The Blackboard

I thought some of you might be interested in a communication by John Anthony, Communications Director Climate and Energy United Nations Foundation
Subject: IPCC communications meeting/call today at UN Foundation
AGENDA
1. Introductions (5 mins)
2. Welcome/explanation of coordination efforts to date and gathering of partners (5 mins)
3. Where things stand (15 mins)
4. Immediate needs/next [...]

Many of you are used to seeing comparisons of observed and projected trends here. But I also sometimes cycle through to show comparison of absolute temperature anomalies to projections temperature anomalies using the baseline the authors of the IPCC AR1 selected when illustrating projections. That is: I show how temperature anomalies would appear if super-imposed [...]

Yesterday, Arthur Smith asked some good questions about my version of Figure 9.5. I answered in comments, but I think it’s worth repeating ‘above the fold’. These are Arthur’s questions:
Hi Lucia,
your graph doesn’t match the IPCC one very closely – why? Just looking around the 1998 El Nino peak, there are the [...]

While visiting Climate Audit I clicked a link to web page that reminded me that Chapter 9 of the WG1 contribution to the IPCC AR4 used the 1901-1950 baseline to illustrate how well models hindcast the 20th century:
The AR4 was published in 2007, so data end with the annual average data for 2005. [...]

Troposphere temps up or down? Yesterday, RSS said up; today, UAH says down. Here are the temperature anomalies since UAH began operation:

UAH for March was 0.208 C; April’s 0.091 anomaly is C . That’s quite a drop! (In contrast, RSS rose 0.04C.)
UAH for April 2008 was 0.015 C; April 2009 was 0.244C. [...]

RSS posted their anomaly: The Lower Troposphere warmed relative to the temperature in March 2009 and April 2008. I’ve created a very cluttered graph illustrating many things about RSS below:
As you can see:

The observed temperature from April, 2009, which is circled in red, and enclosed in a black triangle is up from March [...]

In comments, it appears Deep Climate wants us to compare the current trends to the stated trend in Table 10.5 in the AR4.
Slight correction to my previous comment: I was confusing the A2 and A1B scenario IPCC projections. The former is 0.66 C (0.21/decade) to 2030 and the latter is 0.69 C (0.22/decade). The [...]

HadCrut 3 reported their March anomaly. Here are their current values for the past two months:
2009/02 0.356
2009/03 0.359
You can see how these relate to previous temperatures in the figure below:
I’ve circled the March values in the figure above, you can see March is just a tiny bit warmer than February.
The big question for next month: Will [...]

GISS reported their land/ocean temperature anomaly for March 2009. The GISSTemp March anomaly was 0.47 C, up from 0.41C in February. Than may be spun all sorts of ways: For examples, it’s lower than March ‘08 value of 0.68 C, but higher than March ‘00 0.46C and of course, it’s higher than every [...]

From time to time, I like to think about how to show compare simulated and observed temperatures not in the way I think “best” but using methods “most similar” to figures contained in the AR4 itself. Today, I decided it would be useful to concoct a figure that compares the observed anomalies using a [...]