RSS July Global Temperature Anomaly – up a bit

Just eyeballing it looks like we are still about 0.2C cooler than this time last year. I am looking forward to seeing UAH numbers. It looks like we may have taken a pretty serious down tick on the last 12-18 months. Can’t wait to see what January brings. I think I will get some extra fire wood in just in case.
Bill Derryberry

Can anyone here tell me just how accurate UAH really is(I mean an explanation with scientific evidence)? I noticed how the May 2008 temp anomalies were extremely cool mostly due to a big cold anomaly in the tropical Indian Ocean that had no correlation with the water temperatures just below it according to NCDC and Hadley. Is it really an accurate representation of the air temperature, or does it monitor a layer of atmosphere that is dreadfully warped by El Nino and La Nina and has limited relevance to what is really going on with Gaia’s fever? It seems to me the tropical temperature gives a poor representation of how Gaia actually feels during El Nino and La Nina events GLOBALLY. I feel the data lets El Nino and La Nina heating and cooling run rampant across the globe even if it is not being felt on the surface air(excluding UHI). I have seen this happen with both, but it is VERY obvious in the UAH data, generally over the oceans.

Despite this seeming to have all the excitement of watching grass grow, I now wait with bated breath each month for the new numbers to be revealed.
How will the new numbers compare to last month? Last year? Or, on an anecdotal level, how do they compare to last month’s temperature record for where I live? {Seems to have been boringly average}.
If the last few months develop into a trend and there is a cooling, we’ll be well into any possible cooling before it becomes obvious. If the line returns to, and stays with, the trendline of the past few years, then all it will tell us is that the climate is staying with the status quo.
The trouble is, if that red line does start dropping over the long haul, I’ll be freezing my buns off over the coming winters. A most unpleasant prospect. Give me a warming climate and day and it’s every polar bear for itself.

BTW, there are signs the La Nina may be reforming. Looking at Outgoing Longwave Radiation (OLR) there is a positive anomaly on or near the equator across most of the Pacific. Increasing OLR (more heat lost to space) is a primary cause of the cool waters that constitute La Nina.
http://www.bom.gov.au/bmrc/clfor/cfstaff/matw/maproom/OLR/m.3d.html

Phillip,
NOAA’s weekly ENSO report seems to be predicting that La Nina conditions will return late Winter or Early spring, what I find even more interesting is that the North Atlantic seems to be developing some cool spots as well, and NOAA seems to be predicting a growing cooling trend starting this fall which should continue through Spring.
NOAA, of course, has started to only display their climate predictions PLUS trend, so if the trend line has changed, to the cool side more than NOAA acknowledges then its very possible that we could see the cooling trend resume in force come October or so.
Another thing that I have been following with some interest is a growing cold spot between Hawaii and Alaska. What will become of this? I don’t know.

You said: “I rather expected it to go up a bit, given that La Nina has diminsihed, plus the NH has a greater landmass than the SH, and we are in summer. ”
I do not understand how summer and the the greater landmass could cause the temperature anomaly to raise. Isn’t the landmass the same as the base period 1979-2000 or what ever base period that is used for calculating the average for each month? I can’t see how it will cause temperature anomaly for July to raise this year, unless there is a significant change in landuse this summer.
But the global absolute temperature is higher when it is summertime in NH though, due to landmass, right?

Adding to Jecker’s obvious statements in (00:12:10), I’d also like to point out the other obvious:
People are watching grass grow lower this year and calling AGW off. I’ve no problem on that, love the controversies. BUT, if one watches 1998 clearly off any possible trend, one learns that looking at 2008 as if endorsing the position that GW is called off is as specious and false as if looking at 1998 (in 1998) endorsing a huge acceleration of GW.
So people, calm down and if you really want to see grass grow, fine by me. I just tell you that it won’t reach any interesting “height” to reach conclusions until next two or three years (and even still!).

Jerker,
Yes, I was going to note the same thing: The anomalies are from monthly averages, so the seasonal NH/SH differentials are already taken care of (that’s why there is no detectable 12 month signal, it has already been subtracted out):
Band-pass around annual signal for RSS compared to raw signal
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/rss/fourier/low-pass:35/high-pass:25/inverse-fourier/plot/rss
Just to emphasise the point, here’s the same for HADCRUT Northern Hemisphere only, which you’d other expect to show a very strong annual signal:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3vnh/fourier/low-pass:35/high-pass:25/inverse-fourier/plot/hadcrut3vnh
I also expected RSS (and UAH) to ‘bounce back’ a bit; it seems to me they react more strongly to short-term El Nino/La Nina events – perhaps simply because of the greater thermal mass of the land/sea measurements?

