December UAH global temperature anomaly – down by almost half

But NOAA here in Ne Oregon, promises a warm, dry,than normal January. Praise
Gaia and her Profit….
Believe! El Nino is real and he’s wearing a Superbaby outfit….
This is actually what they are saying that Nino is going save US from winter….
OK.

Where did the data come from? It is not on the http://vortex.nsstc.uah.edu/public/msu/t2lt/tltglhmam_5.2 site yet.
John M Reynolds

The PDO can change quit quickly:
http://climate.gi.alaska.edu/ClimTrends/Change/TempChange.html

Roy,
Is there anywhere to get this data in digital form ??

One burning question: Have those satellites been adjusted with surface stations?, if so, how would these temperatures look if readjusted to checked reality, taking into consideration surfacestations.org recorded error margins?.

Looking at the latest NOAA sea surface temperature anomaly data, the warm area of the Pacific El Nino is obvious, and the north Pacific off Alaska is till cool (phase of the PDO), but the rest of the global oceans also look ‘warm’ and I wonder if it is ENSO that affects the globe – as I have always been led to believe, or the globe that affects ENSO. If the latter, we would have to be looking at a major shift in cloud cover or a reduction in cloud-free atmospheric transparency (or both) in order to get extra warming SW radiation to the ocean surface on this scale. Does anybody have such up-to-date data?
Could Atmospheric transparency be affected by magnetic/electrical properties related to voltages? Is there an ENSO signal of that kind that would be global but affect the Pacific more strongly?

“Henry chance (07:37:08) :
Worse than expected. Weather is not climate they say.”
as in “Reality is not fantasy”?

Wow
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=16781

Richard M (07:37:09) Do you see any El Nino here?:
http://weather.unisys.com/surface/sst_anom.gif
The El Nino was named as such , many years ago, by the fishermen along the northern coasts of Peru, (SA west coast) when such a warm current (el Nino) appeared around christmas, running from NORTH to SOUTH.
However the fact is, as you see, that the contrary is happening: A cold current, called the Humboldt´s current, it is running from SOUTH to NORTH. (All that blue color along SA coasts).
If there were an El Nino, that yellow-green color little spots along the central pacific equator line would have streched reaching the SA coasts displacing the humboldt´s current, which has not happened. If you look only at the SOI index, being negative you would believe there is an El Nino, but SOI refers only to difference of pressures between Tahiti and Darwin which, in these interesting times, mean nothing.

I saw this nine year chart of satellite temperatures vs. CO2 for nine years ending 2009 – negative correlation!
http://www.c3headlines.com/2010/01/satellite-confirms-that-global-temps-continue-decline-trend-a-minus-151f-per-century-rate.html

As I look at the snow that won’t melt and the temperature thermometer that won’t climb out of the teens, I suspect Arkansas didn’t get the El Nino memo.
Think I’ll call in and bug these guys on the radio show…
Highlights on the Show…January 4 – 8, 2010 | Thom Hartmann
… Chance to Save Humanity” Thom speaks with Dr. James Hansen about his new book…
http://www.thomhartmann.com/2010/01/04/highlights-on-the-show-january-4-8-2010/

Weather is not climate OK, but that is surely most relevant back in the day when all we knew about weather/climate was our own little corner of it.
But now we know what is happening all over the world at the same time and we know that it is a bad winter all across the Northern Hemisphere from N. America to Europe to Russia to China and Korea and it is also affecting the Indian Sub-Continent.
We cannot assume that our own little area of sub-zero tundra is balanced out overall by equal or more extensive areas of above average balmy weather. Yes, I am sure there are a few relative warmspots but overall the picture is quite clear. It is a brutal winter all across the NH, not simply a temporary local incursion of arctic air into one particular area.
Imagine if you will a heat wave all at the same time and killing people all across the Northern Hemisphere from N. America to Europe to Russia to China and Korea and also affecting the Indian Sub-Continent.
Would this be reported with no mention of Global Warming? I think not. It would be loudly proclaimed as definitive proof of the reality of warming and accompanied by proclaimations of doom for all the world.

Not to worry about a wee bit of cooling. The extra CO2 produced by massive increases of people burning fossil fuels attempting to stay warm should kick in any day now. In the meantime keep a sharp eye out for Polar Bears heading south for the winter.

Doh! sorry…. if all else fails, read directions…. 🙂

Thanks, Roy, for continuing to post information on reality.
The conflict with predictions made by an unholy alliance of scientists and politicians is obvious to all.
With kind regards,
Oliver K. Manuel

I think we are now finding out how a negative PDO affects El Ninos. It kind of reminds me in a way of how wind shear destroys cyclones.

I was actually surprised that the NH anomaly was as high as it was. I was expecting it to be less than October.

MJK
Could you please tell me what created the “silly idea” of catastrophic warming in the first place? It sure isn’t the data or the physics of radiation transport. Nor was it anything to do with thermodynamics.
Your double standard is showing?
It isn’t a few weeks, we are talking about 3 years and running with no real summer and brutal winters. I am starting to doubt even the satellite data; when they tell me above normal and we go year after year wildly colder than any time in 35 years. I can accept this as natural variability but the idea of warming…. Well there hasn’t been any in North America in the last 50 years. so it sure ain’t “global”
The US data sets are the largest and most complete. Even though they are not very good, what makes you so sure that they are wrong and some nudocumented compilation of other data is right?

