Desperate Deniers Part 5 - Anthony "surface station" Watts flunks NOAA temperature chart 101

Just when you think that Anthony Watts couldn't make a bigger fool of himself, you find out that he can. This is more properly an update to the previous article, but given the crazy reaction to the hottest year on record, it's worth a separate article. In that article I groaned at Anthony saying it couldn't be the hottest year ever globally because in the USA it was "only" the third hottest year ever.

I should know by now that with Anthony Watts you have to check every little thing. Thanks to Mark in the comments, I've discovered that Anthony "surface station" Watts can't even read a temperature anomaly chart.  Harbouring all sorts of paranoid conspiracy theories, he wrote:

When you look at temperature that isn’t biased by continuous adjustments, such as NOAA’s highly questionable fiddling with sea surface temperature data this year, you find that 2015 was not the hottest record at all according to the U.S> Climate Reference Network data, which is a state of the art system designed to need no “corrections” of any kind. 2015 comes in third for the USA:

Let's not dwell on Anthony not wanting sea surface temperatures to contaminate the US land surface data (come again? Are there ships and buoys on land now?).  Let's look at his evidence...

This is the chart he showed to prove it was the third hottest year on record. If you click on it to make it bigger you can see he even put a dab of yellow on that last data point on the right:

Look more closely at his chart. You can click to enlarge it - or go to the full size version archived from WUWT. You'll notice the following:

• Yes, it was, as he said, the Climate Reference Network.
• Yes, the dot on the far right is the third highest dot.
• Hang on....

Wait a minute. What the heck! The chart says that it's the "previous 12 months" and, hey, there sure are a lot of readings for an annual record that began only ten years ago. 

Look down the bottom.  Go to the page itself and scroll down to the table underneath.

Not year - month!

Woops, its a monthly chart. It's not that last year was the third hottest year on record, it was the last month was the third hottest MONTH on record. It wasn't the third hottest December either, it was the third hottest month of any month since the record began - a whole ten years ago! (It wasn't the third hottest month since 1895.)

Here's the chart again, with some annotations:

It was the second hottest year on record, Anthony you goose

You can check for yourself. On both the annual records that go to 2015, last year was the second hottest year on record:

It was a very hot December - the hottest since records began in the USA

Now if Anthony hadn't been in such a flap, itching to get his article on line to prove he was cleverer than all those scientists at NOAA, then maybe he would have read the chart properly. Or maybe he would have plotted an annual chart. And if he'd kept up with the weather news and learnt about the hot December, then maybe he'd have twigged that what he thought was a rather warm 2015 was in fact just a very hot December. The hottest in the record for the USA. The very hottest December. Here's the chart for the month of December only, going all the way back to 1895. In all that time there's never been a hotter December in the USA:

(If I'd looked at his chart and done some simple checking .... Well, thanks to Mark I have now.)

You can check the records on this NOAA page. Here are some tips (I had links but they don't "stick"):

• For any data, pick the data set(s) you want from the choices on the left, and the time period you want from the drop down lists, and the type of data (eg temperature anomaly). 
• For a single month e.g. December only, from the choices up top, select the time scale of 1 month and pick the month
• For annual data, choose "annual"
• For monthly data for a full year, choose "previous 12 months"
• Play around with the choices, there are more than I've listed above.

You can download the data in your format of choice (eg csv) from just below the chart, or copy and paste the data as it appears in the table below the chart.

More gems - why would you trust Anthony Watts?

There are more gems in Anthony's section about how the US temperature record proves that 2015 wasn't the hottest year globally. Read this:

While that USCRN data only spans a little more than a decade, it is instructive for comparison to claims made. NOAA doesn’t seem to like referencing this state of the art USCRN system in their public reports, preferring instead to rely on their old, messy, error prone, and highly adjusted COOP/USHCN network which has been shown to have significant biases. They claim in their SOTC report from Jan 2016 that it was the 2nd hottest year on record for the CONUS:

In 2015, the contiguous United States (CONUS) average temperature was 54.4°F, 2.4°F above the 20th century average. This was the second warmest year in the 121-year period of record for the CONUS.Source: http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/national/201513

As I’ve said before, NOAA can’t seem to keep historical temperatures static, and thus the claims made referencing them, accurate. They change from month to month, and when there is no firmament to the history they present, why trust them?

No firmament? That's the second time this week I've seen him misuse that word. Does he think that NOAA is up in the heavens, or has he just been spending too much time at bible class? (Anthony does misuse words a lot. It's as if he hears a word and decides to use it, without understanding the meaning. That's an endearing trait in a three year old. Not so much for a middle-aged denier blogger.)

Anthony Watts is playing the clown. Just imagine if NOAA took him at his word and started saying that this year or this month was the hottest in the record, using the ten years of USCRN as the record. You can hear the howls of protest from WUWT already. It's not a long enough time - they'd shriek. And they'd be right. In any case, where they overlap, the long term record is virtually indistinguishable from the pristine USCRN, which speaks to its reliability. 

And Anthony's three years out of date. NOAA no longer uses USHCN as a current record, or at least it stopped reporting it on the website back in 2012. It just uses ClimDiv and USCRN now. It's like it states on the page that Anthony used to plot his monthly temperature data:

National USHCN monthly temperature updates have been discontinued. The official CONUS temperature record is now based upon nClimDiv. USHCN data for January 1895 to August 2014 will remain available for historical comparison.

Bad hair day!

Sheesh. You would think a surface station expert could read a temperature chart. You'd think a weather announcer (meteorologist ret'd) would know that last year was the second hottest year ever in his own country. You'd think that Anthony would take a moment to read whatever it says on the web pages he cites as "evidence" of evil intent. You'd think he'd keep up to date with the data used in his home country - the very same data that he has supposedly spent the last nine years complaining about, analysing, trying to "prove it wrong" with his surface station project. (He can blame it on the people he's got doing his work for him. He's an "organiser", not a doer.)

Maybe it's just that Anthony Watts has been having a bad hair day, or a bad hair week, or a bad hair year, or ....

From the HotWhopper archives

• Desperate Deniers Part 1: Stephen Hodgart from University of Surrey and HadCRUT4 - January 2016
• Desperate Deniers Part 2: David Middleton fakes a satellite data "Just for grins"- January 2016
• Desperate Deniers Part 3: Rud Istvan mixes up GISTemp data versions - January 2016
• Desperate Deniers Part 4: Anthony Watts is shame-proof despite all his bloopers about NOAA - January 2016
• 2015 is the hottest year on record by a massive 0.13°C - January 2016
• An economist should know better, maybe ...but what about Anthony Watts? - May 2013