Was the year 2014 the "warmist ever" on record? How many decimal places were used?
https://www.nasa.gov/press/2015/january/nasa-determines-2014-warmest-year-in-modern-record
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2015/01/05/3607735/2014-hottest-year-by-far/
Earth's Global Temperature for 2014, as per physics Prof RGB.
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rgbatduke on July 13, 2015 at 5:24 am
"There is a fundamental problem with the analysis, especially extended back to 1850. Specifically, the error estimatet for the present is around 0.1, but around is not the same as exact. Furthermore, the basis for the error estimate itself is an estimated basis — it has a number of assumptions built into it and it is not, by any stretch of the imagination, the standard deviation of a set of independent and identically distributed samples drawn from a stationary distribution. It does not have an axiomatic basis — the error estimate itself has biases in it that cannot be independently estimated because they are based on assumptions that cannot be independently tested.
"To make this clear, let’s consider HadCRUT4, as it is a dataset I have on hand — including its error estimates. Here is the line for 1850:
1850 -0.376 -0.427 -0.338 -0.507 -0.246 -0.542 -0.211 -0.518 -0.239 -0.595 -0.162
"The first number is the “anomaly”. I don’t want to discuss the difficulties of using an anomaly instead of an absolute estimate of global average temperature but IMO they are profound. Nevertheless, it is important to remember that this is what we are doing in the discussion above, Bob, because the uncertainty in the actual global average temperature is “around” 1 C, not 0.1 C. So when the article asserts “warmest year” what it really means is “highest anomaly” computed “independently” of the actual global average temperature which is paradoxically much less precisely known.
"The last two numbers are the supposed lower and upper bounds on the temperature estimate. One has to assume that these bounds are some sort of “95% confidence” interval, but of course they are not, not really, because the error estimate is not based on iid samples and hence there is no particularly good reason to think that the central estimate is normally distributed relative to the true temperature, oops, I mean “anomaly”. It is also the case that the other entries are supposedly error estimates as well that are somehow combined into the last two numbers, and hence the uncertainty in the uncertainties is likely compounded. Nevertheless, we see that the anomaly in 1850 could have been as low as -0.595 and has high as -0.162. A bit of subtraction and we see that HadCRUT4 estimates the anomaly in 1850 to be  with approximately symmetric error estimates. 0.216 is not particularly close to 0.1 — in fact it is over twice as large.
"Let’s consider the line for 2014:
2014 0.555 0.519 0.591 0.532 0.578 0.456 0.654 0.508 0.603 0.445 0.666
"This line may not be current — they keep tweaking the numbers as the next global meeting to address global warming draws near — but it is what I downloaded at my last opportunity. Note that the anomaly is pretty close to . Each year comes with its very own error, and the errors vary from 0.08-ish to 0.12-ish in the 2000s and not quite twice that in the 1800s.
"This is a serious problem. Error estimates for 1850 of only 0.2 C compared to contemporary error estimates of 0.1 C are simply not credible. They are in-credible. One, the other, or both are absurd. To put it bluntly, there is no way that we know the global average temperature, or the global average temperature “anomaly” — almost as precisely in 1850 as we do today (where within a factor of 2 in the error estimate is absolutely “almost as precisely”. For one simple thing, a rather enormous fraction of the Earth’s surface was still terra incognita in 1850. Phenomena such as El Nino and the Pacific Hot Spot that dominate the temperature estimates for 2014 would have passed unmeasured in 1850 — El Nino itself had not yet been observed or named. Antarctica was basically totally unexplored. The North Pole — far more accessible than the South — was not reached until the 20th century, although attempts to reach it date back into the 19th. Africa, South America, much of Australia, western North America, Siberia, China, Southeast Asia, and the bulk of the Pacific and South Atlantic Ocean — rarely visited to totally unexplored, and certainly not routinely sampled with reliable equipment and methodology for temperature. Look how much NOAA changed its anomaly this year on the basis of “corrections” to SSTs measured by ships (ignoring the one source of truly good data, the ARGO buoys). Now imagine the measurements being made in wooden sailing ships by indifferent ship masters along whatever sea routes happened to be travelled in any given decade.
"In my opinion the error estimates for the anomaly in the 19th century are understated by at least a factor of 3. The error estimates for the first half of the 20th century are understated by a slightly smaller but still large factor, perhaps around 2. I’m not entirely happy with error estimates of 0.1 C for contemporary measurements — not given the long list of “corrections” that have been and continue to be made that produce variations of this order and the spread in the different anomaly estimates. This might be a standard deviation (if this has any meaning in this context) but it certainly is not a 95% confidence interval, not with a spread of anomaly estimates that differ by this general order.
"All of this becomes painfully obvious if one actually looks at and compares global average temperature estimates instead of anomalies. We do not know the current global average temperature within a full degree C, not at 95% confidence. The temperature record we have is sparse over much of the globe today, although with ARGO it is finally starting to become less sparse. This record has been “adjusted” to within an inch of its life, to the point where if one plots the adjustments against carbon dioxide level in the atmosphere, they are linearly correlated with $R^2 \approx 1$, which a sensible person would interpret as (literally) statistically incontrovertible evidence of substantial bias in the adjustment processes used. Because it is impossible to use it to form an accurate estimate of global temperature, it is manipulated to return an “anomaly” with respect to an arbitrary and supposedly self-consistent baseline that itself is only known to some precision.
"I agree with Nick’s assertion that perhaps no year has a better claim than 2014, but I have to categorically reject the assertions of precision in the computation of probabilities. The claim of 2014 is nowhere near 40% likely to be correct. I’d be amazed if it were 5% likely to be correct.
rgb
Source:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/07/13/a-return-to-the-question-was-2014-the-warmest-year/
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