I’m just the messenger,
Arctic sea ice could reach 2007 levels by next week.
http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/images/daily_images/N_timeseries.png

LIFESTYLES OF THE RICH AND ALARMIST!
(hat-tip to IceCap)
http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/gore-hits-the-waves-with-a-massive-new-houseboat/
Sorry Anthony, but I couldn’t resist. They’re are our ultimate role models after all.

expected 9/10 of land mass is NH so when its heats up, it heats up global. Generally though temps are on the way down. Just you wait for 2009-2010!

PG,
Any evidence besides that graph? That is a lot of ice to melt when there is already fall in the air where I live, 45° N, and days are getting shorter. I am just asking because your cryptic comment seems to imply something is going on. I guess I will check CA.

jeez (01:59:47) :
Paul, ignore my email, for a second I thought I had deleted one of your posts.
No problem Charles. I’ve not looked at my emails for a few days, but I will ignore.

dreamin, I assume you know that almost all of ‘climate science’, the IPCC and AGW theory is dependent on persistence of forcings, or in your terms ‘climate memory’.
No, I didn’t know that. Or at least I hadn’t given it much thought. But now that you mention it, it makes sense.
If forcings (things that make the climate warmer or cooler) aren’t persistent, then we can toss all climate science to date in the bin.
Personally, I’m sceptical of the forcings persistence model.
I’m skeptical too, and anyway, one should consider the possibility that any “forcings” themselves are transient and the result of noise. Let me give you an example:
If you are playing blackjack in a casino, your odds of winning in a particular hand are not independent of your odds of winning the previous hand. Because situations can arise where the remaining cards are very rich in tens and face cards. In those situations, you have a better chance of having a winning streak than would be predicted by a model which assumed that each hand was independent.
By analogy, it seems possible that temperatures could engage in a bona fide warming trend (i.e. a trend which passes statistical tests) but which doesn’t have any deep meaning. Perhaps if some ocean current shifts from one state to another.
Thus, if a butterfly in China can cause a rain storm in New York, we should consider the possibility that the same butterfly can cause an ice age.
Anyway, if external forcings drive the climate, then what caused the Little Ice Age? What caused the Medieval Warm Period? And why can scientists not predict global temperature anomalies over a 5 or 10 year time period?
Seems to me the response of many climate scientists is that (1) the little ice age didn’t happen; (2) the medieval warm period didn’t happen; and (3) short term noise makes it impossible predict over a 5 or 10 year period, but it’s possible over a 25 or 50 year period.
(1) and (2) strike me as false. (3) strikes me as an unsupported, ad hoc explanation which conveniently delays falsification for another 20 years or so. i.e. it has all the red flags of BS.
One reason being what you point out, global temperatures look too random on shorter timescales. The standard explanation is weather noise, but I see no reason why the Earth’s weather in aggregate (ie its climate) should be noisy, as weather is just transfer of heat and moisture from one place to another.
I basically agree with you. It seems to me that under the external forcings view, the total heat in the system should be monotonically increasing.

old construction worker,
Latest news is that Hansen wants to set up one of them Stevenson screens over that 800°F hot-spot in California. Can’t get better siting than that!

Anyway, if external forcings drive the climate, then what caused the Little Ice Age? What caused the Medieval Warm Period?
External forcings does not mean extra-terrestrial. There are many terrestrial events that have wide-reaching impacts on the climate. Since you are legitimately asking, let me give you the textbook, accepted idea which is used to explain the LIA. Note that the MWP is not really considered to be a period of global warmth; its effects were most profound in the North Atlantic, and there is not definitive evidence that it occurred to the same extent globally.
The LIA was caused by several things, but two important ones stick out. First, the LIA was a period of anomalously high amounts of volcanic activity. The eruption of volcanoes has two effects: on the long-term, they increase the temperature of the climate because the black carbon aerosols and GHG’s they spout contribute a warming effect. However, in the short-term, they can dramatically cool the climate (as evidenced by the Pinatubo eruption in the early 90’s). The period of high volcanic activity led to a large amount of aerosols being deposited in the stratosphere; they shielded a great deal of incoming radiation.
To add to the decrease of incoming radiation, the sun also underwent the “Maunder Minimum.” Although there really isn’t a physical mechanism which has connected sunspots to a cooling sun, it is a highly popular hypothesis, and the LIA and especially its peak minimum highly correlate to the maunder minimum.
Finally, it has been hypothesized that the oceanic thermohaline circulation may have abruptly shifted, altering the Gulf Stream which helps high-latitude portions of Europe in a warmer trend.
These are the big ideas which go into the LIA. They’re considered “external forcings” because they’re not part of the atmosphere.

