UAH Global Temperature Update July, 2011: +0.37 deg. C
By Dr. Roy Spencer
How ironic..a “global warming denier” reporting on warmer temperatures 
The global average lower tropospheric temperature anomaly for July, 2011 increased to +0.37 deg. C (click on the image for a LARGE version):
Even though the Northern Hemisphere temperature anomaly cooled slightly in July, as did the tropics, warming in the Southern Hemisphere more than made up for it:
YR MON GLOBAL NH SH TROPICS
2011 1 -0.010 -0.055 +0.036 -0.372
2011 2 -0.020 -0.042 +0.002 -0.348
2011 3 -0.101 -0.073 -0.128 -0.342
2011 4 +0.117 +0.195 +0.039 -0.229
2011 5 +0.133 +0.145 +0.121 -0.043
2011 6 +0.315 +0.379 +0.250 +0.233
2011 7 +0.372 +0.340 +0.404 +0.198
For those who want to infer great meaning from large month-to-month temperature changes, I remind them that much of this activity is due to natural variations in the rate at which the ocean loses heat to the atmosphere. Evidence for this is seen at the end of the sea surface temperature record through last month, which has a down-tick during the recent up-tick in atmospheric temperatures:
Global Sea Surface Temperature through July:
Here are the SST anomalies from AMSR-E on the NASA Aqua satellite (note the different base period, since Aqua has been flying only since 2002…click for a larger version):
Smokey says:
August 1, 2011 at 4:23 pm
“Thanks for the regional weather report, Brian. You do know, I hope, that “global warming” over the past century an a half has been about 0.7°C. You’re just experiencing a routine Georgia heat wave. Relax, “carbon” isn’t gonna getcha.☺
[BTW: where I live, in California, the weather has been much below normal this year. It all averages out globally. There is nothing to worry about. The weather always varies from year to year, and from place to place.]”
The weather has always been one of those things for me. I’ve even had dreams about 150 degree days. Crazy stuff.
But I never really paid attention to Global Warming until this spring because I figure it was a lot of political jostling and not much of anything else. But the big Tornado outbreaks this spring was a real eye opener.
noob here.
How come we talk about record highs in July and August but not in December? And, isn’t the summer supposed to have high temperatures?
And, I’ve heard it said someplace: More people nowadays work and live in Air Conditioning than did back in 1930s and even 1980s. Thus, the summer temps will “feel” hotter since we jump back and forth between outdoors and indoors.
Also, many are citing the record highs set recently. But, aren’t they “canceled” out by the record lows set last winter?
And, how can we measure 0.37C change? When the best measurement we can do is in whole numbers?
Brian says: August 1, 2011 at 12:28 pm …. propaganda
Listen Brian, it is not necessary to disprove that these temperatures are due to AGW; it is necessary to disprove the NULL hypothesis: that these temperatures are not natural, as changes in temperature have happened in the past, although you natural global-warming deniers refuse to acknowledge that fact.
Thank you Roy. It is so refreshing to see clean science and clean thinking on climate matters. Most people here at WUWT are not here to prove a point.. We prefer to let the points prove themselves.
@Brian: “I suspect things are going to get worse and tempts are no longer going to be flat”
And yet:
“The forecasts in the [IPCC] Report were not the outcome of scientific procedures. In effect, they were the opinions of scientists transformed by mathematics and obscured by complex writing. Research on forecasting has shown that experts’ predictions are not useful in situations involving uncertainly and complexity. We have been unable to identify any scientific forecasts of global warming. Claims that the Earth will get warmer have no more credence than saying that it will get colder.”
GLOBAL WARMING: FORECASTS BY SCIENTISTS VERSUS SCIENTIFIC FORECASTS by
Kesten C. Green and J. Scott Armstrong, ENERGY & ENVIRONMENT,
http://www.forecastingprinciples.com/files/WarmAudit31.pdf
Brian: “But I never really paid attention to Global Warming until this spring because I figure it was a lot of political jostling and not much of anything else. But the big Tornado outbreaks this spring was a real eye opener.”
I live in OK. Right in the middle of tornado alley. We actually had fewer tornados than normal. You had more than normal. The area just shifted this year to the east a bit. Seems to me that the area designated Tornado Alley is only named that due to the TENDENCY of torndados to form there. Yet, tornados form in all 50 states and all over the world.
California contributed mightily to the reduced Northern Hemisphere numbers – the state was 0.8 degrees C colder than the “normal” for July, whatever that is. The link below has the July results, for the next 30 days then the August results will appear.
http://www.calclim.dri.edu/
My suspicion is that the colder California climate has some connection to the colder Pacific Ocean right next door. All that CO2 just isn’t heating up the ocean surface, dontcha know?