“MJK (08:00:13) :
[…] This conveniently “hides” the return in 2009 to well above average
[…] The use of the term no “net” warming in the commentary is another clever trick. […]”
I heard that these are standard colloquialisms amongst “credible climatologists”? From one Dr. Phil Jones? Describing what they normally do?
Listen MJK. We do not hate you. We are nice people. Nobody of your fellows will find out when you just open your eyes. Don’t let them tell you what to think. Decide for yourself.

MJK (08:00:13) :
Readers might also be intersted i[…] this decade was the warmest on record in Australia and that 2009 the second warmest year on record. […]
It may help some visitors to this blog shift their focus from the silly idea that a couple of cold weeks in a northern winter is proof that GLOBAL warming has stopped.

It is silly to think 10 years represents climate, or that “warmest year on record” has anything to do with proof of global warming.

MJK — Any blind freddy reading the graph can see that it shows a warming trend every decade for the past three decades.
Wow, you figured this out all by yourself? UAH depicts the basic 0.7 degrees C / century rise we all expect. This is not news, nor is it proof of anthropogenic cause, nor is it proof of CO2 warming. The expected temp rise is a continuation of the same trend in effect since the end of the LIA.

Thank you Roy, I always look forward to this data. While there is an El Nino going on, and the “tropics continue warm”, is it unusual for the tropics to exceed the NH anomalies only 5 months of the year, and the SH 6 months?

MJK (08:00:13) : “It may help some visitors to this blog shift their focus from the silly idea that a couple of cold weeks in a northern winter is proof that GLOBAL warming has stopped.”
It might also help some visitors to MJK’s world to shift their focus from the silly idea that a couple of warm decades is proof that global warming ever existed in the first place. If one used decadal smoothing (rather than 25 weeks) and reached far enough back for the discussion to really involve climate and not weather, it would become apparent the world is simply recovering from the Maunder Minimum/Little Ice Age. Should the long term trend continue, a century or so down the road we might reach the climatic conditions of the MWP. Give it several centuries and we might even reach the Interglacial Climate Optimums of the Egyptian dynasties and Middle Eastern empires five thousand years ago. However, looking at the behavior of previous Interglacials, we are more likely to continue the long-term over-all cooling trend.
Remember: the AGW Movement is not about weather or climate. It is about Maurice Strong’s efforts to establish a global governance.

With ref to MJK…the words “warmest on record” relate to approx 150 years of a planet that has been around circa 5 billion years.
The last three decades have been warmer than the previous three but we were heading for an Ice Age 1940 to 1970…allegedly,
Australia may well be quite warm but the rest of us are not….we have just had three lousy summers and are now on our third very cold winter in succession.
The Poles are freezing up and we understand that Antarctica had it’s greatest extent of ice ever recorded during the souther hemisphere’s latest winter…but thats only 30 years….out of the 5 billion.
No increase in overall temp in 11 years whilst CO2 has risen 4-5% and no hot spots in the Troposphere which would be the signal of CO2 related AGW.
Clearly bigger things are at play…..like the Sun.
Roy Spencer is trying to take a more balanced view from his data set, unlike CRU Hadley Centre and it’s cast of resident comedians who think they can deny the historical existence of the “Medieval Warming Period”.

In the graph a “25 month running average” is used. I’d like to learn more about it.
“In statistics, a moving average, also called rolling average, rolling mean or running average, is a type of finite impulse response filter used to analyze a set of data points by creating a series of averages of different subsets of the full data set. Given a series of numbers, and a fixed subset size, the moving average can be obtained. The average of the first subset of numbers is calculated. The fixed subset is moved forward to the new subset of numbers, and its average is calculated. The process is repeated over the entire data series. The plot line connecting all the (fixed) averages is the moving average. Thus, a moving average is not a single number, but it is a set of numbers, each of which is the average of the corresponding subset of a larger set of data points. A moving average may also use unequal weights for each data value in the subset to emphasize particular values in the subset. A moving average is commonly used with time series data to smooth out short-term fluctuations and highlight longer-term trends or cycles. The threshold between short-term and long-term depends on the application, and the parameters of the moving average will be set accordingly.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moving_average
If you could, please describe the specific equation being used, any weights used, and how it’s useful (e.g. why 25 months rather than some other number) plus what information it can be used to obtain from the temperature data.
Also, where is the raw data obtained from? Which program is used to generate the graph? Is it open sourced? If so where can it be obtained from? If not, why isn’t it open sourced?
Thanks.

Why do all these charts show temperature anomaly rather than just straight temperature? Every time I look at these charts I have to figure out what the “normal” period is that the anomaly is measured against, and it just confuses things.
Plus, the setting of the “normal” period seems like an excellent way to massage the numbers to show what you want, doesn’t it? Wouldn’t just providing the average temperature in question remove some of the potential for a misleading chart? Clearly I’m uniformed. Can someone help me out?

