Questions remain for the AGW alarmists, page-23

Oh dear. So full of sound and fury, so thoroughly mixed up.

First up, let's get straight what we're actually talking about here. The first image he talks about is this one:


See that "RSS global mean temperature change" heading? That refers to Remote Sensing Systems, a company specialising in reconstruction of temperatures from satellite data. Now look just underneath the heading, to the name of the data file the graph comes from: "... TLT_Anomalies_Land_and_Ocean_v03_3.txt".Just to be absolutely clear, this is the dataset that he implies doesn't include ocean temperatures.

The second graph he puts up, meanwhile, is of the GISTEMP Land-Ocean Temperature Index, from NASA - so no, the two graphs emphatically do not come from the same data. I've put their latest below. The name kinda gives it away, but it is (throughout its length) calculated from a combination of land and ocean temperatures).



So, to recap what we have so far. Both graphs give estimates of temperatures over more-or-less the same area of Earth's surface, land and ocean. One (RSS) is a complex reconstruction of atmospheric air temperatures from satellite measurements, the other (NASA) is derived from direct temperature methods at the surface. Our hero claims the difference between the two is that only the latter includes ocean temperatures, which is simply false.

To add an extra layer of fail here, NASA actually do maintain a land-only data set - the graph is freely available on their webpage, right under the land-ocean temperature index one. It really doesn't look all that much different:



So on this, Nobel Prize or not, he really hasn't done his homework and has consequently made a fool of himself.


Clearing up a few other things from your rant:

- the RSS dataset only goes back to 1979 (obviously it can't go back further, since it comes from satellite measurements), so your whole (inarticulate, but impressively formatted) paragraph under THIRDLY is misplaced. I've put a plot of the full set below. Also, my reference to the stratosphere cooling referred to it cooling over time, not with altitude. I thought this went without saying, but clearly not. If you go to the RSS link above and scroll through their datasets you can see this for yourself - as you get higher and higher into the stratosphere, the downward trend of temperatures with time gets steeper and steeper. While you're there, don't forget to read their description of how the TLT set is calculated:

"TLT is constructed by calculating a weighted difference between MSU2 (or AMSU5) measurements from near limb views and measurements from the same channels taken closer to nadir, as can be seen in Figure 2 for the case of MSU. This has the effect of extrapolating the MSU2 (or AMSU5) measurements lower in the troposphere, and removing most of the stratospheric influence. Because of the difference involves measurements made at different locations, and because of the large absolute values of the weights used, additional noise is added by this process, increasing the uncertainty in the final results. For more details see Mears et al., 2009b."

My bold. It's also heavily affected by time-of-day issues, since each spot on the surface only gets sampled when a satellite happens to be over it and the satellite orbits don't neatly match the length of a day, and is undoubtedly affected in interesting ways by clouds and other atmospheric disturbances. As I said: a complex calculation, with lots of confounders (I know it's a big word, but feel free to look it up). Far from the gold standard that many in the denial industry make it out to be.