WUWT Readers may remember in 2006 Al Gore announcing on national television one morning that:
The earth has a fever…
He of course was pushing his book, An Inconvenient Truth as the cure. Now, almost six years later, other symptoms have been reported, including spots, which might be from Chicken Little Pox.
Dr. Clive Best writes in with his findings on The Earth running hot and cold !
He writes: (updated 3/8 to fix some typos and clarify the time period for the map)
There has been quite a debate over at WUWT regarding temperature measurements and temperature anomalies. The AGW crew argue that only anomalies can be relied on to track global warming. These anomalies calculated at each individual weather station are the deltas between the measured temperatures and the mean temperatures over a fixed period – just for that station. The anomalies from ~4000 stations all over the globe are then combined to give one global anomaly, yielding the familiar graph we know and love which shows ~0.6 deg.C rise since 1850. Looking in more detail however we discover that some parts of the world are not warming at all and some are even cooling.
Thus motivated I went off in search of the “hot stations” and the “cold stations” from the Hadley/CRU provided station data.
Here we define “hot stations” as those yielding an average anomaly increase since 1990 > 0.4 degrees. “Cold stations” are defined simply as those with an average anomaly < 0.1 degrees. since 1990. Had/CRU anomalies are relative to the period 1960-1989 so they all measure warming/cooling relative to that baseline.
The map above shows in red the “hot stations” and in blue the “cold stations”. In both cases the larger the point the stronger the warming/cooling. This is an active flash map so you can zoom in by dragging a rectangle, and view the data by clicking on any station, (zoom out by clicking anywhere else).
It immediately becomes obvious that the bulk of observed warming is concentrated in the Northern Hemisphere : Eastern Europe, Russia, central Asia, India, China, Japan, Middle East, North Africa. These are all areas of rapid population increase, development and industrialisation. There is essentially no warming at all in the Southern Hemisphere. Bolivia, Peru, Paraguay and Argentina all appear to be cooling. Even Australia and Zealand are static or cooling.
More at The Earth running hot and cold !
– Clive Best
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Hmmm, UHI Much? Maybe there’s a solution:
From the Uranus, 2007
Don’t understand “more cowbell” as it relates to fever? Read this.
Watch the SNL video here (low quality) and a high quality excerpt from NBC here.
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Mr.D.Imwit says:
Kiribati and Tuvalu in the Pacific, and the Maldives in the Indian Ocean are all “sinking”, and have been since around 1991.
They keep asking for help from the rich nations, i.e. land and/or money, because they will be under water real soon. The problem is that the tide gauges show the opposite, so the rich nations aren’t co-opporating. But they keep trying.
cui bono said @ur momisugly March 7, 2012 at 5:21 pm
Northern hemisphere CO2 is anthropogenic; Southern hemisphere CO2 is natural 😉
Mr.D.Imwit says:
March 7, 2012 at 6:07 pm
Is this true or B.S.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2111618/The-new-Atlantis-Entire-Pacific-nation-plans-relocate-rising-sea-level.html.
Enlightenment would be appreciated,
Thank You.
=============================================
“The tide has started to reach the villages and homes of the people that live on top of the 33 flat coral islands that make up the Kiribati islands.”
Location: Kiribati
Number of months of record Sea level trend (mm/year)
89 -11.0
“These values show that there have been significant sea level falls at Kiribati, Tuvalu and Nauru since the start of the project.”
http://www.globaleducation.edna.edu.au/archives/secondary/casestud/south_pacific/1/sea-level.html
Location: Kiribati
Number of months of record ……89
Sea level trend (mm/year)…… -11.0
“There just seems to be something about the N. Hemisphere vs the South, and the Arctic vs. the Antarctic. I’d love to see a simple, comprehensive explanation of this.”
The ratio of land to ocean in the northern hemisphere is 1 to 1.5. The ratio of land to ocean in the southern hemisphere is 1 to 4.
Seems like the graphic indicates general ocean cooling. The land somehow resists such change.
Sorry…..no reported rationing of land….yet. Meant “ratio”,
I can hear the teachers now. “It’s worse than we taught”.
@benfrommo.
