One of the best things about WUWT is the number of eyes and minds at work, multiplying the efforts. This is interesting. Now that the 1998 El Nino is disappearing off the 10 year scale, things are looking a bit different
From “crosspatch” in comments:
NCDC now has December 2008 in the database. Annual North American temperature since 1998 (11 years of data) is falling over the period at a rate of 0.78(F)/decade or 7.8(F)per century. At this rate we will be in an ice age within 5 decades. If you can get the graphic, the heavy black like is the average over the century 1901 to 2000.
Here is the graphic from their automated graphics generator linked to their database:
Source: National Climatic Data Center
While the link he provided is only a result, I’m sure he’ll share the method in comments to this post.
UPDATE: He has indeed, see below. Try your own hand at it. The trend will likely flatten a bit with the removal of 1998 from the 10 year set. Of course you could pick any number of scales/periods and get different results. The point being made here is that the last 10 years hasn’t met with some model expectations.
Also I have corrected in the text the reference to Centigrade when it was actually Fahrenheit, note the (F). NCDC being an arm of the US government operates on the English unit system whereas most other organizations use metric, and thus Centigrade. I’ve made the mistake myself, so has NASA, who famously lost a Mars probe when they botched orbit entry calculations by use of Metric and English units on different science teams.
UPDATE2: Some folks are erroneously thinking that this graph above represents a global trend, it does not. Read on.
It represents US data from NCDC. Also there has been the usual complaint that “10 years isn’t long enough to determine any useful trend”. Perhaps, but when NASA’s James Hansen went before congress in 1988 to declare a “crisis in the making”, there had only been about 10 years of positive trend data since the PDO flip in 1978. It seemed adequate then:
In the graph above, note that the GISS station data does follow the Hansen C scenario, but that we are currently well below it.
Yes we really do need longer data periods to determine climate trends, 30 years is the climatic standard, but you can also learn useful information from examining shorter trends and regional trends.
To generate the graphic I made:
Leave the “Data Type” field at “Mean Temperature”
Select “Annual” from the “Period” field pull down
Select “1998″ as “First Year To Display”
and click the blue “Submit” oval at the below the data entry form.
I haven’t read all comments so maybe somebody else has come to the same graph as me already but if you graph from 1928 to 2008 the trend line is flat:
<a href=”http://stopglobalwarmingdoctrine.blogspot.com/2009/01/ncdc-data-no-global-warming-for-last-80.html
By shifting it just a bit you can have slight cooling or slight warming. So no need for a short 10 year trend to have something that indicates no sign of global warming. Maybe time for some to realise anything can be manipulated to show what one wants to prove. And if you believe that AGW supporters are not doing it you’re extremely naive.
Looks like the PDO is killing the Georgia drought
http://ahps.srh.noaa.gov/ahps2/hydrograph.php?wfo=ffc&gage=cmmg1&view=1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1&toggles=10,7,8,2,9,15,6&type=0
“The -0.78 change is FAHRENHEIT, not CENTIGRADE.”
Yes, I mentioned that way up above in the comments. My mistake.
RSS december temp anomoly
“Here’s a figure showing temperatures since Jan 2001, with anomalies rebaselined to the average for the period.” “The RSS-anomoly for December has been posted”
http://heliogenic.blogspot.com/2009/01/rss-december-temp-anomoly.html
http://rankexploits.com/musings/2009/rss-out-down-from-nov/
“a forest that isn’t logged is worth millions in carbon sequestration.”
Until the forest reached full maturity at which point it becomes a big fat zero in carbon sequestration. As long as it is accumulating biomass overall, it is removing carbon from the atmosphere. Once the forest reaches full maturity and is no longer adding biomass overall, then there is as much decaying material releasing CO2 as there is growing material absorbing it. A fully mature forest does not remove an ounce of CO2 from the air, it is in equilibrium and neither adds nor removes CO2. The only way to get it to remove CO2 again is to log some trees out of it.
