December 2009 UAH Global Temperature Update +0.28 Deg. C
by Roy W. Spencer, Ph. D.
The global-average lower tropospheric temperature anomaly fell back to the October level of +0.28 deg. C in December.
The tropics continue warm from El Nino conditions there, while the NH and SH extratropics anomalies cooled from last month. While the large amount of year-to-year variability in global temperatures seen in the above plot makes it difficult to provide meaningful statements about long-term temperature trends in the context of global warming, the running 25-month average suggests there has been no net warming in the last 11 years or so.
[NOTE: These satellite measurements are not calibrated to surface thermometer data in any way, but instead use on-board redundant precision platinum resistance thermometers carried on the satellite radiometers.]
YR MON GLOBE NH SH TROPICS
2009 1 +0.304 +0.443 +0.165 -0.036
2009 2 +0.347 +0.678 +0.016 +0.051
2009 3 +0.206 +0.310 +0.103 -0.149
2009 4 +0.090 +0.124 +0.056 -0.014
2009 5 +0.045 +0.046 +0.044 -0.166
2009 6 +0.003 +0.031 -0.025 -0.003
2009 7 +0.411 +0.212 +0.610 +0.427
2009 8 +0.229 +0.282 +0.177 +0.456
2009 9 +0.422 +0.549 +0.294 +0.511
2009 10 +0.286 +0.274 +0.297 +0.326
2009 11 +0.497 +0.422 +0.572 +0.495
2009 12 +0.280 +0.318 +0.242 +0.503
maz2 (10:38:09), you’ve misquoted the Precautionary Principle. Here’s a better version:
“The principle means that no expense should be spared and no risk taken, however small, if there is a possible danger to a politician’s re-election.”
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…
JonesII (11:01:15) :
tallbloke (09:45:17) :
You are right, but, here we are again discussing on temperatures, weather and climate, but knowing that (Pieter F (09:53:36) )…the AGW Movement is not about weather or climate. It is about Maurice Strong’s efforts to establish a global governance
As you said, truth is the stick we will beat them with, and I’m concentrating on trying to find and use the truth about how our climate works rather than getting involved in the endless political slanging match. I am glad some are willing to take that on, and I think my best contribution is to find and hand them truth bombs to lob at the fakirs.
I have posted details of my energy model today on my blog. Hopefully, people more accomplished than I in statistical methods will assist me in improving the details.
tallbloke.wordpress.com
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”.
“pwl (10:18:33) :
In the graph a “25 month running average” is used. I’d like to learn more about it.
[…]
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. […]”
pwl, is that all that you have? How old are you, 15?
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.
Ok geniuses. What is climate?
El Niño year but different. This el niño has benn different in some fundamental aspect one of which was pointed out earlier. It is that the warmer water has been concentrated at some distance from South America and close to or at the coast. This clearly has had a modified niño effect on USA and SA.
Whoa – great stuff – hat tip to Bishophill for this
http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/shortsharpscience/2010/01/times-withdraws-misleading-cli.html
Richard M (07:37:09) “All I know is we were supposed to have a mild winter here in the midwest because of the El Nino. Still waiting …”
Balmy-warm on the Pacific side of the great divide – warmest winter in recent memory (so far).
On the other side, you guys are getting hit by AO-.
This reinforces the nonsense we hear from alarmists who don’t understand that spatial phasing impacts regional & global summaries — killing key signals with spatial smoothing is a way to keep the duller sheeple off the mountain trail to the peak of understanding of true causes of natural climate variations.
Here’s a clue for MJK, who seems to have some of us pegged all-wrong:
http://www.sfu.ca/~plv/r.._-r…png
http://www.sfu.ca/~plv/r…png
http://www.sfu.ca/~plv/RegimeChangePoints.PNG
Check the beats & interannual-contrast cross-wavelet harmonic-coherence and note the time-normalized-power-disruption pattern. Chandler wobble, polar motion, QBO, SOI, GLAAM, LOD, NAM, … all fall out, but who the h*ll could be bothered with the trouble of looking at integrals, derivatives, & timescale-contrasts and additionally thinking conditionally (wo! multivariate paradox — too much!) when 2+2=5 v2.0.1.0.1 is conveniently available?
