Big drop in global surface temperature in February, ocean temps flat

This is encouraging. The alarmists have ramped up their hysteria lately and even the most devout skeptics must be feeling a trifle challenged. These UAH and SST anomalies show that we’re not such damfools after all.
We’re not skeptics because we want to be difficult, we’re skeptics because we don’t believe in pink unicorns, alien abductions and climate models.

Mr Abbott,
Has the lower troposphere warmed in the last 16 years?
That too is instructive.

Here are some trend figures for different time periods, for the current UAH LT data. Not much to write home about warming-wise, until you go back 20 years. The 20-year starting point was during the Pinatubo cooling. Expect the 20-year figure to fall over the next couple of years as the Pinatubo effect (1992-94) drops out of the 20-year window.
Degrees C per decade:
20-year 0.149
18-year 0.094
17-year 0.089
16-year 0.057
15-year 0.016
14-year 0.111
13-year 0.069
12-year -0.004
11-year -0.034
10-year -0.009

GlynnMhor says:
March 4, 2013 at 3:39 pm

It would appear that January was a bit of an anomaly then… an outlier as it were.

Strange–the region where I live saw record-setting low temperatures for the month of January. Apparently they’re throwing those away as outliers. And February was warmer than normal–those they probably kept. Obviously where I live is out-of-kilter with the rest of the world.

There was a lot of unusual up and down cycles in the last 3 months, (well, not unusual but they lasted just long enough to affect the monthly average numbers in unusual ways).
We are in a general slight cooling trend right now as we transition from the impacts of a small El Nino last summer and fall to a small La Nina right now with the overall ocean cooling slightly.

@ Abbott……
Your Australian example is junk science/propaganda…the Australian Trick?
According to JoNova,
“the brutally simple average of all the temperatures recorded at 721 weather stations on Jan 7th was 35.1C, not 40.3C. The extra 5 degrees is produced by a form of area weighting to average the thermometers over the entire nation.”….”the average of the hottest 339 stations is 40.3C.”
Apparently the data and methods used by the Australian Bureau are new for this year and not available for inspection. And surprise, we get a bunch of new records this year…..sarc/.
http://joannenova.com.au/

The ocean temperature is as flat as the Earth the warmists live on.

Something to remember, although it might be fun to jam the current low month temperature in the maw of warmists, its meaningless to the question of whether the planet is still warming. The only way to confirm that is to run a linear regression. I find that most posts like this are just as interesting as the data personally. Up or down, its just a fun little data gathering exercise and to think it means anything beyond that and perhaps just irritating “believers in the end of the world via global warming” there is no other point to it.
Of course Abbot is a fool for trying to claim that a record high (for the month, year, decade or whatever) in Australia means anything at all because frankly to even interject something that stupid in a discussion of measurements shows that SOMEONE has zero understanding of statistics and is either ignorant, or is purposely trying to mislead people into actually believing that the world is still warming when Dr. Jones told us otherwise.
In statistics speak, stating that the record high temperature was reached is as interesting as saying that bears #*$& in the woods. Well no duh. But its not interesting at all to the discussion on say Feb. 2013 anomolies and as such Abbot betrays his ignorance at statistics simply by posting here and stating that.
Whether the planet is currently warming or not can only be solved through linear regression on QUALITY DATA. We can argue for instance on whether 15 years is long enough or too long, or perhaps on whether the data is worth anything……. Otherwise, our planet stopped warming 15 years ago and it just freaks people out to no end to hear that they were wrong all along. How else can you explain so many trolls thinking they know more then the actual facts? How else can you explain such a lack of understanding at statistics? Must be some sort of religious belief that people believe CO2 changes the weather and/or climate depending on whether we had a bad weather experience or not recently. Otherwise, remember folks, weather is not climate.

If they would just stop building the windmills, my anger might lessen.
Until then, I view it as bureaucracy out of control.
My rants emanate from this simple ideal.

