Founding Fathers Who Weren't So Virtuous

I learned some interesting things from Richard Brookhiser's book James Madison -- mostly, that the "founding fathers" where hardly paragons of virtue, and the same shenanigans went on then as go on today. Did you know:

• (Incidentally) It was Benjamin Franklin who came up with the terms "positive" and "negative" for electric charge?
• Also, that he had a grandson, Benjamin Franklin Bache, who was a journalist referred to as "Lightning Rod Junior." Is that a great nickname or what?
• Bache was jailed under the Alien and Sedition Act. A Vermont newspaper editor was convicted for writing that President John Adams "grasp[ed] for power" and exhibited "ridiculous pomp," and was fined $1000 and spent four months in a freezing, stinking jail cell. Journalist James Callendar was arrested and convicted for calling Adams a "hideous hermaphroditical character" and was sentenced for nine months in jail and fined $200. Torture then, torture now.
• That journalists of the time were frequently beaten up by those angered by their rhetoric.
• James Callendar, mentioned above, first wrote the story about Thomas Jefferson and his mistress Sally Hemings (his slave) after James Madison (who was then Jefferson's Secretary of State) turned him away when he came looking for a patronage job. Callendar was found drowned in a river only 10 months later, which the coroner ruled an accident (Callendar was, reportedly, bathing while drunk).
• That George Washington and the Senate passed a treaty signed with Britain in 1794 and tried to keep it secret, partly because the treaty did not require that Britain return escaped slaves. Benjamin Franklin Bache printed the treaty and made it known by distributing it widely. 
• George Washington advocated that a canal be built near where he owned land, because he knew the canal would open up the area, lead to development, and increase the value of his property.
  
• Thomas Jefferson and James Madison did not know that the Louisiana Purchase did not include Florida. Then they paid France $2M to try and steal it away from Spain.

And more. It's a great book -- I recommend it.

Blogsam and Websam

Stuff I think is interesting and once probably thought about blogging more about but now it's too late:

• The United States has more people in solitary confinement than any other country in the world. Read that again..... What a shameful statistic.... Now read this essay in the Washington Post by someone who spent a decade in such confinement in China, and somehow came out still able to communicate his experience and feelings. If you need more, read the Jonathan Turley piece from earlier this month, also in the Post, titled 10 Reasons the U.S. is no longer the land of the free.
• What the hell is happening to us? Really? Does anyone have a clue??
• I have a long news article in the January issue of Physics World about light field cameras -- digital cameras that take pictures you can focus after you snap them. Just might be the next big thing in photography -- there is certainly a lot of big Silicon Valley money behind the idea.
• An op-ed in today's WSJ repeats the myth that there has been no warming "for well over 10 years." (I'm being kind by calling it a myth.) We've already seen that the ocean continues to warm, though I haven't calculated the trend yet. It's true that the surface isn't warming lately -- the linear trend of the last 120 months of HadCRUT3 surface data is -0.078 ± 0.027 C/decade (R²=0.07) -- but if you wanted to find temperature of some system, would you only measure the temperature on some boundary in its interior? Of course not! You'd measure many different parts of it. (The 10-yr trend of the UAH lower troposphere temperatures is +0.032 ± 0.097 C/decade, which is not statistically significant.) They seem not to even know about the recent Loeb paper in Nature Geosciences, despite writing,
  

  If elected officials feel compelled to "do something" about climate, we recommend supporting the excellent scientists who are increasing our understanding of climate with well-designed instruments on satellites, in the oceans and on land, and in the analysis of observational data.

• House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (Guess_His_Party-VA) actually said this about Warren Buffett's secretary, who was invited by Pres. Obama to attend his State of the Union address after Buffett wrote that he pays less taxes than his secretary (17.4% to 35.8%):
  

  "We want her to make more money, we want her to have more hope for the future. . . . [But] this notion that somehow the income that Warren Buffett makes is the same as a wage income for his secretary, we know that’s not the same."

  Clearly he thinks some people's money is better than other people's money. Unbelievable. And now the long knives are already after her.
  
