August RSS Global Temperature – holding steady, still cooler than 1 year ago

As long as we are near the modern peak temperature newspapers will keep reporting things like 5th hotest ever, 8th hottest ever and so on. But if temperature still refuse to increase the next years and recover it’s climb upwards to 0.6 – 0.8C annual anomaly it will be harder and harder to claim we are heading towards AGW-future of any significance. Also newsopaper will have a harder time to find record temperatures to report about.
If temperature should have kept increasing as expected by AGW ppl we would have roughly 0.5-0.6C anomaly now but we don’t. Looking back in the last 30 years of RSS/UAH data it is also clear that the temparature increase and decrease quite much and the dips can last for years. So if this is just a dip before we will resume the climb upwards again it could take up to 2 years more before we will know if this is a permanent shift against cooler/stalled warming or just a short break.
Until then AGW ppl will have no problem just claiming this is just a short time dip, which could be true. Time and nature will give the eventual answer on that question no matter what the models say.

Why is it that the temperature delta compared to the reference period is caller “anomaly”? It’s not abnormal, it’s a variation. The use of the term anomaly, especially when the temperatures are (still) higher than the reference period, seems to mean that the variation has to be attributed to abnormal factors, such as GW.

“Once we get annual means matching temperatures on the other side of 1998, global cooling will be undeniable.”
Except… not? This plays into this ridiculous notion that “global warming stopped after 1998.” Once again, 1998 was an extreme anomaly heavily influenced by a significant El Nino event. If anyone has any statistical experience, you might remember that the best way to treat a set of data with a significant outlier is to ignore the outlier when calculating trends.
If one follows this appropriate procedure, then there is still a distinct warming trend through late last year; one doesn’t need to calculate any best-fit lines because it’s apparent with the naked eye. The most recent dip is corroborated with a reversal to and from La Nina conditions. One doesn’t expect an instantaneous reversal of any pattern evolving from these conditions; it took how many months for the 1998 El Nino spike to reverse down to pre-spike levels?
Once again, it is way too early for skeptics to be popping champagne corks. There will be no evidence of “global cooling” until there is a plausible mechanism for such a reversal of phenomenon, and until there is a significant, multi-decadal negative trend to the temperature record. A dramatic reversal of CO2 trends would also signify global cooling; cold waters can dissolve more gas before becoming saturated, and a lowering of atmospheric CO2 is considered one of the necessary conditions for an ice age to occur.

I’m telling ya’ll that the way the AGW crowd will deal with this, should the temperature trend go negative over the next few years is to more or less say, “LOOK!! An American Eagle.” Then, while we look, they’ll start talking about ‘Climate Chaos’ as though that is what the issue has always been. “Climate Chaos’ is wonderfully flexible, allowing them to claim that human increase in CO2 accounts for warming, cooling, stasis, slow increases, slow decreases, fast increases, and slow increases in planetary temperature and if we don’t ‘do something’ about it, it will just get worse.
I’ve already started getting this from my AGW friends (who alternately think I’m either amusingly daft or a sheep under the hypnotic sway of the American far right wing/industrial complex). “Oh, it’s really not about the warming, it’s that the climate is now chaotic and we’ll be seeing wild swings in temperatures (for the first time in history), more and increasingly violent ‘weather events’ (everything seems to be an ‘event’ now for some reason, it doesn’t just rain anymore, we have ‘precipitation events’, etc), etc. Since there are no scientific arguments and this appears to be simply a gratuitous assertion, there is little that can be provided by way of refutation, except, of course, the logical answer to a gratuitous assertion, which is a gratuitous negation.
Anyway, I bet we see more and more references to ‘climate chaos’ as time marches on.

It seems to me from looking at this graph that yes indeed the temperature is on an upward slope for most of the time (30 years) but towards the end is starting to tale off. But one would think that if the climate is directly correlated with CO2 increase, as the greenies say it is, then there would not be large drops in temperature every couple years as seen in the graph along with whats happening now. Would i be wrong in saying that if it was correlated that there wouldnt be those big drops? I just dont see how they can make that gross assumption.

