Watts Does Not Like Upward Adjustements

That didn't take long. I wondered how the skeptics would react to the changes in RSS 4.0, when they had been so un-skeptical over the changes to UAH 6.0 beta. That same day Anthony Watts publishes a post called The 'Karlization' of global temperature continues - this time RSS makes a massive upwards adjustment, in which he basically accuses Carl Mears, chief scientist of RSS, of fraud in changing adjusting the RSS trend upwards. Some extracts give the flavor:

Forget homogenization, that is so 2010. If the pause is bothering you and your belief is that there must be more warming, we only need to find it in the data, then what you need is “Karlization”, named after director of the National Climatic Data Center, (now NCEI) Tom Karl who pulled a fast one this summer trying to adjust the past down, so the present would be warmer.

Now we have a new player in the Karlization process – Carl Mears, who is the chief scientist for RSS (Remote Sensing Systems) in Santa Rosa, CA. This is a private business that just happens to make a satellite based climate data set that is similar to the UAH satellite data set produced by Roy Spencer and John Christy.

Readers may recall a video produced by the execrable “Climate Crock of the Week” activist Peter Sinclair that we covered here where the basic premise was that the satellites are lying.

Clearly, he's miffed. So what to do? Taking a cue from the other Karl, he publishes a paper and claims that new and improved adjustments have found that missing warming.

I like the irony in this. Peter Sinclair is vilified for claiming the satellites are lying, yet Anthony Watts is doing exactly that, claiming you cannot believe RSS 4.0.

The only supporting evidence for this claim is a letter from Dr. Roy Spencer and Dr. John Christy (of UAH), who say they spotted a problem with the adjustments.

From what little we have looked at so far, it appears that they did not correct for spurious warming in NOAA-14 MSU relative to NOAA-15 AMSU ...see their Fig. 7c. They just leave it in.

Fair enough, I cannot really comment on whether this is a reasonable issue. But note that although it's been used for almost a year without criticism, UAH 6 could have just as many problems. We don't know as the methods have yet to be published.

What Watts' objection to the new RSS data really shows, is just how wrong the claims of impeccability for the satellite data are. Anthony Watts himself has objected to anyone criticizing satellite data, calling them satellite deniers, presumably with a sense of irony. The claim made by those who insist that satellite data be used in preference to ground based data is that satellites are unbiased, state-of-the-art and highly expensive. See here for example. All of which may be correct, but actually trying to calculate a global temperature from them requires complicated and fallible calculations, and these are built on many assumptions.

The fact that both UAH and RSS have made adjustments, which have resulted in major changes, proves that they cannot always be that accurate. If you take the Watts' line then UAH 5.6 was completely flawed, but we can trust 6.0 to be accurate - RSS 3.3 was the best data of all, but the person responsible is a fraud.

And as a passing thought, note that the objection above to RSS 4.0 is that it includes a satellite showing spurious warming. In other words, the satellites are lying.

Updates

Carl Mears has now posted more details of the RSS V4.0 adjustments here. This also seeks to address the flaw Roy Spencer claimed to have found:

First, we note that our treatment of NOAA-14, except for the diurnal adjustment, is unchanged from V3.3, so we do not understand how it can be the cause of two thirds the change. ... Clearly, the change in the diurnal cycle is the main cause of any differences between V3.3 and V4.0.

We agree that there is a problem with either NOAA-14 or NOAA-15, or both. We explicitly discuss the problem with the NOAA-14/NOAA-15 overlap in the paper. We do not know if the problem is due to NOAA-14 or NOAA-15. If we assume that all the drift is due to NOAA-14, as Dr. Spencer would like us to do, we can eliminate the use of NOAA-14 after 1999 so that its (potentially erroneous) trend during the overlap period does not affect the overall results. If we do this, the overall trend is decreased by 0.019K/decade.

...

These results are reported in the paper, and the differences between them should be viewed as part of the uncertainty in the final results. For the final dataset, we used case 3 where the errors are shared between NOAA-14 and NOAA-15, which is reasonable because we do not know the source of the problem.

