Confirming what many of us have already noted from the anecdotal evidence coming in of a much cooler than normal May, such as late spring snows as far south as Arizona, extended skiing in Colorado, and delays in snow cover melting, (here and here), the University of Alabama, Huntsville (UAH) published their satellite derived Advanced Microwave Sounder Unit data set of the Lower Troposphere for May 2008.
It is significantly colder globally, colder even than the significant drop to -0.046°C seen in January 2008.
The global ∆T from April to May 2008 was -.195°C
UAH
2008 1 -0.046
2008 2 0.020
2008 3 0.094
2008 4 0.015
2008 5 -0.180
Compared to the May 2007 value of 0.199°C we find a 12 month ∆T is -.379°C.
But even more impressive is the change since the last big peak in global temperature in January 2007 at 0.594°C, giving a 16 month ∆T of -0.774°C which is equal in magnitude to the generally agreed upon “global warming signal” of the last 100 years.
Click for a larger image
Reference: UAH lower troposphere data
I’m betting that RSS (expected soon) will also be below the zero anomaly line, since it tends to agree well with UAH. HadCRUT will likely show a significant drop, I’m going to make a SWAG and say it will end up around 0.05 to -0.15°C. GISS; I’m not going to try a SWAG, as it could be anything. Of course anomalies can change to positive on the next El Nino, but this one seems to be deepening.
Update 06/05/08: Per MattN’s suggestion, changed link above for snow melt to news stories from previous link to National Snow and Ice Center
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
For your information, a NASA sponsored workshop on “Solar variability, Earth’s Climate and the Space Environment” is being held right (1-6 June) now at Montana State University. For the program: http://solar.physics.montana.edu/SVECSE2008/science_program.html
Pierre,
The election dynamic in the US will be very interesting. The media here also seems to regard Obama with a messianic reverential awe, but I think they may end up overdoing it. Obama has a base of emotional, hard core followers who seem to be content that he’s going to ‘change things’ without asking what exactly he intends to change and how. Obama preaching ‘change’, ‘make history’, ‘this is way cool’ seems to be enough for them. If you attempt to engage any of them in a reasonable discussion of his experience, plans, or what exactly he intends to change you’re met with anger, emotional outbursts about that he can ‘bring us together’. Not much to hang your hat on, really.
I think he’s a fine person, articulate, but woefully inexperienced and almost naive in some of his views, such as ascribing the recent increase in gas prices to ‘Big Oil jacking up the price’. I’m afraid he has McGovern views and Carter’s naive approach. I don’t think he has the experience in running a government that we need.
That being said, he may have trouble winning in some States he needs to get elected. If the Democrat primary delegates were awarded in the same manner as the US Electoral College the Democrat Nominee would have been decided months ago, and it would have been Hillary Clinton by a large margin. Barak did not win the popular vote in a single large State and I think he faces a real challenge winning in Fl, Penn, Ohio, States he needs to win the election.
Not one to argue politics too much, but as an Illinois native I don’t see Obama winning. Key states like Florida and West Virginia don’t seem to like him.
In Peoria, IL, May 2008 was a whopping 8.34 F (4.63 C) colder than May 2007. The soil is still too cold and damp to sow Green Beans.
Well, Pierre, I don’t share the depth of your pessimism. I think McCain has a shot at it, and that Obama’s negatives are as serious, or worse, than McCain’s. But unlike whether or not we’re on the cusp of a Dalton Minimum, we’ll know whether you are right about Obama soon enough.
Obama. Heh. Half of HIllary supporters said they’d vote for McCain if Obama was nominee. That’s a quarter of Dem voters. Another chunk may simply stay home or write in Nadir (sic).
It makes me laugh to see all these *huge* “Obama/Hope” posters around town here in Austin. Texas hasn’t voted for a Dem for the presidency since LBJ in ’64. McCain would have to be caught in bed with a dead girl or a live boy for Obama to win Texas. Make me think Dems don’t understand state-by-state winner-takes-all, they carry on as though they live in a pure democracy.
Chris:
Aerosols have only been reduced in N. America & Europe.
see my blog: http://www.scientificblogging.com/blog/258
Lennart
Why does it matter if you are comparing temperatures at different parts of the solar cycle? Warmists would have you believe that the sun has nothing to do with climate change and, when it does, it is only Total Solar Irradiance that matters not sun spots!
And what’s your point? Continue polluting, business-as-usual? We need to move away from oil and coal, period. It harms the environment, causes particulate pollution, completely ruins ecosystems, causes smog, etc.
