Instrument Record

Category · methods

Smoothing and baselines are controls.

Change the window and the zero, watch a trend appear or recede. Those knobs belong on the chart, not on a separate essay.

UAH globe — playground

Same series: raw or 12-/37-month mean, four baselines, three windows

Why 37 months?

A 37-month running mean is long enough to blunt the seasonal cycle and most ENSO spikes, short enough not to erase the 1998 / 2016 / 2023–24 El Niño steps. Treat it as a lens, and always keep the monthly line one click away.

Models vs observations

CMIP ensembles are often compared with tropospheric observations and sometimes run warmer than UAH. This desk does not ingest model output; it keeps the observation side inspectable. The honest version of a model overlay is still one chart with ensemble-mean and observed lines.

Companion desks

Same project, other questions.

They are not extra series on these charts — they are the arguments about ice versus stomata, the 20th-century blade, the ¹³C fingerprint, the 1988 polar forecasts, and what CERES actually attributes the last 26 years to.

Stomata vs Ice

Plant leaves keep a growing-season count of pores. Antarctic ice keeps bubbles of old air. Ice-core CO₂ is heavily smoothed; stomatal series still carry century-scale swings that only meet the ice at the instrumental splice.

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Hockey Stick Lab

Mann, Bradley & Hughes 1998 made a shaft-and-blade by overweighting the Sheep Mountain bristlecone (CA534) by as much as 390×. Strip that weight and the 1910–1938 climb is already there. Drag the weight yourself against HadCRUT5.

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δ¹³C Ledger

The “fossil isotopic signature” is not a raw intercept. Station Keeling plots sit near −13‰; the textbook −28‰ is an isoflux term after gravity, diffusion, blank and scale corrections. The ledger separates observation from the model step.

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Arctic and Antarctic vs the 1988 estimates

1988-era scenarios warmed both poles under well-mixed greenhouse gas. The split is not that: Arctic air rose; Antarctic did not. Sea-level rise since 1900 is expansion-scale, not a melt pulse matching those polar-ice forecasts.

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NZ Atlas

Nikolov & Zeller and Goessling, Rackow & Jung land on the same CERES fact: the last ~26 years of warming track absorbed sunlight from a falling planetary albedo. They split on story; the satellite number they both use is albedo, not CO₂ forcing.

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