“It may help some visitors to this blog shift their focus from the silly idea that a couple of cold weeks in a northern winter is proof that GLOBAL warming has stopped.”
“It may help some visitors to warmer blogs shift their focus from the silly idea that a couple of warm years in a late inter-glacial period is proof that GLOBAL warming has started.”

MJK – a lay person, I was under the impression that it was “settled science” that we have had global warming ever since the end of the little ice age. Am I wrong? By the way, what is the ideal average world temperature, on a daily, monthly or yearly basis? And I don’t mean to be a bore but what is the ideal CO2 concentration in the atmosphere in ppm?

As a follow up this is what I was referring to:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jan/03/peru-mountain-farmers-winter-cold
[snip] during an El Nino year? BTW how did the idea that this was going to be an El Nino year come up? Maybe some climate models get it wrong or something? I know they predicted the 1998 one. Perhaps it was only predictable because it was such a huge event?

“David Segesta (07:40:23) :
Why use a 25 month running average?”
Same question.

MJK — Any blind freddy reading the graph can see that it shows a warming trend every decade for the past three decades.
Thanks MJK for this Oz link. This helps me confirm in my mind that data in one region or data from one time period is meaningless scientifically outside of the proper global coverage and historical time series. I hope he will join the campaign for proper transparency of raw data and full diclosure of sampling protocols and data quality.

I’m in FL and it dropped down to the 30’s last night.

All these oscillating weather sources don’t dance to the same drummer. I would imagine, in a thought experiment, that some are long regular oscillations with larger regular phases, some are regularly shorter, and some are chaotically shorter. I could go on with this thought experiment and mix/match the ocsillation variables. I could also, in my thought experiment, imagine that certain oscillations catch each other when they happen together and force a long spell of hot or cold, wet or dry, calm or windy conditions.
This has come to mind once I began studying the Arctic Oscillation together with the AMO, PDO, El Nino, and jet stream. I can imagine a period of cold wet conditions bringing lots of snow to glaciers and freezing up rivers and streams, followed by incredibly frigid weather damming up larger rivers that together continues to build a mini-ice age, followed by warming.
I went to Google and looked at the satellite topographical map of my ranch. At 3500 feet up, I am sitting right in the middle of what looks like a vast shallow lake below a gouged out terminal moraine. Wonder how many times it happened.

DirkH (08:17:50) :
Look at this entry in the BBC’s Richard Black’s blog:
He noticed that the AO went negative. He doesn’t even try to give it much of an AGW spin.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/richardblack/2010/01/arctic_conditions_arctic_cause.html
———————————————————
Somehow, I don’t think that Richard Black got his 3-month AO index diagram from the NOAA. (if he even knows what that is)
Much easier to have found and bookmarked
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/12/28/the-arctic-oscillation-index-goes-strongly-negative/#more-14605
Perhaps he’s climbed to the top of the fence.

Can I just be sure? The anomaly is with respect to a 79-98 average which is itself calculated entirely from satellite measurements that are entirely independent of any surface instrument. Yes? So I may conclude that Dr Spencer now has a 30 year run of satellite measurements that make no use whatever of surface instruments. (30 years seems to be something of a magic number for climate people.) Anyway, my compliments to Dr Spencer for plotting the moving averages without using “padding” to give the appearance of their spanning the whole period – that “padding” trick always seemed to me to imply that the “Team” were not workers of the highest standards of integrity or competence.

OT Iain Dale’s readers have a guess at why the Head of the Met Office got a 25% pay rise 😀
http://iaindale.blogspot.com/2010/01/challenge-of-day.html
His blog got 1m readers last year.

Please, let’s just go ahead and declare AGW a religion in the US. There’s a constitutional amendment that prevents our government from establishing a religion, so we’d have legal grounds to strike down any law that uses global warming as the root cause… bye, bye cap-and-trade and the EPA could not regulate CO2…

I noticed a comment from MJK about this decade being the hottest on record. 150 years of record.
It’s interesting how often it gets mentioned in the context of “are we currently warming or cooling”. It may be that MJK doesn’t know his/her material so well but I was interested to see that realclimate.org pulls this one out, even though they should know their subject..
http://scienceofdoom.com/2010/01/04/warmest-decade-on-record-and-the-laymans-guide-to-autocorrelation/
To use the economics analogy in the link, if you wanted to find out whether or not we were in a recession, would pointing to the fact that the current decade has the highest GDP on record be relevant? In fact, I’ve never heard an economist or even a less knowledgeable politician try that in a recession.
And yet, “real climate scientists” use this flawed approach with warming/cooling and the “warmest decade on record”.

Leif Svalgaard (10:54:29) :
“Roy’s trick to hide the increase” may come back and bite him. 25-month averaging also flattens the 1998 El Niño anomaly – we’re likely to see the highest average global temperatures ever recorded by satellite in a year or so calculated on his new basis.
This assumes Dr Spencer sticks to 25-month averaging.

Whoa – great stuff – hat tip to Bishophill for this
http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/shortsharpscience/2010/01/times-withdraws-misleading-cli.html

Who was the stellar brainiac that came up with the 25 month average?
Screw 1, 3, 6, 12, 18, 24, 36, lets use twenty five due to its a more logical number much more easily divided by 5. Or what?
Why not go all “mental” using a 12 month average, midsummer to midsummer, using -98 as a starting point? The alarmist’s equation does work, right?
(When was it logical to use a 25 month cycle in a 12 month year cycle? If you start in Jan. you end up with starting the next cycle not until Mars two years later. Add another cycle and you end up with starting in April for the next cycle. And so on. Get the problem when it comes to the weather and climate?)

