Temperatures July Update - Now With BEST

All the data sets have released for July so it's time for another look at how the statistical predictions are coming along. This month I've added BEST to the data sets, and I've been trying to improve the appearance and colors of my graphs, but it's still a work in progress.

Here's what 2016 looks like so far, month by month. (All temperatures have been rebased to the 1981 - 2010 period.)

July saw a pause in the rapid drop of the last few months, with most sets either rising slightly or dropping by only a small amount.

Here's how the projection of the expected annual temperature has changed for each set - as always this is expressed as the difference to the previous record.

Each data set is continuing to slowly drop. It's interesting to see how much of a split there is between the various sets. The two hot satellite sets (the old non-beta UAH, and the new RSS) continue to be the sets projected to beat the record by the largest amount, whilst the two cold satellite sets are projected to beat the record by the least amount. All of the terrestrial sets are between these two. Again it's important to remember these are showing the difference between the expected 2016 value and the previous record, which is different for each dataset. In particular the satellites are compared to the exceptional 1998 value, whilst the surface data is compared with 2015.

The changing probabilities of each set beating their respective record years are shown here:

UAH beta 6 is down to 78% and RSS 3.3 is at 90%. Both down 2 percentage points. Others remain close to certain, with HadCRUT now at 97% and NOAA at 99%.

As always, I don't agree with these probabilities. In particular I think it's very unlikely that UAH beta 6 will beat the record. An interesting point regarding UAH beta 6 is that the average for the first 7 month of 2016 is almost exactly the same as the average of the first 7 months of 1998. 0.584 °C for 2016, compared with 0.580 °C for 1998. Thus the next 5 months will have to be cooler than the last 5 months of 1998 for UAH beta 6 to not beat the record.

Here's the comparison of 2016 to 1998 along with a dashed line representing the average temperature required over the rest of the year for 2016 to equal 1998.

UAH can only drop slightly from July before it fails to beat the record. This will depend on

Comparisons with Other Record Years

The assumption is that 2016 will most resemble 1998 as far as changes over the year are concerned. Both were strong El Niño years, and show a very strong spike in temperatures especially in the satellite records.

Here's what all the different data sets did during the last great El Niño year of 1998. (All anomalies based on the 1981 - 2010 period.)

To make this clearer here's 1998 showing the average of the 4 surface sets, and the 4 satellite sets.

One obvious point is that the satellite data was much higher throughout the year than the surface data. This illustrates just how hot 1998 was in the satellite records.

What's also interesting is the way the surface data drops so quickly in September, whilst the satellite data shows an even bigger drop in November.

So how well would this forecasting method have worked in 1998? Using only data up to 1998, this is how the margin graph would have looked for 1998.

I'm surprised how good this looks. Note that the figure for December is the final result, not a projection. Here's how the probabilities looked.

Less surprising given how warm the start of 1998 was by July all data sets would have been near certain of beating the record.

Lets do the same with 2010. This was another El Niño year, though not a strong one. It broke the record in all the surface data, and produced another massive spike in satellite data, but not enough to beat 1998.

I'd say this would have been a good set of forecasts taken from July say, the two sets that were given little chance failed to beat the record, the one set (NOAA) with a strong chance did beat the record, and of the other five being given between around 40 - 75% chance, 3 did beat the record and 2 didn't.

Finally, if you haven't had a enough, here's last year, which was a record in all the surface data, and not a record in all the satellite data.

For all the data sets the forecast underestimated the annual temperature throughout the year, with the July forecasts being around 0.1 °C below the actual value. But the probability forecasts were not bad, with all the satellite data showing no chance by July, and all the surface sets having greater than 70% chance of a record.

Not in Oz Anymore

Tony Heller (aka Steve Goddard) is still obsessed with Professor Brian Cox, following the well publicized discussion with Senator Malcolm Roberts on Australian television. So much so that he now wants to go to Australia to teach Cox a lesson. The lead article Going Down Under on his website reads in full -

I’m thinking about heading to Australia in a few weeks, to help educate the clueless Brian Cox about climate and the scientific method. A lot of it will depend on being able to fund the trip, which will be expensive. What do you think?

Well, as he asked, what I think is he wants a holiday in Australia and wants his fans to help finance it. But what I also think is he doesn't realize that Brian Cox is not Australian and flew out of Australia 5 day before Heller's post.

