by David Whitehouse of the GWPF
The Global Warming Policy Foundation, 3 December 2010
If the media headlines are to be believed 2010 is heading to be either the warmest or in the top three warmest years since the instrumental global temperature records began 150 years ago, and proof that the world is getting ever warmer. But looking more closely at the data reveals a different picture.
2010 will be remembered for just two warm months, attributable to the El Nino effect, with the rest of the year being nothing but average, or less than average temperature.
With November and December¹s data still to come in (that will account for 16% of the year¹s data) the UK Met Office estimates the temperature anomaly (with respect to the end of the 19th century) for 2010 so far as 0.756 deg C. As it has been cooling for the past 4 months we can expect that figure to decline below the 2005 0.747 deg C level and the El Nino influenced 1998 of 0.820 deg C.
2010 will therefore be no higher than the third warmest year, possibly lower.
Warm Spring
What has made 2010 warm is March and June due to El Nino, a short-term natural effect and nothing to do with anthropogenic global warming.
January was cooler than January in 2007, 2005, 2004, 2003, 2002 and 1998.
February was cooler than February in 2007, 2004, 2002, and 1998.
March was exceptionally warm at a temperature anomaly of 0.971. However it was, given the errors, statistically comparable with March 2008 (0.907) and March 1990 (0.910).
April was cooler than April 2007, 2005, and 1998.
May was cooler than May 2003 and 1998.
June was exceptionally warm at 0.827 deg C though statistically identical to June 2005 (0.825) and 1998.
July, when things started to cool, was cooler than July 2006, 2005 and 1998.
August was cooler than August 2009, about the same as 2005, and cooler than 2001 and 1998.
September was cooler than September 2009, 2007, 2005, 2001 and 1998.
October the last month for which there are records was cooler than October 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005, 2004, 2003 and 1998.
The pattern is therefore of an unexceptional year except for a Spring/early summer El Nino that elevated temperatures.
There is no evidence whatsoever that the lack of warming seen in the global average annual temperatures seen in the last decade has changed.
Check the figures for yourself here.
@Doug Obach
“Does anyone know where I can download an excel file with the temperature anomalies dating back to 1850?”
Each dataset is different but for the CRU one you can get it here http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/temperature/
Dr. Roy Spencer says 2nd warmest based on troposphere temps, 0.38 degrees C:
http://www.drroyspencer.com/2010/12/nov-2010-uah-global-temperature-update-0-38-deg-c/
ALAN F
You said “You’re talking about Eastern Canada! ” No Alan, I was talking about Canada taken as a whole rather than any individual region . You are right about many parts of Canada like the west did not have a record warm winter . All the 11 regions being monitored by Enviornment Canada , 10 were above the 1948-2010 trend line but only 4 had record warm temperatures. The Prairie provinces were right on the trend line with 0 degrees departure . The reason for Canada as a whole having the record warm winter was the EL Nino warming mostly in the Mackenzie District, N.BC mountains and Yukon and the various regions of the Arctic which were from 4.7 to 5.4 above average . Northwestern Forest region was 2.8 C above norm . So the prime reason for the record Canadian winter warming of 4 C during the 2010 winter was clearly the North and Arctic parts of Canada only . I don’t know what weight they received but it must be significant as they occupy a vast area.The topic of whether the current Enviornment Canada measurements are accurate and fair , I can not comment on here. That topic has been blogged on WUWT previously
LabMunkey says:
December 6, 2010 at 8:45 am
@ur momisugly tallbloke.
the question remains as to why the temperatures WERE higher prior to the recent il ninio??
In a nutshell:
Because the the sun was more active than it had been for thousands of years between 1930 and 2003, according to Sami Solanki, the chief solar physicist at the Max Planck Institute. The accumulated ocean heat escaped via el nino’s, which circulated warm surface water around and then recharged in the pacific warm pool under relatively clear skies. Less tropical cloud cover 1980-1998 according to ISCCP data. The ocean sets the temperature of the atmosphere, because it has so much more heat capacity.
If you visit Bob Tisdales site there are some great posts on el nino and la nina and the rise in C20th temps. Bob is a careful researcher, and doesn’t speculate about the cause behind ENSO, but I think my solar analysis holds up well.
