Wednesday 3 February 2010

Interesting

Two imminently interesting events are due.

First will be the release of the UAH satellite anomaly for January 2010 which should happen within days. I don't know for sure, but I suspect it will show a very high anomaly and as a result there will be a little pandemonium among leaders of the denialosphere as they have to scuttle around trying to align their treasured UAH satellite record with the "ice age" January they've all been reporting.

Of course the cold January was regional, not global and the UAH satellite record is not in lockstep with the surface. That's the answer. But these complexities wash over the heads of typical commenters on psuedoskeptic blogs. I also suspect this will act as a block against certain stories appearing in the denialosphere when GISTEMP et al publish not particularly cool global January anomalies. They can hardly complain about GISTEMP when UAH shows a higher anomaly. Who wants to bet they will complain anyway?

The second interesting and more important event is the launch of Cryosat-2, which according to wikipedia is scheduled for February 25th, 3 weeks time. The first Cryosat, if you recall, failed on launch and crashed in 2005. Pity it would have captured the 2007 arctic sea ice minimum and all if it had made it. Cryosat-2 has taken this long to build as a replacement. Anyway fingers crossed.

2 comments:

  1. I've had the same thoughts all month long. The WUWT crowd will be quite confused once the global number for the month comes in. El Nino is still on, so it should be a fairly high number.

    I had thoughts of trying to make money off of people by offering bets about what the January number would be, but then Watts went and posted this

    http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/01/15/uah-satellite-data-has-record-warmest-day-for-january/

    and to his credit, he slowed down the stories about how cold it was after that. So I don't know about the commenters, but at least Watts may have already learned the lesson. At least until next time there's a regional cold snap.

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  2. And it looks like a pretty high number.

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