While there’s been a lot of attention given to the recent NOAA and NASA press releases stating that 2010 was tied for the warmest year globally, it didn’t meet that criteria in the USA by a significant margin according the the data directly available to the public from the NOAA National Climatic Data Center. (NCDC)
Here’s the graph of USA mean annual temperature from 1895-2010 produced by NCDC’s interactive climate database and graph generator, which you can operate yourself here: http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/research/cag3/na.html
Note the rank highlighted in yellow. The pulldown menu gives you an idea of what was the warmest year in the USA from this data, arrows added:
Here’s the partial table output (you can use their online selector to output your own table) sorted by rank from NCDC web page. 1998 leads, followed by 2006, and then 1934. 2010 is quite a ways down, ranking 94th out of 116.
Climate At A Glance
Year to Date (Jan – Dec) Temperature
Contiguous United States
Year |
Temperature(deg F) |
RankBased on the Time Period Selected (1895-2010)* |
RankBased on the Period of Record (1895-2010)* |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1998 | 55.08 | 116 | 116 |
| 2006 | 55.04 | 115 | 115 |
| 1934 | 54.83 | 114 | 114 |
| 1999 | 54.67 | 113 | 113 |
| 1921 | 54.53 | 112 | 112 |
| 2001 | 54.41 | 111 | 111 |
| 2007 | 54.38 | 110 | 110 |
| 2005 | 54.36 | 109 | 109 |
| 1990 | 54.29 | 108 | 108 |
| 1931 | 54.29 | 108 | 108 |
| 1953 | 54.16 | 106 | 106 |
| 1987 | 54.11 | 105 | 105 |
| 1954 | 54.11 | 105 | 105 |
| 1986 | 54.09 | 103 | 103 |
| 2003 | 54.02 | 102 | 102 |
| 1939 | 54.01 | 101 | 101 |
| 2000 | 54.00 | 100 | 100 |
| 2002 | 53.94 | 99 | 99 |
| 1938 | 53.94 | 99 | 99 |
| 1991 | 53.90 | 97 | 97 |
| 1981 | 53.90 | 97 | 97 |
| 2004 | 53.84 | 95 | 95 |
| 2010 | 53.76 | 94 | 94 |
| 1933 | 53.74 | 93 | 93 |
| 1946 | 53.72 | 92 | 92 |
| 1994 | 53.64 | 91 | 91 |
| 1900 | 53.53 | 90 | 90 |
*Highest temperature rank denotes the hottest year for the period.
Lowest temperature rank denotes the coldest year for the period.
Data used to calculate Contiguous United States mean temperatures are from the USHCN version 2 data set.
Of course there is no mention of the USA temperature ranking in the recent press release from NOAA. The only mention of the USA in that PR that comes close is this:
In the contiguous United States, 2010 was the 14th consecutive year with an annual temperature above the long-term average. Since 1895, the temperature across the nation has increased at an average rate of approximately 0.12 F per decade.
There’s no mention of the 2010 ranking for the USA temperature at all, nor any mention of the fact that 2010 was not nearly as warm as 1998, or 1934. I find that more than a little odd for an agency whose mission is to serve the American people with accurate and representative climate data.
They couldn’t find room for a sentence or two to mention the USA historical temperature rank for 2010? Apparently not.
This is blatant cherry picking, a regional result in the USA need not have been mentioned at all. When talking about climate change we are talking about GLOBAL not regional conditions. Fact is GISS and HADCRUT3 both put 2010 as equal hottest year, with 2001 to 2010 the hottest decade on record and the previous decade the second hottest. Running away to regional results are not going to change those facts, this is very desperate.
This is despite the claim that we should be in a cooling cycle and that solar activity is neutral or if anything is cooling at the moment. Obviously on a regional level things are getting more extreme while the extra water in the atmosphere and temp differentials between the land, ocean and atmosphere are increasing.
For those carping about noting that the US wasn’t particularly warm, of course it makes a difference. It’s supposed to be global warming, right? Well, clearly it isn’t global as the US and many other major populated areas were not warm. So why would the US then spend billions of dollars to combat a problem which doesn’t exist in the US? Or exist in Australia, western Europe, etc. What’s the matter, doesn’t the killer CO2 work its evil ways in all parts of the globe? This would all be laughable if it had not advanced so far into the consciousness of so many people.
The funny thing about conspiracies are, you don’t know it is an actual conspiracy till it’s exposed.