Goodbye Australia, you left us with a beautiful view of Perth and happy memories. 'till next year! @robinince pic.twitter.com/VnwWyBuEBH

— Brian Cox (@ProfBrianCox) August 19, 2016

Christopher Monckton Saves The World

Other maps are such shapes, with their islands and capes!
But we've got our brave Captain to thank:
(So the crew would protest) that he's bought us the best-
A perfect and absolute blank!

This was charming, no doubt; but they shortly found out
That the Captain they trusted so well
Had only one notion for crossing the ocean,
And that was to tingle his bell.

The Hunting of the Snark - Lewis Carroll

Christopher Monckton of Benchley had an article on WUWT, asking the question, Is the Reuters news agency committing fraud?. A question to which Betteridge's law of headlines gives the answer.

This has been dissected at Hot Whopper, and I don't have anything to add, but I was intrigued by a typically Mittyesque anecdote he throws in for little reason.

Grockling All Over The World

I once saved the owners of the swank rent-a-suite megaship The World from losing a fortune when her otherwise perfectly sane skipper had conceived the notion of sailing her through the North-West Passage, and had sold them on the idea.

The World was lying in Fremantle at the time. My lovely wife and I were spending a few days aboard. We were grockling all over the ship when, by mistake, we stumbled into the skipper's day cabin, where he and his brother officers were merrily laying plans to penetrate the North-West Passage.

Is the Reuters news agency committing fraud? - Christopher Monckton of Benchley

The World is certainly a swanky ship.

By VirtualSteve - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=8927159

To quote their own website:

The largest private residential ship on the planet, The World is home to only 165 Residences. Residents & Guests spend extensive time exploring the most exotic and well-traveled destinations, and return onboard to a lifestyle that exists nowhere else on earth.

...

With only 165 individual Homes, The World's Residents enjoy one of the most exclusive lifestyles imaginable. Not only do Residents own their individual Residences, but collectively, they own the ship, ensuring that the experiences – both onboard and off – are far beyond current luxury travel standards.

Aboard The World

Monckton doesn't give a date for this story, nor does he explain how he came to be aboard this swank rent-a-suite megaship. The most likely date is February 2012, when The World was in Fremantle and had planned to sail the Northwest Passage, as this archive from the start of 2012 shows.

Given the exclusivity of the ship it seems reasonable to assume that Monckton was on board as a guest of one of the owners; possibly Gina Rinehart, who had financed Monckton's controversial lecture tour of Australia the previous year.

Sic Transit Gloria Mundi

Monckton concludes:

The skipper took us up to the bridge and, with that faraway gleam in his eye that bespeaks the adventurer, told us all about his idea. I called up the University of Illinois' global and Arctic sea-ice data on the ship's computer and gave the skipper a short lecture on the very few occasions over the previous century or two when the North-West Passage had been open.

The Arctic, I said, was unpredictable, wherefore he should not be too ready to join the True-Believers in subscribing to every barmy but transiently fashionable dogma of the New Religion. He saw at once that the thing was impossible and cabled the owners to tell them to think again.

Like most of Monckton's stories this seems highly implausible. The idea that the captain of the ship would abandon a cruise that had been advertised over a year in advance on the say-so of a single eccentric English man, the idea that going through the Northwest Passage was the dream of a temporarily insane captain, the idea that cancelling a planned excursion would save the owners any money, let alone a fortune. (Bearing in mind the residents are the owners.)

But the most obvious problem with this story is that far from cancelling the planned journey, The World successfully sailed through the Northwest passage, as planned 6 months after Monckton's interference.

Setting sail from Nome, Alaska, U.S. on 18 Aug 2012 and reaching Nuuk, Greenland on 12 Sept 2012, the ship became the largest passenger vessel to transit the Northwest Passage. The ship, carrying 481 passengers and crew, for 26 days and 4,800 nautical miles at sea, followed in the path of Captain Roald Amundsen, the first sailor to complete the journey in 1906.

MS The World - Wikipedia

Here's a video of the attempt:

So how could Monckton have saved the owners a fortune persuading the captain to abandon the journey, when it made the journey in any case? It's possible everything Monckton said was true, but after the Captain cabled the owners to tell them to think again, they told him to stick to the plan. Or more plausibly the Captain was just humoring Monckton when he said the thing was impossible - having realized this was the only way to get the Monckton to stop bothering him.

What's telling about Monckton is that four years later he's still telling this story, blissfully unaware that his meddling made no difference to the fate of the World.