January 2010 UAH Global Temperature Update +0.72 Deg. C
by Roy W. Spencer, Ph. D.
UPDATE (4:00 p.m. Jan. 4): I’ve determined that the warm January 2010 anomaly IS consistent with AMSR-E sea surface temperatures from NASA’s Aqua satellite…I will post details later tonight or in the a.m. – Roy
YR MON GLOBE NH SH TROPICS
2009 01 +0.304 +0.443 +0.165 -0.036
2009 02 +0.347 +0.678 +0.016 +0.051
2009 03 +0.206 +0.310 +0.103 -0.149
2009 04 +0.090 +0.124 +0.056 -0.014
2009 05 +0.045 +0.046 +0.044 -0.166
2009 06 +0.003 +0.031 -0.025 -0.003
2009 07 +0.411 +0.212 +0.610 +0.427
2009 08 +0.229 +0.282 +0.177 +0.456
2009 09 +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 +0.288 +0.329 +0.246 +0.510
2010 01 +0.724 +0.841 +0.607 +0.757
The global-average lower tropospheric temperature anomaly soared to +0.72 deg. C in January, 2010. This is the warmest January in the 32-year satellite-based data record.
The tropics and Northern and Southern Hemispheres were all well above normal, especially the tropics where El Nino conditions persist. Note the global-average warmth is approaching the warmth reached during the 1997-98 El Nino, which peaked in February of 1998.
This record warmth will seem strange to those who have experienced an unusually cold winter. While I have not checked into this, my first guess is that the atmospheric general circulation this winter has become unusually land-locked, allowing cold air masses to intensify over the major Northern Hemispheric land masses more than usual. Note this ALSO means that not as much cold air is flowing over and cooling the ocean surface compared to normal. Nevertheless, we will double check our calculations to make sure we have not make some sort of Y2.01K error (insert smiley). I will also check the AMSR-E sea surface temperatures, which have also been running unusually warm.
After last month’s accusations that I’ve been ‘hiding the incline’ in temperatures, I’ve gone back to also plotting the running 13-month averages, rather than 25-month averages, to smooth out some of the month-to-month variability.
We don’t hide the data or use tricks, folks…it is what it is.
[NOTE: These satellite measurements are not calibrated to surface thermometer data in any way, but instead use on-board redundant precision platinum resistance thermometers (PRTs) carried on the satellite radiometers. The PRT’s are individually calibrated in a laboratory before being installed in the instruments.]
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NOTE: Entire UAH dataset is here, not yet updated for Jan 2010 as of this posting
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The HUGE jump in temperature in January 2010 is strange, since it seems it is the BIGGEST such jump recorded, I say that by looking at the data, I am no expert at all. But the jump in sea surface temp is minuscule for January 2010. Maybe this is an error? Can alarmist NASA manipulate these temperatures since, as far as I know, both sea surface and tropospheric temperature come from the same NASA Satellite?
barry (06:26:55):
“For you, though, yonason, who troubled to take up the subject, your reply was a consequence of cognitive dissonance.”
That is simply psychological projection. It is Mr barry who suffers from cognitive dissonance. He attempts to put the onus on scientific skeptics, rather than where it properly belongs.
For the umpteenth time: skeptics have nothing to prove. The burden is entirely on the promoters of the AGW hypothesis to show that it explains reality better than the long accepted theory of natural climate variability. They have failed.
The failure of the AGW hypothesis is due to its proponents’ pointing to AGW studies and computer models as “evidence.” But neither are empirical [real world], verifiable evidence.
The AGW studies are, by and large, opinions. But no AGW paper has been able to provide empirical evidence showing that a quantified rise in CO2 results in a specific rise in the global temperature.
Climate peer review is hopelessly corrupted, as the Climategate emails show. Pro-AGW papers are promptly published, while papers skeptical of AGW are either interminably delayed, or more often, are summarily rejected.
A recent example of practically instant publication is the Menneke et al. paper which attempts to downplay the UHI effect. That paper was particularly sloppy, but it was routinely hand-waved through the climate peer review process by a friendly referee and published with alacrity.
The other so-called “evidence” of AGW is GCMs [computer climate models]. But GCMs are not evidence. They are simply tools — and not very accurate tools. Not one of the ≈ two dozen GCMs predicted the flat to cooling temperatures since 2002.
GCMs are programmed with a specific conclusion in mind. It may be deliberate, or it may be an unconscious decision due to the rewards of showing temperatures rising as a result of rising CO2. But the models project the same general outcomes in lock-step. That is due to programming bias, whether conscious or not.
