Some of you that follow my twitter account will have already seen this, but there was a particularly amusing episode of Q&A on Australian TV that pitted Prof. Brian Cox against a newly-elected politician who is known for his somewhat fringe climate ‘contrarian’ views. The resulting exchanges were fun:
We've had a pause in warming & NASA corrupted data, says Malcolm Roberts. @ProfBrianCox examines the graphs #QandA https://t.co/HTNk4Bzrk1
— ABC Q&A (@QandA) August 15, 2016
The insinuation that NASA data was corrupting the data, lead to the following series of tweets:
Some thoughts on climate deniers (no other word suffices in this case), who accuse my team of fraud. 1/nhttps://t.co/CcCJnlPd3b
— Gavin Schmidt (@ClimateOfGavin) August 15, 2016
The analysis has only ever used publicly available data, analysis code has been public since ~2007 & has been independently verified 3/n
— Gavin Schmidt (@ClimateOfGavin) August 15, 2016
Link here: https://t.co/5rGGCxVXBp 5/n
— Gavin Schmidt (@ClimateOfGavin) August 15, 2016
These changes are small compared to overall trends. Interactive plotter available here: https://t.co/t7wFU3ofev 7/n pic.twitter.com/9gFMzktEzO
— Gavin Schmidt (@ClimateOfGavin) August 15, 2016
So I'm flummoxed. Where do these ppl feel data manipulation is happening? It's not in inputs or the code or presentation. So where??? 9/n
— Gavin Schmidt (@ClimateOfGavin) August 15, 2016
Refusal to see this, cries of 'show me the data' when all data is accessible at a click, can only be described as denial (sorry) 11/n
— Gavin Schmidt (@ClimateOfGavin) August 15, 2016
Oops. Just added to the conspiracy theories by linking to an internal server(!) Here is the public version: https://t.co/nALWMlNDcP 13/12
— Gavin Schmidt (@ClimateOfGavin) August 15, 2016
By coincidence, yesterday was also the scheduled update for the GISTEMP July temperature release, and because July is usually the warmest month of the year on an absolute basis, a record in July usually means a record of absolute temperature too. A record February (as we had earlier this year) is generally with respect only to previous Februaries, summer temperatures are still warmer even if the anomaly is smaller. And so it proved…
Normally we just plot the monthly anomalies (with respect to each month), but here I used the estimates of the seasonal cycle in temperature from MERRA2 to enhance the analysis so that months can be compared in an absolute sense.
This string of record-breaking months is coming to a close now that El Niño has faded, but it is sufficient to give a very high likelihood that 2016 will be a record warm year in the surface records.
