Seeing the environmental forest

It's nice when a topic for a new post lands in your lap.  Or, in this case, in the comments of one of your old posts.  An anonymous commentator made several statements concerning RSS that warrant a longer explanation than is possible in a reply on the comment section.  This is going to be a long, stats-heavy post.  You've been warned.

Back in August, I wrote a post that found the January-June period was the third hottest on record ( based on the Cowtan-Way data set which corrects the coverage bias in HadCRUT4 data).  This post will revise and update that earlier article, incorporating GISS, UAH, NCDC, HadCRUT4, and Cowtan-Way data sets.  I am not including RSS, as that data set has shown false cooling since 2000.

Like a movie vampire, this one keeps coming back no matter how many stakes are driven through its heart.  I've covered this one ( here , here , and here ).  Bluntly: There is absolutely no evidence that global warming has stopped.  For global warming to stop, the Earth's energy balance must be either zero or negative.  The most recent estimates for the energy imbalance are generally between +0.5 W/m 2 and +1.0 W/m 2 .  The only way the Earth is not going to warm while it is gaining energy is if the laws of thermodynamics magically do not apply.  If the Earth is gaining energy, some part of it, somewhere, must be getting warmer.  The heat must go into either melting ice, warming the oceans, warming the land, or warming the atmosphere (or some combination thereof).