The Met Office released its global HadCRUT4 land plus sea surface DATA recently. The HadCRUT4 dataset was first presented in the Morice et al (2012) paper Quantifying uncertainties in global and regional temperature change using an ensemble of observational estimates: The HadCRUT4 dataset.
In the race to have the highest trend since 1976, does GISS LOTI still hold its lead, or has the new HadCRUT4 data overtaken GISS?
And the current winner is…
HadCRUT4 has the highest short-term (1976-2010) linear trend, at a whopping 0.177 deg C/decade.
Figure 1
On a long-term basis, the new HadCRUT4 data comes in a lowly third, just behind the dataset it obsoletes, HadCRUT3.
Figure 2
NCDC: If you’d like to get back in the short-term trend game, you can stop infilling Southern Ocean sea surface temperature, which has been cooling for decades and leave most of the grids at those latitudes blank like HADSST3. That would help to raise your trend. Or you can extend land surface temperature data out over the oceans in areas where there is sea ice, like GISS, to take advantage of the higher rate of warming of land surface temperature. That would help too.
MY FIRST BOOK
The IPCC claims that only the rise in anthropogenic greenhouse gases can explain the warming over the past 30 years. Satellite-based sea surface temperature disagrees with the IPCC’s claims. Most, if not all, of the rise in global sea surface temperature is shown to be the result of a natural process called the El Niño-Southern Oscillation, or ENSO. This is discussed in detail in my first book, If the IPCC was Selling Manmade Global Warming as a Product, Would the FTC Stop their deceptive Ads?, which is available in pdf and Kindle editions. A copy of the introduction, table of contents, and closing can be found here.
SOURCES
The land plus sea surface temperature datasets are available through the following links:
Bob Tisdale - Climate Observations 
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