The global temperature has fallen .653°C (from +0.554 in March 2010 to -0.099 in March 2011) in just one year. That’s a magnitude nearly equivalent to the agreed upon global warming signal agreed upon by the IPCC. It is quite a sharp drop.
According to the 2007 Fourth Assessment Report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), global surface temperature increased by 0.74 ± 0.18 °C (1.33 ± 0.32 °F) during the 20th century
Comments from Dr. Roy Spencer: (plus graph)
(Graph by Anthony Watts, data and commentary from Dr. Spencer/UAH)
UAH Temperature Update for March, 2011: Cooler Still -0.10 deg. C
La Nina Coolness Persists
The global average lower tropospheric temperature anomaly for March 2011 fell to -0.10 deg. C, with cooling in both the Northern and Southern Hemispheric extratropics, while the tropics stayed about the same as last month. (I’m on the road in Virgina, so the temperature graph will not be updated until I return on Thursday.)
April 5th, 2011
YR MON GLOBAL NH SH TROPICS
2010 01 0.542 0.675 0.410 0.635
2010 02 0.510 0.553 0.466 0.759
2010 03 0.554 0.665 0.443 0.721
2010 04 0.400 0.606 0.193 0.633
2010 05 0.454 0.642 0.265 0.706
2010 06 0.385 0.482 0.287 0.485
2010 07 0.419 0.558 0.280 0.370
2010 08 0.441 0.579 0.304 0.321
2010 09 0.477 0.410 0.545 0.237
2010 10 0.306 0.257 0.356 0.106
2010 11 0.273 0.372 0.173 -0.117
2010 12 0.181 0.217 0.145 -0.222
2011 01 -0.010 -0.055 0.036 -0.372
2011 02 -0.020 -0.042 0.002 -0.348
2011 03 -0.099 -0.073 -0.126 -0.345
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It caused by Global Dimming! No joke! Take a look at this BBC documentary about this phenomenon sweeping the planet! It’s the ultimate it climate change.
LOL!
TheFlyingOrc says:
April 5, 2011 at 2:12 pm
Huh. Based on the real low drop last month, I thought that we were done going down, at least for a while.
Are the oceans still releasing heat? Are we going to see this continuing in April? Is there anyone with knowledge making an educated prediction either way.
____
The net effect of La Nina is not a release of heat from the Pacific, but rather, more heat is absorbed during a La Nina, only to be released during the next EL Nino cycle. Note: heat is released as we see the warmer waters pushed toward the western pacific (i.e. why we saw flooding in Australia this winter), but taken as a whole, over the entire pacific, more energy is absorbed during a La Nina than released. Hence, the the overall NET energy effect of the complete cycle (La Nina + El Nino) is exactly 0. The troposphere cools during La Nina as less total energy is released, and the troposphere warms during El Nino as more net energy is released from ocean to troposphere.
Smokey says:
April 5, 2011 at 5:47 pm
Gates says:
“I know of no professional climate scientist who denies natural factors in climate change…both very long term, such as Milankovitch cycles, and the very short climate effects such as ENSO cycles.”
Let me introduce you to a certain Michael Mann [who fancies himself a professional climate scientist]. Mann attempted to show there was very little temperature change from 1400 AD until the industrial revolution. He tried to erase the MWP and the LIA, but his attempt was debunked by McIntyre and McKittrick.
See? You learned something new today.
____
Thank you Smokey, but I seriously doubt whether Michael Mann would deny the Milankovitch cycles or the shorter-term effects of ENSO. I know he is the “devil” to many skeptics (a devil with a hockey stick instead of a pitch fork), but I trust he understands the longer and shorter term natural variations in the climate.
onion2,
Thanx for your parameter-free speculation. However, the natural warming since the LIA isn’t a problem. In fact, it is a net benefit. More is better.
You’re still stuck on the misguided belief that a warmer, more pleasant world is bad. It isn’t. It’s all good.
Everytime I eyeball this graph it just strikes me that something weird occurred around the year 2000. It just looks like someone started adding a constant of around 0.25 to all the temperature readings. Its just weird – I wouldn’t expect nature to act this way; it looks more like a change in algorithm or how data is cleansed or something.
Anyway, I live in Texas and look forward to a cooler summer – bring it on.
“How many years of static or falling temperatures did Gavin say it would take to falsify AGW? Was it 15 or 20?”
it is always 10 years in the future from whatever date it is now. 5 years from now, it will still be 10 years in the future. however long it takes before it starts going up, 5 years byond that is how long it takes to falsify AGW.
“TheFlyingOrc says:
April 5, 2011 at 2:12 pm
Are we going to see this continuing in April? Is there anyone with knowledge making an educated prediction either way?”
