NOAA: Warmest June Ever! Caveat: We Made It Up (Corrected)
Doug, the biggest issue here is simply empirical: does this estimate correspond to observations?
It turns out there are several methods of measuring temperature in the Arctic, and there are in fact a number of weather stations with thermometers that aren’t included (for whatever reason) in the GISS data. When those are measured, it turns out that this has been the coldest winter on record north of 80°N.
This in fact fits with a curiosity that we’ve noted before at PJM: there are a number of examples now of regional temperatures in GISS and GHCN data that show strong warming, but where the warming signal disappears or even becomes a cooling signal depending on the selection of measurement stations. In fact, in one example (around Darwin, Australia), Willis Eschenbach found:
YIKES! Before getting homogenized, temperatures in Darwin were falling at 0.7 Celcius per century … but after the homogenization, they were warming at 1.2 Celcius per century. And the adjustment that they made was over two degrees per century … when those guys “adjust”, they don’t mess around. And the adjustment is an odd shape, with the adjustment first going stepwise, then climbing roughly to stop at 2.4C.
When the observed warming depends almost entirely on estimates, and the estimates turn out to go the opposite direction of the data, well, you have to decide: depend on the appeal to NASA’s authority, or the actual data?
