February 1998 Global Temperatures Reach Unprecedented Levels

Guest Post

The satellite-measured temperature of the lower troposphere—the layer of Earth’s atmosphere that’s closest to the surface—has risen about 0.75 deg C (more than 1.3 deg F) in less than a year in 1997 and 1998, astounding climate scientists from around the world and confirming that man-made greenhouse gases are causing catastrophic global warming.

“At that rate”, a poultry scientist said, “in just a few years, eggs will cook inside the chickens.”

A paleoclimatologist who plays hockey in his spare time told this reporter, “Tree rings are growing at an unprecedented rate.  Bad for trees, good for hockey sticks.”

I received a Western Union telegram from the director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies.  It read:

February 1998 temperature updates from NASA, NOAA, and UKMO.  WOW!!!  Never Before Seen.  Unprecedented in Thousands of Years.

In response to reports of rising sea levels and marine species migrating to land to avoid boiling their brains in the overheated oceans, a representative of the bankrupt fishing industry reports, “People don’t need fishermen anymore, they just go into their backyards and pick up a flounder or two from their gardens.”

“Over the past year or so, global warming has accelerated to never-before-seen rates,” says a lead author of the reports from United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.  “Our climate models told us that we’d soon reach a tipping point. I believe we’ve reached it.”

An “independent researcher”, who requested anonymity, has a different perspective.  As he wrote in a fax:

The recent spike in global surface and lower troposphere temperatures is nothing to be concerned about.  It is how the Earth responds to an El Niño event.

An El Niño is a periodic warming of the surfaces of eastern tropical Pacific.  Changes in weather cause warm subsurface waters in the western tropical Pacific, created by the tropical sun, to rush eastward and rise to the surface of the eastern Pacific along the equator. All of that warm water rising to the surface causes surfaces of the tropical Pacific to warm. Outside of the tropical Pacific, global surfaces warm due to changes in atmospheric circulation caused by the El Niño.

Soon, global surface temperatures will decline as the tropical Pacific goes from El Niño (warm phase) to La Niña (cool phase).  But surface temperatures never return to the earlier values because, after the El Niño, all of the leftover warm water from the El Niño is simply spread around the ocean surfaces.  In effect, an El Niño causes an upward jump in global surface temperatures.  That’s one of the ways Mother Nature has devised to warm the surface of our planet.

That’s far too complex for this reporter to grasp, so I’ll continue to believe man-made greenhouse gases caused the recent spike in global temperatures.