Last month I posted the University of Alabama, Huntsville (UAH) Microwave Sounder Unit (MSU) data for January 2008 with a note that it showed a sharp drop from January 2007 data.
The February data from UAH is out. You can see it the raw data yourself here
It shows a slight rebound from the -0.046°C value of January 2008 to 0.016°C for a slight change (∆T) of .062°C upwards.
click for a larger image
It appears the La Niña in the Pacific and the solar minimum are continuing to affect temperatures globally, resulting in this cooler period for the last 13 months in January 2007.
click for a larger image
Below: A plot of sunspots showing our current position in the solar minimum. Note the uncertainty for the two projections of the next cycle 24.
I’ll plot the other metrics (RSS, GISS, HadCRUT) as soon as they are available. I expect the RSS data to be published soon, perhaps in the next day or two.
I played around with anomaly baselines at the NOAA site and for 1981 to 2008 February data got a declining (albeit it small) temperature trend. Supposedly the period we have seen ‘unprecedented ‘warming.
http://climvis.ncdc.noaa.gov/cgi-bin/cag3/hr-display3.pl
Interesting, you have to go back 30 or more years (into the pre-satellite data) to find a significant warming trend.
REPLY: The link doesn’t work for anyone not on your pc
I think Jim may have understated the value of the link he passed above:
http://www.happs.com.au/downloaders/Cloud_temp_tropo.pdf
I’d say it’ll be top ten at year’s end.
The NOAA now has a new animation tool for sea surface temperatures that highlights what is really going on with the La Nina / El Nino.
It is really Trade Wind-driven phenomenon.
This five-month animation can be sped up so that you can see the cooler patches of La Nina water getting blown across the Pacific (I assume the warmer surface water at the equator is then getting replaced by cooler deeper ocean water at the South American coast.)
http://www.osdpd.noaa.gov/PSB/EPS/SST/anom_anim.html
It would be very informative to see a plot of the geomagnetic data with the 2 satellite temperature data along with the CO2 data over the same period of time.
The geomagnetic data from the link below
http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2008/02/solar-geomagnetic-ap.png
Does the geomagnetic spice correspond with the temperature spike in 1999?
REPLY: A worthwhile endeavor. I’ll make a post on it soon.
Uh, make that geomagnetic spike 😉
If it has bottomed out for the year it isn’t closer to zero anomaly than the 2004 low. It is still indicative of a warming trend if it rises rapidly in the coming months. It’s funny, many of you bash the global warming alarmists for jumping to conclusions and yet you make your own conclusions at the second you intercept data. Hence if you are right and they are wrong it still won’t be because you apply stronger more scientifically solid methods, it’ll just be because you chanced to pick the better inference rule to begin with.
IrreducibleParadox
good point, which reflects how polarised the issue has become. I agree (as a non-expert) the anomaly of the last 12 months could be reversed, and still fit with an upward trend. Anthony has been scupulous in pointing this out.
However, you gloss over something when you speak of inference rules ‘you chanced to pick up’. It is my impression that the alarmists by no means ‘chanced’ to pick up the notion that we were doomed to fry unless we trashed industry, motorised travel and incandescent light bulbs. They wanted precisely that, and were glad to find a reason to justify it. This is why their predictions were so extreme.
As to why they should wish for such things, I’ll leave alone here, as this is a science blog, and I doubt Anthony will thank me for slipping in a theory of post-Communist ecological millenarian self-Flagellation… oh damn, I’ve said it now.
Thanks for your prompt reply. The following paper by Georgieva et al compares sunspot number and the ak geomagnetic ratio
and concludes that the latter correlates much better than the former.
http://tinyurl.com/22rtut
However, their data only goes up to yr 2000 and I don’t think that they used satellite data for global temperature. Thus my interest in a continuation of their plot. And you have the requisite data. Thank you.
That’s correlates much better with global temperature.
RSS is updated: ftp://ftp.ssmi.com/msu/monthly_time_series/rss_monthly_msu_amsu_channel_tlt_anomalies_land_and_ocean_v03_1.txt
-.007C. About as expected.
Feb RSS numbers just in:
ftp://ftp.ssmi.com/msu/monthly_time_series/rss_monthly_msu_amsu_channel_tlt_anomalies_land_and_ocean_v03_1.txt
The green side of this debate has often pointed my attention to research-based computer models demonstrating that increased CO2 will continue to cause global warming, in spite of small irradiation temperature changes caused by the sun factored into the equations.
Not so fast. It seems to me that the sun’s many different “rays” it sends , and sometimes shoots our way (those we can see or feel, and those we can’t see or feel – or haven’t discovered yet), would have a variety of effects. To ignore them, discount them, minimize them, or even worse, disregard the important null hypothesis beginning point of view for any theory you explore or adhere to, seems decidedly unscientific whether your science is green or not.
If I were to state a hypothesis for global warming being human caused I would want to disprove that view in order to make my case stronger. I would be forced to consider the sun and its many different cosmic rays as potentially strong disproving variables. There is lots we already know. Some types of rays have larger effects with small changes, others have small effects with larger changes, some have only small effects with small changes, still others have large effects with large changes, and some seem only to entertain us as they pass us by. Some may eat ozone, some may simply heat us up much like the coils on a burner, and some may even cause the ocean to froth and boil. I am willing to bet there are many other sun-related effects we haven’t begun to understand and may not even know about. My point is that if you adhere to one or the other point of view, you MUST consider and explore all of these variables as potential theory busters that could readily disprove your heated arguments.
Let’s say I am a green scientist in search of the Nobel Prize II. In my exploration, statistical analysis, and model building of all variables I would be forced to consider many, maybe even hundreds or thousands of models. For example, what if the sun decided to stop shooting its “rays” as strongly as before and our ozone layer thickened up, causing sun reflection from the outside. What if the ocean was in a more CO2 absorbing phase (IE cool and calm), causing insulation thinning from the inside? What if I caused these two things to come together in my model (which I could calculate as a random occurrence or a long term cycle)? Would I be spending my prize money on long underwear? I have yet to see evidence that this kind of extensive null hypothesis model building has been done.
Here’s what I do. Every time someone shows me their modeled theory, I always ask the following question: “Disprove it!”
As the earth has warmed in the past century and the Earth glaciers of the ice age have retreated, so have the ice caps on Mars also retreated from increased energy from the sun.(unless those pesky Martians have been over using their internal combustion engines again) There just might be a more plausible explanation for the concurrent rise of Earth temperature and small increase of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere. Carbon dioxide may not the cause of global warming but the result of global warming. The greenhouse gas, CO2, in the air is not a new thing. Volcanoes have been releasing it for years. So why hasn’t it build up in the air turning this planet into the desert of Hell? It does not build up in the air because it is soluble in water and rain delivers it to our lakes, rivers and oceans where it forms a weak, very dilute, carbonic acid. (yes, it is more complicated than that, carbon dioxide reacts in more than one way and the carbonic acid that it forms can further react with other elements such as calcium to form the insoluble calcium carbonate.) But let’s keep this discussion simple . There have been many previous times in the earth’s long history where the earth’s temperature rose and at the same time it can be confirmed from old ice cores that the amount of carbon dioxide in the air also rose. As the earth temperature rises and it’s waters warm, the solubility of carbon dioxide in water decreases, so carbon dioxide must be released from water, to where, where else, the atmosphere. The carbon dioxide in the air is in equilibrium with the amount in the water. (I said simple, let’s keep the amount the trees use as a constant) I have compared the loss of carbon dioxide in the Earth’s water from water temperature rise and find it comparable to the amount of gain in the Air. I ask others confirm my calculation.