They are all anomalies 🙂

maybe these “entities” in Calif are getting a clue:
California cancels CO2 permit sale amid no demand
SAN FRANCISCO, March 4 (Reuters Point Carbon) – The California Air Resources Board (ARB) on Friday said that since no covered entities have signaled their intent to purchase high-priced allowances from the state’s reserve, the March 8 sale has been cancelled…
http://www.pointcarbon.com/news/1.2206612?&ref=searchlist

“It would appear that January was a bit of an anomaly then… an outlier as it were.”
Not so if you factor in the long-term trend. There are plenty of excursions from the trend line of similar magnitude (both warm and cool)
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/uah/plot/uah/from:1979/to:2013/trend
The largest outliers on record occurred in 1998, whether or not the trend is factored. And yet 1998 (or 1997) is often used as a start date for temp trends. I wonder why that is.

“And yet 1998 (or 1997) is often used as a start date for temp trends. I wonder why that is.”
That was an extremely strong El Nino period. However, it was followed, almost immediately, by a 2 year period of La Nina. The La Nina wasn’t as strong as the El Nino, but because it was more than twice as long, it’s effect on the trend was almost equal to the El Nino. Take a look at this table.
http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/analysis_monitoring/ensostuff/ensoyears.shtml
So basically, the effects on the trend of the first El Nino plus the first La Nina period is virtually nil. This basically means that the argument that people pick 97/98 as a starting point may have merit in terms of the motivation, but it has no merit in terms of the effect on the trend. In other words, selecting Jan 98 as your starting point gives a true picture of the trend from that time to the present. This has also been confirmed by people who have ENSO filtered the data before calculating the trend line. The ENSO filtered line has a virtually identical slope to a non ENSO filtered data set.
Bottom line is that there has been no real warming for 15 years.

oldfossil says: “This is encouraging. The alarmists have ramped up their hysteria lately”
But it is no longer aimed at us but a last desperate attempt to persuade the lukewarmers who are ignoring them in their droves.

I always thought that degrees Celsius are anomalies with respect to zero Celsius and degrees Fahrenheit anomalies with respect to zero Fahrenheit. Any base line is as good as the base lines from these two gentlemen. For what reason do weather men talk about anomalies and the rest of the world about deviation scores? Do I miss a very profound and interesting story?

D.B. Stealey says:
March 4, 2013 at 4:18 pm
bw, Here is a chart showing a normal y-axis. Not so scary, eh?
Why don’t you use the Kelvin scale. That would make it look even less scary. Mind even a 5 deg departure on the Kelvin scale wouldn’t look too alarming but, as we all know, a 5 deg drop in global average temperatures is enough to cause mile high ice sheets to form across much of the UK.

James Abbott posted: “The report said there have only been 21 days in 102 years where the average maximum temperature for the whole of Australia has exceeded 39 Celsius …”
RichardD posted: “the brutally simple average of all the temperatures recorded at 721 weather stations on Jan 7th …
SamC would like to know: How many certified weather stations were there in Australia in 1911 and exactly who was calculating the “1911 daily average maximum temperatures for the whole of Australia”?
Or in 1912, … or 1913, …. or 1914, …. etc.
Using a few dozen highly questionable “daily temperature records” from the early part of the 20th Century, …. that were obtained via use of simple, un-calibrated thermometers at randomly selected “locations”, ….. then extrapolating said data to obtain a “daily average maximum temperatures for the whole of Australia” ….. and then comparing those “fuzzy” results to the calculated results from the less questionable seven hundred twenty one (721) 21st Century weather stations ……. is both silly and asinine.

Without responding to all the replies to my posting individually, just as a gentle reminder I said
“BTW the debate on whether the US has had its hottest month/year
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/03/03/a-note-about-temperatures/
can now turn to Australia:”
ie all I said was – have a look at this.
But it had the effect in starting a debate and as would be expected, the main aim from skeptics is to shoot down any data or report which does not fit with their mind set.
The January satellite anomaly gets branded an “outlier” whilst the February figure is “encouraging” and a “big drop in temperature”.
If I had posted a report saying that a given continent had had its coolest summer on record, I have no doubt at all that most skeptics would, without questioning the data, have lapped it up.
The point is that the debate between convinced skeptics and convinced warmists is all about selecting data to suit – which is about as scientific as choosing which doughnuts you like.

There’s quite a bit about Flannery on this thread. Well here is Dr. Tim Flannery in a 2007 interview.

