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.'"

Comments

youtube?

[schneidafunk]

I didn't realize researchers are now submitting their findings on youtube instead of peer reviewed journals.

Re:youtube?

[Anonymous Coward]

I see. So warming is why it snowed in the state of Arkansas in MAY of 1814??? NO, 2013!!!!! Records have never shown a snowfall in May and they've got records going all the way back to when the French owned this land. And the Antarctic has had the all-time record ice coverage in history. Yep, getting really hot.

Re:Double down

[Jane Q. Public]

Double down on stupid.... I swear they are like addicts that refuse to admit they have a problem.

What is interesting here is that they seem to have no problem in their big report reducing warming projections by half -- and now raising total accumulated warming by 100% -- and yet they still call it "science".

Seriously. It would seem to indicate that they have a very serious problem with their science.

Re:Orders of magnitude errors dont inspire confide

[ArsonSmith]

We're NASA, our funding is dropping, no more cold war, we no longer have a space shuttle to steam funds to us for, so GLOBAL WARMING!!!!! give us money.

In other news....

[bobbied]

Global Cooling advocates from the 70's claim their analysis was wrong by a factor of 2. The world is cooling faster than expected based on their data with the blank areas estimated (fudged) too.. The freezing of the arctic regions is expected to continue during the winter months, endangering polar bears and penguins who are not adapted fully to the new level of cold. No comment yet from Al Gore.