Even though little change has been seen, there is some interesting news in the August RSS numbers. We are still cooler than one year ago, and the 12 month trend continues to drop.
The RSS (Remote Sensing Systems of Santa Rosa, CA) Microwave Sounder Unit (MSU) lower troposphere global temperature anomaly data for August 2008 was published today and has remained essentially unchanged, with a value of 0.146°C for a miniscule change (∆T) of -0.001°C globally from July 2008.
RSS
2008 1 -0.070
2008 2 -0.002
2008 3 0.079
2008 4 0.080
2008 5 -0.083
2008 6 0.035
2008 7 0.147
2008 8 0.146
The August 2008 number is 0.221°C lower than in August of 2007 which was 0.367°C
Click for a larger image
The RSS data is here (RSS Data Version 3.1)
While is was going to do my own analysis of the numbers, Walter Dnes did an excellent job of summarizing it all in comments on another thread, so I’ll give him the honor:
This brings down the 12-month running mean to +0.086, which is very slightly lower than the +0.091 12-month running mean to the end of November 1987. That’s almost 21 years ago.
What I’m really waiting for is Hadley and GISS 12-month means to drop below their 1995 values. Hadley might make it in the next couple of months. GISS by year end. Once we get annual means matching temperatures on the other side of 1998, global cooling will be undeniable.
We do indeed live in interesting times.
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34 degrees F last night. Had to start a fire. Eventually got warm. Took more than the fire. You probably want to snip that part.
Reply: Naw, sounds sweet to me. ~ charles the moderator
Seventh Warmest August This Century
Slightly OT, but Mauna Loa is also out today. At 384.14, a bit higher than I would have expected, but the real surprise was that on top of after last month’s brouhaha, they bumped JULY’s number yet again (from 385.60 to 386.39, or another +0.79). WattsUpWithThat??
Pamela seems to have found the solution to a cooling climate. Seems to work for her. Way to go…
As for the new data, looks like it lends credence to that old maxim that if it’s colder than normal where you are, it’s warmer somewhere else. This slow change we’ve been seeing should be most interesting to watch play out over the next several years.
I read an interesting theory over on SolarCycle24.com to the effect that the spike in satellite temp readings for the last few days of August and first couple of days of September might be related to the quantity and intensity of tropical systems in play. No matter what the cause, the end-of-month spike lifted, probably only for the very short term, worldwide average temps. So, the underlying cooling a lot of people have been talking about anecdotally got masked. Even with the spike, the month was lower than last year and just about identical to July in terms of anomaly.
Second, the transfer of heat from the oceans, the Atlantic principally, to the atmosphere will leave SSTs cooler this winter, which could have consequences for the American northeast, Canadian maritimes, and Europe. As a surfer, it is always amazing when hurricane waves plow through a given stretch of coast and stir the water enough to make you need a wetsuit two days after being fine without one. This is different, of course, from the heat transfer to the atmosphere IN the hurricane system, but it is impressive nonetheless. Even a low-level, peripheral effect of a hurricane suggests the power that the storms possess, in this case the power to move a lot of water, churn it, and cool it.
Also per a post on SolarCycle24, tomato harvest numbers are 25% below average in the San Joaquin Valley of California, owing to cool nighttime temperatures this summer.
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You would surely need to see it go as low as -0.3 to -0.4 before being satisfied that the warming trend is really over? I agree it looks to be moving south short term, but there is still, over the series, a decided though small upward trend which would emerge with a straight line fit. Still, if the sceptics are right, this level of negative anomaly is indeed what we will see in the next couple years.
Also slightly OT.
It’s good to see that the supply of airborne plant food is increasing (as measured at Mauna Loa).
Ahhh… the carbon cycle… It’s a beautiful thing, all that photosynthesis and chlorophyll – CO2 – greening the planet and keeping us all alive.
I think that the “*&%$” will hit the fan for the AGW crowd when crop yields start falling due to colder conditions, and food prices rise.
That has to be hard to reconcile. I assume that most of the AGW believers are essentially honest people who have been gulled by a small number of very unpleasant people with nefarious motives. Honest people will eventually question what is happening – especially once it hits their hip pocket $$$ nerve.
Besides the reduction in tomatoes in central valley, wine grapes are about 20% short in Napa, Sonoma and other No. Cal viticulture regions. Cool spring and cooler, but drier summer are blamed. Last year some areas in higher locales also lost crops due to cool growing season and early freezing.
“Once we get annual means matching temperatures on the other side of 1998, global cooling will be undeniable….”
Yes I agree Anthony.
But…. Like all empirical data the the AGW proponents use. They will “adjust” it so it fits their flawed hypothesis.
After all, they have already modeled a cooling to cover the next decade. So they are sitting pretty, laughing.
