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)
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UAH LT up now as well.
http://vortex.nsstc.uah.edu/data/msu/t2lt/uahncdc.lt
“So there is a pre-selection of research proposals and those proposing dramatic changes are favoured… Or am I missing something?”
To put it very bluntly:
There are two main factors at work.
1.) Newspapers are in the business of selling themselves and making a profit. Sometimes a newspaper caters to a particular constuency and, in order to remain in business, endorse the views of that constituency. Even the owner may disagree with this viewpoint, by acceeds to the editors who are responsible for making the call.
The Village Voce springs to mind. They are a far-left paper owned by a political conservative who does not interfere with its workings, though he could if he chose to. (The Voice is handed out for free–its profits come from advertising alone.)
2.) And sometimes a newspaper is owned and run by an owner who loses money but is willing to pay that price in in order to spread a point of view that is agreeable to him.
The government cannot prevent what goes in a newspaper except in the rare exception of classified secrets. While they can (sometimes) prevent some of what goes in a paper, they cannot force the paper to say anying. The government can refuse to be interviewed by a newspaper and may “trade” in information, but that is the extent of its power.
Such is freedom of the press.
All of the issues you raise are valid. But those issues are all filtered through one or both of the two points I make above. 1.) Profit, 2.) What the owner wants to say (for whatever reason). All else is real, but secondary, including the buffeting of “reality” and scientific endeavor.
The NOAA headline that Jan 07 was “the warmest January on record” was not a joke. Why would this one be less deserving?
sorry, but let us play “can you spot the difference” between
“the warmest January on record”
and
2nd coldest January for the planet in 15 years
i spot two MAJOR differences. do you?
REPLY: Lets not get into a war over semantics, or sentence structure. Hold those comments please because I don’t have the time today to moderate all of it.
The point being made is that the warm events get a lot more press than the cold events. The cold events get mentioned as news items when they cause trouble, such as China’s snow and cold, but they don’t get touted the same way or connected with climate change like the warm events do.
sorry Anthony, but the difference between “warmest in 150 years” and “2nd coldest in 15 years” is far beyond semantics.
while i personally don t think that this “warmest” month/year make lots of sense, it obviously is more easy to understand than an abstract “global temperature is increasing by 0.1°C per decade” phrase.
so i understand that you want part of the publicity.
but the difference between the two things is huge and real!
REPLY: The title was from the person who originally brought the dataset to my attention, notice the hat tip (h/t) to MattN at the bottom of the post. In deference to thanking the person who made the phrase, I used the same words he did. So please don’t accuse me of “publicity seeking” because I paid attention to a member of the online community here. If a person brings something forward of value (like you did with the max/min issue) I think they should be rewarded with recognition
It wouldn’t matter what sort of title I used, it would be criticized be someone. I had considered making it “Coldest year in a bakers dozen”. You wouldn’t like that either. So, tough noogies as they say.
Enough on the title issue, no further posts accepted in that regard. I don’t have the time to waste responding.
The UAH numbers show rapid cooling for NH, SH, tropical mid-latitude and polar oceans and by similar amounts. It was questionable if the late 20th century warming was a truly global phenomena, but this cooling is global.
From a religious point of view, I am impressed that Edgar (“The Sleeping Prophet”) Cayce made a correct prediction (he died in 1945) that 1998 would be the end of a 40 year Time of troubles, apparently a coinciding of different solar cycles which started in 1958. Can this date, 1998, just be a fantastic coincidence? If you look at your graph, you’ll see that the year of most change, the high point, is … 1998!
Something worth thinking about.
Cayce predicted a shift in the earth’s axis that would cause widespread calamity.
What happened is a gradual change in the distribution of the mass on the planet:
http://www.gsfc.nasa.gov/topstory/20020801gravityfield.html
It appears that there was an inflection point of some sort in 1998. However, it was not a singular event.
You’re not serious, are you? Let’s not practice Nostradumbass Science…
These predictions were all publicised before 1998, so this seems to be a successful prediction. Is this an inconvenient truth for you? Cayce did predict a pole shift starting in 2001, but I read it, and he said- “This will be a gradual change as man judges time.”
I would have thought you’d be interested in the possibility that there are more Solar cycles than we have found, and that Global Warming is a natural event.
When the polar bears were short of ice, it was proof the end is nigh. Now that their testicles are freezing off, it proves nothing.
To ascertain whether the sun is driving solar activity, we need a large sustained change in solar activity. Looks like we now be getting it. Remember all those people pointing out that solar activity had maxed, and yet the poor poor polar bears are getting short of ice?
Of course we are only going to know the truth after twenty years or so of substantially reduced solar activity, but I recall lots of people who were mighty eager to confidently draw decisive conclusions after five years of very slightly reduced solar activity.
FACE THE FACTS. The hottest year in recent records was 10 years ago(1998).. we have added according to Al Gore 700 million tons of co2 based on his 70million tons a year. into the air.. Why have we been cooling? This year we had record fast ice growth in the arctic. China has had a Winter like none remember, snow in Iraq, snow in saudi arabia, 80 million without power in china due to snow and a 100,000 or more stranded because cold has shut down trafic. We have learned that the melting ice wasn’t caused by global warming, We have learned that the glaciers in Greenland are melting due to heat from the earths crust. We have learned that melted ice is being replaced by new ice. Wake up.. Were cooling..
1970 global cooling was going to distroy us all and government didn’t react to science wanting to add ash to the arctic ice to melt it. and they wanted to add another layer of polution to the upper air to warm the earth. What if government had reacted.
1980 We started global warming. Of couses government was slow to react again..and once again no one could debate these facts..
1990 We discovered that we were wrong in the 80s and someone came up with the idea that global warming could cause global cooling and government was acting too slow. Once again.. These facts were not open to any debate. And now they had all their bases covered.
