This

If the cold polar air is getting colder and the warm tropical air is getting warmer then if California is getting 50% polar air and 50% tropical air, California’s temperatures will fall and this will show up in the anomalies

should read

warm tropical air is NOT getting warmer

No it doesn’t. If the cold polar air is getting colder and the warm tropical air is getting warmer then if California is getting 50% polar air and 50% tropical air, California’s temperatures will fall and this will show up in the anomalies. Even if there were a shift over California whereby there were only 40% polar air and 60% tropical air then California’s temperatures may rise (or remain constant) – BUT the polar air that isn’t now moving over California will shift to some other place and the temperatures will fall there.

However, I dispute the fact that there is any evidence that polar air is actually getting colder.

The anomaly maps are averages over time for a given place. What you need is the ‘anomaly map’ from the cold side of the jet stream vs the warm side, and I doubt that those are available since you would need to dynamically pick temps to track as the jet stream moves.

The cold air within the cold pool at the N. pole moves. Right now it’s warm in California. A few weeks ago it was cold. Now that cold air mass is sitting over the central USA. Now they are cold. If you take a time average over a place (like a monthly average over California) you are hiding how cold that air mass is by averaging when it is here vs when it is somewhere else. (When the ‘cold place’ moves from California to Colorado).

Put at it’s most direct, I’m saying that the cold air source, the N. Polar air mass, has gotten very anomalously cold and is advancing to colder; while the hot air source, the water of the equator and gulf of Mexico is still warm, anomalously warm on a long term trend, but failing to advance to warmer.

Averaging them together on a macro scale (the whole world) hides this. Similarly, picking a physical spot like California, and averaging the temperatures over a month where 1/2 the time it was under cold polar air and 1/2 the time it was under hot tropical air hides the same same thing.

Perhaps I was unclear when I said ‘the cold places’ and ought to have said ‘the cold times in the places that are suffering the cold air mass’…

Yes, there is. The cold places have gotten much colder. It is only by foolishly averaging away that insight that you see nothing.

Which “cold places” are much colder? since when? You can’t average away a cooling trend as you put it. If you have an average of 0.5, say, then some places will be warmer than 0.5 and some will be colder. If the cold places have got much colder, then either the warm places have also got warmer – or the warmer places have grown in area.

Here’s the UAH anomaly map for December

http://climate.uah.edu/

and here’s the GISS anomaly map

http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/do_nmap.py?year_last=2008&month_last=12&sat=4&sst=0&type=anoms&mean_gen=12&year1=2008&year2=2008&base1=1951&base2=1980&radius=1200&pol=reg

Note how consistent they are – where it’s warm on UAH it’s also warm on GISS where it’s cold on UAH it’s also cold on GISS.

As for the rest of your post. I’ve said that there is no evidence that global cooling is underway. You appear to disagree with this but provide nothing to show that my statement is in fact, incorrect. So do you have the evidence or not?

You can take it as read that I understand the limitations of using averages, but the temperature anomalies offer a reasonable comparison of a particular month to a given base period.

“Temperatures throughout Northern Europe including the UK are more likely to be average or warmer than average”.

Perhaps not surprisingly, it is now very dificult to access that original forecast as when you go to the winter forecast, all you get is the most recent update. Interstingly, as Autumn has progressed so their update has become progressively colder. The November update suggested a cold beginning to winter, while the December update finally conceded that December and January were likely to be colder than average with February close to average. Of course, this is now a complete reversal on their original forecast. There is never any reference made to previous forecasts!

I await with bated breath the met office appraisal of their seasonal forecast for this winter whiich will finally have to recover the original statement in order to compare it with what happened!! Wrong again!!

Ben

This has bothered me somewhat too… but I’d ignored your other posts since I felt like I had no choice but to use ‘climate’ to differentiate the longer terms.

I have a modest suggestion: Call it weather, but with a duration qualifier. You can have 1 week weather reports, and 30 year weather models… Adds both clarity and precision. Lets me stop saying “weather or climate” … Also gets rid of the stupid notion that 30 years is climate. As though there were no 30 or longer year cycles of weather drivers…

OK, you’ve got a convert… I’m going to try to always use ‘weather’, ‘short term weather’, ’30 year weather’ etc. unless quoting someone else.

My mind feels tidier all ready ;-)

Weather channel reporting hard freeze warning north of Tampa FL, 15F in Atlanta, minus oh my god up north… Slovenia is violating the terms of it’s agreement to enter the EU to run a nuke to keep warm. Germany has 3 rivers closed by ice. Thailand having 30s temps and declared cold emergency (wimps…), below zeros in the N.E. tomorrow, but it must be warmer, Finn said so… He averaged it with the Sahara Desert and it’s not cold anymore…

But if I condense your post down all you seem to be saying is that some places have been cold – and you only want to focus on those places.

No. Not at all. What I said was that the cold places have been very very cold, outside the recent trend / norm and in many cases setting records. AND the warm ones are still warm, but have had a ‘failure to advance’ to the warm side. AND that adding these two interesting and valuable bits of insight together to get an average destroys that insight. I challenged you to explain what that average means.

What is the flavor of the average of all food served today? If it is all put in a blender, what does the change of flavor to tomorrow tell you? Nothing.

You have some nice space based data sets, go knock yourself out with them. Have fun. Average them and find nothing. Then step back and look at the patterns and see something.

