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
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Ice went out about 3 weeks late up here. This week we have clouds and showers forecast with our third excursion into the 80’s on Sat. Last June was hot and dry, but then our local climate changed back to late 40’s and early 50’s weather (or so I’m led to believe). We had freezes up north 2 or 3 times last week.
Minnesota the way we remember it: 9 months of winter, followed by 3 months of rough sledding.
Not quite 3 weeks Gary. I take it you live somewhere near the Cities. Anyway, here’s a link to ice-out dates this year across MN. Names in green link to historic data.
http://climate.umn.edu/doc/ice_out/ice_out_status_08.htm
I-Falls, the “Icebox of the Nation”.
Jan +2.4
Feb -7.1
Mar -5.8
Apr -3.4
May -7.8
Avg -4.3
MN as I’m remembering it. You bet, aay. From the N. Shore of Lake Superior.
Re: Soot and particulates
It’s puzzled me for a while that particulates seem to cause cooling in India and warming in China.
http://www.amazon.com/Temperature-trends-twentieth-century-India/dp/B000RR7WWU
I think the answer lies in the fact India gets a monsoon but is dry for most of the year and China gets snow.
Anyway, the point is that soot and particulates can warm or cool at any given location depending on other factors. To ascribe a global effect is just wrong, unless you have first determined the local and regional effects. And I am quite sure no one has done this.
Philip_B
It *is* a complex mess, but generally the mid-tropospheric brown clouds are causing heating.
http://www.scientificblogging.com/blog/258
Skeptic’s theory: Rising temps cause increased CO2.
Falling temps should decrease CO2.
What is the lag time?
Does the CO2 curve show any leveling off?
I’d love to hear the explanations from Hansen, Gore, et.al., if CO2 starts decreasing.
david (16:19:51) :
“The La Nina before this was 0.1 to 0.2C cooler.”
No flame, just a question: Which La Nina was that?
http://www.cdc.noaa.gov/people/klaus.wolter/MEI/
Global cooling is still climate change- that is the buzzphrase used by our environmentalists. So either way you cannot make an argument. It looks people look for perfection from nature, and hell I know that nature disappoints.
Carbon credits and footprints are going to rob our country of growth and more importantly take our effort away from reducing real pollutants like fertilizers, all the chemicals used in manufacturing, mercury from coal fired plants and CFL bulbs alike, NOX and methane.
The 1988 La Nina when temperatures dipped below -0.3 and were below -0.2 for a number of months – ie 0.1 to 0.2C cooler than now. Unfortunately, that event coincided with a peak in sunspot numbers and the solar constant so a direct comparison with the present underestimates the background global warming ie the real difference is probably closer to 0.3C (or even more).
Here’s what the sunspot number looked like during the 1988/89 event – http://www.brighton73.freeserve.co.uk/gw/solar/satallite_vs_spots.gif
Another SWAG…
“Dateline June 15, 2008…
Today Dr. James Hansen, Director of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies at NASA, interrupted President Bush’s address to the Nation to report that global temperatures recorded in May continue to increase in accordance with the computer models used to demonstrate the impacts of man made global warming.
Dr. Hansen also alluded to the current administration’s attempts to suppress the news of man made global warming saying, “Other metrics reportedly “measuring” global temperatures have been influenced by these deniers.” He also re-iterated his determination to not allow these politicians to repress the truth about man made global warming.
In other news, the special Papal mass celebrating world peace day will be pre-empted by a special report detailing how President Bush has used his political influence to personally repress Dr. James Hansen of the GISS at NASA.
NBC has reported that their coverage of the 2008 Olympics in Beijing will include daily updates on the impacts of man made global warming by the Director of the Goddard Institute of Space Studies Dr. James Hansen.
Today congress decided to forego the inconvenience and cost of a presidential election and use the Government Computation Method developed by NASA to forecast election returns. …”
David,
Why not just make it 0.5?
We’ll see where we end up, but your original 0.1-0.2 is only 0.5-1 deg century. That’s about the long term trend since the 19th century, which indicates little acceleration and does not seem to be “catastrophic” to me. To get to 2 deg/century, you’d have to find a way to bump it up to 0.4, so I figure the 0.5 should give you a cushion.
[…] We’ve put our plans for opening that chain of surf shops in northwestern Iowa on permanent hia… […]
Too funny Jeff.
I read on the net that Gore and Hansen are on suicide watch.
John why would you define a trend in such a way? You have a full record back to 1979 and this shows a trend of +0.13C/decade (about 0.05C/decade slower than at the surface). That trend is double the average over the last century as a whole.
Anything else is cherry picking.. period.
David,
Your the one that was pickin’ La Nina’s. Weren’t you the one that wanted to focus on 1988? Why start in 1979? You mentioned the surface record, tell me what the trend is since 1950. How about since 1925? 1900? Pick a year, any year. Just make sure you don’t start at the end of the last cool phase of the PDO.
Terry S (10:33:30) :
“This is part of the statement released by NOAA
In light of the expected long interval until the onset of Cycle 24, the Prediction Panel has been unable to resolve a sufficient number of questions to reach a single, consensus prediction for the amplitude of the cycle.”
