Temperatures on the March?

It's said that a lie goes around the world while truth is still getting its boots on.  It works the same for deception.  For example:

"March warmest on record over world land surfaces" worries the Daily Times of Pakistan. "Second-warmest March globally, cool in US," demurs the Baltimore Sun.  "March's record sizzle," says Melbourne's Age.  "Global Land Temperature Warmest On Record" says Science Daily. "Global land temperature in March sets record" says China Daily.  And The Australian follows up the pack by announcing: "Global average temperature has warmed substantially, by about 0.3C from January 2008 to March 2008," 

So that's about 0.3C since January's cold snap and the 0.7C drop in temperatures across all of last year. 

Note that you should never accuse a warmist of fudging figures; just ask the US Government's National Climatic Data Center (NCDC), who last week issued a press release on which most of those reports above were based which said:

The average global temperature (land and ocean surface combined) for last month was the 2nd warmest on record for March, while the average temperature for the contiguous U.S. was near average (ranking the 63rd warmest) ...

Its notable that the headlines pick up on the scarier picture -- "2nd warmest on record for March" -- rather than the business as usual news that the US experienced the "63rd warmest."  But just ask yourself for a moment why, with only 129 years of records, they didn't write that last March was "the 66th coldest March on record," or "the average temperature for the contiguous U.S. ranked about average for the past 129 years of records." Says Bob Wester,

Characterizing it as the "63rd warmest" is yet another example of the pervasive bias in the handling of climate data by many US scientists whose job is dependent on the free flow of federal funding for "global warming" studies.

But why do these figures seem so disparate?  In the same sentence we're told that average global temperature for last month was "the 2nd warmest on record for March," and then we're informed that the average temperature for the contiguous U.S. was "only 63rd warmest."  What's going on?

What's going on is that neither the NCDC nor the media are making meaningful comparisons, and nor is the scariest measure meaningful.  We're not comparing apples with apples, but we're still trying to make apple sauce.

You see, the key word above is "land."  While this last March showed the third warmest figures "on record" for surface temperatures in March (and the NCDC is finally beginning to realise that Anthony Watts' criticisms of their collection of the surface record is highly questionable), the figures for oceans and for the troposphere -- the parts of the globe which global warming models says should warm first -- gave temperatures that are the third and fourth lowest for the past twenty years, as satellite figures from University of Alabama at Huntsville and NASA's RSS both show, and which most of the world's media neglected to report.

Let's just repeat that and put it in bold: global warming models say that the oceans and the troposphere should warm first ... and these temperatures are the third and fourth lowest for the past twenty years.

Why did NCDC and most of the world's media neglect to report this apparent, um, falsification of the models?  Feel free to speculate.

But what do these figures mean, if they mean anything at all?  Well, it certainly means that the climate models on which all the scary scenarios for the future are manufactured are shown to be less reliable for predicting the future than the horoscopes the world's media also regularly run.  It certainly demonstrates that whatever causal factors are present in temperature changes, the scientists programming the models and Al-Goreithms certainly don't have the first clue about them -- especially in terms of the scary "positive feedback loops" they mutter about to sound really scary. 

And so, since all the warmist scaremongering is based on the predictions of these models, it probably means (to say this as gently as possible) that it's safe to say the warmist case is still yet to be proven.