I’ve noticed there’s a lot of frenetic tweeting and re-tweeting of this “sound bite” sized statement from this Climate Central piece by Andrew Freedman.

July was the fourth-warmest such month on record globally, and the 329th consecutive month with a global-average surface temperature above the 20th-century average, according to an analysis released Wednesday by the National Climatic Data Center (NCDC).

It should be noted that Climate Central is funded for the sole purpose of spreading worrisome climate missives. Yes it was a hot July in the USA too, approximately as hot as July 1936 comparing within the USHCN, No debate there. It is also possibly slightly cooler if you compare to the new state of the art Climate Reference Network.

But, those comparisons aside, here’s what Climate Central’s Andrew Freedman and NOAA/NCDC won’t show you when discussing the surface temperature record:

It isn’t hard to stay above the average temperature value when your adjustments outpace the temperature itself. There’s about 0.45°C of temperature rise in the adjustments since about 1940.

Since I know some people (and you know who you are) won’t believe the graph above created by taking the final adjusted USHCN data used for public statements and subtracting the raw data straight from the weather station observers to show the magnitude of adjustments. So, I’ll put up the NCDC graph, that they provided here:

http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/img/climate/research/ushcn/ts.ushcn_anom25_diffs_urb-raw_pg.gif

But they no longer update it, nor provide an equivalent for USHCN2 (as shown above), because well, it just doesn’t look so good.

As discussed in: Warming in the USHCN is mainly an artifact of adjustments on April,13th of this year, this graph shows that when you compare the US surface temperature record to an hourly dataset (ISH ) that doesn’t require a cartload of adjustments in the first place, and applies a population growth factor (as a proxy for UHI) all of the sudden, the trend doesn’t look so hot. The graph was prepared by Dr. Roy Spencer.

There’s quite an offset in 2012, about 0.7°C between Dr. Spencer’s ISH PDAT and USHCN/CRU. It should be noted that CRU uses the USHCN data in their data, so it isn’t any surprise to find no divergence between those.

Similar, but not all, of the adjustments are applied to the GHCN, used to derive the global surface temperature average. That data is also managed by NCDC.

Now of course many will argue that the adjustments are necessary to correct the data, which has all sorts of problems with inhomogenity, time of observation, siting, missing data, etc. But, none of that negates this statement: July was also the 329th consecutive month of positive upwards adjustment to the U.S. temperature record by NOAA/NCDC

In fact, since the positive adjustments clearly go back to about 1940, it would be accurate to say that: July was also the 864th consecutive month of positive upwards adjustment to the U.S. temperature record by NOAA/NCDC.

Dr Spencer concluded in his essay Warming in the USHCN is mainly an artifact of adjustments :

And I must admit that those adjustments constituting virtually all of the warming signal in the last 40 years is disconcerting. When “global warming” only shows up after the data are adjusted, one can understand why so many people are suspicious of the adjustments.

To counter all the Twitter madness out there over that “329th consecutive month of above normal temperature”, I suggest that WUWT readers tweet back to the same people that it is also the 329th or 864th consecutive month (your choice) of upwards adjustments to the U.S. temperature record.

Here’s the shortlink to make it easy for you:

http://wp.me/p7y4l-i66

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