“”Dr. James Hansen concluded:
“If the planet gets too warm, the water vapor feedback can cause a runaway greenhouse effect. The ocean boils into the atmosphere and life is extinguished. …””
OK, I’m just a member of the peanut gallery but….. if Earth’s atmosphere got so hot that the oceans would boil (from water vapor feedback not increased heat from some outside source), wouldn’t the water vapor in the atmosphere evaporate away first from that very heat therefore negating any further warming and then acutally reverse itself into rapid cooling due to lack of water vapor?
Here from 2001 are the IPCC model projections and their envelopes.
http://www.grida.no/publications/other/ipcc%5Ftar/?src=/climate/ipcc_tar/wg1/fig9-14.htm
I think we are currently at the lower edge of the envelopes.
“” Lee Kington (11:58:39) :
George E. Smith (10:48:04) :
I’m always bothered by these “trend” Lines. It seems quite common to simply join the first point to the last point with a straight line, and call that the trend.
Respectfully….. The slope (rate) of decline represented by the green line is created automatically by the software. It was not added by Crosspatch. While there are other methods of visually presenting data “trend lines” are a simple process and meaningful for the intended purpose. “”
Well Lee, my point was not to accuse crosspatch of any malfeasance. It matters not to me that some software automatically drew what it claims is a trend line, or whether a thinking human actually did it. I question the whole concept of believing that the trend has to be a linear equation at all.
If the process by which some software turned some observational data into a graph is such that each data point is sufficiently free of noise to be a believable value of the function; what value is there in such a “trendline”, given that ten years from now, a similar plot is likely to have an entirely different trend line, in which case one could argue that neither of them was in fact a real trend line. To me it is just as valid to claim that the trend is simply what the last two data points show is happening now. I look at that data above and I note two things.
It appears that we have recently come through a warming period, that then stopped, and then more recently started to cool down, and apaprently quite rapidly at that.
How often do we read that 10 of the last 12 years were the warmest on record proving incontrovertibly that the earth is warming. No that is not the only conclusion one can draw; in fact it is equivalent to the observation, “that some of the highest altitudes on earth can be found up in the mountains.”
It is common snese that a cluster of highest values will gather around a maximum; and not surprisingly, when we get to a new cooling minimum that turens around we will find a cluster od some of the lowest temperatures around that point.
So given that we have just gone through a maximum, I would say that the trend evidenced by recent data is that the trend has in fact turned steeply downwards.
But yes I understand that the climatology industry has its way of doing things.
In any case; there is nothing in the curve above to suggest it is in anyway linked to the trend in carbon dioxide as represented by the Mauna Loa data.
I see a pre-occupation with “mathematics” and particularly that esteemed branch of mathematics called “Statistics”, and it seems that physics is only indirectly related to climate “science”.
It would be nice if that “mathematics” used a little less “statistics” and perhaps a little more “sampled data systems theory”, so that people stopped trying to assign credibility to data, that sampled data system theory says is pure hogwash.
“wouldn’t the water vapor in the atmosphere evaporate away first from that very heat therefore negating any further warming and then acutally reverse itself into rapid cooling due to lack of water vapor?”
The problem is that the models assume a positive feedback from water vapor. Observations show a rather strong negative feedback from increased water vapor. Dr. Roy Spencer explains here how he came came to that conclusion and built a much simpler model that seems to run much closer to reality than any of the other so-called climate models.
Joel Shore:
I find your religious fervor entertaining, but in future please avoid responding to my posts. I’m afraid you have much learning to do, both about climate and human nature.
And as the post says that you responded to, man up and find a new religion. Your current one is disproved.
Reply: Please back down on the accusations of religious fervor please on both sides. Please, please please? ~ charles the moderator
@Dirk M. First, when i follow the directions i get a different graph which indicates 0.11 degF/decade warming. I used annual temperatures, which apparently the graph you’ve linked to does not. Did you repeat the steps? Did you get that same graph?
Secondly, in order to prove/disprove global warming, you should use global data. NCDC is only for US surface temps.
So besides some PDO and solar driven noise the climate didn’t change in the last hundred years after-all.