I think you need to give that satellite a kick. Where I live (southeast Michigan) December was 1.5F cooler than average. And we were not in an area that was especially hard hit by winter.

Seems the 0.4 degree increase in UAH graph in June to August in 2009 is where the falacy lies. Some expert in statistics should prove this 0.4 degree hike in those 60 days is the joke and merely hides the decline in following months up to today.
Sea surface (3300 ft) temperatures from 6/2009 to 12/2009 show no increase looking at http://discover.itsc.uah.edu/amsutemps/execute.csh?amsutemps+001 .

On the other hand, maybe I should get a cup of coffee down me and read the 90 some comments above before posting anything!

Re: Pamela Gray (11:32:58)
…and if they are next-door to each other spatially …
… could be a 0, 1/4, 1/2, or 3/4-cycle ordinal phase-concordance – like a back-eddy opposite to the main flow, along the shore, downstream from a narrows … (might want to look at the 1st derivative smoothed to a main harmonic…)
The spatial phase-shifts give “interesting” clues …(that get smeared out – or distorted – by amplitude-averages sometimes…)

Re: 1DandyTroll (12:35:15)
Rather than “5-month”, “13-month”, “25-month”, the thing to do is AVERAGE(A2:A6,average(A1,A7)) or AVERAGE(A2:A12,average(A1,A13)) or AVERAGE(A2:A24,average(A1,A25)).

Re: David Segesta (13:09:50)
People use odd-numbered boxcar-kernels for window-centering purposes, but the issues arising from missing the harmonics are easily avoided – [see my note at Paul Vaughan (13:22:25)].
Btw: You can do spectral analysis with simple boxcar-kernels – it’s a good way to learn how (very seriously) misleading FFT is for nonstationary series.

Wow, DirkH (12:06:59), you really contributed to answering my valid questions with your comment. You’re a stellar scientist or science educator. Top Marks – not! You get an F.
One of the main problems in the ‘debate’ about climate science is that people are so quick to use nasty or mocking or sarcastic ad hominem personal attacks rather than simply answering peoples questions straight up. Not everyone has the inside knowledge of the experts.
Asking Roy Spencer if he used a “weight” on the smoothing and to show his 25 month running average function are valid question. As is asking what information he gleens from such a running average on temperature graphs. Roy Spencer is the expert after all and I’m learning this subject so it’s appropriate to ask questions, even the most basic questions. Even if I wasn’t learning this topic it would be appropriate to ask someone to show their work so that it can be audited and checked and replicated on my own. It’s known as open (source) science. It’s what WUWT and Climate Audit and Paths To Knowledge dot Net (http://www.PathsToKnowledge.net) advocate.
Obviously DirkH one can infer from your comment that you don’t advocate learning about a scientist’s graph nor think it’s relevant to clarify it’s construction.
Maybe this has been discussed before, if someone could please supply a reference I would appreciate it.
Now often I get this type of response from those that are highly educated in their field. Often that is worse than if the person is just some random commenter since it shows that a scientist looks down at others learning or asking auditing questions. That’s part of the extreme arrogance that many scientists have and it’s a rather repugnant aspect of science as the Climategate Jones, Mann, et. al. alleged scientists have proven drives them. Even worse is when the person is not just educated but also a science educator; for some reason they think that their role as an educator ends when their class ends and they become monsters on the web blasting anyone who asks questions. Typically the worse of these in the climate debate are the “alleged professors”.
In any event, DirkH it’s a good thing that you’re not a science teacher of mine. Hopefully you’re not an actual climate scientist or scientist either.
Anyway the questions still stands.

Lief:
“Changing to a 25-month smooth will henceforth be known as “Roy’s trick to hide the increase” …”
“He’ll obviously then choose another interval as needed to maintain the trick :-)”
Very immature Lief. You know that hottest years are not selected from a smoothed line. They are selected based on the average for the twelve months.
Shouldn’t you be figuring out why the correlation between Svensmark’s theory and the climate is so good? I’m curious to see where you are going to come down with regards to that theory – now that you appear to have bought into the AGW fraud. You seem to be reluctant to place a bet one way or the other on Svensmark.

Wayne, that uah plot-site is FANTASTIC!
But isnt this from UAH which started measuring in 1979 ?
I wonder why it starts in 2003, not 1979?

Except, there are bugs.
Try;
-Tick all checkboxes ON.
-Click Readraw
-Then change to Sealevel.
-All checkboxes are unchecked unless 2009 and 2010
=>Thats too bad.
-Now you must check all checkboxes ON again
-Click Redraw =>It plots one year only…….

Leif Svalgaard (12:41:15) :
This assumes Dr Spencer sticks to 25-month averaging.
He’ll obviously then choose another interval as needed to maintain the trick 🙂

Dr Svalgaard, sorry if you’ve answered this elsewhere, but what interval would you use?

