Guest essay by Larry Hamlin
NOAA published its global climate report for year end 2021 highlighting that its global temperature anomaly measurements showed 2021 being the sixth highest of its recorded measurements. NOAA’s global annual measurement for 2021 was 0.84 degrees C.
NOAA chose to emphasize that the annual 2021 temperature anomaly was in the top ten of its recorded years as follows:
“The year culminated as the sixth warmest year on record for the globe with a temperature that was 0.84°C (1.51°F) above the 20th century average. The years 2013–2021 all rank among the ten warmest years on record.”
What NOAA failed to highlight was that the year-end 2021 global temperature anomaly measurement marked the continuing decline of its global temperature anomaly measurements that have now fallen for the last 6 years since peak year 2016 as shown in their graph below. These declining measurement outcomes make a complete mockery of recent climate alarmists scientifically unsupported politically contrived “climate emergency” propaganda claims.
The decline in NOAA’s global temperature anomaly measurements over the last 6 years since peak year 2016 is shown in more detail in the truncated NOAA graph below.
NOAA’s annual highest global temperature anomaly measurement is year-end 2016 which is now shown as 0.99 degrees C (second highest year is 2020 at 0.98 degrees C) compared to its year end 2021 annual anomaly measurement of 0.84 degrees C with a +/-0.15 degrees C confidence level. This year end 2021 global temperature anomaly measurement decline amounts to a 15% global temperature anomaly measurement collapse since peak year 2016.
Furthermore, the NOAA analysis clearly establishes that the monthly and annual global temperature anomaly measurement behaviors are strongly controlled by El Niño and La Nino events (red and blue highlighted portions of the NOAA graph respectively) which are naturally occurring climate phenomena and not driven by man made contributions to atmospheric CO2 levels.
NOAA has exaggerated the importance of both monthly and annual temperature anomaly changes with as small a difference as +0.01 degrees C as a basis for climbing “hottest temperature ever” hype as was done for the July 2021temperature anomaly data even though the confidence level for this measurement is +/-0.19 degrees C as discussed in WUWT articles here and here. Additionally, and more significantly no other global temperature anomaly measurement systems including NASA GISS, UK Met Office, UAH and RSS support NOAA’s “hottest temperature ever” hyped July claims.
NOAA’s July 2021 global temperature anomaly update release originally claimed July’s global temperature anomaly as 0.93 degrees C then changed that in the August temperature anomaly update release to 0.92 degrees C but by the November temperature anomaly update had changed the July temperature anomaly once again back to 0.93 degrees C.
NOAA makes extensive temperature anomaly measurement updates every month where large numbers of prior temperatures are changed again and again. For example, NOAA’s August 2021 temperature anomaly update compared to NOAA’s November 2021 temperature anomaly update shows that in the period between 1954 and 2021 over 250 monthly anomaly temperatures were increased always by +0.01 degrees C with about half of these upward adjustments made in the 1992 to 2021 period.
Thus, more than 1/3rd of the monthly temperature anomaly measurements between 1992 and 2021 were adjusted upward by 0.01 degrees C just between NOAA’s August and November temperature anomaly update releases. These large numbers of constantly on-going upward adjustments result in increasing changes in reported data values with for example the highest annual global temperature anomaly measurement as reported originally for year-end 2016 increasing from 0.94 degrees C to 0.99 degrees C in the year-end 2021 report.
Additionally, these NOAA updated temperature anomaly measurement adjustments between August and November 2021 for years prior to 1954 were also adjusted but in this case always downward by -0.01 degrees C for more than 100 of the prior to 1954 monthly data values.
The justification for NOAA’s never ending upward and downward large number of adjustments that always lower the long past historical data and always increases more recent historical data is extremely perplexing and clearly suggests concerns that these changes are driven by climate alarmist politics (especially by the Biden and other Democratic Party Administrations) versus credible science.
The global yearly annual temperature anomaly decline between year-end 2016 and year end 2021 has occurred despite continuing increases in global atmospheric CO2 levels as shown in the graph below showing CO2 atmospheric concentrations growing from 402 ppm to 417 ppm based on measurements from the Mauna Loa Observatory. Flawed and failed climate “models” would of course depict increasing global temperature anomaly outcomes from this data.
