Thursday, August 11, 2011

GISS: July was 3rd Warmest

GISS -- whose method of computing global temperature covers the poles, for better or worse -- says last month was the 3rd warmest July in their records, at +0.60°C above their baseline.

By the way, GISS has thrown out some outlying stations, which makes small changes in their monthly numbers, some of them going back decades. (They explain more near the bottom of this page.) If you keep your own spreadsheet you're going to want to recopy their entire data page.

By the way, one of the consequences of that revision is that the 10-yr change in average global temperature from the 1990s to the 2000s goes from +0.22°:C to +0.24°C.

5 comments:

The Croquist said...

As I've pointed out earlier Watts has demonstrated that the current US surface temperature measurement system is garbage. When 92% of their sites fail to meet their minimum standards what else can you call it? I have less confidence in their records from 131 years ago and even less confidence in the global measurements. I trust 1880 United States more then I trust 1880 Afghanistan.

When I first started tracking the GISS global tracking information in August of 2009 they had just 2 sites in Africa and none in either Antarctica or South America. Asia and Australia were sparsely covered. Western Europe was largely covered and maybe 50% of North America. At the time they claimed that the 1951 – 1980 temperature anomaly was +0.50 C. Sometime between January 30, 2010 and February 18 2010 they added new data stations. Suddenly they had maybe 10 sites in Africa, 3 in South America, still none in Antarctica but many more in Asia, Eastern Europe, Australia and North America. The temperature anomaly also dropped from +0.50 C. to -0.02 C. My numbers are different from yours because I pulled 250km temps instead of 1,200kn temps.

David Appell said...

Yeah, right, Watts has pointed out..blah blah blah. Watts is a clown, an obvious clown, and if you believe anything he writes then you too are a clown.

Perhaps you missed this paper by _REAL_ scientists, "On the reliability of the U.S. surface temperature record," Menne et al, JGR, v 115, D11108 (2010)

Dan Satterfield said...

It amazes me how many people believe Watts after his debacle about the surface temperature claim. The NCDC made him look exceedingly foolish when they published the graph of warming temperatures using just his handpicked stations. It showed more warming than there analysis not less!

It's very hard to get people to look at facts when their entire political world view is under serious attack by them.

Steve Bloom said...

TC could do even better than that by reading Watts' own (co-authored) paper analyzing the surface stations project, which found that the US surface record is very much not garbage. Of course Watts himself disappeared that paper down the memory hole as fast as he could, so perhaps TC can be forgiven for having missed it.

The Croquist said...

Steve Bloom,

Fall, S., A. Watts, J. Nielsen-Gammon, E. Jones, D. Niyogi, J. Christy, and R.A. Pielke Sr., 2011 has not disappeared down the memory hole. Here is a link from Watts’ website to it.


http://pielkeclimatesci.files.wordpress.com/2011/07/r-367.pdf