You are right, but there are a few points you’ve missed. Firstly, in the interests of public trust in the scientific process (which underpins our technological progress), we should not be engaging in the politicisation, doctoring or “spinning” of results to suit some particular political ideology (in this case, Environmentalism – which, I might add, is anti-technocracy). What the Warmists (including Gore) are doing is setting themselves up for the inevitable falsification of an entire body of work. Next time the scientists might be right, but will the media or the public take them seriously? The validity of the entire scientific process is under threat. It’s an important question.
Secondly, although we should be reducing our consumption of oil (primarily because we buy a lot of it from distasteful regimes), there is no need for us to hit economic reverse gear. A possible consequence of doing so would of course be less likelihood of us being able to develop technological solutions that would mitigate or reverse any negative impact we are having on the environment.
Environmentalism doesn’t need straw men to make its point in our increasingly well educated and sophisticated societies. People can see the merits of birds and trees. The messengers don’t need to preach Catastrophism in order to make an impact.
I might add of course that there are many more important problems Humanity needs to solve that are getting far less attention and funding due to the current Warmist alarmism.
Terry S + Bill (about the cycle predictions): And your point is?
Jared: “keep in mind that the May 2008 12 month mean does not reflect the low point of this cycle yet”
I didn’t look at the lowest temperature of these cycles, but at the temperatures at the solar cycle minimum. Which we for all intents and purposes are at now. New new cycle may not have started, but solar activity is about as low as it can be expected to go.
You are all, how you say, “clasping at straws”, to try to pretend that global warming isn’t happening. It’s kinda silly, it’s obviously happening. How much and how serious can be debated, but claiming that it isn’t happening requires serious amounts of fact-ignoring. 🙂
Lennart,
Doesn’t the fact that you are citing solar cycles suggest that AGW is not the catastrophe that some are positing? There seems to be little evidence that human beings are contributing much — if at all — to global temperature variations. Most likely, global temperature variations are caused by solar cycles.
That is not to suggest that we do nothing about reducing dependence on fossil fuels, pollution, etc., but rather we need to do so in a rational, non-alarmist (!) way.
What all this means to me is that weather variations are normal and will not respond to charts, graphs and SWAGs. But it also suggests rather strongly that “as CO2 rises, temperature rises” is false. Acording to algorean science, the continuing rise in CO2 should continue to raise Earth’s temperature accordingly. Since it has not it looks like Big Al is wrong again. So what else is new?
So, global warmer believer, where are my orange groves in north Florida? There were orange groves here 100 years ago. Now it’s too cold for them.
Bill >> “I don’t see any evidence for your claim the Cycle 24 will ‘probably’ be strong.”
Lennart > No, but this is what NASA and other solar scientists claim. But maybe their science is “alarmist” too?
Lennart, you obviously have more faith in “the rocket scientists” at NASA than I do. I suggest you read http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2006/10mar_stormwarning.htm dated March 10, 2006:
=============begin=quote=============
This week researchers announced that a storm is coming–the most intense solar maximum in fifty years. The prediction comes from a team led by Mausumi Dikpati of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). “The next sunspot cycle will be 30% to 50% stronger than the previous one,” she says. If correct, the years ahead could produce a burst of solar activity second only to the historic Solar Max of 1958.
==============end=quote=============
but wait… there’s more
=============begin=quote=============
Like most experts in the field, Hathaway has confidence in the conveyor belt model and agrees with Dikpati that the next solar maximum should be a doozy. But he disagrees with one point. Dikpati’s forecast puts Solar Max at 2012. Hathaway believes it will arrive sooner, in 2010 or 2011.
“History shows that big sunspot cycles ‘ramp up’ faster than small ones,” he says. “I expect to see the first sunspots of the next cycle appear in late 2006 or 2007—and Solar Max to be underway by 2010 or 2011.”
==============end=quote=============
Guess what… we’re approaching mid-2008 and still virtually zilch on the cycle 24 front. Even assuming a short (9 year) solar cycle 24, that would be 4.5 years to solar max. Assuming that cycle 24 seriously kicked in today, that would put solar max at the end of 2012, or early 2013. If they got that prediction wrong, what gives you faith that NASA will get it right this time?
And I can pull up solar cycle predictions to argue the other way. See http://wattsupwiththat.wordpress.com/2008/06/02/livingston-and-penn-paper-sunspots-may-vanish-by-2015/ which discusses an unpublished paper that predicts the total demise of sunspots by 2015.
