Anthony Watts is foxed yet again by temperature anomalies

I read the latest article from Anthony Watts at WUWT. It reminded me that he really is dumb as an ox and blind as a bat.

Now you and I know that temperatures have been going only one way - up. And it's been getting really hot these past few years. Last year was the third year in a row that was the hottest on record. This year is shaping up as possibly the second hottest.

So what does Anthony Watts do? He plunges deep into idiocy with a most ridiculous article today (archived here).

What got him worked up was that El Nino temperatures are no longer having an effect, now that the Pacific is ENSO neutral. He falsely claimed this in his headline: "2017 Global temperatures are leveling off – near 1980 temperatures"

Near 1980? Really? No, not really. Temperatures today are nowhere near 1980 temperatures.

Despite lots of people trying to help him over the years, Anthony, who mistakenly fancies himself as a temperature expert and was once a weather announcer, still can't tell his anomalies from his baselines.

What caught his attention and sent him down the rabbit hole, was a tweet from Ryan Maue, where he said: "Global temperatures have generally settled to +0.26°C compared to 1981-2010 climatology continuing downward glide thru 2017 (black line)", and posted this NCEP global temperature chart. (Click the chart to enlarge it, as usual):

Figure 1 | Monthly global surface temperatures for 2017 only. Source: NCEP via Ryan Maue

Anthony then trotted off to NASA GISTemp and wrote his headline, and put up this chart. Notice how he added a little box showing the 1980 temperature. Notice too what the temperature has been the last few years. Notice particularly with what temperatures the zero on the left axis lines up:

Figure 2 | Monthly global surface temperatures from 1880 to 2016. Source: NASA via Anthony Watts

You all see what he did there, don't you. Okay, some of you might not be familiar with the different temperature datasets.

• The one that Ryan used measured the differences in temperature from a very recent period, 1981 to 2010.
• The one that Anthony jumped to, measures differences in temperatures (anomalies) from an period thirty years earlier, 1951 to 1980.
• The average of 81-2010 temperature is 0.43 C higher than the average of the 51-80 temperatures.
• Last year, the temperature was 0.78 C higher than it was in 1980, 0.55 C higher than the 1981-2010 average, 0.99 C higher than the 1951-1980 average, and 1.24 C higher than the 1881 to 1910 average.

Thirty years makes a huge difference

That 30 year difference for the two average baselines makes a huge difference. An awful lot has happened to temperature over the past 37 years. Below is a comparison of the years from 1980, with the last four years as well. This is the year to date average, so each month is the average of all the months of the year to that point. The temperature for December each year is the average for the whole year. The main thing is to look at the huge difference between 1980 and recent years.

Figure 3 | Global mean surface temperature, progressive average to date for selected years. Data source: GISS NASA

Here's some information for Anthony Watts:

• The difference between the average temperature over 1980, and the average temperature last year is 0.78 C. 2016 was the hot one.
• The difference between May this year and May in 1980 is still 0.63 C.
• There hasn't been a year as cold as 1980 in 24 years - not since 1993! And barring a cataclysm like a supervolcanic eruption, there's not likely to be another for thousands of years.

Is Anthony Watts plain stupid, deceitful or going senile?

How Anthony, who presents himself as an expert on temperature, could possibly make this beginner mistake is anyone's guess. Here are some options, not mutually exclusive:

• Anthony Watts still can't tell his anomalies from his baselines, despite years of schooling from his betters.
• Anthony does know that he compared apples and pears, but is getting desperate to find ways to hang onto his "ice age cometh" fans.
• Anthony really does need his holiday. The stress is showing.
• Anthony is going senile.

Take your pick or add your own.

