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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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, [...]

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 [...]

Opinion by Andy May I wrote my latest book, Politics and Climate Change: A History, because I recognized that government funding of scientific research was corrupting science. We were warned this might happen by President Eisenhower in his farewell address to the public, where he said: “The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars [...]

By Andy May “If you can’t dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with Bull…” W. C. Fields and, flying a bomber over Berlin. In late February 2015, Willie Soon was accused in a front-page New York Times article by Kert Davies (Gillis & Schwartz, 2015) of failing to disclose conflicts of interest in his academic [...]

By Andy May SAR is an abbreviation for the second IPCC assessment report, Climate Change 1995 (IPCC, 1996). As explained in my new book, Politics and Climate Change: A History, this IPCC report was a turning point in the debate over catastrophic human-caused climate change. The first IPCC report, “FAR,” was written under the [...]