More heat than light in climate reporting

RedNova News - Earth Gets a Warm Feeling All Over:
"NASA -- Last year was the fourth warmest year on average for our planet since the late 1800s, according to NASA scientists."

That statement seems to be pretty definitive, but the reporting on it, at least, raises some interesting questions which the reporter doesn't seem to notice.

For example, the story says that the 2004 average temperature was 0.86 degree Fahrenheit above the average temperature for the period from 1951-1980. But the story had already told us that "Weather stations provide land measurements, and satellites provide sea surface temperature measurements over the ocean." Just how extensive was the satellite data for the 1951-1980 period? Hint: the first US weather satellite, TIROS-1, was launched April 1, 1960, so the first ten years of data would be a bit skimpy.

The warmest years are reported here to have been 1998, 2002 and 2003. But we are not told how much warmer they were than last year. Was it enough to notice? I mean, they are measuring in hundredths of a degree.

Down in the last paragraph we find what strikes me as the most interesting finding: "Compared to the average temperatures from the 1951 to 1980 period, the largest unusually warm areas over all of 2004 were in Alaska, near the Caspian Sea, and over the Antarctic Peninsula." This comports rather well with a model result that predicted GHG warming would show up mostly as an increase of night-time winter temperatures in the high northern lattitudes. How much does it matter if the overnight low in Fairbanks is -22 or -20? In other words, depending on the where and when, it is possible to find measurable warming that no one would ever notice.

This is a complicated subject which I expect to return to from time to time. Bottom line: Virtually everything they say about the climate has as much to do with politics as science.