I have said before, that until someone goes out and systematically studies the history of EVERY land temperature site, both at the site itself and in the neighbourhood, and upwind (prevaling at the time measurements are taken), then the use of land temperatures over a time where we know there was a considerable amount of urbaniisation (1970-2000) is basically MEANINGLESS !!!
There is simple no way of knowing just how much the urbanisation has affected the measurements at any particular station unless you go out and look at its history over that period.. even then it would be very hit and miss.
And when warmists say that there is no UHI signature in the calculations.. I just laugh.
I suspect that a large proportion of the increase in the calculated value of the land-base ‘global average temperature’ over the period 1976 – 1996 is due to UHI effects and the so-called “loss” of data acquisition from many remote sites, (where did they all go ??). Odd that this happened just when the AGW bretheren were trying to make their case, and that once satellite measurements became accepted, the so-called “global temperature” stopped going up….just coincidence… I doubt it !!!
Mr.D.Imwit says:
March 7, 2012 at 6:07 pm
Is this true or B.S.
Total BS…..
The following is from http://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/sltrends.shtml
The mean sea level trend is 2.07 mm/year with a 95% confidence interval of +/- 0.90 mm/year based on monthly mean sea level data from 1948 to 2006 which is equivalent to a change of 0.68 feet in 100 years.
If you look close the end series is 2006, wonder why that would be hummmm. After 2006 the sea level has been dropping. In this crazy little world of climate science this is called cherry picking. So even when we look at the sea level change of .68 feet per 100 years it doesnt look all that scarey. I am willing to bet that the dust and pebbles off tourists feet could deposit that much land height in 100 years.
steven mosher said:
You keep repeating that ad nauseum, yet those who’ve been keeping watch the last 25 years remember the “greenhouse effect” meme back then. Has the “theory” been amended?
According to AGW “theory”, the surface over land should not match satellite; it should be significantly lower.
Per Dr. Roy Spencer (I don’t recall where I quoted it from, but am sure Dr. Spencer will confirm 🙂 )
that should read “temperatures over land should not match satellite”.
“Is this true or B.S.”
Probably both.
It is entirely likely that the Kiribati govt is touting this or even seriously contemplating it, however it is unlikely that sea level rises are going to make a big difference to this island. The local rises are only going to raise the sea levels by around 30cm in a century, and the corals are likely to respond by also moving upwards. A recent survey of some of the Kiribati islands found them to be expanding, rather than sinking.
Latitude – thanks for the link!
Mosh – have a look. I opened the link in a new window so I could put them side by side. If they hadn’t been labeled it would have been very hard to tell which one was which. You can provide all the reasoning you want as to why it isn’t UHI, but look at those two maps side by each and provide a plausible explanation for the correlation other than UHI.
I know, I know, correlation is not causation. But… there still needs to be a plausible explanation.
I don’t understand the significance of 0.4C as a measure of warming. One can produce a gridded color coded map using the GISS temperature data to determine which areas have warmed and how much.
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/do_nmap.py?year_last=2012&month_last=1&sat=4&sst=1&type=anoms&mean_gen=01&year1=1960&year2=2012&base1=1950&base2=1970&radius=250&pol=reg
It shows that a number of regions in the northern hemisphere have warmed between 1C and 4C. Are Scandinavia, Alaska, and Siberia which have a great deal of warming really places of rapid population growth and industrialization compared to other areas of the globe? Why hasn’t the US, Mexico and Southern China, which have had substantial industrialization and population growth seen warming, if urbanization is the reason for warming.
Climate models actually predict that the Southern Hemisphere, which has a larger fraction of ocean area will get warming much later than the northern hemisphere.
It looks like this comes from Phil Jones’ “value added” database (the one where the dog ate the original data). Despite years of trying, there does not appear to be any record of what adjustments were made to the original data. Use at your own risk.
Inspired by the old 20:80 phenomenon, where 20% of X is often responsible
for 80% of Y, I’m wondering what the situation is regarding temperature
stations (TS) and land surface area. Can someone fill in the figures?
90% of TS cover 10% of the land area? Something like that?
To which I might add that all the talk about confidence levels and margins
of error are so much piffle, as they implicitly assume that the TS matrix is
some kind of survey. It’s not. It’s a dog’s breakfast, and no amount of
statistical jiggery-pokery will make it otherwise.
steven mosher says:
March 7, 2012 at 5:26 pm
if it were uhi then uha and rss would not match the land trend as they both do.
