Satellite battle: Five reasons UAH is different (better) to the RSS global temperature estimates

And so the adjustments war ramps up a notch.

There are two main groups that use essentially the same NASA and NOAA satellites to estimate global temperatures. In the last year, they’ve both made adjustments, one down, and one up, getting further apart in their estimates. In ClimateWorld this is a big deal. Believers are excited that now a satellite set agrees a bit better with the maligned “hot” surface thermometers. But UAH still agrees more with millions of weather balloons. The debate continues. Here’s my short synopsis of the Roy Spencer (and John Christy) from the “Comments on the new RSS lower tropospheric temperature set.” (If something is wrong here, blame me).

The Bottom Line:

1. Both data-sets show far less warming than what climate models estimate. UAH shows +0.12 C/decade, the new RSS trend is up to +0.17 C/decade. But climate models estimate +0.27 C/decade in the lower troposphere.

2. The headline suggesting that the RSS revisions found “140% faster warming since 1998” is the usual hype. The warming trend was tiny to start with. The headlines didn’t tell us that RSS is now warming a few hundreds of a degree per decade faster, […]