Saturday, June 8, 2013

Rainbow Yawn

Rush Limbaugh's favorite climatologist, Roy Spencer has suffered another turn of the exploding headscrew for declaring victory for the seventh time in as many years on the strength of a rainbow yawn of a graph that purports to debunk every climate model extant:



Epic fail ? Alas for Roy, David Appell  has found  a fly in the ointment, or a quark in the soup , as the case may be: Roy has downshifted the data to empasize his own group's results :
But then there is this: the linear trend for the entirety of the two datasets on middle tropospheric temperatures in the tropics is
UAH MT 20S-20N:   0.030 ± 0.028 °C/decade
That's right -- their trends differ by a factor of three, with UAH by far the lowest -- a fact which is neatly hidden away in Spencer's graph by taking their average. (Added 6/8: How can Spencer claim"...the observations (which coincidentally give virtually identical trends)...."?)
Most people would consider that a failure of its own, and quite a bad one.
Maybe the people doing the measurements should be paying attention to getting their own piece of the science right, and they ought not be giving everyone else cause to wonder if perhaps their own data is extremely inaccurate or biased low.
RSS MT 20S-20N:   0.090 ± 0.028 °C/decade 
But if we cut through the spagetti, and highlight the real range of temperature observations, the graph looks more like this :
This isn't the first time  Roy has been caught trying to put his own dodgy modeling on a par with the real McCoy.