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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Thanks Roger, I liked that explanation
“Brian (09:00:24) :
[…]
How about measurements above and below a cloud layer? ”
The Real Climate Scientists don’t do this. But the guys around Miskolczi have – using a plane, not a balloon.
http://miskolczi.webs.com/ZM_v10_eng.pdf
Fun thing is, Miskolczi’s theory is not quite in sync with the IPCC’s doomsday scenarios…
Brian:
I have had some considerable discussions as to how the “blocking” or “trapping” of radiation works. Let us take ozone as example. Ozone blocks (or reflects) UV from the sun from 0 up to a certain wave length. At between 12 and 13 it blocks a considerable amount of radiation coming from earth. The reason why we don’t hear any complaints from the warmists about ozone is probably because the net effect is cooling but I would not know this for sure. Did anyone do any testing? I could not find anything. The same applies to CO2.
If you look at the spectra, then you can see that there is absorption, exactly where there is blocking (or reflection). My understanding of what exactly happens is this: The gas absorbs one or more photons (at that wavelength area where it absorbs) and at this stage the molecule becomes sort of like a mirror at that wavelength area. So it starts reflecting the light there and because of the random position we can say that about 50% of that radiation (of that wavelength area) is send back to space. If you look at the definition of the greenhouse effect , it mentions that 50% is send back to earth/ trapped so to speak. I have to believe that something like this is happening, because as I showed you, they can even measure that radiation from CO2 when it reflects back from the moon.
But now what I cannot understand is that nobody has ever looked at CO2 and tried to work out or test how much cooling (by blocking or reflecting light at the relevant wavelengths from the sun) and how much warming by trapping earth’s radiation (mostly at between 14 and 15) is caused by the carbon dioxide. I think to me it looks it could be 50-50 and like you say, the quantity (of the increase of 0.01%) is so small that it cannot possibly very relevant. That is what my instinct tells me. But if there is so much discussions going on about it, why is there no money for this to reasearch this? I don’t understand that.
this CO2 temperature widget is funny: anomaly +0.72K , arrow down. What does this mean, arrow down? Is this an error?
@topic
there were many signs for a new January record. Not surprising: warming in the last 12 years + favourable conditions (El Nino, but not as strong as 1997/98) = record. But is just a month… let’s see what happens in the next years, but the chances are good, the warming trend will continue. Unfortunately.
Re: barry (Feb 7 04:27),
I know of noone on this board seriously contending that climate is a few days or a few months.
If you look, all threads have at the bottom on the mane page
Categories : Climate News, Science, earth, for example
If it is weather, it says categories:weather etc.
This one is” Categories : climate data”
Note, data, i.e what will be averaged to give climate.
Please link to a post here that says a few days or months are climate.
@just you
Unfortunately? I have several friends in the NH who would love it a bit warmer. They have the (white) evidence of “global warming” lying in front of their houses for weeks now. I told them that the trend from 2003 is cooling. All indicators have gone that way.
So (unfortunately) it is really going to get colder. Read all of my entries in this post and you may find out why…..
p.s. to my last
Re: barry (Feb 7 04:27),
I think our difference lies in that I do not think that even 30 or 60 years are enough to average a climate behavior out of weather behavior. It is not just statistics.
By the Nyquist sampling theorem as the PDO has a 30 year frequency at least we need at least 180 years to get a true climate out of the weather data. See the thread :
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/02/05/spencer-record-january-warmth-is-mostly-sea/#comment-310151
an interesting video there.
Leif Svalgaard (22:55:41) :
“There are so many that the mind boggles, but two good ones are two books by Richard Dawkins:”
If Dawkins “boggles” anyone’s mind, their mind is far too easily boggled.
Besides, you said there was new material, as in state of the art stuff. Dawkins just regurgitates old spew, albeit in new and colorful ways. Lee Spetner shows where Dawkins, and many others, are not just wrong, but would almost have to be deliberately so to come up with such outlandish nonsense.
Again, you intimated that some state of the art material existed. If you have any QUANTITATIVE proof, that’s what I want to see, not some deceptive stoaty “proofs” that are really just so much smoke and mirrors.
As I said before, I think the warmers probably learned a lot of their propaganda techniques from the evolutionists. I’m guessing that because most scientists are brainwashed to have that kind of mindset, is why the true believing warmers have gotten away with their scam for so long.
yonason (11:58:29) :
Dawkins just regurgitates old spew, albeit in new and colorful ways.
So, you bought the two books and read them carefully.
To prove that tell us what the first word on page 100 is for both.
