Water temperatures in many areas around Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands are already at August-October levels and there are reports of coral disease outbreaks around Puerto Rico.

Now Watts has resorted to another post on a cold local weather event, routine propaganda that goes along with the “it’s not warming much & surface record is unreliable” claims that have been essentially refuted. What is even more pathetic is that this cited weather event happened 2 years ago. He’s just repeating it. Perhaps Watts is concerned about recent record June ocean temperatures and its effect on his political agenda.

Reliable sources are important to me. If I find that a source is providing false and misleading information consistently (occasional errors can be tolerated, particularly if they are done in good faith), I simply stop reading and trusting that source. Watts supporters seem not to have this criteria. From the comments section, it’s apparent that very few, if any, of the comments echo any of the obvious issues Paul K mentioned above.

[JR: Try again.]

[JR: Uhh, I don't know that. And I'm afraid the burden is on you to show that the world's leading experts on ENSO forecasting don't know what they're talking about. Seriously.]

Thanks. That answers a couple of lingering questions for me. RSS doesn’t include the Antarctic region (below 70S) and that region has been quite warm the last couple of months. However, UAH does, but perhaps their compensation for the factor mentioned is flawed.

Pielke’s post is interesting. He only presents for us 2 hypotheses. How about a 3rd one…

Hypothesis #3: There’s something fundamentally wrong with the satellite measurements and in particular the UAH processing steps that they show a bias towards a smaller long-term warming trend.

Clearly, their history supports this one. Pielke seems to be willing to repeat the history of the late 90’s if UAH remains a cooler outlier, when Spencer declared that his fatally-flawed data was strong evidence that every piece of conflicting data and models were wrong.

http://science.nasa.gov/ newhome/ headlines/ essd5feb97_1.htm

“But the space-based measurements show a more complex vertical structure, with cooling in the lower portion of this deep layer and warming in the upper portion. Spencer and co-author Dr. William Braswell of Nichols Research Corporation have great confidence in the quality of their satellite data. “We’ve concluded there isn’t a problem with the measurements,” Spencer explained. “In fact, balloon measurements of the temperature in the same regions of the atmosphere we measure from space are in excellent agreement with the satellite results.”

“Instead, we believe the problem resides in the computer models and in our past assumptions that the atmosphere is so well behaved. “”

Historically, +.8 anomalies in the Nino 3.4 region is nothing is fairly small and easily reversable.
http://climexp.knmi.nl/ getindices.cgi?NCEPData/ nino5_daily+NINO3.4+i+someone@somewhere+366

PDO doesn’t explain everything. The PDO is related to the long-term effects of ENSO, which I think explains everything since 1975. I see no convincing evidence that we will stay PDO negative permanently. Variation in the PDO over the past millenium is actually smaller than what we’ve seen over the past century, neutral periods of the PDO are possible. I also don’t refute the idea that we won’t be seeing El Ninos. If we see a strong El Nino during this solar minimum, we could very well see a long-term increase in temperature again. I find the idea of an El Nino during PDO negative conditions interesting, and the theories I present on my blog have no relevance to these El Ninos.

“This month’s SST anomaly will likely be cooler.”

If you are jumping to this conclusion entirely based on the NCDC animation map you linked just prior, you are mistaken, unless you are remarkably able to tally up the color-coded sections, make accurate assumptions about the -0.5 to +0.5 grey areas (and others), and forecast what the rest of the month will be (ironic since you appear to distrust forecasts).

“Let’s consider what metrics we can use to look at ENSO. SST; barely positive.”

The latest Nino 3.4 region, the primary el Nino metric, as of Monday’s report, is +0.8 C, which is more than “barely positive”.

Your website (littered with the term “alarmist”) appears to indicate you support the “PDO explains most everything” argument which seems to indicate why you might not want el Nino to emerge. No reason for concern, though. PDO negative phases, if predictable, don’t eliminate el Ninos. They are just associated with somewhat less el Ninos and somewhat more la Ninas – enough to affect the trend during transitional periods but not much longer. Most imporantly, an el Nino won’t refute the notion that the PDO phase is negative, although a super el Nino would mount a strong challenge the notion. There’s also the hypothesis that global warming may be influencing ENSO in varying ways, and interesting and still very much open scientific question. Regardless, let the facts decide things. Don’t seek to spin them.

I don’t know about RSS daily tracker, but RSS and UAH supposedly are using much of the same raw satellite information, although apparently UAH covers more of the Earth surface, if I understand correctly.

A few years ago it was discovered that ice, which apparently is a rich source of microwave radiation, was tripping up the satellite temperature reconstructions to some degree.

Apparently, in response RSS stopped using data from higher latitudes in the Antarctic, while UAH apparently still does so and presumably tries to compensate. This is where the “UAH covers more of the Earth’s surface” bit comes from. It’s true, but many believe it makes their reconstruction a bit suspect.

That’s an interesting spike this week. It’s beyond record high territory the last few days.

Keep in mind that UAH is releasing preliminary data in its daily update, and that the full month’s dataset will be subjected to post-processing which will undoubtably cause these spikey numbers to change (probably downward).

The UAH team has repeatedly cautioned people into putting much confidence into their running daily numbers, but this hasn’t kept Roger Pielke, Sr from making a silly blog post. WIth comments, as usual, turned off of course.

I highly recommend the DeepClimate post linked to above by Paul K. UAH has problems with its annual drop in anomaly in late-spring/summer. RSS, GISS, and HadCrut show a small drop in anomaly in summer months but nothing at all like UAH.

eg..

Risk to small islands
The nine coral atolls that make up the island nation of Tuvalu are home
to 12,000 people. Most of the land is less than 1 metre above the sea. In
50 years it will be gone. The only thing that will remain of Tuvalu is its …. Already, 3,000 Tuvaluans have resettled in Australia.

These are among the territories that the world has already effectively
consigned to oblivion. Even if the most intensive carbon-emitting
countries do manage to agree the policies that will keep warming to
around 2ºC this century, the sea-level rise of 1 metre forecast by 2100
(and more subsequently) will overrun these islands, or make life on
them impossible.