April 19, 2008 RESEARCH UPDATES:

(1) – Our latest article, “Potential Biases in Feedback Diagnosis from Observational Data: A Simple Model Description”, has been accepted for publication in Journal of Climate. It uses a simple climate model to show how daily noise in the Earth’s cloud cover amount can cause feedback estimates from observational data to be biased in the positive direction, making the climate system look more sensitive to manmade greenhouse gas emissions than it really is.

(2) – I have asked the editor of the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society to consider publishing a paper I have written entitled, “Evidence for Internal Radiative Forcing of Climate Change”. I believe that this paper addresses the single most important issue neglected by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel On Climate Change (IPCC): Natural climate variability generated within the climate system in the form of INTERNAL radiative forcing.
This paper is a generalization of our paper that has just been accepted for publication in Journal of Climate, and describes how mixing up of cause and effect when observing natural climate variability can lead to the mistaken conclusion that the climate system is more sensitive to greenhouse gas emissions than it really is. It also shows that a small change in cloud cover hypothesized to occur with the El Nino/La Nina and Pacific Decadal Oscillation modes of natural climate variability can explain most of the major features of global average temperature change in the last century, including 70% of the warming trend. While this does not prove that global warming is mostly natural, it provides a quantitative mechanism for the (minority) view that global warming is mostly a manifestation of natural internal climate variability. (This paper is sure to be controversial, and it will be interesting to see how difficult it will be to get published.)

If you run through the original plots in post 96 (emailed to you), you will see the writer’s point is true. There is a warm anomaly over most of northern Asia – it is shown on GISS ST and also on UAH LT satellite data, so this warming is already reflected in the UAH LT dataset, which shows only minor March warming on a global average basis. The GISS ST shows a higher Asian warming anomaly, which may be valid, but GISS also lacks any data for large parts of the globe that are outside the warm Asian region – so the GISS weighted average is high. I expect the ST/LT difference will narrow in April 2008.

Best, Allan

It is possible, even probable that Hadcrut3 was not out at time of writing – date and authorship of that note are still unknown.

As discussed, ST lead LT trends by ~1 month, so let’s see if April LT’s reflect the strong warming spike alleged in March 2008 ST’s. We will also see if April ST’s exhibit a strong reversal.

“Disconnects” of Hadcrut3 ST and UAH LT trends do occur in the past datasets – but are not all that common or that large.

Best, Allan

P.S. New record cold this weekend in southern Alberta (Lethbridge). Must be due to all that record hot March weather.

The tropical upper troposphere remains anomalously cool. Presumably this is a lag effect of La Nina.

This is helpful – authorship unknown – perhps someone here on CA?
Best, Allan

Let us begin with a comparison of temperature anomalies for three different datasets: MSU Satellite, RSS Satellite and NASA GISS, courtesy WoodforTrees.org.

http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/uah/from:2007/plot/rss/from:2007/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:2007/plot/gistemp/from:2007
Notice how RSS and UAH are in good agreement with each other but GISS indicates a sudden heat wave.
Now let us look at the global temperature anomaly map for the RSS satellite for March 2008:

http://www.remss.com/msu/msu_data_monthly.html (make sure to click the anomaly tab)
Notice the heat wave occurring in Asia while there are cool temperature anomalies in Southern Africa, North America, and in the South Pacific near Antarctica.

Now let us look at the March 2008 anomaly map from NASA GISS:

http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/maps/ (set ocean for Had/Reynv2 and base period to 1979 – 2000 to match the satellite anomaly period then select “make map”)

Here you can see the heat wave over much of Asia, but notice that data is missing for Southern Africa, a large portion of North America and the South Pacific.

The result is this official NASA GISS temperature anomaly graph that shows a dramatic jump in global temperatures in March 2008:

http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/Fig.C.lrg.gif

I glanced at other data and the warm burst seems to originate in the Pacific region. I probably need to limit this type of chart to 20N or 25N rather than 30N, or use 200mb, to stay clear of the tropopause.

Also, this uses reanalysis data, so I should note that we can’t put a fine point on any aspect.