This Is How We Get In Pointless Climate Flame Wars
The other day I posted a graph from Roy Spencer comparing climate model predictions to actual measurements in the tropical mid-troposphere (the zone on Earth where climate models predict the most warming due to large assumed water vapor positive feedbacks). The graph is a powerful indictment of the accuracy of climate models.
Spencer has an article (or perhaps a blog post) in the Financial Post with the same results, and includes a graph that does a pretty good job of simplifying the messy spaghetti graph in the original version. Except for one problem. Nowhere is it correctly labelled. One would assume looking at it that it is a graph of global surface temperatures, which is what most folks are used to seeing in global warming articles. But in fact it is a graph of temperatures in the mid-troposphere, between 20 degrees North and 20 degrees South latitude. He mentions that it is for tropical troposphere in the text of the article, but it is not labelled as such on the graph. There is a very good reason for that narrow focus, but now the graph will end up on Google image search, and people will start crying "bullsh*t" because they will compare the numbers to global surface temperature data and it won't match.
I respect Spencer's work but he did not do a good job with this.
