Thursday, September 2, 2010

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:

YEARMTHGLOBENorth HSouth HTROPICS
2009Jan0.2510.4720.030-0.068
2009Feb0.2470.565-0.071-0.045
2009Mar0.1910.3240.058-0.159
2009Apr0.1620.3150.0080.012
2009May0.1390.1610.118-0.059
2009Jun0.041-0.0210.1030.105
2009Jul0.4290.1900.6680.506
2009Aug0.2420.2360.2480.406
2009Sep0.5050.5970.4130.594
2009Oct0.3620.3320.3930.383
2009Nov0.4980.4530.5430.479
2009Dec0.2840.3580.2110.506
2010Jan0.6480.8600.4360.681
2010Feb0.6030.7200.4860.791
2010Mar0.6530.8500.4550.726
2010Apr0.5010.7990.2030.633
2010May0.5340.7750.2920.708
2010Jun0.4360.5500.3230.476
2010Jul0.4890.6350.3420.420
2010Aug0.5110.6720.3490.362

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.

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