Hard Rockin Denier' Endorses CRU Data!!!

By night AGW Denier and Creationist Roy Spencer rocks out with his band Christian rock band EcoFreako. By day, he maintains the UAH (University of Alabama) database of daily satellite temperature readings .


Lately, Roy has been engaged in a little side-project--comparing CRU's surface readings to his satellite data to see how they match up. His preliminary conclusion:

I’ll have to admit I was a little astounded at the agreement between Jones’ and my analyses, especially since I chose a rather ad-hoc method of data screening that was not optimized in any way. Note that the linear temperature trends are essentially identical; the correlation between the monthly anomalies is 0.91.

Furthermore, and more specifically, there seems no evidence of an urban heat island effect:

Of course, an increasing urban heat island effect could still be contaminating both datasets, resulting in a spurious warming trend. Also, when I include years before 1986 in the analysis, the warming trends might start to diverge. But at face value, this plot seems to indicate that the rapid decrease in the number of stations included in the GHCN database in recent years has not caused a spurious warming trend in the Jones dataset — at least not since 1986. Also note that December 2009 was, indeed, a cool month in my analysis.

So: validation from a most unusual source. Unfortunately, the EcoFreako website seems to have disappeared. However, here's a link to MP3s of them playing "Earth Has A Fever" (sung to the tune of "Cat Scratch Fever", and "I Want To Mock Al Gore All Night", sung to the tune of...well, you figure it out.

Hottest July Ever?

Though Dr. Spencer tells us, via Roger Pielke Sr., that the readings might be skewed a tad high by satellite drift, nevertheless it looks very much as though July 2009 will go into the record books as the hottest July ever recorded on a worldwide basis. Note that the yellow line represents July 2005, and that the deep red line for July 1998 remains buried in the pack. These two years, depending on where the numbers come from, are generally considered to be the hottest on record.

Whatever the final July ranking, it seems pretty clear (as Roger Pielke Jr. suggests here) that the notion that the planet is going through a phase of global cooling is no longer sustainable.

Pielke Sr. Responds...

...to continuing record high temperature readings from the UAH satellite. Specifically, I asked him when we might know the result of this "short term test" of Roy Spencer's hypothesis (vs.the IPCC's, read through link). He responded::

Thanks for alerting me to your weblog. I contacted them [UAH], and they reported there is a drift in the part of the diurnal cycle that the AMSU sensor samples. I have urged them to write a weblog on this issue to clarify as all of us are comparing with their long term average.

In the July analyses of UAH and RSS (which is from a different set of satellites without the drift) we will see if this record warm anomaly appears. I have been informed that since 1992, the RSS and UAH data closely agree with each other. The differences that do occur provide us with a measure of the uncertainty in the assessment of these climate metrics.

All of us should follow this data closely (along with the upper ocean heat data) as I feel a much better consensus can be achieved if we focus on this information, rather than the use of a global average surface temperature trend to assess global warming.

And later:

On the two hypotheses, however, we need to go through the current El Nino to see if the heat remains elevated or returns to a long term average. The upper ocean heat data will also be key in this assessment.

Given the other side of El Nino: some time in 2010 or 2011.