2015 Climate Announcement from NASA, NOAA

Climate experts from NOAA and NASA will announce new data on 2015 global temperatures during a media teleconference on Wednesday, Jan. 20, 11:00 a.m. ET. The scientists will also discuss the year’s most important weather and climate events in context of long-term warming trends.

You can read more about it here, and listen to a livestream of the briefing here (it starts at 11:00 A.M. Eastern time).

Monty Hall

Readers as old as I am may remember one of TV’s more popular game shows, Let’s Make a Deal, and its host Monty Hall. Those keen on probability and statistics may also know of a now-classic, once in dispute, problem known as the Monty Hall problem.

Martin Luther King

Joe Romm and Van Jones have an excellent essay on the urgent need for climate action, on this day which celebrates the life of a great American, Martin Luther King.

Cherry Cruz Cherry Monckton Cherry Christy Cherry Spencer Cherry Curry

Amid all the brouhaha about Ted Cruz’s insistence that the globe isn’t warming, based on his using satellite data for the lower troposphere (not Earth’s surface), insisting that it’s “the best we’ve got” (it isn’t), and ignoring absolutely all the other evidence (which isn’t just powerful, it’s overwhelming), we haven’t paid enough attention to the fact that Cruz, and Monckton, and Christy, and Spencer, and Curry are cherry picking. Not just a little — they are cherry cherry cherry picking.

Earth to John Christy

John Christy doesn’t like criticism of the satellite temperature record. He has multiple objections, but the one that struck me as bizarre is this one which was recently brought to my attention:

Drift

The Rabett made an interesting post recently, based on an idea that occurred to him on the subject of the “Cruz pause” (a drawback to slumming at Lucia’s).

If the changes in temperature over short periods (like days or months or even annually) track each other, even just in direction in the satellite and surface records (so) then that is pretty convincing evidence that the problem is a long term drift in one or the other and that on the short term they are measuring the same thing.

N-TREND: New Kid on the Hockey Rink

A new paper by Wilson et al. combines data from paleoclimate reconstructions over the last 1000+ years, by a number of different researchers, to create a sort of “consensus” reconstruction. Hence the name: Northern hemisphere TREe-Ring Network Development, or N-TREND. As pointed out by And Then There’s Physics, it’s not groundbreaking or earth-shattering, it pretty much tells the story we already knew.

Higher and Higher

It’s been a while since the University of Colorado updated their satellite-based sea level data. But there’s a more recent update from AVISO.

What can one expect to have happened most recently? There’s been a lot of rainfall, which can move water from ocean to land and lower sea level. But there’s also an ongoing el Niño which tends to be associated with enhanced sea level. There’s also the fact that in the last few years, melt from the Greenland ice sheet has taken off like a bat out of hell. Of course, those fluctuations will be on top of the continuing sea level rise due to global warming. Here’s the data:

Not Cool

Hottest Year on Record

Back when Richard Muller announced the formation of the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project, those who deny the danger from global warming were thrilled. They thought the Berkeley project would prove once and for all just how Earth’s temperature had really changed. More to the point, Muller was skeptical about Earth’s reported temperature history, so they expected it to show that all those other guys — NASA, NOAA, HadCRU — got it wrong. Anthony Watts welcomed it, praised it, and announced that he would accept the results, whatever they were.

When the Berkeley project announced their results, deniers changed their tune. Instead of “showing the love” to Richard Muller and the gang, they turned on them like a pack of wolves. That’s because the Berkeley project showed that all those other guys — NASA, NOAA, HadCRU — got it right.