Please explain why the land only slopes (red and purple) are steeper than the total slopes (green and blue).
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/rss-land/from:1978/trend/offset/plot/rss/from:1978/trend/offset:-0.07/plot/uah/from:1978/trend/plot/uah-land/from:1978/trend/offset:0.09
davidmhoffer says: [re earth lights from space vs Figure 1] “I opened the link in a new window so I could put them side by side.”
I opened two tabs in Opera and expanded both charts to about the same scale. I then use the tabs and CTRL [SHIFT] F6 for a blink comparator. Very, very interesting!! I can even spot the places in Alaska and Hawaii where the red dots occur–right on a lit-up region. Same for most of the rest of the world.
There’s not 100% correlation, but the similarity is striking. I’m wondering if satellite temperatures are read at night. Or if the UbinHAD/CRUD data has corrected for UHI in the wrong direction. Or both. Is a puzzlement.
Eric Adler;
Are Scandinavia, Alaska, and Siberia which have a great deal of warming really places of rapid population growth and industrialization compared to other areas of the globe? Why hasn’t the US, Mexico and Southern China, which have had substantial industrialization and population growth seen warming, if urbanization is the reason for warming. >>>>>>>>
1. Nobody said that UHI was the EXCLUSIVE influence on the temperature trend. This look at the data suggests however that it is a SIGNIFICANT influence on the trend.
2. High latitude regions show a larger temperature fluctuation because P (watts per square meter) varies with T^4 (T*T*T*T). So, it takes a LOT of watts to influence temperature in warmer areas and very FEW watts to influence temperature in cold areas. So, for any given increase in w/m2 on a global basis, not much change in the tropics, and even less to summer highs and even less to day time highs. Much change however to high latitudes, much more to winter lows, and more still to night time lows.
More on Kiribati.
From the Telegraph yesterday:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/australiaandthepacific/kiribati/9127576/Entire-nation-of-Kiribati-to-be-relocated-over-rising-sea-level-threat.html
But they obviously don’t read their own back issues (03/06/2010)
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/australiaandthepacific/tuvalu/7799503/Pacific-islands-growing-not-shrinking-due-to-climate-change.html
Never let facts get in the way of a good headline…
And just look at all that aerosol cooling over asia. The AGW camp is in a bizarre place with their claims of aerosol cooling. Not only does the lack of warming over china tend to indicate that the current claims of aerosol cooling are a crock…the fact that there’s no aerosol cooling means that their explanation of cooling in the 50s, 60s and 70s was also a crock.
Mike Smith, the speed you quote is just 0.6% of the speed of light.
Eastern Europe, Russia, central Asia, India, China, Japan, Middle East, North Africa.
Plus Western Europe and North America. And I’d exclude N Africa, I’d say thats 50/50 warming cooling.
What do these places all have in common? (partially excepting the Middle East)
A large reduction in anthropogenic aerosols since 1960.
The reduced aerosols increase early morning insolation, increasing minimum temperatures, especially in winter, which is where you will find the bulk of the measured warming.
Note, its a common misconception that aerosol pollution has increased in China. In 1960 a billion Chinese used domestic stoves and open hearths for heat and cooking, These are very smoky and now banned in most places in China.
These are all areas of rapid population increase, development and industrialisation.
Eastern Europe, Russia, and Japan have had population decreases and de-industrialisation (of the smoky aerosol polluting kind).
A recent Japanese study (http://johnosullivan.livejournal.com/41060.html) showed that the less industialised countries were emitting more CO2 than industrialised ones.
If this is true and CO2 is a cause of higher temperatures, shouldn’t Africa and South America have more red dots that the Northern hemisphere?
Perhaps the disparity is due to CO2 NOT being a well-mixed gas but it instantaneously migrates from the SH to the NH to cause them to have the red dots.
/sarc
@ur momisugly Mike Smith. “particles moving at 4,000,000 MPH.” Light speed is generally defined as 186,000 miles Per SECOND. Converted to MPH it comes out as 669,600,000 mph. Unless I’ve lost a,”0″ or two somewhere, I make 4,000,000 mph 0.5973% of light speed. CERN can breathe easy again.