Now that winter is drawing near (northern hemisphere), I see the global warming chatter has died down (right on cue).

Citizen Runner wrote:The linked plot breaking out global land and sea temperatures indicates that the temperature plateau of the last decade is driven by the sea component. The land component has contined upward during that period.

I don't think the data agree with your claim. Here are the trends for land-based dta (earlier combined dataset included both land-based and sea-based temperatures):

Same (or perhaps more pronounced) recent trend to either plateau or decrease, dependng on your perspective.

I was looking at this graph linked by another poster:

http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/service/global/glob/201201-201210.gif

which came from here:

http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/global/2012/10

I'm not sure why the two data sets disagree without looking into it deeper, which I don't have time to do that right now. I understand that the CRU data is compiled entirely from surface station measurements while the NCDC data also incorporates some satellite data.

This ^.

I love the "Time Magazine was once warning of the next ice age therefore global warming should not be taken seriously" argument.

I guess I shouldn't laugh. It is actually kind of scary that the vast majority of Americans today seemingly have no ability to differentiate between actual science and pop culture (aka Time Magazine).

Stumbled on this site which has a short explanation of the various temperature data sets including a graphs comparing the CRU and NCDC data sets for land and for ocean temperatures.

http://www.climatedata.info/Temperature/reconstructions.html

Citizen Runner wrote:I was looking at this graph linked by another poster:

http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/service/global/glob/201201-201210.gif

...

It seems to me that also shows a plateau for land-based temperatures.

This isn't a rigorous analysis, but I have that NCDC data in Excel and the linear LMS regression for land only data shows a positive slope of about 0.05 C/decade for the last 10 years. The ocean is about -0.06 and the combined is about -0.04. So, arguably, there is a small positive slope to land while the other two are negative. Regardless, the ocean component dominates and it's been flat to decreasing for the last decade which is my main point.

Another interesting characteristic is that the land and ocean temperatures pretty much overlay each other from 1900 to about 1980 (obviously they've been referenced to the mean over this period) and track pretty well. Starting about 1980 they start to diverge and are separated by about 0.5 C at present.

Citizen Runner wrote:Another interesting characteristic is that the land and ocean temperatures pretty much overlay each other from 1900 to about 1980 (obviously they've been referenced to the mean over this period) and track pretty well. Starting about 1980 they start to diverge and are separated by about 0.5 C at present.

Here's a plot of the difference between ocea and land anomaly since 1880:

(the x axis is months since 1880)

Same plot with land anomaly superimposed:

not my real name wrote:

Hmmmm, not true. I've grabbed the data and plotted it up. I'll throw up some tinypic plots when I get a chance.

There is noise of course, but your plot shows what appears to be about a zero mean difference between month 200 to about 1100.

It's easier to see trends with the annual NCDC data rather than the much noiser monthly data:

Here's the same data with a 9 year moving average to further smooth out the ripples:

Interesting plots.

Plenty of different ways of looking at the data. Here I've normalized both land and ocean data sets (smoothed annually) to range between -1 and +1 over the period of record.

Don't claim this "means" anything. Just another way of looking at the trends.