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NASA Says 2010 Tied For Warmest Year On Record
An anonymous reader writes "It may not seem like it, but 2010 has tied 2005 as the warmest year since people have been keeping records, according to data from NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York. The two years differed by less than 0.018 degrees Fahrenheit. That difference is so small that it puts them in a statistical tie. In the new analysis, the next warmest years are 1998, 2002, 2003, 2006 and 2007, which are statistically tied for third warmest year. The GISS records begin in 1880." Adds jamie: "This was the 34th consecutive year with global temperatures above the 20th century average — 0.62 +/- 0.07 C above, to be precise. It was the wettest year on record too, according to the Global Historical Climatology Network."
NASA also put out a piece comparing different findings by different organizations, explaining the differences and why they aren't a big deal. The articles also states that year-to-year measures aren't particularly useful - not only are 2010 and 2005 very close, but the next six are also very similar to each other - but looking at it decade by decade (i.e. a larger sample size) gives far more meaning:
On that time scale, the three records are unequivocal: the last decade has been the warmest on record. “It’s not particularly important whether 2010, 2005, or 1998 was the hottest year on record,” said Hansen. "It is the underlying trend that is important."
I live in constant fear of the Coming of the Red Spiders.
It gets hot, steamy, wet and wild!!!
Your house is not the world. Sometimes it snows over your house, but that doesn't mean it's snowing over my house. It might even be sunny over my house.
Frankly you'd have to be a special kind of stupid to claim that global temperature averages aren't on the increase. That it's all our fault and we're all going to die? I'm still waiting to be convinced.
Here's the temperature plotted over the last 32 years http://reason.com/blog/2011/01/06/global-temperature-trend-upate not as dramatic as you might think.
And most of the places people like living were under water. See any problems with that?
No one is saying or has ever said that higher temperatures and levels of CO2 are bad for life in general. They are bad for how humans currently have their civilizations arranged.
without some idea of the error in the measurments, hard to tell what a change of x deg F means
Who gives a shit about that?
What I care about is are we hurting our own chances of living here?
Oh and stop quoting that nut case.
Couldn't have anything to do with the urbanization that occurred between 1880 and 2011 could it?
If by "urbanization" you mean "unprecedented emission of greenhouse gases combined with massive deforestation" then yes, that's pretty well supported by theory and observation. If by "urbanization" you mean "the false rumor that the presence of concrete magically makes thermometers in the ocean and in space register higher temperatures" then no, it couldn't
I don't have a master's in statistical inference, just a plain old BS in engineering. And even I can tell that all of this "warmest year on record" business is just people getting worked up about short timescale noise in a signal with periodicity on the order of 400? 11,000? 400,000? years.
Maybe it is the warmest year on record. So what? Keep records for long enough and you'll wind up with a coldest year too.
Have any of you noticed that every year they use a different set of reporting stations to "show" that it's the hottest year?
I haven't noticed that. It isn't mentioned in the article. All it says is:
The analysis produced at GISS is compiled from weather data from more than 1,000 meteorological stations around the world...
You make it sound like they chose the 5 hottest stations. Logically, they should take some statistical function of all the stations. It seems really unlikely that they are cherry picking stations to produce a result. NASA is a research organization.
P.S. If you get modded down, it will be because you made an outlandish accusation that NASA is falsifying evidence, with no evidence of your own. If what you say is true, that would be quite a scandal. I'd love to see someone point out what stations they are using and ask them why they are doing it that way.
Thank God man-made global warming was proven to be a hoax. Just imagine what the world might have looked like now if those conspiring scientists had been telling the truth. No doubt Nasa would be telling us that this year is now the hottest since humans began keeping records. The weather satellites would show that even when heat from the sun significantly dipped earlier this year, the world still got hotter. Russia's vast forests would be burning to the ground in the fiercest drought they have ever seen, turning the air black in Moscow, killing 15,000 people, and forcing foreign embassies to evacuate. Because warm air holds more water vapour, the world's storms would be hugely increasing in intensity and violence – drowning one fifth of Pakistan, and causing giant mudslides in China.
The world's ice sheets would be sloughing off massive melting chunks four times the size of Manhattan. The cost of bread would be soaring across the world as heat shrivelled the wheat crops. The increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would be fizzing into the oceans, making them more acidic and so killing 40 per cent of the phytoplankton that make up the irreplaceable base of the oceanic food chain.
Oh, wait.....
Sometimes the light at the end of the tunnel is the headlight of an oncoming train.
Maybe it is the warmest year on record. So what? Keep records for long enough and you'll wind up with a coldest year too.
That is the point that gets me. I don't doubt that dumping CO2 into the atmosphere raised the temp a little, but history is flooded with examples of rising temps, lower temps, higher CO2, lower CO2, and I don't quite see how what we are doing rises above being background noise, in the larger picture.