• This didn't seem to get much news time, but... the U.S. health insurance situation continues to fall to pieces: about 1% fewer workers are covered every year, for several years now. Since 2008 the uninsured rate has risen from 14.8% to 17.1%. That's about 2.3 million adults a year who have lost their insurance -- 189,000 per month. Have you heard any discussion of this at the Republican candidate debates? Any? Even Obama barely mentioned health care in his SOTU. The whole system is going to shit and it's like no one wants to talk about it until it hits them.
  

Joke Too Good Not to Post

Did you hear about the homeopath who forgot to take his medicine?
He died of an overdose.


Via Tallbloke (where they are busy constructing an alternate scientific reality. Really.)

New Ocean Heat Data (And Yes, the Trend is Up)

NOAA has updated their upper ocean heat content data to Dec 2011, and it doesn't look like much cooling is going on. (Tamino deconstructs those who are trying to spin it otherwise.)



Here is a nice chart that explains why ocean heating is a much better indicator of warming than atmospheric temperatures -- let alone atmospheric temperatures measured where we happen to live, on the surface -- about 90% of the heat being added to the planet ends up in the oceans. (Also known as, why you can stick your hand in a 200°F oven but not 200°F water.)

Hadley's December Temperature

The Hadley Centre publishes their December '11 temperature anomaly: +0.262 C.

http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/temperature/hadcrut3vgl.txt

At least by my records, that makes 2011 the 11th warmest year in their records (which go back to 1850), and last month the 16th warmest December -- ignoring subtleties of uncertainties and all that. I'm on a deadline.

Another IPCC Demand for Secrecy « Climate Audit

Steve McIntyre has received another request from the IPCC to remove text and a figure from the AR5 ZODS (Zero Order Drafts) that appear on his site:

http://climateaudit.org/2012/01/26/another-ipcc-demand-for-secrecy/

He responded with a request for the legal basis behind their request; it will be interesting to read the response, if any.

I haven't responded to the IPCC request I received, and as of now don't plan to. I continue to strongly believe the documents are of public and journalistic interest (especially those of WG2), and have been working on a piece with more on this. As a journalist I believe I have every right to publish this material, which I did not obtain by illicit means. (And, as far as that goes, I also have that right as a US citizen.) Nor do I see how I can possibly be bound by any IPCC strictures.

I honestly don't know enough about Canadian law to know Steve's position -- he writes that he knows of nothing that legally binds him, either. And I certainly think his long record of investigation and blogging demonstrates he should qualify under any freedoms of the press (while recognizing that courts both here and there are still sorting this out). He said that he registered as an IPCC reviewer of the FODs but never received any documents, and didn't (and wouldn't) agree to confidentiality agreements.

In any case, the documents are now mirrored at Cryptome, as well as Wikispooks.

I think the IPCC is making a mountain out of molehill on this, and fanning what were barely warm embers. It makes me wonder if they aren't pressing this issue just because they can.

Cool Pic of a Dust Cloud Over the Atlantic

Here's a great image of a a dust plume from the western Sahara making its way across the Atlantic Ocean. (Taken by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite, on January 19th.)

Greedy Lying Bastards

This looks like it will be provocative (to say the least) -- an upcoming documentary on the oil industry called Greedy Lying Bastards, by Craig Rosebraugh. Here's the trailer:



Via PRNewswire:

How can you right the wrongs when the fossil field industry wields so much influence over energy and environmental policies? "Greedy Lying Bastards" details the people and organizations casting doubt on climate science and claiming that greenhouse gases are not affected by human behavior and includes interviews with scientists, industry experts, international political delegates, climate change victims as well as deniers, and people affected by the practices of the fossil fuel industry. Among them: UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon; Rep. Henry Waxman; former EPA head Christine Todd Whitman; leading climate science skeptics Myron Ebell, Christopher Lord Monckton, and Jay Lehr; Ken Wiwa, the son of the slain Nigerian environmentalist; farmers in Peru and Uganda; and Mike Robichaux, one of the few doctors willing to treat Gulf residents sick with chemical poisoning from the BP spill, Republican Presidential candidates, Texas governor Rick Perry and Minnesota representative Michele Bachman, as well as other prominent politicians like Senator James Inhofe, from oil-rich Oklahoma.

