Country page USA

13 01, 2021

At the White House, the Purge of Skeptics Has Started

By |2021-01-13T13:03:10+01:0013 January 2021|News, USA|Comments Off on At the White House, the Purge of Skeptics Has Started

January 12th, 2021 by Roy W. Spencer, Ph. D. Dr. David Legates has been Fired by White House OSTP Director and Trump Science Advisor, Kelvin Droegemeier President Donald Trump has been sympathetic with the climate skeptics’ position, which is that there is no climate crisis, and that all currently proposed solutions to the [...]

11 01, 2021

Michael Mann’s 2008 Reconstruction

By |2021-01-11T16:29:39+01:0011 January 2021|News, USA|Comments Off on Michael Mann’s 2008 Reconstruction

In my last post, it was suggested that Michael Mann’s 2008 reconstruction (Mann, et al., 2008) was similar to Moberg’s 2005 (Moberg, Sonechkin, Holmgren, Datsenko, & Karlen, 2005) and Christiansen’s 2011/2012 reconstructions. The claim was made by a commenter who calls himself “nyolci.” He presents a quote, in this comment, from Christiansen’s co-author: Fredrik Charpentier [...]

6 01, 2021

Changing Climate Debate History

By |2021-01-06T21:25:34+01:006 January 2021|News, USA|Comments Off on Changing Climate Debate History

While researching my next book, I found a bit of interesting deception on the Intelligence Squared web site. This is the organization that hosted the famous March 14, 2007 global warming debate on the motion “Global Warming is not a Crisis.” Debating in favor of the motion were the late Michael Crichton, Professor Richard Lindzen [...]

23 12, 2020

Ocean Temperatures, what do we really know?

By |2020-12-23T21:16:49+01:0023 December 2020|News, USA|Comments Off on Ocean Temperatures, what do we really know?

This is the last in my current series of posts on ocean temperatures. In our previous posts we compared land-based measurements to sea-surface temperatures (SSTs) and discussed problems and contradictions in the land-based measurements (see here). This first post was overly long and complicated, but I needed to lay a foundation before getting to the [...]

19 12, 2020

Sea-Surface Temperature Anomalies

By |2020-12-20T13:22:31+01:0019 December 2020|News, USA|Comments Off on Sea-Surface Temperature Anomalies

My previous post on sea-surface temperature (SST) differences between HadSST and ERSST generated a lively discussion. Some, this author included, asserted that the Hadley Centre HadSST record and NOAA’s ERSST (the Extended Reconstructed Sea Surface Temperature) record could be used as is, and did not need to be turned into anomalies from the mean. Anomalies are constructed by taking a [...]

16 12, 2020

Sea-Surface Temperatures

By |2020-12-16T17:01:30+01:0016 December 2020|News, USA|Comments Off on Sea-Surface Temperatures

My last post compared actual sea-surface temperature (SST) estimates to one another to see how well they agreed. It was not a pretty sight; the various estimates covered a range of global average SSTs from ~14°C to almost 20°C. In addition, some SSTs were declining with time and others were increasing. While I did check the [...]

13 12, 2020

Sea surface and mixed layer temperatures

By |2020-12-13T16:14:54+01:0013 December 2020|News, USA|Comments Off on Sea surface and mixed layer temperatures

As described in my previous post, the ocean "mixed layer" is sandwiched between the very thin "skin" layer at the ocean surface and the deep ocean. The skin layer loses thermal energy ("heat") to the atmosphere primarily through evaporation, gains thermal energy from the Sun during the day, and constantly attempts to come to [...]

9 12, 2020

Sea surface skin temperature

By |2020-12-10T12:43:36+01:009 December 2020|News, USA|Comments Off on Sea surface skin temperature

In previous posts, see here and here, I’ve tried to show that because the oceans cover 71% of Earth and they contain 99% of the thermal energy stored on the Earth’s surface, they dominate the speed and magnitude of climate changes. In all my posts the Earth’s surface is defined as everything from the ocean floor to [...]

1 12, 2020

The true “control knob” of long-term temperature change is the oceans

By |2020-12-09T15:26:11+01:001 December 2020|News, USA|Comments Off on The true “control knob” of long-term temperature change is the oceans

A considerable amount of new information on ocean temperature has been gathered since I last wrote about the subject in 2016 here. In my last post on GHCN and the National Temperature Index, it appeared that ocean temperature trends and the thermal energy distribution in oceans dominate climate change. Land-based weather stations are invaluable for weather prediction, [...]

30 11, 2020

The U.S. National Temperature Index

By |2020-12-09T15:47:08+01:0030 November 2020|News, USA|Comments Off on The U.S. National Temperature Index

The United States has a very dense population of weather stations, data from them is collected and processed by NOAA/NCEI to compute the National Temperature Index. The index is an average temperature for the nation and used to show if the U.S. is warming. The data is stored by NOAA/NCEI in their GHCN or “Global Historical Climatology [...]