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.
DR:
Here’s the real fingerprint of global warming: click
AK
Thermal mass of CO2 in the atmosphere? Close to its mass, less than a 10th of a percent of the atmosphere. Ever noticed how it gets cold on a clear night very quickly. That is because the thermal mass of the atmosphere is also very small with respect to say maybe the ocean. There is no magic that CO2 can retain more heat than O2 Or N or H2O vapor.
So to talk about this minor gas storing huge heat seems like alchemy at best.
Then why do Hansen and Schmidt publish papers about a 10 year ocean warming trend as though it is very meaningful? Why do they look at 10 year polar ice melt trends as though they are meaningful?
i haven’t read these papers. why do they say they are significant in the papers?
You can claim that a ten year trend is not meaningful because we have cycles of natural variability that are longer than ten years..
Not my claim, rather inferred by you (but not too far from the truth 😉
If you think that a ten year trend isn’t meaningful, then explain why please.
A RealClimate post starts with an image showing 8-year trend lines for every year from 1980 – 2005. The point of this exercise is to show that for any given year, the trend line may vary greatly from the adjacent years and may swing from positive to negative slope and viceversa. Does any one trend line accurately reflect what the temperatures are doing? no.
however, if you start tallying successive years, you’ll quickly find that, while no single year’s trend mimics another, warming/positive trends are more prevalent than cooler/negative trends by about 2:1.
that starts to take on significance, but only for that period. if you look solely at that image around 1982, or 1990, you can clearly see a cooling trend – the slopes are going negative – but even those clear trends are over-written by the fact that in that time period the temps have increased 0.5degC.
what we are seeing with the 10 years leading up to 2007 (positive trend) and up to 2008 (this blog post – negative trend) has been observed before but doesn’t, by itself, hold any weight on what temps will be doing 5, 10, 50 years from now.
two averages,
the last 100 years – mean average temperature
1909 – 2008 = 52.94
remove those warm recent years since 2000
50 years
1951 – 2000 = 52.94
Bill Illis,
You’re my hero! I found similar graphs on wikipedia (see attribution of recent climate change). It’s cool that you could recreate them. Anyhow, I went onto RC about 6 months ago and asked the very same question that you asked, i.e., why does the aerosol forcing looked “forced”? I found it surprising that no one could answer my question or explain the trend. It was at that very moment I knew AGW was a farce and that it was all tied to the models. Based on that experience and other exchanges, I realized that the modelers likely know their models are not accurate in any measurable way, but yet cannot admit it publically. The parallels to the financial mess are uncanny. It’s like watching a trainwreck in slow motion. There were many people on Wall Street who saw the mess coming, but couldn’t say anything because they were hoping that their investments would survive the upcoming crash. In other words, why say the truth knowing that you will have 100% chance of causing a run on your bank when if you say nothing, there’s maybe a 1% chance that you’ll get lucky and escape the damage. In summary, I truly believe the modelers know they are screwed and are hoping against hope that the agw charade can last another 10-20 years (i.e., retirement) or at least give them time to extricate themselves (like the banks, once again).
This NCDC data base is corrupt. It still shows 1998 as the hottest year in the US even though 1934 has been acknowledged to be the hottest on record. Build a graph from 1901 through 2000. 1998 will be the hottest year.
OT.
ASMU has not posted a reading for the entire month of January (Ya, I know that means 5 days) but that does seem unusual.
“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”
Hold the hockey stick and imagine that is a line of a graph. It would rise gradually until it suddenly takes off (eh!) upwards. Here is an example of an exponential graph. It shows a response quite similar to Mann’s temperature change forecast. If you look at the original so-called “hockey stick” graph you notice that the intention was to show runaway warming (which never happened).
“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.”
