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Editor of the Fabius Maximus website says:
John,
I hate to think that was the motive of all the scientists doing research in ocean heat content.
On the other hand, they record the data using thermometers — but also never show it in degrees. The changes in degrees are small, which would raise questions about the significance of this finding (especially before Argo, circa 2005). Perhaps that’s a smoking gun.
The good news is that to understand this work we can ignore the mental states of the scientists involved — which is always a good idea. Motives don’t matter (e..g, some excellent surgeons enjoy cutting people).
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Ken L says:
As a layman, who nonetheless reads enough sometimes to get the gist of things, if not the details, I have a problem – how to reconcile this statement by Noaa’s Barnston, taken from the article:
“Satellite measurements help tremendously with this problem. But they are not as reliable as in-situ measurements, because they are indirect (remote sensed) measurements. We’ve come a long way with them, but there are still biases that vary in space and from one day to another, and are partially unpredictable. These can cause errors of over a full degree in some cases. We hope that these errors cancel one another out, but it’s not always the case, because they are sometimes non-random, and large areas have the same direction of error (no cancellation).
with this statement by Dr. Roy Spencer, taken from an article by Paul Homewood ( originally in a post by Spencer, October, 2014), “Roy Spencer On Satellite v Surface Temperature Dataâ€, August 30, 2015:
Satellite microwave radiometers, however, are equipped with laboratory-calibrated platinum resistance thermometers, which have demonstrated stability to thousandths of a degree over many years, and which are used to continuously calibrate the satellite instruments once every 8 seconds. The satellite measurements still have residual calibration effects that must be adjusted for, but these are usually on the order of hundredths of a degree, rather than tenths or whole degrees in the case of ground-based thermometers.
Hopefully someone can help me out. I have ideas, but I’d rather hear from those with a lot more expertise than I have.*********************************************
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Editor of the Fabius Maximus website says:
Ken,
People tend to focus on the instruments used to measure climate, rather than the often far larger and more complex issues affecting data accuracy. There are many of those for satellites, giving us data from varying sets of moving objects in ever-changing orbits high above the Earth.