Posted on 02/26/2008 11:28:32 AM PST by crusty old prospector
A twelve-month long drop in world temperatures erases global warming
Over the past year, anecdotal evidence for a cooling planet has exploded. China has its coldest winter in 100 years. Baghdad sees its first snow in all recorded history. North America has the most snowcover in 50 years, with places like Wisconsin the highest since record-keeping began. Record levels of Antarctic sea ice, record cold in Minnesota, Texas, Florida, Mexico, Australia, Iran, Greece, South Africa, Greenland, Argentina, Chile -- the list goes on and on. No more than anecdotal evidence, to be sure. But now, that evidence has been supplanted by hard scientific fact. All four major global temperature tracking outlets (Hadley, NASA's GISS, UAH, RSS) have released updated data. All show that over the past year, global temperatures have dropped precipitously.
Meteorologist Anthony Watts compiled the results of all the sources. The total amount of cooling ranges from 0.65C up to 0.75C -- a value large enough to erase nearly all the global warming recorded over the past 100 years. All in one year time. For all sources, it's the single fastest temperature change every recorded, either up or down.
Scientists quoted in a past DailyTech article link the cooling to reduced solar activity which they claim is a much larger driver of climate change than man-made greenhouse gases. The dramatic cooling seen in just 12 months time seems to bear that out. While the data doesn't itself disprove that carbon dioxide is acting to warm the planet, it does demonstrate clearly that more powerful factors are now cooling it.
Let's hope those factors stop fast. Cold is more damaging than heat. The mean temperature of the planet is about 54 degrees. Humans -- and most of the crops and animals we depend on -- prefer a temperature closer to 70.
Historically, the warm periods such as the Medieval Climate Optimum were beneficial for civilization. Corresponding cooling events such as the Little Ice Age, though, were uniformly bad news.
Not much, Jan 2007 was 8 days above avg; 15 below and 7 avg.
Two and one half days were 20F above but were canceled out by the greater number of days below.
What is unusual is that when there were days above they were much above, reflecting a large movement of warm gulf air ahead of a steep gradient from the north and very cold air.
I don’t understand how the graph you presented is so smooth in its analysis.
While I have serious issues with the surface station locations and placement and the collapsing numbers of the total sites, I still think we must use the raw data before we make all the corrections to better fit the modeling process.
By doing that, you get get any result you want, why are so determined to shoot down every thread out of hand?
If I told you it was raining would you just sit there under your umbrella and complain how hot and dry it was?
Are you still referring to the anomaly plot for January? I'm not sure exactly what you mean, but any kind of averaging process over time reduces the influence of variability within that time interval. (palmer always reminds me about this for ice-core data, because the CO2 in ice cores is essentially an averaged sample over whatever time interval is represented by the sampled ice core layer.)
I still think we must use the raw data before we make all the corrections to better fit the modeling process.
Taking that statement at its basic level, I can't imagine any environmental observational data set that won't have an occasional outlier that would get tossed by a simple Q-test or similar. The data has to be QA/QC'ed to some extent. How much and how its done -- that is a process that is, and should be, constantly scrutinized.
Not really, the more respectable ones are pointing out that 1998 was a warming hype year and point out problems with GISS.
We don't know that yet. The problem with determining the solar effect is that irradiance is opposite to the other effects. If the sunspots were just cooling, then it would be simple, but the sunspots are only a crude proxy for other effects that affect cosmic ray and UV flux.
Outlier is a term that should be reserved for obviously wrong data - for example, if St. Louis had an average temp of 54F on one thermometer for one day and another thermometer one mile away had 40F degrees, both are suspect; while if one out of ten in a close radius differ where only one was off by more than one degree the spurious one becomes obvious.
Move out beyond ten miles and narrow your time allowed to ten minutes and that one thermometer becomes a predictor.
I rechecked St. Louis for February, 2008 and it was warmer than 2007 by 1C, but not 3C.
That's fine, but raw data can have outliers. Something has to be done about them.
I rechecked St. Louis for February, 2008 and it was warmer than 2007 by 1C, but not 3C.
But St. Louis doesn't account for the whole dot.
I don't know what "that" means here. (Sorry.)
The plot is for January; eyeballing the one closer to St. Louis, it looks more like 2C than 3C, size-wize. There must be a text presentation of the data somewhere, but I don’t have time to look for it.
It makes me curious as to how these heat sources "accidentally" got placed near monitoring stations (or visa versa).
Is it like Lynx hair, eagle feathers, and butterfly food plants suddenly are "found" on private property?
“That’s fine, but raw data can have outliers. Something has to be done about them.”
You finally agree with something I say.
Now, let’s get the instrument shelters back in the middle of open, well ventilated areas, maintain them and calibrate the instruments inside and add more of them instead of letting them die and fall off the grid.
I am not trying to challenge you to a battle of the fastest searcher but instead want you to appreciate that we must be extremely certain and not just consensus-sure before we go half cocked off on a tear down the walls of industry witch hunt.
Read this link and see what a “scientist” can do with statistics and modeling of graphs:
http://motls.blogspot.com/2008/01/2007-warmest-year-on-record-coldest-in.html
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