In addition to NOAA’s global temperature anomaly decline since year end 2016 all other global temperature anomaly measurement systems used by climate scientists worldwide all show declining global temperature anomaly measurements during the period from 2016 through 2021 as shown in the graphs below for surface global temperature anomaly measurement systems from NASA GISS and UK Met Office and for satellite global temperature anomaly measurement systems from UAH and RSS respectively.
Despite the usual climate alarmist grossly exaggerated hype by NOAA and NASA in their year 2021 annual reports trying to conceal the clearly obvious downward global temperature anomaly measurement trends while global atmospheric CO2 levels are continuing to climb the annual global temperature anomaly outcomes for year-end 2021 and the last six years do not support and in fact clearly dispute recent climate alarmist claims that we are in a “climate emergency” driven by man-made CO2 missions.
Actual global temperature anomaly measurements by NOAA, NASA, UK Met Office, UAH and RSS all show downward anomaly trends versus the upward climate “computer models” temperature anomaly trends with these speculative “model” trends unsupported by measured data. The failed debacle of the last COP26 climate alarmist confab seems clearly appropriate based upon these latest global temperature anomaly measurement results.
However, all these politically contrived climate alarmist driven COP cabals that commenced in the 1990s have a spectacular track record of failure as noted above.
Didn’t Phil Jones say it would take 7 years of data to convince him that temperatures were not increasing?
(I tried a quick search for that quote and was unsurprised to see that most of the articles that popped up were written by Skeptical Science.)
Stop using Google for climate searches. They bury non agenda items.
Duckduckgo quick search returns as 4th item:
Dr. Phil Jones – CRU emails – 5th July, 2005 “The scientific community would come down on me in no uncertain terms if I said the world had cooled from 1998. OK it has but it is only 7 years of data and it isn’t statistically significant….”Dr. Phil Jones – CRU emails – 7th May, 2009‘ Bottom line: the ‘no upward trend’ has to continue for a total of 15 years before we get worried.’
Thanks, Doonman.
I guess Phil Jones was feeling pressure from his fellow alarmists to maintain the climate change fiction.
Phil Jones and Michael Mann are the biggest climate change liars in history. Their bogus temperature records are the only thing in existence showing unprecedented warming today.
The actual temperature readings, before they are mannipulated by dishonest people, show that the present day is no warmer than in the recent past.
Jones and Mann had to change this perception in order to successfully promote Human-caused Climate Change, so they went to their computers and cooled the past which made the present look a lot warmer than it really is.
I think both of these men should be in jail for scientific fraud.
One of their apologists wandered by and gave you a downvote for highlighting the truth. Fixed.
Phil Jones admitted that there had been no statistically relevant warming for 30 years at one point
You cant knockba nail in a knot – too thick
Lets hope the Tonga volcano has reminded the green blob that nature does her thing, regardless of humans!
Larry,
A lot variation is expected in the global average air temperature due to the relatively low thermal inertia and high heat flux. The atmosphere’s thermal inertia is 1/1000th that of the ocean and continuously receives exchanges of heat from the cryosphere, land, ocean, and its own internal exchange between layers. CO2 is only one among many agents that modulate the energy fluxes into and out of the atmosphere. So what you see in the NOAA record and corroborated by GISTEMP, BEST, JMA, HadCRUT, ERA, etc. is inline with expectations. If you want a less variable timeseries representing the heat uptake of the climate system then you can refer to ocean heat content instead which stores about 90% of the planetary energy imbalance. See Cheng et al. 2022 for the latest update in this regard. Note that OHC in 2021 is the highest it has been in their 44 year record.
so the low thermal inertia of the atmosphere makes it a poor proxy for global temperatures because it is somehow resistant to the ocean’s temperatures? lol.
No. I didn’t say that NOAAGlobalTemp is a poor proxy for global temperatures. It is a good proxy for the near surface global average temperature. It’s just that the near surface global average temperature is highly variable because of the atmosphere’s low thermal inertia.