These people are going nowhere. Not as long as there is a dollar to be had. Take the Government funding away….. These people will become as scarce as hens teeth….. In the deafening silence, you’re liable to find a couple of old guys in white coats blinking myopically, holding all the data and conclusions we ever needed….
As long as Government “does” science…. We’ll have bad science.
Maybe I’m being pessimistic. But I keep noticing too much money being spent, for too little return and too many policies using Science as a prop for justification…. It’s not healthy.
Forrest Gump said “Stupid is as Stupid does.” Well I will let everyone decide for themselves. For the first time, the National Republican Platform has adopted an Environmental Protection Plank that addresses “Climate Change.” The platform was released from committee on Monday, September 2. It was an interesting fight.
The McCain Campaign wanted the following wording, “Increased atmospheric carbon has a warming effect on the earth. While the scope and long term consequences of this warming effect are the subject of ongoing research, we believe the United States should take measured and reasonable steps today.”
The final Environmental Protection plank states the following, “The same human economic activity that has brought freedom and opportunity to billions has also increased the amount of carbon in the atmosphere. While the scope and long term consequences of this are the subject of ongoing scientific research, common sense dictates that the United States should take measured and reasonable steps today to reduce any impact on the environment.” They also added a Climate Prize for scientists who solve the challenges of climate change.
You can read the platform at the following link. The Environmental Protection plank starts on page 35.
http://www.gop.com/pdf/PlatformFINAL_WithCover.pdf
In the 2004 platform, the term “global warming” was completely absent. It remains absent in the 2008 platform, too; however, “climate change” has been added. Maybe they wanted to include global warming as the cause of global cooling, and the only way to accomplish that is to use the term “climate change.” LOL
Actually, if you read the entire plank, it appears that they want to use climate change to advance nuclear power and other alternative zero-emission power sources, like solar and wind. I guess the “ends justify the means” in the GOP, too.
Opinion: It appears that Western Civilization is leaving the Age of Reason and Enlightenment and entering the Age of Stupidity. This plank and the implied “ends justify the means” is another example. The only thing that can save us from ourselves is honorable scientists who will tell us the truth and risk their reputation.
Could the decrease seen earlier this year be just another blip? In the 80’s and 90’s there are also sharp drops but these then recover to original temperatures…
Could temperature be on the rise again…
“Once we get annual means matching temperatures on the other side of 1998, global cooling will be undeniable.”
True, but the media will never report it, and that will be better than actually trying to deny it. As I recently read: the media are in the NEWS business, not the truth business. Global cooling is not a catastrophe (yet), so they won’t bother to report on it. It doesn’t go along with their woe-is-us-because-man-is-destroying-the-planet theme. And even if (or when) it does become catastrophic, they will never make the link between the two. Thus is the deception preserved, even while it is disproven.
I meant to add this to my last post but forgot. All the scientific findings against AGW will never matter much, other than to scientists and the well informed such as we here, because AGW is not about science. It is about politics pure and simple. Case in point, if you took politics out of this, AGW would be a relatively minor issue talked about by “geeks.” It would be tantamount to discussing Star Trek, or the fine points of nanotechnology, or what have you. It would be a total non-story. Since it is hurricane season, let me say that the science behind AGW is just the rain and clouds. The real “core” of the system is political. You can disprove it all you want, but until the core is destroyed it will never go away. Much like tropical storm Hanna, if you have been following it as I have.
Fred,
There is indeed an overall trend of 0.017K/yr (1.7K/century), as you can see from:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/rss/plot/rss/trend
(get the numbers from http://www.woodfortrees.org/data/rss/trend)
but each month that goes by below trend (i.e. less than +0.33K anomaly) slightly reduces it – for example, up to December it would have been 1.8K/century:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/data/rss/to:2008/plot/rss/to:2008/trend
Keep watching!
@Mike bryant (21.02)
acutally 7th warmest august of this millenium.. WE are doomed
Is it just me or are others sick of hearing about “carbon” being put into our atmosphere when they are really talking about carbon dioxide, a compound and not an element. Aaargh!
The temperature observations are beginning to resemble scenario ‘C’.
http://www.realclimate.org/images/Hansen06_fig2.jpg
Alex wrote:
“Could the decrease seen earlier this year be just another blip? In the 80’s and 90’s there are also sharp drops but these then recover to original temperatures…
Could temperature be on the rise again…”
Its a good point. But i think not: We have the sun going sleeping and we see the ocean temperatures slowly decreasing. So where should that heat come from? There can allways be a bleeb in these curves both ways, but there will have to happen something new if the cooling trend should change.
ENSO (La Nina/El Nino) has gone to neutral around may, so the fact that 2008 temperatures are still lower than recent years is getting harder and harder to explain for the CO2-crew.
Alex.
Yes, certainly it can be a blip. On geological timescales entire human civilisations are blips. This is why it is so wrong to put straight lines through all the data on a graph and call it a trend. It gives far too much significance to the end points. See John Brignell’s “Numberwatch”site.
