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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Deech56 (09:34:22) :
RE Deech56 (07:38:23) :
Oh, and did someone do the stats on the regression before making a claim that it has been cooling in the US since 1998?
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 significan
I haven’t done a survey of all textbooks, but basic statistics books will often state a rule of thumb that t>2 is significant.
E.M.Smith (04:13:07)
Kukla pointed to two things as conditions for a return to a glacial period – a low obliquity and perihelion in NH winter. Right now one of those conditions is met – perihelion at Jan 7 2010 – but the other is not, obliquity while falling is above its midpoint.
Do you see either of these factors as relevant?
Did glacials start with global warming? Kukla, George; Gavin, Joyce, Quaternary Science Reviews, Volume 24, Issue 14-15, p. 1547-1557.
John from MN (14:22:54) :
“ Later dates in the spring for frost and earlier dates in the fall would all spell food shortages for humans.”
“If you go back and check records for early frost in Iowa and Minnesota, you find that the Labor day frost of 1974 , has a matching early frost that occurred in 1915 almost 60 years before 1974. The next 60 year early frost after the year 1974 should occur in the year 2034.
There also seems to be a pattern of a 21 year cycle of early frosts. Years in that cycle pattern include 1953-1974-1995 and should again occur in 2016.
If you check the growing degree days for each state you will notice that Michigan and North Dakota are ahead of normal in growing degree days for the year 2008, so not all of the northern corn and bean states are at risk for an early frost this fall.
One last cycle of cold weather that does not indicate an early frost is the 30 year cycle. This is a long term cycle and dead center years in that cycle would be 1963-1993 and should next occur in 2023.”
From: http://www.marketforum.com/?d=ft&id=979198
If we get Labor Day frost in Iowa and Minnesota in 2016 then the world grain supply will not last until the following year’s harvest. Tens of millions will starve.
Hot was uncomfortable but the cold will kill.
Andrew30,
If you based a long term climate forecast on the length of solar cycles, you might actually do pretty well.
The Hindu reports today that 25% of US grain is going to biofuels, instead of feeding people.
http://beta.thehindu.com/sci-tech/energy-and-environment/article91775.ece
There are four lovely maps that show the regionality of warming and cooling, and no, they aren’t anomaly maps – they are maps of individual station trends – warming/cooling magnitude.
(color key for rate trends here:http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_XKX5ZAAET-Y/S1Sla-dMmsI/AAAAAAAAAD8/Lhv-rmKqaYY/s320/maplegend.png)
http://82.42.138.62/GHCN/images/GISSraw1880to1909map.png
http://82.42.138.62/GHCN/images/GISSraw1910to1939map.png
http://82.42.138.62/GHCN/images/GISSraw1940to1969map.png
http://82.42.138.62/GHCN/images/GISSraw1970to2010map.png
The rate of warming in the Arctic 1910-1939 is just as strong as in 1970-2010, on the other hand the cooling, almost worldwide, 1940-1969 is stunning
Steve Goddard (15:14:28) :
“If you based a long term climate forecast on the length of solar cycles, you might actually do pretty well.”
You are likely correct, but that is not my writing, it was from a farmer in 2008 talking amount the harvest and the pricing.
“The Hindu reports today that 25% of US grain is going to biofuels, instead of feeding people.”
I know, and the CRU is partly funded by companies that do ”Food to Ethanol” like Broom’s Barn Sugar Beet Research Centre and Tate and Lyle. Probably because the marketing line is that Ethanol produces less CO2 then petrol. But we know that is also produces less power per unit volume, thus it is a wash in the end.
They lie, deceive and they have no shame. They are beneath contempt.
Bull feathers! On Christmas Day 1966, we were playing baseball in short sleeved shirts in Illinois. On Christmas Day 1965,we were ice skating on creeks and water puddles in fields which were frozen completely solid for a period of weeks in Illinois and Kentucky. The Arctic deep freeze was coming down out of Canada and freezing everything solid down to the Mason-Dixon line and farther south. Some of the shallower lakes had to be restocked because of the fish kill resulting from the cold weather.
In the Summer of 1934, the creeks and rivers around Albany, Kentucky and Byrdstown, Tennessee were virtually dried up at times, and some of the wells failed to supply enough water. Temperatures in Cairo, Egypt soared, and the Argentine pampas agriculture suffered from the heat. It was as warm or warmer in the years around 1934 s the hottest years around 1998. In June 1966, a heat wave resulted in official air temperatures of 106F and unofficial air temperatures of 136F underneath the steel roof of the barn where we were putting up the hay bales we had just harvested.
Yes, weather is local. The global climate, is nonetheless, a global sum of that local weather occurring around the globe. When the sum of the local weather around the globe is different than what occurred in another time period, the difference is reflected in more of the local weather around the globe as a difference in global climate. Consequently, some local weather does indeed reflect changes in global climate when the local weather is a manifestation of such changes to the sum of the local weather constituting the global climate.