They have never uttered those direct words but they HAVE produced forecasts and provided graphics that would require exactly that. In 1998 we were being told we had only 10 more years before “runaway” warming. In 2008 we were told we had only 10 more years before “runaway” warming. A “runaway” state is where something begins an unstoppable change in a certain condition with the change accelerating over time. It produces an exponential “hockey stick” graph. In a “runaway” condition there can be no reversal because the feedback is all positive. It not only gets warmer but the increase in temperature is greater with each passing unit of time. In such a condition it would be impossible to cool at all or even remain stable. Gore has used the words “runaway” warming many times. Runaway warming means the same thing as “can never decline”. But more importantly, not only has temperature declined but *ALL* warming since December 1987 has been *ERASED*. It is gone. It doesn’t exist anymore. So today we sit at a point where the globe is cooler than it was 21 years ago. Not only have temperatures “reduced” year on year, every single but of the graph between 1987 and today can basically be replaced with a flat line. The Earth is not warmer now than it was 21 years ago. All of their forecasts have been proved wrong. There is no CO2 forced “global warming and that is my main problem with these people.
A: Today’s temperatures are not “unprecedented” in the Holocene (since the last ice age) and have been as much as 2.5 degrees warmer.
B: Temperature is not rising at an “unprecedented” rate. In fact, it isn’t rising at all. It is falling.
C: Nobody has shown any correlation between observed CO2 change and observed temperature change. There is a hypothesis that CO2 would cause warming that has not borne out over years of observation. Since the industrialization and increase in human CO2 emissions, there have been more cooling years than warming years.
So the Earth does not “have a fever”, it isn’t getting “hotter” and rising CO2 is not having the predicted impact. 0 for 3. What is the opposite of a “hat trick”?
Here is a graph.
I took the .xls spreadsheet data for AP (as referenced from WUWT), turned into a suitable series and as a first explore used the old trick of integration to see if anything fell out.
Note: like temperature datasets, without an absolute reference dataset graph tilt is arbitary, so do not read much into tilt.
This graph fits with long memory here in England, including asking others who are even older, and reports about winters. It seems to be the broad sweep.
The AP data does not seem to correlate well with the sunspot data I have, which suprised me. There is a lot more thinking and investigating to be done.
http://www.gpsl.net/data/AP_integrated_tnca1.png
So what physics property causes that shape or is this just plain nonsense?
(data off http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/01/04/solar-geomagnetic-ap-index-now-at-lowest-point-in-its-history/)
“It still shows 1998 as the hottest year in the US even though 1934 has been acknowledged to be the hottest on record.”
I believe 1934 was the hottest globally, not sure if that was the hottest in North America. I know GISS had to modify their adjustment which bumped the global 1998 to second place behind (I believe) 1933 or 1934. NOAA uses a different adjustment process to the USHCN data than GISS does. The data currently plotted for December 2008 may be unadjusted “raw” data. My guess is that we will see December 2008 adjusted warmer in the next week or so … the same time the narrative on the main page changes from November to December.
Don’t forget, we can vote once every 24 hours: click
“There is no magic that CO2 can retain more heat than O2 Or N or H2O vapor.” – TerryBixler
well, i’ll disagree with you on the O2 and N – they do not retain heat to the degree that H2O vapor and CO2 do. there is a reason theyare not called GHG’s.
so, there is less CO2 than water vapor (0.4% vs 2%-3%, 4% on a really humid day) in the atmosphere, which means that there is (2.5%/0.04%) 63x more water vapor than CO2 to put a number to it. i have no qualms with this fact.
if you consider the residence time of both CO2 and H2O vapor, you find that water equilibrates very quickly – hence a very short residence time. if you increase atmospheric water vapor by 20% or so, it will precipitate quickly out. if you take 20% out of the atmosphere, that 20% will be replaced within 3 weeks or so by oceanic evaporation. CO2 doesn’t have that same flexibility – there are natural cycles that remove CO2 but aren’t nearly as ubiquitous or as quick, as rain.
if the oceans weren’t constantly taking up CO2, the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere would be near double what it is now. it’s not that CO2 doesn’t go away, it just takes longer to remove it, hence the build up we see now.
so, in short, water vapor may be more massive in the atmosphere (again by about 60x) but CO2 sticks for more than 60x as long as water vapor.
