Fourteenth Warmest August Since 1979 Or Number One Warmest August Since 1881?

There's a big global warming alarmism march scheduled here in New York for Sunday, so time for some support from the fake "scientists" who keep this thing going.  And right on cue the good folks at the Huffington Post have spoken to Gavin Schmidt of NASA for the information they need.  Schmidt, for those who don't know the name, is the officially-designated successor to James Hansen, who was the prior head of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, and scare monger extraordinaire who helped Al Gore launch the global warming enterprise back in 1988.  And the word from NASA/GISS/Schmidt is, this recent August was the warmest August since records began all the way back in 1881!  Number one warmest in 134 years!  Oh, and by the way, May was also a record-breaker.  We're all going to broil!

This past August was the warmest since records began in 1881, according to new data released by NASA. The latest readings continue a series of record or near-record breaking months. May of this year was also the warmest in recorded history.

The information was promptly picked up by other alarmists and spread widely.  Here is the take from scare-monger Greg Laden:

According to data just updated by NASA, last August was the warmest August for the entire instrumental data record, which begins in 1881.

Funny thing is, in 1979 the government put up satellites to get more accurate measures of average world temperatures than could be obtained from the scattered ground-based thermometers monitored by NASA/GISS.  Somehow, HuffPo, Laden, and others of their type don't mention the satellite results in their "warmest August ever" articles.  Should we check?

Two different groups monitor the satellite data and put out monthly reports on the "global average lower troposphere temperature anomaly."  The two are RSS and UAH.  So where does August stack up in their history? The answer is, in the UAH data set August 2014 is the ninth warmest August, and in the RSS set, it ranks fourteenth.  And that's out of only 35 years.  Fourteenth out of 35 puts 2014 barely above the average.

Well, these can't both be right.  Can they?  Can anybody help us reconcile whether the weather we are experiencing is really the hottest ever or, on the other hand, not really warming at all?

Steven Goddard (real name: Tony Heller) has a detailed analysis at the realscience website.  It is not a pretty story for NASA.  To understand Goddard's post, you need to know that while the satellites essentially measure the whole world equally, the surface thermometers monitored by NASA/GISS are not evenly spaced.  There are lots of thermometers to monitor in the U.S., lots in Europe, fewer in places like Central Asia and Africa, and almost none over the oceans (70% of the earth's surface) or in the polar regions.  That fact gives NASA/GISS tremendous ability to play with its results by giving extra weight to a handful of stations claimed to represent huge areas, such as all of Antarctica.  Goddard:

There were three stations in Antarctica on the right side of the 250 km map below which he [Schmidt] marked as very hot. Those three stations averaged about -20C. This map has 250km extrapolation, and gives a feel for where the stations are located, and where there is no data.

He extrapolated those three -20C Antarctic stations across a huge area of below normal  temperatures on both the lower right and lower left side of the map, and massively skewed his global average anomaly using a large area of fake +6C anomaly, which he declared hot at -20C. . . .

But it is much worse than it seems. None of those three stations actually have any temperature data during the 1951-1980 baseline period, so his since recanted (disproven by his own data) claim is a complete fraud. How can he know what the anomaly is, if there was no temperature data during the baseline period?

Just letting you know this in case you think that any data that comes out of the U.S. government can be trusted. 

And if you are interested in pursuing the subject further, there seem to be more articles and posts every month where people compare current NASA and NCDC reports on historical temperatures to raw data from the sites in question, and discover that NASA and NCDC systematically cool the historical temperatures to make the present appear warmer by comparison.  Here's a September 4, 2014 article from Joe D'Aleo of IceCap titled "Data Games."  The article covers a recent comparison of raw temperature records with current data from NCDC for the state of Maine showing massive cooling of the past, as well as similar recently-documented tampering from Australia.  Sample:

Meanwhile, this tampering has now made its way down from the national to the state level. NCDC made yet another change this spring to how it calculates past state wide average temperatures. If you downloaded from NCDC the Maine state average annual temperature plot in March, you would have seen no real long-term trend for annual temperatures (-0.03C/decade) since 1895. 1913 was the warmest year - almost 46F for the annual average. The annual mean was 41.2F. 2012 was second warmest year, just short of 45F.

This spring after NCDC announced a new and better version of their state data. I downloaded the new Maine annual temperatures and found a remarkably different story. 1913 was cooled to 41F (almost 5F lower) and the average cooled to 40F. 2012 was now the warmest year, over 3F warmer than 1913. The long-term trend jumped to +0.23F/decade, the highest of any state.