Saturday, January 4, 2014

Global Warming and freezing temperatures

It looks like Roswell is fixin' to have the coldest temperatures it's seen in a decade.  At the same time, last year is the 4th warmest on record.

I say that last bit entirely unironically.  The kicker, of course, is that this is in the satellite record, which only dates back 35 years.  I'm quite a fan of the satellite data sets which, despite at least one shortish period marred by bad sensors, give us well calibrated, truly global, daily temperature readings. 

This is in great contrast to the surface record where 70% or more of weather stations are not calibrated within 2°C of true, where "adjusting" and "gridding" and "homogenizing" cause the temperature as read to diverge quite a bit from the temperature as reported.  With the satellite data sets, what you see is truly what you get.

And so even though we're freezing here, last year was hot - globally speaking.

Of course, we don't have a lot to say about what temperatures were like more than 35 years ago, other than the data have been heavily adjusted, gridded, and homogenized.

But brrr, it's cold.


2 comments:

Dave H said...

Heh. Right now this guy sums up my attitude about climate change:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T5iQ_i6K8S0

(I've got about 2 ft. of snow in my yard right now.)

Old NFO said...

Good one...