Also, the colder Pacific is likely due in part to the wee bit less ice in the Arctic, which allows more heat to escape to space. Since ice’s primary purpose is to act as an insulator to keep heat in the water layer below it, less ice allows more heat to escape. Engineers have known this for decades, and that is why we place some sort of cover or barrier on the top of liquid storage tanks. Homeowners with heated pools also know this, and place insulated covers over the pool at night to keep heat in the water.
Water evaporation as a cooling mechanism is an issue for some open-top storage tanks (and also for lakes), but evaporation is not an issue for liquids with low volatility such as heavier oils. Heat loss via radiation is stopped by an insulating roof – just like ice in the Arctic.
Gotta love these AGW types. It’s seriously no wonder that their models are wrong, and projections from those models are failing to materialize.
La Guy says August 1, 2011 at 1:30 pm
The rate of ocean PH change is unprecedented in 50+ million years.
La Guy, what is your evidence for this statement?
Tilo Reber-UAH is the data set that is likely most correct. RSS makes use of a method of correcting for orbital drift of it’s satellites which is A) too aggressive and B) currently unnecessary in UAH since AQUA has a stabilized orbit. John Christy has done many papers documenting the evidence for biases in RSS’s method and how UAH is highly consistent with radiosonde data that RSS is not.
Steven Mosher, why are you so antagonistic? Why do you assume that everyone who disagrees with the end of the world doom and gloom is in denial of “basic physics” and why in God’s name ally yourself with a crackpot like Brian? Why on earth rush to the defense of someone who is attributing individual weather events to AGW? I often suspect that you are trying really hard to be “fair” and throw equal invective at “both sides” as it makes you feel better about yourself. You are the sort of person who lives and dies by the fallacy of the golden mean. And seriously, what did the WUWT readership ever do to you to warrant the constant anger from you?
Here is the way I see it: the evidence suggest that the effect of AGW is primarily to warm the coldest air masses, in other words, high latitude and cold winter day concentration of warming, especially at night. This is hardly a way to create more extremes of climate, and hardly contributes to more heat waves. Now, it what way am I in denial of basic physics for not being convinced otherwise by anecdotes, rather than actual evidence?
has this one been posted already?
Satellite methods underestimate indirect climate forcing by aerosols
Joyce E. Pennera,1, Li Xua, and Minghuai Wang
Department of Atmospheric, Oceanic, and Space Sciences, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48109; and bAtmospheric Sciences and Global Change
Division, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Richland, WA 99354
Edited by Robert E. Dickinson, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, and approved June 27, 2011 (received for review December 11, 2010)
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2011/07/25/1018526108.full.pdf+html
steven mosher;
No amount of warming would convince them. No amount of new records. Nothing will convince them. Not and ice free arctic, not more heatwaves, not increased temps. Nothing.>>>
C’mon mosher, that’s over the top, even for you.
The question isn’t about how many new records or how much warming or if there will be an ice free arctic.
THE QUESTION IS ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTION OF CO2 INCREASES TO THE TEMPERATURE.
And if you will refer back to the very names you spouted like Lindzen and others as supporters of the notion that GHG’s increase the surface temperature based on known physics, you’ll find that they ALSO say that the amount is negligible, and based on the known physics, additional CO2 over what we already have will be INCREASINGLY negligible.
Sorta left that part out, didn’t you.
Why?
@ur momisugly Brian, mate did you read the part that said “Even though the Northern Hemisphere temperature anomaly cooled slightly in July, as did the tropics, warming in the Southern Hemisphere more than made up for it:” Unless I am severely mistaken Georgia is in the Northern Hemisphere, which cooled overall in July. Sorry that it’s so hot where you are, but apprarently other places were cooler. Remember – Weather is about differences in temperature and climate is about overall temperature – which interestingly enough rose in the Southern Hemisphere – this is something that I can attest to. Last year in Western Australia it was dry with clear skies and Winter was cold and very dry -something that many AGW people believed was due to climate change. This year, its warmer, cloudy and we are getting near average rains. Hmmm go figure!
La Guy says:
August 1, 2011 at 1:30 pm
The rate of ocean PH change is unprecedented in 50+ million years. Last time this rate of change happened there was a mass extinction.
================================================================
No change of sea level or pH in your neighborhood……………
http://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2011/07/25/monterey-bay-shows-no-change-in-sea-level-or-ph/
steven mosher says:
August 1, 2011 at 2:25 pm
But you will always find people who refuse to accept the physics we used to defend this great country.
