You know how the warmists parrot on that “satellites agree with surface temperatures” – not any more – they should check the data.

Half a decade back you could make the case that trends 1979-2005 in the old land only CRUTem2 were not too different from University of Alabama at Huntsville AMSU satellite based lower troposphere trends.

The introduction of the UKMO dominated CRUTem3 in 2006 saw the land trends 1979-2005 blow out and the just introduced CRUTem4 of Dr Phil Jones et al has increased the warming trend 1979-2010 again over the earlier CRUTems and satellites.
So the next time somebody says to you, “…well anyway the satellite temperature trends agree with the surface…”..
You should ask them to check the numbers because it simply is not so anymore.

19 thoughts on “You know how the warmists parrot on that “satellites agree with surface temperatures” – not any more – they should check the data.”

  1. Now that has set it out with clarity.
    So the sfc minus sat trends are huge and growing.

  2. Differences like this are giving science a bad name. Meanwhile Roy Spencer says that

    “Even without any adjustments, the ISH data have a 20% lower warming trend than the CRUTem3 data, a curious result since the CRUTem3 dataset is supposedly adjusted for urban heat island effects.”

  3. Thanks Geoff – I did see Dr Roy Spencer’s comment over at Watts –
    Have to say I have never accessed the ISH data – but if it is anything like GHCN – UHCN – then it will be riddled with errors.
    IMHO it is an urban myth that – “…the CRUTem3 dataset is… adjusted for urban heat island effects.” From their earliest versions in the 1980’s – the Jones team has never “adjusted for urban heat island effects”.
    If you read Brohan et al 2006 – the paper that birthed CRUTem3 – pdf available at link in main article – you will see that on page 4 they start talking about Uncertainties – they take several pages yakking on about this – that – and the other – type of error in their data – before on page 9 dismissing Urbanisation effects in about a half page. Despite UHI being the single most important all pervasive contamination in global T data. All they conclude is to agree with the Jones et al 1990 Letter to Nature figure of 0.05 over a century. Which I would have thought has been comprehensively trashed in view of Jones own revised views on Sino data as per one of his 2008 papers. See —
    History made as Jones et al 2008 paper admits huge urban warming in IPCC flagship CRUT3 gridded data over China” – March 16th, 2009

  4. Genuine statement through current NASA employee …

    “My son is a nuclear physicist with NASA and knows GHG theory is bogus and NASA distorts AGW data. BHO won’t allow Civil Servants to express skepticism. James Hanson is actual spokesman for NASA on GHG theory, picked by Al Gore and BHO”

    This was said by a father to a contact I have who spoke personally with that father on April 13th.

  5. Warwick – I now see an identical warming trend of 0.134 C per decade for the entire record from 1979 to last month in both satellite datasets – UAH and RSS.

    So the difference between satellite and surface data is even bigger now. What really amazes me is the distortion in CRUT4 of the most recent years. CRUT4 has 2005 and 2007 both warmer than 1998, with 2007 even being warmer than 2010 (see second graph here).

    This is crazy – impossible when you think of the strong El Nino conditions in 1998 and 2010: of course they are the two warmest years, as both satellite series show. 2007 was roughly a neutral year for El Nino overall, and it is 0.25 C cooler than 2010 in the UAH series, which makes sense. Now, 0.25 C is a large difference – almost two-thirds of the total range of annual temperatures in CRUT4 over the last 14 years. How CRUT4 can possibly rate 2007 warmer than 2010 is beyond me.

    I wonder if the RSS satellite people, Mears, Wentz et al, who have long bought into the warming story, are now seeing the light, as their own data line up almost exactly with UAH but diverge widely from the corrupted surface aggregates.

  6. Warwick, I am sure that you are aware that Phil Jones has pointed to the paper by Wang & Jones which has been found to be scientific fraud in a peer reviewed article by Douglas Keenan see www.informath.org/pubs/EnE07a.pdf (the latter was also submitted under oath to a UK Parliament inquiry). Jones has claimed that he just did the statistics and had nothing to do with the data supplied by Wang. However, Jones still relies on this fraud to claim that UHI is insignificant. It seems to me that now Jones, inCRUT4, is claiming the present measurements are accurate (ie no UHI) but he is deducting the equivalent UHI from past measurements to make them cooler and increase the trend which is not there in the raw data. I suggest that Jones knew about Wang’s data and still accepts Wang’s fraud to cover his own sins.