Such was the case in the Summer of 1978, when the local weather in Southern California, Northern California, Washington, Illinois, New York, England, Scotland, Wales, the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Germany, Austria, Italy, Spain, Greece, Egypt, India, and Japan were so unseasonably cold and rainy for most of the summer season. Crossing the English Channel was a bone chilling experience on 6 June 1978, much the same as it was cold and rainy during the D-Day invsion of 6 June 1944. It was often described in 1978 as the year without a summer by radio and television commntators as I traveled around the world that year. This extraordinarily cold summer weather around the Northern Hemisphere followed closely upon the heels of the hot drought of 1976.
There are currently no reliable datasets of the global air temperatures suitable for global climate research. The original records were never intended to be used for or recorded with the accuracy required for reliable global scale climate research. The observational records which have been put to use for climate research have been improperly and heavily redacted using methods which guarantee a warm bias in the latter period/s. Access to the original observational records have been made relatively inaccessible for most practical purposes, and entirely inaccessible for those which are being deliberately and/or non-deliberately destroyed by records retention policies and/or negligence. Some of these original mnuscript records are reportedly being destroyed by insect larvae eating the papers in the archives. The summaries used to create the datasets do not disclose the full temperature records, and the numbers taken from the summaries have been repeatedly adjusted and otherwise altered without maintaining a change log or other audit trail to permit a reconstruction of the original values or numbers taken from the summaries. In other words, the governmental agencies responsible for the datasets used to compute the global mean air temperature values have lost the original raw observation values and are now working only with numerical values they have invented by alterations to the original values. Using their invented numerical values for global air temperatures, they then dropped the vast majority of the invented values for the surface observation stations, with an even greater proportion of the absent station records coming from the coldest global locations in the latter time periods. Omitting the coldest observational records in the global summary has the inevitable effect of making the global sum and average of temperatures appear hotter than would otherwise have been the case if those colder observational stations and records also been included in the latter time periods.
When you read the Menne et al paper and pay close attention to the Methods in particular, you can see how the paper once again reaches false conclusions by erroneous manipulations of already faulty datasets.
I understand surfacestations.org has surveyed all, or nearly all US stations, and am aware that Anthony Watts promised to do a comparative analysis based on the best stations when 75% of stations had been surveyed. This is the final step, the necessary finishing touch to this excellent project, to see whether adjustments have introduced a spurious warming trend for the contiguous US (and is applicable to the topic of this and many previous threads).
Can anyone direct me to this final important step? It didn’t appear in the Heartland Institute booklet written by Mr Watts. Is there a dedicated thread or something, like the one at climateaudit a couple of years ago, where John V and steve mosher were doing the analysis?
A quantitative analysis and comparison is an absolute must to finalise the project. Has someone crunched the numbers, or will someone advise when this may happen?
Deech56 (07:19:23) :
Amazing – why pick 1998?
It makes no difference when you pick the date from. If you take the time to look at the first graph, it is flat even with the tiny X Axis. Why not pick the start point as the start of the MWP? or immediately after.
Even including the before and after of the MWP the graph would be flat, possibly slightly down. It shows that CAGW is cobblers, ( apologies to the moderators, I hope “cobblers” doesn’t infringe your policy ), it’s a fallacy.
You can obfuscate and lie as much as you like, what it boils down to is you are peddling a big fat lie.
D. Patterson (15:43:14) :
These comments are merely anecdotal evidence, and the anecdotal evidence you cite conflicts with my life experience. There are biological indicators and most contradict your findings.
What the Menne et. al. paper did, was put the final nail in the hypothesis that mis-leading temperature monitors are responsible for the warming trend. In case you missed it, the paper shows the poorly designed stations would actually have a cooling effect versus the better designs.
There was no content to your comment to address. Would you care to put something in your next comment that isn’t just opinion, so that we can decide to give up some of our time, to examine the information and try to understand it?
Deech 56
Are you saying that the trend line that NCDC put on their own data is fakey and the real trend, as calculated by you, is much smaller?
Steve Goddard (15:14:28) :
“If you based a long term climate forecast on the length of solar cycles, you might actually do pretty well.”
Do you realize that if we could dispose of the AGW thing and present some real information like that to farmers about what the coming year would be like then that would be information that they actually could use. For short season years they could put in short season crops, longer crops in longer season years. It would be better to bring a smaller mature crop of something then have a frozen immature crop in the field.
But a field of corn or soy beans or rye is not as lucrative as carbon credit trading.
It is this kind of thing that makes me most upset about this abasement of science, it may be possible to provide good and useful information to the people that can actually use it but the fog of AGW prevents it from getting out.