Andi Hazelwood: Should Australia be preparing for permanent drought conditions?
Dr. Tim Flannery: Well, it’s the new climate. We will have to get by with less water. The CSIRO’s telling us that. We’re seeing it now, in the evidence before our eyes in our rivers and creeks, and of course the computer models in the global models have been predicting just this now for some years. I think all evidence says that this is our new climate and we have to get by with less water than we’ve ever had before.
http://old.globalpublicmedia.com/transcripts/2833

Let’s see how this prediction turned out eh.
Jan 2008
Australian Floodwaters Threaten Previously Drought-Struck Towns
Feb 2009
Crocodile risk in Australia flood
Dec 2010
ACT dams full to overflowing
Jan 2011
Unprecedented, "Biblical" Floods Inundate Australia
Feb 2012
Floods create ‘inland sea’ in Australia
Apr 2012
It’s official: Australia no longer in drought
Feb 2013
Warragamba Dam overflows
Mar 2013
Australia invests $100 million in flood mitigation infrastructure
Where are all those mothballed desalination plants when you need them? During the next natural cycle I will ask where are all those flood mitigation structures? What these fools don’t understand is that Australia has always been a land of extremes.

Walter Dnes says:
March 5, 2013 at 1:56 am
Anyhow, the value I get is -0.000251 per year Apr 1997 to Jan 2013.
Thank you very much! Can you also give me the slope for March, 1997 to January 2013? Thanks!

Walter Dnes says:
March 5, 2013 at 1:22 pm
Can I contact you offline to discuss this further?
Sure! Just let the moderator know he has my permission to give you my email address.
Speaking of GISS, in January they made a whole bunch of changes including making the warmest month, January 2007, warmer from 0.89 to 0.93. You can still see the 0.89 on WFT.

Jimbo says:
March 5, 2013 at 7:57 am
It’s not the trend that’s the problem, it’s the lack of statistically significant warming in 15+ years. The reason why these years are important is because of what it tells us about the predictive skil or lack thereof of the models. See below:
Just playing devil’s advocate here but I’m not sure your assumptions are correct. If you want to invalidate the models you need to show that observations are significantly different to the model projections. As far as I can tell – they aren’t.
You cite this NOAA statement as justification for your assertion

“The simulations rule out (at the 95% level) zero trends for intervals of 15 yr or more, suggesting that an observed absence of warming of this duration is needed to create a discrepancy with the expected present-day warming rate.”
http://www1.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/cmb/bams-sotc/climate-assessment-2008-lo-rez.pdf

Note that they refer to “ zero trends for intervals of 15 yr or more”. But there hasn’t been a ZERO trend for this length of period. There have been non-significant warming trends but that is not the same thing.
The error bars on the model projections probably do rule out the zero trend for intervals of more than 15 years but they probably do still include the observed warming (albeit non-significant) trend.
What this all means is that invalidating the models will take several more years (unless there is rapid cooling). The best you can hope for is to show that the probability that the models are simulating reality (i.e. the observations) is small (e.g. less than 10%). Unfortunately the same logic leads to the conclusion that there is only a small probability that warming has really stopped.

Tilo @ here

That was an extremely strong El Nino period. However, it was followed, almost immediately, by a 2 year period of La Nina. The La Nina wasn’t as strong as the El Nino, but because it was more than twice as long, it’s effect on the trend was almost equal to the El Nino.