=======================================================================
Nancy Pelosi says:
“I’m trying to save the planet; I’m trying to save the planet,
I will not have this debate trivialized by their excuse for their failed policy.”
Brian: “But I never really paid attention to Global Warming until this spring because I figure it was a lot of political jostling and not much of anything else. But the big Tornado outbreaks this spring was a real eye opener.”
The number of strong tornadoes has been trending down over the last 60 years: http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/img/climate/research/tornado/tornadotrend.jpg
I must also confess to being confused by the numbers I am seeing. I understand different groups measure different things and there are differences in how the data is processed, however it almost seems as if two groups are not even on the same planet. The following GISS data has an anomaly of 0.57 for March and 0.50 for June, or a DROP of 0.07 in that period. See http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/tabledata/GLB.Ts+dSST.txt
To be consistent with the June month, UAH went from -0.10 to + 0.32 or UP 0.42 between March and June. See
http://vortex.nsstc.uah.edu/data/msu/t2lt/uahncdc.lt
This gives a huge net difference of 0.49 for these two data sets comparing March 2011 to June 2011.
Do not fully believe the figures they come out with-much higher than what really is the case. The weather patterns have a cooler than normal signature to them-even the heat wave in the central USA isv being caused by a blocking ridge-put in place by an expansion of the circumpolar vortex-most of canada quite chilly as well as much of the rest of the hemisphere-as the vortex expands south-it concentrates the heat in the southern US-the heat cannot expand north toward the Arctic, so it builds more and more giving the appearance of warming in this area-but the overall picture features chill and not warmth. A wall of chilly air is blocking the warm air at about the 50th parallel through much of the hemisphere.
Brian: “I suspect things are going to get worse and tempts are no longer going to be flat like they have for the last number of years. ”
Don’t get your hopes up Brian. RSS is still trending down and HadCrut3 is still dead flat.
See the second chart here.
http://reallyrealclimate.blogspot.com/2011/07/rss-and-uah-divergence-charts.html
Two thoughts:
Climate is not simply the average of weather. It is a combination of sunlight/heating days, record temps at the extremes, precip amount/type, local topography, distance and direction from large bodies of water, etc. Both day to day weather and the average of weather is…weather.
As to heat, La Nina, La Nada, and El Nino conditions will, depending on location, send temps up OR down. It is all together revealing of a lack of understanding when a commenter states that temps are warm in spite of La Nina.
From R. Gates on August 1, 2011 at 1:42 pm
Which is actually a 2005 Policy Statement from The Royal Society, which has long been pushing (C)AGW:
http://eprints.ifm-geomar.de/7878/1/965_Raven_2005_OceanAcidificationDueToIncreasing_Monogr_pubid13120.pdf
(This is a great example of why I don’t like these “short URLs” as they conceal what you are actually clicking on. Could be kiddie pr0n, WWF climate pr0n, EPA-endorsed “educational” child-abusing climate pr0n, even pdf’s.)
Direct link: http://royalsociety.org/Ocean-acidification-due-to-increasing-atmospheric-carbon-dioxide/
It has the following alarming section in the Summary on pg vi (bold added):
This contrasts with the June 2009 Inter-Academy Panel statement on Ocean Acidification posted at the Royal Society’s site:
http://royalsociety.org/Inter-Academy-Panel-statement-on-Ocean-Acidification/
Selected bits (bold added):
Clearly you have erred by supplying outdated information. Climate Science™ has moved rapidly to more shocking, even more alarming proclamations. In just four short years, it has moved from continuing CO2 increases yielding by 2100 a pH “probably lower than has been experienced for hundreds of millennia”, to “The oceans are now more acidic than they have been for 800,000 years.”
Also (requiring better numbers for proper examining of the differences) we’ve gone from the oceans absorbing “In the past 200 years” “approximately half of the CO2 produced by fossil fuel burning and cement production” to only “about a quarter of the carbon dioxide emitted to the atmosphere by human activities since the industrial revolution”. According to the US EPA, referencing IPCC AR4, in 2004 the anthropogenic CO2 emissions were, as a percentage of total GHG emissions, 56.6% fossil fuel use, 17.3% “biological” (deforestation, decay of biomass, etc), and 2.8% “other” (includes cement production and natural gas flaring). The remaining GHG percentages were not CO2. As fossil fuel burning is the overwhelmingly majority source of anthropogenic CO2, this indicates a major revision in just four years of our understanding of how much of it the oceans have absorbed over hundreds of years, indicating the oceans have really absorbed only about half of what was previously thought to have been absorbed.