Please provide links, this came from http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/SolarCycle/SC24/Statement_01.html and was release in March 2007. I was under the impression that they were going to issue an update in 2008, but that apparently hasn’t happened. Thing have changed so much over the last year that there isn’t much to be gained from year-old data.
The professor: “Doesn’t the fact that you are citing solar cycles suggest that AGW is not the catastrophe that some are positing?”
Eh, no. Solar cycles have a short-term impact on climate no matter how hot the planet is. Even if the planet would get so hot that the polar caps melted, global temperatures at solar minima would still be colder than at solar maxima.
The point is that when the temperature rises, skeptics come with all sorta of arguments of why it’s not relevant. One being: “It’s just the solar cycle”. But ever time it drops, then that is somehow a real change showing that global warming isn’t happening. That sort of argumentation is pseudo-science best contained in sunday-school.
“There seems to be little evidence that human beings are contributing much — if at all — to global temperature variations.”
First of all, if humans are contributing to it or not is really besides the point. It’s a problem no matter what. Secondly, the evidence is overwhelming, if you just dare look at it.
Tom: “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?”
But it HAS risen. Or are you taking a relative fall as proof that there is no absolute rise? With that logic, every winter is proof Al Gore is wrong, because temperature falls compared to the summer. Climate doesn’t quote work like that. 🙂
Walter Dnes: “And I can pull up solar cycle predictions to argue the other way.”
Please, go ahead. The rest of us can talk about something that is relevant for the topic.
Terry S: “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.”
No, what I’m saying is that the warming will hopefully not be as problematic during cycle 25 as it otherwise would have been.
“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.”
How much do you want to bet?
“Its good to see that we are changing some minds.”
No, you are not. You are just clasping at pseudo-scientific straws in an attempt to to take the issue seriously.
Mike K
Welcome to the world of heretics. I too was in the AGW camp. What got me thinking was the deliberate skewing of the geological record that became known as the “Hockey Stick”. From there I just stopped trusting anything on its face and read the papers. Its been tough as my training is all in earth and water – not air, but it has continues to reinforce my decision, even if many of my colleagues vociferously disagree (and many do).
In order to fit the definition of ‘global warming’…mustn’t global temperatures increase consistantly forever and ever from here to infinity?
As a so called ‘denier’, I don’t claim future cooling or warming. I could care less about prognostication…it seems rather pointless. This is why, as a meteorology graduate, I giggle at climate models.
Our ego’s help in rationalizing that which we exert no control (the earth, the universe), but they grant us hubris in conculsions.
And since it’s ‘all about the data’…what has happened so far is most important. Trends are nice, too. But since 1998…where is the ‘global warming’ trend?
Even with warming…it would be much more beneficial than enormous cooling. Why? Plants would thrive, growing seasons extended, ocean travel widened through the Arctic. Definitely not all bad! Yes, sea level rise wouldn’t be all that nice…polar bears would have to move south or face suicide. But this is all hypothetical!
Even some of my ex professors whom get massive funding for claiming future warming…for their climate ‘ego-driven’ models….cannot see into the foggy future.
We must let go of the need for absolute certainty and absolute ego fulfilment. We must learn to accept things for how they will naturally swing…it’s how the Earth works. And how it is affected by the Sun, and how things other than humans influence it.
May 2008 seems to continue a downward trend. Wouldn’t it be nice if it continued? Our brains are overactive with fantasy, aren’t they! Too disapprove of IPCC/NASA/NDCP predictions? To see if another Maunder minimum happens? To see ski season extended for 9 months out of the year in the Northern Rockies? To see world wide disaster and famine because of cold global temperatures as a backlash at human ‘hubris’?! Heh. May be not. May be so. Or may be the opposite? Time will tell…but even if I could…I wouldn’t want to look into a crystal ball showing the future.
It is more interesting to let it happen.
As a AGW denier…this is what I believe.
Ken Westerman
Meteorology B.S. University of Utah 2007
Lennart Regebro (22:26:49) :
“First of all, if humans are contributing to it or not is really besides the point. It’s a problem no matter what. Secondly, the evidence is overwhelming, if you just dare look at it.”
I disagree. A mild warming of the lower temperatures in the northern hemisphere of a degree or two ( which is where the warming comes from) will be beneficial to agriculture and even by IPCC numbers will not raise sea levels more than 50cm. Humanity is adapting daily and weakly to much larger variations. So a mild warming is not a problem.
The evidence is not overwhelming that the warming is due to anthropogenic CO2. All non computer model calculations give slight, half a degree or so for doubling, warming. The so called by you “overwhelming” evidence comes from the IPCC computer models that are falsified at the moment, except the update by keelyside et all that is fitting the current temperature trends and predicts a stasis until 2015 or so. I am sure if they fit the tropical tropospheric temperature trends the warming will become even more gradual.
All we need is 100 years grace to have lots of energy from fusion reactors . Fusion reactors pollute minimally with radiation, do not contribute to bomb making ,and have no CO2. This will provide the definitive experiment of how much anthropogenic CO2 affects climate because once fusion reactors get on the way anthropogenic CO2 will become teensy.
