A few days ago, Climate Progress brought you “Breaking News: The Great Ice Age of 2008 is finally over — next stop Venus!” That scientific finding was based on the NASA (and Hadley Center) temperature data through the end of March. Now NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) weighs in with its data (here), reaffirming the end of the Great Ice Age of 2008:
Based on preliminary data, the globally averaged combined land and sea surface temperature was the second warmest on record for March and the January-March year-to-date period ranked eleventh warmest.
March 2008 missed the record for the warmest March (2002) by a whopping 0.07°F. March 2008 was the warmest March over land in the record, beating the previous record by nearly 0.3°F. And it was the warmest March over land and sea in the northern hemisphere on record by 0.2°F . 
Once again, the geographical distribution of the warming continues to be really, really bad news for those worried about …
… the land of the permafrost permamelt, where it is running upwards of 4°-9°F warmer than normal. 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 (still) working on a two-part permamelt update for Climate Progress. Definitely not for the squeamish.
In any case, I know how much stock the deniers put in one month’s worth of data, so I will try to keep them — and you — up to speed on our (climate) progress toward record warming.
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The deniers put plenty of stock in the temperature anomaly data for February. I don’t see why they wouldn’t do the same for March….. oh, wait.
Will this finally be enough to shut up the deniers running around the net screaming about how cold it is outside their window? Of course not.
Will we finally start paying attention to people like Lord Stern, who is warning (link below) that things are far worse on the climate front than we (and he) assumed just a couple of years ago? Probably not.
http://www.independent.co.uk/ news/ business/ news/ stern-warns-that-climate-change-is-far-worse-than-2006-estimate-810488.html
If it was the 2nd warmest, then global cooling continues its unrelenting rampage through the heart of AGW territory.
Please don’t use Fahrenheit. Centigrade is superior in all respects.
Ben — Celcius. i.e., Kelvin – 273.
Sorry. I usually use Centigrade. I felt Fahrenheit-ish today.
“and the January-March year-to-date period ranked eleventh warmest”
Did you notice that this is compatible with a decade of cooling, and in fact reflects that? Which are the 10 years with hotter first 3 months? You keep confusing warm with warming, cool with cooling. The planet is warm, yes, but it is cooling, also yes.
These rebounds are normal and expected, both when there is unusual cold and also when there is unusual hot. But the rebound is usually not as astounding as the initial anomaly. You had to go back more than a decade to find colder februaries, but you only had to go back 6 years to find a hotter march. And according to GISS, not even so far, as 2005’s March is also shown hotter. AND the march you find in 2002 wasn’t a rebound effect. AND it was a full 0.2ºC higher.
AND the absolute value of the anomaly is not especially high compared to the recent past: for the last 10 years, you find bigger anomalies on December 2006; January, March, September and October 2005; February 2004; January, February and March 2002; February, June and July 1998… And lots of anomalies not as high but almost (less than 0.02ºC different). While you only find a handful lower anomalies than the ones of January and February 2008 and they are rather far and non-consecutive: July 2004, October 2000, December 2000 and January 2000, with very few other records even close to these low anomalies, all of them in 1999 or 2000.
Check by yourselves:
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/Fig.C.lrg.gif
Spiegel Online published today a disturbing article about gas hydrates under the Arctic ocean floor.
“Three to 12 kilometers from the coast, the temperature of sea sediment was -1 to -1.5 degrees Celsius, just below freezing. Permafrost on land, though, was as cold as -12.4 degrees Celsius.”
Is the submarine permafrost the more immediate threat?
http://www.spiegel.de/ international/ world/ 0,1518,547976,00.html
Nylo — You are a funny guy. I almost thought you were serious for a second, but then I thought, no, nobody could miss the entire point of my recent posts on the subject.
NOAA and the NWS itself is part of the problem. The mild winter was headlined as the “Coolest since 2001″ but apparently the 2nd warmest (warmest on land and in the NH) is not worthy of headline. The +4.03 degrees Fahrenheit anomaly averaged over all the Northern Hemisphere land is pretty remarkable.
Sorry, that should read 2nd warmest March above.
Joe — NOT Centigrade. The derived SI unit is named ‘degrees Celcius’, Kelvin – 273.
I stand corrected — sort of.
It’s Celsius.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celsius
Nylo — There’s two great videos going around U-tube you should see, featuring Will Ferrel as George Bush, talking about global warming. A guy as funny as you would love them.
Joe — To be really, really picky, the unit is ‘degrees Celcius”, not just ‘Celcius’. I assume thee original reason for this is that ‘C’ abbreviates ‘Calorie’, i.e., a kilocalorie, sometimes called a ‘food calorie’.
But when using the basic SI unit for temperature, it is just ‘Kelvin’, not ‘degrees Kelvin’.
You know, Roy Spencer, one of the Morano 400 and thus a hero to the denialists, has analyzed the UAH data, and their site has the planet warming at a rate for 20 years.
Now, I wonder why the hero doesn’t talk about “cooling” over the last decade. I wonder. I wonnnnder. I wonder if it has to do with cherry-picking…inadequate sample size…
Best,
D
Dano, I don’t know what you are talking about, but I see nothing of what you claim in the links you provide. Your first link is an image hosted in tripod which, by the way, cannot be seen. The second is raw data from the UAH that clearly shows cooling for the last 10 years. The third one is an article about how cold March has been in the tropics.
Maybe you can provide a link which actually shows your point? Thanks.
maybe you posters who are so sure the globe is getting hotter can explin the record snow falls we have had the last tow yesrs. Not being sarcastic. But if there is global arming,how do you account for no El Nino in the summer months for the Northern Pacific? how do you account for 158% snow pack in the Cacades this year, and 152% last year, and when I called Mt Rainier National park, they told me the ice caves would open if we had another record snow fall next year. It snowed here in western Washington, about 1-1/2 inches in Sumner where I live, they had about seven inches in Hoods Port, same day, at sea level on Hoods Canal, and Everett , Sequim actually brought out snow plows. On the 19th of April we had snow shores here again, 8 to 12 inches in the cascades, foot hills, and its so cold I can’t plant a garden like I generally do in april about mid month. Can you explain these things in laymans language to me? or am I just going to get a bunch of mumbo jumbo about computer models, like the coming ice age I read about in seventies. really curious about this.
William — Two things:
First, local weather isn’t global climate. That’s why I publish global statistics
Second, some parts of the planet will get more snow from global warming — for a while — as we throw more water vapor into the atmosphere, and, in some cold places it will come down as snow. On our current path, the Cascades ain’t gonna see much snow post-2050, but we only have about a decade to stop that from happening.
WE will never stop global warming from happening. It is a naturally occurring cycle that has occurred itself many times over the history of the earth. WE can only hope to adjust to it!! Temperatures have risin in the past half century the same amount as back in the period between 800AD and 1200AD during which a global period of warming changed vast cultures and history.