It may be that there is some minor anthropogenic influence on global temperatures. But the AGW hypothesis fails, because the scientific method is not followed.
AGW believers attempt to re-frame the debate by demanding that skeptics must prove that AGW does not exist. In other words, skeptics are expected to prove a negative.
The motive for that duplicity is clear: if AGW proponents followed the scientific method, they know that their alarming climate catastrophe scenarios would be falsified. But with many $billions at stake, they are willing to defenestrate the scientific method in favor of scientifically invalid AGW propaganda.
Henry Pool (23:52:37) :
Missingo, you have not answered me on the results of my experiments 1+2? Anyone can see what the argument is about: the 100 ppm CO2 (0.01%) added since 1960 changes nothing on heat retention in my experiments. The amount is too small. Now if you were to introduce 1 or 2% water vapor in those experiments, you probably would see some heat retention taking place but it would still be small compared to doubling of energy release due to the doubling of the population over the past 50 years.
Your ‘experiments’ are meaningless in the context of the earth, to make it realistic suspend your gas filled chamber in a vacuum chamber with its walls at ~3K and heat it from outside with a lamp at a brightness temperature of ~5000K (no internal heater). That won’t deal with the variation of atmospheric pressure with altitude but it’s closer to reality.
Re: barry (Feb 6 06:29),
“there is so much talk on climate trends and statistics, and none at all on what a statistically significant climate period actually is.”
Have a look at this series of enlarging scales of the temperature history of the planet and tell me what a statistically significant climate period is.
My definition would be: it depends on what you are studying. Climate is average weather, how big the averaging interval is depends on what one is studying. If it is the emergence of homo sapiens, it is different ( look at the holocene optimum).
If it is whether anthropogenic excess CO2 is affecting average temperatures, it is different. In any case, the long view of climate as seen above, is that it is chaotic, variable, and has been much hotter and much colder than now in the history of homo sapiens.
Now if we want to determine whether we are turning and going downhill, as in the medieval warm period going into the little ice age, or we are going up still as in the roman period, we can only speculate ( btw the plots are at rest in this link .
Look at the roman warm period, 0 AD. What would be a good climate interval that would tell us if we are going up or coming down slope? looks as if 20 to 30 years would do it. So we wait. And in the meantime take part in the fun on these blogs by speculating on weather. Whats bad about that?
The serious stuff is when people present analysis based on PDO and ENSO and all the rest of the alphabet soup ,and sun cycles etc and are threshed out with pros and cons . Stick around.
Hi Phil. yes I have been thinking that if you want to test exactly how much of the sun’s energy is reflected by carbon dioxide and compare that to how much of earth’s radiation is trapped by Co2 you will have to come up with some other kind of testing. In this experiment it is just to show that the 100 ppm Co2 do nothing and is in fact nothing compared to simple AHG.
barry (07:46:34) : that there is so much talk on climate trends and statistics, and none at all on what a statistically significant climate trend actually is. …
Seeing as a vast number of articles and comments at this site are premised on the assumption that short-term trends (< 14 years) are climatically significant, a post reinforcing this assumption is long overdue.
Well, I’d suggest at least a 10,000 year baseline. We know there are cycles that long ( interglacials ) that shift climate. After that you are looking at million year ranges of geographic changes. Short of 10,000 years? “I don’t think so, Tim”… We have 1500 year cyclicality ( Bond Events ) but that just changes weather for a while, not the climate ( Sahara stays a hot desert, Mediterranean stays mediterranean, Siberian arboreal stays arboreal, etc.)
The idea of ’30 year climate’ is a profound oxymoron.
tell me what a statistically significant climate period is
I’ve done that and provided links. And it was in the context of short-term trends, which are the subject of much discussion here, and specifically on this thread. It is amazing that there is little awareness or even curiosity about a concept fundamental to so many discussions here: how much data do you need to distinguish a statistically valid climate trend from weather phenomena?
Well, I’d suggest at least a 10,000 year baseline. We know there are cycles that long ( interglacials ) that shift climate. After that you are looking at million year ranges of geographic changes. Short of 10,000 years? “I don’t think so, Tim”… We have 1500 year cyclicality ( Bond Events ) but that just changes weather for a while, not the climate ( Sahara stays a hot desert, Mediterranean stays mediterranean, Siberian arboreal stays arboreal, etc.)
I see. Then you would argue that ‘ the climate has been cooling since 1998’ is a bogus claim, and you would at the very least agree with me that all the comments here on describing global or regional temperature changes over one month, one year, or a decade… are deluded.
In my part of the world, the climate is constantly changing. We mark it with four seasons. We may be kidding ourselves…
Context is important, isn’t it?