"This film is an investigation into an industry that is simply out of control," Rosebraugh contends. "The fossil fuel industry has shown that it will stop at nothing to maximize profits for shareholders, whether it's cutting corners on safety, employing highly paid lobbyists to impact the political process, giving huge amounts to climate change deniers to ensure that no legislation is passed that would impact the bottom line, or complicity in the murder of individuals who speak up against environmental degradation."

No release date yet.

IPCC Writes to Request Removal of the ZODS

I received an email from Sophie Schlingemann, the IPCC Legal and Outreach Officer, requesting removal of the Zero Order Drafts from my site. The wording is nearly identical to the letter received by Gallopingcamel. I believe these documents are of public and journalistic interest, and that I have a right to publish them, and plan to decline.

Also, I've put up a Zipped file (71 MB) of all the ZOD documents here, and an RAR-compressed file (77 MB) here. The latter is also mirrored at Cryptome.

Trenberth Response to Today's Loeb et al Paper on Missing Energy

I asked Kevin Trenberth for his thoughts on today's Loeb et al paper in Nature Geosciences, since he and John Fasullo have been doing a lot of work on determining and identifying the missing energy. It's interesting:

"It seems to have its main point that our earlier paper was wrong. I will certainly disagree with that. In our earlier papers (refs 2,8 and 27) we pointed out that there were major discrepancies between the inventory of energy uptake in the climate system, mainly in the oceans, and the top-of-atmosphere observed changes. The period of "missing energy" was 2008-2009 which was a La Nina period and their Fig 2 shows indeed that there was a large input of energy into the climate system at that time. But 2008 was the coldest year this century and so where did the heat go?

We did not make a big deal about the uncertainties in the observations which are highlighted in this paper. But we were well aware of them. The main point of our paper was that yes, perhaps the observations are consistent within the error bars but if so, the error bars (uncertainties) are so large as to make the values useless. A key purpose of our paper was to challenge both the ocean heat content community and the CERES (atmospheric radiation) communities to do better. Both have responded and the situation has improved somewhat. The latest CERES data as reported here has corrected their data and found about 20% of the problem. In addition the OHC communities have improved their estimates and some of the problem has gone away from that standpoint too. But there remain some major problems. As they note on p 3: the correlation with two of the OHC data sets is only 0.05, and they choose to use the one that is correlated 0.46. Even that is not very good and is not significant for so few values.

Moreover, the uncertainties computed by Loeb et al for CERES appear to be wrong. They included the systematic error in the interannual error bar, so the real error bar on the change is less than shown and in fact it seems likely the agreement is not within the uncertainty.

So while their conclusions may be valid: yes there is no evidence of a discrepancy, given their uncertainties, and yes there is no "statistically significant" decline in OHC rates of change, but the uncertainties are so large that neither dataset is useful to know what is really going on, and that is the key point. The discrepancies among OHC data sets remain huge. We MUST do better. So the key point in their title is "within uncertainty". It should add: "but the uncertainty is too large."

The necessity and difficulty of combining all these datasets is a good reminder that all the people building sensors and launching satellites and transmitting data and slaving away at their computers all day long to make the data compatible, consistent, and usable are doing really important work. I hope their office has a window.

New Paper Says No Missing Climate Energy

There's a new paper just out in Nature Geosciences that seems important: it says there is no "missing energy" in the climate system after all, and that the Earth continues to accumulate energy [as expected with AGW]. Here's the abstract:

Global climate change results from a small yet persistent imbalance between the amount of sunlight absorbed by Earth and the thermal radiation emitted back to space. An apparent inconsistency has been diagnosed between interannual variations in the net radiation imbalance inferred from satellite measurements and upper-ocean heating rate from in situ measurements, and this inconsistency has been interpreted as ‘missing energy’ in the system. Here we present a revised analysis of net radiation at the top of the atmosphere from satellite data, and we estimate ocean heat content, based on three independent sources. We find that the difference between the heat balance at the top of the atmosphere and upper-ocean heat content change is not statistically significant when accounting for observational uncertainties in ocean measurements, given transitions in instrumentation and sampling. Furthermore, variability in Earth’s energy imbalance relating to El Niño-Southern Oscillation is found to be consistent within observational uncertainties among the satellite measurements, a reanalysis model simulation and one of the ocean heat content records. We combine satellite data with ocean measurements to depths of 1,800 m, and show that between January 2001 and December 2010, Earth has been steadily accumulating energy at a rate of 0.50 ± 0.43 W/m² (uncertainties at the 90% confidence level). We conclude that energy storage is continuing to increase in the sub-surface ocean.

