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The "warming" is actually more like ...

Not even close. Even over 50 years the trend is closer to 0.2/decade:

GISTEMP Least squares trend line; slope = 0.177 per decade over the last 50 years.

BEST Least squares trend line; slope = 0.178 per decade over the last 50 years.

But of course this has continued to accelerate so over the last couple decades you get:

GISTEMP Least squares trend line; slope = 0.21 per decade over the last 20 years.

BEST Least squares trend line; slope = 0.20 per decade over the last 20 years.

RSS Satellite data (which doesn't extend back 50 years) Least squares trend line; slope = 0.20 per decade over the last 20 years.

We know for a fact that on average it is not colder

According to this graph, the South Pole is in fact getting colder : ftp://ftp.ssmi.com/msu/graphics/tlt/plots/rss_ts_channel_tlt_southern%20polar_land_and_sea_v03_3.png

So please explain to me how one can conclude that a negative trend in temperature can possibly be construed as warming up.

> The Heartland Institute skews the data by taking two points
> and ignoring all of the data in between, kind of like grabbing
> two zero points from sin(x) and claiming you're looking at a
> steady state function.

Totally, 100% false. I'll give the poster the benefit of the doubt, and assume they don't know what they're talking about. Check for yourself...
1) download the file of monthly anomalies from ftp://ftp.ssmi.com/msu/monthly...
2) import into a spreadsheet
3) take the slope() function for the 3rd column for the range Sept 1996 to June 2014

You get a very slightly negative result.The slope() function uses *ALL THE POINTS FROM THE START TO THE END*. I repeat, the submission is flat out wrong.

> I smell a startup about to try for some more funding!

I rather smell some pretty bad science in your post.

Near field component of an RF field can be either magnetic or electric: it depends from the source type (electric dipole vs. current loop) and its polarization. IIRC some useful discussion on the topic can be found here. The near field becomes negligible with respect to the propagating wavefield at a distance of a few wavelengths: if indeed they use 2.4 GHz for their device, either it isn't a near field device, or it does not work at 2.4 GHz.(I will resist to the temptation of posting my thoughts about the security of NFC technology here...)

I don't know where you found that water has a 2.4 GHz absorption band (Wikipedia ? ham radio literature ?!? I am curious...). To my knowledge water in the liquid state has a somehow broad absorption resonance at around 15 - 20 GHz. By the way, if water should resonate at 2.4 GHz, microwave ovens would burn meat on the surface, leaving the rest cooked rare! As a reference look at this paper: RF attenuation is easily estimated from real and imaginary parts of the dielectric constant.

Flesh is a lossy dielectric body, and cannot be approximated with a poorly conducting metal surface, as you do when you write "this largely comes down to thermal effects in the skin and other surface layers". RF absorption inside the human body cannot be neglected, except maybe in the spectrum window between far infrared and UV-B regions.

51 (no more a radio amateur, since when I wanted to become a physicist...).

Oh look, I found an interesting discussion about that very post from John Christy of UAH, posted on notorious denier Roger Pielke Jr's blog. The great thing about blogs as compared to scientific journals is that you get to choose your "pal review"! Who will notice if you mis–represent the original data, and use a flawed dataset?

One comment really nails it, and I can't link to it individually, so I'll just include it here:

The first thing I noticed when looking at Christy’s graph was that Hansen’s scenario B had been replotted to make it appear that it tracks scenario A very closely. It doesn’t, it never has. The graph on Real Climate uses the original data http://www.realclimate.org/images/Hansen

The next thing that was obvious was that the RSS and UAH temperature graph shows very little warming. I thought this issue was supposed to have been rectified after Spencer and Christy corrected the errors relating to orbital drift (meaning the temps were taken at progressively later times each day).

After making the corrections (version 5.2) the data now correlates with other global temperature records such as those of NASA and the CRU (remember when the skeptics always relied on the RSS / UAH temperature records, until it came to light that it was wrong).
Detail - http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/fu
Summary - http://www.ssmi.com/msu/msu_data_descrip
UAH Data - http://vortex.nsstc.uah.edu/data/msu/t2l
RSS Data - http://vortex.nsstc.uah.edu/data/msu/t2l
Comparison Data - http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/temper
Hansen’s Data - http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/docs/1988/1988

It appears that Christy has chosen to use the old data in his comparison. In effect, what he’s done is to exaggerate the warming predicted in Hansen’s Scenario B (the one Hansen always said was most likely) and then downplay the true amount of warming that has occurred.

When the real data are used it becomes apparent how accurate Hansen’s scenario B projections have actually been – not exact but pretty close. Considering Jim’s 1988 projections were based on single inputs then this is quite impressive.

Like the article says. Most of this data was already publicly available online:

• HadCRUT Data
• NASA Data
• UAH Data
• RSS Data
• NOAA Data

I took this data and plugged it into Cornell’s free data analysis software Eureka and it found a clear warming trend in the data. I'm not statistician, so I was just playing around, but I have yet to see anyone use this data to argue for anything but a warming trend (Note: I have seen skeptics use parts of this data to show short-term cooling trends). My favorite email attacking the results the software gave me was that I had "manipulated" the data by copying-and-pasting it into Excel.

I'm glad more data is being made publicly available, but, like someone else said, that just means it's time for the skeptics to move the goalposts again. Either put up a competing hypothesis that explains the data or shut up.

You mean like these graphs from the IPCC

I was thinking more like the snow in China, and the hurricane season that hasn't happened in 4 years. But oh, we're going to get more hurricanes, any day now.

I mean by satellites operated without AGW funding on the line. NASA keeps changing its historical data, as do other people.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/05/02/a_tale_of_two_thermometers/

But really, the prediction is pretty simple. For the last six months, the earth's temperature has fallen, according to satellite measurements.

ftp://ftp.ssmi.com/msu/monthly_time_series/rss_monthly_msu_amsu_channel_tlt_anomalies_land_and_ocean_v03_1.txt

The reason given for this in AGW circles is the recently ended LaNina. If temperatures continue to fall, then, AGW theories won't stack up.

But the main point is this: I've not seen a single climate (as in non-weather event), that justifies the amount of money proposed be spent on AGW. Just give me one predicted event... and I'll see you a snow in Iraq.

I can't go on anymore with such nonsense.

It is better for the inuit to have to move, the polar bears to drown and go extinct, then it would be for the world to give up cheap energy. By every conceivable scale, a few bears is not worth screwing billions of people for.

Oh really, that would surprise those scientists who have said the ice covering the Arctic Sea ice coverage has shrunken for the fifth year.

Your article is dated. Check the SAME web site again. Ice has been higher this winter (2007), than before. Even April had 500k km more surface area than last year.

can't go on anymore with such nonsense

Neither can I!

Global Satellite Temperature anomaly

Notice how they aren't going up.

Now here's the deal. AGW people claim (after the fact), that this temperature drop / flattening is due to LaNina. Now, here's the deal. I've got my sunspot guys that tell me because we have weak solar lower activity and we're in an ice age cycle, in fact that, we're heading for global cooling. Assuming the sun cooperates, we might actually be cool and stay cooler throughout the year.

So at best, you are starving billions of people to death to save a couple of eskimos and their polar bears. At worst, you are wasting billions of dollars to do something that won't even matter at all.