Sorry, E M Smith – posting late. Should have said;
you would at the very least agree with me that all the comments here on describing global or regional temperature changes over one month, one year, or a decade as ‘climate’ trends… are deluded.
BTW if we wanted to cool the planet there would be a very simple geoengineering approach: Desertification. Air humidity in the Sahara is usually at 3-4 percent, at most 30 percent. An easy way to bring down the dangerous accumulation of the most important greenhouse gas, water vapour. Sealing off large swaths of land with tarmac might help as well.
George E. Smith (14:09:01)
Go back and read my post carefully. Trying to focus on the definition of heat is irrelevant to my post and is but a red herring.
“It is not something (heat) that can propagate in the absence of molecules or atoms”.
This has nothing to do with my argument.
“But what CO2, and other GHGs such as H2O and methane CH4 can and do do in the atmosphere, is selectively intercept and absorb ENERGY in the form of Electromagnetic Radiation; treated either as a Photon stream or a wave as you prefer.”
The energy that CO2, H2O etc. absorbs has nothing to do with selective interception but has everything to with the physical properties of the gas involved. Measure the absorption spectra experimentally, repeat a number of times for verification and voila you have the natural absorption properties of that gas. This is a feature of nature and can’t be altered by you or anyone else.
“As to the consequence for the total energy balance of the planet; that it is a much more complicated issue, but to deny that CO2 “heats” the atmosphere as do other green house molecules, is not a fruitful pursuit.”
The real truth is that CO2 at less than .04 percent by volume with a specific heat capacity less than aluminum is woefully inadequate to even come close
to the ability of N2 and O2 to absorb and retain em radiation in the form of kinetic heat. Not wishing to face the facts is definitely not fruitful at all.
Why use an aluminum heatsink on a cpu? Because its cheap and it radiates heat quickly because of its specific heat content. Aluminum is lousy at retaining heat. Copper is even worse than aluminum at retaining heat which is why it is used on faster processors. Apparently real physics gets no respect at all from warmers.
The term feedback cannot be applied to the earth’s climate system since a feedback requires a closed system. Since there is no physical shell or barrier surrounding the earth and the exosphere is open to space allowing kinetic heat to escape, the term feedback is incorrect. I suppose you will try to make the analogy to blankets as I’ve seen in so many places. Also there is not enough CO2 in the atmosphere to block anything. It is a matter of proportion. Again, only proper experiments IN the atmosphere will settle the matter. Oh, and the earth and its atmosphere is NOT a greenhouse.
In short, the C02 as the earth’s thermostat is bunk. How much does CO2 at less than .04 percent contribute to the earth’s climate? Zero, zip, zilch, nil, nada. Good luck with your efforts to demonize CO2. The real facts speak otherwise.
“Brian (10:50:14) :
[…]
The term feedback cannot be applied to the earth’s climate system since a feedback requires a closed system.”
Where did you get that from?
Re: barry (Feb 6 09:55),
Were you replying to me? Maybe your english is different than my english.
I was asking the question with respect to the linked plots, not with respect to the puny lengths of mine and your lifetime. Obviously you did not even look at the plots so bye bye. I wish there were an “ignore” function on these blogs.
It’s the reflection off the snow.
It will be interesting to see NASA GISS land based temps. for January. Will this give Jim the chance to put it through the roof?
anna v (08:30:47) :
“Re: barry (Feb 6 06:29),
Have a look at this series of enlarging scales of the temperature history of the planet and tell me what a statistically significant climate period is.
My definition would be: it depends on what you are studying. “
Yes, and so is Bob Carter’s, as we see in this other series of his.
What Barry is deliberately ignoring is that Dr. Carter is addressing the AGW loons on their own turf. THEY are the ones trying to squeeze “trends” out of short term data, and all he’s doing is saying that even that can’t be done.
Slippery buggers those warmers.
Dear Moderator,
340 comments to this post so far
how is that in relation to the WUWT record number of comments to a post?
John
Reply: Not even close. ~ ctm
CTM,
OK, I will bite.
What is the record?
John
Reply: I’m not sure, but I think it was the first climategate post, which garnered 1616 comments. ~ ctm
CTM,
I am curious about WUWT moderation.
I have a question on the decision making process for you WUWT moderators.
How do you decide who covers the night shift everyday? Do you like play a game of paper-scissors-stone and winner gets his/her choice?
Hey, I am in Taipei so it is daytime here as I enjoy the night shift moderator.
John
Reply:
We use all the methods noted below.
~ ctm
CTM, I should have expected you to decide by such a highly statistical process given that you all are WUWT moderators. Great.