>>Louise says: I can’t understand the table – why is the hottest year (1998) ranked as 116th? Surely it should be ranked 1st and so 2010 would be 23rd of 116 not, as you said, “ranking 94th out of 116″? <<
Yeah, what she said…
I used official weather data for Philadelphia PA from the Franklin Institute going back to 1872. I plotted the daily minimum and daily maximum temperature (in deg F) as a function of day from 1872 to present (49052 data points) and fit to a line using linear regression. Slope was 0.000062 +/- 0.000011
Next I averaged all data for a given year and plotted the average as a function of year and fit to a line: slope was -0.00085 +/- 0.0070
Then I fit the entire daily temperature going back to 1872 with a sinusoidal wave. I subtrated this sinusoidal wave from the raw data and obtained the residual daily temperature as a function of day. I fit this data to a line an obtained a slope of -0.0000011+/- 0.0000050
Linear Rgression Slope summary:
Fit raw data: 0.000062 +/- 0.000011 F
Yearly avg: -0.00085 +/- 0.0070 F
Residuals: -0.0000011+/- 0.0000050 F
Can I conclude that Philadelphia PA is showing absolutely no warming or cooling over the past 138 years? So if Philly isn’t warming, other places on the earth must be warming that much more to show an overall global average increase.
By the way, notice that the three different ways I treated the raw data gave three different slopes (all not statistically significant from zero, but different non-the-less) One was positive and two were negative as well. This further proves my point that boiling down the entire globe’s temperature to a single yearly average and then fitting trends to this data is really not mathematically accurate
I am the farthest thing from being an AGW proponent, but I’m 100% sure the NCDC’s “hottest year” designation for 2010 was for the entire planet, not the US. This is kind of a red herring. It is not a surprise to anyone who’s paying attention that 2010 was not a record breaker for the US with how cold Jan, Feb and Dec were across the country.
nandheeswaran jothi says:
January 14, 2011 at 6:12 am
rushmikey says:
January 14, 2011 at 4:03 am
….and exactly what percentage of the Earths surface is made up of the USA?
about 1.5% of the total earth surface, about 6% of the total land surface
but about 22% of the land surface at our latitude band AND a significant number (majority?) of the land temp stations, which is what they’re measuring for the global average.
Pamela Gray says:
January 14, 2011 at 6:28 am
Trenberth says this rank could have been much worse were it not for global warming
=====================================================
Is there anyone that didn’t see that one coming?
Just a few months ago, they were all saying for a “fact” that 2010 would be the warmest.
If they can’t even get it right a few months in advance……………………
wayne Job says:
January 14, 2011 at 5:17 am
I concur; RSA (where I am) was most definitely cooler in 2010, together with every English speaking country in the world it appears. Perhaps the other (non – English) numbers are “lost in translation” LOL.
jimmi says:
January 14, 2011 at 4:28 am
“Also, since 2010 was one of the warmest globally (in the top 3 if not the warmest), even though it was cold in the USA, that means there must have been parts of the world where 2010 was unambiguously the warmest – anyone know which bits?”
You have to ask? That would be all the places in the world where no actual temperature measurements are made. The Warmista have been reducing the number of measurement sites for years. Whenever they show a graph of temperature, such as the one above, they should also show a graph of declining measurement stations. If the Warmista used only the warmer areas where actual measurements are made, they could not arrive at the higher global temperature that they have published.
Robert L says:
January 14, 2011 at 5:50 am
“Frequent readers here will recognise a problem with the trend line in the graph – linear fit to a periodic function will more closely reflect the phase of start and end conditions rather than the underlying trend.”
You could use a series of trend lines that fall within the period. Not something that would catch on here though, it shows that the warming is accelerating.
http://woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1850/to:2010/mean:25/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1850/to:1950/trend/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1860/to:1960/trend/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1870/to:1970/trend/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1880/to:1980/trend/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1890/to:1990/trend/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1900/to:2000/trend/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1910/to:2010/trend
Green Acres says:
So why would the US then spend billions of dollars to combat a problem which doesn’t exist in the US? Or exist in Australia, western Europe, etc.
__________________________________
I’m not sure if you’re being serious or not, but of course it matters if global temperatures are rapidly rising. A good skeptic should be concerned. What is unclear are issues such as “climate sensitvity” and factors other than man-made CO2 in driving climate. If gobal averages keep soaring upwards in a short time span, then we will of course have a great deal of problems. Skeptics don’t doubt this. What is being debated (or should be debated) are feedbacks, naturally occuring variations etc.
Again, I’m kind of hoping you were joking.