Henry Pool (09:46:01) :
Brian:
I have had some considerable discussions as to how the “blocking” or “trapping” of radiation works.
With whom? Judging by your post they totally misunderstand the subject!
Phil.
These remarks of yours are not really very constructive.
Admittedly, we are not all as clever as you are. Please enlighten us with your knowledge and understanding.
Smokey (08:59:28) :
I see, so you want empirical evidence that you believe, not just empirical evidence. And by empirical evidence that you believe I mean empirical evidence that doesn’t support AGW.
anna,
If you think a climate signal emerges after 180 years, do you ever take issue with people talking about climate on shorter trends?
How about the post from Roger Knights just below my last one.
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
(PDO)
The cautious amongst the skeptics see climatic significance in a 7 year trend. Mainstream science posits a 20-30 year period as a reasonable period to establish if there’s a climate trend. Roger continues:
He’s talking conflating short-term trends with climate change.
(Knights is incorrect about the models. A number of runs that end up in the middle of projections by 2100, have 10 and even 20 year flat or slightly cooling trends in various parts of the 21st century, some even for the current period. The usual mistake is to point to model ensemble means in the IPCC, which are smoothed to emphasise the climate signal, and do not show interannual variability – but that’s another topic)
From earlier in this thread:
Amino says:
Mainstream AGW is about 20-30 year climate periods, not 3 years.
(Sorry about the formatting – oh for a preview button for us limited to posting in the wee hours)
SteveE (01:46:19),
You made a statement that I refuted in my 08:59:28 post. Your example was one of correlation, not of causation. I provided a citation giving an equally plausible alternate explanation. Therefore, your conclusion is simply an opinion. It is not empirical evidence showing that CO2 is the cause of a rising global temperature.
Maybe you haven’t read all my posts, but I have repeatedly asked someone, anyone, to provide empirical evidence specifically demonstrating, in a testable manner, that an X increase in CO2 results in an X increase in global temperature.
Because that is what the entire debate is about: CO2=CAGW. Everything else is extraneous. If the CO2 catastrophe hypothesis fails, then the entire AGW edifice comes crashing down.
As a skeptic I am not saying — and I never have said — that CO2 causes no warming at all. The physics seems sound. But the essential question is: how much warming? The IPCC’s ridiculously inflated sensitivity number has no relation to observed reality. And if, as seems very likely at this point, the sensitivity number is anything less than one, then CO2 is inconsequential and can be disregarded for all practical purposes.
The climate alarmist crowd claims that the rise in CO2 will cause runaway global warming and climate catastrophe. They cannot back down from that claim. Because if it turns out, as appears very likely, that the effect of CO2 is insignificant, then there is no reason to spend any more money on mitigation, on grants, or on anything else connected with the CAGW hypothesis. More than $50 billion has been wasted on this non-problem, and many other branches of science have been starved of funding as a direct result.
If you can give me real evidence showing that a specific rise in CO2 causes measurable warming, I’ll sit up straight and pay attention. But your example above does not rise to the level of evidence showing that CO2 is the predominant cause of global warming.
Either the planet is heating up catastrophically due to rising CO2, or the planet is well within the parameters of natural climate variability, and beneficial carbon dioxide is only a harmless trace gas. Based on real world observations, the latter appears to be the case.
Henry Pool (21:53:31) :
Phil.
These remarks of yours are not really very constructive.
Admittedly, we are not all as clever as you are. Please enlighten us with your knowledge and understanding.
Well it’s not exactly the first time I’ve refuted similar misconceptions on here, it gets a little tiresome after a while! Since I haven’t seen you post here on this subject before I’ll do it again.
Henry Pool (09:46:01) :
Brian:
I have had some considerable discussions as to how the “blocking” or “trapping” of radiation works. Let us take ozone as example. Ozone blocks (or reflects) UV from the sun from 0 up to a certain wave length. At between 12 and 13 it blocks a considerable amount of radiation coming from earth.
Molecular Oxygen absorbs UV at wavelengths up to 242nm in the stratosphere which causes it to break up into two oxygen atoms, when these oxygen atoms collide with an oxygen molecule they form an ozone molecule (O3). The region in the atmosphere where this production is favored is called the ozone layer, the ozone absorbs (not reflects!) UV light in the range 240-320nm. This warms the lower stratosphere but the reduction of ozone over recent decades has led to a relative cooling there.
Ozone also absorbs in the IR and on the following image you’ll see the ozone absorption at about 1000 cm^-1, note that it’s much less than CO2 (not considerable).
http://i302.photobucket.com/albums/nn107/Sprintstar400/Atmos.gif
The reason why we don’t hear any complaints from the warmists about ozone is probably because the net effect is cooling but I would not know this for sure. Did anyone do any testing? I could not find anything.