As an EE, I have designed control loops. These loops typicly use negative feedback to force a return to a set point. The set point can move about, but feed back is a design requirment. I supose that there might be a way to design a system using positive feedback, but I have not seen one in my career used in a long lived system.The climate has been around a bit, and there are complex life form today which date to forms existing in the distant past. To believe otherwise is to reject the prevailing scientific wisdom. A sensitive climate would surely have selected them for extinction long ago, given that complex life forms require long periods for adaptation to changes in the climate set point.If this view is correct, the earth climate is likely dominated by negative feed back and set points vary slowly. IPCC models currently assume positive feed back. Dr Spencer has provide an indication of one negative feedback mechanism in the climate. There are probably others. The imperical data sugests that negative feedback is the dominent mode and logic tells us that it likely is.
If we are interested in science and understanding, should we not be more interested in truth and less in assigning blame? Should we not be more interesting assisting our brothers and sisters toward enlightenment and less about winning political victiories? After all policatical victories are temperal and not necessarly truths.
It is my belief that if we enlighten some, we will all get passed the greed and the self interest and the fear, that currently prevails. It is not consenses that rules in the long run after all, but truth. Does anyone agree?
VG (14:42:43) :
Anyone notice RSS temp TLT does NOT include South Pole data
http://www.ssmi.com/msu/msu_data_description.html#msu_amsu_trend_map_tlt
whereas all the others do TMT ect
Yes, conventionally the atmosphere is above ground!
“what we are seeing with the 10 years leading up to 2007 (positive trend) and up to 2008 (this blog post – negative trend) has been observed before but doesn’t, by itself, hold any weight on what temps will be doing 5, 10, 50 years from now.”
While that is true it is orthogonal to the point. The point being that forecasts made toward the end of the 20th century were that we could not possibly be in the situation we are in now with temperatures back down to what they were before the forecasts were issued. The current reality invalidates the forecast completely. CO2 has risen steadily, temperatures have not. Not a single indicator forecast has come to be. THAT is the point.
To argue that past trends do not guarantee future behavior is true but beside the point. I am not saying the current cooling will continue. I am saying the forecasts made by these people were wrong and have been proved wrong by direct observation. Their forecasts are wrong, their models are wrong and CO2 does not cause “global warming”. To believe otherwise is belief not based on any physical reality. Hansen would be best served to say that his models are incorrect, human generated CO2 isn’t causing any “global warming” or any other detrimental climate impact over the past 70 years of increased output.
That is not to say that human influences are not causing local warming due to things such as large scale farming, deforestation, and urbanization because they are. But CO2 output from fossil fuel consumption is not.
Chris,
Yes, it seems like the “run” on AGW has begun. No one wants to be the last in line. Everyone is proclaiming the idiocy of this morally bankrupt belief system. All you have to do is look around. Google “Global Warming”. Google “Global Cooling”. Read the articles. People are NOT stupid. They are figuring it out. Talk to your friends. Admit that you are starting to have doubts about AGW. You know what? Most of your friends have huge doubts too. They will be happy to be able to hear the truth, and to finally let this enormous weight fall from their shoulders. Tell them to make WUWT their home page. Tell them to straighten out their Mayors, their governors and their representives up to and including the President. Tell them to protect the intellectual capital of this great land of ours.
Don’t be the last person standing when the music stops. The lies have been refuted by Mother Earth herself. Sure she had a few hot flashes, but that time is over for a long while. She doesn’t want us lying about her anymore.
Respect your mother. The Earth controls her own destiny. Take care of your family and your neighborhood, and maybe Al can move back to Tennessee, and Jim can move back to Iowa, and stop telling tall tales about Earth, her temperatures and her people.
It is now time for freedom, freedom from fear, freedom from want and freedom from the lies of our would be masters. The laughter has already started, and the celebrations have begun.
Who will be the last to “get” the joke?
obodog (19:59:29) :
As an EE, I have designed control loops. These loops typicly use negative feedback to force a return to a set point. The set point can move about, but feed back is a design requirment. I supose that there might be a way to design a system using positive feedback, but I have not seen one in my career used in a long lived system.
Never seen an oscillator?
REPLY: I’ve seen, and designed, many. They are stable state devices. The more stable the oscillator, the better. – Anthony
robodog (19:59:29) :
…
It is my belief that if we enlighten some, we will all get passed the greed and the self interest and the fear, that currently prevails. It is not consenses that rules in the long run after all, but truth. Does anyone agree?