The reference is "Observed changes in top-of-the-atmosphere radiation and upper-ocean heating consistent within uncertainty," Norman G. Loeb et al, Nature Geosciences, Jan 22, 2012, doi:10.1038/NGEO1375.

Granted, that is a rather large uncertainty. (But hey, this is a really difficult analysis.) ENSO plays a large part in the radiation budgeting:

The Future's Name for Our Great Carbon Event?

I came across this really interesting thought:

"As seen by paleoclimatologists 10 million years in the future, whatever species they may be, the present era of catastrophic release of fossil fuel carbon will appear as an enigmatic event which will have a name of its own, much as paleoclimatologists and paleobiologists refer today to the PETM or the K-T boundary event. The fossil carbon release will show up in 13C proxies of the carbon cycle, in dissolution of ocean carbonates through acidification of the ocean, through mass extinctions arising from rapid warming, and through the moraine record left by retreating mountain glaciers and land-based ice sheets."

-- Raymond T. Pierrehumbert, Principles of Planetary Climate (2010), Ch 1 

I wonder what these future beings will call this event. The "Anthropocene" might be OK for now and the hundreds of thousands of years following it, but it doesn't seem right for the event itself, will appear to them as a sudden carbon event of only 200-300 years duration -- a veritable spike. So maybe "The Great Burning," or for the more scientific-minded "The Pleistocide," since it will end the Pleistocene with its characteristic repeated glaciations.

Pierrehumbert's is an absolutely fantastic textbook, if you really want to drill down deep into climate science. (There was a free PDF on his Web site, but it appears to be gone.) He continues:

"As an event, it is unlikely to permanently destroy the habitabilty of our planet, any more than did the K-T event or the PETM. Still, a hundred generations or more of our descendants will be condemned to live in a planetary climate far different from that which nurtured humanity, and in the company of a greatly impoverished biodiversity. Biodiversity does recover over millions of years, but that is a long time to wait, if indeed there are any of our species left around at the time to do the waiting. Extinction may not be precisely forever, but it is close enough."

By the way, did you know it was Andrew Revkin who came up with the word "Anthrocene," in his 1992 book Global Warming: Understanding the Forecast, which evolved (perhaps independently) to "Anthropocene." Brilliant.

Canada's Cost from Climate Change

By the way, a study published last September estimates that climate change will cost Canada C$5 B/yr by 2015 and C$21-43 B/yr by 2050. With an estimated 5% chance the costs then are a least C$ 91 B.

All that oil ought to be able to pay for that.

They estimate Canadian GDP in 2050 will be C$5000 B in 2008 C-dollars. So C$43 B will be about 1% of GDP (sounds low compared to the Stern Report), and up to about 2%.

So while Canada will make trillions from selling their oil, and pay up to $100 billion a year to combat climate change. And they'll pay almost that much if they don't sell their oil. I'd say that pencils out, for them at least.

Steven Harper on Canadian Oil Sands

Here's an interview of Canadian Prime Minister Steven Harper, done a day or two (I think) before President Obama's decision to deny the application of the Keystone XL pipeline. He doesn't sound like somehow who will be deterred by that denial.

And remember, Obama's denial wasn't on the merits of the application, but, he said, because the State Department couldn't meet the deadline Congress had imposed. At least, that's their story. Clever.

Climate Winner of the Week

I suppose Bill McKibben has to be named the Climate Winner of the Week, for spearheading the effort to stop the Keystone XL pipeline.

But it's hard to see him and the environmental lobby winning the war. There's just too much money at stake. Who do these people think they are, corporations?

That oil is too valuable not to be sold. Period. That simple factor will swamp all other considerations: of CO2 and environmental destruction in Alberta and the fear of pipeline breaks. You'd have to be a saint not to rip that oil out and sell it, and there are very few saints among us.

After Obama's decision earlier this week Canada's Minister of Natural Resources issued a statement that said, basically: That's unfortunate. But this is going to happen.