No. I didn’t say the atmosphere was resistant to ocean temperatures. In fact, it is the opposite. You can quite clearly see the modulation of atmospheric temperatures from natural cycles that effect SSTs like ENSO.
you said your heat content was better. you didn’t say how they “measure” the heat content. you didn’t say the accuracy of the, uh, instruments they measure this heat content with. you didn’t say what 200 ZJ over the course of the entire ocean’s upper stratum would translate into on said same instruments.
you did say that the heat content shows something different that the atmospheric temperatures and thus was a better indicator of global warming. Although, for the last 6 years any link between to two seems… unlinked, which ,, in reality, should make you question everything you posted, since you also posted that atmospheric temps are just too darn sensitive to outside influences. Since the whole global warming hypothesis’ mechanism resides in the atmosphere, I now have to wonder why i should care about the oceans at all.
6 years.
billtoo said: “you said your heat content was better”
Yes. Oceanic heat content is a better metric for the heat uptake in the climate system as compared to NOAAGlobalTemp.
billtoo said: “you didn’t say how they “measure” the heat content. you didn’t say the accuracy of the, uh, instruments they measure this heat content with.”
I provided the reference for the ocean heat content graph I posted. In that publication or one of the publications it cites you will find the answers to your questions including how OHC is measured and the uncertainty in these measurements. The graph I posted also contains the 95% CI for the annual measurements.
billtoo said: “you didn’t say what 200 ZJ over the course of the entire ocean’s upper stratum would translate into on said same instruments.”
No I did not discuss that nor a million other topics. We can do that now if you like. Just understand that I am far from expert so there’s a good chance I won’t know the answer to many of your questions. What does “translate into on said same instruments” mean to you?
billtoo said: “you did say that the heat content shows something different that the atmospheric temperatures and thus was a better indicator of global warming.”
I said it is a better indicating of the heat uptake in the climate system because the ocean is taking on about 90% of the planetary energy imbalance.
billtoo said: “Although, for the last 6 years any link between to two seems… unlinked, which ,, in reality, should make you question everything you posted, since you also posted that atmospheric temps are just too darn sensitive to outside influences.”
I’m not expecting a high R^2 correlation between the two on monthly or even annual scales especially over only 6 years because atmospheric temperatures are very sensitive to energy fluxes which are themselves highly variable given the atmosphere’s relatively low thermal inertia. But to suggest that OHC and NOAAGlobalTemp aren’t linked would be misleading. You can see that OHC often deviates below its trendline during and immediately following -ENSO phases as NOAAGlobalTemp deviates above its trendline. This is a demonstration of the higher than average heat flux from the ocean to the atmosphere. ENSO phases cause significant perturbations in the atmospheric temperature on monthly timescales.
billtoo said: “Since the whole global warming hypothesis’ mechanism resides in the atmosphere, I now have to wonder why i should care about the oceans at all.”
I’m not sure who is advocating for that hypothesis. Climate scientists certainly aren’t. They say the entire climate system is warming including the cryosphere, land, air, and oceans as a result of a planetary energy imbalance. This planetary energy imbalance is buffered by the ocean at around 90% with the cryosphere, land, and air combining for the remaining 10%. See Schuckmann et al. 2020 for details.
bdgwx
You said, “Yes. Oceanic heat content is a better metric for the heat uptake in the climate system as compared to NOAAGlobalTemp.”
Perhaps you can explain something to me. The specific heat capacity of water is about 4 times that of air, and about 2 times that of most terrestrial materials. Why is it then that the air is only warming about twice as fast as the oceans?
Since 1960 the ocean (2000m depth) warmed about 0.12 C and the near surface air warmed about 0.9 C. So that is about 7.5x faster. The reason the ocean does not warm at the same rate is because it takes a very long time for heat to percolate down into the deep ocean. A full equilibrium response in the ocean takes a very long time; if I remember correctly hundreds of years. I believe the layer above the thermocline is relatively quick though; maybe a couple of decades. I’m prepared to be wrong about those equilibrium response times if someone knows for sure.
I don’t think that you understood the question. Note the very first table at the top of the article. I would expect water to warm more slowly (1/4) than the air because of the difference in the specific heat capacity.