WRT Negative feedback dominance of the climate – strongly agree.
However, wrt the rest – I am a cynic. Please point out a historical period when greed, self interest and fear, did not prevail.
But also – there is much real compassion, courage and generosity of spirit within humanity and no reason to give up hope or strive for better outcomes than have been seen in the past.
Mike Bryant (20:06:02) :
Who will be the last to “get” the joke?
Well said.
“so, in short, water vapor may be more massive in the atmosphere (again by about 60x) but CO2 sticks for more than 60x as long as water vapor.”
That is another true but pointless statement. It doesn’t matter how long a water molecule stays in the air before it rains out, it matters how many water molecules are in the atmosphere at any given moment.
If you increase the temperature, you increase evaporation. So while a water molecule may condense out, it will be replaced by another one that evaporates. Imagine you have 35% relative humidity. Now you increase the temperature. At first the air will become dryer and more water will evaporate and the relative humidity will return to 35%. So while the *relative* humidity remains unchanged, the *absolute* humidity … the number of water molecules evaporated into the atmosphere has increased. Eventually both evaporation and condensation will increase. This will cause the transport of a lot of heat high into the atmosphere where it will radiate into space.
Water is a natural evaporative cooler; a swamp cooler, if you will. More water will be absorbed into the system as needed but how long an individual molecule of water molecule stays evaporated is a pointless argument as it doesn’t mean anything. What matters is how many of them are evaporated at any given moment.
Fernando (19:17:20) :
“OT; D’ALEO IN CNN
http://www.metsul.com/blog/
PUM!!!”
Lou Dobs obviously is well informed about the AGW religion.
After the remarks from some CNN Meteorologists it looks like the course is turning 180 degree. Let’s see wattsupwiththat
AK: “so, in short, water vapor may be more massive in the atmosphere (again by about 60x) but CO2 sticks for more than 60x as long as water vapor.”
Lol. Nah, water lasts forever.
And again, how long CO2 molecules stays in the atmosphere only matters if they have some significant impact on temperature. At this point I believe it is safe to say that the impact of CO2 has been greatly overstated. We see no significant climate impact from CO2 increase to date. Doubling CO2 is not likely to have much more than a half-degree impact on climate and may in fact have less if it results in greater evaporation and increased negative feedback from the water vapor.
It doesn’t matter if CO2 stays in the atmosphere for a million years if it doesn’t have much impact and it is becoming more obvious with passing time that CO2 does not have the impact it has been promoted as having.
Tim C (19:44:35) :
Here is a graph.
…
The AP data does not seem to correlate well with the sunspot data I have, which suprised me. There is a lot more thinking and investigating to be done.
http://www.gpsl.net/data/AP_integrated_tnca1.png
I am rusty, you are integrating how to get the plot?
As for sun cycles, there is a 22 year cycle where the sun reverses polarity.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunspot_cycles:
The physical basis of the solar cycle was elucidated in the early twentieth century by George Ellery Hale and collaborators, who in 1908 showed that sunspots were strongly magnetized (this was the first detection of magnetic fields outside the Earth), and in 1919 went on to show that the magnetic polarity of sunspot pairs:
* is always the same in a given solar hemisphere throughout a given sunspot cycle;
* is opposite across hemispheres throughout a cycle;
* reverses itself in both hemispheres from one sunspot cycle to the next.
Hale’s observations revealed that the solar cycle is a magnetic cycle with an average duration of 22 years. However, because very nearly all manifestations of the solar cycle are insensitive to magnetic polarity, it remains common usage to speak of the “11-year solar cycle”.
Half a century later, the father-and-son team of Harold Babcock and Horace Babcock showed that the solar surface is magnetized even outside of sunspots; that this weaker magnetic field is to first order a dipole; and that this dipole also undergoes polarity reversals with the same period as the sunspot cycle (see Fig. 3 below). These various observations established that the solar cycle is a spatiotemporal magnetic process unfolding over the Sun as a whole.
Oh, and sea level change has started a gradual negative trend since 2006, too.