What will the next danger to mankind be, Anthropogenic climate stability where climate is in an unnatural stable state preventing evolution, adaptation and mankind will be threatened by extreme boredom. (sarcasm end)
Excellent post, Ed Scott. If nothing else, the deliberately false alarmism of the UN/IPCC, Gore, Strong, Mann, Hansen, Schmidt and others has put the spotlight on climate science.
Scrutiny of their lackadaisical/non-existent submission policies has even made the Royal Meteorological Society begin to squirm, now that it has been made clear that they have never required any archiving of the data or methodologies that submissions to their journal are based on: click
If the RMS adopts a policy requiring corroborating data, then that will become the gold standard, and any journal or scientist who refuses to provide essential data will be rightly suspected of prevaricating regarding their claims. There is currently much public money flowing into the climate sciences, and the more alarming a claim, the more likely that money and status will flow to the alarmists. Al Gore and James Hansen are classic examples.
And if transparency/public archiving had been required by the UN/IPCC, Michael Mann’s fraudulent hockey stick chart would never have been published.
The taxpayer is paying the freight, and the public has every right to see exactly what they are paying for. If the RMS does not adopt a policy requiring public archiving, they will certainly lose much credibility — and the issue will not go away.
I just voted on my other computer and in the time it took the pharyngula site got six votes while watts got four, as I left my other computer on the Watts page without refreshing. So we were voting slower at that moment folks. We were way ahead earlier on. Come on. Get that other computer fired up. Cheers, Ed.
whoo Global warming!! (which is BS in it’s purest form)
Meanwhile in the real world..Snow in Texas,Vegas and Alaska’s average winter temp for 12/08 is -20F..it’s been frickin cold here..the 07/08 winter months weren’t this bad.
The NCDC site is one of my favorites, but not for the temperature data that is tainted by (1) urban heat island effect, (2) land use effects, (3) atrocious siting locations, and (4) station dropout. (All 4 of these problems have been brilliantly document by Anthony.)
I like using the NCDC site for local, statewide, regional, and national PRECIPITATION trends. Precipitation measurements are not affected as much by problems (1) thru (4) and therefore are a great source of information to debunk AGW coolaid drinkers when they talk about global warming having made great changes to precipitation when in fact it has not.
Example: Look at L.A., the state of California, and the Southwest as a region on yearly, monthly, or seasonal scales. There is no trend outside normal variability. The wildfires in southern California have nothing to do with global warming induced changes in rainfall.
I recommend everyone put the NCDC site on a shortcut.
I think for scientist and amateur scientist alike we are holding our breath to see if a long solar minimum will have an effect on earths temperature. It’s sort of a grand experiment to see what really happens.
It will be difficult to cheat on this one!
“The wildfires in southern California have nothing to do with global warming induced changes in rainfall.”
A warming Earth should be a wetter Earth overall. Great droughts come with cool periods with some exceptions due to changes in weather patterns. There is evidence of some extreme drought periods in both the West and Midwest. One indication is swamped trees in Sierra Nevada lakes that are tens of meters under water now but at one time were thriving. Another indication is sand dunes in the US Midwest that are currently stabilized by prairie grass. Most of these extremely dry periods are associated with cooler climate conditions.
For us in California, the past 100 years or so have been one of the wettest periods in this interglacial. Some may remember a six-year drought back in the late 1980’s. That is nothing compared to the hundred-year droughts that appear to be rather common according to studies of tree rings from snags pulled from Sierra Nevada lakes. California will be in a world of hurt if we go into another hundred year drought cycle.
Gavin presents an interesting graph showing all the model runs overlayed on the actual smoothed temp. The problem is that all the models give weight to CO2 as the driver and try to random-out weather noise from weather variables. The problem with that assumption is that these models assume that there is a cause and effect relationship between something that is rising and something else that is also, but rather noisily, rising. That is like saying that since I prepare for winter every fall, my preparation causes winter. In the old gods and goddesses world, if you awoke before the Sun, you performed rituals to get the Sun to rise. And sure enough, every time you performed the ritual, the Sun rose. Therefore your rituals caused the Sun to rise. Lots of things can ride along with trends. And some might even seem to have a plausible mechanism that causes the other thing to rise. Even the best scientific minds can make this mistake early in the discovery phase of an observed coupled phenomenon. Only time (and that has been proven again and again through history) can eventually bring about new insight when one or the other thing does not happen (IE the goddess slept in and the Sun rose anyway).
