By Steve Goddard
We are all familiar with the GISS graph below, showing how the world has warmed since 1880.
The GISS map below shows the geographic details of how they believe the planet has warmed. It uses 1200 km smoothing, a technique which allows them to generate data where they have none – based on the idea that temperatures don’t vary much over 1200 km. It seems “reasonable enough” to use the Monaco weather forecast to make picnic plans in Birmingham, England. Similarly we could assume that the weather and climate in Portland, Oregon can be inferred from that of Death Valley.
The map below uses 250 km smoothing, which allows us to see a little better where they actually have trend data from 1880-2009.
I took the two maps above, projected them on to a sphere representing the earth, and made them blink back and forth between 250 km and 1200 km smoothing. The Arctic is particularly impressive. GISS has determined that the Arctic is warming rapidly across vast distances where they have no 250 km data (pink.)
A way to prove there’s no data in the region for yourself is by using the GISTEMP Map locator at http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/station_data/
If we choose 90N 0E (North Pole) as the center point for finding nearby stations:
We find that the closest station from the North Pole is Alert, NWT, 834 km (518 miles) away. That’s about the distance from Montreal to Washington DC. Is the temperature data in Montreal valid for applying to Washington DC.?
Even worse, there’s no data in GISTEMP for Alert NWT since 1991. Funny though, you can get current data right now, today, from Weather Underground, right here. WUWT?
Here’s the METAR report for Alert, NWT from today
METAR CYLT 261900Z 31007KT 10SM OVC020 01/M00 A2967 RMK ST8 LAST OBS/NEXT 270600 UTC SLP051
The next closest GISTEMP station is Nord, ADS at 935 km (580 miles) away.
Most Arctic stations used in GISTEMP are 1000 km (621 miles) or more away from the North Pole. That is about the distance from Chicago to Atlanta. Again would you use climate records from Atlanta to gauge what is happening in Chicago?
Note the area between Svalbard and the North Pole in the globe below. There is no data in the 250 km 1880-2009 trend map indicating that region has warmed significantly, yet GISS 1200 km 1880-2009 has it warming 2-4° C. Same story for northern Greenland, the Beaufort Sea, etc. There’s a lot of holes in the polar data that has been interpolated.
The GISS Arctic (non) data has been widely misinterpreted. Below is a good example:
Monitoring Greenland’s melting
The ten warmest years since 1880 have all taken place within the 12-year period of 1997–2008, according to the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) surface temperature analysis. The Arctic has been subject to exceptionally warm conditions and is showing an extraordinary response to increasing temperatures. The changes in polar ice have the potential to profoundly affect Earth’s climate; in 2007, sea-ice extent reached a historical minimum, as a consequence of warm and clear sky conditions.
If we look at the only two long-term stations which GISS does have in Greenland, it becomes clear that there has been nothing extraordinary or record breaking about the last 12 years (other than one probably errant data point.) The 1930s were warmer in Greenland.
Similarly, GISS has essentially no 250 km 1880-2009 data in the interior of Africa, yet has managed to generate a detailed profile across the entire continent for that same time period. In the process of doing this, they “disappeared” a cold spot in what is now Zimbabwe.
Same story for Asia.
Same story for South America. Note how they moved a cold area from Argentina to Bolivia, and created an imaginary hot spot in Brazil.
Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.
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