It is good we have a hiatus now so the planet can be saved by the irresponsible apprentice magician suggestions of the warmers, that will destroy economies and kill millions all for nothing, in my opinion, because I have convinced my self by studying the problem that the contributions of anthropogenic CO2 is minor. Millions are on the bring of starvation even now because of the hasty push towards turning corn from food to fuel.
Secondly, the evidence is overwhelming, if you just dare look at it.
I have looked at it, in considerably more detail than most. I have yet to see any persuasive evidence that CO2 is responsible for significant warming in the last 100 years. This is despite billions of dollars being spent trying to find such evidence.
I understand science and how repeatable data that can only be explained by a certain theory is persuasive evidence that the theory is correct.
I too believed AGW was real, just exaggerated for political and other purposes. Having looked the evidence, I now think now think any CO2 greenhouse effect (from the increases over the last 50 to 100 years) is so small that we can’t detect it. That is why there is no persuasive evidence.
When you confront the AGWers with the shakiness of their evidence, invariably they retreat to ‘but its the only way we can explain the warming that has occurred.’
Which is why the discussions come down to, is the warming real and can the warming be explained by other causes. Because if CO2 isn’t causing significant or even measurable warming, then either the warming isn’t real or it has some other cause (or causes).
>David,
>
>Your the one that was pickin’ La Nina’s. Weren’t you the one that wanted to >focus on 1988?….
John nothing like throwing up smoke to cover your tracks.
I’ve debated enough sceptics to know that to continue this discussion is a waste of time . Just remember the MSU trend is 0.13C/decade – that’s double the rate of the 20th century, and directly contradicts you world view.
BTW is this you by any chance (http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2007/05/bolt_pranked.php)?
Lennart,
relevant to the topic is that AGW “THEORY” requires a couple of specific things to happen. These are things the MODELS PREDICT. In other words, for their physics to be correct, and the models relevant, these things MUST happen.
One is that the upper troposphere in the tropics is supposed to warm faster than surface temp. It is barely warming, no where near surface rate.
http://www.remss.com/msu/msu_data_description.html
Another part of the theory is that the ocean is supposed to be storing heat that will be the buffer to keep things warm during solar minima and other inconvenient periods. The Argo project data found no extra heat down to 2000 meters. In fact, it recorded a very minor COOLING!!
Until recently they claimed both Arctic and Antarctic would warm and start melting. While the Arctic has melted very nicely for various reasons the Antarctic has been very stable and has above average sea ice and Ice Pack!!
As has been mentioned previously, the only consistent warming has been in the Northern Hemisphere where most of the temperature record has been contaminated by over reliance on stations in UHI’s and questionable adjustments..
So, when scientists find that the data disagrees with the theory they typically adjust, change, or throw out the theory. When AGW types find data disagrees with the theory, they adjust, change, or throw out the data.
Let me put this another way. For AGW to be happening, CO2, and other so-called Greenhouse Gases must be causing EXTRA heat to be retained in the earth environment. That means that if all the heat radiates and can’t be found there is no DANGEROUS AGW. Since 2003, during the highest temps on modern record, the oceans did NOT warm. Now that the air is cooling off AND the oceans are not warming, where is the extra heat that proves the AGW theory?? There is some data from below 2000 meters and it does not show any extra heat either.
Here is a cool tool that lets you drill down through the ocean depths to see the temps. It is at annual, but, you can look through it month by month also with the arrow controls at the top:
http://www.nodc.noaa.gov/cgi-bin/OC5/WOA05F/woa05f.pl
Here is a site that has extensive links to published papers on paleo data showing the Medieval Warming Period was warmer than now AND global.
http://www.co2science.org/data/mwp/mwpp.php
Their home page has links to effects of elevated CO2 on plant life also.
Re Lennart,
“First of all, if humans are contributing to it or not is really besides the point. It’s a problem no matter what. Secondly, the evidence is overwhelming, if you just dare look at it.”—what??? go look at the 700Kyr ice core record. The very small temperature rise is a tiny tiny blip on the record.
Second, the beginning of 2008 is about “average” global temps. Look at the world food crisis, the failures to get crop planted and growing all across the US. Please give me back 1998.
Please tell me what have been the consequences of the very recent small warming?
[…] The Earth got colder in May. That’s why it’s called climate change now, kids. All this cold weather […]
Deadwood
Totally agree with you, the information we’re given via the media is predominantly sensationalist and frankly innacurate and misrepresented. I followed the links here and came to the conclusion that CO2 probably has a much smaller effect than suggested by official bodies and that the sun and the ocen currents a much greater effect. The most damaging effect of the global wrming hysteria has been the reckless and disastrous growth of biofuel. This has resulted in food riots as food prices soar and ultimately will lead to mass starvation if the current warm period ends, which is a strong possibility. The effects on biodiversity are also huge.
|I’m waiting for some official body to say that over-fishing is now contributing to the ‘pause’ in global warming as there are massive algal blooms occuring more frequently (more carbon in algae, less in the atmosphere)…just my SWAG!!