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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Lennart, I would say based on your responses you have a lot of reading to do. I would also say any further responses without adding clear data or direct applicable links to dispute posts by others will cause you to be labeled a troll.
GISS is so hard to guess because it has so very little contact with reality.
Ever heard the axiom “Those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it.”?
By focusing only the last 30 years you’re ignoring all the prior precedents, and when viewing historical information we see that nothing happening now is unprecedented. We know sea levels were higher during the Roman Warm Period, ask some ancient historians. We know most glacial retreat occurred before 1950, ask some glaciologists. There were global warming scares in the 20s and 30s, hell, even in the late 1800s. We’ve learned nothing.
FYI, I didn’t say the last 30 years didn’t count. I said you can’t focus solely on that.
No, you see, even if the temperature increase isn’t primarily caused by humans, that doesn’t suddenly make greenhouse gases non-greenhouse gases. And it doens’t make the temperature increase benign. And it doesn’t make adaptation any easier or any better. An increase in temperature i an increase in temperature, no matter what caused it.
My my, Len, you do like to prattle on about nothing whatsoever, exposing your complete ignorance, in the true style of Bimbolopithicus Climatensis. The issue is with C02, whose warming effect is relatively small, and decreases further as C02 levels increase. Further, man’s contribution of C02 is only about 3%, making his warming contribution via the burning of fossil fuels negligible. There is, in fact, absolutely nothing man can do about climate change except to adapt, and if you think adapting to warming is hard, try adapting to cooling. It is idiotic to think that a cooling climate, which is almost a certainty at this point is preferable to a warming one.
>Just to interrupt the regularly-scheduled flames, we’re supposed to have snow in the mountains today in Colorado. I remember this happening in late sping when I was a kid in the 50’s, not so much recently.
In OZ our ski season starts this coming weekend. There is not a flake of snow anywhere with temperatures approaching 10C. We have just had the driest May on record and most of southern OZ hasn’t had a wet autumn for 19 years…. in part because of annular mode changes.
Of course this doesn’t prove global warming.
Wahhhh, I want my global warming!
Seriously folks, I’m freezing my butt off up here (in New England) I want it to be warm!
As you can see, the difference between May of this year and other cool May’s is NH anomalies. May of this year had very low anomalies for Tropics and SH, but slightly warmer for NH (when compared to the cooler May’s). This is where aerosols fit in. 85% of all aerosols are in the NH. Lower sulfate emissions in NA/Europe and higher soot emissions in China are the reason why NH anomalies are consistently higher now – not CO2.
Chris, I’m guessing you haven’t got any this published…
Would love you to explain why the surface in the tropics are warming fast as is the SH with the exception of the southern Ocean and the Antarctic (a hint is that the UAH product is problematic, and as recently shown in Nature it doesn’t match basic dynamical constraints – ie the laws of physics). The UAH product over the Antarctic is a pure extrapolation (so I wouldn’t get too excited about the SH cooling) – the radiosonde data suggests massive warming in recent decades for much of the year.
Just to remind everyone, the UAH product shows a warming of 0.13C/decade.
Lets revisit this in a year when nature reverts back to normal – ie the La Nina cooling ceases and the solar minimum has passed.
I’m tipping UAH will come in at +0.35C in May 2009…
David, it depends on how you define the starting and ending points:
http://rankexploits.com/musings/2008/no-statistically-significant-warming-since-2000/
Certainly since 2002 there has been a clear decline in the Earth’s temps even before the recent El Nino
Re: Mike K
“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”
1. The La Nina has been fading rather rapidly the past 3 months. In fact, the waters of the tropical Pacific were mostly neutral in May. Yet, the tropical temperatures continue to drop. Also, you will see they did not get this cold in the last La Nina 1999-2000, which was stronger than this one.
2. I don’t think greater number of recording stations in the U.S. causes a recording bias. Look at previous months of global temps, and they often do not match up with the U.S. anomalies well. For example, March was a pretty cold month in the U.S., yet global anomalies shot up a bit.
In addition, this article is about satellite temperatures in the lower atmosphere, not surface stations anyway.
re: David
All of the temperature metrics show the recent cooling to some degree or another, not just UAH. And GISS is the only metric that shows warming in the past 10 years.
Also, if you are saying all of the recent cooling is due to ENSO, consider this…
2002-07 featured 3 El Ninos and no La Ninas. Also, if AGW is ongoing, how is this most recent Nina (not as strong as the previous one in 1999-2000) dropping global temps just as low (if not lower) as that one? Shouldn’t the effect be less, since ENSO just “masks” AGW?
Lennart:
Lennart, you’re probably not aware but the “father of global warming,” James Hansen himself USES the paleo interglacial record to advance his claims of dangerous AGW. Hansen said he has stopped citing climate models in his warmings about AGW and relies almost exclusively on the paleo record to substantiate his claims.
The problems with this are many, not least of which is the fact that CO2 levels lag behind temperature increases, that the warmer interglacials became more humid as the biggest GHG, WATER VAPOR, was unleashed into the environment, that the oceans released CO2 from both desorption and the lower biogenic reuptake from warmer seas.
Every ice ages during the Eocene stopped before CO2 levels increased. The reason for this is the Earth’s orbit ( see Milankovitch Cycles )
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7e/Milankovitch_Variations.png
CO2 levels always lagged behind the onset of interglacials. Even Real Climate concedes this: “…All that the lag shows is that CO2 did not cause the first 800 years of warming, out of the 5000 year trend. The other 4200 years of warming could in fact have been caused by CO2, as far as we can tell from this ice core data.”
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2004/12/co2-in-ice-cores/
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/klim_img/epica5.gif
We are not being given a straight story by the environmental activists, they are bent upon galvanizing a herd of people into a huge gov’t controlled society that redistributes wealth. That’s not environmentalism, that’s socialism.