Sure, there will be some jobs created if the pipeline were built: about 20,000 man-years worth, said TransCanada. That's not very many, really: the US worker force grows by roughly 100,000 people per month.

So the jobs created would be a drop in the bucket. The big factor is the profit -- for oil companies, and the Canadian government.

There's an estimated 175 B barrels of oil to be recovered from the Canadian tar sands, at current prices and with current technologies. That's worth about $17.5 trillion on today's market -- 10 times Canada's 2011 GDP of $1.7 B/yr (US$ or CAN$ -- they're almost equal now).

In 2006, Royal Dutch Shell said they made an after-tax profit of $21.75 per barrel from their Canadian oil sands unit. Canada wants to get production up to 4.4 Mb/d within this decade, so that's $35 B/yr in profit to be had. They will mumble something about carbon capture and sequestration and the Canadian government will do away with some more tax incentives in the name of "environmentalism" and they will find a way to get it.

CO2? Author David Strahan estimates that CO2 emissions from the tar sands are 20% higher than average emissions from oil (mostly from production), and that a barrel of oil, with production and refining and consumption, emits about 500 kg CO2e per barrel.

So the Canadian oil sands will put about 0.8 Bmt CO2e/yr into the atmosphere. If all that's recoverable eventually gets burned, it would put about 90 Bmt CO2e into the atmosphere, or 24 GtC using the famous 44/12 ratio.

Worldwide emissions in 2010 were 9139 Tg C, or 9.1 GtC. (Maybe it's weird, but I actually enjoy doing these numbers.)

So the entire recoverable Canadian tar 

sands represents about 3 years 

of current worldwide CO2 emissions.

Is that so bad? I don't have the exact numbers, but looking at this chart and calculating the area of the triangle it seems the world has emitted about (1/2)*(70 yrs)*(9000 MmtC/yr), or ~ 300 GtC. (Here Myles Allen said 500 GtC, and we'll probably emit another 250-500 GtC before we're finished.)

So the Canadian tar sands will increase "expected" "conventional" emissions about about 5-10%.

Instead of adding a total of about 800 GtC 

to the atmosphere, burning the Canadian tar sands 

will increase this to about 825 GtC.

If what we've burned so far (~500 GtC) has resulted in a ~1°C increase in temperature, and (throwing in some feedbacks) what we'll burn before we're through (~350 GtC) will add another ~ 1°C, then using all the Canadian tar sands (~25 GtC) we can get our hands on will add another ~0.1 °C.

Canadian tar sands = another 0.1 °C of warming

Is that so bad if, it makes the Canadians and a whole bunch of other people rich (~$15-20 T)?

I guess I'm just too cynical to think 350.org and the environmental lobby is going to stay in the way of $15-20 trillion worth of money sitting under the Canadian wilderness.

Most IPCC AR5 ZOD files Are Up

I've uploaded most of the IPCC AR5 Zero Order Drafts (ZODs) to here.

If you have any of the remaining chapters (WG1 Ch6 and Ch7) and are willing to share, you can write me here. Confidence guaranteed.

Incidentally, the site where the ZOD files were first leaked, Megaupload.com, was shut down yesterday.

Oh, Come On!

Now this is completely ridiculous, from the Irish Times (via Bishop Hill):

As climate issues intensify the media, incredibly, throws in the towel
JOHN GIBBONS

OPINION: GLOBALLY, 2010 was a year of weather-related disasters on an almost unprecedented scale. Last year was worse, with a record $380 billion in economic losses attributed to “natural” disasters, many climate-related, according to insurance giant Munich Re.

Few experts expect to see any break in this upward trend this year, or any time soon. Instead, as record emissions of greenhouse gases continue unabated, the climate system is now behaving precisely as scientists have been projecting for decades. The rapid build-up of energy in the system is the “engine” that is fuelling extremes, from storms and floods to severe droughts.

Actually the facts are (as Scientific American explains) that 2/3rds of the amount was not due to climate change, but to the Japanese tsunami and the New Zealand earthquake.

Natural disasters around the world last year caused a record $380 billion in economic losses. That's more than twice the tally for 2010, and about $115 billion more than in the previous record year of 2005, according to a report from Munich Re, a reinsurance group in Germany. But other work emphasizes that it is too soon to blame the economic devastation on climate change.