I will give it a shot and say the low values WILL continue in April at least. (I thank the person who posted the following very recently). It shows the Northern Hemisphere snow cover at about 1.5% higher than the recent 15 year average as of April 1. And as we know, whenever there is a blanket of snow on the ground, it is very hard for any surface temperature to get too much above freezing, generally speaking. And for the same reason, I will predict that at least for April, the rate of loss of Arctic sea ice will be slower than normal.
http://stevengoddard.files.wordpress.com/2011/04/screenhunter_87-apr-03-08-40.gif
“Thank you Smokey, but I seriously doubt whether Michael Mann would deny the Milankovitch cycles or the shorter-term effects of ENSO. I know he is the “devil” to many skeptics (a devil with a hockey stick instead of a pitch fork), but I trust he understands the longer and shorter term natural variations in the climate.”
Ahh…but your trust may be misplaced.
@James Baldwin Sexton says:
April 5, 2011 at 2:42 pm
… After 30 years of crying about the arctic ice, wailing about our impending doom, lamenting the certain demise of our polar bears and all sorts of gnashing of the teeth, can you see a discernible difference in the ice coverage? One would have expected a significant difference.
Completely agree. I thought he was making an error pointing out a difference in snow cover.
That low temperature value is due to the presence of a La Nina phase of ENSO. ENSO is a temperature oscillation that alternates between cool La Nina an warm El Nino phases while the global average temperature remains the same.
Arno Arrak says:
April 5, 2011 at 7:58 pm
That low temperature value is due to the presence of a La Nina phase of ENSO. ENSO is a temperature oscillation that alternates between cool La Nina an warm El Nino phases while the global average temperature remains the same.
What needs to be added is that the UAH and RSS data bases have been shown to be more sensitive to the El Nino/La Nina cycles than the thermometer data base.
http://tamino.files.wordpress.com/2011/01/all5raw.jpg
REPLY: While that doesn’t really mean much in the context of what these were designed to look at, the LT, it proves my point about heat sinks around land thermometers. The variance of land base thermometers gets reduced by being next to a heat sink. – Anthony
Notice how the La Nina minima are getting warmer. In 1985 La Nina was 0.5 degrees colder than this one. This is 0.2 degrees per decade.
@R. Gates says:
April 5, 2011 at 5:26 pm
2011 should give 2007 a good run for being the lowest summer sea ice extent on record.
REPLYAre you serious? The Arctic ice mass had a decent recovery last year, and multi-year ice has been increasing.
RG, these types of predictions are what get proponents of AGW theories into so much trouble. Climate is a far more complex system than we are able to model reliably, and predictions about sea ice extent seem about as reliable as guessing which crow flies first.
I keep a very open mind about all of this, but any effects of warming will be quite long range, and probably on the mild side. Now, ocean acidification on the other hand….
ferd berple says:
April 5, 2011 at 6:59 pm
“How many years of static or falling temperatures did Gavin say it would take to falsify AGW? Was it 15 or 20?”
The fraud will collapse when the free money runs out. And yes the money will run out eventually and when it does the fraudsters will melt away and suddenly ala post war Germany you will be hard put to find anyone who actually suppported CAGW in the fist place.
We are all sceptics now? We are going to find in the next few years that even the most fanatical CAGW cultists who now spray around the term ‘denialist’ were in fact secret sceptics from the start. I keep getting a sneak peak of the near future where we are entertained by the likes of Mann/Thorne/Gore/Briffa et al claiming they were really sceptics secret double agents working from within to bring down the CAGW monster.
Werner Brozek says:
April 5, 2011 at 7:03 pm
I will predict that at least for April, the rate of loss of Arctic sea ice will be slower than normal.
___
Uh, I wouldn’t be so confident in that prediction, as indications are that we could be in for a very interesting ride down to the minimum and challenge 2007 for the lowest modern summer arctic sea ice minimum. I’ve also noticed you gave a link to Steve Goddard’s site. After his PIPS2.0 nonsense here last year, I’m surprised anyone would put a lot of stock in his forecasts. His prediction LAST year- 5.5 million sq. km. minimum, Mine: 4.5 million sq. km. He based his on his beloved PIPS2.0. It’s a MODEL, so tread carefully with this MODEL data…really.
A very good blog (in addition to WUWT of course!) for some in-depth Arctic Sea Ice discussion is at:
http://neven1.typepad.com/blog/
(will the moderators let this pass?, hope so, it’s a good blog for sea ice fanatics)
Caution: most the posts on this blog are from “warmists”, but the discussion on sea ice (IMO) is quite good and very in depth, with clean analysis that tends to avoid the political commentary that some of us can do without. There even currently is a great link to a video of a recent submarine breaking through the Arctic sea ice. Pretty cool…
Looking forward to how the 13 month rolling average looks on Thursday.