Indeed, it is clearly worse than we thought, as the oceans have clearly absorbed far less CO2 than was thought yet ended up far more acidic than was thought!
Please try to use more current references that properly convey just how much more alarmingly catastrophic the consequences of inaction have become according to the latest peer-reviewed (by PhD’s!) Climate Science™.
Ocean to atmosphere to space
Indeed, that is the basic heat flow cycle of the Earth’s climate.
Atmospheric warming can be caused either by more heat retention in the atmosphere (climate warming), or more heat release from the oceans (climate cooling).
Thus, atmospheric temperature changes alone are not evidence either for or against climate warming or cooling.
Brian: “But I never really paid attention to Global Warming until this spring… But the big Tornado outbreaks this spring was a real eye opener.”
If you’d like to understand more about what caused those, read these by Dr. Spencer:
http://www.drroyspencer.com/2011/04/more-tornadoes-from-global-warming-thats-a-joke-right/
http://www.drroyspencer.com/2011/05/the-tornado-pacific-decadal-oscillation-connection/
The trend for strong tornado activity has actually been down over the last 50 years. This year was a terrible anomaly.
First, I suppose if the the graphs had scales to match the last 10 million years or even since the onset of the more recent glaciation all the hot air over small recent temperature fluxing would seem ridiculous, as it seems to me at least. Would we then be discussing some other minutia?
Second, many have been on the planet long enough to have endured many such heat events that occur in the midwest and southeast. What esle is new??
Third, what is so hard about understanding the UHI, Urban Heat Island affect. Additionally, as the urbanization grows, so does the heat island. You live on asphalt, need I say more???
Fourth, so all the drama queens who blame me, my parents, and grand parents for fabricated changes in climate change their story as often as the sun sets. The alarmists said the planet is heading for another ice event, then,suddenly from the great minds of darkness came the CO2, turning the planet into global weather chaos, but mind you, that is now, and a different form of CO2. Is there a one of them who has been spot on for the last 40 years????
The only expertise I see in them and their tunnel visioned following is the ability to be puppet to puppeteer.
Joe Bastardi says:
August 1, 2011 at 4:30 pm
Forecast: Global temps fall to -.25 c ( .15 cooler than drop last year) for Jan-March. AMO goes neutral to cold, giving up first cold pdo/amo couplet since 70s.
Forecast entered, so lets see how good I do ( note: forecasted drop to normal last year for start of this year) BTW most climate models are seeing the drop, the most impressive is frontier research center!
———
Joe, i do like the fact that you at put it all out there…right or wrong. I respect that.
I have a number of methods for disabusing the gullible of their Global Warming notions.
Some are ‘thought experiments’ – some are ‘experiments’.
I use this one to put into perspective the temperature DATA that is so regularly and rigorously quoted by both sides in the dispute.
I take my Warmist and we discuss Global Temperatures.
Then I show him my 200 dollar digital thermometer which measures to an accuracy of .1 degrees C. (I explain that its absolute calibration is not necessary for our experiment)
I take the instrument to nearest fridge quickly place the probe say in the vegetable section, close the door and wait. After 15 minutes or so we take a reading.
Next we quickly move the probe to the top of the fridge.
We repeat the same process at 3 or four different positions inside the fridge and guess what!
WITH THE DOOR CLOSED AND THE COMPRESSOR RUNNING YOU CAN TAKE MULTIPLE TEMPERATURE READINGS….INSIDE A FRIDGE.
(If any wit suggests I need a new fridge or thermometer I will suggest they try the experiment themselves…because replicateability is at the core of all proper science!)
The earth is radiatively coupled with space, water vapour is constantly on the move through wind and convection…the temperature at 300hPa is minus -30C over the equator and minus -60C over the poles. On a daily basis ocean currents shunt massive amounts of energy across the surface of the ocean not to mention cold and warm upwelling. On a yearly basis one polar region is cast into double digit deep freeze mode.
Ice cap, sea ice, tundra, plain, mountain, forest, coast and desert, hundreds of thousands of micro and not so micro climates all obeying their own geo-physical imperatives…a bewildering combination of local conditions all sharing the same atmosphere.
They could string all the supercomputers in the world together, run their finest models and they still wouldn’t be able to tell you what was happening in a fortnight’s time. There’s a ‘horizon’ chaos imposes on our predictions.
To speak about Global Temperature as a quantifiable number or even a useful idea is in my humble opinion verging on pseudo science. File with Carbon Footprint