Almost two-thirds of 2011's exceptionally high costs are attributable to two disasters unrelated to climate and weather: the magnitude-9.0 earthquake and tsunami that hit Japan in March, and February's comparatively small but unusually destructive magnitude-6.3 quake in New Zealand.

It's probably good to be on the watch for this sort of thing.

Another Bastardi Failed Prediction

This is like shooting fish in a barrel, but.... In November 2010 Joe Bastardi made a prediction about 2011 Arctic sea ice -- that it would reach a low of "5.5" Mkm², and be back to 2005 levels:

So how did he do? Guess.

NSIDC's Arctic sea ice data is here. In 2011 the Arctic sea ice extent reached a monthly low of 4.61 Mkm², 16% below Bastardi's prediction.

For the year 2011's average was 10.66 Mkm² (average of the monthly averages). 2005's average was 11.11 Mkm².

In fact, 2011's average Arctic sea ice extent was the lowest in their records (which go back to Nov 1978). It's true that the low point of 2011 was higher than the low point of 2007 (4.61 Mkm² in Sept 2011 compared to 4.30 Mkm² in Sept 2007), but for the year the average was the lowest.

Bastardi concluded with "The ice is coming back, will do so in forward and back steps, with forward defeating the back steps."

For more such Bastardiness, see today's WUWT, where Joe thinks CO2 can't mix in the atmosphere because it has a higher molecular weight than air.

Nor am I going to question them as to why they believe a trace gas like CO2 (needed for life on the planet) with a specific gravity of 1.5 as compared to the atmospheres 1.0, was going to mix with air in a way to affect the earth’s temperatures.

Which is, of course, pure bunk, and demonstrably false.

Soggy Oregon

It's been miserably wet here this week -- snow (about 8"), rain, melting, more rain, and then, still more rain, and now flooding. I noticed moss has been growing around the edges of my car windows. They don't really try to plow the side streets here, but luckily I didn't need to go anywhere. It's easy to understand why Lewis & Clark and their men were completely miserable in the winter they spent on the mouth of the Columbia River in 1805. They were there for 105 days -- only 12 of them were without rain, and there were only 6 days of sunshine.

"...the men suffered from colds, influenza, rheumatism, and other ailments that the captains treated. Clothing rotted, and fleas infested the blankets and hides of the bedding to such a degree that a full night’s sleep was often impossible."

They left to head back east 8 days before they had planned to. Whatever the pioneer equivalent of "fuck this shit" was, I'm sure it was said when they finally decided to bail.

Anyway, John Fleck told me about this nifty NOAA site that shows river conditions in the Pacific NW. Next to my town, the Columbia River has risen about 5 feet in 3 days and is forecast to rise another 3 ft before peaking.

Oliver doesn't seem to mind cold or wet or snow or rain -- he goes out no matter what the weather. Lately he has found a way onto the crest of the roof, where he sits and meows loudly at the neighborhood.

But Sophie is particular and has spent the last three days in one spot, except to get up to eat or go the box. I've had to work at the kitchen table.

NASA PR Sorta Spins 2011 Temperature, Says It's 9th-Warmest

NASA public relations says 2011 was the 9th-warmest year in their records, but that's not really true.

The scientists at NASA GISS have summarized 2011 here, and it's much more nuanced presentation than from NASA HQ. It reports they finds an average global temperature of

2011:   +0.51 ± 0.05 °C 

compared to the 1951-1980 baseline. (The uncertainty is 2 standard deviations.) That's statistically cooler than last year:

2010:   +0.63 ± 0.05 °C

which is the warmest year in their records.

But

the numbers depend on a lot of factors, which the GISS technical page rightly discusses, even if HQ doesn't (and most journalists probably won't either).

