[palmer]

Thanks for posting the chart. Cogitator is going to bet me that the next El Nino will exceed 1998 by 0.1 degrees or roughly 0.9 on your chart. Ok, well, he hasn’t quite agreed to that yet. He may try to substitute GISS for satellite measurements; not acceptable. He may weasel a little on the size of the El Nino; fair enough, I’ll give him an even 0.8

[cogitator]

It has to be surface measurements because that's what the record is based on. No one is defining the new global surface temperature record with lower troposphere measurements.

It's an official new record if it's 0.05 deg. C* higher in all three surface temperature records: NOAA, Hadley Centre UK, and GISS.

* Exceeds current error bars.

Here's the chart for 2005 from NOAA. You can see the size of the error bars.

Here's what NOAA says about 2005, by the way:

"The 2005 global temperature was statistically indistinguishable from the standing record set in 1998. One data set, in use at NCDC since the late 1990s, produced a global annual temperature for 2005 that was slightly below 1998 (below left). An improved data set, which incorporates innovative algorithms that better account for factors such as changes in spatial coverage and evolving observing methods, results in 2005 being slightly warmer than 1998. (below right)."

Source: http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/research/2005/ann/global.html

Question for the skeptics in general (not necessarily palmer): If there's been a decade-long cooling trend since 1998, how could 2005 have been as warm as 1998?