So either the temperature continues to be very noisy regardless of CO2, or CO2 will stop rising. The third possibility is that scientists will discover a new and more accurate way to measure one or the other and discover that the old data was not accurate. Are any of these things plausible? You bet.
“True … unless you have forecast rising temperatures that are not only increasing but increasing at an exponential rate (looking like a hockey stick) where temperatures should never drop in *any* year, let alone have a 10 year down trend.” – crosspatch
first, i’m not sure what kind of hockey sticks you’ve played with, but all the ones i have ever used or seen are straight, with a sharp bend in them, not “exponentially growing”. secondly, i would like to see where any scientist has said that the temperatures should never drop in *any* year – because that’s about the most ridiculous statement i’ve heard in a long while, and so far i’ve only heard it from you.
“And furthermore, ak, since the RSS numbers now show a global anomaly for December 2008 that is 1/2 the anomaly of December 1987, we can say that all the heat accumulated since that time is now gone. It isn’t like all that heat has hidden itself to suddenly re-appear. It is flat gone. It will take more energy to heat the planet back up to what it was in … “ – crosspatch
it takes constant energy to keep the earth warm. thankfully, we have the sun to help us out with that. i’m not sure what link you are trying to make between dec 1997 and dec 2008 as far as heat storage.
an outdoor swimming pool will be warmer in late summer than late spring because of the accumulated thermal energy, but you may be in a surprise if you try to enjoy that warm water come december. but thankfully by next summer, you’ll be able to enjoy that pool again.
CO2 (if i guess correctly where you are going with this) like water stores heat efficiently (hence the GHG moniker), and i’d like to think you’re not under the assumption that it retains that heat with 100% efficiency, right? even in the coldest siberian winter, the C02 there retains some heat, whereas other non-GHG’s wont. that stored heat, though, won’t do much to change the fact that it’s fricking cold there in winter. but in the end, it retains more heat than a non-GHG would.
deeper pools of water will store more heat than shallower pools. larger concentrations of atmospheric GHG’s will store more heat than non-GHG’s.
I drove along a stretch of the Thames today (on an adjacent road, that it) and not a hippo could be seen. There was one in my bathroom mirror this morning, sadly.
I am curious about the difference between weather and “climate”. It is often said that climate is observed over 30 years. I can understand, for example, when I am on a diet, that my weight will decrease over several days, but from day to day, my weight may go up or down a bit depending just on how much water I drank and when I last took a pee. However, with weight it is obvious that the trend has to be across several days because we know that, for example, food transit through the gut can take a day or two. And so on. But what I haven’t seen mentioned in the popular news about AGW are the actual processes and cycles that could be causing fluctuations in temperature. Unless these are known and quantified, like, you could have a kilo of food and water in your gut and bladder at any time, so those are always the range of expected fluctuations, unless these are quantified, how do we know that climate can be observed over 30 years and that 30 is long enough to be free of natural fluctuations, not to mention short enough–we could be transitioning from one very long cycle to another and that would also mask the AGW signal, no? Say a 300 year cycle. Thirty years for “climate” seems a rediculously arbitrary number. And frankly until someone in the popular press can explain and justify the difference between weather and climate, I see no reason to trust any of it.
The next thing Joel Shore will say is the “hot spot” in the tropical troposphere is not a fingerprint of AGW, but is a signal of warming no matter the cause. 🙂 That is the latest polished turd popping up in various blogs.
Waiting…….
Well known CNN personality Lou Dobbs is putting his foot down and making a clear stand on global warming. Not only The Huffington Post but apparently (it appears) CNN is softening it’s stance on global warming. A quickly cooling earth is debating quite successfully with Al Gore. Al Gore avoided debating Václav Klaus. But he can’t run from the earth. The earth is winning the debate!
See this YouTube title:
Lou Dobbs Tonight Reports On Global Warming Jan5, 2009
at
OT; D’ALEO IN CNN
http://www.metsul.com/blog/
PUM!!!