Murray (13:05:07) “[…] cute curves. Could you provide some labelling so us less gifted guys have some idea what they are trying to tell us?”
Think of it [very loosely speaking] as an index of radial acceleration of the ‘inner’ solar system relative to the ‘outer’ solar system, as viewed from a reference point at the north pole of the sun. Btw: This has nothing to do with TSI, sunspots, solar activity, etc. – this is about EOP (Earth orientation parameters). You can quickly derive the curve from NASA Horizons (online software) output. See the Russian literature, particularly Barkin & Sidorenkov for related ideas – note particularly Barkin’s challenges of conventional modeling assumptions that simplify math to make it tractable and Sidorenkov’s ideas about the hydrologic cycle (in the context of the Russian school of thought on zonal vs. meridional circulation regimes).

“RobP (13:50:40) :
I think I am missing something here, but all this jumping around from month to month worries me. Temperature is only a measure of energy ”
Consider for a moment that a temp. of say 0 deg C is about 273K, so when it goes up by a degree that’s about a third of a percent.
For the radiation emitted into space, the absolute temperature is decisive. Seen this way, it’s not much jumping. It’s of course a colossal amount of energy nonetheless due to the sheer size of the planet. If you divide the radiated energy by the area of the surface it gets more manageable again; hundreds of Watts per square meter.
Shouldn’t make you worry all that much.

The tropics are warm … that’s laughter you hear … in SWFL, we been freezing cold the last week with a hard freeze predicted by the weekend locally.
Send some global warming our way, Floridians are not used to below 40F weather. The orange growers are going nuts trying to harvest crops.
The gulf water is getting so cold, fish kills are eminent.

What’s the resolution on UAH? Could it be used to QC the surface temperature products from CRU, GISS, etc?
Given the concerns around UHI, it would be interesting to see what UAH has for the area around Darwin Zero for example… or Siberia, or New Zealand for that matter.

What is the rationale when choosing what constitutes the “normal” temp. time period ? This is confusing to me. Why choose say 1961-1990 (instead of any other time period) ? and say “this year (whatever the year) “is the warmest since (whenever) compared to the “normal”.
It would be ineresting to see the results when using different “normals” and compare, will it produce different temp. trends?

Are the trolls really trying to tell us it’s getting warmer?

OT but fascinating – saw this comment on James Delingpole’s blog
“Just got my Jan 2010 ecopy of Physics Today and I won’t be burning this one. It has an article on the “Hacked Climate Emails.”
To appreciate the significance of what they report, understand two things: (1) Physics Today is the flagship publication of The American Institute of Physics, an association of 10 academic societies, whose main reason for being is to promote public funding of academic research and (2) AGW is the biggest cash-cow they’ve ever seen.
They lead with a report of a conversation with a PR operator for one of the world’s leading environmental organizations who didn’t want to be quoted. He said he believed that they were on the verge of convincing the general public that they needed to make sacrifices in order to stop AGW, but all that ended on Nov. 20. “The e-mails represented a seminal moment in the climate debate of the last five years, and it was a moment that broke decisively against us. I think the [Climatic Research Unit (CRU)] leak is nothing less than catastrophic.”
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100021420/how-to-keep-warm-this-winter/comment-page-1/#comment-100123939

Watts widget rocks.

Ralph (11:10:19) :
Wind Power.
And don’t expect wind power to keep you warm when we get these cold events. This is a record of the wind speeds in the Irish Sea (where many of the UK’s windelecs reside) for the last 7 days (when it was bitterly cold).
http://coastobs.pol.ac.uk/cobs/met/hilbre/getimage.php?code=5&span=2
Any wind speeds below 5kts will not produce any appreciable power. So with Gordon Brown’s new push for wind power, we would all be freezing and dying by the thousand.
Are these politicians just stupid or deliberately evil??
Why use “or” – could be “and”.

AdderW (14:35:34) :
What is the rationale when choosing what constitutes the “normal” temp. time period ? This is confusing to me. Why choose say 1961-1990 (instead of any other time period) ? and say “this year (whatever the year) “is the warmest since (whenever) compared to the “normal”.
It would be ineresting to see the results when using different “normals” and compare, will it produce different temp. trends?
Possibly because it covers the peak period when the baby boomers were young, free, and in love… of the glorious salad days of their youth when all was right with the world… who would want to return to such days of peace and joy…

That link doesn’t quite work, so go on to CET, then type in 1989 to 2009 on HADCET (under Series) and Winter (under Scope)

Here’s another clue:
http://www.sfu.ca/~plv/fSAM_fAAO..png
Maybe I’ll elaborate if the funding comes through…

tarpon wrote: “The tropics are warm … that’s laughter you hear … in SWFL, we been freezing cold the last week with a hard freeze predicted by the weekend locally.
Send some global warming our way, Floridians are not used to below 40F weather. The orange growers are going nuts trying to harvest crops.
The gulf water is getting so cold, fish kills are eminent.”
So does this mean a cooler gulf stream over the next year? If so we are presumably looking at a colder western Europe and more Arctic Ice, i.e. less summer melting during 2010. If I was an alarmist I would start talking about feedback mechanisms and how we are all doomed.

If Mount Mayon erupts and ejects a significant amount of ash high enough, Lord, it could get cold.

