October 15, 2010. Dr. Roy Spencer is, for my money, the most respectable climate skeptic—a genuine climate scientist. He published "The Great Global Warming Blunder: How Mother Nature Fooled the World's Top Climate Scientists," in April 2010.

There are 4 main global temperature series and Roy follows his (cool) favorite, a U.S.-satellite based series. It's been accumulating data since December 1978. To smooth out the data hiccups, Roy plots a 13-month running average. That's his version of "How hot has the last year been?" That average just reached its highest level ever, as you can almost see in the graph below. I downloaded his data to make the exact comparison.

Sept. 2009 -- Sept. 2010 = 0.511  -- New record.

Dec.  1997 -- Dec.  1998 = 0.502  -- Previous record.

Remarkably, Dr. Spencer makes no mention of this all-time record set by his favorite temperature series, either on his home page (where he draws attention to the cooling ocean due to La Nina) or on his temperature-graph page. However we do find this remark on his home page: "Past experience ... dictates that the global tropospheric temperature, still riding high at +0.60 deg. C for September, must cool in response to the cool ocean conditions. But given Mother Nature’s sense of humor, I’ve given up predicting when that might occur."

Hmmm. Perhaps his new book is somewhat autobiographical, and one of the "Top Climate Scientists Fooled by Mother Nature," has been Dr. Roy Spencer. Here's his graph:

Now, to tell the whole story, you should know that if Roy used a 12-month average (I asked him a year ago why 13, but got no reply) this would not yet be the hottest year ever, but if the globe is as warm next month as this month (remember it's going toward summer in the southern hemisphere), then the 12-month average will also hit an all-time record.

When 1998 set the record we were in an unusually hot El Nino, and sun was near average temperature. Now we are in a La Nina (cool) and the sun is the coolest it's been in decades. So this seems like it does out-do 1998. I guess mother nature is just determined to trick us into thinking that we're warming up the globe.