UPDATE – see new graph of global ∆T for the past year below. There has been a global drop in temperature of 0.63 degrees Centigrade in the past 12 months.
Of course we already have had a heads up from all the wire reports around the world talking about the significant winter weather events that have occurred worldwide in the last month, but until now, there hasn’t been a measure of how the planet was doing for the winter of 2007/2008.
Remote Sensing Systems of Santa Rosa just posted the latest MSU (Microwave Sounder Unit) data.
January posted a -.08°C near global anomaly between -70S and 82.5N latitude (the viewshed of the satellite sounder). That makes it the coldest month since January 2000, and the 2nd coldest January for the planet in 15 years. Both northern and southern hemispheres posted negative anomalies of -.120°C and -.038°C respectively, happening for the first time since January 2000.
The United States posted a -.557°C anomaly for January 2008 and a -0.196°C anomaly for December 2007.
Here is the raw anomaly data for January 2008
| Year | Month | -70.0/ 82.5 | -20.0/ 20.0 | 20.0/ 82.5 | -70.0/ -20.0 | 60.0/ 82.5 | -70.0/ -60.0 | CONUS | 0.0/ 82.5 | -70.0/ 0.0 |
| 2008 | 1 | -0.080 | -0.188 | -0.063 | 0.025 | 0.288 | -0.833 | -0.557 | -0.120 | -0.038 |
Which can be viewed in its entirety here (.txt data, RSS Data Version 3.1)
Here is my plot of the raw, unedited Global anomaly data (-70S to 82.5N) supplied by RSS per month. Note that the anomaly trend between late 2007 and early 2008 is quite steep and that the period leading up to 2008 is relatively flat.
click for a larger image Note: RSS Data Version 3.1
UPDATE:
I decided to plot a magnified graph to show the global change in temperature over the last year from January 2007 to January 2008, the ∆T of -0.629°C is quite significant for a 12 month period, rivaled in the last 10 years only by the 1998 El Nino warming peak.
Click for a larger image Note: RSS Data Version 3.1
Probable cause– [Una] Niña muy grande. It looks like we may have a PDO shift as well. But as some say, trying to correlate such things is a “fools errand”. But, judge for yourself.
click for a larger image
We live in interesting times.
(h/t MattN)
This data is encouraging however, a similar drop did occur in 1988 during a solar minimum+la nina. If history is repeating itself we should see temps recover by about 0.4 deg by the end of the year.
If temps stay low or go lower then we are entering new territory. One thing to note: we are talking anomolies and not absolute temps so a cool summer could have a large anomoly even if it is hotter than now.
If the solar/enso hypothesis have any merit we should see that evidence show up in the next 12 months. A recovery similar to 1988 would tend to support the AGW view that such variations are random blibs in a long term trend.
Anthony,
I’m the first to admit uncertainty; being a trained biologist I’m forced to. I hope my contributions to the AGW threads reflect that; if not, my mistake, I’ll try harder.
Keep up the good work!
Jd
I’m glad to see my comments get such positive feedback (Oh! a horrible “pun”). Perhaps Jd is implying (correctly?) that “wiggle room” does go both ways. It could be better, it could be worse. I’d put money on “better” personally (I’m climate “optimist” when I’m not a “Climate Copernican”, ie someone who doesn’t think it makes sense to call the present climate “ideal” and any change “bad”.)
I’m also timetochooseagain, in case you just got confused! 😉
Again Andrew (TTCA), well said on the summary; regarind complex natural systems, uncertainty still rules the day. Although based on your last note I think I’m still a little more “agnostic”. Evan, I couldn’t have said it better myself. Some of my most esteemed collegues are mostly self-educated. And as a scientist working with Policy Makers…I’ve felt their pain.
Best regards,
Jd
John Danielson – You might want to check out http://www.climateaudit.org/phpBB3/
under Physics issues and in particular Basic Quantum Mechanics and the Green house Effect There is lot of other interesting stuff being discussed there.
Also a good link here
http://brneurosci.org/co2.html
which looks at GHG and in particular CO2 from a empirical point of view. I don’t know for sure but this guy sounds like an experimental researcher. On this web page he makes the statement:
“What about secondary effects, such as ice melting, changes in albedo, and so forth? Doesn’t this increase the predicted temperature beyond the 1.39 to 1.76 degree estimate?