If ENSO alone was responsible for global temperatures, we would expect to have seen a clear decline in temperatures since 1997 (which includes all of the le Nino period). I calculated the lnear regression for the ENSO SST anomalies you linked to, from 1997 to December 2012.
The trend is -0.12C/decade.
For 1998 to December 2012;
The trend is 0.1C/decade.
That’s a pretty sizable difference for one year.
Doing things crudely, we could subtract the ENSO trend and a get a rough idea of what the surface temp record is for each period, if ENSO was factored out. Here are the trends with no ENSO adjustment.
1997 – 2012
GISS: 0.09C/decade
Had4: 0.04C/decade
RSS: -0.001C/decade
UAH: 0.09C/decade
Subtract the 97 – 12 ENSO trend and you get
GISS: 0.21C/decade
Had4: 0.16C/decade
RSS: 0.12C/decade
UAH: 0.21C/decade
For that period, accounting for the ENSO trend makes a significant difference. There has been much talk about the 97 trend, and this resukt might recommend some circumspection on straight global temp trends without factoring for internal variability.
But the 98 to 12 period is positive for ENSO (0.08C/decade). factoring ENSO, the results look like this:
1998 – 2012
GISS: -0.01C/decade
Had4: -0.05C/decade
RSS: -0.12C/decade
UAH: -0.03C/decade
(we haven’t factored solar, which would skew temps downwards for the period, as there is a peak in 2000, and very low activity in recent times, which has been covered at WUWT – http://sidc.oma.be/html/wolfmms.html)
While I am surprised by the ENSO trend since 98, what the difference with the 1997 trend tells me is that the period is too short for ENSO influences to be evened out.
Also to consider, there is a lag of several months between ENSO peaks and surface/tropospheric temps (also well-covered here). I ran a regression starting from the last 3 months of 97, to the 9th month of 2012 (to avoid any annual signal). the result was -0.08C/decade., which would more properly be consonant with global temperatures. This would make the 98 – 12 trends:
GISS: 0.15C/decade
Had4: 0.11C/decade
RSS: 0.04C/decade
UAH: 0.13C/decade.
In this crude analysis, those last are what I would call the real global temp trends after factoring out ENSO for the period 1998 to 2012. They’d be slightly higher if solar was factored (and the solar/temp lag also accounted for). Finally, the satellite data show higher peaks for ENSO events than the surface records, but this is too difficult for me factor.
The temp difference if I take of one year and only go up to 2011 (accounting for lag) would produce no significantly different result from the temp trends as they stand with no ENSO adjustment. One year less makes a trend difference for ENSO of 0.02C/decade (warmer). This is a trend difference of 0.1C (ENSO data) just from dropping a year. That’s significant, and reinforces the error of looking at a time period this short, or thinking that one year could not make much of a difference.

James Abbot replied: and as would be expected, the main aim from skeptics is to shoot down any data or report which does not fit with their mind set.
James Abbot, it is a perfectly normal, logical, reasonable, intelligent mindset that “shoots down” the “junk science” silliness of anyone claiming an associations, correlations and/or comparison between the extrapolated “average surface temperature” derived from the pre-1960 temperature Records ……. and the post-1960 calculated “surface temperature averages”
No one really cared about “average surface temperatures” until Charles Keeling started getting correct atmospheric CO2 ppm “counts” in 1958. And it was only after 1958 that the interested Climate Scientists had to “back-pedal” into those old Temperature Records and extrapolate out some reasonable sounding “temperature averages” to support their junk science “CO2 causing AGW” claims.
And PS, I am not a “skeptic” of CO2 causing AGW, ….. I am a “denier” of it, …. simply because it is not based in/on actual, factual science & mathematics, logical reasoning and/or intelligent deductions.

oldfossil says:
March 7, 2013 at 2:47 am
“The skeptic community can only stand to gain in credibility if we challenge assertions coming from all sides. For example, look at the second chart presented by Dr. Roy Spencer above. It shows the Global SST anomaly, relative to the average for 2003-2006.”
In reference to the content/context of the above comment, and not to the author of the comment, ….. it is my opinion, that any tit-for-tat challenging, arguments or discussions between AGW proponents and their skeptics that is related to or associated with the above cited chart by Spencer is, …. in actuality, …. much ado about nothing. Absolutely nothing of any value to anyone other than maybe a “feel good feeling” about their own importance.
Thus said, I would think that anyone in their right mind would be asking …. “Who the ell cares what those Global Average SST anomalies currently are or have been over the past 11 years”?
And if you don’t agree with my above assessment then, ….. while looking at the above cited graph of global average sea surface temperatures (SST) from July 2002 to Feb. 2013, …. pretend or imagine that it is now say Jan 2005 …. and then ask yourself just what challenges or arguments the above “comments thread” would contain?
Then do the same thing again for Jan 2008. Then again for Feb 2010. And again for Dec 2012.
And when you are all done, include the above Feb 2013 “comments thread” and then tell me, …. just what the ell has been accomplished, proven, disproved, justified, resolved, settled and/or factually confirmed ….. that is related to the “cause & effect” claims of CO2 causing Anthropogenic Global Warming climate change.
You might as well create a similar graph for the “passing yards gained” by one of the NFL Teams, …. between Jan 2002 and Jan 2013, …… and then get in a “heated” argument about how those past PYG “averages” are going to directly affect and/or determine the number of “passing yards gained” during their 2013 Fall Football Season.