David Rose uncovers January 2017 HadCRUT temperature, beating the UK Met Office

David Rose took a short vacation after writing his second article full of false allegations about the NOAA paper published a couple of years ago. Now he's published a third monstrosity. He's digging himself into a deeper hole, aiming to totally sever any slim connection he might have had with science.

His first article was rubbish, his second article was an extrapolation of the first with nothing much to add. Today he's posted yet another "no new news" article, despite this tweet he sent to Bob Ward:

@ret_ward I already used this info last week. Let me explain. A news story, in general, is meant to contain something new.

— David Rose (@DavidRoseUK) February 10, 2017

David Rose's latest, like his previous, was full of fakery: fake news, fake horror, fake allegations, fake umbrage. He even seems to have faked the January 2017 temperature from the UK Met Office Hadley Centre, writing:

Since record highs caused last year by an ‘el Nino’ sea-warming event in the Pacific, HadCRUT 4 has fallen by more than half a degree Celsius, and its value for the world average temperature in January 2017 was about the same as January 1998.

After David Rose tweeted something about "full disclosure", John Kennedy from the UK Met Office pointed out that January data for HadCRUT4 hasn't yet been released. (Is there a mole? :D)

Re: your final paragraph. January 2017 HadCRUT4 isn't out yet. @DavidRoseUKhttps://t.co/nkUtGwHDSL

— John Kennedy (@micefearboggis) February 19, 2017

I'm not about to try to predict what HadCRUT4 will show for January 2017. I will show the data for years and months to date, and make some suggestions.

This is the annual global surface temperature chart for HadCRUT4. I've added a red line showing the average for 1998. As usual you can see the temperature each year by placing your cursor over the chart. The 1997/1998 El Nino warmed the planet by a huge amount. The HadCRUT temperature went up by 0.36 C between 1996 and 1998 and dropped hugely in 1999 (by 0.23 C). The 1998 temperature was surpassed with a vengeance by the 2015/16 El Nino, as you can see. Will the temperature in 2017 drop as much as it did in 1999? That's not all that likely because the 1998 El Nino was followed by a La Nina but there's no sign of that happening this year (except for a very brief incursion reported by NOAA, but not by the Bureau of Meteorology).

Figure 1 | Global mean surface temperature. Data source: UK Met Office Hadley Centre

Below is a plot of the data that's available for the month of January only. It goes to January 2016.

Figure 2 | Global mean surface temperature for January only. Data source: UK Met Office Hadley Centre

It's not impossible that the January data will be "about the same as January 1998" for HadCRUT, after all January 1998 was in the middle of a super El Nino and was unusually hot. Here's what happened in the month of December, according to HadCRUT4:

Figure 3 | Global mean surface temperature for December only. Data source: UK Met Office Hadley Centre

The temperature anomaly for December 1997 was reported as 0.505 C. The anomaly for December 2016 was reported as 0.592 C. The chart below compares HadCRUT4 with GISTemp, showing the January 2017 temperature for GISTemp (but not for HadCRUT4 since I don't have the sort of information that David Rose claims to have).

Figure 4 | Global mean surface temperature for January only. Data source: UK Met Office Hadley Centre and NASA GISS

Here's some arithmetic for the numberphiles. In 1998 GISTemp January temperature anomaly was 0.51 C above the 1961 to 1990 mean, while HadCRUT4 was 0.49 C above it. In 2016, GISTemp January temperature anomaly was 1.03 C above the 1961 to 1990 mean, while HadCRUT4 was 0.91 C above it. This difference is attributed to GISTemp treating Arctic temperatures differently to the way HadCRUT does. If the same difference (0.12 C) occurs in January, then HadCRUT4.5 would probably come in around 0.7 C, which is quite a bit higher than the anomaly of 0.49 C in January 1998, despite it being a super El Nino with an extreme (for the time) temperature.

(I will point out, also, that the difference between GISTemp and HadCRUT4 in December 2016 was 0.097 C, somewhat less than the 0.12 C difference between them in January 2016.)

I could write about all the other things wrong with David Rose's article. His grandstanding, taking credit for the grandstanding of Lamar Smith and his appalling behaviour. His pumping up his prose with words like "claim", as usual. His not knowing the difference between the word "pause" and the word "slowdown".  His fake claim that this paper "made a huge impact on the Paris Agreement", when most of the agreement had been thrashed out before it appeared. His quote-mining Peter Stott from a Sunday Times article (without attribution), leaving off some important words:

Peter Stott, head of climate monitoring and attribution at the Met Office climate centre, said: “The slowdown hasn’t gone away . . . However, our confidence in a warming world doesn’t just depend on surface temperatures. It is seen in a wealth of indicators, including melting snow and ice, and rising sea levels.”  

David Rose only quoted the first five words of Dr Stott and even then felt the need to embellish. He also left out lots of quotes from other scientists.

I could, but I've already written one article about this, and Bob Ward has done a superb job listing 30 false claims made by David Rose in his previous article (which isn't very different from his latest one). (There are more in the references to my last article.) As well as that, to head off the hints that David Rose made about an upcoming paper, Peter Thorne has written a useful article at CarbonBrief.

Curiously WUWT hasn't yet picked up on David Rose's latest atrocity. Perhaps they regard it as "old news".

The NOAA paper was published almost two years ago, in June 2015. Why is David Rose rehashing his nonsense? As I tweeted recently, could he be wanting to shut down NOAA so that all this extreme weather we've been having will come to a stop?