Dr. Roy Spencer has an essay below on sea surface temperatures starting to bottom out, but in addition to that, the UAH daily lower troposphere plot shows a sharp drop also.
As this graph of UAH TLT from D Kelly O’Day’s site shows, The current global anomaly is 0.044C – or very nearly zero. That’s a big drop from last month when we ended up at 0.60C.
Note the black dot, the value on 10-26-10. Click to enlarge the image.
Now compare that to Dr. Spencer’s Sea Surface temperature plot below.
Bottom Falling Out of Global Ocean Surface Temperatures?
by Roy W. Spencer, Ph. D.
Having just returned from another New Orleans meeting – this time, a NASA A-Train satellite constellation symposium — I thought I would check the latest sea surface temperatures from our AMSR-E instrument.
The following image shows data updated through yesterday (October 27). Needless to say, there is no end in sight to the cooling.
(Click on image for the full-size version).
Since these SST measurements are mostly unaffected by cloud cover like the traditional infrared measurements are, I consider this to be the most accurate high-time resolution SST record available…albeit only since mid-2002, when the Aqua satellite was launched.
I won’t make any predictions about whether SSTs will go as low as the 2007-08 La Nina event. I’ll leave that to others.
The grand old duke of penn, he had 10,000 menn, he marched them up to the top of the hill, and he ….
It’s worse than we thought.. (is there a prize for saying that first in each thread??)
I’m going to follow this with great interest, it would seem internal forcings are not as irrelevant as the IPCC et al would have use believe.
I’ll predict not just colder surface temps than 2007-08, but a long term cooling trend for all the world’s oceans. Surface temps bounce all over, but we just went through a pretty substantial heat-dump from the oceans to the atmosphere with this year’s El Nino, and with the 80 yr grand maximum of solar activity ending in 2003, the very high statistical correlation between solar-magnetic activity and global temperature (.5 to .8 in numerous studies) says it is going to get cold. Add the very high levels of snow cover for the last two winters, reflecting away an above-recent-average amount of the sun’s energy, and the planet’s heat sink (the oceans) have to cool.
When that cooling will show up on surface is highly variable, but the cooling oceans creates a strong expectation of cooling surface temps. It’s a prediction with a high degree of short run uncertainty, but a prediction nevertheless. For the longer run, as long as the sun stays relatively quiet, cooling will follow, unless the laws of physics have somehow changed. We don’t know exactly HOW solar magnetic activity drives global temperature, but we know that it does, and that whatever the mechanism, it will still be operative, because, whatever the physical processes at work, they do NOT just change.
Can CO2 override these mechanisms, whatever they are? No, because the warming power attributed to CO2 comes from failing to account the historic warming power of solar magnetic activity. When that temperature influence is accounted, the temperature influence attributable to CO2 falls equivalently, and becomes negligible. We are soon going to wish CO2 had a powerful warming influence–an easy way to save of cooling (which unlike warming is actually dangerous)–but unfortunately, we are not that lucky.
Some people may strongly wish to hide the decline?
It is rather curious to see these temperatures falling when the Arctic sea-ice was also falling to a record low extent in 2007. It would appear that these temperatures could be a response to the ocean having been forced to melt a record amount of ice mechanically dislodged from the Arctic region…
Oh Dear, i think 2011 is gonna be a miserable and cold one for all. I hope it doesn’t go on any longer, and get any colder, than that. For all the GW terror stories, i’d much rather live on a warm planet than a cold one……..
I have to laugh, but “starting to drop rapidly” seems as presumptive of the future as all the AGW claims. Wouldn’t “continuing to drop rapidly” be better?
The only conclusion I would draw from Dr Spencer’s graph is that ‘oscillations of SST around the mean amplified since 2007’.
If it gets colder, that’s weather and not climate?
It still the hottest year ever in la-la Al Gore world.
You will just be accused of cherry picking and only looking at short term data (that there is no data from that source prior to that date is NOT relevant)
I find this very interesting.
I was wondering when the air temp would final catch up with the sea…and then just a few days ago I notice what seemed to be a turn around.
Do you northern folks know what an amazing La Nina (IOD) winter and spring we have been having down south?…the desert awash, long dried up rivers gushing forth, dry land farmers now worried about too much moisture for harvest, all very exciting
Oh no!! It’s worse than we thought.
Thankyou Anthony – I’ve just had a profound realisation. I’ve been wondering for a while why there is such a distinction between the Judeo-Christian god which is so predictable and “good”, and the Greek/Roman/Norse style gods who “just play with men as their playthings”.
Looking at the temperature graph, it really could seem that there is some “weather god” who purposefully leads people on … creates a trend that leads people to think they know what is going to happen, and then the “weather god” just dashes their hopes. We saw this in the 1960-70s cooling trend, we then saw it in the 1970-2000 warming trend and on a smaller scale (weather is fractal!!) we see it in the 2008-10 warming trend and now the “weather god” seems to want to play with those who are vain enough to think they can predict him/her and it’s all change again. The point I was thinking is: right now the warmists have had their hopes dashed, but in time we will see another alarming warming spell to dash our hopes after which it’ll be the warmists, then us etc. etc.
Of course there is a perfectly rational explanation for the global temperature: it is 1/f type noise, so that we see little trends on top of even bigger longer term random up/down trends, on top of even bigger even longer term random up/down trends. Waves on waves on waves like the proverbial flees, with flees with even smaller flees.
