A n average rate o f increase o f g l o b a l m e a n temperature during the next century of about 0.3°C per decade (with an uncertainty range of 0 . 2 — 0 . 5 ° C per decade) assuming the I P C C Scenario A (Business-as-
Usual) emissions of greenhouse gases; this is a more rapid increase than seen over the past 10,000 years.

In the end the two series were similar but RSS has consistently exhibited more warming than UAH.  Then a little more than a decade ago, the group at NOAA headed by Zou produced a new data product called STAR (Satellite Applications and Research). They used the same underlying microwave retrievals but produced a temperature record showing much more warming than either UAH or RSS, as well as all the weather balloon records. It came close to validating the climate models, although in my paper with Christy we included the STAR data in the satellite average and the models still ran too hot. Nonetheless it was possible to point to the coolest of the models and compare them to the STAR data and find a match, which was a lifeline for those arguing that climate models are within the uncertainty range of the data.

Until now. In their new paper Zou and his co-authors rebuilt the STAR series based on a new empirical method for removing time-of-day observation drift and a more stable method of merging satellite records. Now STAR agrees with the UAH series very closely — in fact it has a slightly smaller warming trend. The old STAR series had a mid-troposphere warming trend of 0.16 degrees Celsius per decade, but it’s now 0.09 degrees per decade, compared to 0.1 in UAH and 0.14 in RSS. For the troposphere as a whole they estimate a warming trend of 0.14 C/decade.

Comedy career

After graduating from Colorado College,
Richards moved to Melbourne to work in standup comedy.