It's such a cold December: 2010 ends on a chilly note where people live

While I am sure GISS will come out with some impressively dire news, the satellite data which is actually scientifically usable has December at +0.18C. I have a little more at my website.
John Kehr
The Inconvenient Skeptic

There’s one more thing to notice here: As I’ve pointed out before: That big blob of positive anomaly up in the Canadian Arctic desert does not contain as much excess heat as an equally sized blob of positive anomaly in the tropics. The reason is that the total heat content (the enthalpy) of air depends not only on the temperature, but also the pressure and the water vapor content. And colder air is much, much drier than warmer air. In fact, even Sahara is moister than the Canadian desert, so a +10C anomaly in Sahara represents more excess heat than a +10C anomaly in Nunavut.
It would be even harder to collect good quality data, and it would be much harder to “sell” to the public, but if climate scientists really wanted to present a measure of excess heat in the atmosphere, they should measure enthalpy, not global mean temperature. But since the heat capacity of the atmosphere is so low compared to the ocean, ocean heat content is the only really reliable measure (if done right, of course…) of global warming anyway…

I appreciate your graphs and your explanation of the data.
I can only share that we here in South Australia have seen only 1 day
of 32C in the past 2 months of supposed ‘spring/’summer’ and each evening
has basically been much like tonight, here on the coast below the Coorong:
about 11-12C and while we’re NOT ‘stoking the fireplace’ ~ I’m getting
another ‘duna’/comforter for the bed tonight.
So much for our January ‘summer’ in the Southeast.
C.L. Thorpe

“AGW is built upon the premise of a slow, very slow upward trend that will eventually accelerate. But, that’s a long ways off — today, we are talking about hundredths of a degree C. How many trillions of dollars is that worth to you?”
This puts it all in perfect perspective – excellent post and Happy New Year!

Yes, temperature is increasing slowly for humans, who often think of a decade as being a long time. However, the heating of the planet seems to be very fast compared to the past, where shifts in climate usually took 1000’s of years. A trend of 0.2 oC does not seem like a lot, but it’s really quite fast. The prediction of those pesky computer models is that warming should be strongest in the arctic, rather far from the UHI effect.
[ryanm: 0.2C over a period of a several decades seems quite reasonable to me in terms of natural variability considering the effects of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation are likely around that number…]

Fantastic tools to be used again and again!
This really makes a difference.
If i should mention “something” that might be changed:
1) First of all, Denmark should be in the centre of this graphic, obviously:
http://www.coaps.fsu.edu/~maue/extreme/gfs/current/raw_temp.html
2) Ok, in the above anomaly map (superbe!) then i would have preferred if the colour scheme perhaps better showed cold vs warm. Many grey areas are in fact hot, and thus you have to take some more time to get an impression of the overall temperatures.
K.R. Frank Lansner

Since I started keeping Phila. PA temperature records going back to Jan 1 2011 we’ve had record high temps. Yesterday it was 51F! It’s unprecedented and worse than I thought. The trend is definitely predicting 200F temperatures this summer. Today it’s 23F but that’s just weather so it doesn’t count. I can hide that somehow with some sort of trick. I know, I’ll look at the latest tree rings in my woodpile before I burn them in my woodstove.. If they are large I’ll use that as a temp. proxy and throw out the actual readings. Next I’ll mount my thermometer on the chimney in direct sunlight for future readings.

anna v says:
January 3, 2011 at 3:18 am
Once more I would like to stress that averaging the anomalies is not the same as averaging temperatures. The whole game of averaging is to know the changes in energy content of the globe. It is the energy that makes the difference, not the anomaly on the temperature. The anomaly is a proxy for the temperature and the temperature is a proxy for the energy radiated.
Energy flow=constant*T^4
Anomaly is Delta(T)
Here are some numbers: The arctic temperature is -20C
The Africa temperature is +20C
both show a 4C anomaly , setting parameters for the year 2010 .
In terms of anomaly there is the same change.
In terms of energy radiated (T arctic is -16C, T africa 24C)
257.15: 247.9 W/m2 Arctic
297.15: 442.1 W/m2 Africa
The radiation from Africa is 194.2 Watts/meter^2 more than the one from the Arctic, whereas the anomalies are the same.
Anomalies are bad proxies for energy and average anomalies worse for average energies.

Sounds all very good except much of the energy radiated from the troposphere comes from latent heat of state change of water. This is does NOT follow Stefan Boltzmann’s equation.