Simply eyeballing the temperature vs year graphs indicates a “cycling”. And, by the look of it, we’ve been near a “local minimum” — so an upturn just about now is not unexpected.
I disagree. Take a look at a stock market graph over a time period of about a year. It’s easy to think that there are predictable cycles, but there are not.
For better or for worse, a lot of my thinking about climate models is informed by knowledge of financial markets and how they work.

Walter,
Thanks for the link. I slapped the data into a spreadsheet locally so I could play with it. I must be missing something though because the data says that Aug 5th 2008 was -.12 F lower than Aug 5th, 2007 in the comment section, but when I look at Aug 5 2007 the reading was 272.649 and Aug 5, 2008 is 272.583, which, even with my somewhat limited arithmetic skills (aided immensely by Excel) is -.066, not -.12. I wonder if I’m misreading the data somehow?

JP: If we turn the common understanding about the PDO and ENSO around… If the frequency of La Nina episodes outnumber El Ninos, the PDO will remain negative. Will La Ninas be more frequent than El Ninos for the next 20 to 30 years? Your guess is as good as mine. Looks like they’re trying.

Paul Shanahan- “A little off topic. I appears we have had hailstone here in the UK. A little unusual for summer! Must be very cold up there.”
Hailstones are quite common in summer months and have nothing to do with cool ground temperatures. In the UK,especially the southern half this time of year always has three days of fine weather folloed by a thundery outbreak. Hailstorms are very common during thunderstorms.
Back to the July temperature anomoly, we now have a neutral ENSO and ‘coolphase’ PDO. The solar minimum is well established (one sunspot last month) so why is the temperature still above average? As I understand the theory, low sunspot activity allows more cosmic rays to enter the earths atmosphere forming more clouds by increased ion-induced aerosol nucleation, hence a cooling. As this is a direct process there should be no temperature lag.
Temperatures should be falling, but they are not, could there be another reason?

Mike Keep
it will propably take a number of colder years to cool down ocean temperatures and roll backthe arctic ice anomaly that are forcing against a very juvenescent cooling trend. The Maunder Minimum also did not happen in the first year after the end of the medieval warm period.

Counters
How many volcanoes? Evidence of these volcanoes? For 300+ years? Wow the earth was really heaving out some gas. Oh yea don’t volcanoes also produce CO2, where is that in the record?
Mike K. yea we are really blazing at .147 positive. The Earth wont cool in just a year or two it takes time since 70% of the surface is water. How long does it take for your coffee to cool down, especially the store bought type.

Mike Keep (09:16:01) :
Hailstones are quite common in summer months and have nothing to do with cool ground temperatures. In the UK,especially the southern half this time of year always has three days of fine weather folloed by a thundery outbreak. Hailstorms are very common during thunderstorms.
Hi Mike
Not sure where the ground temperature bit came from in your post. I was referring to the heavens. I must admit that hail in the summer is not something I had noticed before observationally. That’s not to say it doesn’t happen, of course. From what I understand, hail the size of marbles is a very rare event in the UK, but is common in say, the US.
This must mean that either there is a lot of moisture in the air, the cumulus cloud went VERY high or it was very cold in the atmosphere. It’s just an observation I thought might be interesting as a “side show”.

co2science has hundreds of studies, from all over the world indicating that the MWP was world wide.

Matt….
The 4 years cycle you see is pretty easy to explain, for the most part.
1985 was a La Nina and solar minimum.
1989 was a very strong La Nina.
1993 was the Pinatubo eruption (volcanic, so really separate from climate cycles).
1996 was La Nina and solar minimum.
2000 was strong La Nina.
2004 was a neutral ENSO year, so this is the one that is harder to explain, but you will note it also did not dip near as much as the others overall.
2008 was La Nina and solar minimum.