They have no science to be contested, only fiction; and they have no shame.
E.M.Smith (04:13:07) :
Smart nations at this point, having read through what you posted, will immediately set to work stockpiling coal reserves and investing in massive greenhouse projects. A return to that “Bond Event” would cripple any nation in the temperate zones not prepared for it. The winters are still leapfrogging from one hemisphere to the next in a ‘top this’ contest, and that is not good news. In addition, SC24 is lackluster in progress, and SC25 is projected to follow suit and be even weaker by the few Solar Scientists who didn’t totally miss the boat.
There are enough indications of where we are currently headed to start making preparations. I’ve seen enough.
I really don’t understand why the author of this post didn’t respond in kind to the NASA report. Instead of global temperatures, the post used US temperatures, and instead of a comparison of the decade of the 90s to the last decade, there was a discussion primarily of the last two years.
So lets get back on target here, and address the issue instead of running away from it. Here are the relevant questions regarding the NASA press release on the Hottest Decade Ever:
1. Do other global temperature records show that the last decade was hotter than the 1990s? Since the UAH dataset seems preferred here, what does the UAH data show? My printout of the monthly UAH global temperature anomalies show the 1990s were clearly not as hot as the last decade, confirming the GISS data. And since this is satellite derived data, any concerns about land station measurements aren’t an issue. Why didn’t the post address the UAH record? (Maybe it didn’t show what was wanted in the post?)
2. If we do limit ourselves to the US mainland (only a few percent of the Earth’s surface) what does the comparison of the 1990s to the latest decade show? Although a calculated and statistically checked response is preferred, the graph in this post shows clearly the latest decade was hotter.
If we were to use the US record on its own, since it is such a small portion of the plant, rather than compare the last ten years to the previous ten years, it would give a much better signal if we could use a longer period. So lets compare the last 15 years with the previous 15 years, since our areal coverage is so limited. But yikes, now we see almost runaway heating in the US!!! Clearly something not suitable for a WUWT post.
3. Well OK, this is all backward looking, how about this year 2010? Do we expect a hot year or not? This issue was addressed over on the Tisdale post, and guess what? Some people think that because of long term heating due to AGW, topped by the El Nino impact this year, that there is somewhere between a 50% (Hansen) to 90% (see link on Tisdale post) chance that the global temperature anomaly will set a new HIGH TEMPERATURE record this year! And in fact, the UAH monthly anomaly apparently is going to set a January record THIS month. The previous monthly anomaly record in the UAH dataset was just last November!!!
Hmmm, with all this information, now observers can look at just how carefully this post was crafted, to select information that could be sold to the gullible, and avoid confirming the Hottest Decade statement by NASA. A good try, but it will only be believed by those who already were pre-disposed to believe it. The post doesn’t stand up to any real analytical examination.
REPLY: Paul K: Your post might have merit if anybody but the small cadre people like yourself actually believed GISS anymore. So, your clever constructs here on how you want the post to be written really don’t apply. Also, I booted you off WUWT once for your trolling, here and because of the things you say elsewhere about me. So here we are again, with you under a new handle. Get your own blog, write your views there all you wish, but stop clogging up mine with your constructs about “crafting”. I write about things that interest me, I find this interesting, and so do my readers. You don’t like what I write and never will and that’s fine, now run back to Taminoland and whine there. – Anthony
Steve Goddard (15:14:28) :
The Hindu reports today that 25% of US grain is going to biofuels, instead of feeding people.
Steve, the corn that goes into ethanol is feed corn. In fact, there has always been much more US acreage planted with field corn than in the food varieties. In addition, after the oil is taken out of the corn the rest is still sold as feedstock. There has been very little reduction in US grain production of food varieties. If there was then corn would sell for a lot more than $3 and change.
I am firmly in the camp that ethanol is not an efficient source of energy and other bio-fuels, like algae, look more promising. However, we should try to keep the facts straight.
Karmakaze (11:40:19) :
Mate just relax and take a deep breath, you’re going to pop a vein.
In actual fact, skeptics don’t like talking about the coolest/warmest year/decade etc This phenom was introduced by the alarmists to “prove” AGW. Since the origins of AGW alarmism, skeptics have been (as you would expect) reactionary to claims by alarmists. Put simply, alarmists started it.
“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”
I’m sure you are referring to the tight knit clique of Jones Mann Briffa Hansen et al. Check out the many climategate emails as proof. Cherry picking of tree rings, cherry picking of bristlecone pines, cherry picking of weather stations, cherry picking of baselines for trends, cherry picking of research papers admitted into IPCC reports, cherry picking of reviewers for submitted papers, cherry picking of scientists used to further their agenda and most importantly CHERRY PICKING OF CLIMATE FORCINGS. (they left out the big orange in the sky and those fluffy white candy floss)
“Seriously, will you guys ever learn that local weather is NOT global climate?”