In short, no. Because these calculations are based on observed measurements, they automatically take into account all of the earth’s responses. Whatever way the climate adapted to past CO2 increases, whether through melting, changes in albedo, or other effects, is already reflected in the measured temperature, and therefore it will also be reflected in the prediction. This is because the prediction is based on an extrapolation of past measurements that were taken after the earth adapted to the CO2 increase.”
A very good point to remember.
Why not let the climate system make all the fancy calculations – it is the real super computer.
“This data is encouraging however”
I am not so sure. Global cooling would probably be quite a bad thing. I assume you’ve looked at the longtern geological record. According to that, we are right at the end of the current longtern warming period. The orbit and axis tilt/wobble could catch up with us any time. I only hope mankind is advanced and wealthy enough to cope.
I suppose that’s yet another reason I’m on about this “get rich quick” thing for the world. (That. plus I want it to happen in time for our cells to be regenerated! It could happen. If it does, I’m FOR it!)
I like the story about the inductivist turkey who made observations, that is fed 3 pm every day – when it was raining, snowing, extreme sunshine… It was quite a surprise to end up on the Christmas table.
The second story I like is about a group of scientists who were contracted to optimize milk production in the farm. When the farmer opened the report and read ‘Let’s imagine that your cows are spherical’, he shut it immediately.
What I believe is that uncertainties in the models are anyway too large to make accurate predictions. On the other hand, there are so many predictions that someone will have the close one anyway. However, that one could be based on the completely wrong assumptions…
See the surface data set at University of East Anglia at webpage:
http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/temperature/hadcrut3gl.txt
This dataset is the global average delta versus the 1961..1990 normals. They won’t have Jan2008 for another couple of weeks, but Jan2007 through Dec2007 look similar to the satellite data.
A couple of interesting items…
1) Dec2007, delta +0.211 is the lowest delta of any month this century, heck, make that this millenium. (Nitpick; December 2000 was the previous century/millenium).
2) 2007 was the 3rd coolest year of the past 10 (1998..2007)
Essentially the Earth cools itself by transporting heat accumulated at the tropics toward the poles. And essentially this causes what we call weather, and of course determines the temperature at ex-tropical latitudes.
An El Nino is where heat transport from the Tropics increases, and a La Nina is where heat transport decreases.
So, a La Nina means either less heat is being transported from the tropics and hence more heat is being accumulated (bad = more GW) , or there is less heat to be transported and hence it’s consequence and not a cause, ie the Earth is cooling (really bad in IMHO).
John Danielson, Timetochooseagain: I also have looked around for good justification. Lately they just quit with Beer’s Law, i.e., signal attenuation then a ‘wave of the hands’. Thus derivation leaves off with the IPCC accepted forcing function (Hansen 1988). But regarding absorption and ‘back-radiation’, I have seen the attempt to use wrongly Kirchoff’s relation for plane solids: E = (1 – A), i.e., the emissivity where all vibrational energy either becomes heat or is re-emitted. But with the gases at STP the values of E and A can only be estimated experimentally and are quite small. Therefore, Schwartz’s attempt to estimate sensitivity to CO2 doubling from recovery following CO2 pulse todate is one of the few feasible approaches I’ve seen; otherwise the effect is unmeasurable.
2nd coldest January for the planet in 15 years
i hope this title was supposed to be a joke?!?
REPLY: Well being a Brit, you should know.
“That’s strange. NY’s January was balmy, even”
I live in CT on the NY border (literally) and from what I measured beginning with just after Thanksgiving through right around January 20th the temperature was running at or slightly below normal. You are correct in that our snowfall has been (thankfully) unimpressive, but from a temperature standpoint its been about as average as average can be. Granted, I only refer to a slice of Westchester, Dutchess, and Putnam counties.
Anthony, one thing that has been puzzling me and this thread might be a good place to ask. The alarmist position is that the global average temperature is going to rise and then they behave as though the maximum temperature perceived during the day is going to rise by that amount, thereby giving rise to all sorts of disaster. But as I seem to see it, the average will rise largely due to a rise in the minimum temperatures found, rather than a rise in the maximums. Surely this, if true, should mean that even if the two to three degree rise in average does occur, it still won’t mean that we are all going to fry, just that we won’t need so many blankets.
