Global warming or data splodging?

Watts Up With That has the story of George Monbiot's claim that:

'Last month’s (NASA GISS’s map generator) shows a deep blue splodge over Iceland, Spitsbergen, Scandanavia and the UK, and another over the western US and eastern Pacific. Temperatures in these regions were between 0.5C and 4C colder than the November average from 1951 and 1980. But on either side of these cool blue pools are raging fires of orange, red and maroon: the temperatures in western Greenland, northern Canada and Siberia were between 2C and 10C higher than usual. Nasa’s Arctic oscillations map for 3-10 December shows that parts of Baffin Island and central Greenland were 15C warmer than the average for 2002-9.'

Watts Up With That explains what data splodging is and also touches on heat islands, something I have blogged about before:

'All the sudden, those “raging fires of orange, red and maroon” don’t look so big, do they George? There’s no reds, oranges or yellows over northern Greenland, or Iceland, or the East Siberian Sea, or most of Africa, and much of Antarctica’s coastline and the southern ocean.

In fact, a lot of those isolated red and maroon splotches in Greenland, Canada, and Russia are single data points. Yep, GISS takes data from these stations and smears the effect writ large on the 1200KM smoothing map. Journalists like yourself often don’t notice, they simply see the issue in shades of smeared red.

And guess what George? In those remote locations like Nuuk, Greenland, (see arrow, under a red splotch in SW Greenland) what have we there? Remote pockets of humanity. Humanity building little cities of warmth in the cold Arctic, growing cities'

Watts Up with That should be a regular read for all climate change 'deniers' and 'warmists'.