Well you see it’s simple thermodynamics coupled with turbulences, like when you boil some water and suddenly you see ice cristals appear in the pot due to chaotic temperature fluctuations. The temperature shifts simply become so violent that there’s chaotic temperature repulsion. Like we see now. Outside. Those anomalous masses of snow. They’re a fluke.

What global warming? As far as I can see even from the available scientific evidence (even if it’s corrupted) the world has not changed either way over the past 100+ years compared to longer term trends going back 100’s and 1000’s of years. If anything I find this surprising. I would have thought the climate would either have cooled or warmed a lot more than it already has. So, what’s all the fuss about? Are global warming alarmists on drugs or something?

Looking at Roy’s plots at his site raises some questions. There he is using a 20 year average for calculating his anomaly at 14,000 ft (ch05). That would be consistent with the vertical axes in the plot above indicating 1979 to 1998.
But in looking at the track for 2009 against the 20 year anomaly, he appears to be using the 20 year average for each specific date of the previous 20 years (the yellow line). It would be nice to have the ‘zero’ line 20 year average plotted along with the constantly changing daily one.

Pieter F (09:53:36) :
It might also help some visitors to MJK’s world to shift their focus from the silly idea that a couple of warm decades is proof that global warming ever existed in the first place.
—————————————————————–
Especially taking UHI in to account.

RobP (13:50:40)
I think you are correct to be interested about the meaning of the very noisy pattern of the anomalies, but it is not worrisome. Although it is a tremendous amount of energy when multiplied by 500 million square kilometers, it only takes about 3kWh to warm a square meter of atmosphere from sea level by one degree C. In a 730 hour average month, this only takes 4 Watts out of the 330 W average total solar insolation. So a reduction in cloud cover of a little over 1% would raise the air that degree in a single month.
So what we are looking at in these charts is really just an artifact of the cloud cover variations and exchanges to the ocean, which has the same heat capacity as the atmosphere in its top 2.5 meters.
I think the real meaning of these graphs and the graphs of regional anomalies is that 1 or 2 Watts of additional theoretical forcing from more GHG is NOT a catastrophe.
Peter Moliterno, P.E.

Peter of Sydney (15:52:38) :
“What global warming? As far as I can see even from the available scientific evidence (even if it’s corrupted) the world has not changed either way over the past 100+ years compared to longer term trends going back 100’s and 1000’s of years. If anything I find this surprising. I would have thought the climate would either have cooled or warmed a lot more than it already has. So, what’s all the fuss about? Are global warming alarmists on drugs or something?”
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It seems to be some kind of steroid that locks them into a delusional power trip.

Leif, I maintain there is no single, definite trend in the temperature data. If you want the world to believe there is one, and even a catastrophic increase, no less, then the burden of proof is on you.
The only correct way of putting it: if, by handpicking a smoothing averaging, or a “convenient” reference period reasonably long, I can come up with a graph that shows no significant temperature increase, then the DATA shows NO AGW-related increase trend! Sure, there *may* still be one brewing, but it’s not showing, so the AG warming is still a puzzling theory.
Maybe the choice of Spencer to use a 25-month right now is not entirely fair, but it’s legit. (The 98 El Nino is smoothed out, someone complained… but wait… well, that’s actually a GOOD reason to use a longer averaging base! To decrease the +/- by nino/nina.)
But you seem to ignore the paramount difference there is between plotting a slightly different moving average over a visible raw data graph that anyone can judge for himself (so that it’s more of a visual aid than anything else) and the nefarious trick of the original “hide the decline”, that implied tampering with the plot of a graph without telling it, to show perfect accordance between datasets that weren’t.
But what do I know, I’m a neophyte, right?

“It may seem that if they could pass off FDR as a great president, Hitler as a conservative, the Tet Offensive as a grand victory for communism, and Barack Obama as qualified to run the country, there is absolutely no lie too preposterous for our liberal elite ruling class to ram down our throats. But even NBC ought to realize that it’s time to pull the plug on the global warming hoax. They can’t even totally suppress the ClimateGate emails that reveal the “crisis” as deliberate fraud; how are they going to hide . . . . .”
http://www.iloveco2.org/2010/01/global-warming-what-global-warming.html
. . . . . . the fact that it is COLD everywhere!
I do NOT believe for one minute that the (meaningless) global average temp is 0.28 degrees to the warm side of what they arbitrarily call “normal.” I don’t care what instruments they say they use, those instruments and the data they generate are only as good as the “scientists” upon whom we depend for that data and it’s interpretation. We have seen from Climategate that they are not to be trusted, and I don’t.

yonason:
“We have seen from Climategate that they are not to be trusted, and I don’t.”
Yonason, Roy has nothing to do with climategate. In fact, if any of the cliamtegate cabal saw Roy they would probably spit on him. Roy doesn’t support the idea that CO2 is a big problem. And from what I have seen of his work, I have no reason to distrust him.

pft:
There is obviously an algorithm being used to convert satellite measurements to surface temperature, and what some folks worry about is that the algorithm can be tweaked to give more “accurate’ temperatures by those who deem them too low.
Roy Spencer is not an AGW alarmist pft. Those temperatures are the most accurate that he can produce. And you can bet that they are very close to correct. You have to accept that there was some warming in the 70s, 80s and 90s. It may have been more the result of ENSO and PDO than of CO2, but it nevertheless happened.

