New RSS TLT V4

By stoat on July 4, 2017.

Since I'm able to post, and listening with half an ear to a rather boring meeting, I'll briefly post this. Mostly I think I'll refer you to Moyhu who tells you what you need to know; this is largely for my own reference. The take-home message, errm, apart from "the new trend is higher than the old trend", is probably what Gavin said: Structural uncertainty in satellite temperature records is much greater than for the surface station datasets. But all show warming. So early, and repeated, claims for high accuracy for the satellite record are wrong; but I think we've known that for a bit. It might be nice to have a *cough* Red Team assessment from Woy, but as so often, when you need them the Red Team aren't there1.

NS also points out what has been said before, but perhaps not so clearly: that TLT really isn't a very good idea at all.

At some point, someone who cares enough really ought to update the wiki page for this properly, rather than what we have now, which is a bald change of the trend value.

Refs

* FAQ about the V4.0 TLT Update

Notes

1. Woy weighs in late with Comments on the New RSS Lower Tropospheric Temperature Dataset. as you'd expect, he focusses on technical details, minimises the warming, ignores the unreliability issue, and focusses on disparity with GCMs (using a number so well known to the septics that he doesn't trouble himself to source it).

Tags
climate science

More like this

Some models show more warming in the troposphere than at the surface, while a slightly smaller number of simulations show the opposite behavior.
but also
Globally, the troposphere is predicted by models to warm about 1.2 times more than the surface;{{cn}}
has been there a while causing the contradictory tag since Jan 2016.

What is worse the ref given seems to contradict itself:
"The most recent climate model simulations give a range of results for changes in global-average temperature. Some models show more warming in the troposphere than at the surface, while a slightly smaller number of simulations show the opposite behavior. There is no fundamental inconsistency among these model results and observations at the global scale."

but later
"Almost all model simulations show more warming in the troposphere than at the surface."

So which is it 'almost all' show warming or just a slightly smaller number that show less warming?

Is there a more authoritative or suitable source to settle this.

Maybe what is wanted is not 'someone who cares' so much as someone with sufficient knowledge, understanding and time to do the editing necessary? (i.e. don't look at me.)

[Yeah, or me. Though I might do it if no-one else does. The problem is revising it all to "now" whilst preserving some history. I think "almost all" GCMs show more warming aloft -W]

Off-topic, but not entirely unrelated. Comments on the "East Is Red" thread from May are now locked, so I can't post this there.

Judy Curry has just written a 2778-word post enthusiastically promoting the "Red Team" thing. Somehow she manages not to mention even once the actual "Red Team" exercise that already occurred (Berkeley Earth) nor the (non-existent) GWPF Report despite the fact that she's on the board of GWPF.