December 3rd, 2010 by Roy W. Spencer, Ph. D.
YR MON GLOBE NH SH TROPICS
2010 1 0.648 0.860 0.436 0.681
2010 2 0.603 0.720 0.486 0.791
2010 3 0.653 0.850 0.455 0.726
2010 4 0.501 0.799 0.203 0.633
2010 5 0.534 0.775 0.292 0.708
2010 6 0.436 0.550 0.323 0.476
2010 7 0.489 0.635 0.342 0.420
2010 8 0.511 0.674 0.347 0.364
2010 9 0.603 0.555 0.650 0.285
2010 10 0.426 0.370 0.482 0.156
2010 11 0.381 0.513 0.249 -0.071
The tropical tropospheric temperature anomaly for November continued its cooling trend, finally falling below the 1979-1998 average…but the global anomaly is still falling slowly:+0.38 deg. C for October, 2010.
2010 is now in a dead heat with 1998 for warmest year.
Read the rest of the story here.
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Sorry, numbers like 0.38 degrees just get my BS meter going. So would 0.37 or 0.39.
Confounders, measurement errors etc etc. Nothing to see here, folks.
Why does it matter if 2010 is measured insignificantly warmer than 1998?
James Hansen, GISS, NASA, Global Temperature Trends: 2007 Summation
James Hansen, GISS, NASA, Global Temperature Trends: 2008 Annual Summation, 16 Dec 2008 (No summation was not made in 2009)
Dave F (8:51 pm)
‘….This is all very strange. I was led to believe, in no small part thanks to NASA climatology and other reports that natural processes were holding down temperatures, hence the lack of statistically significant warming….’
According to ‘IPCC Science’, no natural processes can hold down temperatures because the ever increasing anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentration (which is likely to continue indefinitely) is the overwhelming climate forcing factor (ref. IPCC report AR4).
They dismiss all other factors including solar:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/bb/Radiative-forcings.svg
To Peter Hearnden December 3, 2010 at 4:29 pm
The United Kingdom IS cooling down. If you take a running 10-year average of temps then you can see it. 2008 was cooler by 0.49 C and 2009 was cooler by 0.30 C. 2010 will also be cooler. There’s a guy doing a watch on it here: http://www.scalgon.co.uk/page10.html
eadler says: December 3, 2010 at 8:27 pm “The year 1998 is notable for the most powerful El Nino in modern times. El Nino events have a powerful effect on global average temperatures.”
I’m a simple farm lad too. Can you expertly explain to me
(a) what was the source of the global extra temperatures attributed to 1998? Please, do not say that it was El Nino, and a good El Nino will do that.
(b) did the higher temperatures start in one location and spread, or was there lockstep all over the globe?
(c) are there weather records that do not show the temperature anomaly of 1998? If so, how did they avoid it?
(d) where did the excess 1998 temperature anomaly go once it headed for 1999?
(e) as you describe the 1998 effect as global, was it an event confined within the outer limits of the atmosphere (closed system) or was it related to events outside the atmosphere, such as TSI?
So far as my work has taken me, I can provide tentative answers.
(a) the extra high temperatures came from the movement of global entities (such as warm water currents) closer to the temperature recording devices.
(b) the temperature was quite spotty in distribution. There is faint evidence that it moved from the Equator polewards, but there is a lot of noise in this effect. One cannot discount that there was a statistical freak component that caused more global stations to show warming than in other years, thus raising the global average.
(c) There are many stations that showed little or no 1998 high average temperatures (try Antarctica). Some show cooling cf. adjacent years.
(d) where did the inferred extra heat go? Perhaps in a greater incidence of cold ocean upwellings than in 1998. Remember that the solid earth a few metres below surface would not have shown detectable temperature change and that the oceans did not show a confident change before during or after 1998 at depths below 300m.
(e) the system shows more evidence of being closed and no evidence consistent with an annual global effect from GHG.
On top of all this, you have to remember that we are looking at global variations within a large enclosing error envelope, so there is a probability that the effect was simply noise. There is inadequate sampling of 90% of the ocean mass.
@Eadler
Yes, and if all the simple folk around the globe all felt that (in their humble experience) the globe was not warming up, while the illustrious climate scientists keep on insisting it is, would you still keep bleating that we should trust the scientists? Climate is merely the longer term aggregation of weather. Thus, while short term weather may not be climate, climate certainly is weather, averaged out. The mantra that weather and climate are not to be confused is a misleading half-truth. And scientists get it wrong all the time in all fields, even when they are not manipulating the data. So do kindly get off your high horse.
eadler says:
If recognize that you are “simple folk” , you should listen to what the climate scientists have to say, rather than look at the weather in your own backyard, as the basis for your conclusions.opinion on global warming.