To answer a couple of Q’s here, from my limited understanding:
The ‘anomaly’ is shown presumably because we are not sure of any base point. What we can measure id the difference (anomaly) instead.
Taking the 79 to 98 average as our baseline in this instance seem a fairly obvious thing to do. This is the first 20 years, and we want to compare to that. I guess taking the first decade may have been acceptable to. Given what seems to happen in 93/4 I am not sure it would be very different.
Taking a 25 month mean also seems sensible. It smooth out the 12 month cycle to some extent I’d assume. If anyone could try it with an 11 year smoothing it may be interesting, but eyeballing it, I don’t think terribly different.

Across the Chunnel: AGW say, Veni, Vidi, Vici.
AGW/Gaia’s “Daisy” chain: EUrope, UK, France, Germany, Belgiummm, Copenhopenchangen, etc.
BTW, Liberal Iffy is in Provence, France, sipping ice whine.
“And with a new low-pressure system — rather incongruously dubbed “Daisy” — set to move in”.
…-
“Brrrrr!
More Snow Coming for Already Frigid Europe
It has already been an unusually cold winter across much of Europe. But more snow is on the way in the coming days, and there’s no end to the big chill in sight.
The irony was difficult to ignore. As world leaders gathered in Copenhagen in early December for what turned out to be a failed attempt to agree on a worldwide plan to combat global warming, temperatures outside the conference were bitterly cold. Delegates from equatorial countries were shivering under multiple layers, and even those from northern Europe had a hard time staying warm.
Now, almost three weeks after the conference ended in fiasco, Europe continues to be in the grips of frosty and snowy weather. And with a new low-pressure system — rather incongruously dubbed “Daisy” — set to move in over the weekend, much of Central Europe could soon be buried in a new layer of snow.”
http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/0,1518,670188,00.html
…-
“Y2Kyoto: Daily Driver
Dear Britain,
Now you know.
Yours truly,
Saskatchewan”
http://www.smalldeadanimals.com/mt/mt-comments.cgi

RobP:
Ocean Heat Content (OHC) – important enough to have its own acronym – is a hot topic.
The ocean stores approximately 1000x more heat than the atmosphere.
In terms of movement of heat from the equator to the poles, they (atmosphere and ocean) both move about the same amount of heat – surprisingly enough.
The Argo fleet of 3000+ sensors measures the temperature and salinity around the world’s oceans down to a depth of 2km. But they have only been in place the last few years, the first of them were deployed in the late 90’s.
And below 2km there is still little data.
Roger Pielke Sr has often commented on his blog about ocean heat so a good place to go looking.
Two recent comments on ocean heat:
http://pielkeclimatesci.wordpress.com/2010/01/04/guest-weblog-by-leonard-ornstein-on-ocean-heat-content/
http://pielkeclimatesci.wordpress.com/2009/12/29/comment-from-josh-willis-on-the-upper-ocean-heat-content-data-posted-on-real-climate/

JER0ME (19:33:08) :
“Roy Spencer is not an AGW alarmist pft. Those temperatures are the most accurate that he can produce.”
I thought he was using their numbers. “In fact, Dr Roy Spencer has just posted the December anomaly from UAH:”
http://www.australianclimatemadness.com/?p=2705
Which means, I believe, that Spencer did NOT “produce” them. He is therefore constrained to work with the numbers they provide, and it is that data that I don’t trust. I in no way mean to criticize Spencer, as should have been clear from what I wrote, and the fact that he is using already processed data, thereby not being responsible for whatever errors it may already contain.

RobP (13:50:40) :
Good insight Rob, back to core physics! You might be a late comer but your questions are very welcomed here.

From about 1997 onwards, if this was a stock chart, you could make a case, based on technical analysis that this stock is headed lower. It is routinely making lower highs and lower lows. 1998 was the first high, with end of 2006/beginning of 2007 making a lower 2nd high, and the end of 2009 making a 3rd lower high. The low hit at the beginning of 2008 was lower than the low hit in 2004.

Dan (15:35:32) :
Pretty soon, Chicagoans will see a white bear coming ashore from off the ice, and his name won’t be Brian Urlacher.
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Will it be the new offensive coordinator?

Bart (18:53:05) :
I’m not getting all of the complaints about a 25 month running average. The monthly data are plotted along with it, so nothing is being “hidden”. What’s the beef?
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Good question: where’s the beef?
What I am wondering is not about the validity of the beef as it can be seen there is no validity.
What I am wondering is what is the motivation for the beef?
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I am also wondering (just wondering, so no one read more into it than that, please) if Roy Spencer put out the 25 month as a curve ball to see what people’s reaction would be. I’ve noticed in the past he likes to do things like that as with his satire web site The ecoEnquirer.
http://www.ecoenquirer.com/

pft (17:20:15) :
“… Thermometers on board can not direcly measure surface temperature.”
Is it actually “surface temperature” they are measuring? If so, that’s not going to tell you what the atmospheric temperature is. On a hot summer day the surface will be a lot hotter than the air. Go barefoot on the beach sometime, and then try to tell me the air is just as hot.
Also, how do they measure temps at different altitudes? How do they subtract out background, or even decide what “background” is?
Does anyone know of a good online ref., for how they do those measurements? It seems it doesn’t make much sense to debate the merits of something without knowing how it works, except that there do seem to be inconsistencies between the method when compared to others that suggests there may be significant problems that are being ignored. That may not be the case, but without a more detailed knowledge I feel perfectly justified in being suspicious, based on what other problems have been shown to exist, and yet which those charged with keeping the data are denying.

scienceofdoom (20:11:14) :

“RobP:
“Ocean Heat Content (OHC) – important enough to have its own acronym – is a hot topic.”
The ocean stores approximately 1000x more heat than the atmosphere.

