New study sheds light on global warming trends
TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — New research by a team of Florida State University scientists shows the first detailed look at global land surface warming trends over the last 100 years, illustrating precisely when and where different areas of the world started to warm up or cool down.
The research indicates that the world is indeed getting warmer, but historical records show that it hasn’t happened everywhere at the same rate.
And that new information even took scientists by surprise.
“Global warming was not as understood as we thought,” said Zhaohua Wu, an assistant professor of meteorology at FSU.
Wu led a team of climate researchers including Fei Ji, a visiting doctoral student at FSU’s Center for Ocean-Atmospheric Prediction Studies (COAPS); Eric Chassignet, director of COAPS; and Jianping Huang, dean of the College of Atmospheric Sciences at Lanzhou University in China. The group, using an analysis method newly developed by Wu and his colleagues, examined land surface temperature trends from 1900 onward for the entire globe, minus Antarctica.
Previous work by scientists on global warming could not provide information of non-uniform warming in space and time due to limitations of previous analysis methods in climate research.
The research team found that noticeable warming first started around the regions circling the Arctic and subtropical regions in both hemispheres. But the largest accumulated warming to date is actually at the northern midlatitudes. They also found that in some areas of the world, cooling had actually occurred.
“The global warming is not uniform,” Chassignet said. “You have areas that have cooled and areas that have warmed.”
For example, from about 1910 to 1980, while the rest of the world was warming up, some areas south of the equator — near the Andes — were actually cooling down, and then had no change at all until the mid 1990s. Other areas near and south of the equator didn’t see significant changes comparable to the rest of the world at all.
The team’s work is featured in the May 4 edition of the journal Nature Climate Change.
The detailed picture of when and where the world has warmed or cooled will provide a greater context to global warming research overall, Wu said.
The paper: Fei Ji, Zhaohua Wu, Jianping Huang, Eric P. Chassignet. Evolution of land surface air temperature trend. Nature Climate Change, 2014; DOI: 10.1038/nclimate2223
Evolution of land surface air temperature trend
Fei Ji, Zhaohua Wu, Jianping Huang & Eric P. Chassignet
Abstract:
The global climate has been experiencing significant warming at an unprecedented pace in the past century1, 2. This warming is spatially and temporally non-uniform, and one needs to understand its evolution to better evaluate its potential societal and economic impact. Here, the evolution of global land surface air temperature trend in the past century is diagnosed using the spatial–temporally multidimensional ensemble empirical mode decomposition method3. We find that the noticeable warming (>0.5 K) started sporadically over the global land and accelerated until around 1980. Both the warming rate and spatial structure have changed little since. The fastest warming in recent decades (>0.4 K per decade) occurred in northern mid-latitudes. From a zonal average perspective, noticeable warming (>0.2 K since 1900) first took place in the subtropical and subpolar regions of the Northern Hemisphere, followed by subtropical warming in the Southern Hemisphere. The two bands of warming in the Northern Hemisphere expanded from 1950 to 1985 and merged to cover the entire Northern Hemisphere.
“REPLY: HUH? HUH? Another crypto comment from drive-by-Mosher with no context. For somebody who constantly bitches about showing your work, code, data, etc. you sure do leave lots of incomplete commentary that leave people scratching their heads.. Live up to your own expectations please by at least giving the SLIGHTEST hint of what you are talking about. -Anthony”
HUH?
you have an article claiming this wonderful new fact. the warming is not spatially or temporally uniform.
As I wrote, we’ve been saying this for some time.
context is simple: headline says: “warming is not spatially and temporally uniform”
I’ve said that dozens of time here. Our results show that. Its weird that they think this is a new result.
Other folks on this thread point out the very same thing. not rocket science to figure out what I mean.
I expect people to be able to add 2 and 2 and not come up with a fractional answer.
