Surprise, but not Shock

The extremity of global temperature anomaly in February this year has shocked some people:

Record-breaking heat AGAIN

NASA has released the global temperature estimate for February of 2016. It’s a new record for the hottest monthly anomaly yet.

The red dot at the end marks the latest monthly value.

Surface or Satellite?

Lamar Smith Distorts Research

I (and others) happen to disagree with the conclusions of Fyfe et al., one of its authors being distinguished climate scientist Mike Mann. If scientists didn’t disagree, progress would be much more difficult. When we disagree with respect and politeness, everybody benefits.

There are of course a great many things we happen to agree on, one of which is that some people are exploiting their research, not representing it honestly, in order to promote an agenda.

One such is congressman Lamar Smith. Mike Mann recently penned this open letter to Smith:

Dear Congressman Lamar Smith,

Please don’t misrepresent (http://dailysignal.com/2016/02/26/the-inconvenient-facts-the-media-ignores-about-climate-change/) our recent Nature Climate Change commentary (http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/v6/n3/full/nclimate2938.html).

Our study does NOT support the notion of a “pause” in global warming, only a *temporary slowdown*, which was due to natural factors, and has now ended.

Our recent work (http://www.nature.com/articles/srep19831), which you fail to cite, indicates that the record warmth we are now experiencing can only be explained by human-caused global warming.

Michael E. Mann
Distinguished Professor of Atmospheric Science
The Pennsylvania State University
University Park, PA
16827

Well said.

Scientists will continue to disagree, as the battle of ideas moves us further along the path to truth. Unfortunately, political opportunists like Lamar Smith not only obstruct climate action when it’s most needed, they make it next to impossible for the voting public to know what it is that we disagree about. Of this you can be sure: it’s not what Lamar Smith claims.

New Dataset from RSS: End of the Satellite “Pause”?

Carl Mears and team at RSS have published a new paper describing a revision of their data for atmospheric temperature. The focus is on improving the “diurnal correction,” which is necessary because different regions of Earth are observed at different times of day. The upshot is that the lower atmosphere has warmed faster than was previously believed.

Leo!

Start at the 1:55 mark:

Amazing Optimism from Al Gore

This TED talk is amazingly good. It’s a beacon of realistic optimism in the struggle to fix the climate crisis. Watch it on youtube, or watch it here:

Hottest Monthly Temperature Anomaly Yet

NASA has released their temperature data for January of 2016, and this month came in as the hottest monthly temperature anomaly on record

Here’s what it looks like since 1970:

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Why Deny Global Warming?

Ted Cruz has recently been asked, by voters no less, why he denies global warming. His response has been to double down — nay, triple and quadruple down — on denial. His standard answer is a litany of idiotic denier memes, moronic talking points that are so easily refuted they can’t possibly appeal to anyone with half a brain and a smidgen of actual knowledge. If you’re in denial yourself, Ted Cruz sounds great; confident, fast-talking, all the right buzzwords, insults for your most reviled targets. But if you know the least bit of the truth about global warming, it’s far too obvious how full of baloney he is.

It raises a fascinating question: why is Ted Cruz (like so many others) in such extreme denial, and more to the point, why does he not only admit it, but flaunt it? Why not do like Marco Rubio and Jeb Bush, play the “I’m not a scientist” card and fall back on that other zombie lie — the “ruin the economy” lie, the one that isn’t just false, it’s the opposite of true?

Adjusting U.S. Temperature Data

One of the loudest and longest criticisms of U.S. (and other) temperature data is that the raw data are adjusted to compensate for non-climate factors, so we can better identify the changes due to climate factors (which is, after all, what we really want to know).

All the adjustment procedures are well documented, programs, raw and adjusted data are publicly available, but deniers continue to imply either total incompetence or, far too often, outright fraud — that adjustments only exist to exaggerate warming trends. In truth, adjustments exist to make the data better.