NOAA Part 1: February unusually warm
The new monthly data from NOAA’s National Climactic Data Center agrees with the NASA data I blogged on a few days ago:
- The globally averaged combined land and sea surface temperature was the fifteenth warmest on record for February, the sixteenth warmest for boreal winter (December-February), and the January-February year-to-date period ranked twenty-second warmest.
- The presence of a strong La Niña contributed to a global average temperature that was the coolest since the La Niña episode of 2000-2001.
So it was relatively quite warm, even with a strong La Niña. No doubt the next El Niño year we see will be the warmest year on record. Anybody want to take a $1000 bet against that? Delayer-1000s, where are you?
Jeers to the Bush Administration’s NOAA/NCDC for the headline “NOAA: Coolest December-February Since 2001 for U.S., Globe.” Presumably they are happy to feed the delayer-1000 meme that we’re in a cooling trend. And the Drudge Report was happy to oblige them by running that exact headline.
Let’s get this straight. We have some short-term cooling from a strong La Niña. And a little more cooling from being at a solar irradiance minimum. And we still have the 16th warmest winter on record. The planet is warming — deal with it (please). Not only that, but the most abnormally warm place is the worst possible location from the perspective of carbon cycle feedbacks [click to enlarge]:
That’s right. We’re running upwards of 9°F warmer than normal in the land of the permafrost permamelt. This is worrisome because:
- Siberia contains probably the world’s largest amount of carbon locked away in the permafrost.
- The permafrost is increasingly not so perma.
- Much of that carbon would be released as methane, which is 23 times more potent a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.
I’m working on a two-part permamelt update for Climate Progress. Definitely not for the squeamish.
Part 2 of this post will deal with Arctic ice.
See also this Jeff Masters post.
March 17th, 2008 at 12:39 am
But Joe, short term weather variances are not climate. (Where have I heard that before?)
March 17th, 2008 at 1:04 am
Joe, What is the ACTUAL CO2ppm number from Maui? A CO2 burp would show up immediately. Can we see some sort of equal area projection global map? The Mercator projection isn’t very user friendly. Don’t forget all weather events are AGW proof–Just kidding alittle.
March 17th, 2008 at 8:57 am
I really am not the “alarmist type” person - but this is really alarming.
I can’t help but ask Joe - sounds like we’re crossing some sort of a tipping point in perma…?
March 17th, 2008 at 9:08 am
If it was so warm, then why have the poles frozen so much?
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/ cryosphere/ IMAGES/ current.area.south.jpg
and
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/ cryosphere/ IMAGES/ current.area.jpg
Never has the arctic recovered 11 million sq. km in one winter.
Hmmmm
March 17th, 2008 at 9:11 am
Since 2004, Antarctica has grown more than 1 million sq. km!
March 17th, 2008 at 9:18 am
GW is nothing new:
http://wattsupwiththat.wordpress.com/
March 17th, 2008 at 9:18 am
What is the lifetime for methane in the atmosphere?
Here’s hoping it’s not a long time like CO2
March 17th, 2008 at 9:20 am
Oh, it’s 8.4 years.
March 17th, 2008 at 9:47 am
I honestly don’t know how it is people who don’t believe in science and how one uses observational data to test a theory — how those people can cite random points of data, while ignoring the millions of points of data, thousands of scientific papers, and detailed scientific understanding of climate change.
Either you believe in the scientific method or you don’t. If you do, then you are stuck with the IPCC review of the science. If you don’t, what is the point of trotting out denier/delayer talking points that are based on selective sampling of data, while ignoring 99.9% of the observational data.
March 17th, 2008 at 10:18 am
Dear Joe:
The claim made by this website is that it’s been “really warm!”
This of course is based entirely on one statistic derived from (LOL!) surface stations, while ignoring all satellite data sets. So you’re right about one side cherry picking data from the huge masses showing a cooling trend.
If I were you, I’d be hoping real hard for a UN-IPCC-Europe coup d’etat and for them to shut down all those “denier” websites, the “deniers” behind them, and all them hot “denier” books that have been coming out, and so on. Time is running out you know. It’s begun to get cooler, more and the “denial” machine is just getting started. In a few short years we could very well be back to 1960s-like winters. If that should happen, you still might be able to convince the public that it’s still warm out - but only if you have complete control of information and the climate and weather services.
But I’d say your AGW boat has drifted into the deadhorse latitudes with no tropical winds in sight for your sails. The AGW hoax is over.
March 17th, 2008 at 10:21 am
Antarctic sea ice has grown 11,000,000 sq. kn this winter - a record!
March 17th, 2008 at 10:46 am
PG — I get tired of anti-scientific delayers accusing me of what they themselves are doing.
But to cut to the chase, $1000 says the next decade is hotter than this one. I’ll give you 2-to-1 odds. If you won’t take the bet, then everyone will know you don’t believe the Nonsense you are spouting, which makes it pure disinformation.
March 17th, 2008 at 11:50 am
Could someone tutor PGosselin about difference between area and volume?
Unless life’s too short to bother, that is….
March 17th, 2008 at 12:14 pm
Joe,
off topic but thought it might interest you.