While it’s true that a drop of 0.774C in 16 months is dramatic (-0.0484C/mo), there have been comparable/larger drops before. Here are the largest per-month lower troposphere monthly temperature anomaly drops based on at least a 16-month time period:
-0.0556C/mo change from 2/1998 to 6/1999
-0.0519C/mo change from 4/1998 to 8/1999
-0.0484C/mo change from 1/2007 to 5/2008
-0.0454C/mo change from 4/1998 to 1/2000
-0.0452C/mo change from 2/1998 to 8/1999
-0.0446C/mo change from 2/1998 to 7/1999
-0.0423C/mo change from 1/1998 to 6/1999
-0.0420C/mo change from 5/1983 to 9/1984
-0.0415C/mo change from 5/1998 to 1/2000
-0.0410C/mo change from 8/1998 to 1/2000
Granted, most of them start during the great El Nino of 1998, but 1983-4 also shows up. I think we need a few more months’ data to rule out that it’s not just starting at a major positive fluctuation and ending at a major negative one.
If you don’t like fossil fuels, “don’t use them”. I never remember being forced to use any energy source. If you believe that your computer is destroying this planet, then you have the moral obligation to turn it off, and quit using it. This has become more about regulating someone elses access to energy at market prices, than it is about the health of the planet.
I for one, don’t believe any of that AGW crap, and recognize it as a “power-grab” complete with straw man bad-guy, that needs to be defeated. The slogan for AGW should be: “Just give me a global quasi-government panel of regulators, and I will save you from the phantom menace”.
I also believe the best judge of power sources, is the well-informed consumer. If there are alternative sources that have a superior cost-benefit to the end-user, those sources will prevail. If you don’t like any of the sources, boycott the utilities and do it yourself, or do without.
As far as Obama for Prez., he is an attractive candidate, weighed down by the Dumbocratic legacy. The Dems are 2 for the last 7 elections, and those 2 that they won, were both assisted by Ross Parrot, dividing the non-urban voting block. The media will report it as a slam-dunk win, right up until he loses.
The low tropic temperatures can easily be explained by the persistant La Nina and as the Pacific covers half the globe this is obviosly going to have a bearing on global mean temperatures. The Atlantic in comparison looks very different http://www.osdpd.noaa.gov/PSB/EPS/SST/data/anomnight.6.2.2008.gif.
Also noteworthy is the Cold anomoly over a large part the USA and Southern Canada and the warm anomoly over Eurasia http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/research/hadleycentre/obsdata/HadCRUT3.html. If there are more temperature recording stations in the USA than anywhere else is it possible that there is a bias in this respect. When the anomolies reverse (which they will) will there then be a bias the other way which, when coupled with an El Nino, would falsely show a huge temperature rise. Because sea temperatures are a more reliable indicator of global temperature changes I use them but I would love to know if there is a bias on Land temperature measurements because of differing densities.
For the record I have previously been a staunch advovate of AGW, I have put a few posts on his excellent blog supporting AGW, but after reading links from you guys, I am definately swinging the other way. The more I learn the more questions I have!
No need to SWAG GISS; Hansen’ll do that for you again and again and again until the data matches his models. From the way they keep tweaking the historical record, it looks like he’s got his folks very well trained.
Leebert,
Would it be wrong to say that soot, despite its capacity for dimming, contributes to warming due to ground cover, whereas sulfates contribute to cooling due to its dimming capacity, particularly at higher altitudes.? If true, the combination of US and Europe reducing sulfate emissions and China contributing soot (but not particularly sulfates by using low sulfur coal) could cause the 90’s warming trend.
When I suggested over at RC that climate models ought to show sensitivity to changes in aerosol assumptions (i.e., high sulfate, low sulfate, high soot, low soot, etc.), I could never get a straight answer from them. Of course, to do so would expose the models as being highly sensitive to the various net forcings that are conjured up to predict a sensible temperature trend for the last 50 years. In other words, their forcings are not independent of one another. If one is out of whack, the other forcings have to be adjusted to compensate. Again, the modelers could make the forcings independent of one another, but if they did, they would have temperature trends pointing in all directions. As long as global temperatures are going up, it’s easy for them to claim that factors other than CO2 don’t matter much. But, once you have oscillating temps, like the 1940-1970 cooling trend and possibly the 2002-onwards trend, it’s going to get harder for them to justify their rigged forcings.
Instead of implementing cap and trade, how much cheaper would it be to install particulate collection devices on all of China’s power plants? Probably 100 times cheaper!