I don’t believe one should use the UAH 0.13C per decade trend line. It should be discarded.
The May 2008 anomaly 0f -0.18C is lower the December 1978 anomaly when the satellite measurements began.
In essence, the Excel-generated regression line producing a 0.13C trend is just an artefact. Data points that are shaped like a half circle will also produce a positive trend line when one should just say “the trend is a half circle. It went up, now it has come down.”
Of course, some of the recent decline is likely La Nina produced and, thus, a temporary variation in the general trend. But we are nearing 30 years of NO net change in temperatures at all which is not a trend at all in my mind.
It has been much too cold for my taste…we have not had Spring, and yet the calendar says it will soon be Summer.
Global cooling? We cannot make too many conclusions from one cold May. I don’t think this signifies a trend in our global climate, other than the one involving a greater set of abnormalities. C’mon, is anyone going to take this one fact as evidence we have nothing to worry about when it comes to driving Hummers et al?
David:
“John nothing like throwing up smoke to cover your tracks. ”
Those aren’t my tracks. Yours are the only tracks in the sand. Remember, you picked 1988, not me. It actually makes some sense, since in a data set with lots of ups and downs, it is often useful to pick peak-to-peak or trough-to-trough the spot a trend. Picking the tail end of a cool period (1979) to compare with what might be the middle part of a cool period (now) may give a distorted trend. I’m not married to this, it’s just one of many ways of looking at the data. But again, don’t complain that I looked at the difference between now and 1988 and determined a trend. You brought it up.
“I’ve debated enough sceptics to know that to continue this discussion is a waste of time .”
Sorry to hear that. Sounds like your more comfortable discussing this issues with those who agree with you.
“Just remember the MSU trend is 0.13C/decade – that’s double the rate of the 20th century, and directly contradicts you world view.”
That is also about the trend from about 1925 to about 1945, the last warm phase of the PDO. Again, I’m not married to this way of analyzing the data, but it is one of many ways of looking at it. It’s not a “world view”, it’s what the data say.
“BTW is this you by any chance (http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2007/05/bolt_pranked.php)?”
Is who me?
Nativecoach:
Did you not read many of the comments here? We aren’t talking about one month of cooling…all of 2008 has been cool. And the trend for the past 10 years globally has been flat or slight cooling. Until that trend changes, the evidence indicates that global warming has stopped…for whatever reason.
We know sea levels were higher during the Roman Warm Period, ask some ancient historians. We know most glacial retreat occurred before 1950, ask some glaciologists.
I’m going to call you on both these statements.
Sea levels were substantially lower in Roman times. We know this from historical records. For example a Roman map shows a substantial island between England and France. We know this island was inundated by the sea around 1100.
While have we good records for some glaciers going back 70 to a 100 years, we have little to no data on many others. Even today we can not say with any certainty whether overall glacial mass is increasing or decreasing.
We have just had the driest May on record and most of southern OZ hasn’t had a wet autumn for 19 years
I must have missed a radical geographical realignment of the Australian continent, because south western Australia from Shark Bay to Esperance (an area as big as Victoria, NSW and Tasmania combined) has had the wettest start to the year in at least 20 years.
“We are not being given a straight story by the environmental activists, they are bent upon galvanizing a herd of people into a huge gov’t controlled society that redistributes wealth. That’s not environmentalism, that’s socialism.” leebert
The wealth distribution currently seems to be from the middle class to the very wealthy via fractional reserve banking, so some resentment of the rich is in order.
Until we have an honest banking system we are in danger of even more socialism.
some great quotes about banking:
http://www.barefootsworld.net/banking-fed-quotes.html
In the Waikato, New Zealand, the highest temp in 2007 was 22 C. In 2008 the highest temp was 18.5 C.
Oops. Sorry. That last one should read
In the Waikato, New Zealand, the highest temp in May 2007 was 22 C. In May 2008 the highest temp was 18.5 C.
A question for my own interest about UAH data. How does one go from the daily “”chLT” data at http://discover.itsc.uah.edu/amsutemps/data/amsu_daily_85N85S_chLT.r001.txt to the monthly data at http://vortex.nsstc.uah.edu/public/msu/t2lt/tltglhmam_5.2 ?
Nothing I do can get me from point a to point B. Am I using the wrong daily file?
Len, Lenny, or Lennart:
You can call me Pam, Pammy, Pamela, Pamela Sue, Strawberry Shortcake, Lil Red, Mrs. Gray, Miss Makin, Liberal Lil, Teach, bookish, stubborn, “campaigner to fight alcohol abuse and save the beer”, Cancer Lip (no thanks to the sun), Graydancer, Excommunicated Catholic, or just plain ol’ Farmer Gray. For me, I am beginning too warm up two Len.
So Len, I’m confused. Do you believe that warming is caused by CO2 and cooling is caused by the sun? Jez askin cuz I’m wonderin how you wood modul that.
addendum
Not only is it colder than last year at this time in Enterprise, Oregon, it’s 11 degrees colder than LAST MONTH! Solar flux continues its slow decent into REM sleep, in spite of yet another cycle 23 spot that just appeared. No number yet. Probably won’t last long.
The Sun has gone to bed
And so must I
I flit, I fleet, I fleetly flee I fly
Dum da da dum dum dum dum dum
Dum dum dum dum dum
Looks like you got an Instalanche today. Please keep up the good work, word is getting out. The more people learn, the more they question the conventional wisdom.
I’ll bet June is another record setting month for blog traffic.
SWAG – in Australia it is a rolled up bedroll wrapped in canvas.
I am in Halls Creek, it’s cold, and raining as well. Not surprising as it’s desert country. Last year in June we had 400 times monthly average rainfall.
Good work Anthony !