The map with the ‘hot’ arctic is the familiar distorting projection. As always it grossly exaggerates the most northerly and southerly areas and greatly compresses everything nearer the equator. For example Greenland (836,109 sq miles) appears several times larger than India (1,269,346 sq miles). The green area in mid-Pacific looks about the same size as the Arctic red-area but in reality it must be several times bigger.

“…but even through all of that, you must know that the global temperature has changed only on the order of a 1-3 percent during the past 30-years. “

Q. Is this within the limits of natural climate variability?

In the NCEP charts, why are the scales for positive and negative temperatures … disproportionate? For example, in the “NCEP GFS deterministic forecast model analysis and forecast 2-meter temperatures,” the first four grid marks to the right of “0” are 8, 16, 24, and 32, but the corresponding marks to the left are -12, -30, -46, and -62. And it also uses “green” for temperatures below freezing. WUWT?

“onion says:
January 3, 2011 at 4:35 am
BillD is correct. 0.2C per decade would be very fast. In just 100 years that’s 2C warming which is a lot for a global amount.
Smokey, that is an abrupt change triggered by an unstable climate, although in this case it’s regional. That’s precisely the kind of thing we have to worry about with a 0.2C per decade change. We could hit something abruptly on the way up.
In fact it’s possible we’ve already started hitting something…*points at the snow storms in the UK and US*”
So where did 0.2C/decade come from? I thought there was general agreement on 0.6/7C only over at least 100 years. Also Onion has been duped into thinking that CO2 is causing the cold and snowstorms over UK and US. If it is caused by AGW surely it would have fallen as rain storms? So the lack of albedo over Arctic (no sun in winter) causes global warming and snow over UK/USA whereas the albedo from snow below Arctic is caused by AGW and also causes global warming, so everything causes AGW. I am sorry I am lost and can no longer follow the thinking of those believing in AGW.

Thunder Bay, in North Western Ontario, must be a perpetual anomaly. It is always either colder or warmer than else where in North America. For most of December it has been very mild, with daily highs often above zero (Celsius). It is turning cold again now and I suspect than our usual winter temperatures of minus twenty to minus thirty will be back. The effect of Lake Superior and the position of the jet stream are the critical factors.

Is there actually any warming and how good are the numbers.
New Zealand’s Climate Science Coalition has issued a press release detailing the end of the Kiwi-gate affair.
The outcome is that data published in 2009 by New Zealand’s National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA) entitled ‘Are we feeling warmer yet’ has been abandoned and replaced with real, unadjusted data that shows a picture that warmists don’t want you to see:
“NIWA makes the huge admission that New Zealand has experienced hardly any warming during the last half-century. For all their talk about warming, for all their rushed invention of the “Eleven-Station Series” to prove warming, this new series shows that NO WARMING has occurred here since about 1960.
So the rest of the planet is warming other than New Zealand, explanation please.

For the warmers on the thread (BillD and Onion) please do not confuse weather pattern variation with AGW. You embarrass the climate scientists who have the task of separating such things and do so in reputable labs. The AO is clearly negative and has been sloping down for quite some time http://www.cpc.noaa.gov/products/precip/CWlink/daily_ao_index/JFM_season_ao_index.shtml , explaining quite well the warming of the Arctic from frigid glass breaking cold to just frigid cold during the Jan, Feb, Mar winter season. When the AO flips back to positive, the Arctic will return to frigid glass breaking cold.

Onion says:
Onion your comments always are…well, like onions.

Thanks for the interesting graphs, Ryan!
However, the equirectangular plate carree projection that you use and which is favored by GISS exagerates the poles, where flucutations tend to be extreme and where data is in any event scarce.
In a CA post at http://climateaudit.org/2008/02/12/equal-area-projections/, I discuss several equal-area projections. For your purposes, the Lambert Cylindrical Equal Area projection with a 2:1 aspect ratio would be most suitable. A 2:1 aspect ratio (originally proposed by CA’s John A) makes each meridian appear to be half the length of the equator, and makes the “reference latitudes” at which there is no shape distortion 40.8 deg. N&S.
Another good option, but which distorts N/S relations, is the Mollweide projection, perhaps interrupted to reduce shape distortion.
[ryanm: yes, I purposely use this worst map projection because it is a notorious way to scare folks with those extremely warm Arctic temperatures. For publication, I would never submit nor positively review such ugly plots. ]

Robuk – that’s not quite true I’m afraid.
Even with the ‘new’ NIWA data, the picture hasn’t changed much. See http://hot-topic.co.nz/niwas-new-nz-temperature-series-plus-ca-change/
Earlier this afternoon NIWA released its recalculated NZ temperature record and as expected the changes from the “old” seven station series are more or less negligible. The trend over the last 100 years is identical, 0.91ºC per century, as the graph above shows. There are minor differences in some years, and larger ones at some stations, but the net effect to is confirm what we already knew: New Zealand warmed significantly over the last century.

