NYC Monthly Climate Dinner -- csaee_d

Around 2010, the Earth's warming as measured by satellite data seemed to have stopped.  Climate skeptics had a field day talking about "the pause" in warming.

Here is a plot I made from the satellite data downloaded from the University of Alabama at Huntsville website:

UAH Lower Troposphere Satellite Temperature Data

The raw data was monthly, the red line is the monthly data averaged over a year, and the green line is monthly data averaged over 5 years, which is the most interesting as it makes it easier to observe long-term trends, which is what we are interested in.

As one can observe, looking at the green line, that warming seems to have stopped from about 1998 to 2014, after which warming returned with a vengeance.  For years, climate skeptics kept saying "warming has stopped" because they weren't checking the latest data, and many of them are less than honest.

The climate skeptic Roy Spencer is at the University of Alabama at Huntsville, and he makes this chart available on his website.

It's the same data, but he does tricks to minimize the amount of warming that is apparent.  To begin with, he compresses the Y-axis relative to the X-axis for no appartent reason.  He never plots 5-year data.  His red line and my red line go up and down at the same time because they're both plotting the same thing.  He plots all these blue points that came from heaven-knows-where, it's probably monthly data which is seasonal, meaningless, and completely useless except to drown the signal in noise.

To do a better job of drowning out the signal in noise, Spencer would have had to outright fabricate data, which I don't believe he did.

The first time I saw Spencer's plot I didn't have my own plots of the satellite data.  A climate skeptic was showing me Spencer's plot in about 2021 and telling me with a straight face that the plot showed "no warming". I didn't agree -- I felt it showed warming, and that was what motivated me to do my own, more objective, plots, minimizing the noise and maximizing the signal.

Interestingly, "the pause" didn't show up on surface temperature measurements.  NOAA provides plots:

This is plotting a 5 year average of the data.  There's still "the pause", but now it's only from about 2008 to 2014 rather than 1998 to 2014.

Some climate scientists argue that the reason for "the pause" in satellite temperature data was that the satellite was decaying in it's orbit, and here is a plot I made from data that had that decay adjusted for:

"The pause" is still there, but much less evident.

No matter whose plot one uses, whatever "pause" ever existed ended over a decade ago.