Your response supports a slow rise in water temp’s, but isn’t really responsive to my question. The point is, water seems to be warming too much.
The classic mistake of conflating kinetics and thermodynamics (and stoichiometry). For many reasons, they do not necessarily track.
Funny that I should get a down vote for asking a question! Are some topics verboten?
I’d like to see that graph with temperature on the y-axis in stead of ZJ. I bet it would be a very, very, very small number.
50 ZJ is equivalent to about 0.018 C of 2000m ocean warming.
Are you sure that isn’t .0175 😉
Yes, he is certain.
stellar
The comments software has issues with URLs starting with “ftp:…” (it automatically adds “http://” if you use the “three links of a chain” button instead of leaving it as “plain text which will be automatically converted after hitting the ‘Post Comment’ button”), but Dr. Cheng’s set of “annual and monthly timeseries” files can be found at :
ftp://www.ocean.iap.ac.cn/images_files/
The file I used below is “Temperature0_2000m_monthly_timeseries.txt”.
There is a slight difference with the NODC numbers, probably mostly due to a different “Reference Period” being used when calculating anomalies.
The total delta of ~400 ZJ in the OP’s graph corresponds to a temperature difference (in 2000m of ocean) of ~0.16°C (or 50 ZJ ~= 0.02°C).
Average temperatures expressed to a precision of hundredths of a degree are meaningless when the measurements themselves are measured to, at best, tenths of a degree. And that’s before all the estimation of non-existent measurements.
Breaking….
“ UK Climate Change Risk Assessment 2022”
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/uk-climate-change-risk-assessment-2022
The BBC is wetting itself
Truth is a beautiful thing, but not what progressives want you to focus on.
Sarc alert.
Clearly, you don’t understand climate science. Of course NOAA needs to continually revise recent temperature data upwards when it doesn’t agree with climate models. Climate models are truly the brainchild of brilliant climatologists and cannot be wrong. If the data does not agree with the models, then the data must be “inaccurate” for some reason. All NOAA’s temperature data gatekeepers need is a month or so to figure out what went wrong and make the appropriate adjustments, then all will be well.
And please don’t rely on UAH data, since Google’s fact checkers have decided that the satellites measuring atmospheric temperatures make “unreliable and harmful claims” about said temperatures: http://www.drroyspencer.com/
Dan M: “Of course NOAA needs to continually revise recent temperature data upwards when it doesn’t agree with climate models.”
The myth that never dies.
Hausfather, Carbon Brief 2017
Your stupid never ceases to amaze us. You must really hate humanity?
More Hockey Sticks provided as “evidence” of something.
“And please don’t rely on UAH data, since Google’s fact checkers have decided that the satellites measuring atmospheric temperatures make “unreliable and harmful claims” about said temperatures”
Of course, the UAH satellite data is the most accurate of all the different data sets since its data correlates 97 percent with the weather balloon temperature data, whereas the other databases do not.
Google’s censors are just lying to people. UAH doesn’t show all those “hottest year evah!” claims made by NASA and NOAA since 1998, and that’s why the alarmists want to marginalize the UAH satellite data.
Here’s the UAH satellite chart. See if you can spot any “hottest year evah!”s between the year 1998 and 2016. If you go by the UAH chart, you couldn’t declare any year between 1998 and 2016 as being the hottest year evah!. None of those years are warmer than 1998, and 1998 is statistically tied with 2016 for the warmest year in the satellite era, so even 2016, is not a “hottest year evah!” going by the UAH chart.
Yet NASA and NOAA have declared ten years between 1998 and 2016 as being the “hottest year evah!” based on their bastardized charts. The UAH chart puts the lie to these scaremongering claims, and that’s why alarmists want to dismiss the UAH satellite.
“And please don’t rely on UAH data, since Google’s fact checkers have decided that the satellites measuring atmospheric temperatures make “unreliable and harmful claims” about said temperatures”
Of course, the UAH satellite data is the most accurate of all the different data sets since its data correlates 97 percent with the weather balloon temperature data, whereas the other databases do not.
