NYT: Latest study supports global warming

[Newsjock]

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/236311_warming12.html?dpfrom=thead

By ANDREW C. REVKIN
THE NEW YORK TIMES

Some scientists who question whether human-caused global warming poses a threat have long pointed to records that showed that the atmosphere's lowest layer, the troposphere, had not warmed over the last two decades and had cooled in the tropics.

Now two independent studies have found errors in the complicated calculations used to generate the old temperature records, which involved stitching together data from thousands of weather balloons lofted around the world and a series of short-lived weather satellites.

A third study shows that when the errors are taken into account, the troposphere actually got warmer.

Moreover, that warming trend largely agrees with the warmer surface temperatures that have been recorded and conforms to predictions in recent computer models.

The three papers were published Thursday in the online edition of the journal Science.

more

[rodeodance]

1. suspect this too will be labeled 'junk science' by the WH!!

[ninkasi]

2. Nobody with a couple of functioning brain cells

will be surprised. Let me guess...Shrub will order another study of the problem.

[BlakeB]

3. Lord help us.

We need to get another Democrat in there to get the environment back on track. Hopefully it won't be too late.

[DeepModem Mom]

4. kick

[leftylady]

5. How many studies do we need?

Maybe we can just study it to death. And it will all go away.

[PATRICK]

7. Studies lost

due to ocean flooding of NYT offices. President vows new studies to replace the old.

[hatrack]

6. Gee, imagine that

All those thousands of reports of melting glaciers, burning forests, shifting insect, bird and mammal species and rapidly shifting weather were actually right :eyes:

[leftylady]

8. Who would've thought!

[Viking12]

9. A more detailed summary of the most recent studies

is available at RealClimate, a blog run by working climate scientists.

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=170#comments

In previous posts we have stressed that discrepancies between models and observations force scientists to re-examine the foundations of both the modelling and the interpretation of the data. So it has been for the apparent discrepancies between the Microwave Sounding Unit (MSU) lower tropospheric temperature records (MSU 2LT), radiosonde records and the climate models that try to simulate the climate of the last few decades. Three papers this week in Science Express, Mears et al, Santer et al (on which I'm a co-author) and Sherwood et al show that the discrepancy has been mostly resolved - in favour of the models.

It is worth encapsulating exactly what the problems have been and why they have taken so long to resolve. The MSU records are derived from a series of satellites that have been in orbit since late 1978. Each satellite has had different calibration problems (due to orbital decay, sensor issues etc.) and stringing them together has been fraught with difficulty. Different groups have made different decisions about how to do this and this has lead to quite some differences in MSU products particularly between the UAH group (Spencer and Christy) and the RSS group (Wentz, Mears and colleagues) . The differences have been mostly seen in the trends, rather than the monthly or interannual variability, and so have been more difficult to validate. Incidentally, it is a clear sign of 'cherry-picking' when people only report their favorite one of the groups' trends instead of the range.

There have been three principle MSU products: Channel 4, Channel 2 and the 2LT records. MSU-4 is a record of lower stratospheric temperatures, MSU-2 is mainly mid-troposphere combined with a significant chunk of the lower stratosphere, and MSU-2LT is an attempt to use more viewing angles to try remove the stratospheric influence from MSU-2 and leave a lower-tropospheric record. (Recent upgrades to newer satellite instruments with more channels have lead to the 2LT record being renamed the TLT record).

The disagreement with the models related mainly to the MSU 2LT record. Models do quite well at matching the history of MSU-4 (whose variability is a function mainly of ozone depletion and volcanic aerosol effects), and models also match the lack of significant trend in MSU-2 (which is affected by stratospheric cooling and tropospheric warming which cancel out to some degree) (i.e Hansen et al 2002). So the problem has been principally with MSU 2LT, which despite a strong surface temperature trend did not seem to have been warming very much - while models and basic physics predict that it should be warming at a slightly larger rate than the surface.