The reasoning is that, with all this cloud cover,the highs aren’t as high, but at night, the lows aren’t as low.
Absolutely.
We had a very cool June here in MO. However, it was very humid and cloudy with record rainfall. I don’t beleive it ever broke 90 in June here, or maybe only one or two days, which is odd. We’ve only had a couple of 90 degree days in July, and one in August so far. The forecast for the rest of this week are high’s in the low 80’s with lows in the low 60’s, which is pretty uncommon for August here. However, for June, Climatology called it the 2nd warmest June ever, or something like that. I call BS. I would sure like to see a graph of only the daily highs, and then only the daily lows, and then the combination of the two into an average temperature. That would be interesting, and I think would cut through some of the BS.

Now here’s something that was a pleasure to read. Let’s hope this trend picks up some super-heated steam.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/guest_contributors/article4474202.ece

I understand that the sun’s output (measured at Earth) cycles by roughly a couple watts per square meter peak-to-valley.
A quick, simplistic calculation indicates it would take the Earth’s oceans rough order of magnitude well over 100 years to completely respond to a 2 watt per square meter change (assuming I did not screw up).
If that’s anywhere near right, the ocean temperature (and therefore Earth global temperature) is probably always behind the sun forcing in some sense — maybe a couple hundred years behind. Thus, the sun may have reached a genuine minimum of some sort during the little ice age and then picked up its output to new highs over a couple hundred years ago — and we are still adjusting to the new highs.

Who knew watching grass grow could become a sport?
I think Vegas is behind the curve here…

Walter,
Svensmark’s hypothesis, at least the aspect that postulates that high energy particles (and thus Muons generated from GCR collisions in the atmosphere) are the ‘spark’ behind formation of CCD (Cloud condensation nuclei) is going to be tested at CERN in the CLOUD project. While Dr Svensmark believes he has already verified this effect on his own, CLOUD will provide a more rigorous verification.
If this is verified, then the remaining work is looking for the signal in the past, something that researchers have presented evidence for and against.
Personally I think this is the mechanism that controls temperature more so than CO2 level, but that remains merely an opinion.
http://public.web.cern.ch/public/en/Research/CLOUD-en.html

Hi Paul,
“Not sure where the ground temperature bit came from in your post. I was referring to the heavens.”
Sorry, my mistake. Read it as ‘over there’, how I refer to blighty from the dampness of the Emerals Isle!

dreamin (08:31:35) : quoting someone: “Simply eyeballing the temperature vs year graphs indicates a “cycling”. And, by the look of it, we’ve been near a “local minimum” — so an upturn just about now is not unexpected.
And responding: I disagree. Take a look at a stock market graph over a time period of about a year. It’s easy to think that there are predictable cycles, but there are not.
There are predictable cycles in weather over a year. I’d bet my house that, in the NH, August will be warmer than February. Not sure what you mean by “persistence” but there is definite autocorrelation, not only from year to year, but a warmer than average JAN is likely to be followed by a warmer than average FEB.
Likewise, there appear to be longer climate cycles one of them around 30 years and another around 70 years. The 70 year cycle seems to have a lot of influence in the NW weather along the Pacific coast (I’m pulling this out of memory; there was a seminar presentation provided on the Monckton’s DVD).
The UAH graphs are for global temperatures which should pretty much even out. One exception is that during part of the year, the Earth is closer to the sun. So happens that is during the NH winter months. Winter is approx 4-5 days shorter than summer in the NH because the orbital speed is also greater during this time. I don’t know what that means in terms of temperatures.
Anyway, the upturn in June may not have been all that predictable.
——
dreamin (14:27:56): it’s not too hard to create a financial market model which “predicts” past market behavior and fool yourself into thinking that your model will predict the future. It looks to me like the same mistake is being made in climate modeling.
Amen to that. I think it’s a major downfall of the GCM’s. I believe they are too detailed: a lot like trying to predict river flow by modeling the dynamics of each water molecule. They are also incomplete (e.g. lack substantial modelling of clouds). Like trying to model river flow but neglecting precipitation.

