lolwot or whoever you are. Since you bring up the BEST data analysis of temperatures I have to say a few things about it. First, there was no systematic analysis and their main effort went into collating three commonly used temperature databases into one monster database they posted on the Berkeley web site. What annoyed me was that they totally ignored the existence of satellite temperature measurements that started in December 1978. That is in conformity with Hansen of GISS and other databases that follow his lead. You probably don’t know this but there is a major difference between between satellite and ground-based temperature measurements in the eighties and nineties. In ground-based records that period shows a steady warming called the late twentieth century warming. In satellite records there is no temperature rise, only an alternation of warm El Nino and cool La Nina periods for twenty years. And the warming, when it comes, is a step warming initiated by the super El Nino of 1998. In four years it lifts global temperature by a third of a degree Celsius and then stops. That was about 2002 and there has been no warming since. What makes this difference between satellite and ground-based records vitally important is that in 1988 Hansen announced that anthropogenic global warming had arrived. That is ten years before the start of actual warming according to satellite records. The warming that is recorded by ground-based temperature measurements started after a thirty year period of no warming from the fifties to the seventies when people were talking about a coming ice age. Hansen was then part of the Pioneer Venus project but in 1978 he quit and joined GISS because “The composition of the atmosphere of our home planet was changing before our eyes.” His first task at GISS was to devise a new method of recording global temperature change. And lo and behold, as soon as it was implemented temperature started to rise and ten years later he was able to say that global warming had arrived. I compared the satellite and ground-based curves at high resolution and found that the El Nino peaks were present in both. The difference was that the La Ninas which appear as valleys between the peaks were all made shallow, about half their depth in satellite records, and this gives ground-based curves an upward slope. Neither GISS nor NOAA nor the Met Office have used the satellite temperature curves at any time during the thirty two years they have existed. BEST had enough funding to make a study of this but they preferred to ignore it and spent it all on what was basically a clerical job. You take it from there. To learn more, get my “What Warming?” from Amazon.
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