Global warming is a clear and present danger, and the people who deny it are putting us and future generations at risk. But these deniers are losing one argument after the other. Earlier this week, data revealed how quickly the oceans are warming, and now new data shows that the small discrepancies between satellite and ground data are actually not there.
Researchers from Remote Sensing Systems (RSS), based in California, have taken a close look at the temperature-measuring satellites and discovered that datasets were not taking into account that satellite orbits decay over time. This would cause an offset between the measured location of the satellites and where scientists thought it was measured. The study has been published by the American Meteorological Society.
The upper atmosphere has a low density of particles, but it is still enough to affect low-Earth orbit satellites. As they circle the Earth, their orbits slowly decay over time. As they are designed to be at the same spot at the same time every day, the orbital decay changes the fly-over time.
Knowing the orbit of the satellites, this was easy to fix. It was just a matter of recalibrating the right detection times with the right locations. “By correctly accounting for the changes in satellite measurement times, the new satellite data are in better agreement with the surface data,” lead author Carl Mears told website Carbon Brief.
Surface temperatures, even those collected via various different methodologies, are in an unbelievably good agreement with each other, but satellites have been a bit more fickle. Let’s be clear, even the uncorrected data showed that the Earth was warming, the only difference is in how quickly.
Another source of uncertainty rests on the fact that the satellites were designed to study the temperature of the upper atmosphere, and we are using them to work out the temperature in the lower atmosphere. Researchers use statistical tools to estimate a correct “conversion strategy” and the team at RSS believe that the slight change in position created a change in the final temperature values.
The new method shows once again that the so-called climate change hiatus (which has been disproven several times already) never happened. This hasn’t stopped climate change deniers from claiming it as real or doubting the incredibly strong findings that support man-made climate change. We can’t even describe climate change deniers as simply naive anymore for their pick and choose of the data. They are liars, plain and simple, bent on a self-destructing campaign of misinformation.
[H/T: Carbon Brief]