Lets see.
A mole of water is about 18cc, while a mole of air is about 22.414*1000=22,414cc. That’s a factor of 22.414/18=1245.
BUT, the specific heat of water is about 4 times that of dry air, raising the number to 1245*4=4981 (about 5000 times greater)
For moist air that’s about 1/2, or 2500 times.
summary – the oceans store from 2500x to 5000x more heat than the air.
No?

Do you folks who think an incline is being hidden honestly believe it is getting warmer?
Look out the window.
Then send a box of used books to a pensioner in the UK.
Then start waxing your skis for those longer skiing seasons that Australia and New Zealand have been having.
Then go to the Andes in Peru and talk to the indigenous folk about the longer winters they’ve been getting the last four years.
Then go to China and dig out a snowed-in motorist.
Then go to Russia and talk some sense in to Putin about him wanting to stop all snow coming to Moscow—tell him to look out the window like you did.
Then go to the US Midwest and ask the farmers about last summers growing season.
Then go to Seoul and see the largest snow storm ever on record.
Then look at this map:
http://mapcenter.hamweather.com/records/7day/us.html?c=maxtemp,mintemp,lowmax,highmin,snow
etc, etc

We need a complimentary graph to the UAH temp anomaly called the Roy Spencer selected average n-month anomaly graph. We can um and ah as the value for n climbs above average some months and speculate if there’s a solar cycle – Spencer n relation.
Seriously, I’ve been wondering for a while if the cooling we’re definately experiencing will show up at all on UAH. Robert Felix had the idea oceans warm during (land) ice ages. I don’t agree with his underwater volcano theory. Instead I wonder about changes to the cloud system as being the cause of ocean warming and land cooling. In which case the oceans warming will offset the land cooling. So no SC signature on UAH.
Lief’s skepticism for Svensmark reminded me to think of different mechanisms for the solarcycle Earth climate relation.
In line with Lief saying Earth’s magnetic field has much more influence on incident cosmic rays, those graphics on how the suns magnetic field squashs the Earth’s field leads me to wonder how much less squashed is the Earth’s magnetic field during solar minimum? Would this variation in squashedness affect the incident cosmic rays?
This was my 1st theory when I 1st heard about GCR and cloud formation. It seems the most simple and intuitive.

Keep wondering what possible evidence would disprove AGW/human made climate change?
60 years of flat temperatures? 90 years?
Never? because all those scientists can’t be wrong?

Leif Svalgaard (19:55:40) :
Leif Svalgaard (19:54:18) :
I have generated 20 random y values in a time series.
Using simple averaging and linear trend, if slope of the trend of the raw data is increasing, the slope of smoothed data is greater, per Excel anyway.
Original values trend: y = 0.4488x + 45.189 len 20
3 len averaged trend: y = 0.5281x + 43.96 len 17
4 len averaged trend: y = 0.532x + 43.906 len 16
You must be speaking of some other aspect or other smoothing than simple averaging. Could you clarify? Were you speaking of the length of the trend line?

Re: phlogiston (19:17:35)
“The Antarctic Circumpolar Wave is a coupled ocean/atmosphere wave that circles the Southern Ocean in approximately eight years. Since it is a wave-2 phenomenon (there are two ridges and two troughs in a latitude circle) at each fixed point in space a signal with a period of four years is seen. The wave moves eastward with the prevailing currents.
Note that although the “wave” is seen in temperature, atmospheric pressure, sea ice and ocean height, the variations are hard to see in the raw data and need to be filtered to become apparent. Because the reliable record for the Southern Ocean is short (since the early 1980s) and signal processing is needed to reveal its existence […]”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antarctic_Circumpolar_Wave
Note the harmonics here:
http://www.sfu.ca/~plv/fSAM_fAAO..png

Bart (18:53:05) “I’m not getting all of the complaints about a 25 month running average.”
Moving average – (running averages are anchored at the left-end).
2 things:
1) As you roll the smoothing-bandwidth, you cyclically reduce local-variance as you pass through subharmonics of dominant periods (e.g. diurnal, annual – i.e. anything stationary).
2) As you increase the bandwidth, you cut more centred-averages off the ends of a series.

Re: yonason
I didn’t do the maths myself.
[Trying html tags first time, does it work?..]
Elementary Climate Physics, F.W. Taylor, Oxford University Press 2005.
Excellent book by the way.
“The top 3.2m of the ocean has the same heat capacity as the entire atmosphere, and the total ocean heat content is about 1,000 times that of the atmosphere” (p.9)