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.