It seems NOAA prefers surface sampling from ships [a bucket thrown over the side] and buoys than those new-fangled ARGO buoys, can't trust them.
Ross McKitrick points out that to get the new NOAA sea surface data they added 0.12 °C to the buoy readings, to make them more like the ship data. That magic number came from Kennedy et al. (2011) where the uncertainty was reported as (wait for it) 0.12 ± 1.7°C. (Which is like saying there is definitely one apple here, give or take 17 apples. So this is what 95% certainty looks like?). Worse, that uber-extremely-uncertain-number was supposed to be used to adjust the ship data down so it was closer to the buoys. The authors felt the buoys were more accurate than bucket-from-ships. Even Karl et al paradoxically agree (have cake, eat cake), saying that because the buoy data is better, it should be weighted higher. In this fashion, the best data can get adjusted the most, to make it more like the bad data, then it can count for more. This is Double-Good-Science! Thanks to Ross McKitricks comments on Karl et al 2015 for details (1K PDF).
Not all alarmists are comfortable with this:
Dr Peter Stott, Head of Climate Monitoring and Attribution at the Britain’s Met Office Hadley Centre said…
“The slowdown hasn’t gone away, however,” and “The results of this study still show the warming trend over the past 15 years has been slower than previous 15 year periods.”
Prof Tim Osborn, Professor of Climate Science at the University of East Anglia, said he would caution against dismissing the slowdown in surface warming on the basis of this study, nor to downplay the role of natural decadal variability for short-term trends in climate.
“There are other datasets that still support a slowdown over some recent period of time, and there are intriguing geographical patterns such as cooling in large parts of the Pacific Ocean that were used to support explanations for the warming slowdown,” Professor Osborn said… (h.t to Waxing Gibberish).
[Reuters] “Some other experts said however the idea of a hiatus was still valid, since warming had probably slowed this century if compared to fast rates in the 1980s and 1990s.
“It is curious that a comparison with these decades was not included in this new study,” said Richard Allan, a professor of climate science at the University of Reading. (h/t Barry Woods)
