2024 Satellite Temperature

The December 2024 data from RSS was just made available, so I thought I'd put together some summary graphs for RSSv4 and UAHv6.1. The 2023-2024 warming spike was more pronounced in satellite data, which is intriguing. But RSS continues to show more warming than UAH.  

Here are trends for the full dataset and the last 30 years:

1979 - 2024 Trends
UAH: 0.153 ± 0.012°C/decade (2σ)
RSS: 0.230 ± 0.012°C/decade (2σ)

1995-2024 Trends
UAH: 0.162 ± 0.025°C/decade (2σ)
RSS: 0.249 ± 0.024°C/decade (2σ)

These trends seem pretty disparate from each other (RSS shows ~50% more rapid warming), and my uncertainty calculation doesn't account for all the sources of error in these datasets. Most importantly (as I share here), difficulties with satellites beginning around 1998 were resolved in different ways between RSS and UAH. The decisions made by each explain a good portion of the disagreement between them (they can be seen between 1998 and 2004 below), and that is not factored in to the above uncertainties. Things change after 2005. From 2005-2024, the trends for each are:

2005-2024 Trends
UAH: 0.284 ± 0.043°C/decade (2σ)
RSS: 0.325 ± 0.044°C/decade (2σ)

Over this time period, RSS is warming only ~14% faster than UAH.
However, both RSS and UAH show acceleration. Below I show changes in 30-year trends between RSS and UAH, and you can see a clear upward trend in both. UAH has hit its most rapid warming rate recently, and I can't say for sure, but I'm guessing that has mostly to do with the fact that UAH cools with respect to RSS in the late 1990s.
And both datasets continue to affirm one of the major predictions of climate science. Manabe et al 1967 predicted that GHG-induced warming would lead to a cooling stratosphere (TLS) and a warming troposphere (TLT), and both have been observed since satellite observations began in 1979.
And I frequently see people share graphs of CO2 and UAH temperatures with scales chosen to give the impression that CO2 doesn't correlate with temperature. While I don't think it's best to use TLT to show the relationship, I think it's a perfectly valid rebuttal of these claims to simply plot CO2 forcings on the x-axis and TLT on the y-axis and just calculate the correlation. As expected, the correlation is clear in both UAH and RSS, and the slope of the correlation is higher in the RSS data. The slopes for these are:

UAH: 0.57°C/W/m^2
RSS: 0.88°C/Wm^2

I'm a little surprised that the r^2 is lower in UAH than RSS, which agrees more with GMST datasets. I'm not going to make anything of this, but I find it interesting.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Debunking the Latest CO2 "Saturation" Paper

Image
Update (12/29/2024):  The paper I discuss below was retracted a couple days ago, citing failures in the peer-review process. "Subsequent to acceptance of this paper, the rigor and quality of the peer-review process for this paper was investigated and confirmed to fall beneath the high standards expected by Applications in Engineering Science . After review by additional expert referees, the Editor-in-Chief has lost confidence in the validity of the paper and has decided to retract." A paper published earlier this year is the latest in the long history of attempts to show that CO2 is already "saturated" in the atmosphere, and therefore increased CO2 cannot cause any more warming. The latest in a series of these kinds of papers from Kubicki et al 2024[1] attempts to make this point by modeling the atmosphere in a couple different experiments. The result of their experiments suggested to them that we should question whether "additionally emitted CO2 in the atmosp...
Read more

Was There a "Mike's Nature Trick" to "Hide the Decline?" Part 1 - Misreading CRU Emails

Image
In November 2009, someone likely stole[1] and publicly released over 1,000 emails from Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia. Following this, people combed through all these emails  looking for evidence of frauds and coverups on the part of climate scientists. They found very little damaging information, but not everything they found was was good. There were, as best I can tell, four categories of content that were discovered: The normal kinds of communication you'd expect to find in correspondence between scientists Words and phrases that were twisted out of context and redefined to support an imagined conspiracy that had been imposed on the emails. Evidence of mean-spirited attacks on contrarian scientists and heavy-handed tactics intended to punish journals that published contrarian studies.  A single email describing the process of creating a graph for a WMO statement that used the phrase "hide the decline."  Here I plan to tackle the "hid...
Read more

The Marketing of Alt-Data at Temperature.Global

Image
Temperature.Global (12-month running average, sort of) A few years ago, I started seeing people post links to a new dataset for global temperatures at a website called temperature.global. There are at least four unique features of this dataset. First, the website claims to update global temperature in near real time. Second, every year in the dataset averages below "normal." Third, there is absolutely no transparency regarding their methodology (those who administer it are anonymous, most of the data is hidden, and much of their methodology is unclear). And fourth, what is disclosed about their methodology reveals that what they are calculating is not the Earth's surface temperature. Description of Temperature.Global If you go to the temperature.global website, it becomes almost immediately apparent that this website has little concern for transparency. The website is hosted by Parler (the alternative social network), which if nothing else is pretty odd. There are no name...
Read more