There’s plenty of postings about ozone, mainly about the effect of its depletion and our role in that.
The same applies to CO2.
If you look at the spectra, then you can see that there is absorption, exactly where there is blocking (or reflection). My understanding of what exactly happens is this: The gas absorbs one or more photons (at that wavelength area where it absorbs) and at this stage the molecule becomes sort of like a mirror at that wavelength area. So it starts reflecting the light there and because of the random position we can say that about 50% of that radiation (of that wavelength area) is send back to space. If you look at the definition of the greenhouse effect , it mentions that 50% is send back to earth/ trapped so to speak. I have to believe that something like this is happening, because as I showed you, they can even measure that radiation from CO2 when it reflects back from the moon.
Almost totally wrong!
CO2 strongly absorbs IR from the earth in the large band centered on ~650nm (see above). The excited CO2 thus created is sufficiently long lasting that in the lower troposphere that it gives up its energy to colliding N2 and O2 molecules thereby heating the atmosphere, only higher up in the atmosphere where the pressure is lower does radiation become significant. The direction of the radiation is random so ~half is to space.
There is no reflection by CO2!
But now what I cannot understand is that nobody has ever looked at CO2 and tried to work out or test how much cooling (by blocking or reflecting light at the relevant wavelengths from the sun) and how much warming by trapping earth’s radiation (mostly at between 14 and 15) is caused by the carbon dioxide. I think to me it looks it could be 50-50 and like you say, the quantity (of the increase of 0.01%) is so small that it cannot possibly very relevant. That is what my instinct tells me. But if there is so much discussions going on about it, why is there no money for this to reasearch this? I don’t understand that.
I don’t know why you’d state this, there must have been hundreds of papers on this by now, start off by looking for V Ramanathan at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego, he was one of the first to put this all together in the 70s. As you’ll see from the above graph the effect of CO2 is far from negligible.
She was talking about the need to filter out the 60-year PDO cycle in order to obtain a signal about longer lasting trends. If you consider the PDO cycle to be a climate factor, because its effects persist for decades, then a much shorter-term is OK. Here’s what she said:
Well, we’ve had a 20-year up-leg (1978 to 1998) and a ten-year flattish trend. It looks like things could well be cresting and heading down for another 20 years, then another ten-year flattish trend, in phase with the down-leg and reversal of the PDO.
Barry: How about the post from Roger Knights just below my last one.
Barry: [sarc] The cautious amongst the skeptics see climatic significance in a 7 year trend.[/sarc]
That’s your strawman. A skeptic need do no more than falsify (or shoot holes in) a claimant’s hypothesis, which a flat-trend tends to do. As I wrote, it “casts doubt” and it “weakens the case.” I wasn’t implying there was anything more than a possible long-term, or climatic, significance in a 7-year flat trend, given that the PDO is turning, as I just wrote above.
What I stressed as the gravamen of my charge was that there is “anti-climatic” significance in it. I.e., it falsifies, or tends to falsify, the alarmists’ erstwhile implication of a tight link between rising CO2 and rising temperatures. This tight link was “the horse they rode in on” during the 80s and 90s, when such a tight link existed. They weren’t saying then that it could have been mere correlation. They took it as a striking confirmation of their theories. They made hay with the visual impact the tight correlation of the lines on their charts. So they set themselves up for a fall when those lines diverged.
And mainstream science is wrong. Since 1998 it’s been known that the length of the PDO is 60-some years. Using a 20-30 year cycle as significant will (and has) misled the mainstream into thinking that the recent 20-year upleg (1978 to 1998) heralds an unstoppable uptrend, rather than merely being an up-leg (warm phase) of the PDO.
Nope, I’m pointing to an inconvenient truth — if you “live” by a two-decadal warming trend, and keep claiming “it’s unstoppable (under business as usual),” you’ll “die,” or at least be lamed, and deservedly, if there’s a one-decadal “stoppage” (such as has just occurred).
This looks like an attempt to levitate the alarmists out of the corner they have painted themselves into. I’m sure a few of the modelers left themselves an “out” back in the day, because it’s “not done” in scenario-building to say that any outcome is impossible. Everything is a matter of probabilities.
But the odds they’d have offered on a stoppage coming to pass so soon would have been (I infer) low (under 10%). Hansen certainly implied a relentless warming on a decadal scale. And so did all the others who piped up, when they used short-term events (Arctic sea ice, Wilkins shelf, Katrina, a bad couple of tornado years, coral bleaching, drought in Atlanta, etc.) as confirmations of their forecasts.
