Carl Mears
It has been suggested that the lack of a tropospheric hotspot (if there is such a lack) is mostly due to errors in the surface temperature datasets, which are (in this story line) suspected of being biased in the direction of too much warming. This seems unlikely. Clearly, the above spread in results for different upper air datasets reveals considerable structural uncertainty (Thorne et al, 2005) for the upper air data, and the error bar on the RSS trend values is much larger than the error bar for the HadCRUT4 value. Also, the various surface datasets are much more similar to each other. To show this, I redo the analysis in Figure 1 using a different surface dataset constructed by NOAA (GHCN-ERSST). The final trend ratios are almost identical to those found using HADCRUT4, and the conclusions reached are unchanged.
Carl is a smart guy, but he let his preconceived notions turn logic on its ear.
The surface data sets are crap, and they change constantly. The past doesn’t look anything like it did 40 years ago. And the current data sets all use the same tortured data – so of course they look the same.
Garbage in – garbage out.
“Also, the various surface datasets are much more similar to each other.”
This is like noting that all the casinos use similar blackjack rules, and concluding it is therefore unlikely that the odds are biased in favor of the house.
Of course all the surface records suffer similar problems. Urbanization is happening everywhere, all the major climate outfits that administer the datasets have large incentives to generate more warming and few controls.
Since weather balloon thermometers cannot find the “hot spot”, the climate charlatans have said that it can be measured by wind shear. Logic does not apply to alarmists …
“Carl is a smart guy”
[Citation required]