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RSS Data Source is here
The RSS (Remote Sensing Systems of Santa Rosa, CA) Microwave Sounder Unit (MSU) lower troposphere global temperature anomaly data for December 2008 was published today and has risen slightly. This is the new data version, 3.2 which changed in October. The change from November with a value of 0.216°C (V3.2) to December 0.174°C is a (∆T) of -0.042°C. Not much change really, but it is surprising in that many people expected a larger gain in December, not a slight drop.
RSS
2008 1 -0.070
2008 2 -0.002
2008 3 0.079
2008 4 0.080
2008 5 -0.083
2008 6 0.035
2008 7 0.147
2008 8 0.146
2008 9 0.241 (V3.1)
2008 10 0.181 (V3.2)
2008 11 0.216 (V3.2)
2008 12 0.174 (V3.2)
don’t you mean ‘fallen slightly’ ???? Please read the para carefully and tell me what/where I am not understanding ?
how does this year compare with 1980 or 1987 ( a quick look led me to believe those were comparable years….)?
anyone?
As a farmer, I can learn a lot from this kind of graph. I would learn that when the temps start to go warm I have a few good years of growing a crop I would not be able to grow ordinarily. I would also learn that eventually, that warm weather crop will fail within a one year time span after a few good years of profit, due to colder weather. So I would need to have a bottom line crop in place to get me over the cold spell before it starts to warm up again. Inexperienced farmers who see weather change as some kind of permanent climate change put themselves at risk of going out of business if they put all their money into one, hard to replace quickly, crop. Like vineyards. Or warm season fruit and nut trees. These crops take years to develop, then more years till profit is made, and are hard (read expensive) to remove so that a hardier quick growing crop can grow in that space till the weather turn warmer again.
The good stuff is in noisy weather like the RISS graph. Very little can be gained, and much money (and more) lost, from long term straight trend lines.
All the warming continues to be in the NH. Almost none in the Tropics or SH.
Not very global Global Warming.
“All the warming continues to be in the NH”
Yeah, I was surprised by that, too. I had expected the SH to warm a little and the NH to cool a bit but the observation was just the opposite.
If this were a graph of the inland NW from Washington to mid-California, I would have had a crop failure or at least a severe decrease in 82, 84, 89, 92, 99, and a rather major one in 07. The big failure in 07 (read vineyards) came about because the long term weather trend to warm caused farmers to put more and more warm weather acreage in for the long haul, thinking they were living in a permanently warmer climate. But they were just risking money on weather. Piss poor planning.
Now you know why weather trends of two to 30 plus years are far more important than climate. It is the longer trends up and quick trends down that have far more important information in them within these 100 years long graphs. Farmers cherry pick for a good reason. They look at a trend within the longer graph, measure it from bottom to top, or top to bottom, and make a bet on how long it will last. Warming trends last longer than cooling trends, and last at least 2 years but usually more. But even that is a bet, not a settled science kind of thing. I would bet that a warming trend would last about 5 years before a cold year ruins a crop. And if the longer data shows that there are two or more spells of ever warmer seasons, that trend will also continue for a while before the entire endeavor needs to be changed back to cold season crops within a year. Those will be some lean years so I had better salt away some “tide me over” money and have a good relationship with an understanding bank till I can start growing warmer weather crops again. This is the farmer’s version of weather related cap and trade.
Crosspatch quotes philip_b:
There is more sea in the SH than there is in the NH.
Thanks for the insight Pam, got any tips for someone who does not own any land but is dead certain that Texas is going to burn like crazy this spring?
Folks, we can vote every 24 hours at: click
Don’t be complacent! It only takes a few seconds.
And it’s for a really good cause.
There is more sea in the SH than there is in the NH.
Indeed there is. But it’s not clear to me why that should affect GHG warming, given that CO2 becomes moreorless evenly distributed within a relatively short period, < 1 year.
The relevant fact is probably that 20 times more people live in the NH than the SH.
BTW, the NH is 1.9C warmer on average than the SH. Although the NH is -1.6C cooler in the winter, it is 5.4C warmer in the summer.
