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Global Warming Since 1997 Underestimated By Half

Layzej writes "A new paper shows that global temperature rise of the past 15 years has been greatly underestimated. The reason is that the weather station network covers only about 85% of the planet. Satellite data shows that the parts of the Earth that are not covered by the surface station network, especially the Arctic, have warmed exceptionally fast over the last 15 years. Most temperature reconstructions simply omit any region not covered. A temperature reconstruction developed by NASA somewhat addresses the gaps by filling in missing data using temperatures from the nearest available observations. Now Kevin Cowtan (University of York) and Robert Way (University of Ottawa) have developed a new method to fill the data gaps using satellite data. The researchers describe their methods and findings in this YouTube video. 'The most important part of our work was testing the skill of each of these approaches in reconstructing unobserved temperatures. To do this we took the observed data and further reduced the coverage by setting aside some of the observations. We then reconstructed the global temperatures using each method in turn. Finally, we compared the reconstructed temperatures to the observed temperatures where they are available... While infilling works well over the oceans, the hybrid model works particularly well at restoring temperatures in the vicinity of the unobserved regions.' The authors note that 'While short term trends are generally treated with a suitable level of caution by specialists in the field, they feature significantly in the public discourse on climate change.'"

6 of 534 comments (clear)

  1. Double down by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    Double down on stupid.

    Just as they get to the point where they can admit there's been no warming for 17 years and started coming up with excuses, here comes another "estimate".

    They had issues with the coverage when they were predicting the apocalypse. I swear they are like addicts that refuse to admit they have a problem. Excuse after excuse. We could have glaciers encroaching on New York and they'd be talking about cO2.

    1. Re:Double down by ColdWetDog · · Score: 5, Interesting

      You be trolling ma'am. You toss off an overstated, inflammatory reply - that's trolling.

      Yes, it's also factually incorrect. But that's life.

      --
      Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
  2. Re:Twice as much to deny! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Not really. The method they use when filling the gaps is to make the gaps cooler than the average when it deals with historic data and warmer than the average when it comes to new data and for some magic reason all our measuring stations are in places that has observed the least change.
    As a denier I only need to take their estimated difference and flip it around. With the invented values for 2012 placed at 1997 and the invented values for 1997 placed at 2012 you can clearly see that there have been no global warming at all.

    Isn't it interesting how much intentionally skewed values can change the outcome.

  3. Re:Orders of magnitude errors dont inspire confide by ebno-10db · · Score: 2, Interesting

    They don't really understand what's going on, at least with any degree of precision. That's why responsible climatologists give overall projections a wide error band. However, pretty much all the predictions based on honest science (as opposed to throwing spaghetti against the wall) point in the same direction.

  4. Especially by gr8_phk · · Score: 3, Interesting
    Especially when a couple month ago we heard that they overestimated because the temperature increase has stalled over the last 10 years. Perhaps this accounts for the missing temperature rise? But then....

    While infilling works well over the oceans, the hybrid model works particularly well at restoring temperatures in the vicinity of the unobserved regions

    The method used works well over the oceans - is that where they omitted data and the used the prediction method? But it works "particularly well" where we have no actual data to validate it...

  5. Re:Global Warming vs. Terrorism by lil_DXL · · Score: 4, Interesting

    The common denominator between the war on terror and climate change denial is quite clear. The war on terror has redistributed enormous amounts of wealth from the government (aka taxes, everyone's money) to a few dozen selected businesses while climate change denial does the same with heavy industries as regulations raises costs, so... yep, it's the good ol' profit motive that is behind this catastrophe. It all gets worse when you take into account how popular the post-hoc ideology invented to justify this slow genocide is. "Climate change is a conspiracy" is a conspiracy.