RSS is out for December, down slightly

Of course the other way to look at iit might be that, with the possible changing phase of the PDO/very strong La Nina in combination with low solar activity, it might be equally as plausible to expect a downward spike comparable to the upward spike of 1998!!##?? I wonder how IPCC would explain that?
Ben

It looks like they’ve run a “Hansen” algoithim over the data for those ice chart, in the ealier version the lines don’t cross, yet in the current one they do in October.
Something distinctly fishy.

Pierre,
I was taking into effect the rather cold snap across eastern Siberia and the very cold central/western North America. These places were very much warmer than normal (almost record breaking) in November. I figured that should drop the average globally by about 0.2°C. However, while taking that into account I ended up ignoring the vast warmth that has accumulated in the doldrums in the S.Pacific and S.Atlantic, which has warmed by well over 1°C (SST-wise) over the month of December.
Those warming SST’s probably offset the -4°C to -6°C temperature anomalies over the above mentioned land areas. It’ll be interesting to see where land anomalies end up in December using the surface temperature metrics. I don’t think it’ll be as cold as January ’08 by a long shot. But it certainly won’t have the typical land/ocean disparity we usually see when the numbers are reported.

dennis ward (03:40:34) :
Given that there has been little sunspot activity of late and the fact an ice age is supposedly on its way, I would have expected a very big drop. Instead global temperatures have been rising for 9 of the last 12 months.
By my calculations, the anomaly increase for 2008 is +.244 C. Therefore, assuming straightline yearly increases, in 2050, the anomaly relative to the baseline period will be +10.25 C. Thanks for pointing that out. sarc/off

dennis ward (03:40:34) :
“Given that there has been little sunspot activity of late and the fact an ice age is supposedly on its way, I would have expected a very big drop. Instead global temperatures have been rising for 9 of the last 12 months”.
If you study the graph closely, you will see it’s quite normal (23/30 intances) for the temps to take an up turn in the latter half of the year. Yes, temps have been very gradually rising, but it is a very subdued affair by comparison with many of the dramatic & quite normal upward spikes of the majority of previous years.
As I have already pointed out though, there were very similar circumstances in the lead up to 1998. This however, was within the context of an exceptional El Nino year (1998) and there is little or no sign of such conditions prevailing in 2009.
Too early to call I would say but if you look at the pattern trends within the graph and your opinion isn’t swayed by either prevailing or skeptical science, I would say the odds are more in favour of a drop away towards turn of the century (1999 – 2001) values.
I have also pointed out that should we experience La Nina conditions as extreme as those of El Nino (1998) conditions, in combination with lower solar activity, it is conceivable that we could indeed see a down spike as extreme as the up spike of 1998. That would drop us down to mid 1980’s values and while not an ice age, it would feel very bitter by comparison with recent years.
While a drop away to turn of century values for 2009 could still be discounted as a small blip within a general warming trend, a drop to mid 1980’s values would probably raise a few eye brows!!
Ben

Hi Anthony;
I’ve become an avid reader of your site over the past year, and rely on your balanced and realistic observations and reports in my personal efforts to understand climate as much as possible.
Our regional cable company has been running Gore’s AIT a few times recently, and it’s caused all sorts of emotional local letters to the editor taking both sides of the debate. Anytime Gore’s message is regurgitated as factual or good science, I feel a slight blood pressure rise, and I finally had to make a comment based on sound information from your website.
I hope you don’t mind, but you may have a pile of new readers staring today. You can review my letter by going to http://www.castanet.net, place your cursor on News, then slide down and click on Letters.
My brief entry is titled “The real word on climate change”, and references your site.
Thanks for your dedication to this subject and for a great website. Very educational and enjoyable.
Ken Luknowsky
Kelowna, BC, Canada

Raining here in Nothern Vermont. Again.
🙁

Hansen rarely posts anything less than +0.50°C.

