These are fairly pivotal studies, and may significantly shift the scientific assessment of global warming as it is occurring now. I really enjoy watching the process of science at work.
There is an error in the LiveScience article; it says that the previous analysis by Spencer and Christy's group showed a tropospheric cooling, whereas the new analysis shows a warming. In actuality, the new correction increases the warming trend in Spencer and Christy's data by about 50%. They report a decadal trend (from 1979) of 0.12 degrees C, in contrast to Mears and Wentz, who get 0.19 degrees C. In either case and considering the error bars, the tropospheric temperature trends are now in agreement with models of how the surface and atmosphere are warming.
Lets see, as I remember we haad an Ice Age and now we don't... hmmmm. Yep. I think its getting warmer.
The real question is the role of man. And the jury is out on that one.
The fact that the climate is warming has never really been in dispute. The warming & cooling of the planet has been going on forever.
The dispute is whether the current warming trend is man-made, which has never been conclusively proven.
That would explain the so-much warmer winters we have been having lately.
What, you mean we haven't been having warmer winters? They're actually colder???
It must be Bush's fault, then!
"This was used by some critics to say 'We don't believe in climate models, they're wrong,'" Santer told LiveScience. "Other people used the disconnect between what the satellites told and what surface thermometers told us to argue that the surface data were wrong and that earth wasn't really warming because satellites were much more accurate."
They're moving the goalpost.
What we have no idea about is how much is is caused by humans, and what would be happening if we weren't here?
The earths atmosphere radically warmed and cooled all on it's own many times before humans invented the internal combustion engine. It's not static. Finding that it's gradually changing is not a big shock.
Only a fool would want colder winters.
If not for a general moderation in the interglacial climate....civilization as we know it would not have developed.
And in those days where were cars, power plants and greedy businessmen?
But until then, the evidence demonstrates that non-human sources for climate changes are far more important than even the worst predictions of the global warming crowd.
The bottom line, I don't care if the earth's warming. I'm not going to change the way I live.
Well, interesting.
But, for most folks, we won't care.
Unless global warming actually results in a noticeable change in the weather, which really hasn't happened, people won't get worked up about it.
Uh huh, and wild birds do not fly at night.
Let's see--MSNBC does a story about people criticizing the Spencer studies, yet does not even try to interview Spencer (or other like-minded party) for a response? MSM--fair and balanced as usual...
Good news for agriculture and people in northern latitudes.
"Sherwood explains these discrepancies by pointing out that the older radiosonde instruments used in the 1970's were not as well shielded from sunlight as more recent models. What this means as that older radiosondes showed warmer temperature readings during the day because they were warmed by sunlight"
--- If so, there should have been a step change in the graph of each temperature point at the moment that the new device replaced the old in each radiosonde balloon. If the graph of temperatures for a location shows this step change, it should pretty conclusively prove that the equipment is a cause. Since there are 'many' such locations around the globe, it should be pretty obvious on any data analysis since the same thing would happen immediately after the new device is installed at every location.
Common engineering practice is to run both a new & old measurement device in parallel whenever possible to make sure that the reading is repeatable & is reading the same thing. I would like to believe that climate scientists & meterologists us this scientific practice. If so, any difference in readings should have been noted immediately & at every station as the new device is used.
If the difference between the new & old devices was so small it it couldn't be detected at the time, but only later through trend analysis, it would seem that (if both devices were working correctly), any change in trend would NOT be due to the device but an actual change in conditions.
However, that is not what I read in the articles. A theory is proposed (that the difference in the readings is due to faulty equipment) but then the articles go on to a detailed explaination of how an adjusting (fudge factor?) was incorrectly applied 30 years ago and now that it is correctly applied, everything trends together.
Regardless of the merits of climate change or not (personally I'm agnostic on it), if you can't prove your case with direct numbers & statistics and you have to rely on "adjustments" and "correlations", then you really can't prove your case.
ping list
Fact is, we can't reliably predict a week of weather, and the envirohysterics are claiming their predictions extending years are sacrosanct and infallible.
The second key question is: What the hell can we do about it if it's really a threat to life on the planet? The Kyoto treaty is ineffective political eyewash designed with only one thing in mind: destruction of the U.S. economy and distribution of our wealth around the globe under auspices of that "noble" institution, the U.N. It's socialist "humanitarianism" based on Marxist political theory. A lot of those people just don't think humanity should survive.
I've always been a true Darwinist, unlike the liberals who pretend they can "freeze" evolution and species extinction with the silly Endangered Species Act (while truly being only cynically interested in obstructing capitalist activity). If the planet heats or cools too much we'll either fail as a species and go extinct -- an interesting experiment in biological self-awareness -- or a few hardy souls will survive to carry on, just as our ancestors did in the Pleistocene Ice Age. Either way, there's not a damned thing we can do about it. And I'd rather die free and capitalist than servile and socialist.
That global warming is occuring is beyond dispute. And for me, the evidence that it is largely human-caused, and that for the most part, the effects thus far have been negative, is more highly convincing the skeptic's take on the matter. What is an issue of dispute is how do we deal with it; policies like Kyoto may look good on paper, but we have seen the disastrous effects of large-scale economic interventionism and social planning, and are still feeling them today, and the drastic remedies some propose may cause more problems than they solve.
As you pointed out that was not the case, Spencer and Christy showed warming at a much slower rate. But this 'study' is not surprising, this is about the 10th attempt by Global Warmers to 'correct' Spencer and Christy's data. It is not that hard to try to manipulate data to meet your desired results. The fact is, global warming models greatly exagerate man's impact on global warming and produce outrageous results that will never happen.
Know thine enemies...