UAH Global Temperature Update for August, 2012: +0.34 deg. C
By Dr. Roy Spencer
The global average lower tropospheric temperature anomaly for August (+0.34 °C) was up from July 2012 (+0.28 °C):
Here are the monthly departures from the 30-year (1981-2010) average:
YR MON GLOBAL NH SH TROPICS
2012 1 -0.09 -0.06 -0.12 -0.13
2012 2 -0.11 -0.01 -0.21 -0.27
2012 3 +0.11 +0.13 +0.10 -0.10
2012 4 +0.30 +0.41 +0.19 -0.12
2012 5 +0.29 +0.44 +0.14 +0.03
2012 6 +0.37 +0.54 +0.20 +0.14
2012 7 +0.28 +0.45 +0.11 +0.33
2012 8 +0.34 +0.38 +0.31 +0.26
As a reminder, the most common reason for large month-to-month swings in global average temperature anomalies (departures from normal) is small fluctuations in the rate of convective overturning of the troposphere, discussed here.
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Philip Bradley says:
September 6, 2012 at 1:29 pm
>>
There has been a pronounced pattern in the anomaly in the last couple of years, It reaches its maximum in the NH summer and minimum in the NH winter. Curiously the SH and tropical ocean follows the same pattern , although weaker, So its not directly a seasonal effect. Probably ENSO related.
The biggest trend is in the south polar land which continues cooing, especially in the SH winter. That the coldest place on Earth is getting even colder, I find somewhat ominous.http://i45.tinypic.com/htrx8g.png
>>
Interesting comment. I decided to do the rate of change plot for each hemisphere as well. There has been a steady, notable change in the pattern since the ’80s. Usual comments about larger swing in NH being due to larger proportion of land area do not seem to apply.
Now SH is showing more variation. Also a couple of years of phase lag in NH, whereas before all was in phase.
Is anybody studying rate of change apart from drawing inappropriate straight lines on a time series??
RACookPE1978 says (September 6, 2012 at 10:55 am)
So, 1/3 of one degree.
———
Which is 1/3 more than Lewandowsky should have got in academia. 😉
Werner Brozek says:
September 6, 2012 at 1:53 pm
Thanks Werner, I find these lists very informative.
Bill: “Needs the standard disclaimer about the polynomial.”
Sure: “Product is not food-safe. Do not take internally. Known by the State of California to induce tardive dyskensia in elephants.”
Gunga Din: “If it wasn’t for that several trillion we might be at .065C.”
I see you are a supporter of the Ben Bernanke Green Initiative. A truly marvelous idea to print our way to riches and climate stability via unchecked anthropogenic greenback emissions. The only drawback is that when we’re all rich enough to burn $100 bills then it’s quite likely we will have need to do so for warmth. This rather offsets the initial carbon sequestration process, but I’m sure it’ll work itself out in time.
If it were not for the sun being in a funk, we would hockey stick over heated by now. 😉
Greenland was green at one time, back when man was overburning the trees of Europe. The trees were all burned up and the mini ice age snowed Greenland back over. Now Coal and Oil are melting Greenland once again. It’s okay though, the USA is going to ban coal and price oil so high it will only be used by China. 🙂
If you study that graph, it has a flaw in it. The temp. never really dropped after 2010, it’s still going up. Bush had the grap fixed and it’s controlled by big oil. 😉
We are at .8 up, not .34? What is Spencer thinking….oh my, we are all going to die of heat exhaustion caused by big oil and coal. Tune in tonight for 4 more years of windmills and solar panels. I use to sell A123 battery cells, but wanted to quit supporting the Governement. Woops, did I say that?, I meant, I did not build that or something like that.
For Chr*st’s sake, how about some error analysis? What’s the standard deviation in these measurements? How accurately are we really able to measure “global” temperatures. Now, given that, can we really say anything?
Andrew W. – There is no satellite data before 1979.
And Sorry guys. It does need the disclaimer. As someone pointed out, this polynomial would imply that it was warmer before 1979 when in fact it was cooler.
I believe he is using the polynomial in a somewhat serious, somewhat humorous way which would explain why he used the line he did about it being for entertainment only. The serious part of it is he does think that it could have an underlying natural cycle due to natural variability due to something like ocean currents. As a scientist you don’t want to fit data to just any old equation. For it to make sense it needs to have some physical basis. An engineer may need to fit a curve exactly to get the best fit for safety or other reasons but there won’t necessarily be a physical meaning for all of the constants. You can always get a better fit with more parameters but this does not lead to insight or understanding. You want to fit something with the least number of parameters when you want to understand the system.
Bill says:
September 6, 2012 at 7:27 pm
Andrew W. – There is no satellite data before 1979.
I know Bill, that’s why I said “when other longer term data does not support that fit”.
Tim Neilson says:
September 6, 2012 at 4:41 pm
Werner Brozek says:
September 6, 2012 at 1:53 pm
Thanks Werner, I find these lists very informative.
Thank you! I realize these lists are not everyone’s cup of tea, but I find them interesting. By the way, I got most of the rankings from Lubos Motl’s site so I owe him thanks for that. In case you are interested in the rankings for the last 30 years on many of these sets, go to http://motls.blogspot.ca/ and type in RSS in the search line for example.
And your point is?
0.06C is well inside the error bands of measurement and due to averaging so not significant.