Google’s censors are just lying to people. UAH doesn’t show all those “hottest year evah!” claims made by NASA and NOAA since 1998, and that’s why the alarmists want to marginalize the UAH satellite data.
Here’s the UAH satellite chart. See if you can spot any “hottest year evah!”s between the year 1998 and 2016. If you go by the UAH chart, you couldn’t declare any year between 1998 and 2016 as being the hottest year evah!. None of those years are warmer than 1998, and 1998 is statistically tied with 2016 for the warmest year in the satellite era, so even 2016, is not a “hottest year evah!” going by the UAH chart.
Yet NASA and NOAA have declared ten years between 1998 and 2016 as being the “hottest year evah!” based on their bastardized charts. The UAH chart puts the lie to these scaremongering claims, and that’s why alarmists want to dismiss the UAH satellite.
And note that we are currently 0.5C cooler than the highpoint of 2016. We are half-way back to the baseline temperature, if you go by NASA and NOAA’s claims about how warm 2016 was, where they claim 2016 was approximately 1.0C warmer than the the baseline. So now we are only 0.5C warmer than the baseline. That means it has been cooling, not warming.
I guess that’s what happens when you hit the edit button one too many times.
Was wondering about this; normally it won’t let you attach more than one image file.
The word “cycles” is also successfully banned.
Great post !!
Eliminate years at and before El Ninos… and the alleged warming DISAPPEARS.
https://rclutz.com/2022/01/12/uah-confirms-global-warming-gone-end-of-2021/
What happens when you apply an ENSO filter that equally eliminates El Ninos and La Ninas?
Why eliminate data at all?
Turns out the years before the super El Ninos (1998 and 2016) were also when the AMO and PDO changed to their warm phases. I suspect they were the real reason for the warming at that time.
For an exo-planet to be considered “Earth-like” , the average exo-planetary temperature is expected to be 15ºC or 59º. So with 2021 coming in at 58.8 degrees Fahrenheit or 14.9 degrees Celsius, we are almost Earth-like!
Please, try to drive a few extra miles in your gas-guzzler or turn your home-heating up if it is fuel-oil or natural gas fired, we need more CO2.
As Dr. Happer shows, even doubling CO2 from today will have no measurable effect.
So this planet is doomed to never ever be Earth like, a failed planet in the Galaxy scrap heap. Not a very nice Galaxy tourist brochure, what?
bonbon ==> Yet….still….Mostly Harmless!
No – every year is the hottest year ever. Thats the only reality the normie is supposed to hear. Any other opinion is racism.
“No – every year is the hottest year ever.”
That’s the alarmist’s mantra. It’s dead wrong.
” Climate Alarmists Conceal Global Temperature Anomaly Measurement Declines ”
Nothing relevant. They are doing their job.
Alarmist report to say the least. They even report on 5 inches of rain falling in one particular place.
That was on my patio the other day. How did they know that?
Hey, I have a question: considering the upticks in volcanic activity (especially Tonga! What a Burper!) is anyone going to take the infusion of itty bitty ash particles going aloft (and likely staying there for a while) into account?
I expect to find more such eruptions showing up in the near future. Don’t ask why, just a “gut” feeling. So the finer particles are not necessarily plonk down to earth quickly, but can be carried for Very Long Distances.
Just askin’, because my cat is concerned about her supply of catnip and canned salmon.
I hope they do a lot of time…
The original one was better, but Mikey threw one of his trademark hissy fits and threatened to sue, so it had to be pulled. Warmunists have such thin skins, and can’t appreciate humor, but Mikey is in a class all his own.
The timing of Earth’s orbit perihelion is moving away from peak Southern Hemisphere exposure 400 years ago to peak northern hemisphere exposure in 10,000 years.
Southern Hemisphere is getting less sunlight and northern more are the long term trends. The difference between insolation over oceans and land is narrowing. That means net ocean evaporation contributing to land precipitation is declining. The ocean upwelling of cool water is in decline meaning the oceans are retaining more heat.
Open ocean surfaces are temperature limited to 30C so more ocean heat means more surface area is limiting to 30C.
The seasonal changes are greater than the annual changes. 2020 was the highest sunlight year of this century so far. Compared to 1850, March and April 2020 had 1W/sq.m more sunlight while September and October were 1W/sq.m less. The seasons are changing slightly.