[…] out the chart at Watts Up With That? You tell me if you see a catastrophic warming trend evident over the last 30 […]
Lennart,
You say:
My point is in response to what you said in an earlier post about a strong solar cycle 24, which was:
The press release I quoted was released by NOAA, but the panel it talks about was comprised of scientists from NOAA, NASA, and ISES and it refutes your claim that NASA and other scientists are predicting a strong cycle 24.
You also say:
I think you need to read this and other threads more carefully. You’ll find that most posts that you would ascribe to “deniers” don’t deny that warming has happened. What I and many others believe is that the science that claims CO2 is the major cause is far from settled and that there are other factors playing a far greater role in climate change.
You are obviously an AGW proponent and yet you are citing the strength/weakness of the solar cycle as having at least as big an effect as CO2 on the climate. This must be so since you say
The clear implication from what you say is that the current weakness in the solar cycle is enough to mask any effect of increasing CO2 and in order to do that its impact must be at least the same as CO2.
I’d be willing to bet that as little as 6 months ago you would have claimed that the solar cycle had no effect whatsoever on climate. Its good to see that we are changing some minds.
When I was in the Army, we made WAGs = Wild Ass Guesses.
If we really knew what we were doing, we made SWAGs = Sophisticated Wild Ass Guesses. Then I went to grad school.
It’s just a tad unscientific to pretend that a decline in temperature from the peak of warming during an El Nino to the peak of cooling during a La Nina has any meaning for global warming. The current temperatures should be compared to the temperatures post La Nina events in the past. May is no different to the temperatures seen during the 1998-2000 La Nina event. The La Nina before this was 0.1 to 0.2C cooler.
BTW I’m tipping another upwards revision in the MSU data soon…. just a hunch.
Now I prepare for the flames…
Chris:
There’s a great deal of confusion over how aerosols behave depending upon latitude, type, mix, altitude, etc.
In the Indian Ocean and around the entire Pacific basin, including in the American Pacific NW in springtime, soot & sulfates heat the middle troposphere more than they dim the surface (cooling it).
That’s b/c it’s a big blank spot, and all they really should admit is that they don’t know.
Indeed. Even Ramanathan and Carmichael have conceded that since the data for aerosols are lacking from the 1970’s, it is only an assumption that aerosols had a net cooling effect. Again, it may have varied by type, color, spin, strangeness, charm, who knows?
So in the case of criticisms of the skeptic “Hoax” movie (sorry I forget its name) when it covers aerosols … those criticisms are just as speculative as any skeptic factoids pulled out of the air. Ramanathan himself has conceded it could go either way.
That’s the whole gig.
Let’s just say if the odds are low that society can quick mitigate CO2 emissions within a time window against whatever risk is posed from “climate change,” then not only is soot abatement cheaper (and doable), but to ignore it and go about screaming only about CO2 is grossly inconsistent. The activists are acting like they can just snap their Luddite fingers & make it so.
Frankly I think the activists would rather keep the polar bears as CO2 poster children than admit that soot even exists. If they believe that CO2 is a big threat, and they know the data on soot (which EDF does, I know that from reading their blog), and they then avoid mention of soot for fear of diluting the CO2 message and just hope that soot mitigation will follow along, they would then be intentionally playing a game of brinksmanship.
IMO either that belies a willingness to use the bears as game pieces, or it’s really not a crisis. Another possibility is that they’re afraid that aerosols, once abated, will reveal a far softer CO2 warming signal.
Either way soot is the carbon that shall not be named.
Since China’s the biggest emitter of soot & aerosols right now, and the Asian Brown Cloud is what led to Ramanathan’s discovery, then once again, we’re stuck on a political dilemma. This one’s easier to solve, though, you’re right. But if CO2’s not the threat and soot turns out to be the pernicious dark horse that falsely implicated CO2 more than its due, then they won’t have a way to foist their last great effort to bring globo-soc onto the world & the USA down from hegemon (like we’d be better off with a “sinohegemon” trading card instead).
So again, soot is the carbon that shall not be named.
Also, Philip B., if you look at the data, there seems to be no such thing as a lag between tropical warming and NH warming.
Francois, I believe you, but I’d be interested in a link.
Poleward transport of heat from the tropics is fundamental to pretty much everything we (think we) know about the climate. If the data doesn’t show this, then either the data is flawed (it is not a good measure of heat content) or we have to junk most of our theories about the climate.
I think the former and essentially agree with Pielke that measuring temps 5 feet above the ground is a poor way of determining if the Earth’s climate is warming or not.
Gotta admit, measurements of ocean temperature or energy should yield a better quality than surface, especially land based measurements.
A, it represents the most surface area
B, it is a more homogeneous fluid
C, it is much less suceptable to human influence