Insignificant record warming and other climate remarkables from deniersville

Despite climate science deniers thinking global warming will stop on 20 January, there is little changed in climate conspiracy land. It's just more of the same old denier memes that have been circulating for years. At WUWT they've had John Christy going on about CO2 being plant food, and some very detailed work to try to prove something or the other about the medieval climate anomaly (see the interactive map and references here).

Deniers still enraptured with medieval warming

Regarding the latter, I'm not sure that deniers know that it was climate scientists who did the hard work to determine the extent and timing of warmer and cooler periods in recent history. (In climate terms, the Holocene is recent history.)  Many of them have some odd notion that climate scientists, who've been the ones finding out about the past, have also been trying to "cover up" what they've found.

Deniers are a odd bunch.

To prove that scientists have been covering it up, a couple of people have been exposing all the covered up publications (ie published work, publicly available to the public) that have any information about past climates in different parts of the world. It's quite an effort pulling together scientific papers on temperture changes in different parts of the world. What they have yet to do (if they are going to) is work out what happened to the global average temperature between, say, 800 and 1400, which extends beyond the medieval climate anomaly but seems to be the period that interests them most.

The focus on medieval times can be explained by deniers' tendency to logical fallacy. They seem to think that if something other than burning fossil fuel caused some warm years in the past, then it has to be something other than CO2 emissions that is causing global warming now. Which is pretty darn weird of them, isn't it. Especially since the world is warmer now and on a steeper warming trend than it ever was in past centuries in the Holocene. (Some are even claiming that we're heading for an ice age. I mean we must be mustn't we. With three "hottest ever" years on a row, our luck has to change, even though the amount of CO2 in the air is higher than it's been in probably more than a million years.)

UAH warmest year on record

I mentioned John Christy. There are a couple of things to point out in that regard. Roy Spencer, John's partner in the upper air, has written a blog post with the troposphere temperatures for December. (I'll write about that separately, when RSS data comes out.)

There are three things of note in the meantime. The first thing is that the lower troposphere is the hottest it's ever been in the satellite record, according to UAH. Roy is doing his best to play that down, heading his own article: "Global Satellites: 2016 not Statistically Warmer than 1998". No further comment necessary.

Do Christy and Spencer expect much faster warming very soon?

The second thing is that Roy Spencer and John Christy might be expecting the rate of warming to increase a lot in the near future. I say that because, as you know, scientists like to use a scale on charts and figures that are appropriate to the data. A scale that has meaning in the context of what is happening. Well, look at the scale on the chart below, from Roy and John (at WUWT). It goes up to 0.95 C a decade. I think that they are probably overestimating the rate of warming to come, at least in the near term. On the other hand, maybe they are expecting a cooling at 1 C a decade. Who am I to say? They are the experts, or so they say.

UAH v6 to be published in a Korean journal

The third thing is that over at WUWT we're told that John Christy and Roy Spencer have finally found a journal in which to publish their write up of UAH version 6. They may have had to shop around a bit. The journal is one you might not have come across before. It's the Asia-Pacific Journal of Atmospheric Science, and the next issue is likely to be the February issue. Roy Spencer has favoured that journal in the past, with his 1D model paper co-authored with William D. Braswell (and discussed by ATTP). The same journal published a paper by Lindzen and Choi, back in 2011. That was an expansion of their 2009 paper in GRL, which as they said "was subject to significant criticisms".  (I'm not saying the journal is poor quality. It's the journal of the Korean Meteorological Society and is fairly new, having started in 2008.  All I'm thinking is that it's likely that Spencer and Christy tried more prominent journals first.)

From the WUWT comments

The thoughts below are in response to the report of UAH lower troposphere temperature (archived here, latest here).

Jim G1 pays no regard to the actual trend (about 0.12 C/decade for UAH), and simply looks at the 1998 temperature compared to the average reported for 2016, and writes:

January 3, 2017 at 2:47 pm
18 years and we’re up .02C, then in 1800 years we should be up 2C compared to 1998. That’s my model and I’m sticking to it.

Freedom Monger is pushing the UAH lower troposphere temperature as the ants pants, and shouts:

January 3, 2017 at 2:50 pm
Well, if 2016 is going to be spun by the Media as THE HOTTEST YEAR EVER, I can spin it as Proof of the Pause:
HEADLINE: THE EARTH’S AVERAGE TEMPERATURE HAS REMAINED BASICALLY THE SAME FOR 18 YEARS!
Sub-Headline: 2016 ONLY 0.02 degrees C WARMER THAN 1998!

tom s probably lives in a cool part of the world, and would prefer to be somewhere warmer:

January 3, 2017 at 3:26 pm
And I’ve enjoyed our nice run of above average months here in the northland. I want warmth. More and more warmth. “Mother earth…please provide warmer weather where I live for the rest of my years, thank you”. .

Don Easterbrook writes how if it hadn't been colder than now in the 1930s, it would have been warmer.

January 3, 2017 at 4:10 pm
If NOAA and NASA hadn’t significantly reduced the 1930s temps, 1934 and 1936 would remain the hottest years of the century.

He's wrong, of course - this is from NASA's GISTemp from an earlier article here:

Richard M thinks, contrary to rational thinking, that warming means it's cooling:

January 3, 2017 at 4:27 pm
Keep in mind that in 1998 we had just moved into the +AMO and Arctic sea ice extent was still very high. Now we are near the peak of the AMO’s effect. That is why you see almost all the warm areas in the Arctic. Warmer ocean water melts more ice which allows heat from the water to warm the air.
Looks to me like we are cooling outside of this climate noise.

That's enough.