Probably correct in stating that at least a mention of the U.S. temps for 2010 would have been in order– however irrelevent that would be to the global perspective. Along with that would be a mention that 37 U.S. states set night time HIGH temperature records during the summer of 2010– and as most of you should know, higher night time temperatures are stated to more indicative of general warming from GHG’s. (greater LW backradiation with greater GHG’s). See:
http://www.nrdc.org/globalWarming/hottestsummer/
http://content.usatoday.com/communities/greenhouse/post/2010/09/summer-set-records-for-night-time-temperatures/1
http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/2010/09/06/20100906phoenix-weather-summer.html
How come the only places warming are the places that have the fewest thermometers? :-O
Can it possibly be true that no one here recalls that tens of thousands of people died in Russia due to the raging fires and record smashing heat wave? In addition, the Arctic saw 5 degree C anomalies for the year. The global number is correct. Don’t think that these anomalies will go away or never affect the U.S.
Dr. Spencer says global temps have gone down 0.7 F since this time last year.
http://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2011/01/14/global-temperatures-have-dropped-0-5c-in-the-last-12-months/#comment-30820
Not sure about some of the analysis here. All 14 of the last years have been above the long-term average displayed on the chart. So, yes, this was the 14th consecutive year with an average temperature above the long-term average.
But there were also only 2 years since 1998 with a temperature *lower* than 2010. so it all depends on how you want to spin the numbers.
Can someone explain to me why noted skeptic Dr. Roy Spencer’s global temperature calculation also shows 2010 to be so hot (the red line is the 13 month average)? Is he cooking the books too?
Best be careful how loud you crow, Anthony. Although I believe we are heading for a definite period of global cooling on the decade scale, look again at those tables. 1934 was a hot year in the US, but 1933 ranked 93. 1998 was a hot year in the US, but 1997 ranked 76! So if 2010 ranked as very cool, there is a high probability that 2011 or 2012 will rank very warm! Then the AGW vultures will be eating your flesh for a whole year.
Instead of giving the appearance in our speech that the world is becoming an ice cube, we should be focusing on the non-linear behavior of climate change. The only upward trend is the long-term thawing trend from the last ice age. Ice at the poles is the anomaly, it is not the norm for this planet. Natural thawing will occur because the planet is not meant to be this cold.
In order for global warming theorists to be right, they need to peg CO2 levels to temperatures, which they cannot when the historical records are considered for the past millions of years.
RE: Owen says:
January 14, 2011 at 6:35 am
** Now if we can work on getting the instrumentation more robust in the rest of the world, we will be able to make some good projections – and in about 1,000 years there will be enough reliable data to make some good time series statistics.**
No, they already had observations and closed stations or deleted them from the list. It is easier and cheaper to fill-in, plus you get the desired result.
C3 did an interesting post on recent NCDC temperatures: http://www.c3headlines.com/2011/01/noaa-reports-that-1998-temperature-was-13-degrees-warmer-than-2010-us-cooling-at-94-per-century-rate.html
and also this newer one about “temperature change” for the UK’s CET series:
http://www.c3headlines.com/2011/01/are-modern-temp-changes-unprecedented-2010cet.html
The “warmest” year meme pushed by Hansen et al appears to be pretty lame, IMO.
2010 not the warmest year in the USA??? {scratch head smile} So what? Another stellar thread …
REPLY: Jack, thanks for making it clear you don’t care about the climate in the country you live in. – Anthony
**Sure. Canadian Archipel, much of the Arctic; Antarctic Peninsula; region from Red Sea to Caspian Sea. To name but land areas.**
Possibly, maybe even probably, true. The big problem with this statement being that we have in recent years seen excellent analyses showing that supposedly anomolously high temperatures in these regions we manufactured or mistaken.
But I’m sure we can trust them all now.
The US and Europe are the areas with the most intensive and presumably reliable temp data while the Arctic and the Middle East had the warmest year while having the least reliable and intensive temp data.
So in effect this measurement of 2010 as a record warm year depends entirely on temp data from the least reliable parts of the planet measured to tenths of a degree and going back a century.
Strange.
Warmest ever? Not remotely in Britain. The temperature in 2010 at 8.83C was identical to the first year of the record in 1659.
http://hadobs.metoffice.com/hadcet/
We simply must stop accepting that we know the global temperature to tenths of a degree back to 1880-its complete hubris to believe that.
Combining a SST back to the same date is nothing short of nonsensical, we have no idea whatsoever what the SST’s were, other than in a few shipping lanes, which even then were taken haphazardly in bizarre ways.
Tonyb