Taking the Earth's Temperature

The U.S. Science Team Leader for the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer (AMSR-E) on NASA’s Aqua satellite, Roy Spencer, has a blog in which he updates the current measured temperature of the earth by the AMSR-E sensor. Here's the graph from his latest posting:

Click to Enlarge
The current peak and the peak in 1998 have more to do with an El Niño occurring at that time and not much to do with any "runaway" global warming.

His table of measurements over the last year and half show how variable this measurement is and how it varies over hemisphere:

YEAR	MTH	GLOBE	North H	South H	TROPICS
2009	Jan	0.251	0.472	0.030	-0.068
2009	Feb	0.247	0.565	-0.071	-0.045
2009	Mar	0.191	0.324	0.058	-0.159
2009	Apr	0.162	0.315	0.008	0.012
2009	May	0.139	0.161	0.118	-0.059
2009	Jun	0.041	-0.021	0.103	0.105
2009	Jul	0.429	0.190	0.668	0.506
2009	Aug	0.242	0.236	0.248	0.406
2009	Sep	0.505	0.597	0.413	0.594
2009	Oct	0.362	0.332	0.393	0.383
2009	Nov	0.498	0.453	0.543	0.479
2009	Dec	0.284	0.358	0.211	0.506
2010	Jan	0.648	0.860	0.436	0.681
2010	Feb	0.603	0.720	0.486	0.791
2010	Mar	0.653	0.850	0.455	0.726
2010	Apr	0.501	0.799	0.203	0.633
2010	May	0.534	0.775	0.292	0.708
2010	Jun	0.436	0.550	0.323	0.476
2010	Jul	0.489	0.635	0.342	0.420
2010	Aug	0.511	0.672	0.349	0.362

Go read Roy Spencer's posts if you want a working climatologist's view on the climate, a view that isn't co-opted into mindless "global warming". Instead, his view is more nuanced and conservative and more focused on getting the science right. To understand his viewpoint, read this blog posting.