites and I am still looking for a plot of “radiative in minus radiative out” from satellites.

Your example does not hold, because one moves air with a temperature, not an anomaly. The high temperature going north gives a huge positive anomaly, the low temperature coming south is taken up by storm systems, mixes in the atmosphere vertically and dissipates down to the temperatures we measure, not -50C but upwards of -20, giving negative anomalies.

bugs – “quite a peculiar moment, to make changes to the dataset…”

actually bugs, now was the time, while the anomoly’s are high, so that you can see eggsactly what is happening.

Re: anna v (Mar 7 22:45),

repeat of second paragraph:
Your example does not hold, because one moves air with a temperature, not an anomaly. The high temperature going north gives a huge positive anomaly, the low temperature coming south is taken up by storm systems, mixes in the atmosphere vertically and dissipates down to the temperatures we measure, not -50C but upwards of -20, giving negative anomalies, which are smaller in value than the positive on the pole, as the plot for february shows:
http://nsidc.org/images/arctic.....igure4.png

que pasa with you ice guys
http://arctic-roos.org/observa.....-in-arctic
its also much much thicker check out your pals at CT and look at the concentration maps.
Answer will be winter ice no reflect anything LOL

What the heck are “times that should not produce a hottest winter”? Surely not during an El Nino, which are times which would produce a warm anomalies.
.
if you look at the enso index, you would NOT expect this el nino to produce any records. it is a minor one.
.
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/e.....index.html
.
on the other hand, the lack of sunspots (remember, it is the sun?!?) is pretty special.
and we are in a negative PDO phase. and we have seen “12 years of cooling” already. tempertures should be in free fall right now. according to sceptic predictions.
.
anyone remember Easterbrook?
.
http://rankexploits.com/musing.....peartures/

que pasa with you ice guys
http://arctic-roos.org/observa…..-in-arctic
its also much much thicker check out your pals at CT and look at the concentration maps.
Answer will be winter ice no reflect anything LOL
.
which part of the term TREND do you folks not understand?
.
http://nsidc.org/images/arctic.....igure3.png

DeNihilist (Comment#36856) March 7th, 2010 at 10:57 pm

bugs – “quite a peculiar moment, to make changes to the dataset…”

actually bugs, now was the time, while the anomoly’s are high, so that you can see eggsactly what is happening.

You will have to ask sod about that, not me.

Re: Richard (Mar 7 17:20),

Having a look at your graph above, (the red, green and blue lines), can it be said that the temperature trend is decreasing? If not why not? After all the lines are progressively less steep.

Assuming that you are replying to me about the monthly average ice extent graph to which I linked, why do you think different months having different slopes means that the trend is decreasing? The slope at the maximum in March is less than the slope at the minimum in September. The slope of the annual average is, not surprisingly, between those two slopes. But each new point added as time passes is consistent with the trend for the previous thirty years. The slope for any given month isn’t changing significantly.

DeWitt Payne (Comment#36894)
Re: Richard (Mar 7 17:20),

Assuming that you are replying to me about the monthly average ice extent graph to which I linked, why do you think different months having different slopes means that the trend is decreasing?

No I was not replying to you. I was looking at Lucia’s figure 1, UAH trends. The question was to Lucia.

The trend lines are progressively less steep. Common sense would dictate that the the trend was decreasing, or at any rate was not increasing.

Sod-The ENSO event in question is already over one sigma. It doesn’t look “minor” to me. Not to mention the fact that we aren’t actually seeing records, only near records.

“on the other hand, the lack of sunspots (remember, it is the sun?!?) is pretty special.”

Lack of sunspots? Dude, Minima is over already. Also, it’s hardly the case that everyone agrees with arguments for the importance of solar influences.

as for PDO, see that little red bar at the very end?

http://jisao.washington.edu/pdo/

That’s POSITIVE!

“and we have seen “12 years of cooling” already.”

No, we’ve seen twelve years of no warming. There’s a pretty important difference.

“tempertures should be in free fall right now. according to sceptic predictions.”

I didn’t know that skeptics made official predictions to which they all signed on. But given that we are coming out of the solar minima, we have positive ENSO and PDO, I really don’t see how temperatures would be “in freefall”.

What’s your point anyway? There must be some huge global warming hiding somewhere because it isn’t as cool as you think it should be? That’s pretty silly. The system cares not for how you think it “should” behave. It does what it does, and neither skeptic nor wackos like you can predict what it will do next.

Re: anna v (Comment#36860) March 7th, 2010 at 11:23 pm

My original statement still holds, that (acknowledging that I am neglecting local weather effects here) that the change in anomalies would still be due to the differences in their respective baselines.

As for weather, yes I agree that local weather such as air temperature changes due to the latent heat of precipitation or degree of stratospheric mixing will influence the temperature (and the anomaly on any given day, season, or year. But for any of these processes they are either:
a) stochastic, in which case they will be averaged out in the baseline
b) persistant/cyclical, in which case they will again be averaged out in the baseline
c) truly weird one time events, say a Moscow December with a week of 80′sF (maybe the thermometer reader went temporarily insane), all we can do here is examine the data point and determine whether this should be treated as an outlier. As you may know from labs in school this can be a tricky business, but at least they won’t happen often!
or d) These events are gradually increasing/decreasing over time and contribute to the overall trend, but this is a problem for physical inspection. For instance, many locales will have periodic high temps. due to El Nino, if El Nino is increasing in severity or frequency then we would have to try and ferret this out and determine its effect on the overall trend. If neither of these were happening then then El Nino and El Nino is unchanging over the baseline period then again it will not appear in the anomaly trend.
Sorry for the long post. Just trying to contribute to the dialogue on anomalies here.

Re: Andrew_FL (Comment#36920) March 8th, 2010 at 12:07 pm

Your post is antithetical to science. Saying that “The system cares not for how you think it “should” behave. It does what it does, and neither skeptic nor wackos like you can predict what it will do next.” implies that the PDO is completely unknowable, completely unpredictable in it’s behavior. If it’s complete noise then I wonder why it has a name in the first place. Something may be difficult to quantify but that doesn’t mean that it is unquantifiable. The PDO is especially difficult to predict, both in timing and intensity, but that does not mean that we cannot hypothesize (by looking at past behavior) about its future behavior.

Re: Richard (Mar 8 11:07),

The trend lines are progressively less steep. Common sense would dictate that the the trend was decreasing, or at any rate was not increasing.

To determine whether the trend is decreasing, we need uncertainty intervals. (The same would be said for a similar IPCC graph in the AR4.)

In the case of my graph in this post, we would not yet be able to distinguish those decreasing slopes from a constant trend with “noise”.

Tom W. (Comment#36923)-Thanks for reading into my post things I did not say. I did not say that the PDO and it’s behavior are “unknowable” I said that climate is (presently) unpredictable on short timescales. This is a statement with which everyone agrees (just ask weather forecasters how good they are more than a week or two out) because the behavior is not presently understood.

It might be someday but it isn’t now. In my mind “we don’t know” is not antithetical to science, it’s the most important phrase in science.

In comment 36756, Lucia wrote:

“Average surface temperature is a good proxy for detecting general warming or cooling — both of which are worth knowing since I, for one, would like to know whether Chicago is likely to end up under a glacier or Florida underwater.”

According to geologist William F. McClenney, you can say good-bye to Florida — no matter what man does or does not do about CO2 emissions.

See the 5-part series of articles by McClenney here:

http://icecap.us/index.php/go/.....imes_rule/

He provides an interesting perspective on the whole climate change issue.

A first look at UAH 5.3 (posted yesterday):

http://deepclimate.org/2010/03.....t-uah-5-3/