Roy Spencer's UAH report for March

Meanwhile…
http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/images/daily_images/N_timeseries.png
Hmmm…

So is it or is it not the warmest march ever? The press is reporting it as such.
In specific portions of the US, perhaps. Elsewhere in the world (over most of the world) absolutely not. Note well the UAH anomaly — it isn’t enormous by any stretch of the imagination.
The US has been warm in March because of how air has circulated across it — ordinarily we get cool air moving down from the northwest in bursts that last a fair amount of time and dominate the average, but instead our air has been coming more consistently out of the south and the arctic air has stayed home, keeping the pacific northwest colder and snowier than usual. I’m guessing that this in turn is associated with the change in the phase of the PDO.
In NC spring has been warm, no doubt, but it was neither the earliest spring nor, I suspect, the warmest. I’m also still very much worrying about a late killing frost — there is plenty of cold air up north and we may yet get a dominant wave carrying it south. In three more days we’re due for nighttime temperatures in the 30’s, and that’s always risky.
If one takes a peek at the 5,000,000 year sediment/proxy thermal record, the peak temperature of the entire Holocene is cooler than somewhere between 1/3 and 1/2 of the record. On the timescale of this curve, the last 10,000 years is a sharp spike back to temperatures close to the stable norm for the first 2 million years of this time frame (with no ice ages). We should be worrying about how to prolong this spike at all costs (which we probably cannot do, as we haven’t got a damn clue about the major factors that contribute to the observed bistability except to note that they are almost certainly beyond our control) because return to the cold phase dominant attractor would most certainly be a real catastrophe, where there is no evidence in the climate record that a still-warmer stable phase even exists for the Earth’s climate for any values of the functional controlling parameters, let alone a catastrophic one.
rgb

Had Grímsvötn blown more SO2 into the stratosphere instead of mostly just ash what would it look like?

Thank goodness. With 6+ B people around, even something as minor as another 1985 could kill tens if not hundreds of millions.

This warming missed Oregon!

“But the decade was not cold”
Winters were cold.
NOAA says 1979 was the coldest Winter in US history. 1978 was 7th. 1977 was 11th.
1984 and 1985 were 18th and 19th coldest. 1982 was 22nd coldest.

sunshinehours1 says:
April 4, 2012 at 10:13 am
NOAA has the February 2012 as the 17th warmest.
1954 was 4F warmer.
1930 was 2.67F warmer.
For March, the US might beat 1910 … finally.
1910 50.56
2007 48.45
——————————————————————————————–
Thank you sunshine we will get on the adjustments right away.
signed NASA-GISS

Albert says:
April 4, 2012 at 11:28 am
“The start date of 1979 is at the end of a decade so cold people were worrying about another ice age. It sure is a good thing we’ve warmed up a little since then.”
Haha, not really. Some people might have speculated that another ice age was possible. But the decade was not cold. In the instrumental record of GISTEMP, it was the second warmest decade of all decades up to that point.
___________________________________
My cases of frost bite from the Sixties and Seventies tells me you are either nuts or blowing smoke. When you almost lose toes from walking to the school bus in minus 30F weather for days on end you remember it. When the snow is over your head you remember it. I also remember the hype about a comming Ice Age.

George Kukla, together with Robert Matthews of Brown University, convened a conference in 1972 entitled “The Present Interglacial: How and When will it End?”, and reported it in Science magazine… [note the date]
Kukla and Matthews alerted President Richard Nixon, and as a result the US Administration set up a Panel on the Present Interglacial involving the State Department and other agencies. None of us knew then that the mid-century cooling was about to be punctuated by a warming spell from the late 1970s to the mid 1990s…. [again note the dates]
A more definitive confirmation of Milankovitch came in 1976, in a paper by Hays, Imbrie and Shackleton, using Shackleton’s data in the figure above. But long before either that paper or my own, there was widespread behind-the-scenes acceptance of Milankovitch, and Kukla, for one, was concerned about the implications…..
George Kukla: Well almost all of us have been pretty sure that there were only four ice ages, separated by relatively long warm intervals. But now we know that there were twenty in the last two million years. And the warm periods are much shorter than we believed originally. They are something around 10,000 years long. and I’m sorry to say that the one we are living in now has just passed its 10,000 year birthday. That of course means that the ice age is due now any time.
http://calderup.wordpress.com/2010/05/14/next-ice-age/

You might get away with rewriting history in other blogs but not here.

“sunshinehours1, you’re confusing winters in the US with the decadal average temperature for the whole world. ”
It isn’t the “decadal average” people remember. It is cold winters.
Jan/Feb 1968 -0.550 -0.396
Jan/Feb 1969 -1.138 -1.074
Jan/Feb 1972 -1.041 -0.963
Jan/Feb 1974 -0.506 -0.632
http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/temperature/crutem3nh.txt
Jan and Feb temperatures below -1 were quite unusual.
Jan 1940 was -1.184 And then the next previous one was 1895.
HADCET has 1979 as the 7th coldest winter. 1982 was 11th, 1985 was 15th
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadcet/ssn_HadCET_min_sort.txt