[Vision2020] 1-15-22 Realclimate.org: NASA Climate Scientist Gavin Schmidt: "Another dot on the graph"

[Ted Moffett]

Vision2020 Post: Ted Moffett
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https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2022/01/another-dot-on-the-graph/

All content below is an excerpt from website above:

So last week was the annual release
<https://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/news/20220113/> of the temperature
records from NASA, NOAA and Berkeley Earth
<http://berkeleyearth.org/global-temperature-report-for-2021/>. The Copernicus
ERA5 data <https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-59915690> was
released a few days ago, and the HadCRUT data will follow soon. Unlike in
years past, there is no longer any serious discrepancy between the records
– which use multiple approaches for the ocean temperatures, the
homogenization of the weather stations records, and interpolation.

Depending on the product, 2021 was either the 5th, 6th or 7th warmest year,
but in all cases, it is part of the string of warm years (since 2015) that
have all been more than 1ºC warmer than the late 19th C.

Controversy is so 2000 and late

Many of the issues that exercised the blogosphere a decade ago have been
put to rest. Despite flailing attempts by a couple of diehards to resurrect
talk of a ‘new pause’ (no warming since the last record warm year!), and
the never-ending insistence of some solar enthusiasts that a dramatic
cooling is right around the corner, these are not serious issues.
Discussion too of the ‘irrelevance’ of the global mean changes to ‘normal
people’ has also faded as the contribution of the overall warming has
become more and more obvious in the incidences of extreme heat waves,
intense precipitation, coastal flooding and wildfire intensity.
Transparency of the data and methods has all increased (though note that
for GISTEMP, the code and the publically available data has been available
since 2007), but since that came at the same time that as a large increase
in the digitized raw data available and the strength of the trends, the
importance of the specifics of the coding has diminished. Additionally, we
now have much better quantification of the uncertainties in these estimates
(see below). The ‘polar hole’ issue is almost completely put to be bed,
with HadCRUT5 and the NOAA (Interim) products coming around to
interpolation of one sort or another.

So given this increased maturity of these analyses, are there any
scientifically interesting issues left? Yes, but they are perhaps a little
more subtle than before.
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