Sadly these Climate scientists should be putting their head out of the window sometimes to check their models are reflecting real life and not pre conceived results.
You sound less than simple yourself.
So what! 0.38C is well inside the error bands. Temperature measurements in the SH are not as well covered as the NH, and even those miss out on the coldest areas, so any idea that this data set is both totally correct or showing any tipping point is ludicrous.
There are for more important problems on this planet than to work towards some goal that is not possible. Leave geoengineering alone and find something useful to do.
I think “the warmist year ever” will be about right.
In 1976 the UK experienced a very hot dry summer. We had two similar summers in the 1990s which suggested that our climate was warming up but in the past 10 years our summers have been average or poor. We have also had a couple of winters more like those of the 1950s and 1960s and if the weather of the past 10 days or so is any indication this one will also be a severe one.
Of course, as one commentator pointed out, Britain is only a tiny part of the global land mass but if the world really is warming up it should not be difficult for scientists to say exactly where this warming is taking place.
Well then, where is it? We have heard a lot about polar ice melting. Is all the warming taking place there? If not, where are the other places?
eadler says: December 3, 2010 at 8:27 pm
If you recognize that you are “simple folk” , you should listen to what the climate scientists have to say, rather than look at the weather in your own backyard, as the basis for your conclusions.opinion on global warming.
–
That’s where the Greenland Vikings went wrong. If they’d have listened to the climate modelling experts a thousand years ago, they’d have known not to farm under glaciers.
Peter Miller says,
“In the world of real science, today’s normal practices of ‘climate scientists’ would not be tolerated.”
That’s because most of the people working in climate science are not real scientists (i.e. chemists and physicists who study pure fundamental science) – instead the climate ‘scientists’ have first degrees in geography and environmental science – subjects I am acutely aware of the lack of firm foundations those studying them have of the fundamentals, having myself an A-level in Geography. Basically geography is an applied science which generally doesn’t do any fundamental research. You learn about chemical weathering processes such as chelation without knowing anything about chemistry or how the reaction happens – a geographer certainly couldn’t have come up with it by themselves. It’s the same with climate science. Physicists do a bit of applied research and start the field of meteorology and write text books on it. Then geographers read those books without understand the fundamental physics, and think they know how to model climate change (i.e. they hear about the Swedish chemist Arrhenius’ experiment with CO2 and think it could drive climate). These people are jokes. And it is these people which fill the UEA CRU department.
“It is clear that you don’t understand the difference between climate and weather. ”
This is a very relevant comment. Over what period does a series of weather events become climate?
If we take a 2000 year period it can be argued that we are in a cooling phase. For instance there is some evidence that in the Northern hemisphere we are cooler than those periods when the Vikings buried their dead in Greenland, when the Romans were growing grapes more northerly than now and of probably not quite as hot as the Medieval warming period. Much is made of the threat of sea level rises, but again, in the UK, we now have towns that were once ports and are now cut off from the sea as sea levels have dropped. Therefore if we get enough warming to bring those sea level rises back to what they were in Medieval times, we would then only be where we were.
The pro carbon scientists seem to be focussing on a very limited time period to support their arguments and some wish to try and prove past events did not occur, e.g. the MWP. The fact that we are not warming as much as the computer models have predicted surely is evidence that the science is far from settled.
@eadler
‘The UK is a tiny part of the globe. The weather in the UK is not an indicator of a global trend.’
Neither is the weather anywhere an indicator of global trends. UK might be a tiny country but the current cold snap reaches from the british isles to eastern siberia across northern China all the way around Alaska and Canada and Greenland and back to Norway. But that is just weather, which of course the heat stroke suffered by the rest of the planet are as well.
‘If you recognize that you are “simple folk” , you should listen to what the climate scientists have to say,’
ROFL, that was what the “simple folk” did, they listened to the Met Office, and look what happened, the religious hippie scientist were wrong yet again.
In Greece we are a the lower part of the globe, contributing to the rise in temperatures. In the astronomical records of Athens, temperatures kept since 1890 the only November that was this warm was in 1926.
It is 30C degrees in Crete, and 23C in the Athens area, with warm dusty winds from Africa. Up north there are floods, but here only cloudy, no rains.
My tangerine tree which still has ripening fruit, is blooming :(.
