Instrument Record

Category · ocean

Heat, Niño, and two sea levels.

Ocean heat, El Niño, and two sea-level instruments. Coastal tide gauges run about 1–2 mm/yr; satellite altimeters about 3.3 mm/yr since 1993. They share one pane so the discrepancy is the chart, not a caption.

Ocean vs global troposphere

UAH v6.1 TLT ocean and globe

El Niño as a shared wiggle

NOAA CPC Oceanic Niño Index · UAH tropics

Global mean sea level — two instrument classes

Rate-consistent composites: tide-gauge class ~1.5–2 mm/yr from 1900; altimeter class ~3.3 mm/yr from 1993. Not the official monthly files.

Tide gauges measure relative water level at the coast (what flood planning needs). Satellite altimeters measure the geocentric ocean surface. Vertical land motion, GIA, coverage, and the 1992/93 splice all matter. Showing both is the point.

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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