Maybe you can tell us all what “Global Climate” really is.
“Only by starting at a well above trend point, and ending at a below trend point, can they show a downward trend”.
Glad you brought that up. Can you explain to us “idiots” why it’s ok to claim global warming, starting at the very end of the little ice age? then continue explaining why it’s not ok to start “Global Cooling” at the end of a warm period (1998)
What’s good for the GOOSE…..
Your choice of words and tone in your post is regrettable
Paul K2 (16:42:39) :
The data is so tainted selective and manipulated as to be of no true value.
Nothing that you are presetting has any scientific basis.
[snip – your statements about satellite data is incorrect ]
Paul,
This article presents NCDC data about US temperatures and trends. That is it’s only intent. Not every article has to be a battle against Hansen.
BTW- As soon as El Nino fades in the spring, satellite temperatures will go down – just like they did in 2007 after a very warm January. Keep hoping for your “record hot” year though, and stay warm in the meantime.
Richard M (17:05:04) :
Sometime around May of this year in sub-Saharan Africa there will be about 30-50 million people who would love to get their hands on that ‘feed corn’.
No shame, no shame at all.
RE Hu McCulloch (10:34:08) :
Thanks, Hu. Ah, I noticed that the chart is for the NCDC temps and I’ve been using the NASA-GISS numbers (since I can get the numbers off the site easily). Glad to get the link. I did download these data and did a few calculations.
From 1895 the slope is 0.12 deg F/decade (or 0.067 deg C) and the SE is 0.02 def F/decade. A little higher than NASA-GISS over the same period. The t statistic is 5.59 with 113 degrees of freedom, so the slope is significant at p<0.0001.
So since 1998? Slope of -1.03 deg F/decade with SE of 0.46 deg F/decade. t Statistic is 2.216 with 10 degrees of freedom. To achieve significance at p<0.05, t would have to be 2.228 or greater. Ooh, so close, but if you include one more year (1997) the bottom drops out – t statistic is 0.83. You gain one more degree of freedom, but the p<0.05 cutoff is only lowered to 2.201. I have it on reasonable authority that if annual means are used, the autocorrelation is minimal, but with t equal to 5.59, we are far from borderline.
OK, all this is using Excel's LINEST and TINV functions. I'm not a statistician, but I did take the grad school equivalents of Stats 101 and 102 (linear regression – yes, a whole semester of it) and these are fairly straightforward analyses. If someone wants to verify, please do so.
The reason I've spent so much time on this is that I hope the readers understand that when someone bases their conclusion on a temperature chart starting in 1998, they are not telling you the full story. Please think twice before nodding in agreement. (Now let's see whether I screwed up the HTML.)
to: Baa Humbug (17:20:51) :
Damn well said, sir!
>> Deech56: Veronica, When I do the calculations of US data from 1895, I get a slope of about 0.053 deg C/decade. This slope is significant at p<0.0001. To look at reasons, you have to look at the models, and we know that from about 1950 you need to include anthropogenic forcings to account for the global temperature changes. <<
No you don't. This model gives a better fit than the CO2 models:
http://climaterealists.com/attachments/database/TwentiethCenturyTemperatureCorrelationupdate.pdf
In any case, the pre-1979 global (pre satellite) measurements are all but worthless. There were no good temperature records covering the oceans (70% of the planet) until the satellite measurements, and also large gaps in the land coverage.
We can discuss the US records, which is what is done here. They are at least continuous and have reasonable spatial coverage. The temperatures since 1998 show cooling down to the century-plus average. So do the temperatures since 2001, which excludes the El Nino peak. Unlike the Warmists, no one here is extrapolating that cooling out to claim that we're going to have catastrophic cold by 2100.
RE Richard M (13:27:58) :
C’mon, people were all over the place saying that it has been cooling since 1998 even before the current El Niño. 1998 gets picked because people who ant to “show” temperature dropping want to start with a high year. For noisy data like surface temperature, any 10-12 period is too short to show significance.
You can say a change in a fraction of a degree is “significant” because it is. “Significance” has a precise statistical meaning and just requires some calculations to show this. 30 years is usually the standard because with that many data points, the confidence interval becomes narrow enough to show the trend. Other measurements may require a shorter time period if they are less noisy.
The baseline is just used to calculate the anomaly, and choice of baseline will have no effect on the trend, which is really what we are interested in. Also, as I wrote before, if you want to invoke a cycle of some sort, do the Fourier transform.
RE Kevin Kilty (14:44:45) :
Depends on the significance level and the degrees of freedom. Here’s a table of the t distribution.
RE Veronica (16:02:03) :
My bad – different temperature scale (°F vs. °C) and different data set. I have a little longer explanation in my response to Hu.