In 10,000 years time, the northern land masses will be getting 10W/sq.m less sunlight in January than now. That means more precipitation and more of it will fall as snow. The current glaciation cycle started 400 years ago.
Oh no, the ENSO regions have transgendered ” … El Niño and La Nino events …”
The article observes that “Thus, more than 1/3rd of the monthly temperature anomaly measurements between 1992 and 2021 were adjusted upward by 0.01 degrees C just between NOAA’s August and November temperature anomaly update releases.”
That certainly means that those earlier data releases were wrong. But those were corrected from earlier corrections. How do we know that the latest correction won’t be corrected again? We don’t.
All those corrections pretty much prove that we have no idea of the actual temperature history. Thus we have no accurate history to make claims about today’s climate against.
And it’s not just little tweaks – there was a time when 1998 was cooler than the 1930s – NO MORE 1998 is now shown as far warmer than the 1930s.
“All those corrections pretty much prove that we have no idea of the actual temperature history. Thus we have no accurate history to make claims about today’s climate against.”
We do have the written temperature record. Unmodified, Temperature charts from around the world show it was just as warm in the Early Twentieth Century as it is today, which means there is no unprecedented warming, as the alarmists claim, and since there is no unprecedented warming, even though CO2 in the atmosphere has increased, then that must mean CO2 is a minor player in the Earth’s temperature regulation, and that means we don’t have to stop using fossil fuels. We can use them until we use them up, and it won’t hurt people or the planet.
“We do have the written temperature record.”
Do you know of a source that puts these records together is an easy to understand manner that I can put on my site, DebunkingClimate.com?
Thanks
JK
Sorry, Larry Hamlin, but this data does indeed present a climate “emergency” for the AGW/CAGW alarmists.
“Emergency” in the sense that the global annual temperatures since 2016 are running in the opposite direction to increasing global atmospheric CO2 concentrations.
Too bad.
Few know how lucky we are to live during in a Mild Thaw up out of the coldest era of the past 8,000 years called the Little Ice Agehttps://businessdevelopmentinternational.biz/climate-change/
I don’t think a lot of people have the Big Picture in mind when it comes to the Earth’s climate.
The Big Picture says the Earth is cooling. The Big Picture says CO2 does not appear to be a driver of the Earth’s temperatures.
From the article: ““The year culminated as the sixth warmest year on record for the globe with a temperature that was 0.84°C (1.51°F) above the 20th century average. The years 2013–2021 all rank among the ten warmest years on record.”
None of those “NOAA” years would be counted as the hottest on record if they used the UAH satellite chart. The UAH charts shows that none of the years between 1998 and 2021 were warmer than 1998, so all those claims of “hottest year evah! are simply false.
And keep in mind that the UAH satellite data and the weather balloon data correlate at about 97 percent, while NOAA and NASA and all the rest of the databases do not correlate with the weather balloon data.
NOAA has bastardized the temperature record as a means of scaring people to death by making them believe we are living in the hottest times in 1,000 years.
But if you look at the UAH chart, the NOAA deception is obvious.
I see some are actually looking into Pal Review system and bumping into the obvious-
Clubs and Networks in Economics Reviewing (WP-22-05): Institute for Policy Research – Northwestern University
Larry Hamlin discovers afresh that if you start a short-term temperature chart at the peak of the last El Nino you can convince yourself, for a while anyway, that global warming has stopped.
Wash, rinse, repeat.
“Larry Hamlin discovers afresh that if you start a short-term temperature chart at the peak“
Yeah. And if you start at the end of the “little ice age” you can get one degree of warming out of a natural recover from an unusual cold spell.
TFN,
I would just invite you to examine GLAT over the period of 1940 to 1975 to see the error in your statement . . . WAIT! . . . Does 35 years qualify as short-term or long term?
I’m so confused.
How is it that a slowly increasing temperature trend which has been occurring since the lower temperatures of the “Little Ice Age” an “anomaly”?
Significant departure from that trend is the anomaly. He who controls the language (as well as the temperature record database) controls the conversation.