LazyTeenager says:
January 3, 2011 at 6:24 am
Ryan dismisses
————-
But, that’s a long ways off — today, we are talking about hundredths of a degree C.  How many trillions of dollars is that worth to you?
————–
Well I agree that nothing much has happened yet. But why is it so hard to appreciated that if we delay acting until we get a serious beating about the head then action will be too late to be effective.
———————-
Well, because:
1. You have not provided, and from what I can see no one else has, PROOF or EVIDENCE that we will “get a serious beating about the head” if we don’t act now. INCOMPLETE, INACCURATE models that have no PROVEN ABILITY to predict the climate are not PROOF of the assertion that something bad will happen if we don’t act.
2. The POLITICAL motivations of those who claim doom is ahead is suspect, i.e. They are motivated to: a) provide results that show impending doom in order to obtain further research funding; b) believe in the redistribution of wealth and see cap and trade as a great means to that end; or, c) both.
I strongly urge you to think critically about the motivations of the pro-AGW side (to spend YOUR money the way THEY see fit) versus the skeptical side (who have little or nothing to gain PERSONALLY, except, of course, keeping THEIR money and using it the way THEY see fit).

@LazyTeenager says: January 3, 2011 at 6:24 am
Great fairy-story.
So, if you see a car with hazard lights a-flashing, what you should REALLY do is to drive the car into the nearest tree and rush off to spend trillions on windmills.
Yes?
Do you never tire of posting pathetic and risible BS?

“How many trillions of dollars is that worth to you?”
Not much. I moved south several years ago for a warmer climate and last winter I was hoping for some of that global warming to show up here but it was someplace else.

“”””” The Earth’s temperature varies a lot, from hour to hour, day to day, season to season, year to year for a bunch of reasons of which the sun is order 1, but even through all of that, you must know that the global temperature has changed only on the order of a 1-3 percent during the past 30-years. “””””
So that means in the last 30 years the global Temperature has changed by somewhere in the range of 2.88 to 8.64 deg C ?
That seems like an awful lot of change to me.
Well maybe it only changed by 0.15 to 0.45 deg C ; well unless it changed by 0.59 to 1.77 deg F. Does anyone measure weather on the Rankine Temperature scale ?

“You must look at the weather — weather is part of the climate”
_____________________________________________________________
As a big MLB fan, I like to use the following analogy, which I think sums it up pretty neatly:
“Weather is a single game of baseball. Climate is the standings at the end of the season.”

it’s colder in nm, arizona, and california than in areas around hudson bay.
funny how the co2 seems to make places warmer where there’s no sun, and turns the sunny desert southwest into siberia.

TerrySkinner in effect makes a point that I wish to endorse and enlarge on. This is that it would be more informative to present these excellent plots on an equal areas projection rather than on something presumably related to Mercator’s venerable method, which is excellent for navigational purposes but which severely distorts ones areal perception of the real globe. It would be more “honest”, I think, and would certainly change ideas on the relative importance of any changes.
Louise tells us that the new NIWA data is scarcely different from their previous revelations. What the NIWA analysts seem to have missed is that in 1954 a step change in temperature took place in /all/ the seven sites that they presented. If you don’t believe this just try fitting least squares lines to the data split at 1954, and examine the inferential statistics, including confidence interval plots for the fitted LS lines. You may be considerably surprised.

The weather patterns have a signature of global cooling-blocking over greenland-weaker jet stream which loops a lot more bringing cold air into Europe and most of North America. Coldest Dec. since 1683 in London-the year the greatest frost fair ever was held on the frozen Thames River. During the depths of a colder period known as the little ice age. Blocking over greenland was a rare occurrance during the warmer decades of the 20th century, but was frequent during little ice age which led to extreme cold and snow over western europe. The only thing mitigating it is the stored up warmth of the oceans which is making n. new england and e. canada very mild as the east winds blow off the warmer water-due to a southward expansion of the polar easterlies-which is caused by the cooling trend. A local effect of global cooling would be to make europe much colder in winter but n. new england and e. canada milder-at least initially.