Well if you live in the southern hemisphere we are yet to see this so called warming everyone is talking about. Were feeling it, its in the stats and yet were being asked to lead the world in combating global warming – bah humbug!

Alex (00:01:13) :
“Could the decrease seen earlier this year be just another blip?”
Yes, the cooling at the beginning of the year was caused by the La Nina, temperatures are starting to rebound. If the theory that sunspot minima should result in cooling was correct then we wouldoff course be seeing a fall in temperatures. No mention anywhere on this blog of the 4,000 + year old Markham ice sheet breaking away from Ellesmere Island, or the study that reinforces the theory that global warming causes stronger hurricanes, typhoons and cyclones (the study showing that larger storms are more resistant to wind shear than smaller storms, the number of which has remained fairly constant). http://www.nature.com/news/2008/080903/full/news.2008.1079.html
Hurricane Ike will prove a good test of this as it encounters windshear as this looks a very large and intense storm.
Hopefully these will soon be points for discussion on this interesting blog.

Aars,
Concerning the Nature Magazine TC “Study”:
“The team statistically analysed satellite-derived data of cyclone wind speeds. Although there was hardly any increase in the average number or intensity of all storms, the team found a significant shift in distribution towards stronger storms that wreak the greatest havoc.”
Essientially, the scientists reanalysed and adjusted the TC intensity based on the subjective Dvorak Method. Funny how statistics always makes its way into these things. As far as vertical wind shear is concerned, the shear component comes into play early in the cyclogenesis of TC, that is, when deep convection is organized. Strong TC cannot develope if they cannot get past this stage. During the last weak El Nino year of 2006, the wind shear was storng enough to severely limit ANY TC, despite other factors. The Alarmists will not give up.

Jerry: Scientists dream. Engineers turn dreams into reality. Both are necessary.
Pamela: Fire comes in many forms. Stay warm.
Back OT, sort of. If a slight drop in temp from last year is just an anomaly and should be ignored, what should we do with a big hurricane, that ‘proves’ global warming?

Any talk of a remaining upward straight-line trend in temperatures is completely disingenuous because it fails to factor in the significant cooling driven by volcanic eruptions in the 80’s and 90’s (Mt. St. Helen’s, Sierra Hudson, El Chichon, Pinatubo). The fact of the matter is that temperatures have gone nowhere for the better part of 30 years once volcanic impacts are accounted for.
Yes, temperatures did shoot up in the late 70’s as the PDO swung positive and the weak solar cycle 19 ended. But since then we may have seen a minimal jump in the late 90’s as the AMO swung positive. Now that the PDO has swung negative and the AMO will follow in the next 5-10 years and the sun is going into a funk, expect the now downward trend to continue. Note that reaction to lower solar activity tends to lag. After all, didn’t the warmers crow about “warming in the pipeline”! Well now “the pipeline is cooling” and this impact will be felt for years to come!

Christopher Hanley wrote:

The temperature observations are beginning to resemble scenario ‘C’.
http://www.realclimate.org/images/Hansen06_fig2.jpg“

Christopher, did you happen to notice that the date of the so-called latest observation was 2005? It is nearly 2009, and temps have fallen dramatically since the date of that graph.

Temperatures since the satellite record began in 1979 have gone up and they have gone down. Overall, they are up slightly. 1976-1979 was the end of a cooling period which began in 1944 with 1976-1979 being a low starting point.
Over the sat period record, we have had impacts from ENSO (which has increased the trend overall, caused the increase in 1998 and the dip over the past 18 months), two major volcanoes (which caused dips in 1982 and 1991), increased CO2 and GHGs (which has increased the trend somewhat but by far less than global warming theory indicates) and a more active Sun (which increased the trend a small amount until the recent slowdown in solar activity.)
These 4 impacts explain almost all of the change in that RSS chart with natural variability explaining the rest.
Global warming theory indicates that temps should be close to 1.0C higher than the data indicates so that is the most important conclusion one should reach from the chart. It should be growing twice as fast as it actually does.
If CO2 and GHGs increase temperatures, even the most rapid warming period seen so far is much less than global warming predicts. It is so much lower, in fact, that global warming is most likely not a problem at all.