Yeah, we had a crappy winter on the West Coast too. But it was the opposite of what happened on the East Coast. Very warm and very little snow in the mountains where we depend on it for late summer stream flows.

I live on the same continent you do and I've lived here since the 1950's. It's easily the warmest year I can remember and the weather statistics support that assertion.

Unless you're taking a global view of the situation you're missing to much to have an informed opinion.

You just don't know how adjusted the satellite data is. Far more adjustment goes into satellite data than the surface temperature records.

Satellites don't measure temperature directly but rather the microwave emissions of O2 molecules. The data has to be adjusted for orbital variations, sensor degradation, the effects of clouds and water vapor, the effects of high elevations and the differences of replacement satellites that are launched every 10 years or so. Compared to that surface temperature adjustments are a piece of cake.

You mean "hockey stick graphs". There have been over a dozen studies since the original and they all show similar shapes. Here's a graph with 10 of them from 2005.

Anyone with some statistical chops can handle the raw data. The reason you don't see raw data graphs of global temperatures from climate contrarians is because they don't help their case that much. Instead they'll cherry pick some individual records like that station in Paraguay and try to imply that shows the global records are rigged.

I know there were some cold records set east of the Rockies on North America this past winter although not all that many. That doesn't negate the fact that there were also record high temperatures west of the Rockies and when you look at it globally it was a pretty warm winter.

The Koch brothers tried that with Berkeley Earth and that didn't turn out so well (for them). The researchers at BE were pretty much unconnected with the climate science community and use their own methods of adjustment yet their results came out about the same as everyone else.

You wouldn't know what to do with the raw data if you got it. It is available to anyone who cares to seek it out but it may take some work to get it.

There wasn't near enough snow along the US East Coast and in New England to make up for all of the snow we didn't get on the West Coast this past winter.

I see a lot of hand waving about the temperature adjustments but I seldom see any serious scientifically rigorous challenge that addresses the reasons and methods that scientists give for making the adjustments. If you want to challenge the scientific mainstream you need to use science. Anything else is inadequate.

Science always seeks improvement and is never static unless it's dead. If you think the changes that have been made are scientifically unjustified then lets see your scientifically valid evidence challenging the updates.

Regarding the State of the Climate report this post is about, it was finished before the GISS update so there is no connection between the two.

It may only be a 0.02% change in the overall atmosphere (I didn't check your math) but it's also an over 40% increase in one of the principal greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

It's more like 255 TW but just because it's a big number doesn't mean much. The total energy from an average of 250 W/m^2 is 127,500 TW, 3 orders of magnitude larger.

What does the energy consumption of humans have to do with anything? It has practically nothing to do with global warming other than being responsible for supplying most of the CO2 that is causing most of the warming.

Time to trot out the old "correlation isn't causation" meme. It could be a coincidence the the Dalton Minimum was at the same time or the DM could be a partial explanation. Remember that Mt. Tambora and the "Year without a summer" occurred during the DM.

True and Zharkova's double dynamo hypothesis doesn't have anything to say on climate change or a mini ice age, just that there may be lowered solar activity for a while. How such low solar activity affects climate has been examined before and what they found was it would only slow global warming down a bit but not stop it. RealClimate had a post on it in 2011.

I kind of misspoke when I wrote that. The 0.2% is the difference between maximum solar forcing and minimum solar forcing in a Maunder Minimum scenario given the Sun's variability so the potential change is more like half of that.

I found several sources that seem to disagree with you:
http://www.pnas.org/content/10...
http://www.grida.no/climate/ip...
https://www.ipcc.ch/publicatio...

Bad assumption.