Is There A Pause In Global Temperatures?

The “pause”, meaning the lack of global temperature rise in the 21^st century, has gotten a lot of attention. The warmers want to deny that it is significant. The skeptics say that it is very significant in that atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) has been increasing during this period of time. According to the wamer’s theory, global temperatures should have been rising. Last year, some of the keepers of the global temperature records decided they had, had enough of this focus on the “pause”. So they made some bogus changes to the way the temperature was measured and when they were finished, they said—– see there really was no pause. Click here to see how they have tried to pull this off.

There are several global temperature amassing groups. These groups broadly are divided by being ground based or satellite based. The former are dependant on temperatures measured mostly from ground-based stations supplemented by some ocean surface temperature measurements. The ground-based stations are primarily in populated areas. Northern Hemisphere stations predominate. The vast areas of the oceans (75 % of the globe’s surface) are minimally covered. There are also enormous areas of land where population is very limited, or no one at all. In those areas, computers predict the missing temperatures.

The ground station leaders are: (1) (GISS), NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (2) (HadCRUT4) the Hadley Centre of the UK Met Office and the land surface air temperature records compiled by the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia. (3) NCEI) NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information.

(For those of you with longer memories, yes, the University of East Anglia was the headquarters of the Climategate gang)

The latter group consists of two satellite based global temperature-measuring organizations. Satellites measure radiance in various wavelengths in troposphere. The troposphere extends about 7 miles above the Earth’s surface and the troposphere is where all of our weather occurs. The radiance measurements are translated into temperatures. In 1979, the University of Alabama at Huntsville (UAH) was the first satellite system to begin reading these temperatures. Start up problems are typical with any new breakthrough technology. For example early on there were problems with orbital decay and also with drift.   The UAH promptly made allowances for those problems as they have  with some smaller ones as time has past. The weather balloons (radiosondies) that have been used for many years, show agreement with the UAH satellite measurements. This is confirming proof of the satellite systems high accuracy and because it actually measures temperature across nearly the entire globe, that makes it the gold standard. The other satellite system is the Remote Sensing System (RSS). UAH and RSS have a few differences in how they make their tropospheric measurements, still the resulting temperatures are in close agreement. The satellites measurements cover about 95% of the Earth’s surface eliminating the use of computers to simulate actual measurements, as is the case with the ground based systems.

The illustration below shows the Earth’s atmosphere with the troposphere being the lowest part.

The final player in this drama is the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The IPCC is a branch of the UN. It was created to show how man was causing global warming and what the consequences of that would be. No, the IPCC was not created to examine the science of global warming; the founders had already decided man was the cause. The IPCC is programmed to report on the status of their work about every 5 years or so. The IPCC is often said to be the warmer’s equivalent of the “spoken word.” Most of the mainstream media accepts without question any pronouncement that is said to be from the IPCC—in their mind, it is the ultimate authority. Many major newspapers and science journals (and other media, too) do not allow, in their media, skeptical views, research, questions, letters to the editor, etc.

The IPCC produce temperature forecasts. These forecasts are the basis for catastrophic things that will happen—-flood, drought, snow, sea level, vast migrations of people, etc. —–if we do not quit using fossil fuels.

In the next posting, we will compare the IPCC temperature forecasts to the ground and satellite measured temperatures.

cbdakota