Also, is their a reason why that level of the atmosphere took so long to cool down after onset of the cooler surface from El Nina?
Andy
R Gates: I always appreciate your comments which suggests you might have a more than passing knowledge of the science. Even though I agree with you that the physics of CO2 should lead to some net warming i cannot find that effect in the data. I note that temperature has been rising (taking NOAA ocean and air temperature for example) since 1959 but I cannot find any association between the year on year changes and changes in CO2 levels as recorded at the Mauna Loa observatory*. Loss of Arctic sea ice is a function of warming – of itself it does not establish the causal link between temperature and CO2. I appreciate that climate science and its predictions are based upon Boltzmann’s Law and various theories of climate change, and the models that formalise those theories (that is after all what models do). But in no other science that I am aware (natural or social) does theory trump observation. So the question I ask, taking the hypothesis that changes in annual levels of CO2 explain changes in either ocean or air temperature, can you tell me what explanatory model with what lag produces an R2 significantly different from zero?** I will even take and work with the specification of a distributed lag model if you can provide one. I would appreciate your assistance because CO2 forcing is such a simple explanation that it would be nice if it were true – it would be with considerable regret to learn that this is the one case where Ockham’s Razor hasn’t worked and that we need to work with a much more complex theory.
* I agree that humans emit measurable amounts of CO2 but the quantities we produce are only significant if causality can be established which is physically significant at the levels involved.
** I have been fascinated to read the debate in the literature on multi-attribution fingerprinting. What is equally fascinating is the almost complete lack of convincing results – the approach is now going bayesian in order to bring in theoretically conditioned priors to try and obtain the desired results. It is truly amazing the data torture being employed to bolster the AGW case.
You can bet on that at the link below. At present, the given odds that 2011’s ice will be higher than 2007’s are only 40%, so you’d have to put up $6 to get $10 back.
https://www.intrade.com/v4/markets/?eventClassId=20
Jim D at 8:58 pm says:
Notice how the La Nina minima are getting warmer. In 1985 La Nina was 0.5 degrees colder than this one. This is 0.2 degrees per decade.
===========================================================
The temperature down-spike in ’85 was accentuated by the El Chichón eruption in ’82.
To get a feel for the underlying warming trend why not look at the longest record available viz. HADCRUT3 (which nicely coincides with the rise in CO2 concentration)?
That trend includes solar irradiation, internal fluctuations like ENSO & PDO, GHGs, aerosols, water vapor feedbacks and all, and shows +0.7°C or 0.5°C/century.
Some of that trend must be attributable to a continuing recovery from one of the coldest episodes during this interglacial.
It has been mentioned before, but a great deal of clarity can be injected into the mind by reading this recent essay:
http://www.geoffstuff.com/Understanding_the_Atmosphere_Effect%20%282%29.pdf
(I could not get a direct link to work, so I put Dr Postma’s essay onto my site, purely to assist distribution)
I told you I could feel a draught.
Anthony,
The logic of climate science really is not that bright.
Take a pound of warm air and take a pound of cold air and it is a pound. End of story.
Now logic dictates that there is far more molecules in that cold air than warm vibrating air.
stevo:
At April 5, 2011 at 11:38 am you say:
“It really is appalling that you can’t or won’t learn the simplest basics of statistics. Comparing noise with trend is stupid – no other way to describe it.”
I agree.
The trend of global temperature is COOLING over the last 10 thousand years.
There has been some noise in the trend that has given us; e.g.
the Roman Warm Period,
the Dark Age Cool Period,
the Medieaval Warm Period,
the Little Iced Age, and
the Present Warm Period.
In other words, there is a clear and undeniable trend of global cooling that has a lot of “noise” in the data.
As you say, it really is “stupid” that you and me can see this but so few others can.
Richard
Anthony,
One basic simple question not being asked:
WHY IS THE OCEAN NOT ABSORBING HEAT ANYMORE?
Any time I bring up surface salt changes, they go on deaf ears.
Posts like this will be referred to in the future as people wonder how it was that people historically denied basic, centuries old science being plainly demonstrated in simple plots such as this. Sorry, but i really did laugh out loud as I scanned through the comments of the “sceptics” as they managed to completely ignore the mind numbingly obvious trend in the data – even neglecting the intricacies of the El Nino/La Nina oscillations complicating the story. There’s a very sad lack of honesty at this site and I really am left wondering how people can be so demeaning to their own intellect in this way. Really, worryingly sad. I know you’ll have your clever refutations that will be relentlessly backed up by the entrenched group think but, really?