Put down your tea or coffee before you read this next bit

Don't risk drowning your keyboard. Put your coffee or tea aside before you read on. It gets worse if you can imagine. I've just read the comments and Leif Svalgaard pointed out that Anthony was falsely comparing two different base averages. Here is the exchange. Prepare to be gob-smacked. Get out your head vice. Whatever keeps you sane.

lsvalgaard  pointed out the anomalies were calculated from wildly periods:

June 27, 2017 at 7:38 am
How can you say that 2017 is like 1980. The base periods on your Figures are different: 1951-1980 for GISS and 1981-2010 for the first Figure.

Anthony Watts says he knew that, but he presented the false conclusion he made anyway.

June 27, 2017 at 7:53 am
Yes I realize that, and expected complaints, in fact I counted on them…but here’s the deal: which one is the RIGHT temperature? hmm? Anomalies are all products of their baselines, and baselines are a choice of the publisher.
If NASA GISS is to be believed as the world’s most cited source for global temperature, then 0.27C is correct for 1980.
Unfortunately, they have been living in the past, and refuse to update their baseline. UAH did it, RSS did it, NOAA/NCEP did it….why not GISS? The answer: Gavin Schmidt.
Not sure about BEST: They don’t list their baseline period in their graph: http://berkeleyearth.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/land-and-ocean-summary-large.png
This is why absolute temperatures don’t suffer from the choices made by the researchers for the anomaly baseline.There’s no musical chairs with anomaly baselines.
Cue the anomaly defenders, Stokes and Hausfather in 3…2…1

What can I say? This comment suggests senility or stupidity of the highest order. I doubt Anthony coped with first grade arithmetic, and his numeric skills went downhill from there.

"which one is the RIGHT temperature? hmm?" - that in itself, and especially in the context of his comment, shows that Anthony just cannot figure out what is meant by an average, and what the difference from an average tells him. He doesn't get it that whether he uses NCEP data or GISTemp data or BEST data or UAH data - 1980 will continue to be around 0.8 C colder than last year, and probably around 0.7 C colder than this year.

If he prefers to use an actual temperature rather than work with differences in temperature, then why doesn't he do that? What he'd find is exactly the same result. 1980 was cold compared to the 2010s - and about 0.8 C colder than last year.

1980 was the hottest year on record - until the end of 1981

To put this in context, 1980 wasn't at all cold compared to the 1910s. It wasn't cold compared to any temperature recorded before it. 1980 was the hottest year on record at the time! See for yourself from the chart below (hover over it to show up the temperature of each year.)

Figure 4 | Annual average global mean surface temperature. Data source: GISS NASA

Anthony Watts is blind as well as ...

Not satisfied with showing off his lack of numeracy skills, Anthony wanted to show off his colour blindness, too. He put up a chart of sea surface temperatures, showing large areas of ocean are much warmer than average, and said:

Just look at the sea surface temperatures, there’s not a lot of warm water:

Now remember that in reality, the areas of surface shrink as you go to the top and bottom of the map below. That means that by far the biggest area of oceans are quite a lot warmer than the baseline temperature, though not as hot as when there's an El Nino.

As the chart (from NOAA), which Anthony posted shows, in many parts they are approach 2 C above the base. What the base is, is the "long-term mean SST (for that location in that time of year)" according to NOAA - I could find no more information than that . I don't know the start or end of the period over which the mean is calculated.

Figure 5 | Sea surface temperature anomalies. Source: NOAA via WUWT

So it turns out that Anthony Watts really is as blind as a blind bat as well as being as dumb as the proverbial ox. If anyone tries to persuade you that Anthony Watts knows anything about global temperature, you can tell them about this display of stupid.

References and further reading - from HotWhopper archives

This is not the first time, by a long shot, that Anthony Watts has shown he just can't wrap his little brain around the notion of anomalies, averages, differences and baselines.

• An economist should know better, maybe ...but what about Anthony Watts? - May 2013
• On GISTemp, baselines and anomalies - June 2013
• Confirmation bias and anomalous anomalies at WUWT - June 2013
• Bob Tisdale's perspective on baselines - January 2014