J. Hansford.
Yes, like you I mourn the demise of science. In my view, computer modellers are not scientists, as they do not gather data, form hypotheses and test theories etc. Any real scientist is automatically a sceptic – otherwise we’d still be sacrificing virgins and reading entrails. A computer modeller is in exactly the same relation to a scientist as the highly skilled glassblowers and machinists are to chemists and physicists. Obviously there are scientists who can devise their own programs, glassware and apparatus, but to call one who is primarily a computer programmer a scientist is like that irritating phrase “Rocket Science”, in that what is meant is engineering. There is very little science to be done on rocketry, virtually all concerned with chemistry and Newtonian mechanics.
That may sound disparaging. It is not so meant. We have quite enough scientists but what is really needed at the moment is engineers and technicians who can gather the airy-fairy notions of the ivory tower mob and make useful things out of them. It does no-one any good to let the “Meejah” confuse categories and people to manipulate words for status reasons.
(Sorry, drifted a bit OT there)
Fred:
You say;
“You would surely need to see it go as low as -0.3 to -0.4 before being satisfied that the warming trend is really over? I agree it looks to be moving south short term, but there is still, over the series, a decided though small upward trend which would emerge with a straight line fit.”
A “straight line fit” is meaningless.
Change to mean global temperature (MGT) is usually quoted as a linear trend (e.g. by IPCC) over a selected period of years. But this is a fundamental error because any (yes, any) choice of time period is not appropriate when using linear trends to assess the change, especially when attempting to discern any anthropogenic effect on the change.
Before explaining why the use of linear trends is not appropriate, I point out that IPCC 2007 provides an extreme use of linear trends to mislead concerning MGT changes, see
http://globalwarmingquestions.googlepages.com/howtheipccinventedanewcalculus
However, such deliberate – and extreme – misrepresentation is not the major problem.
Local and global climates tend to vary in cycles or oscillations. Some examples of well-documented climate cycles are Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO), North Atlantic Decadal Oscillation (NAO) and El Nino Southern Oscillation (ENSO). Other cycles also seem to exist. For example, global climate seems to be bi-stable in that it is stable in a glacial state and in an interglacial state. Global climate fluctuates between these states apparently as a result of variations in the Earth’s eccentricity, obliquity and precession that are called ‘Milankovitch Cycles’ (after the Serbian civil engineer, Milutin Milankovitch, who discovered their correlation to the Earth’s glacial and interglacial conditions).
The climate cycles are overlaid on each other, and any anthropogenic global warming (AGW) must be overlaid on them.
So, the temperature variations induced by observed climate cycles must be identified and removed from the global temperature time series if AGW is to be observed. This is commonly recognized in terms of ENSO, for example. Indeed, IPCC admits this for ENSO.
But another apparent cycle has a length of ~1500 years with ~750-year-long phases of warm and cold. This appearance is because since the time of Christ there was
the Roman Warm Period, then
the Dark Age Cool Period, then
the Medieval Warm Period (MWP), then
the Little Ice Age (LIA), then
the Present Warm Period.
And another apparent cycle length is ~60 years because measurements suggest that globally there was
cooling to ~1910, then
warming to ~1940, then
cooling to ~1970, then
warming to 1998, followed by
no significant warming or cooling.
Until the global temperature exceeds the maximum in the paleo record (and present temperature seems to be less than the maximum in the MWP despite the very recent attempt of Mann et al. to revive the ‘hockey stick’), it is not possible to observe any AGW unless the temperature cycles are identified in terms of their forms, amplitudes and phases. This identification is not (yet) achieved. And in the absence of this identification linear trends tell nothing concerning AGW.
Consider the ~1500-year-cycle. Almost any period of time less than 1500 years will provide a linear trend of warming or cooling purely as a result of the sampling of part of the cycle (to understand this, assume a sinusoid and sample almost any fraction of a cycle length as demonstrated in the URL I cite above).
So, no time period for a linear trend in global temperature is appropriate because a linear trend is misleading.
However, as the URL I cited demonstrates, the use of linear trends allows anything to be suggested by choice of end points and time periods. Furthermore, as that URL clearly demonstrates, the IPCC uses this to provide untrue suggestions.
In summation, trends in the MGT data set mislead, but patterns in the MGT data set inform.
Richard S Courtney
Jeff Wiita (23:03:15)
‘In the 2004 platform, the term “global warming” was completely absent. It remains absent in the 2008 platform, too; however, “climate change” has been added. ‘
At least they used the trem “based on sound science”.
trem=term
Mike Bryant (21:02:02) :
Seventh Warmest August This Century
It didn`t feel like that in the UK.
Gloomy August wettest since 1992
Much of Wales has had the wettest August since 1992, and sunshine levels were among the lowest on record.