To add, global cooling could actually warm the arctic during the winter-all the positive anomalies on the map occurred in conjunction with blocking anticyclones setting up shop in areas that normally dont have them. While the mid latitudes show a lot of very negative anomalies-the global anomaly looks to be below the average overall-and the weather patterns fit that very well.

I note that the articles on the end-of-year RSS and UAH data published after this one have positive anomalies relative to the same 30 year period that this article uses. Why is there a difference? And which is a more accurate summary of the present state?
[ryanm: the numerical weather prediction analysis will generate a different temperature estimate, and this is expected. That’s the dilemma, to use only observational data, satellite data, a combination of both in a model context, or some other incarnation to get the “true” temperature. Here, I am plotting up 4 times a day snapshots of temperature — clearly missing out on a lot of diurnal variability. Neither is completely right or wrong.]

Watch the Jets! The more they vary, the more variation to the weather (and climate). After the MWP and before the LIA there was a long period of great variation (hot and cold) with the up and down girations of the Jets. Betweem the recently ended ‘Modern Warm Period’ and the next LIA, the Jets are going to dance once again. Global Warming? Yes, sometimes; but not the ALGORE kind. Global Cooling? Yes, sometimes that too. What’s ahead? Another glacial, no bout a doubt it! Hummmm… wonder what the boys and girls at the UN are going to say and do about that? Bet it won’t be much different than what they’re crying about now. One thing you can always count on are politicians (and the weather).

I have now concluded my analysis of the, at times, very, pretty, pictures.
What with the anomaly color is green, in the first two images containing green, which denotes below normal, minor, but still, one can only conclude the overall is below normal.
There’s a “huge” real frakking anomaly in the next to last image though. OMFG but W(ho)TF did chose pink as being colder ‘an blue for antarctica’s edges?

LazyTeenager says:
January 3, 2011 at 6:24 am
Well I agree that nothing much has happened yet [concerning temp. increases]. But why is it so hard to appreciated that if we delay acting until we get a serious beating about the head then action will be too late to be effective.
Therefore, LT, according to you, there’s no evidence whatsoever of CAGW since there’s no significant warming “yet”, eh, not even a tropical trophospheric “hot spot”; so “let’s all try to commit suicide by getting back to being an underdeveloped nation as a precaution, before it’s too late”?
Well, me, I’m sticking with the opposite fossil fuel and nuclear energy cure instead being enacted by two of those already existing underdeveloped nations, LT, India and China, as necessary to their survival and wellbeing; but I can see how you better keep going on ahead with your own bad self’s “precaution”, since you apparently feel sooo strongly that your facts and logic can never be falsified, eventually even in the face of the mighty Precautionary Principle!
But please let me know exactly what you are doing in your own personal life to decrease your own “carbon footprint”, because you can probably do enough for the both of us, even if it might have to really mean committing suicide, as you seem to suggest it would for many people; and I wouldn’t want an altruistic person such as yourself to miss a chance at trying to personally “save” one more person!

TomRude:
Your reference to the book “Global Warming: Myth or Reality? The Herring Ways of Climatology ” had me very excited: was there some fishy angle to CAGW I had missed in my studies? Alas, no, the book’s focus is on “Erring Ways”. But for a few moments I had visions of migrating climatologists…

Come on Onion fair go!
0.2 degrees per decade would be well within the error of measurement.
In addition Ryan does not appear to have accounted for the UHI effect.
After adjustment for UHI the real temperature must have been going down.

Coldest December on record for Ireland
http://www.independent.ie/national-news/december-officially-the-coldest-on-record-2482857.html

It’s interesting how a few extreme record-breaking summers can distort memory. I expect we are able to acclimatise to hotter weather to some extent and we’re starting to accept it as the norm.
Even though our summer down here in south eastern Australia feels cold, so far October, November and December 2010 were all still above the long term averages for Melbourne. Yes, even the most recent 1981-2010 30 year average, which was warmer than the 1971-2000 30 year average, which was warmer than the 1961-1990 30 year average .
Yes, even in a cold, wet La Nina summer down in south eastern Australia the signs of warming are obvious. (One of the other signs, of course, being the record precipitation. Rain dumps that we’ve never before seen in this part of the world. And we’ve had La Nina’s before, needless to say.)