John
Hi Brian
You say:
“Also there is not enough CO2 in the atmosphere to block anything”
I think this was in response to my assertion that Co2 also reflects or blocks sun light similar to the mechanism whereby we know or assume that ozone blocks UV light.
I said that because of this property there must be some cooling effect of Co2 which nobody seems to have properly ever investigated e.g. how much cooling and how much warming does Co2 really cause?
This paper here seems to indicate to me that you are not right?
http://www.iop.org/EJ/article/0004-637X/629/2/1175/61819.web.pdf?request-id=d5c8def3-e610-4d2f-86ed-8436340aca4a
yonason,
What Barry is deliberately ignoring is that Dr. Carter is addressing the AGW loons on their own turf. THEY are the ones trying to squeeze “trends” out of short term data, and all he’s doing is saying that even that can’t be done.
Carter said, “you can argue over what is a climatically significant period…”
But he presented no argument. No one here has.
anna,
My definition would be: it depends on what you are studying.
I am referring to thousands of comments here attaching the term ‘climate change’ to a months worth of data. Or a year’s worth. Or ten years. These periods are being studied by the regulars here in countless threads without ever bothering to establish or even question a fundamental concept:
At what point does a climate signal emerge from the noise of weather?
I have stated the opinion that the absolute minimum is 14 years, and a more reasonable period of 20 – 30 years, and provided links to statistics experts to support these figures.
It’s based on math. Statistical analysis.
I do not know how to make my query clearer. It is not I, or the ‘warmists’ who speak of a few months or several years of data being climatically significant. These periods are taken as statistically significant WRT to climate by the denizens of this and other skeptical blogs. If you need corroboration, scroll through this thread. As far as I know, no skeptic has ever attempted to demonstrate with math why they think a climate trend is statistically valid at anything less than 14 years, and yet shorter periods are constantly spoken of as if they are.
Show me the maths. Here are the links again for an example.
20 – 30 years
14 year minimum
yonason,
What Barry is deliberately ignoring is that Dr. Carter is addressing the AGW loons on their own turf. THEY are the ones trying to squeeze “trends” out of short term data
Carter is talking about 3-year and 9-year trends in the video you supplied. As evidenced in the links above, warmists say these are too short.
anna,
I am well aware, as paleoclimatologists are, that climate can be assessed on much longer time periods – but that is not the are of study I’m interested in. My question is about the short-term trends popular amongst skeptics. Surely you are familiar with the ‘cooling since 1998’ meme that’s been bandied about for the last few years. If you agree with me that this is too short a period to consider climatically significant, would you be happy to say so directly?
barry (04:27:18) :
At what point does a climate signal emerge from the noise of weather?
I have stated the opinion that the absolute minimum is 14 years, and a more reasonable period of 20 – 30 years, and provided links to statistics experts to support these figures.
It’s based on math. Statistical analysis.
I do not know how to make my query clearer. It is not I, or the ‘warmists’ who speak of a few months or several years of data being climatically significant. These periods are taken as statistically significant WRT to climate by the denizens of this and other skeptical blogs. If you need corroboration, scroll through this thread. As far as I know, no skeptic has ever attempted to demonstrate with math why they think a climate trend is statistically valid at anything less than 14 years, and yet shorter periods are constantly spoken of as if they are.
Show me the maths. Here are the links again for an example.
20 – 30 years
14 year minimum
I have to agree with this. One of Barry’s links is to Tamino’s blog – unfortunately (and annoyingly) Tamino is correct. Leaving aside the statistical analysis, logic tells you that, if TSI varies by ~0.1% (~0.07 deg C) over the period of a solar cycle, then you need at least the length of a solar cycle to determine the underlying trend. There are also ENSO fluctuations to consider. Many of the recent short term trends have been influenced by the transistion from El Nino to La Nina (2002/03 -> 2007/08).
A lot has been made of the “cooling since 1998” but that may well be coming to an end. The UAH trend since 1998 could well go positive in the next few months and although, this is not likely to be statistically significant, even that may change by 2012, i.e. by the end of Tamino’s 14 year ‘minimum period’ for a trend.
The cautious amongst us make the more modest claim that the trend has been flat since 2002. That’s simply an observation, not necessarily a claim that a long-term flat trend has been established. It’s significance lies in the following:
1. Its correlation with the cresting at about that point in the 30-year PDO cycle. (See Dr. Akasofu’s paper (a long PDF) at http://people.iarc.uaf.edu/~sakasofu/little_ice_age.php .) Since we believe these multi-decadal cycles are what were responsible for the flat-to-cooling trend from 1942 to 1978, and a prior cooling trend from before and during the start of the 20th century, we take this current pause as a likely harbinger of another cooling period.