1. The resolution of the underlying virtual network -- that is, as I understand it, GISS (and the Hadley center) take into account the fact that temperature stations aren't evenly distributed around the globe (or evenly distributed in time). There are regions with a higher density of stations than others. You don't want to just average all the stations across the world, because that would over-represent regions with many stations (like, say, the northeastern US) and under-represent regions with few stations (like, say, the Arctic, or undeveloped countries, or places were few people live, like the Sahara Desert). So they construct a virtual, even-spaced grid, and then average all the stations within a grid, and then average all the grids. That way all regions get an equal weighting. So the final number is going to depend on the chosen grid size; as they write, the 2011 average global surface temperature anomaly was +0.51 °C for a resolution of 1200 km, but +0.44 °C for a 250 km resolution (both are ± 0.05 °C). Which is better? It's a judgement call -- do you ignore regions where there's no data, or try to estimate them by interpolating across them? GISS believes the first is preferable, and give their reasoning in a footnote.
2. Each year has a statistical uncertainty, which GISS calculates to be 2σ = 0.05 °C. But being good scientists they say comparing years depends on how close the years are, and go on to say
   

   "The size of this uncertainty and the small temperature differences among different years (Fig. 2) is one reason that alternative analyses yield different rankings for the warmest years. However, the magnitude of global temperature change of the past century is in good agreement among the GISS, NCDC (NOAA National Climatic Data Center), and HadCRUT (UK Met Office Hadley Centre and the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit) temperature analyses."

3. Statistically speaking, you can't say one year is warmer than another if their difference is not statistically significant. It's like asking if Romney is ahead of Obama if a poll shows their support levels at 51% - 49%. It depends. If the uncertainty of the numbers if ± 3%, you can't make a statistically significant about them (i.e. one that holds to a certainty of p% -- usually in climate science 95), but you can make statements about the probability that Romney is ahead of Obama (you'd have to calculate the overlap of the Bell curves that surround each number, and it depends on the objectivity of the questions, the randomness of the poll participants, yadda yadda. So 2011 was "statistical significantly" cooler than 2010 by the statistical standards of climate science. That doesn't mean that you can rank it as "warmer" or "cooler" than an earlier year if the difference in their anomalies is less than 0.10 °C.
   
They also, to their credit (and perhaps anticipating criticisms), elaborate on the nuances of whether the rate of warming has changed in the last several years, etc:

The 12-month running mean (Fig. 3a) provides a useful alternative measure of temperature change on the annual time scale, and 60-month (5-year) and 132-month (11-year) running means (Fig. 3b) reduce the variability caused by the Southern Oscillation (El Niño-La Niña cycle) and the solar cycle. The current status of these running means (Fig. 3) adds some weak evidence for the frequent assertion that the rate of global warming has been less in the 21st century than in the last two decades of the 20th century. However, that impression is dependent on the end point, which is heavily influenced by the strong La Niñas in the past three years. If an El Niño occurs in the next few years, which is likely as we discuss below, the mean warming rate will probably exhibit no slowdown on the decadal time scale.

They then go on to summarize by saying, basically, Yes, warming has been slowing down lately, due to a strong La Nina (the one in 2010-2011, not the current one) and a solar minimum, but

We conclude that the slowdown of warming is likely to prove illusory, with more rapid warming appearing over the next few years.

Anyway

1. the NASA HQ press release is simplistic
2. NASA GISS did a great job of presenting all the nuances
3. there's certainly no reason to think global warming is "over" 
4. you can be sure contrarian bloggers will try to say that it is, and
5. later, when/if it does get warmer, these same bloggers will revert back to claims that the data is junk because someone, somewhere near a temperature station, once grilled a piece of chicken.

More Hulme

"There is an increasing appreciation, both among scientists and among the public, of the contingent factors of personal belief, cultural context and institutional arrangements, which influence the way scientific knowledge is established. Somewhere in between science as the sublime discovery of absolute truth -- a purely positivist reading of science -- and science as a hopelessly subjective activity  -- a purely constructivist mentality -- is a more nuanced understanding of what science can do and what it can't do and a deeper understanding of the nature of scientific knowledge. Essential to this new understanding is an appreciation of scientific uncertainty. Far from being able to eliminate uncertainty, science -- especially climate science -- is more useful to society with it finds good ways of recognizing, managing and communicating uncertainty."

-- Mike Hulme, Why We Disagree About Climate Change (2009), Ch. 3

First ZOD is Up

I've put one IPCC AR5 Zero Order Draft (ZOD) here: Chapter 4 - Observations: Cryosphere.

Still looking looking for the others....