While the press is hyperventilating over NASA GISS recent announcement of the “Hottest Decade Ever“, it pays to keep in mind what happened the last two years of the past decade.
According to NCDC, 2009 temperatures in the US (53.13F) were the 33rd warmest and very close to the long term mean of 52.86F.
Generated from http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/research/cag3/na.html
Since 1998, according to NCDC’s own figures, temperatures in the US have been dropping at a rate of more than 10 degrees F per century.
Generated from http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/research/cag3/na.html
For 2009, all regions of the US were normal or below normal except for the southwest and Florida.
Temperatures in Alaska were also slightly below the long term mean. Three of the last four years have seen below normal temperatures in Alaska.
A few fond memories from 2009 :
Americans suffer record cold as temperatures plunge to -40 16th January 2009
Jul 28, 2009 Chicago Sees Coldest July In 67 Years
Aug 31, 2009 August Ends With Near-Record Cold
Oct 14, 2009 October Cold Snap Sets 82-Year Record
And my personal favorite:
From: Kevin Trenberth <trenbert@xxxxxxxxx.xxx>
To: Michael Mann <mann@xxxxxxxxx.xxx>
Subject: Re: BBC U-turn on climate
Date: Mon, 12 Oct 2009 08:57:37 -0600
Cc: Stephen H Schneider <shs@xxxxxxxxx.xxx>, Myles Allen <allen@xxxxxxxxx.xxx>, peter stott <peter.stott@xxxxxxxxx.xxx>, “Philip D. Jones” <p.jones@xxxxxxxxx.xxx>, Benjamin Santer <santer1@xxxxxxxxx.xxx>, Tom Wigley <wigley@xxxxxxxxx.xxx>, Thomas R Karl <Thomas.R.Karl@xxxxxxxxx.xxx>, Gavin Schmidt <gschmidt@xxxxxxxxx.xxx>, James Hansen <jhansen@xxxxxxxxx.xxx>, Michael Oppenheimer <omichael@xxxxxxxxx.xxx>
Hi all
Well I have my own article on where the heck is global warming? We are asking that here in
Boulder where we have broken records the past two days for the coldest days on record. We
had 4 inches of snow. The high the last 2 days was below 30F and the normal is 69F, and it
smashed the previous records for these days by 10F. The low was about 18F and also a
record low, well below the previous record low. This is January weather (see the Rockies
baseball playoff game was canceled on saturday and then played last night in below freezing
weather).
Trenberth, K. E., 2009: An imperative for climate change planning: tracking Earth’s global
energy. Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability, 1, 19-27,
doi:10.1016/j.cosust.2009.06.001. [1][PDF] (A PDF of the published version can be obtained
from the author.)
The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a
travesty that we can’t. The CERES data published in the August BAMS 09 supplement on 2008
shows there should be even
h/t to Steve Goddard
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How about adding a geographic location after our names.
This is a world wide conversation.
Sometimes Americans like me can be ego-centric and assume everyone posting is an American. I can’t always tell where someone is speaking about.
WUWT is based the USA, but has become a worldwide phenomenon.
Where are you, waldo?
Given the recent revelations regarding our temp “washers” and “adjusters”, coupled with the work done at this sight regarding the quality of the surface stations, I don’t believe anyone can say with any certainty anything about whether the earth is getting cooler or warmer. The veracity of the reported temperatures are very much in question(worldwide). The proxies used for temperatures are absurd. Therefore, any discussion regarding the earth’s temperature is purely academic and not pertinent to reality . IMHO
Hmm…FNC – just a quip that Climatescam isn’t a good stock pick, AGW dead. Still, at least a dig at AGW.
“Amazing – why pick 1998?”
The 1970’s saw a cooling trend. Most of the AGW charts and graph’s start at the end of a cooling trend.
So why not start at the peak of a warming trend?
Isn’t playing with statistics fun 🙂
At least until the people who invested hundreds of billions of dollars based on the statistics find out it was ‘just a game’.
If this cooling does not stop soon, there will be an ice age in Eureka, California (small town on the coast in the far north of the state). Temperatures have been dropping steadily since 1992 at the rate of 15 degrees C per century.
http://sowellslawblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/eureka-ca-headed-for-ice-age-in-67.html
Herman L,
The US hasn’t cooled a “little” since 1998, rather it has cooled a lot. Alaska has cooled more than 2.5C. The cooling is not due to one of the many nonsensical USHCN manipulations, but rather due to colder weather. Hope this helps.
dekitchen
Remember back to summer 2003, when parts of Europe (maybe 1% of the earth’s surface) had a two week long heat wave that became the poster child of global warming?
Now that things have turned cold, alarmists have retreated to their climate models. Try to stay warm. Europe is freezing.
http://wxmaps.org/pix/temp4.html
dekitchen: interesting points. Still, how do climate scientists explain that parts of the earth are cooling, while CO2 continues to increase? Physics is impartial, and does not allow CO2 to work its warming in some areas but not in others. If CO2 causes warming, then that warming will be observed in all locations.
The fact that the U.S. is cooling, and has done so for more than a decade, indicates that something other than CO2 is responsible for temperature increases AND decreases.
RE Peter Dunford (07:19:13) :
Three things:
1. This is from a year and a half ago.
2. Not a peer-reviewd paper.
3. It’s Monckton and his utterances need to be taken with a huge grain of salt.
You know what? I’ve been paying close attention to this subject for years now, and after the Climategate emails etc were released, I don’t believe a word any of them are saying any more (the warmers, that is).
RE Deech56 (07:38:23) :
Why, I did Deech (using MS Excel). Here are the results:
Slope = -0.57 degC/decade, SE = 0.26 deg/decade, 10 degrees of freedom
T = 2.15 – not significant
How about if we start at 1997?
