By Dr. Richard Keen

At the end of each month, NCDC posts a “U.S. Climate at a Glance” summary on its website.  The post features a color map of monthly mean temperature anomalies (departure from normal) for the entire U.S., based on an unspecified selection of stations.

It’s fun to find your home and pick out what the previous month was like there.  I’ve done that for the past two months (June and July), and compared the analyzed departures to those actually measured at my NWS co-op station at Coal Creek Canyon, Colorado.  For both months I found that the map departures calculated by NCDC for my location were about two degrees higher than the directly measured departure.  The reports were posted on ICECAP and Watt’s Up With That, and last month I closed by saying..."I’ll keep checking this in future months, but I suspect the story will remain the same, with mystery adjustments inflating the temperature departures in one direction only.”

Now here is August’s report.  I added the locations of Coal Creek Canyon and of the nearest NWS first-order station, Denver, to the map.  On the map, both stations are within the +2F contour, with Denver approaching +4F.  My best interpolation gives analyzed map departures of +2.5F at Coal Creek and +3.5F at Denver.  Compare that to the actual departures (compared to the calculated normals for each station) of +1.2 and +2.1, respectively.  Once again, the point departures in this part of Colorado are inflated by more than one degree.

Here is a list of the compared departures and Coal Creek and Denver for June, July, and August, 2010.  The story is consistent - the NCDC analysis has the summer of 2010 running 3 degrees hotter than normal, while the observations have warm anomalies of less than half that.  Those “mystery adjustments” raised Colorado’s summer temperature by 2 degrees above the direct measurements.  Keep in mind that this two degree discrepancy is greater than the alleged “Climate Change” signal to date.

As I noted earlier, this is simply a spot check of two of NCDC’s 2000 grid points.  But Denver is a major first-order station, and Coal Creek has been a stable station with no moves or urban influences for almost 30 years, and the instruments are meticulously maintained.  Coal Creek is at 8950 feet elevation in the Colorado Rockies, a region predicted by all models referenced by the IPCC to have the greatest warming in the “lower 48” United States.  According to NCDC analyses, this warming is occurring.  According to actual observations, it is not.

See enlarged here.

See enlarged here.

See PDF here.

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Multidecadal Tendencies in ENSO and Global Temperatures Related to Multidecadal Oscillations
Energy & Environment, Volume 21, Numbers 5, pp. 437-460, September 2010, Joseph D’Aleo, Don Easterbrook

Abstract: Perlwitz etal (2009) used computer model suites to contend that the 2008 North American cooling was naturally induced as a result of the continent’s sensitivity to widespread cooling of the tropical (La Nina) and northeastern Pacific sea surface temperatures. But they concluded from their models that warming is likely to resume in coming years and that climate is unlikely to embark upon a prolonged period of cooling. We here show how their models fail to recognize the multidecadal behavior of sea surface temperatures in the Pacific Basin, which determines the frequency of El Ninos and La Ninas and suggests that the cooling will likely continue for several decades. We show how this will be reinforced with multidecadal shift in the Atlantic (and declining solar activity).

See publication here. More to come.

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Radio/Internet Interviews

Brian Sussman, was this morning’s guest on the Tea Party Power Hour radio show.  Brian discussed his new book Climategate:  A Veteran Meteorologist Exposes The Global Warming Scam.  Most intriguing was his discussion of how man-made global warming fits into the Marxist/Socialist/Communist agenda.  To listen to the interview, please click on this link.

Steve Goreham, the author of Climatism:  Science, Common Sense, and the 21st Century’s Hottest Topic, Recently joined us to discuss his new position as the head of the Climate Science Association of America.  Goreham says his new association will try to take the politics out of climate science.  To listen to the interview, please click on this link.

Is Cap and Trade dead in the United States?  It may not matter as the Environmental Protection Agency prepares to regulate CO2 and other greenhouse gases as pollution.  Shannon Goessling of the Southeastern Legal Foundation discusses her organization’s four lawsuits against the EPA here.