The WUWT site, Anthony Watts posted“The ‘Karlization’ of global temperature continues – this time RSS makes a massive upwards adjustment”
It seems since my last posting, the RSS satellite temperature record will be revised. It appears that it will be cited as proving there was no “pause”. Dr Mears, the chief scientist of RSS said that he has been bombarded with emails wondering why the RSS is supporting the DENIER’S view. Mears believes that the denialists (his words) like to cherry pick the starting point. Watts commented on this by saying:
” It seems to me based on his recent comments that Dr. Mears has gotten fed up with people using his RSS data set to suggest that the world isn’t warming as he expects it should”.
According to the WUWT posting, Mears and Wentz revised the RSS data and prepared a paper for submittal. Watts provides this exchange about the Mears, & Wentz paper:
“Given this sort of work has only two groups doing it, it is a very narrow field of scientific specialty, I asked Dr. Spencer this question:
“I assume neither you or Christy were asked to review this paper? There aren’t many satellite temperature data experts in the world”.
He replied:
“Interesting question….
John reviewed their original paper submission to JGR, in detail, asking for additional evidence — but not advocating rejection of the paper. The JGR editor ended up rejecting it anyway.
Mears & Wentz then revised the paper, submitted it to J. Climate instead, and likely asked that we be excluded as reviewers”.
UAH developers, Christy and Spencer have made a preliminary review of the paper and believe they have found a fatal flaw. Spencer sent this email to Watts:
“The paper is for MT, not LT…but I think we can assume that changes in one will be reflected in the other when Mears completes their analysis.
From what little we have looked at so far, it appears that they did not correct for spurious warming in NOAA-14 MSU relative to NOAA-15 AMSU…see their Fig. 7c. They just leave it in.
Since this spurious warming is near the middle of the whole time period, this shifts the second half of the satellite record warmer when NOAA-14 MSU (the last in the MSU series) is handed off to NOAA-15 AMSU (the first in the AMSU series).
Why do we think NOAA-14 MSU is at fault?
1) AMSU is supposed to have a “Cadillac” calibration design (that’s the term a NASA engineer, Jim Shiue, used when describing to me the AMSU design, which he was involved in).
2) NOAA-14 MSU requires a large correction for the calibrated TB increasing with instrument temperature as the satellite drifts into a different orbit. The NOAA-15 AMSU requires no such correction…and it wasn’t drifting during the period in question anyway.
So, it looks like they decided to force good data to match bad data. Sound familiar?”
The main point in Spencer’s reply is that the Mears & Wentz paper used spurious warming data which shifted the temperature record to warmer results. The rest of the jargon NOAA MSU and NOAA AMSU are the older and newer (advanced) microwave sounding units that read troposphere radiation used to gauge temperature. MT and LT are middle and lower troposphere.
Even if the new RSS temperature data is not retracted, the gap between IPCC forecast temperatures discussed in the previous posting and actual observations will remain.
A New Study
A new study was released in the journal Nature titled “Making sense of the early-2000s warming slowdown”. The lead author is John C. Fyfe, and there were several other notable warmers such as Michael E. Mann and Benjamin D. Santer listed as coauthors. The paper is behind a paywall but the Examiner.com posted a summary of the paper, using the title of “New paper shows there was a global warming hiatus this century”.
The Examiner posting said
“Climate researchers have published a new paper this week in the journal Nature Climate Change that acknowledges there has been a global warming slowdown from 2000-2014. Their research shows a hiatus did indeed occur and continued into the 21st century, contradicting another study last June that said the hiatus was just an artifact that “vanishes when biases in temperature data are corrected.”
Just as RSS says there was not any pause (hiatus) this paper says there was, indeed a pause.
cbdakota
Climate Change Sanity 