Sunday November 8, 2009, 2:05 pm
"As discussed on my weblog and elsewhere (e.g. see and see), the upper ocean heat content trend, as evaluated by its heat anomalies, has been essentially flat since mid 2003 through at least June of this year. Since mid 2003, the heat storage rate, rather then being 0.6 W/m2 in the upper 750m that was found prior to that time (1993-2003), has been essentially zero.

Nonetheless, the article is correct that the climate system has not cooled even in the last 6 years. Moreover, on the long time period back to 1880, the consensus is that the climate system has warmed on the longest time period. Perhaps the current absence of warming is a shorter term natural feature of the climate system. However, to state that the “[t]he Earth is still warming” is in error. The warming has, at least temporarily halted.

The article (and apparently the NOAA study itself), therefore, suffers from a significant oversight since it does not comment on an update of the same upper ocean heat content data that Jim Hansen has used to assess global warming."

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/10/27/pielke-senior-on-the-borenstien-ap-statistics-article/

Sunday November 8, 2009, 2:12 pm
"Published peer-reviewed scientific research generally cites temperatures measured by ground sensors, which are from NOAA, NASA and the British, more than the satellite data."

That statement is the telling tale of this misleading story. Ground sensors are notorious for recording "Heat Island effect temperatures that do not reflect true temperature readings. This is just one more attempt by global warming alarmist to push their carbon credits cap and trade agenda using faulty data.

Sunday November 8, 2009, 5:00 pm
Ralph, they use satillite data as well, actually. Both show the same trends, even while differing in some details.

Here is surface temperature data:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/gistemp/from:1980/to:2009/plot/gistemp/from:1980/to:2009/trend

And here is satillite data:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/rss/from:1980/to:2009/plot/rss/from:1980/to:2009/trend
And most of the temperatures readings are from rural areas well away from cities.
http://www.skepticalscience.com/urban-heat-island-effect.htm

{{{The skeptic argument...There has been a great deal of controversy about the accuracy of the temperature data, mainly the bias of temperature data due to urban heat island effect. This controversy has lead many to focus on rural temperature stations. In recent weeks, researchers have been visiting these temperature stations. What they noticed was that there are serious problems with the quality of these temperature stations. They noticed that many of these temperature stations were located next to concrete buildings, near hot exhausts of air conditioning units, attached to metal towers and poles, surrounded by driveways and above gravel.

What the science says...
While urban areas are undoubtedly warmer than surrounding rural areas, this has had little to no impact on warming trends.


When compiling temperature records, NASA GISS go to great pains to remove any possible influence from Urban Heat Island Effect. They compare urban long term trends to nearby rural trends. They then adjust the urban trend so it matches the rural trend. The process is described in detail on the NASA website (Hansen 2001).

They found in most cases, urban warming was small and fell within uncertainty ranges. Surprisingly, 42% of city trends are cooler relative to their country surroundings as weather stations are often sited in cool islands (eg - a park within the city). The point is they're aware of UHI and rigorously adjust for it when analysing temperature records.

This confirms a peer review study by the NCDC (Peterson 2003) that did statistical analysis of urban and rural temperature anomalies and concluded "Contrary to generally accepted wisdom, no statistically significant impact of urbanization could be found in annual temperatures... Industrial sections of towns may well be significantly warmer than rural sites, but urban meteorological observations are more likely to be made within park cool islands than industrial regions."

Another more recent study (Parker 2006) plotted 50 year records of temperatures observed on calm nights, the other on windy nights. He concluded "temperatures over land have risen as much on windy nights as on calm nights, indicating that the observed overall warming is not a consequence of urban development".

Comparing rural to urban trends
The paper Urbanization effects in large-scale temperature records, with an emphasis on China (Jones et al 2008) finds urban temperature trends to be little different to rural trends. The paper begins by looking at 5 sites in and around London. Figure 1 shows absolute temperatures, clearly indicating a UHI influence on the urban sites at London Weather Centre (brown) and St. James Park (dark blue). The coolest record is the rural based Rothamsted (dark green). However, the excess urban warmth has no effect on the temperature trend - all sites show the same overall trend.

