January 22, 2016

A "smashing" one tenth of one degree! Ya gotta laugh

Hansen emits no inaccuracy in what he says below.  The key to seeing what a risible emission it is lies in context and knowing what he does NOT say.


Hansen

The glaring omission is of course a total failure to mention the satellite record -- but there is much more to amuse even in the small excerpt below. His claim that a temperature rise of one tenth of one degree "smashed" the temperature record would amuse most people but, in the context of the truly minuscule changes Warmists normally are burdened with, I suppose you can understand his excitement.

Even that one tenth is a mirage, however. Hansen is the king of corrections and adjustments but, in another amusing act, he makes  no attempt to correct for the El Nino effect. In the past, Warmists often found fault with skeptics who did not correct for the effects of the 1998 El Nino so it is quite a travesty that Hansen is not making any corrections for the current El Nino.  "Do as I say, not as I do" seems to be the gospel of the Green/Left

He is well aware of the current El Nino and describes it fairly but fails to mention that all or nearly all of that wondrous one tenth is due to El Nino, not CO2.  I showed yesterday why that is so.  The unusual "leap" in warming has no corresponding unusual leap in CO2 levels. Reality is so disappointing to the Green/Left.  But they have become experts at seeing only what they want to see  -- and Hansen has a well-developed talent in that direction.

And he HAS to see that one tenth as significant.  He admits that the past changes that have sparked proclamations of "warmest" years have been only in hundredths of one degree.  He is not blind to how trivial are the changes that Warmists hang their hats on.

We really should be a bit sorry for the old fraud. Warmism is his life's work but he must know by now that it is a castle built on sand.  He knows the numbers, unlike his disciples in the media.  And the numbers are not kind.  The reality that repeatedly emerges from them is that we live in an era of exceptional temperature stability.  How galling for people who fancy themselves as "saving the planet"!

Note finally that he uses the "adjusted" sea surface temperature record originally promulgated by Tom Karl.  The adjustments were very convenient to Warmists and Karl is very secretive about the deliberations that went into creating them.  As usual, getting research details out of Warmists is like getting blood out of a stone. Warmists don't subscribe to normal scientific ethics.  They can't afford to.

But at any event, why make any adjustment at all?  The satellite record covers both land and ocean evenly, simultaneously and comparably.  It is a far superior methodology to trying to create some comparability in the higgeldy-piggeldy thermometer data.  Because of El Nino, the satellite data might even show a small uptick for 2015.

All in all, the article is a rather good example of lying with statistics.  Everything he says is factually true.  It's just not the full story.


Global Temperature in 2015

James Hansen et al.

Update of  the GISS (Goddard Institute for Space Studies) global temperature analysis (GISTEMP) finds 2015 to be the warmest year in the instrumental record.  Unlike the prior three record years, 2014, 2010 and 2005, each of which exceeded the preceding record by only a few hundredths of a degree, 2015 smashed the prior record by more than 0.1°C . The only prior record-raising jump of annual global temperature as large, probably slightly larger, was in 1998. The 1998 temperature was boosted by the strong 1997 - 98 “El Niño of the century".  The 2015 temperature was boosted by an El Niño of comparable magnitude.

The high 2015 global temperature should practically terminate discussion of a hypothesized “global warming hiatus”, as the past two warm years remove the impression that warming has plateaued.  Close examination (Fig. 1b) reveals that the warming rate of the past decade is less than in the prior 30 years, but such fluctuations are not unusual and can be accounted for by a combination of factors. The present GISTEMP analysis uses the NOAA ERSST.v4 (Extended Reconstructed Sea Surface Temperature, Version 4) 5 for ocean surface temperatures. Principal change in v4, relative to v3 that was used in recent years, is a revision of the ship SST bias adjustment, which Huang et al. 5 well justify.

SOURCE

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