My inference above needs to be robustified. I hope a few skeptics will document this. As I wrote:
“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.”
Leif Svalgaard (13:04:43) :
“yonason (11:58:29) :
Dawkins just regurgitates old spew, albeit in new and colorful ways.
So, you bought the two books and read them carefully.
To prove that tell us what the first word on page 100 is for both.”
I never said I’ve read all his material. I’ve seen enough material of his quoted which tells me he’s the Al Gore of Evolution. If I see that a book contains obvious falsehoods, or misleading information, I’m not going to waste money or time on it.
The best chance evolution may have is in what’s referred to as the “RNA-World” hypothesis. (Note – they are honest enough to call it an hypothesis, rather that either a “theory” or “fact.”) And, if that’s true, a lot of what currently is being referred to as “fact” will be shown not to be. I.e., it isn’t “established.”
The only reason I brought that up is because of the connection I see between warmism and evolutionism.
An example of how evolutionists lie like warmers is the “nylon bug.” We’re led to believe that it’s (1) unique, and (2) that it metabolizes nylon, and so that is proof that the mutations in the gene of that singular bug randomly generated a brand new activity never seen before.
Nonsense. First, it isn’t unique. There are no fewer than 11 other bacteria in 7 genera that have the same activity, AND second, while they only metabolize the monomers and dimers (with minimal activity for trimers) they have no activity whatever against nylon itself, which is the long chain polymer. But, there are 2 fungi that do degrade the polymer itself. (Also, those bacteria are among the ones commonly used in Bioremediation, the technology of detoxifying some of the nastiest human waste, almost as if they were “designed” to do just that.)
That’s just one example of how deception permeates scientific thinking, and has been poisoned it. Evolutionists distort facts to create false impressions, and refuse to acknowledge weaknesses that are far from resolved. There is no “established fact,” not yet. And saying so just feeds the “believe any seemingly possible fantasy” mind set that got us into this AGW quagmire to begin with.
Re: barry (Feb 8 06:26),
If you want a preview for this board you can have one in Firefox: go to
http://climateaudit.org/ca-assistant/
and follow the instructions. You end up by getting a preview function for CA, for Watts up and for Lucia’s blackboard. Works well.
Now about the intervals, yes I take exception with people talking about climate in terms of less than the intervals between the MWP and the LIA. I think all the finer details are chaotic weather, control by the confluences of the alphabet soup of ocean currents and atmospheric currents ( PDO, ENSO etc) as Tsonis et al have shown.
Now you are wrong about the models. The models that appeared in the IPCC report were carefully vetted to show only the increases, and those are the ones that tried to stampede the world into economic harakiri with 90% confidence levels.
Of course there are runs within the errors that show flatness and I am sure there are runs that show cooling, because the errors are huge and were hidden under the rug, no propagation of errors was done. Just a sphaghetti graph around the best values that each model chose by feel ( it is written in black and white in the AR4 report chapter 8).
After the data started to falsify their published in the IPCC predictions, they came out with new fits. But as von Neumann said, with four parameters I can fit any function, with five an elephant, or something like that. The IPCC GCMs have a plethora of parameters.
yonason (10:11:47) :
I never said I’ve read all his material. I’ve seen enough material of his quoted
Have you read any? ‘quoted’ is a giveaway that you have not looked into this yourself, but are just regurgitating [your word] other people’s misguided opinions. You are, of course, entitled to adhere to anything you like, but spare us, please.
Hi Phil.
Like Missingo before (read my posts) you have not really studied the solar spectra just before it reaches the atmosphere and just on top of sea level. Where did the missing radiation between the two spectra exactly go (unless reflected)?
If CO2 does not reflect how come we can measure the CO2 as it reflects off the moon? (Again, refer to my post to Brian on this and study the referred report where they analysed the earthshine from the moon).
[this topic is done ~ ctm]
Roger Knights (08:57:34) :
And mainstream science is wrong. Since 1998 it’s been known that the length of the PDO is 60-some years. Using a 20-30 year cycle as significant will (and has) misled the mainstream into thinking that the recent 20-year upleg (1978 to 1998) heralds an unstoppable uptrend, rather than merely being an up-leg (warm phase) of the PDO.
Really, then kindly explain why the PDO Index doesn’t appear to show that?
Do you think that a total record of 110 years would be enough to establish that?
http://jisao.washington.edu/pdo/img/pdo_latest.png
[this topic is done ~ ctm]
Evolution is a prohibited subject. This stops now.
Yoo hoo, other moderators please take note.