Things don’t look so random when you treat the data as ordinal and use phase-aware methods that aren’t fooled by nonlinear strange-attractors (like unconditioned linear-correlation is). The mainstream assumptions of randomness? Sheer idiocy &/or bold deception? – Take your pick – (…only depends on whether one is a leader or a follower in the 2+2=5 scheme).
The issue isn’t “whether or not there is warming”. Climate is not an environmental issue, but pollution, land use, & population are.
MJK – For sure the satellite data shows warming overall. However, all of the AGW skeptics I know accept that it was warming from ca 1976 through ca 2002. The bits in question are how much and due to what cause. Now look at the satellite record – about 0.3 degrees C over 30 years or 1.0 degrees C per century, hardly catastrophic. Now consider that the surface record clearly shows cooling from about 1944 to 1976. Even the ardent AGW folks accept that. Go farther back and there was warming from about 1910 to 1944, and cooling from 1880 to 1910. Hmm, looks like an approximate 60 year cycle. However going farther back, there is a clear warming trend from ca 1700 to now, with smaller warmings and coolings cycling around the trend. Go way farther back, to the egyptian optimum, and you find a cooling trend from then to now, with a much longer cycle of warming and cooling cycling around the trend. So yes, we have had a recent 30 year warming trend. and a longer 300 year warming trend, and a 5000 year cooling trend, and we are not back to the warmth of even 1000 years ago. Now note that there is a ton of evidence that the surface instrument trend, as reported, suffers from several warming biases, so certainly overstates the warming of the last 100 years, and especially the last 35 years. Back out those biases, and the decade of the 30s is the warmest in the last century.
Now look at the satellite curve again, carefully. Pick the center point of the big spike of 1997/98 to avoid starting point bias, – that’s January 1998, and plot the trend to now, a slight, but not statistically significant cooling, for 12 years. If 24 years (1976-2000) constitute evidence of a warming crisis, surely 12 years of cooling, ar at least no warming, are significant.
Now do some research on the concept of “paradigm paralysis”, open your mind and eyes, review all of the evidence holistically, and then get back to us. Murray
Still the warmest decade in the last 150 years? Probably. Casastrophic? No — unless you are a true CAGW believer. So, bye, bye.
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’m beginning to believe that a zero anomoly is like absolute zero, impossible to obtain. If the current year of cold temperatures is still above normal, I don’t want to know what normal is.
Tom P (12:11:31) :
“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.
He’ll obviously then choose another interval as needed to maintain the trick 🙂
Anyone who wishes can see the satellite numbers plotted daily at the following site. Pick a year and pick an altitude. I understand that Roy Spencer uses the temperatures at 14,000 feet for various good reasons. One of the oddities you may note is that the annual swings with season at surface and also 14,000 feet are 180 degrees out of phase with seasonal swings at 102,000 feet. I know why lower elevation temperatures rise and fall in concert with northern hemisphere summer and winter, respectively, (more land mass in the northern hemisphere) but I have never heard an explanation for why temperature at 102,000 feet behaves just the opposite.
Any answers out there? Inquiring minds want to know.
http://discover.itsc.uah.edu/amsutemps/
CH
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.
“I’m in FL and it dropped down to the 30’s last night.”
Here, near UAH, it got to 14 early this morning. Unbelievable, for Alabama.
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 .
you mention no warming in the last 11 years or so, however what would have been the globe temperature without the pinatubo cooling? so could we extend it to more than 11 years?
On the other hand, maybe I should get a cup of coffee down me and read the 90 some comments above before posting anything!
2009 has been warm?
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=16781
Paul Vaughan, cute curves. Could you provide some labelling so us less gifted guys have some idea what they are trying to tell us?
I’m not sure why Dr. Spencer uses the 25 month average or why he has used the 13 month average in the past. To my way of thinking a 12 month average seems more logical. But anyway I calculated the trailing 12 month average from the data he presented and it turns out to be 0.26C.
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…)
Even if it is lower than November, it is quite high for December : it’s the 5th or 6th highest December anomaly recorded by UAH. Moreover, January has begun pretty strongly!