Adrian Kerton says:
December 4, 2010 at 3:01 am
Some sweeping, simplistic, claims there of very dubious merit and accuracy..wine, is it such a good climate indicator anyway (despite you being probably wrong)? http://www.eh-resources.org/climate1.html
Sea levels? Try discussing your lack of concern with the Dutch for starters.
http://www.wur.nl/UK/newsagenda/archive/news/2008/Second_Delta_Committee_features.htm
http://ec.europa.eu/maritimeaffairs/climate_change/netherlands_en.pdf
“Moreover, the
current standards are out of date and must be raised, the climate is changing
rapidly, the sea level is probably rising faster than has been assumed, and more
extreme variations in river discharge are expected”
http://www.deltacommissie.com/doc/deltareport_full.pdf
150 – 400million people may have reason to more worried than you are within 60 years.
http://www.oecd.org/document/4/0,3343,en_2649_201185_39727650_1_1_1_1,00.html
http://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/briefs/gornitz_04/
As this pretends to be a science website I’d appreciate some supporting evidence, from competent sources to illustrate your points. Thanks.
‘If you recognize that you are “simple folk” , you should listen to what the climate scientists have to say, rather than look at the weather in your own backyard, as the basis for your conclusions.opinion on global warming.’
The arrogance emanating from that sentence is astounding.
Maybe these so called climate scientists should revert back to doing simple science rather than complex mathematical modelling. Basic stuff like checking if actual temperatures match up with satellite and proxy measurements. Or is that too simple and not grand enough?
@eadler
In my experience, arrogance is a very poor substitute for competence.
And the warmist climate “scientists” show plenty of the former. Precious little of the latter.
And the UK may be a tiny country but we pay a lot of AGW scientists salaries…!
2010 UAH Global Temperature of lower atmosphere.
? Lower atmosphere, what elevation? and how do satelites consistently pick the same elevation?
Peter Hearnden says:
December 3, 2010 at 4:29 pm
“hard for us simple folk in Devon to make a living, never mind understand this complex science which is beyond the education standards in this remote part of the UK.”
Never a truer word spoken! The Met office on the outskirts of Exeter and the adjacent eponymous University, are incapable of deciphering the complex science, which is indeed beyond their educational standards.
Yet hubris is a well developed trait amongst the ignorant, and they display it in spadefuls with the baleful prognoses that they feed to the equally ignorant and increasingly venal political classes.
Perhaps it is fitting that Nemesis, a daughter of Oceanus, is approaching, although unfortunately not with the rapidity with which mythologically she was ascribed.
Is there a relationship between Roy Spencer’s satellite temperature numbers and the real weather and temps we experience here on the surface? Seems I have seen discussions in the past that there is a relationship but it is not direct.
I also wonder if some of the claims that this will be the warmest year on record use NASA’s trick of extrapolating surface temps as far as 1200 kilometers, mostly in the polar regions. That is another discussion that has gone around here. I too would like to see error bars or error estimates for all averaged temperatures. Might put things in a little more perspective.
I note that in my own location, the fall temperature average was 2.6 degrees above normal, but it was only the 61st (out of 123) warmest fall. that helps with the perspective too.
Bill Illis says:
December 3, 2010 at 5:03 pm
“…And don’t forget there is a 3 month lag from the La Nina which is yet to come. Temps are still going down for at least the next 3 to 9 months. Another 0.30C of decline to go perhaps.
Thanks for the information, Bill. I agree that temperature will continue to fall, but think it will last much longer that your estimate. Once the ocean starts to cool it takes a lot of sunlight to bring it back up to temperature. Currently our orbit is taking us ever further from the quiet sun and I conjecture that we are going to get more cooling than we’ve seen for over the last century – wrap up warm!
I have 1998 at .535 through November, and 2010 at .526. Dec 98 was coolest of the year, so we need a cold month to not break the record. Fortunately from the looks of AMSU, it looks like we are starting off cold…
Eadler’s attitude to us ‘simple folk’ demonstrates his elitism and arrogance. I have worked with ‘scientists’ who were absolutely flummoxed by the simplest practical demands on their incredibly advanced intelligence and had no right to the enormous self-regard they exhibited, as does Eadler. I have also worked with scientists who were down-to-earth and supremely practical, so to put all of one occupational grouping into the same basket is fallacious thinking in the extreme.
I began my working life grubbing out thistles in Southerly gales at the bottom end of Polynesia with onlythe great Southern Ocean between me and Antarctica, removing wool from dags in Winter-struck, freezing and draughty shearing sheds and milking a relative’s herd of cows in Winter, which entailed being up to my ankles in a thin and icy mix of mud and cow-shit while getting the beasts to the milking shed, so I know the often miserable conditions farmers in so-called temperate climates spend their working lives.
I was a simple countryman once, like Peter Hearnden, and I know it has made me very aware of weather and climate for the balance of my life. Trust a climate scientist? Yeah, right… I trust people who divine the future from examining chook guts, too.