2. The doubt such a pause casts on current alarmist claims that the trend is up, given that their claims prior to 2002 that the trend was relentlessly up (under a business-as-usual scenario) have been falsified. For instance, the trend of temperatures over the Noughties falls below the 0.2 degrees C / decade trendline of Hansen and the IPCC’s “Business as Usual” projections from before 2002. (E.g., Hansen’s 1988 Scenario “A”.) It’s my impression that the alarmists back then were not allowing for more than two or three years of slack in their models. Everything that happened was due to a “forcing,” and they had all the important forcings accounted for, so they thought. If they had been asked back then to estimate the probability of an eight-year flat trend, they’d have said, I infer, “less than 10%.”
This weakens their case that CO2 is as an important a factor in the global temperature as they think. Or at least it indicates their models, which failed to allow for a lengthy slack period, are not as reliable as claimed.
Nailing down just exactly how much slack the alarmists were allowing for back then would be a fruitful area for both sides to research, to help resolve how damaging (or not) this pause is to the AGW hypothesis.
FWIW, Hansen made an embarrassing predictive flub, a WUWT thread titled “A little known 20 year old climate change prediction by Dr. James Hansen – that failed badly”. (He predicted Manhattan would be awash by now.)
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/10/22/a-little-known-but-failed-20-year-old-climate-change-prediction-by-dr-james-hansen/
PS: I have often preached that it is wise to avoid overstatement, because it gives the other side an opportunity to refute the overstated part of the claim and seem thereby to have disposed of the matter entirely. It’s like handing them a strawman to knock down. If our side made a habit of phrasing its claims in a more lawyerly, guarded fashion, this wouldn’t occur.
OTOH, it should be evident to warmists that skeptics’ talk about a recent cooling or flat trend can’t be dismissed as outrageous because short-term trends mean nothing. Such pauses do mean something, because warmists had earlier implied that they were very unlikely to occur.
Here’s an analogy. Let’s say there is an auto race, and a backer of the car named “Carbon” claims that it so far outclasses the rest of the field that it will “lap” them every 20 times around the course, on average. He therefore predicts that after 100 laps it will have lapped the field five times. Further, his prediction is correct after the first 20 laps. (I.e., from 1978 to 1998.)
However, after the next ten laps, it gains no further ground, and even loses a bit. Critics of the carbon backer then say this makes his prediction that his favorite will win by five laps look like a bad bet. (I.e., this implies that the correct public policy would be “wait and see” rather than “tax and spend.”)
Carbon backer can’t wave their observation aside by saying that it doesn’t count because there are always short-term surges and fades in the course of a race. That’s a strawman. A ten-lap hiatus does not disprove the idea that the carbon car may get a second wind and pick up the pace again. Claiming that that is the point in dispute and brushing it aside is knocking down a strawman.
What such a hiatus should and does do is considerably lower our degree of conviction in carbon-backer’s initial claim of a relentless outpacing of the field, and warn us to keep our wallet in our pocket, rather than backing his bet.
Dirk H (10:56:50)
The term feedback is more complicated than my simple statement and is more relevant to electronics than the earth’s atmosphere. Is there an experiment in the atmosphere that confirms the postulated feedback by climate scientists?
Do we know for 100 per cent certainty that these feedbacks are occuring or are they real because a computer model and some impressive graphics on a computer screen say so? And who said math and models were a replacement for hardcore experiments anyway? You know climate scientists are better off renting a hot air baloon, loading it with some gear and take a nice long tour while recording some data. How about measurements above and below a cloud layer? Design a experiment to simply tour around anywhere in the atmosphere and continuously record data. Far better than spending countless hours in front of a computer. From my point of view, for the money spent so far on the whole warming thing current climate science is inept. Replace all the climate quacks with engineers then maybe we will get somewhere.
Henry Poole (22:34:52)
I totally agree with you on “some cooling effect” but not from blocking. It’s related to the proportion of CO2 and its measured specific heat content, .04% represents really a very tiny mass. There simply isn’t enough of it to “get in the way”. On the other hand its specific heat content says that, because it’s poor at retaining kinetic energy it can’t possibly have a warming effect especially at .04% concentration by volume. The tiny tiny effect that it does have is more cooling than warming. This is why warmers have had to resort to some kind of amplification. Overall, compared to the concentration O2 (220,000ppm), N2 (750,000ppm) and water vapor (max 40,000ppm) CO2 has no sensible effect on the climate at all.