All the data is where it has always been
All the code is where it has always been
folks can sign in to our SVN updated nightly and watch.
that allows me to see who actually checks sources and who just blathers. wink.
here is a sample.
http://berkeleyearth.org/graphics/physical-effects-of-warming
@Steven Mosher – your problem is that you are not the funnel for all information from alarmist. You are but one warmist with common sense. But those around you lack that trait. You may have been saying it for a long time, and most here can add 2 and 2 and get a whole number. But that does not seem to be true of the alarmist camp.
Anthony reported on the research. He did not create it. And his reaction of incredulity is matched by many of us as well.
Perhaps your scorn and shock should be directed at those who wasted their time telling us the blatantly obvious.
I thought the science was all settled. Why are these people claiming it is all a surprise to them.
I bet they’ll find out soon, that it doesn’t rain everywhere at the same time either.
You are new here?
12,900 results from Google’s site search.
site:http://wattsupwiththat.com paper Nature
Here is one. There are many, many, many others.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/09/25/new-paper-in-nature-on-ocean-cycles-finally-causes-recognition-in-media/
Come on now Anthony; fess up.
This stuff this morning, is just the start of Dr. Roy Spencer’s Top Ten dumbase catastrophic globular climate change list; right have I pegged it ?? Have I ??
Re; Peter Burmer May 5, 12:41 am;
You are either being sarcastic or do not read this site on a regular basis.
I bet if we took a poll 90% of the regular readers of this site believe there has been substantial warming, both in the first AND second half of the 20th century, as shown in the several and various data sets.
That is probably as good or better than you’d get by polling the alarmists.
Maybe you should stick around and read what is actually discussed here, rather than assume guys like Gavin Schmidt and Dana Nucitelli are giving you an accurate account.
Theo Goodwin:
re your comment at May 5, 2014 at 9:23 am.
You seem to have been misinformed. I have no problem of stroke; my struggle is with failures of my heart, lungs and liver.
Richard
I let Phil speak for me http://troglopundit.files.wordpress.com/2014/02/automotiv_groundhog.jpg
“The global warming is not uniform,” Chassignet said. “You have areas that have cooled and areas that have warmed.”
THEN IT’S NOT GLOBAL, DIPSHIT.
richardscourtney says:
May 5, 2014 at 12:51 pm
Richard, I regret causing you puzzlement. What I meant is that you might cause one or more Alarmists to have a stroke. They never see the full consequences of their positions. You are in my prayers with special emphasis on heart, lungs, and liver.
Gee… seems to me I did a whole series on where things were warming, and not. And how some seasons warmed while other cooled in the same place. And how it especially warmed where there were lots of airports. And that it especially warmed in places that speak English and were well connected with each other and the UEA. And then there was that one where I found that the warming showed up in a nice rotational pattern around Africa, just as the methods changed country by country…
Maybe I ought to have attributed it to CO2 and been published in Nature…
https://chiefio.wordpress.com/category/dtdt/
https://chiefio.wordpress.com/2010/04/11/the-world-in-dtdt-graphs-of-temperature-anomalies/
And one of my favorites:
https://chiefio.wordpress.com/2010/04/01/global-warming-from-africa-contagious-spreading-at-100-miles-per-year/
Yes, you can actually find the “global warming” spreading from country to country and map the speed….
So, the paper leaves out Antarctica, eh?
Yes, it leaves out the continent which has been experiencing overall
cooling for some decades, except for the Antarctic peninsula. Very
convenient, that, for purposes of demonstrating that there has been
a global warning.
It couldn’t be deliberate that they left out Antarctica, could it? /sarc
This reminds me of the Indycar Fanboys Club who try to predict the outcome of future Indy 500 races by studying plastic models of racing cars and reading statistics about past races in print magazines. They are shocked – SHOCKED to discover that in reality the real cars travel at different velocities at different places on the track. Wait till they discover the pit stops…
/sarc?
I have used the HadCRUT global gridded temperature data to calculate trends and means for the grid cells. I did this for whatever periods I chose (eg. 1900-2013). I always found that some areas warmed more than others and some areas cooled. I did not think this was startling. Who knew…maybe I could have gotten a research grant and a paper for doing this.