Slope = -0.23 degC/decade, SE = 0.29 deg/decade, 11 degrees of freedom
T = 0.79 not significant
Even if the trend from 1998 were significant, the fact that starting one year earlier makes a difference just shows that any conclusion based on such a short time span is not robust.
I have to ask, is 45th warmest in 92 year record on the original graph for Alaskan temperatures?
And in Cambridgeshire I saw my first white Christmas – something I never saw in Scotland!
under “A few fond memories from 2009 :” above
“Jul 28, 2009 Chicago Sees Coldest July In 67 Years”
here’s an excerpt from the article:
“The National Weather Service says 2009 has seen the coldest July since the official recording station was moved away from the lakefront in 1942. The average temperature this month in Chicago has been a mere 68.9 degrees.
Even in the years before 1942, when the National Weather Service recorded temperatures at the cooler lakefront, there are only three years that had colder Julys through the 26th.”
(now the recording station is at the worlds 3rd busiest airport)
?? Is the last decade really the warmest for the century? According to my calibrated eyes, the decade 1929-1939 is not much, if any, cooler than 2000-2009. If the last decade is warmer, is it significantly warmer at the 95% level???
There are some scientists that I can believe in, such as Lindzen, Spencer, Michaels, Soon and a good number of others. They might be right. They might be wrong. But I still believe that they are honest and doing their best to further scientific research.
There are other “scientists”, Hansen, Jones, Mann, Watson, Houghton, Stieg (and dozens more) who have forfeited the right to expect to be taken seriously in any other capacity than as barefaced con men. And often as incompetent con men at that. I wouldn’t give Hansen any more credit than a buffoon like Monbiot.
But I wouldn’t expect even Lindzen to forecast with confidence what the climate / weather will be like even in three years time, never mind 90 years. And he would lose credibility in my eyes if he did.
Sure, we know a hell of a lot more about how the climate works than we did a decade ago. But there are still huge uncertainties. In fact the only thing it is pretty clear is that the theory that climate is driven more than fractionally by human CO2 emissions is an absolutely busted flush.
Clearly, by 2010, we can be confident that it will either be cooler, about the same or warmer. My hunch (and I don’t think anyone can have much more than a hunch) is that it is more likely to be cooler than warmer.
I just hope that it won’t be much cooler, as other comments have noted.
But the real “travesty” isn’t (as Trenberth suggests) “that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment”.
The REAL travesty is that we haven’t really got a very clear idea what the climate has actually been doing for the last thirty years! Because, irrespective of how many billions of tax payers dollars have been poured into this AGW scam, we can clearly see that the surface stations results are almost completely without merit and that GISS, UEA, the Hadley Centre have all been carrying out fraudulent “adjustments” to further their political and rent seeking agendas.
The satellite data appears to be more reliable but I certainly wouldn’t say I was confident it is robust.
But there again, what on earth does some annual (or monthly, or decadal) average temperature really mean? Is there some figure which is “correct”?
The title of this post is wrong. It should read “2008 and 2009 were the coolest years since 1997 in the USA”. 1998 obviously was a very hot year, talking about “coolest year since” thus doesn’t make any sense. But 1997 indeed was slightly cooler than 2008 and 2009.
Interesting how alarmists love to talk about the warm decade since 1998, but are completely disinterested in the actual trends during that decade. There was a step function upwards in 1998, and a strong slope downwards since. This is very significant.
http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2010/01/noaa_pl1.jpg
Thanks for the invitation, it was fun. However, this study points backward to further studies, and so on, so that a full understanding of what has happened here will take time to read the supporting work. I do note that the authors conclude the following.
The reason why station exposure does not play an obvious role in temperature trends
probably warrants further investigation. It is possible that, in general, once a changeover to bad
exposure has occurred, the magnitude of background trend parallels that at well exposed sites
albeit with an offset. Such a phenomenon has been observed at urban stations whereby once a
site has become fully urbanized, its trend is similar to those at surrounding rural sites [e.g.,
Boehm, 1998; Easterling et al. 2005]. This is not to say that exposure is irrelevant in all contexts
or that adherence to siting standards is unimportant.
Indeed it does warrant further investigation. In fact, it is so interesting a topic that I cannot understand why, when the change in instrumentation and/or siting was made, the new and old stations were not run simultaneously for a time to actually quantify the effect. I worked for a Federal science program in the 1970s (Interior Department) and we often ended up computing things that really should have been measured directly. Lack of budget is one motivation for this, but so is the pervasive idea that computations can take the place of observations. There is also an unfortunate tendency throughout government, maybe throughout our society actually, that aggregation of data, which is what this study does, is better than just looking at individual observations.
The idea that siting too close to structures that operate heat-producing equipment biases maximum temperatures downward is counter-intuitive to say the least. Please show me a direct comparison, not aggregated, adjusted, grid area weighted values. Finally, what happens after change to “bad” conditions is complete is not the pertinent point, but rather what happens to the aggregated data during the change over.
The Warmenista don’t have much of a sense of humour do they? 😉
DaveE.
As Deech56 points out above, the “downtrend” since 1998, however amusing, isn’t statistically robust.
The lead graph is accompanied on the NCDC site with an official uptrend estimate of 0.12F/Decade, but there is no standard error, let alone correction for serial correlation of the errors. Sounds like a good stats/econometrics exercise!
Wouter (03:45:45) :
Bunk. …. A “trick”, if you will.
No, sir. A “trick” would be adding tree ring data to the end of the temperature chart.
Graphic show warmest year in the nineties.
I thought it was 1934 for USA ?
In the USA maybe.
But what about globally?
Hi Deech! What is the rate of warming since 1998? Looks like you have a negative number there. I thought there was no cooling? At the least, it would seem, there has been no warming.