For a great read about the ocean, and why its importance was neglected by climate scientists, check my repost of John Daly’s brilliant essay The Deep Blue Sea
http://tallbloke.wordpress.com/2010/12/06/john-l-daly-the-deep-blue-sea/
Every time I see the word “ever” in a title, I don’t read the piece for it starts on a major nonsense.
I believe that the MET office year runs from September to October – why it should I have no idea. Autumn equinox?
If it were not for cherry-picking, eadler and kampen wouldn’t have much to say.
Let’s look at an apples-to-apples comparison of December temperatures: click
If they can show the percentage of warming due to the increase in CO2 compared with the climate’s natural variability, they will be the first to be able to do so. But since the null hypothesis of natural variability has never been falsified, the CO2=CAGW conjecture must be tested against the null. So far, CAGW fails. Of course that doesn’t matter to true believers, any more than the scientific method matters to them.
I especially enjoyed Adler’s know-it-all belief system:
A total non-sequitur, which is typical of Al Gore’s acolytes. If CO2 had a significant effect on temperature, then temperature would closely track the rise in CO2. But it doesn’t. There is no “continuing effect” as Adler claims. CO2 is such a minor player that its effect is too small to be empirically measured, thus debunking the CAGW conjecture.
Patrick Davis says:
December 6, 2010 at 4:13 am
Warm spring? Not in Aus matey…and “summer” is looking pants too! Humid yes, stupid humidity, ~95+, horrid. Fortunately we have temps at ~27c where I am.
Looks like you may be saved by rain on the final day of the Test Match too…
Doug Obach says:
December 6, 2010 at 8:29 am
Does anyone know where I can download an excel file with the temperature anomalies dating back to 1850? I would prefer a downloadable file rather than entering the data by hand. 160 years x 14 columns = bound to make a mistake upon entering.
========================================================
Doug,
The way I do it, is the old tried but true “copy and paste” method. In the case as a .txt file such as the one provided in the link, simply “save as” a text file, open with excel and do a “text to columns” step. The actual process is different, depending upon the version of excel. I believe one can also accomplish this using Open Office’s spread sheet prog.
sharper00 says:
Ah I notice that the best temperature record is now the CRU one and coincidentally the coolest. I guess all the complaints about UHI, station placement, adjustments etc are no longer a concern.
You work with what you’ve got. As GHCN is going through a
rewriteupdate and haverebuggeredimproved all their numbers, and changed all the station IDs, they are a bit of a pain right now. GIStemp depends on GHCN…While I’ve not added the latest changes to this report, it gives an overview of the kinds of things that are done to
bugger“improve” the data:http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2009/11/03/ghcn-the-global-analysis/
So the choices are a bit limited. Then we have a couple of satellite series that are diverging… what to do what to do…
In any event this method of analysis is quite odd. It simply lists a month-by-month basis which previous months were hotter with no attempt to discern a trend or pattern.
You don’t want to “go there” if you are a “warmer”… I’ve DONE the by month analysis, and it shows some months warming while other months cool. Kind of “puts the lie” to the notion of “Global Warming” when it isn’t even consistently warming by month…
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2010/04/26/dmtdm-a-northern-view/
More at:
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/category/dtdt/
As near as I can tell, it’s all just a ‘splice artifact’ of the way most of the thermometers are now at Airports, and Tarmac is hotter in the sun than grass and trees. So we get sunny months showing a rise, and cloudy / rainy ones not so much, in peak temps. Then in winter the airports are full of snow removal, jet exhaust, cars and trucks, deicing, etc so the lows get clipped. In one case in South America there is a nice peak right on top of spring break IIRC… For Marble Bar Australia, we’ve got a ‘never exceeded record’ in a place where GISS shows a constant warming anomaly. What I find is that it’s a splice artifact from changing where the thermometers are located:
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2010/04/03/mysterious-marble-bar/
And globally, there is a great deal of “instrument change” going on in the GHCN. Warmers claim it doesn’t matter, I claim it is a central problem. But I could be wrong.
I mean, it’s not like we have a peer reviewed paper that looks at the selection bias in thermometers in a country and finds cooling if you use all the thermometers… Oh, wait, we do:
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2010/03/10/lets-talk-turkey/#comment-3840
Well, maybe I’m not so wrong after all…
So looking at the ‘trend’ in individual months is HIGHLY productive, from a skeptics point of view. As is the impact of Airports Percentage.