So…the warming is lumpy. I’m sure the AGW “true believers” will come up with an explanation. How’s this one:
“It proves the warming is man-made because natural warming would not be lumpy”.
“But the largest accumulated warming to date is actually at the northern midlatitudes.”
—
Doesn’t this contradict other studies, such as the one by Cowtan and Way, which claim that the Arctic is warming at about eight times the pace of the rest of the planet? So who has it right, is it the midlatitudes or the Arctic that has warmed the most? Or do such contradictions even matter to them as long as an alarmist message makes the headlines?
“Global warming was not as understood as we thought.”
—
Here’s my takeaway from this study: The science isn’t settled, and global warming isn’t global.
No regional cooling seen at any latitude at anytime between 1940-1970.
http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/vaop/ncurrent/fig_tab/nclimate2223_F3.html
Hmm…
Where’s Ferdinand he is usually here to say the ice core data proves that everyone on this site is wrong and we don’t understand the data or the meaning of this process.
Don’t you all get it co2 rise and everything warms that’s it nothing else could happen no evidence matters be cause you wouldn’t understand anyway.
Actually, we should be thankful that US taxpayers are paying “scientists” to find out that the weather is different at different places. We should rejoice at being able to keep them suitably occupied, for such a cheap price.
Contrast this dogboonle bargain, with that other exercise in self flagellation called ITER.
Dunno what ITER is ?? You should find out; it’s currently estimated to cost you $6.5B, which currently is only $2.6B overrun from what DOE guessed.
The news article in Physics Today for Feb 2014 consumes two full pages, talking about all the minutiae of what it’s going to cost, and all those concerns.
Nowhere do they talk about what it is. Well actually it is ITER, which tells you about the same as “it”.
But they are already pouring concrete for a big concrete slab to put IT on, a 1.5 meter thick concrete slab; probably based on the design for the German U-boat pens in France.
Well jolly good show ! IT is going to be built in France, too.
There’s a nice colored bar chart probably done in M$ Excel, that shows how all this cost overruns works.
But there is no drawing or other diagram of what IT is; or how IT works.
As far as I know; IT in fact does NOT work. Nobody has one in their garage. Only thing I know, is that it needs a Tritium Building. Everybody reading WUWT knows what a Tritium building is. It’s pretty much the same as the building where Wile E. Coyote keeps his Acme Dynamite stored.
Well maybe it’s the Road Runner’s dynamite.
I dunno where they keep all that Tritium at present, but they need a Tritium building for IT
IT of course is a Thermo-Nuclear fusion reactor, similar to the Pons and Fleischman cold gadget.
Does anyone remember when they first announced that they had figured out how to make one of those ; ITs that is.
Don’t expect to see an artists impression of what an IT looks like.
In the greatest Nancy Pelosi tradition, we will have to build IT, to find out what IT has in IT.
So rejoice in these minor climatism expenditures; They are a bargain compared to what IT is going to cost overrun.
But they should be able to keep all the physicists laid off from the Higgs Boson success, off the street, so they aren’t stealing hubcaps for amusement.
So get ready for IT; or at least for the bill.
S. Fred Singer (‘What’s up with the Weather – the Debate’) once commented on climate models: “and the global average temperature simply isn’t good enough. It has to be based on geographic variation, or variation with altitude, or temporal variation, or much more detailed measurements.”
Here’s one scientist who clearly got it right years ago.
David Rice says:
Uh, yeah they did. One of the ways that some “scientists” have attempted to … what was that quaint phraseology again … oh yeah … “…deal a mortal blow to the misuse of supposed warm period …” is to claim that the MWP was predominantly a northern hemisphere event. They have claimed that current warming is different because current warming is global.
But it isn’t. Seems it is predominantly northern hemisphere as well. Huh.
Don’t you understand the areas that are cooler are only cooler because global warming is happening. we never had cooling until we had warming.