The result is that the randomness in the weather/climate is orders of magnitude larger than you would expect from a simple casual glance/short term study. The longer you look, the bigger the randomness!!! So that, however long you watch the climate, there will always be a bigger random trend that comes along bigger than you would expect from the period of analysis (unless you take account of the 1/f nature of the noise)
But imagine how this was for the ancients … they think they have worked out when to plant and harvest, and just as they believe they have “understood the mood of the weather god” … hey presto along comes a change. So they readjust, they think they have understood the extent of variety in the weather and then … hey presto, along comes an even greater change that is far outside their perception of “normal variation”. That is just the nature of 1/f noise, but it sure must have look to the ancients as if their were some “hand of god” making the changes.
Now, it may be just coincidental, but the move from “weather god” (1/f) type religion to Christian (white noise) happened during the Roman Warm Period (150BC-270AD), a period when the weather gods would have been much less important because of the absence of bad weather? Instead of an indeterminate moody set of gods, we see a replacement with a benign deterministic god; a god that doesn’t play with humans, but an adult god which works by the bargain — you be “good” and I’ll be “good”.
This is the basis of most modern western thinking: that things have a cause, “god” acts for a purpose likewise warming must be “caused” by something. This would be an alien concept if we lived with the old god religions where a “warm spell” was just part of the inexplicable moods of the gods. Obviously without this concept of “determinism” we’d never have got most of modern scientific thinking, but even in some areas like quantum physics, we are seeing the revival of “you can’t know what’s happening …. it’s up to the gods/chance”.
Likewise the idea that it “must be man-made” is entirely Judeo-Christian. God punishes the bad and rewards the good, that is the basis of Judeo Christian philosophy, so our culture expects a deterministic relationship between mankind and “good and bad” things. Define warming as “bad” and inevitably people will try to link this as being morally determined by “bad behaviour” on the part of mankind. It’s just the way we are brought up: bad things are caused by bad people as a punishment for being bad.
This is unlike the older religions where the gods didn’t care two hoots for men, they just did as they pleased. It was much more a one way concept Gods => cause things to happen to men. Bad things … the gods are being moody. Men seldom caused the gods to do things! So in the older religions, there is not the moral determinism and if something “bad” happens, it is not necessarily a result of men being “bad”.
And the insight? That the type of religion may be rationally determined by the type of technical noise that has most impact in the environment … or perhaps a period of climate uncertainty will see a revival of the old gods!
Just another nail, http://i.blogs.indiewire.com/images/blogs/reverseshot/archives/Driving-Nail-Coffin.jpg.
What will that do with “the warmest year ever”?
If this currend downward trend continues, Punxsutawney Phil will be casting a very big shadow on Feb. 2. 2011 !
Wth the La Nina is still running strong combined with the fact that there is always a few months delay for a shift in the SOI show to up in the SST, we can expect the cooling to continue for at least 5-6 months.
I’m sure Phil would predict a 40 day smoothed value of -0.3 !
Keep in mind that Roy Spencer does not include SST data north of 60N or south of 60S in his global SST anomaly graphs, avoiding the need to adjust for sea ice. But for most of us the difference is insignificant:
http://i56.tinypic.com/2yknzue.jpg
And for those interested, here’s a link to the mid-month SST anomaly update:
http://bobtisdale.blogspot.com/2010/10/mid-october-2010-sst-anomaly-update.html
I am trying to buy large stocks of thermal underwear to sell-on at much inflated prices later this year! Brrrrr!
Very interesting!
It correlates very nicely to the variance of the rate of sea level rise that is happening in the last years! But what amazes me is that the rate of rise goes up before the AMSR-E temperatures go up…
This might also explain the recent trend in the decline of the rate of sea level rise, as measured by the University of Colorado:
http://ecotretas.blogspot.com/2010/10/going-down.html
Ecotretas
It can be watched here too
http://discover.itsc.uah.edu/amsutemps/execute.csh?amsutemps
I used the above graphs for this short article, “UN FCCC meeting in Cancun: where’s global warming?”, http://funwithgovernment.blogspot.com/2010/10/un-fccc-meeting-in-cancun-wheres-global.html
Wow, 0.35C drop in just six months. That’s half of all the warming we have experienced since 1850. This has to start reflecting in the overall temp record by now. I can’t find the link to it, but I’ve seen speculation that we may have a two year La Nina this time round. Brrr.
Why haven’t these figures been homogenised to show a warming trend?
This is a clear case of negligence by the Hockey Team, not an indication of falling temperatures.
These figures cannot be correct, because I have yet to hear them repeated on a BBC news bulletin, where the news is always hot hot hot.
I’m not sure this is the place for a philosophical discussion but very briefly I must disagree with Mike Haseler about the “Judaeo-Christian” God and His involvement in climate change (and I assume Mike also means most of the other scares that have bedevilled us over the years).
As a Christian I do not subscribe to the idea the God micro-manages the universe, at least not in the sense that appears to be implied here. In fact I am more inclined to the view expressed by Chesterton that “when man stops believing in God, he doesn’t believe in nothing he believes in anything”.
To an extent it is a belief in God and His creation that drives my skepticism and my view that the earth was made for man not man for the earth, a negation of the view of the eco-loons who see humanity as a blight on the planet which has got to be not just “un”-religious but “anti”-religious.
“Lee says:
October 29, 2010 at 12:46 am”
Well in Australia, the October/November cutover brings a sign of summer, ie, warm. It’s not happening this year. It’s COLD!