See a suddenly very cold north polar area. See the way low ozone. See the open IR window that O3 was blocking, especially at the poles. See the air getting very cold. See the lobes of very cold polar air shooting south and the (residually overheated) hot air from the tropics headed north. Watch this heat engine wobble back and forth, sometimes freezing Portland, sometimes heating it, sometimes heating New Hampshire, shortly to be freezing it. Moving heat from tropical warm waters to the frozen north to be cooled.

Or average it all together and see nothing. Your choice…

There is no evidence that “global cooling” is underway.

Yes, there is. The cold places have gotten much colder. It is only by foolishly averaging away that insight that you see nothing.

December 2008 UAH NH anomaly is +0.4 (relative to 1979-1997). While temperature averages are not perfect we don’t have anything better.

Yes, we do. Now I have a bit of an advantage here because I spend all day looking at hundreds of charts of chaotic price data and looking for patterns in it. And I use a variety of tools too. I use averages to hide things I don’t want to see and I use other tools to make patterns stand out. After a while you get good at it. In a ‘battleground’ or inflection zone, you look at volatility, the delta between high and low. It is critical.

So take the UAH, and divide it at the jet stream. Take the trend of the cold side. Watch just that. As a separate behaviour, take the trend of the hot side. Watch just that. If you are really ambitious, watch them both at once. But do not average them together…

Like I said: You want a dataset, knock yourself out. Then tell me what does your average mean. To that I would add: And why do you want to use an average to hide the strain between hot and cold areas?

I am an expert at spotting an inflection point in price data ahead of darned near anyone else. I have a decade or so experience at it. Fortunately it’s now built into my brain since doing it long hand would be very time consuming and I have to evaluate a chart in about 20 seconds. I don’t expect anyone to pick up that skill in less than a year or so. What I’m fairly sure of at this point is that the same techniques can be used to spot inflections in major weather (and by extension climate) cycles.

Do you have a tool that will do that for you with weather data? Probably not, but you are free to go build one. Sort the data into hot and cold sides of the jet stream. Compute 2 simple moving averages for each. Look at the slopes. Look at the convergence and divergence between the simple moving averages. Finally, look at the number of hot vs cold datapoints (in stock terms, the advance / decline line). Integrate all that. Thats your trend. Inflection to the downside is when the hot data fails to advance, the cold data has the bottom fall out, and the MACD (the 2 moving averages of different time periods) converges and inverts to the downside. Having the AD line rollover to the downside helps too (more places on the cold side, fewer on the hot side).

Just don’t ever ever average it all together into one useless meaningless number. Ever.

“Averages hide more than they reveal”.

http://www.cnn.com/2009/US/weather/01/14/winter.storms/index.html

However when I hear “coldest air of the season” and “gulf of mexico” in the same sentence it makes me wonder.

Carbon dioxide is a very weak greenhouse gas with its ability to affect temperature logarithmic due to saturation issues. It is swimming in a sea of other gases, including water vapour, which largely has a very similar absorption spectrum, not to mention orders of magnitude higher concentration. The bulk of the temperature rise took place during the most recent Grand Maximum, and, now that it is over, temperatures are falling along with the weaker solar wind and our shrinking outer atmosphere. If you want specifics, I believe that the CO2 effect has been overestimated by a exaggerating the alpha value used to determine radiative forcing (the scientific literature on this is somewhere between abysmal and non-existent, yet the IPCC continues to apply it without explanation). Furthermore, I feel that the positive impacts of CO2 (enhanced plant growth rates, water use efficiency and nitrogen use efficiency) likely outweigh the negative (a very minor warming effect and temporary ocean acidification), so we should probably focus on other issues, such as land degradation, air and water pollution, wealth inequity, space travel and eradication of disease. If you don’t mind a digression, have you ever noticed that most physicists (who are the only ones who really understand how CO2 might interact with other gases in the atmosphere) deny climate change theory, while most supporters either come from fields like geography, biology, environmental science, oceanography and political science, or are political activists. It won’t be the first time consensus is wrong, but it is going to be a bombshell.

Tell you what. Why don’t you give us your email address

Give me yours and I’ll email you.

Lulo

Satellite temperatures show that your ‘above average’ temperatures are only above average by a tiny fraction of a degree,

Well 0.2 globally and 0.4 in the NH is not exactly insignificant.

and the trend is downward

Is it? Jan 1999 to Dec 2008 (10 years) is up isn’t it? Or do you mean if you only select certain start years it’s down?

I also think the hype about the negative PDO is overblown. A developing La Nina will hold temperatures back a bit, but once that’s over expect them to recover to the level of the recent highs.

Tell you what. Why don’t you give us your email address.

In a couple of years time, if the cold downturn has not materialized we can all email you and tell you you were right. On the other hand …

I didn’t say it was impressive or particularly warm – I said it wasn’t cold . Many posters on here (and elsewhere) have been suggesting that the NH is having a brutally cold winter and generally implying that global temperatures are plunging sharply downwards. This clearly isn’t the case. Some places have been cold – but some have been warm and, overall, NH temperatures have been above the 30 year average.

Many are expecting much lower temperatures due to ‘weaker’ solar output. I think they’ll be disappointed. I also think the hype about the negative PDO is overblown. A developing La Nina will hold temperatures back a bit, but once that’s over expect them to recover to the level of the recent highs.