Sanity check: 2008 & 2009 Were The Coolest Years Since 1998 in the USA

RE JAE (09:46:48) :

?? 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???

The NASA document referred to global temperatures; this article was only about the US.
RE Steve Goddard (10:10:17) :

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

You cannot claim a “strong slope” that is “very significant” unless you do the stats. Continuing to pick 1998 smacks of, to be charitable, “selective analysis”.

Abitbol (10:43:38) :
Graphic show warmest year in the nineties.
I thought it was 1934 for USA ?
It was. Upon further review of history, however, things have changed in the present that need to be corrected, so corrections were applied, to the historical record, of course.

Anyone who has lived in the interior of the US and has been paying attention for the last twelve years, is probably aware of the fact that temperatures have cooled dramatically and snowfall has greatly increased. Same for Alaska.
http://climate.rutgers.edu/snowcover/png/monthlyanom/nam12.png
This is also true for the UK. Ten years ago I used to regularly see people water skiing on lakes around London in January with very mild weather. Temperatures the last two winters have been much colder, and summers have been very cool for the last three years.
Sometimes people need to step outside of their computers and statistics and get in touch with the real world.

RE Dave F (10:45:12) :

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.

Hi Dave. I’m not the one making the cooling claim, so please take up your concerns with them. I will say that we have had significant global warming for the last 30 (or more) years, and that’s the relevant period to determine climate trends. You should be wary of anyone who picks 1998 as a starting point for any temperature trend.

To those that reference Menne et al here’s comments for that paper from Pielke Sr

Lets have some fun too;
http://ifglobalwarmingisrealthenwhyisitcold.blogspot.com/

RE Dave F (10:56:01) :

Also, Deech, if 12 years is too short a time to be significant, why worry about the warmest decade** (10 years) on record?
** Your results may vary.

Apples and oranges. There’s a difference between doing a trend analysis and doing a straight comparison. You can test the significance of the temperature anomalies of the 2000s vs the 1990s using a t test (1990, 1991…1999 vs 2000, 2001…2009) – the p value I got was 0.001. That’s pretty significant.

“Steve Goddard (11:17:15) :
Deech,
1998 is a very significant year. There was a strong El Nino and a step function upwards. This is also very visible in UAH and RSS global data. It is very interesting that temperatures in the US have now returned to their pre-1998 values. ”
It really is. As if El Nino brought up a lot of heat stored in deep ocean water and it took several years to cool the upper ocean layer down again. Is it known from which depths El Nino rises?

Deech56 (09:34:22) :
“. . . any conclusion based on such a short time span is not robust.”
Time to choose new term other than “robust”. The Michael Mann’s of the climate “science” community have degraded its meaning to where it now means “I’m right, you’re wrong, nya, nya, nya”.
I, and I suspect many others here, now regard any argument that uses it a fundamentally flawed, by virtue of its association with Mann.
Try “statistically meaningful” since that is apparently what you are referring to.
Otherwise I agree with your point. Twelve years, heck even 20 years, is not a statistically meaningful period within which to make valid claims about long term climate fluctuations.
That does not however mean that a twelve year trend is not relevant, just that it is not long enough to devine the future. Similarly the thirty years since 1980 are not sufficiently long to predict the next 100 years – just better than the last 12.

Oh not this crap again.
Seriously, will you guys ever learn that local weather is NOT global climate?
Why don’t you do the same thing for the Southern Hemisphere? Show us what happened in the REST of the world besides the US.
I also note that these two cold years… are still HOTTER than at any time prior to 1998, and occured during both a La Nina and a nearly unprecedented solar minimum and yet they didn’t even manage to get as cold as the long term average?
Sounds to me like natural variation is struggling to hide the global warming signal now. The coldest it gets, is only just enough to offset the warming.
As for people talking about the last 12 years – you simply look like idiots when you keep pulling that rat out of your bag. For the late comers here is a brief explanation of why anyone pointing at that is not only an idiot, but is a liar too:
1998 was the result of one of the strongest El Nino’s we’ve seen, and was much warmer than even the global warming trend would have caused without it. These idiots have been told this for 12 years, they KNOW this, but they KEEP pushing the same old lie that the world has gotten cooler since then. To do that, they have to point at a year that was below the trend due to natural variability as well… La Nina and solar minimum.
Only by starting at a well above trend point, and ending at a below trend point, can they show a downward trend.
Make it a 10 year trend or a 15 year trend and you see that despite the outliers, the trend is still upwards… which is why the last decade is the hottest on record.
They have to cherry pick like a pack of inbred retards to get something even close to what they want – and even then it doesn’t really show anything.
No one ever said temperatures could not go down for short periods. In fact if they hadn’t gone down during La Nina and solar minimum, we’d be in REAL trouble, because at that point the global warming ‘signal’ would have swamped the natural variation ‘noise’ and would be a sign that it is too late.
One last point – global warming leads to warmer air temperatures, which leads to greater water vapour concentration which leads to greater precipitation and snowfall. Global warming can and does lead to localised lower temperatures and greater rain and snow fall. The latter does not preclude the former… it supports it.
In a half dozen years or so, when we hit the next solar maximum, and if there is an El Nino again, will these idiots accept the ten years prior to that as proof that global warming is real? Or will they complain about cherry-picked data?
My money is on them “forgetting” how they cherry picked 1998 for their start point when 1998 is no longer the hottest year (or nearly so) on record.

Deech56 (11:08:14) :
What is the purpose then of saying ‘warmest decade’. Isn’t the ten year period insignificant because it is too small? That would make this an exercise in hand waving, right?

Deech56 (11:09:38) :
RE Veronica (11:03:07) :
Anthony – have you written any comments about the Menne et al. paper anywhere, or will you do so? I’d be interested to hear what you think about their reasoning and their use of your data.
REPLY: Yes I plan to. – A
LOL. Looks like the whole surfacestations project got scooped.

I hardly think this is over. At first read, and I haven’t looked at all the supporting documents, it seems the Menne et al paper involves the homogenization issue at least, and perhaps all of the other serial correction issues. These corrections might still be done out of order, which smears UHI throughout the data, and so perhaps it is no surprise that the aggregated sets that Menne et al look at show similar trends.
On a separate thread Anthony has answered quite well by showing the site picture and graph for Detroit Lakes. That ought to make any sentient being pause and think again.