Frankly Peter, I have a problem with any graph such as this if it uses non-archived data.

PRECISELY.

If not for Christy and Spencer making their methods public, nobody would’ve noticed the few errors (widely celebrated by global warming scaremongers) they’ve made.

So why is everyone else permitted to be so secretive?

Frankly Peter, I have a problem with any graph such as this if it uses non-archived data. Phil Jones has been asked, ad nauseum, for his data. As Hans von Storch discovered, he still refuses to release it.

I asked WC if he know where to find Jones’ data. He refered me to the massaged data from which Jones constructed the graph. I told WC that I wanted the raw, unadjusted, unsmoothed data. He refered me to Jones, who only has one answer: NO.

Re 157/158, OK, now I see the problem. I misread the graph because it is so deceptive. The Wikipedia is once again wrong, or at best misleading. They start their trend line way after the start of the MSU data, and they have picked their start date very carefully so that the difference between datasets is minimized.

Being a suspicious type fellow, after seeing that the trend lines started way late, I went to the original sources, and downloaded the data to compare them. In fact, the UAH MSU data is significantly different from the ground based data (p less than 0.5)

The slope of the entire 1978 – 2005 data from the UAH MSU analysis is 0.119°C/decade. That of the Jones surface data is 0.172°C per decade. Thus, the MSU temperature rise is only 69% of the ground rise.

Obviously, the author of the wikipedia article had an axe to grind, so he/she didn’t show us the trend for the full dataset, only for part of it … which is why I’m very, very cautious about citing wikipedia articles. Too often, it’s just some joker with more time on his hands than accuracy in his theories.

In fact, I’m cautious about most things I haven’t calculated a priori for myself.

Bad wikipedia … no cookies.

And in any case … I reinstate my earlier claim that no, they are not in “close (but not perfect) correspondence”, they are still a long ways apart, with the UAH MSU data still, after all corrections, showing only 69% of the rise shown by the surface data.

Being a suspicious type fellow, after seeing that the trend lines started way late, I went to the original sources, and downloaded the data to compare them. In fact, the UAH MSU data is significantly different from the ground based data (p

w.

The wikipedia article shows that the surface temp has gone up by ~0.55°C over the period covered by the trend lines, and the UAH MSU record shows a rise of ~0.36°C over the same period.

The UAH MSU rise, then, is only 65% of the surface rise … maybe that’s “close (but not perfect) correspondence” on your planet, but on my planet, that’s a very large difference.

w.

I think this is also part of what I was getting at, BKC. It’s hardly an “average” or a “mean” if there is no geographical represenation in some very large areas of the planet.

Mark

Well, I’ve yet to find a sceptics who dismisses the satellite record but, as the link below shows, the satellite record and the surface record are now in close (but not perfect) correspondence. These records are all onto something and I think it follows if one is wrong, they all are.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Satellite_Temperatures.png

The spike in the “global mean temperature” due to the “98 El Nino has bugged me for a while. It indicates to me that the “global mean temperature” isn’t really global. No energy was added or taken away from the earth system, it was just re-distributed. If it were truly a “global mean temperature”, then there should be no spike.

Humm, well, EN/LN is a change in ocean currents. Millions of years ago two other changes in ocean current were cause by the closure of the Isthmus of Panama and the opening of the Drake passage. Both of these even has PROFOUND effects on global climate, (much larger than EN, but then again they were much larger changes). Therein lies your answer?

So, the question is not why En caused a rise in global temperature, but why the rise in ’98 was so large?