RACookPE1978: Spencer’s base line includes temperatures up to Dec 2010. That’s why his chart only shows 0.34 when other charts show more like 0.8C
I’ve been running a model of UAH temperatures based on the ENSO, AMO, Solar cycle TSI, Volcanic forcing and a left-over warming trend correlated with the Ln(CO2).
Its matching pretty well right now.
http://s16.postimage.org/bgwxdm20l/UAH_Model_Aug_2012.png
It also leaves a global warming signal which is much lower than the basic numbers – only 0.04C per decade (which is the same trendline going back to 1870 using Hadcrut3 with the same approach).
http://s14.postimage.org/q6etngovl/UAH_Model_Warming_Aug_2012.png
Bill says:
And Sorry guys. It does need the disclaimer. As someone pointed out, this polynomial would imply that it was warmer before 1979 when in fact it was cooler.
No, that polynomial does not imply that it was warmer before 1979.
Fitted trend lines are not inherently predictive. All polynomial (including linear) trend lines head to infinite magnitude in both directions. For the vast majority of graphs presenting trend lines, that condition is not merely not implied, it is physically impossible. Yet none of those graphs contains a disclaimer. What about Roy Spencer requires that he use disclaimers where no one else is required to?
Just eyeballing that chart, it certainly looks like something close to a steady state, oscillating around El Nino/La Nina, since 2001.
Bill , I’d be very interested in seeing what you’ve done but even with constrast and brilliance wound up to 100% it’s damn near illegible.
How about a more conventional , white background?
It may also be interesting to run your model using the SST data before Hadley do all their bucket adjustments and regridding. That all makes significant changes to long term variations.
http://judithcurry.com/2012/03/15/on-the-adjustments-to-the-hadsst3-data-set-2/
It would be worth seeing whether that affects the numbers that come out of your model in a significant way. There’s a link to the data at the bottom of that article.
Re: polynomial fit and reference points for anomalies\
The purpose of any curve or line is to indicate trends. We’re way beyond entertainment in the debate. And the non-CO2 proposed factors are cyclic. So a curvilinear representation of the fundamentals of temperature variation vis-a-vis global warming is appropriate. It is true, however, that mathematical analysis cannot find a pattern if the data in which the pattern is present is less than a couple of cycles. Which is what the 1979-2012 data is, about 1 1/2 cycles. In these cases it is better to add templating or PROXY (!) non satellite data to the beginning and get a good running start.
The edges of graphs are like maps, not valid due to no other side of end-of-data trends. So we have to clip ’em back beginning and ends. However, mere academic perfection is not the point in the debate, but to show what is going on. Horrors of horrors! some subjective, human-mind injection of information and imagination is appropriate.
So I say the polynomial is “in”, but pre-’79 trend analysis should be injected in to get the beginning appropriate.
As to the use of 1980 – 2010 average for the baseline: yes, mathematically this is correct. But what we are involved in is a dispute with the warmists, whose basic claim is that post about 1975, temperatures globally started to rise due to GHG man put in the atmosphere. All their gnashing of teeth is about the change since that start. So when we reboot to the 1980 – 2010 comparison time period, we are producing an orange to their apple. Which means they can argue that we are being disingenuous.
We should use the same reference period and value as the warmists. We feel that the instrument errors, UHIE and inappropriate adjustment procedures have given then the 0.65 to 0.80 C rise, and that corrections would bring this down. But we are not saying that the change they are talking about is 0.34C, because they are using a different reference point.
We must be consistent in order to argue and convince. The UAH satellite data looks to me to say that since the mid 70’s, there has been about a 0.54C global temperature rise, compared to the Hansen report that says there is a 0.65 or 0.80 C rise. But I’m guesstimating here.
Doug Proctor:
In your post at September 7, 2012 at 12:06 pm you say
“some subjective, human-mind injection of information and imagination is appropriate”? Really?
Have you greased this slope or do you think it is already sufficiently slippery? Just asking.
Richard
To Greg House, September 6, 2012 at 10:52 am:
I suggest you take a look at http://www.drroyspencer.com/latest-global-temperatures/ for an explanation of the source of the global temperatures.
Downdraft says:
September 7, 2012 at 3:21 pm:
To Greg House, September 6, 2012 at 10:52 am:
“I suggest you take a look at http://www.drroyspencer.com/latest-global-temperatures/ for an explanation of the source of the global temperatures.”
=================================================
Thank you, but your link does not answer the questions I asked in my previous comment on this thread (September 6, 2012 at 10:52 am).
Except for the slight kick in the butt after the 1998 Super El Nino (i.e., what is seen from 2003 to 2008) there really hasn’t been much of a change in temperature since 1987.
Bill Illis
I always appreciate your comments.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/09/06/uah-global-temperature-up-06c-not-much-change/#comment-1073119
Maybe you could give much more detail on what your doing and why (i.e., explained in a way so that even a 5th grader could understand) and submit it to Anthony as a guest post?
Amino Acids in Meteorites says:
September 7, 2012 at 7:59 pm
>>
Except for the slight kick in the butt after the 1998 Super El Nino (i.e., what is seen from 2003 to 2008) there really hasn’t been much of a change in temperature since 1987.
>>
Maybe you missed my plot of rate of change higher up:
http://i46.tinypic.com/2wocgw2.png
There was a change equivalent to about 4 or 5 K/century for much of the 1990s. The rather spurious assumption that that would continue unabated for the next 100 years is what all the fuss has been about.