One of the bigger jokes in climate science now is that the missing heat is hiding at the bottom of the sea, and someday will surface again and restart global warming.
But the reality is that the oceans get colder with depth, so any large scale ocean turnover will cool the planet. This is what happens during La Nina. The planet warms during El Nino, due to a lack of ocean turnover.
I tried an experiment to randomly remove 90% of GHCN US stations three times, using different random seeds. One run produced cooling and others produced warming. Blue is the full data set.
The 90% removed leaves approximately 100 US stations, showing that amount isn’t enough for the US – much less the world.
I tested out my theory, and removed every other station when calculating the US temperature. It has almost no impact on either the yearly temperature or the trend.
Suppose you have four temperature stations in a relatively small geographical area, and you add a fifth in the geographic middle of the group. Should the trend change?
No, it shouldn’t. The addition of the fifth station might cause the average temperature of the group to shift due to differences in local geography, but it shouldn’t affect the trend much. This is because the temperature trend in the geographic middle of the group should be about the same as the numerical average of the trend at the other four stations.
Despite record cold and Great Lakes ice, NCDC thinks they can get away altering the US temperature record to make the past winter just below average temperature.
Climate at a Glance | Time Series
74% of the US was below normal temperature this winter, much of it 10 degrees below normal.
It was actually the ninth coldest winter on record, and the coldest in 35 years.
NCDC bumped the winter up to 34th warmest, through an amazing 4 degrees of tampering relative to 1949.
These adjustments are about 5 times larger than what they show in USHCN documents.
[Anthony Watts pointed out that the HPRCC map above uses a different set of stations and different baseline period than the NCDC graph. This is a valid point and affects the 74% of US below normal I mentioned, but seems unlikely to account for more than a about half a degree difference in the regional anomalies.]
The number of 100 degree days and 0 degree days have been near historic lows in recent years in the US, though 2014 may reverse the trend.
In 1999, Hansen said that the US had cooled over the last 50 years despite increasing greenhouse gases.
NASA GISS: Science Briefs: Whither U.S. Climate?
The US government says that the country has warmed significantly over the last 50 years due to rising greenhouse gases.
downloads.globalchange.gov/usimpacts/pdfs/national.pdf
Disclaimer : you simply aren’t intelligent enough to understand all of this big science, and Mosher says the temperature record is all good.
The missing heat has sunk to the bottom of the sea, where it is disguising itself as very cold water. When this just above freezing water returns to the surface, it will make global warming hell break loose across the planet.