  7. Thanks cementafriend – I have tried to keep up with Keenan’s exposure of Jones et al 1990 over the years. I have a page here debunking;
    Jones et al 1990 Letter to Nature
    Jones PD, Groisman PYa, Coughlan M, Plummer N, Wangl WC, Karl TR (1990) Assessment of urbanization effects in time series of surface air temperatures over land. Nature 347:169-172

    with the 4 pages scanned.
    If you look down the page you will see I have assembled many links to ClimateAudit where Steve ran a whole series of articles critical of “Jones et al 1990 Letter to Nature” over the years. There is much to dig into there as many of us tried to reconstruct what stations Jones had used here and there.

    But the pdf is now downloadable at my crudata page – just scroll down to;
    The famous Jones et al 1990 Letter to Nature

  8. One thing that Roy Spencer found in the ISH data relevant to Australia is the marked cooling as urban population increased in the US southwest.

    I noted at his blog that this looks like an Urban Irrigation Effect. Lower density = more gardens = more irrigation. Resulting in higher temperatures from WV GHG warming and albedo changes.

    Much of Australia has a similar climate to the US SW and urban irrigation is widespread.

    However, here in Perth when the official station was moved from opposite a nightly irrigated park to an unirrigated location, nighttime temperatures immediately rose 1.5C.

    Whether you irrigate at day or night seems to determine whether you get higher or lower temperatures, with effects substantially larger than the claimed CO2 GHG warming.

    And in case you think readings from the bush avoid this problem, I’ve been in remote locations in WA and the only patch of green for a 100 Ks is a small area of grass in front of the shire office, the usual location for temperature measurements.

  9. CRU doesn’t do any UHI correction for individual locations. The claimed 0.05 C increase due to urban heat islands apparently is applied to global temperatures as the last step in their analysis. It is a travesty.

  10. Warwick,
    it seems that it’s not only the “official” temperature rise in NZ that is under discussion.
    Century old map throws new doubt on climate change sea level claims. A new book on the history of New Zealand has inadvertently stirred the climate change debate by revealing a near zero sea level increase over the past century.

    The book, The Great Divide by Ian Wishart, includes a 100 year old map of Cloudy Bay lagoons in New Zealand, drafted back in 1912 to show the location of 20 kilometres of canals dug with wooden spades by ancient Maori….appearing very like today.

    www.investigatemagazine.co.nz/Investigate/?p=2719&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=new-book-blows-treaty-of-waitangi-debate-wide-open

  11. Sorry. Should have waited on confirmation, indeed still waiting.

    Appears strange. Link above from val majkus contradicts Real Science, but shows Real Science page.

  12. I agree Graeme it’s weird but on one hand you can post a comment on the Steve Goddard site but not now on the Real Science site

  13. Warwick,

    Thanks for this terrific summary. What a useful and succinct tool to have at one’s disposal!

  14. As a layman, I’d like to point out that the table at top could be more layman – friendly (labeling). Am I correct that I’m looking at degrees/decade trend for satellite dataset, non-sat. set A, non-sat. set B, non-sat set C? It was hard to digest at first.

    Thanks for all you do.

  15. Thanks for having a look Ed – yes the column labelled UAH AMSU is the satellite data from Spencer & Christy at the University of Huntsville, Alabama –
    CRUT2 is the land only data of Professor Jones & team at the Climate Research Unit, University of Norwich. CRUT2 evolved in the 1980’s, was current for many years and ended in 2005.
    Superceded by CRUT3 which was dominated by the UK Met Office.
    Now early this year Prof Jones is back with his new version CRUT4 – which as you can see carries even more warming compared to earlier CRUT versions and satellites. The period 1979-2010 was used because the first editions of CRUT4 I saw were not updated through 2011. Early in 2013 I plan another update through 2012.

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