Global Warming Hot Air, Part I.

ScienceDaily.com has recently released yet another story proclaiming the end of the world due to Global Warming. According to them, the top 11 Warmest Years on Record have all been in the last 13 years.

The University of East Anglia and the Met Office's Hadley Centre have released preliminary global temperature figures for 2007, which show the top 11 warmest years all occurring in the last 13 years.

ScienceDaily.com cites the National Meteorological and Hydrological Services (NMHS) and the World Meteorological Organization.

Now, the problem with all of this is that the WMO's 'record' that puts 11 of the warmest years 'ever' in the past 13 years only takes 'averages' based on dating going back as far as 1961. The reason that this is important is that, when the 'averages' are expanded back to 1880, you find that the enormous 'increase' that 2007 saw over the 'averages' of 1961-1990 isn't really all that significant.

Why?

Because of the 30 years between 1961 and 1990, 18 years (60%) were below the average annual mean temperature of the entire period between 1880 and 2006, and 20 years (66.6%) were below the 5-year mean temperature.

So, the WMO and ScienceDaily.com are reporting that we're seeing a temperature increase over a period where temperatures were below normal.

The Huffington Post's Joseph Romm also jumps into the fray with a headline that claims NASA is stating that 2007 is the second warmest year, behind the 'record warmth' of 2005, in the Goddard Insititute for Space Studies analysis.

Romm's dataset, however, doesn't appear to factor in the fact that the same study that ScienceDaily.com cites only puts 2007 as the 7th warmest year since 1850, and he uses 'old data' that had to be revised when a blogger managed to catch a Y2K glitch in NASA and NOAA's climate data collection methods last August.

That's not necessarily Romm's fault, though, as NASA was rather silent about releasing the corrected figures that place 5 of the top 10 warmest years ever before World War II.

Beyond that, no one mentions that we're never given any of the real surface temperature numbers. In his report, Contaminated Data, Ross McKitrick points out a number of the flaws with trying to compare what is to what was.

The surface-measured data has many well-known problems. Over the post-war era, equipment has changed, station sites have been moved, and the time of day at which the data is collected has changed.

Many long-term weather records come from in or near cities, which have gotten warmer as they grow. Many poor countries have sparse weather-station records and few resources to ensure data quality. Fewer than one-third of the weather stations operating in the 1970s remain in operation.

To 'correct' this, scientists play with the numbers. To deal with the 'false warming' generated by growing cities and urban sprawl, they include an 'Urbanization Adjustment'. To deal with the changes based upon the time of day that the data is collected, they have a 'Time of Observation Bias Adjustment'. But, no one knows whether or not any of these adjustments adequately compensate for the changes.

But in a 2004 study with climatologist Patrick Michaels, we found that the adjustment models were not removing the contamination patterns as claimed. If the contamination were removed, we estimated the average measured warming rate over land would decline by about half. Dutch meteorologists using different data and a different testing methodology had come to the same conclusions.

McKitrick showed that there was a direct link between observed warming trends and regions experiencing economic growth to the point that they could demonstrate that "the probability they are unrelated is less than one in 14 trillion." They also showed that the contamination of the data could account for up to half of the surface warming measured since 1980.

If McKitrick's information is as solid as his claims, and the mean temperatures since 1980 that have been reported by NASA are adjusted by his suggested 50%, only 1998 would remain in the 'Top Ten Warmest Years on Record' at 10th place.