Bill Marsh
On CERN, a more extensive exposition on cosmic rays:
http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/0804/0804.1938v1.pdf

For those of you interested, my alternate theory of climate change (to the forcings model).
The Earth’s climate is dominated by water feedbacks, specifically water phase changes, over hours to days – evaporation, clouds, rain/snow. Overall, it is in dynamic equilibrium.
Forcings operate over years to decades.
So, water feedbacks swamp changes in forcings over very short timescales. Which leaves us with the question, How do warm and cold periods such as the MWP and LIA occur?
The answer is that the primary influences on our climate are factors that affect phase changes of water. Svensmark’s GCR forming clouds. Soot and particulates causing ice and snow to melt. And aerosols and particulates seeding cloud formation.
This is due to the very different effects of water in it’s different phases. Ice/snow = strong cooling from increased albedo. Water vapour = strong warming due to GH effect. Liquid water as clouds = mostly cooling effect.
You can see the effect of the water vapour/clouds phase change feedback in the diurnal temperature range of humid versus dry places. In the humid tropics diurnal range is small, perhaps 5C. In the dry tropics diurnal range is large, up around 25C. The more water there is the bigger the feedback.

Counters
‘The LIA was caused by several things, but two important ones stick out. First, the LIA was a period of anomalously high amounts of volcanic activity. The eruption of volcanoes has two effects:’
Sorry to bust your bubble, but you are wrong about volcanic activity. we where coming out of the LIA when volcanic activity increased.
http://www.longrangeweather.com/global_temperatures.htm
To add to the decrease of incoming radiation, the sun also underwent the “Maunder Minimum.” Although there really isn’t a physical mechanism which has connected sunspots to a cooling sun, it is a highly popular hypothesis, and the LIA and especially its peak minimum highly correlate to the maunder minimum.
So that leaves a correlation to the sun.

KlausB: My e-mail is on the site linked above (trivially hidden to avoid spam). For new datasets I need an easy-to-read monthly data file which is kept up to date by the provider, plus academic refs etc.
BTW, you might be interested to know that I just added HADSST2 sea surface temperatures…
Cheers
Paul

I thought chaos theory and quantum theory pretty much told us we would have limits on how far we could predict in the future. Einstein famously said that “God does not play dice with the Universe” but could not prove otherwise.
Science is not pointless but it has its limits and it is good to recognize those.
I agree, and it’s troubling to me the way people throw around phrases like “chaotic system” without really knowing what they are talking about.
Why is it possible to predict an eclipse? Because a small error in the measurement of the positions and motions of sun, earth, and moon results in only a small error in predicting their positions at or around the time of the next eclipse.
In a chaotic system, these uncertainties have a tendency to multiply, giving results that are difficult or impossible to predict even if one understands the interactions of the system’s elements.

And the UAH winner is (2008 7 0.048) up from -0.114 in July.
http://vortex.nsstc.uah.edu/public/msu/t2lt/tltglhmam_5.2
John M Reynolds

As I look at the UAH monthly mean data from 1979, something strikes me. The whole thing pretty much averages out to zero. In, fact almost every month in the record would be rounded to zero, except for some months in 1998. Has anyone else made this observation? Can anyone here even PERCEIVE these differences? I might be making too much of this, but in my view this seems to be much ado about nothing.
Adapting to Zero Climate Change,
Mike Bryant
PS I would like to see this data set rounded to nearest whole number.
REPLY: Mike eyeballing doesn’t reveal the trends all that well. There is a decadal trend of 0.130 degrees in the global data. – Anthony

counters — “Note that the MWP is not really considered to be a period of global warmth; its effects were most profound in the North Atlantic, and there is not definitive evidence that it occurred to the same extent globally.”
The only way you can get here is to buy into MBH99 or Ammann and Wahl’s defence against M&M05’s proof of MBH99 being wrong. Otherwise the literature is rife with examples showing that MWP was in fact global.
Given that MBH99 is completely and utterly discredited to the point that even the IPCC on AR4 no longer used the hockey stick, yours seems a very curious and telling comment; it’s as if you start with MBH99 and go from there.
The MWP was global. Period. MBH99 was wrong, and they lied. Period.

Understood. My apologies if it seemed that way.

Fred Nieuwenhuis
The 5.2 seems to summarize everything Big Picture style whereas the other table seems to break stuff down into data by region/type.

The MWP was global. Period. MBH99 was wrong, and they lied. Period.
I think you are probably right, but if we assume for the sake of argument that it was limited to the Northern Hemisphere, there still remains the question: What (if anything) caused it?

Sun spots, or rather the lack there of.