John Danielson: My first piece of advice to you would be stop going to Wikipedia for information on this subject. If you have a free month of spare time, check out climateaudit like someone suggested. Then you can really start to see how much wool is being pulled over our eyes.
Evan: I share the same concern. A cooling to what we had in the 1950s-1970s likely wouldn’t be much of a problem. Cooling back to the 1800s will devestate crops and condemn millions, if not billions, to starvation. Can we possibly feed 7 billion people if global temperatures drop 1C+ longterm?
Hi,
Raven, It it not the drop so much as we seem to be entering a PDO shift and a period of low solar activity. This may combine to make temperatures drop even more than expected.
“Surely this, if true, should mean that even if the two to three degree rise in average does occur, it still won’t mean that we are all going to fry, just that we won’t need so many blankets.”
How about that? Point. Especially since more than one AGW advocate I’ve seen tend to point to T-Min “first, last, and always”.
I often wonder if waht comes out of the adjustment cauldron weights the two equally. Does anyone around here know this? I seem to recall the Rev saying that it was a finction of T-Max, T-Min and T-OBS, though I don’t remember him ever using the term “average” or “mean”.
Raven: “This data is encouraging however, a similar drop did occur in 1988 during a solar minimum+la nina.”
Just to clarify, solar minimum was in 1986, not 1988. We were well into Cycle #22 by 1988.
MattN
“Just to clarify, solar minimum was in 1986, not 1988. We were well into Cycle #22 by 1988.”
That is good to know. We will see.
I have been looking for benchmarks to watch for that I can use to determine whether the warmers managed to get something right despite all of the issues with the methodology and dubious claims of certainty when there is none. The temperature recovery after this La Nina ends will be one to watch.
Is there anywhere a discussion about the role of media influencing science? Science should be something that is ‘true, pure and honest’. However, one of the most relevant criteria in research financing is actuality of the proposal. Something is actual when there is a large attention of the media. Nobody is interested in the news of something not changing or not dramatically changing. So, for satisfying the criteria of actuality, the research proposals are written with hypotheses and assumptions that consider a system in a dramatic change. Mainly only these research proposals get financed. The executor of the project feels the responsibility to prove what has been written in the proposal, being interested in financing of the next proposal. So there is a pre-selection of research proposals and those proposing dramatic changes are favoured… Or am I missing something?
REPLY: Well being a Brit, you should know.
thanks for this Anthony, i ll take it as a compliment. (actually i am german, but quite a fan of the brits…)
I often wonder if what comes out of the adjustment cauldron weights the two equally. Does anyone around here know this? I seem to recall the Rev saying that it was a finction of T-Max, T-Min and T-OBS, though I don’t remember him ever using the term “average” or “mean”.
the method used to calculate a “average” or “daily mean” temperature seem to vary over the world.
i am rather sure that the US is using a min-max average while German for example was using a weighted mean of 3 temperatures measured at specific hours.
REPLY: Good point, but I’m not sure if that applies to the way global datasets are calculated such as at HadCRU or GISS. I’ll run it up the food chain to see what can be learned. I don’t believe T-OBS ever figures into such average or mean calculations, although it is recorded on the observer form. It might be used as a quality check point of some kind to forward/reverse calculate a likely trend to see if the Tmax/Tmin falls outside of reason.
Thanks for the background and links. I shall attempt to further educate myself and I appreciate all the suggestions.
sod: “i hope this title was supposed to be a joke?!?”
The NOAA headline that Jan 07 was “the warmest January on record” was not a joke. Why would this one be less deserving?
What’s good for the goose is good for the gander….
It looks like we had a false alarm for the start of solar cycle 24 as we continue with minimal sunspots and no new reverse polarity sunspots. Nobody seems to know what this means and what the implications are for the climate, but the prolonged solar minimum and abrupt cooling may not be a coincidence.
Average temperature is computed from min/max for historical reasons. Min/Max thermometers have been around for about 150 years (wikipedia will give you the details) and prior to electronics were the only reliable 24 hour measurements.