Roy Spencer seems to agree with this in an update to his original blog post:

Chip Knappenberger has pointed out that, while the warming in RSS v4 versus UAH v6 might be as described above, when RSS v4 is compared to RSS v3.3, the increase in warming might be mostly due to their new diurnal cycle adjustment. In other words, the NOAA-14 calibration issue was also in their v3.3, but maybe it was obscured more by diurnal drift adjustment issues.

Some additional links:

Hot Whopper has a long look at Watts' and Spencer's claims - 101 conspiracy theories about troposphere temperature: the RSS love affair is over

Stoat - The RSS Middle Tropospheric Temperature Now V4.0, is much shorter, but makes interesting points about how professional the RSS presentation is compared with UAH.

RSS February 2016

The RSS data is now in for February and it's a whopping 0.974 °C. Very much in line with the UAH figure.

This means that Monckton's Great Pause is no more, at least for a while. Whether this makes any sense depends on how meaningful you thought Monckton's definition was in the first place. Here's what the previous pause now looks like:

From June 1997 the trend to present is now +0.09°C/Century, and the smallest trend is from December 1997, at a mere +0.01°C/Century. I expect Monckton will point out, correctly that these are pretty much still zero.

By contrast the warming trend since the end of 2006 is now 1.92°C/Century.

In fact RSS shows there has been warming at over 2°C/Century since February 2007, over nine years of rapid warming! That of course means nothing as it's only 9 years and cherry picked to start in an La Niña, and ends with an El Niño. It's just that Monckton has in the past used even shorter time intervals to claim rapid global cooling has occurred.

Finally, here's the full trend:

This is a rise of 1.26°C/Century.

Updates on Satellite Data

A couple of brief updates that are relevant to my previous post on Monckton's Pause.

UAH Latest Data

Whilst we wait for the RSS February 2016 temperatures, Roy Spencer has posted the UAH figure here. It's an astonishing 0.83 °C above the 1981 - 2010 average. That beats the previous monthly record by 0.09 °C.

Here's a graph showing monthly values. I've highlighted February 2016 along with the previous record month (April 1999).

This does seem something of an outlier, and I'm a bit suspicious of it. It will be interesting to compare it with the RSS figure.

RSS is being Updated

Gavin Schmidt reports there is to be a new version of RSS.

New version of RSS about to be released - the end of the satellite 'pause'? https://t.co/OVWLLoHNF8

— Gavin Schmidt (@ClimateOfGavin) March 2, 2016

The abstract to the linked paper says:

The new methods result in improved agreement between measurements made by different satellites at the same time. We choose a method based on an optimized second harmonic adjustment to produce a new version of the RSS dataset, Version 4.0. The new dataset shows substantially increased global-scale warming relative to the previous version of the dataset, particularly after 1998. The new dataset shows more warming than most other middle tropospheric data records constructed from the same set of satellites. We also show that the new dataset is consistent with long-term changes in total column water vapor over the tropical oceans, lending support to its long-term accuracy.

This will very likely set the cat amongst the skeptical pigeons. Some commentators have been very certain that satellite data is nearly perfect, yet have a very selective attitude to what satellite data to use.

A couple of years back, RSS was showing little or no warming since the turn of the century, whilst UAH and all ground based measurements were showing continuing warming. At this point lots of skeptics were pointing out that satellites were more accurate than ground records, but only referring to RSS when they said that.

Last year UAH announced an update that brought UAH trends a lot closer to RSS, and suddenly UAH became acceptable with the same people who insist that any adjustment to ground based observations are evidence of fraud.

Now if RSS have a new version that shows more warming, will it be ignored or called fraudulent, by the same people who insist satellite data is the gold standard.

Update

Impact of updated diurnal cycle correction in MSU-TMT in RSS v4: pic.twitter.com/0Ov1myxGNg

— Gavin Schmidt (@ClimateOfGavin) March 2, 2016

This shows the overall change in the mid troposphere to increase the warming from 0.78 °C / Century, to 1.25 ° / Century. What I'm still not sure about, is how this will be reflected in the lower troposphere records, which are the ones usually used in comparison with surface data.