A similar comparison was made between two sites in Vienna. Again, the absolute temperature is greater for the urban site but both sites show near identical trends.

Comparing rural and urban networks in China
So established urban areas show the same trends as surrounding rural areas. What about urban areas that are still developing? China, in contrast to Europe, has experienced rapid economic growth over the last 30 years with a dramatic increase in its city areas. If there were to be significant urban-related warming, it ought to be in this region and over recent decades. Figure 3 compares a range of temperature datasets:


Figure 3: Annual average temperature anomalies. Jones et all (dotted green and brown) is a dataset of 42 rural and 42 urban sites. Li et al (solid green and brown) is a homogenized dataset of 42 rural and 40 urban sites. Li (blue) is a non-homogenized set of 728 stations, urban and rural. CRUTEM3v (red) is a land-only data set (Brohan et al., 2006). This plot uses the 1954–83 base period.


That there are hardly any differences between the six series tells us several things. Small datasets of 40 stations show the same result as the 728 station dataset. In other words, for a region of this size, the average can be constructed from a limited number of sites, implying that for the 728 station network there is considerable redundancy.


As the scale increases, the overall impact of homogeneity adjustments diminishes. This might be a bit heartbreaking for those hard working boffins who spend hundreds of hours pouring meticulously over station data, ensuring the data is all homogenised (but of course, they don't do it just to calculate global trends).

And of course, the most significant finding: the trend is the same for both urban and rural groups over any of the periods. Even in the case of developing urban areas, when averaged out over large areas, urban heat island has little impact on the warming trend.}}}

Global warming would impact the lowest levels of the atmosphere, as well as the Earth's surface, the most because CO2, being heavier than most molecules of the atmosphere, would tend to be lower. So the upper atmosphere should actually be cooler under man-made global warming.

Sunday November 8, 2009, 6:18 pm
Judy quoteing the "What's Up With That" denialist blog again...what a suprise LMAO!!!!

Here are THE DATA - all FIVE independently derived data sets - INCLUDING THE SATELITE DATA all show a WARMING TREND since 1979 - both Judy and Ralph have seen this before but deny the FACTS and continue to sputter the denialist dogma ... truely amazing ...

http://www.climate4you.com/images/AllCompared%20GlobalMonthlyTempSince1979.gif

and here are the longer -term data - gee, what kind of trend do you see (Judy and Ralph apparently see cooling):

http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/Fig.A2.lrg.gif

Sunday November 8, 2009, 11:20 pm
Well, OF COURSE real statisticians wouldn't say the earth is cooling. Global Warming is an aspect of Climate Change, which consists of temperature extremes, and over all, an increase, or warming, of the global temperature. The MAJORITY of all types of scientists who study these issues concur with the findings. Despite what the "mainstream media" says (what a joke, btw!), the "scientists" who want to disprove the 'theory" of climate change are fringers and outliers who can't get published in a peer reviewed journal.

Thursday November 19, 2009, 3:23 pm
It is obvious that the article in the first comment of above article knows nothing about statistics

First the author use the terms not “scientifically legitimate” a statistician would never use that term. They would use the term statistically significant and depending on the statistic being used it would come with a p value of 0.05 or 0.01

The p value is defined as The probability that an observed or greater difference occurred by chance. The difference is said to be statistically significant if it is greater than what might be expected to happen by chance alone 95% of the time. Or to put it another way the probability of this data showing global cooling is less than 0.0001 in one!

The author above talks about statistical regression and not statistical significance. Statistical regression is "fitting a line to a set of data, whether it is linear or quadratic or some other polynomial. From the author's premise of using a ruler he is talking about linear regression and not about correlation of the data to a model.

In simple terms the author is blabbering out of the wrong orifice