From recent media reports (e.g. the WaPo’s Capital Weather Gang) you would think that the new RSS satellite dataset for the lower troposphere (LT) has resolved the discrepancy between climate models and observations. But the new LT dataset (Version 4, compared to Version 3.3) didn’t really change in the tropics. This can be seen in the following plot of a variety of observational datasets and the average of 102 CMIP5 climate model simulations. Comparison of 102 CMIP5 climate model runs … [Read more...]
Was July the “Hottest Month on Record”? Who Cares?
Mainstream media the world over breathlessly report that scientists say July 2016 was the “hottest” month in the global temperature record stretching back to 1880 (or as CNN wrongly reported, “ever”)! And future Julys will only become hotter! Repent, the end is near! Or maybe not. Consider: First, for most of the world, whether land or sea, raw data were nonexistent for most of the period before, roughly speaking, the 1960s, making precise claims about global temperature before then … [Read more...]
