Climate Progress

Last month, NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center reported “the globally-averaged combined land and sea surface temperature was … the ninth warmest for the January-July year-to-date period” (out of 129 years), as I reported here. The first seven months of the year were +0.45°C (+0.81°F) warmer than the 1961-1990 average.

Now here’s the shocking news. The NCDC just reported that “the globally-averaged combined land and sea surface temperature … ranked as the ninth warmest … January-August year-to-date period.” The first eight months of the year were … wait for it … +0.45°C (+0.81°F) warmer than the 1961-1990 average.

So you see, there has been essentially no warming whatsoever from July to August, which is probably because August tied with 1995 as the tenth warmest on record.

Bottom line: Other than a record decline in Arctic sea ice (see “Arctic shrinks by an Alaska and 3 Arizonas in August“), August was a pretty dull month climate-wise — heck, “El Niño/Southern Oscillation (ENSO) conditions were in a neutral phase during August” — and I was desperately trying to spice it up with a sexy headline that might at least temporarily excite my few remaining denier readers.

Since interest in the campaign seems to have brought in a bunch of new readers in the last few weeks, let me repeat the key points from my last post on the monthly data.

While the monthly data doesn’t tell us much about the climate, the peer-reviewed scientific literature has a couple of interesting forecasts for the next decade:

• The “coming decade” (2010 to 2020) is poised to be the warmest on record, globally.
• The coming decade is poised to see faster temperature rise than any decade since the authors’ calculations began in 1960.
• The fast warming would likely begin early in the next decade — similar to the 2007 prediction by the Hadley Center in Science (see “Climate Forecast: Hot — and then Very Hot“).

That is why they call it global warming.

Related Posts:

• Yes, the globe is warming. But how fast?
• This just in: Great Ice Age of 2008 is STILL over
• “Hadley Center to deniers: We are STILL warming”
• Hansen throws cold water on cooling climate claim
• Nature article on ‘cooling’ confuses media, deniers: Next decade may see rapid warming
• Where is the media on the incredible warming and extreme weather of February?
• Media enable denier spin 1: A (sort of) cold January doesn’t mean climate stopped warming
• No warming since 1998? Get real, deniers!
• NASA: 2007 Second Warmest Year Ever, with Record Warmth Likely by 2010
• Must read from Hansen: Stop the madness about the tiny revision in NASA’s temperature data!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 16th, 2008 at 10:15 pmand is filed under Science, Extreme Weather. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.