2000 Well the models of the 1990s didn’t prove out and they changed the name from global warming to what they now call “climate change” and once again..you can’t debate this. Once again government didn’t act fast enough. Once again anyone that disagreed was labled as working for oil companies.
Well going into 2010 and the earth seems to be cooling now.. 2008 is projected to be the coolest year in 15 years.
And that may be revised cooler. Arctic is freezing back, The northern passage looks to have closed up. I think we will find that Glaciers are growing at record pace this winter.
Look for the attention to turn from the north pole to the south pole now.
1
In Al Gores movie he described an Inconvient truth when Science is getting paid to get one answer. And finds another. If they report that their funding drys up. Well now the Inconvient truth is the money is coming from government. Any Scientist that dare speak out loses all funding. That is the inconvient truth of today.
We have not experienced this radical of a drop since the 1980s. I have a nagging worry. There are 6 Billion plus who need to be fed. Our ability to tolerate another 1940 – 1979 type period is questionable. I do not want to contemplate anything worse than that.
Note – of course the drop from the 1997 – 1998 peak was of a greater magnitude. I am specifically referring to a a wave shape that consists of a drop down, from a “noisy” longer term trend. That is what one needs to worry about.
1948 to 1998 are the best years in the history of the planet for practically everybody–except for what has happened since. We are on a Good Times trend. Maybe we’ll wake up one fine day and have an “erikpuura’s Turkey” moment. History is funny that way. But those years cannot be characterized in any way as a Time of Troubles, not when compared with anything else. (The end of nearly all worldwide hunger, anyone?) There are troubles of some sort or other in any 50-year stretch.
It’s easy to fit the present into predictions from the past, if you control the conditions. Give me general predictions and I can probably come up with fulfillments that fit.
I am more interested to know what is happening in the Southern Hemisphere right now. It’s summer down there and are they experiencing cooler than normal temperatures? The down-under folks experienced winter in ’07 the likes of which they had not seen in a hundred years. If their summer is weak, we can fully expect the same for the Northern Hemisphere. The Chinese are worrying about crop failures this year due to the cold, and rumors out of North Korea is that things have gone from worse to intolerable. Pajama Boy is supposedly busy moving assets out of country, looking like he know his gig is about to end. Meanwhile, the Russian weather guys are saying, “Ummmm, guys, we’re heading into a long term cooling trend.” Seems the GW crowd is going to have some explaining to do.
Yes, us Austrians here in the deep-deep south are going through a rough patch- lots of rain, etc. I blame it on some of our previous Prime Ministers, who wanted to align us with Asia so much, they changed the weather! We now have winter at the same time as you do, it seems!
And welcome to the new year of the Rat! you can expect Stock Markets to be easily rat-tled, but you can still make enor-mouse profits!
Sod, perhaps you could explain why if global warming is accepted with the debate over headlines such as “Warmest January on Record” are any more newsworthy than “Dog Bites Man.” Surely we should expect each month on average to be warmer than previous ones.
Imagine yourself in a taxi on a journey in an unfamiliar region. If the driver proudly announces after an hour that “You are now the nearest you have ever been to the destination,” you will not be too impressed. On the other hand if you find out half an hour later that you are now as near to your starting point as you were at the beginning of the journey and that no net progress had been made then you would be well within your rights to ask what was going on.
If a person brings something forward of value (like you did with the max/min issue) I think they should be rewarded with recognition
well, of course i will accept your wish.
if you are interested in other “daily mean” calculations, you should google “Mannheimer Stunden”.
they were introduced by Johann Jakob Hemmer in the late 18th century, when he was trying to build a “global” network of climate stations.
in short, temperature is measured at 7am, 2pm and 9pm with the evening temperature weighted twice in the daily mean. other countries used other times and different weights.
(Germany switched to a daily mean calculated from the temperature at every full hour in 2001)
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tagesmitteltemperatur
i don t know whether climate research today is using a standardized min/max temperature, but with historic data i think we are forced to take what we have got…
REPLY: Thanks for this resource
Sod:
I’ll tell you the difference. Highly accurate satellite data CONFIRMS that Jan 08 is indeed the 2nd coldest January in 15 years. No debate. This same highly accurate satellite data DEBUNKED the notion that Jan 07 was the warmest ever. Check the RSS data. No debate.
The statement is exactly identical to what an alarmist would say. It is straight out of the Book of Gore, chapter 13 verse 1, but with the word “coldest” substituted for “warmest”. And you took the bait hook, line, and sinker, just like I imagined. Outstanding.
What’s good for the goose, is good for the gander.
That is all….
REPLY: NO more comments on title, please. I’ll delete.
[…] those that have been harping about my “2nd coldest in 15 years” headline, it appears that NCDC has that one beat with “the 49th coolest January in 114 […]
“2008 is projected to be the coolest year in 15 years.”
You mean, DANGER! DANGER! 2008 projected to be 20th HOTTEST in the last 100 years!
Do get with the program.
“they were introduced by Johann Jakob Hemmer in the late 18th century, when he was trying to build a “global” network of climate stations.
“in short, temperature is measured at 7am, 2pm and 9pm with the evening temperature weighted twice in the daily mean. ”
I.e., if there was a severe T-Min bias (a la LaDochy), that would probably be magnified.
“(Germany switched to a daily mean calculated from the temperature at every full hour in 2001)”
That sounds a heck of a lot more rational. But why isn’t there a constant, running mean, considering the temp can now be tracked continually and transmitted automatically by the more advanced machines?
Thx for the info.
BTW, heat sink bias nails you at T-Max and esp. at T-Min. That’s how US temperatures are calculated.
Then so what if the CRN biases don’t exist for the other 99% of the time?