RSS Adjust Their Temperatures—Guess Which Way?

For years, RSS has been an embarrassment to the climate establishment. Their satellite data has consistently shown the pause in global temperatures since 1998, which so many scientists have attempted to explain.

At the same time, the surface datasets of GISS, NOAA, and HADCRUT have diverged, with the help of adjustments, to show much greater warming.

The pressure on RSS to conform has been immense, and now the inevitable has happened. Highly conveniently they have found huge errors in their previous version, and have now adjusted to a new version, v4, which miraculously finds that global warming has continued unabated after all!

Even more miraculously, virtually all of the “errors” identified have occurred since 2000, thus removing the pause.

The warmist website, Carbon Brief, has the detail:

A new paper published in the Journal of Climate reveals that the lower part of the Earth’s atmosphere has warmed much faster since 1979 than scientists relying on satellite data had previously thought.

Researchers from Remote Sensing Systems (RSS), based in California, have released a substantially revised version of their lower tropospheric temperature record.

After correcting for problems caused by the decaying orbit of satellites, as well as other factors, they have produced a new record showing 36% faster warming since 1979 and nearly 140% faster (e.g. 2.4 times faster) warming since 1998. This is in comparison to the previous version 3 of the lower tropospheric temperature (TLT) data published in 2009.

Climate sceptics have long claimed that satellite data shows global warming to be less pronounced that observational data collected on the Earth’s surface. This new correction to the RSS data substantially undermines that argument. The new data actually shows more warming than has been observed on the surface, though still slightly less than predicted by most climate models.

Produced by Carbon Brief using data from RSS.

Both the old record, version 3 in grey, and the new record, version 4 in red, are shown in the figure above, along with the difference between the two, in black. The trends since 1998 for both are shown by dashed lines.

Most of the difference between the old and new record occurs after the year 2000. While the old record showed relatively little warming during the oft-debated post-1998 “hiatus” period, the new record shows warming continuing unabated through to present. Similarly, while the old RSS v3 record showed 2016 only barely edging out 1998 as the warmest year in the satellite record, the new v4 record shows 2016 as exceeding 1998 by a large margin.

https://www.carbonbrief.org/major-correction-to-satellite-data-shows-140-faster-warming-since-1998

I’ve no doubt Roy Spencer or John Christy will soon weigh in with their technical assessment of this, but it gets clearer every day that most official climate information has become untrustworthy and essentially worthless.

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