“All the warming continues to be in the NH. Almost none in the Tropics or SH.”
As someone (perhaps R. Wood) pointed out in an adjoining thread the albedo of the oceans perpendicular to the unrefracted incoming solar is low with respect to land.
So of the 40% of solar TSI that actually reaches the surface, more is absorbed by the oceans and much, much more retained:
85% of this value falls between the Tropics, and by virtual of the Earth’s elliptic orbit 7% more falls on the SO than the NH.
Now water’s heat capacity is 1.5 times larger than earth and yet its emissivity is only 60% that of dirt or green leaves, 70% that of snow!
Metaphorically, the NH land masses comprise Gaia’s radiator fins and the SO its heatsink.
The oceans, in turn, have 1000 times the heat capacity of the atmosphere. The emissivity of CO2 at STP is 1000 times smaller than green leaves or dirt, that of gaseous H2O, 500 times smaller. The transfer of energy, therefore, is inexorably outward from the surface toward space.
The imbalances between these interfaces break any analogy between the earth and a ‘grey body’. Heat transfer in this system, on the contrary, is chaotic and episodic.
So, when a ‘physicist’ employs the analogy of a ‘black body’ to any low-temperature, low-pressure gas such as Earth’s atmosphere you are being lied to in some fashion or other.

Oh my goodness. This PDF from Christopher Monckton is absolutely priceless. Here’s a snippet:

The truth: Since global temperatures have followed a cooling trend for eight straight years (or 11, if one goes back to the exceptionally warm el Nino year of 1998), most of the supposed recent consequences of “global warming” mentioned in the article – to the extent that the phenomena mentioned have occurred at all – cannot possibly have arisen because of “global warming”, because there has not been any. What is more, it is not only the atmosphere but also the oceans that have shown a cooling trend. Not one of the models relied upon by the IPCC had forecast the cooling. The pink region in Figure 1 is the IPCC’s range of projections for future “global warming”, starting in 2001. It bears no correlation whatsoever to the observed downtrend. From January 2009, SPPI will be publishing a monthly-updated CO2 Report that will make these and other data regularly available, and will help to dispel climate myths such as those perpetrated and perpetuated in the Wall Street Journal.
“Higher temperatures make weather patterns more unstable”: In fact, the reverse is true. The world has warmed by 0.7 degrees C since 1900: yet, despite this warming, the number of landfalling Atlantic hurricanes shows no trend at all throughout the 20th century; the number of intense tropical cyclones and typhoons has been falling throughout the 30-year period of the satellite record; and it is settled science that, outside the tropics, warmer weather will generally mean fewer storms, because the differential between warmer and cooler parts of the globe will diminish.
“The planet has grown steadily warmer in recent decades”: In fact, the reverse is true. The fastest rate of growth in global temperature, at a rate equivalent to almost 2 degrees Celsius per century, was between 1910 and 1930. No “recent decade” has matched that warming rate, though 1975-1998 came close. Between 1940 and 1975, and again between 2001 and the present, global temperatures have exhibited a downtrend. In fact, the current warming began 300 years ago, at the end of the Maunder Minimum, a 70-year period when there were very few sunspots on the face of the Sun. Between 1700 and 1735, according to the world’s oldest instrumental temperature dataset, the temperature in central England rose by 2.2 degrees C, equivalent to 6.3 C/century, or about nine times the warming rate seen in the 20th century.

Absolutely priceless.

>Not much change really, but it is surprising in that many people expected a larger gain in December, not a slight drop.
Which people Anthony? With La Nina trying to re-establish it would be unusual to see RSS to show a “larger” gain.
And, perhaps you might give us your theories as to why the temperature continues to be well above zero despite a cold sun and “La Nina”.
REPLY: There were a number of comments here expecting a gain. As for cold sun and La Nina…surely you know about thermal intertia? – Anthony

Metaphorically, the NH land masses comprise Gaia’s radiator fins and the SO its heatsink.
Were this the case then we would see substantial heat flows (over time periods up to a decade or 2) from the SH to the NH. No such heat flows have been observed and it’s safe to assume they don’t exist.
Which means both hemispheres are in thermal equilibrium. Heat gains equal heat loses in each hemisphere, and albedo differences are balanced by an equal radiative (or convection mechanism) to remove the heat gained by the albedo difference.
Note this is a discussion about heat and not temperatures. The large summer and smaller winter temperature differences between the 2 hemispheres is satisfactorily explained by the thermal properties of water and water vapour.
Anyway, the context of the discussion is the effect of increased GHG/CO2. And what remains to be explained is why increased GHG/CO2 have no significant effect on SH and tropical temperatures, when we should expect an equal heat gain in both hemispheres.
BTW, I have been bringing this point up for years and the only explanation the Warmers can come up with is heat transfer from the SH to the NH, which we conveniently can’t find, never mind measure.