I have responded to many of Stephen Mosher’s comments on various sites, but to date he has responded to only one. His response displayed surprising ignorance on many levels but in good spirit I queried if he knew the difference between daytime high and nighttime lows in the BEST data set.

No response, so I had to do it myself. Twenty years is the longest time frame offered for the data. The data is land only for nighttime lows and daytime highs.

Science is not kind to our preconceptions and I totally thought that CO2 might rule the night. Well, maybe from 1965 to 2000 and change, but the end of the data in 2000 and change (sorry, this is a 20 year average) appears to be another crossover point.

Apparently the highs dominated the warming from 1850 to 1870 even though the lows began the downward drag a few years earlier. The low’s striking drop from 1864 to 1888 barely restrained the highs over the same rough period.The lows lead the charge from 1888 to 1925 when they handed the ball to the highs. The highs were on a roll until 1942 when they ran out of gas. The lows rose to the occasion and carried the ball past the crossover point in 1962 all the way through the high tailspin from 1942 to 1970 to the 2002 crossover.

If you thought this was going to be easy, sorry ’bout that. None of these transition points from daily low to daily high temperature hegemony matches the average temperature transition points. They are on different layers. Average all you like but to get to the bottom of this we are going to have to bear down on many, many layers of input.

My advice: pack a lunch, go to work every day looking for insight.