Andrew Revkin is attending a forum at UVM tomorrow night. A notice for the forum with a bizarre interview (first question) with Revkin:
http://www.uvm.edu/ ~uvmpr/ ?Page=News&storyID=12018
And I blogged about it here: http://www.dailykos.com/ story/ 2008/ 3/ 16/ 21360/ 2027/ 800/ 478201
I emailed my blog and your blog on the subject, ( that I link), to the interviewer.
Hopefully they don’t give Revkin a pass!
March 17th, 2008 at 12:33 pm
caerbannog — Too short to bother. He’s a hopeless nut, IMO.
March 17th, 2008 at 12:46 pm
go on take the bet PGosselin!
March 17th, 2008 at 1:34 pm
PGosselin,
If someone explains to you why there can be record refreezes of artic ice and that it would be wrong to conclude that means global cooling, will you then stop and think about it? That maybe there is really global warming going on or that these scientists know something? I doubt it but give it a chance.
There will always be ice in the artic. In the winter. When people talk about ice free in the artic, they are talking about summer ice free.
If and when there is summer ice free in the artic, that winter may have the largest winter refreeze. Why? Because there is so much more area to refreeze because the ice that would usually have stayed is gone. More area to refreeze. As more of the multiyear ice has frozen there is more area for single year ice to freeze closer to the coldest parts of the artic.
The refreeze area that has refroze one year is easy to melt in the summer because it is so thin. The ice that has been there many years is much thicker and is harder and takes longer to melt.
Two things. When I said that there will always be winter ice in the artic, I really don’t have any idea about that. I could imagine at some time that the artic is warm enough to not refreeze in the winter. When that would be, I wouldn’t know. Also the year when there is the largest area of refreeze might not be when there is artic ice free, because maybe the refreeze needs cold ice near it to freeze more ice.
That’s all my speculation. If somebody can say it’s wrong go for it.
March 17th, 2008 at 1:37 pm
Peter,
For a carbon dioxide number go to;
http://www.carbonify.com/carbon-dioxide-levels.htm
March 17th, 2008 at 2:51 pm
Ronald, thank you but I was interested in this years(real time) current numbers(co2ppm) that would show a huge increase caused by the thawing of the Siberian tundra as presented by Joe Romm in the post–”this is worrisome because….” I think Joe is going to plan B, C, and D on proving we need to ban carbon now and end Western culture as we know it.
Joe I’ll admit there is probably some human caused changes in the climate, but the science proving just what the effects are and how much they are or what is the actual gas(es)/aerosol(s) are, is too immature to use to justify the end of carbon based economies.
The “solution” offered by the warmists is still looking for a crisis severe enough for the world to go to a ‘lifeboat’ type government with the tree huggers holding the Very gun on the other life boaters– Even if the AGW proved to be 100% correct, the greens still won’t get to run the world except in their Dreams. Thank god.
March 17th, 2008 at 4:39 pm
Peter Foley stated “Even if the AGW proved to be 100% correct, …”
Peter, it already has. As the tundra thaws, it will express methane, not C02. Do you know what happens next?
March 18th, 2008 at 2:22 pm
“Let’s get this straight. We have some short-term cooling from a strong La Niña. And a little more cooling from being at a solar irradiance minimum. And we still have the 16th warmest winter on record. The planet is warming — deal with it (please)”
The right way to read the data is not that the planet is warming, but that the planet is WARM. For it to be warming, you would need February to be hotter than the RECENT years. Say, last decade. Cooling doesn’t mean cool. It means cooling. It will take some time for monthly low temperature records to beat those 30 years ago, of course. Cooling is a process.
Repeat with me: regarding the last decade, the planet is WARM, but not warming. And the planet is COOLING, but not cool.
I would gladly take your 1000$ bet. But I don’t think you would pay after you lost.
March 18th, 2008 at 4:23 pm
Yeah, that’s right. I run a high-profile blog and I’m gonna welch on a bet. Nice try. You won’t take the bet because you know you’d lose.
Why would I repeat your disinformation? The fact is, the planet is warming and it will soon be hot.
One of the more anti-scientific things written on this blog in a while: “For it to be warming, you would need February to be hotter than the RECENT years.”
March 19th, 2008 at 11:17 am
Everything depends on the time resolution you want to apply to the concepts of global temperature change. If you take a time resolution of 30 years, for example, you are entitled to say that we are still in a warming process: our temperatures are higher than the average of the last 30 years. On the other hand if you only pick 10 years resolution, we have been rather the same. And if you pick 5, we are definitely cooling.
The truth is that, no matter which time resolution you want to pick, the warming trend will show now less extreme than 10 years ago. Because the temperatures have kept quite stable for 10 years. It’s, let’s say, a little stop in the warming. This is important because it is opposite to the predictions of Mann et Al with their hockey stick. The hockey stick was so terrifying because the last year in the graph was 1998, a strongly positive anomaly. If we were to draw a new graph today with up-to-date temperatures and the same kind of time-averaging of the temperature graph, we would see that it doesn’t go that high for 1998 (averaging the later years softens the thing quite a lot), and the average warming trend is also reduced (same total warming but in a +10 years timespan).
March 21st, 2008 at 4:05 am
You are proposing a bet over “a record”. Which record is that? Do we include the MWP, RWP and the holocene optimum, all well established and natural climate phenomena of the recent past?
Yes, I know you would dare to bet just over the records of the past 150 years. But alas, in natural history that is just a blink.
March 21st, 2008 at 8:54 am
bet is this decade vs. next — pretty simple.