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2010/11/18/airports-a-tarmac-tale/
World May Post Hottest Year in 2010, UN Agency Says
http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-12-02/world-may-post-hottest-year-in-2010-un-agency-says.html
from the article:
The worldwide average temperature in 2010 through part of November was 0.55 degree Celsius hotter than the long-term average of 14 degrees (57 degrees Fahrenheit), the WMO Secretary General Michel Jarraud said.
“The long-term trend is a trend of very significant warming,” Jarraud said today in Cancun, Mexico, where envoys from 194 nations are working on a treaty curb climate change. “We are very concerned. You cannot dispute the warming.”
Harold Pierce Jr says:
ATTN: PaulM
Temperature is not measured to +/- 0.001 deg C.
“The monthly numbers for 1998 were:
[…]
I suspect that temperature measurements are not all that accurate. In Canada temperature in weather station records is now reported to +/- 0.5 deg C.
If you round temperature measurements to the nearest whole deg C, global warming vanishes.
MONTHLY temperatures are not reported. Daily temperatures are reported. The monthly is calculated via an average. As temperature is an intensive variable, that makes the monthly average exactly meaningless… but we ignore that. And temperature is not heat, so it says nothing about gaining or losing heat. But we ignore that.
In the USA, temps are reported in WHOLE DEGREES F (though the ASOS gear at airports also has a WHOLE degrees C spigot…) In Europe I don’t know what they do, but it’s averaged to make a monthly average number in the GHCN that’s in 1/10 C. Whatever an average of a bunch of temperatures might mean.
Except at the airports, where the EU ASOS looks like they also report in whole degrees C. Rounded UP, I might add… just like we round up at ASOS in the USA.
But there is also a 1/10 C spigot on the ASOS, so we hope that’s what the local met offices use to calculate the “monthly average”…
@PaulM: Good luck on that whole 1/100 C precision out of thin air thing…
I’m afraid Howard’s response to this analysis (despite its obnoxious manner) is probably as much as the piece actually merits. In fact, had I encountered this article without any context or identifying information, I may have guessed it to be an unusually dry bit of satire from the CAGW blogosphere.
Either…a) plenty of good examples of warmer months exist throughout the full range of the instrumental period, but for some reason the author happened to focus exclusively on very recent years in making his monthly comparisons; or b) such examples could only be found during the last decade or so.
If a, then the article ought to be revised immediately to reverse this focus…but I’m inclined to rule out a (unless this article was, in fact, a satire). And if b, then the most salient argument which jumps out at me from this piece is that the last decade has been the warmest on the instrumental record.
I’d like to think I’m missing something here…?
tallbloke says:
December 6, 2010 at 8:58 am
In a nutshell:
Because the the sun was more active than it had been for thousands of years between 1930 and 2003,
========================================
thanks tallbloke
Marginally off-topic, but a few notes about that dreadful stuff, CO2.
Firstly, as we all know (on this side of the great divide, anyway) – it is the lifeblood of plants. If you go onto the internet there’s a very detailed paper on raising tomatoes – and guess what..? The writers recommend pumping CO2 into your polytunnels to a concentration of 800-1000ppm…! Scary, eh..?? Surely all the workers will be dropping like flies – and the poor old tomato plants will be wilting and dying. Obviously not – they will thrive and fruit prodigiously..
Secondly – what do you suppose the limit for CO2 concentration in a submarine is..? 400ppm..? 1000ppm..?? Actually its 8000ppm – and to the best of my knowledge no submariners have conked out due to an excess of carbon dioxide in their cramped workplace..
SO…. CO2 at 390ppm..? Ye gods – what are we to do..? Rejoice at how well our crops are doing, I shouldn’t wonder..!
E.M.Smith says:
December 6, 2010 at 10:01 am
Harold Pierce Jr says:
ATTN: PaulM
=======================================================
You guys are all wrong! See, what happens is that we take a tree ring, or a clam shell, (whatever’s handiest) and compare them to the actual thermometer readings. As you stated, obviously, thermometers aren’t calibrated well enough to report in the thousandth’s, but as we all know, tree rings and the like are! So, we just calibrate the thermometers to the tree rings, and, voila, accuracy to the 1/1000 of a degree! (Works for all scales of temperature!) I think this is where Mann went wrong, he should have talked to Hansen first before he tried to strike out on his own. </sarc
My way of saying, "well said". Thanks.