The reason for the differences is probably high water vapour levels in the SH means greater thermal capacity of the atmosphere. It takes more energy to warm and cool the same amount of air.
http://profhorn.aos.wisc.edu/wxwise/AckermanKnox/chap14/climate_spatial_scales.html
And continuing with the climate trivia. The SH in summer gets 5% more solar insolation than the NH in summer due to the orbit of the Earth, and despite that it is 5C cooler.
Note, I don’t know why crosspatch would expect more warming to occur in the SH. I wouldn’t. The SH and NH are effectively separate climate systems over a decade to a few decades. I would expect existing trends to continue, ie continued warming in the NH and no warming in the SH. Which proves to me what even is causing NH warming, it’s not evenly distributed GHGs.
Do you see the last update of the NSDIC about the ice extent ?
First (end of november 08)
http://nsidc.org/images/arcticseaicenews/200812_Figure2.png
Second (6th of jan 2008)
http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/images/daily_images/N_timeseries.png
What happens ?
In the UK:
“Meanwhile, the National Pensioner Convention warned that 12 pensioners could die every hour during the cold snap.”
12 an hour! and how many die from the heat in the UK?
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/7814922.stm
I expected a drop. Only a larger drop.
I had +0.08°C as my guess, so I was off by about a tenth of a degree.
Thanks for the info !
I’m NOT buying the NDIC graph. No growth in ice for at least 1 week, and then it grows at *exactly* last years rate for a few weeks? It’s too perfect. It’s way too coincidental. I smell a rat….
mark (20:20:17) :
Average above or below RSS MSU anomaly full year.
1980 0.0150 1987 0.0993 2008 0.0921
2008 Is the 12th hottest year since
time began1979.Given that there has been little sunspot activity of late and the fact an ice age is supposedly on its way, I would have expected a very big drop. Instead global temperatures have been rising for 9 of the last 12 months.
But it has been cold where I live lately so that means global warming isn’t happening.
Tom Woods,
Looks like I’m a tenth over, you’re a tenth low.
Let’s watch what the others report.
Overall in all the blogs there’s too much cherry picking of cold events, which seems to lead people to overestimate the cooling. I never thought December would be cool.
I expect January to perhaps hit your December projections.
MattN
To me it appears rather strange there’s no ice forming in the Barent’s Sea with all the cold temps there recently.
http://www.findlocalweather.com/weather_maps/temperature_north_asia.html
So not everyone has to do the math, the average for Jan-Dec 2008 is 0.095 C. — John M Reynolds
Araucan:
One thing I missed out on is that either they’ve got a typo on the second graph or they’ve moved the comparator from 2007 vs 2008 (first graph) to 2006/07 vs 2008/09.
That is, they’ve changed the comparison from year-on-year to two years ago vs this year.
Is that the explanation?
Don’t know…
Araucan (01:29:18) :
>Do you see the last update of the NSDIC about the ice extent ?
I did a double take yesterday, when I first saw this. Read the legend at the bottom… very carefully. In the first graph, the green dashed line is 2007, i.e. late 2007. In the second graph, the green dashed line is 2006-2007. So they don’t want “last year’s” numbers as the green dashed line, but rather the year of the record low, which happened in the summer/fall off 2007.
It does make sense that the lowest year is plotted at the bottom.
MattN,
That’s ice extent, not amount. There have been some unusual winds that have pushed the ice together. As far as the extent running alomt exactly equal to 2007 over the last few weeks, that does appear odd.
I was looking at Dec 07 vs Dec 08 when I was expecting an increase. ASU sat temps for Dec 08 were about .3C higher than Dec 07.
We’re well into La Nina values.
NINO3.4 SST Anomaly (Weekly centered on Dec 31, 2008) Present Value = -1.088 Deg C
NINO3.4 SST Anomaly (December) Present Value = -0.73 Deg C, a change of -0.51 Deg C from November
Global SST Anomaly (December) Present Value = 0.134 deg C, a change of +0.019 since November
The monthly SST anomaly update for the hemispheres and individual ocean subsets is here:
http://bobtisdale.blogspot.com/2009/01/december-2008-sst-update.html
crosspatch (21:11:33) :
Richard Sharpe (21:33:32) :
Philip_B (20:34:23) :
BUT…….. USA cont. = -0.609