

July was Earth’s hottest month in what’s destined to be Earth’s hottest year - cryptoz
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/capital-weather-gang/wp/2015/08/17/july-was-likely-earths-warmest-month-in-whats-destined-to-be-earths-warmest-year/

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jeremyt
I've been developing an increasing interest in climate change lately, and I've
also been digging into the numbers and arguments on both sides.

Frankly, the claims made in this article are a bit ridiculous. To anyone with
any kind of math or science background, the claim that one can accurately
measure the temperature of the earth down to two decimal places is hubris.

But it's even worse when one considers that the distribution of temperature
recording stations isn't uniform, that large swaths of the earth have barely
any coverage at all, and that the most accurate way of measuring temperature
has only been available for the last couple of decades (satellite
measurements). And I might add that the article above uses surface
temperatures and not satellite measurements.

In many of these temperature stations, temperatures are still recorded by
hand, on a piece of paper, by observing a thermometer. One has to deal with
different measurements made by different people and equipment as things are
replaced or repaired.

Additionally, lots of these temperature stations have had their recorded
temperatures adjusted upward. I always wondered why, and I did some
investigation and found out that it was because the temperature stations had
been moved from an urban environment to a more rural environment. However, the
measurements have not been subsequently adjusted down as those new
environments urbanized. What we see is a ratchet effect, not in actual
temperature but in observed temperature.

What's the upshot? The supposed 0.02 increase in temperature is well within
the margin of error for both the surface level temperature measurements and
the estimation made in the upward temperature adjustments at many sites.

~~~
cwal37
Have you happened across this[1] (which ars sums up here[3]) in your
comprehensive research on the topic? It's almost entirely about exactly what
seems to be your big sticking point, that we're bad at measuring temperature,
and the results aren't worthwhile as a result. This is something that
absolutely consumes the scientists and technicians involved in taking these
measurements, because they know it's going to catch heat no matter what.

Here's a fairly comprehensive post[2] with numerous links to publications and
explanations. Satellite vs. surface is mentioned explicitly near the bottom.

[1][http://www.sciencemag.org/content/348/6242/1469](http://www.sciencemag.org/content/348/6242/1469)

[2] [http://www.skepticalscience.com/surface-temperature-
measurem...](http://www.skepticalscience.com/surface-temperature-measurements-
advanced.htm)

[3] [http://arstechnica.com/science/2015/06/updated-noaa-
temperat...](http://arstechnica.com/science/2015/06/updated-noaa-temperature-
record-shows-little-global-warming-slowdown/)

~~~
jeremyt
I dug a little deeper on your first link, and it appears that in order to come
to a different conclusion, the scientists have just applied a different
correction to the data... And, mind you, they're using extraordinarily
unreliable ocean temperature measurements... Here's a key quote from a
critique of the paper:

"K15 have made some relatively minor changes to the bias correction methods,
and the result is a large increase in the post-1998 trend.

A. They added 0.12 oC to readings collected by buoys, ostensibly to make them
comparable to readings collected by ships. As the authors note, buoy readings
represent a rising fraction of observations over recent decades, so this
boosts the apparent warming trend.

B. They also gave buoy data extra weight in the computations.

C. They also made adjustments to post-1941 data collected from ships, in
particular a large cooling adjustment applied to readings over 1998-2000.

Taken together these changes largely explain the enhanced trend over the past
15 years. So now everybody needs to decide if they think these adjustments are
valid.

Perhaps they are. The main problem for us observers is that other teams have
looked at the same issues and come to different conclusions. And the post-1998
K15 data don’t match that from other independent sources, including weather
satellites."

To put it plainly: if the data doesn't fit, just make some convenient
corrections and then suddenly it'll fit exactly what you want it to.

I encourage you to read the whole critique:

[http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/06/04/a-first-look-at-
possib...](http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/06/04/a-first-look-at-possible-
artifacts-of-data-biases-in-the-recent-global-surface-warming-hiatus-by-karl-
et-al-science-4-june-2015/)

The more I dig into this stuff the more I realize that the data, at least
prior to satellite measurements, is just crap and needs to be discarded.

------
rrss1122
It specifies it in the article, but if you went just by the title, it is not
the Earth's hottest month in Earth's hottest year. It is the hottest recorded
month, but not Earth's hottest month.

When we start seeing megafauna in Antarctica like we did when dinosaurs lived
there, or even any land animals besides penguins and humans, then we can start
talking about Earth's hottest months.

------
tremendo
I live in Phoenix, AZ. The temperature map in the article seems to show that
for this area the July temperature difference from 1951-1980 average is in the
lowest segment (-2 to 2). It had been my impression that it was noticeably
hotter this summer. The heat arrived later than normal, but stronger. In my
perception at least, which may be influenced by the fact I just came in from
the outside and am still sweating like crazy :-/

We don't seem to have a handle on this warming, and there is no real will to
tackle this problem. It seems we are determined to wait for bigger
consequences before we'll be convinced to act. At which point it might be
easier to just migrate, and keep polluting. That's how we humans roll.

~~~
LoSboccacc
Part of the problem is that the system is quite chaotic. A measurement change
well within our instrument tolerance can give incredibly different simulation
of the evolution of the climate. Heck the whole chaos theory was basically
born from observations of the instability of weather models

What I noticed mostly is that our forecasts are getting sensibly worse even in
the short period. If I had time for a serious research, I'd look more at how
some climate change happened to modify the patterns that we previously used
successfully in our models because with confidence in forecast simulations
dropping is gonna be very hard to make sense of any data. Especially since
dire predictions from the seventies eighties and nineties all turned wrong and
people is desensebilizing to the problem, even if the risk is about the
unknown unknown more than the actual known