Having read through all this, the most notable trend that I can see is with the comments of our Troll chums.
More deliberately obtuse. More pathetic. More desperate.
They must be getting really nervous that their grants will be cut.
From Bob’s iceagenow site is this dailynews Dec.3 article (which no doubt has been offered here already somewhere):
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1335216/UK-snow-Overnight-temperatures-fall-20C-Britain-left-sheet-ice.html
Roger Sowell says:
Has anyone seen the forecast for Florida, today and tonight? A hard freeze warning is in effect.
In Florida.
The Sunshine State.
Where oranges
are grownwere grown year-round.There, fixed it for you. The northern limit of commercial orange groves in Florida has been moving south for several years… due to increasing frost losses…
Watch the crops. They don’t lie. They are saying 2010 was a cold year.
I really don’t have a problem with the “highest on record” comments, as long as the duration of the “record” is stated in the document – right up at the front, along with the measuring method, and error bands one sigma and three sigma. That is precisely what we don’t get from the warmists.
Anomalous anomalies, error bands a multiple of the resolution of the dataset, projections based on wishful thinking – as if the world really operated in linear fashion – non-science, non-think, new-speak is the order of the day.
Keep the battle up, and continue taking it to their side. WE WILL WIN!
We’re not trying to fake reality for profit or fame, just trying to understand a small part of the universe.
Call it cherry picking… WHATEVER. If I’m going to buy extreme AGW warm-mongering, you’ve got to show me 2010 was the hottest… period. Not 2nd – or 3rd – or a tie. This El Nino gave us the best shot at warmest evah. That’s 12 years of Co2 (how much ppm increase over 12 years… does anyone know?), and we can’t even statistically tie 1998?
It’s unfortunate that most climate experts have painted themselves into a corner by down-playing solar activity. Otherwise, I’d give them some credit there. But then we’d have to adjust our models, wouldn’t we.
David, I would like to draw your attention to the (UAH AMSU daily temps) link on WUWT. When you plot the AQUA channel 5 for 2010 (recommended by Dr. Spencer) + the average temp curve + the record temp curve, you will see that for approximately ten months in 2010, this years temp consistently plots 0.2 to 0.5deg C higher than the average temp curve (I think this average temp is for the 2002 to 2009 period?). The satellite derived temp this year ran close to, or exceeded the record high temp curve, several times during 2010. It has recently fallen rapidly down to the average trend line. We need at least another 5 to 10 years of data to see if the temps are going to continue to flat line, or begin to trend up or down. In conclusion the Met office/CRU data is not my favorite data series for the current era and year to year changes in global temp, while interesting, are weather variations at best.
Regards,
Lorne
Harold Pierce and EM Smith – you are quite right of course, measuring the average temperature of the earth to 0.001 degrees is absurd.
Don’t blame me – blame Phil Jones.
Whenever people talk about a temperature rise of 0.7 degrees in the century, and try to claim that it’s a lot, it’s good to ask if they would even notice if tomorrow was 0.7 degrees warmer than today.
If these headline are based on land based temps alone… the jetstream seemed to be on the US/ Canadian border most of the summer, if not up into Canada, from the Midwest to the east coast, letting a lot of tropical heat up through the US. It would be interesting to plot the Jetstream path in “warm” years vs “normal” vs “cool” years. Just on observation from someone that does not have a Degree in science… so according to the Gorebull warmists, I am not permitted to make such an observation. I suspect though that in “normal” and “cool” year the jetstream has a path cutting through the US. Because we all know it has nothing to do with the sun..”Sarc off”.
It ia all about the difference in the Smoothing Radius
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/maps/
250 km radius
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/do_nmap.py?year_last=2010&month_last=10&sat=4&sst=1&type=anoms&mean_gen=10&year1=2010&year2=2010&base1=1951&base2=1980&radius=250&pol=reg
or
1200km radius
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/do_nmap.py?year_last=2010&month_last=10&sat=4&sst=1&type=anoms&mean_gen=10&year1=2010&year2=2010&base1=1951&base2=1980&radius=1200&pol=reg
So if you know the temperature in Madrid you know the temperature in London. Don´t think so. Look at the 250km radius and you see that where GISS tells us it´s getting warmer is where they have less data.
Compare also GISS and DMI Polar temperature.