That said, I do like cars that pollute less, developing better technologies that use less energy or pollute less, but not because of global warming. I just like to breath, drink water, fish, and want to have a national energy policy that isn't dependent on people half way around the globe. If were were making decisions based on those issues, it would make more sense as those are issues we can all agree on and benefit from, and don't require drastic, job killing measures, nor as heated of a debate.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
when we know that this is a lie, and temperatures have not risen since 1998.
You've been claiming this for years even though it's been shown to be bullshit the entire time. Why don't you just post it again a little later. The more you post it the truer it becomes, right?
Support SETI@home
but history is flooded with examples of rising temps, lower temps, higher CO2, lower CO2, and I don't quite see how what we are doing rises above being background noise, in the larger picture.
Except, of course, that it's not. In case you're too busy to click and read, it's an article that explains that CO2 levels are substantially higher now than any point in the last 800,000 years. Typically the largest increases were around 30 ppm/1000 years. In the 17 years prior to that article in 2006, CO2 had risen 30 ppm.
But by all means, let's continue to ignore these things and wait until we're absolutely certain before we go off and improve our planet and (if you're in the US) reduce our dependency on foreign oil and other such drastic, uncomfortable measures.
Actually
Both Climate Change and Global Warming are unique terms that have specific meanings.
To put it simply:
Cause: Global Warming
Effect: Climate Change
http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/climate_by_any_other_name.html
If anything, we should be talking about Global Warming more.
Because it's amazingly simple when you boil it down to it's bare constuients.
**"Is it the sun?"** Sometimes but definently not for the past half century.
http://greyfalcon.net/solar0.png
**"Are we certain that less and less infrared radiation is exiting out into space, almost entirely in the wavelength we'd expect CO2 and CH4 to block?"**
Yes
http://greyfalcon.net/greenhouse
**Is the rate of warming significant?**
Yeah, I'd say 100x faster than you'd expect from changes in earth's orbit alone is significant.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bftcWQiZPPg
http://www.skepticalscience.com/How-to-explain-Milankovitch-cycles-to-a-hostile-Congressman-in-30-seconds.html
http://greyfalcon.net/climate2
(^^ I need a better source for this comment)
**"Do we know that the CO2 is from fossil fuels. i.e. "Manmade CO2"**
Yes
http://greyfalcon.net/carbon3
http://greyfalcon.net/c14
http://greyfalcon.net/carbon2
DONE. That's all you need to know.
With absolute certainty "manmade CO2" is the main cause global warming.
Sure, that's totally fair in an ideal world; however, the forests have developed a mono-culture because of all the fire suppression that has been going on for decades.
The forests were already over-crowded and unhealthy. The current pine beetle outbreak (which mostly affects lodgepole pines, but can also hit pinon, and a few others) is so devastating because of this.
In the past, outbreaks would be limited by a hard freeze in the winter which killed all the beetles and limited their range. Also, naturally healthy and diverse forests limited the scope of devastation. Today we have forests that are composed almost entirely of a single species in many places and the trees are all roughly the same age and present a similar amount of susceptibility.
Once the beetles have taken every last tree, the ability for the forest to replenish itself will be hindered by the fact that there is very little other plant life around to protect the soil. Unprotected soil leads to more violent snow melt runoff, erosion, water contamination, etc. The forest will have a much more difficult time replenishing itself.
Someone flopped a steamer in the gene pool.
http://bigcitylib.blogspot.com/2009/05/antony-watts-and-surface-stations-wait.html
Fandroids hate facts.
People have always believed that it's perfectly acceptable to kill off other species to keep humans around. Why do you think the Grizzley bear and wolf populations got so low?
Who are you to say that we are more important than, say, the really clever octopods who will come after us?
What a stupid question. I'm more important because I'm me and I want to live, and if that motherfucking octopod thinks he's going to take my place he better bring a whole bunch of bros and some serious weaponry otherwise he's ending up on my plate for dinner. I think a better question is what type of self hating species WOULDN'T do anything and everything in their power to survive? If you feel a deep rooted urge to jump into killer whale's mouths in order to save THEIR species then by all means do so before you spread your genes and hurt ours.
That's an extremely dishonest way to describe it. You make it sound like they threw out the less reliable data set and kept the good one, wow! what a great idea huh?!?!
In fact they used that tree ring data without caveat for most of the chart, then silently omitted it near the end of the sequence, substituting data from the other set only for those years where the data from the first set didnt fit their hypothesis. Then they labeled the chart so it looked like a single, reliable data set produced the whole sequence, and presented it to the world as such.
I find this line deliciously ironic. Perhaps you are not acquainted with the phenomenon of psychological projection?
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
I'm not a global warming denier. I'm someone who thinks the globe is warming, but we don't know how much of it is man made. Likely much, maybe most, maybe less than half. But it doesn't matter if we can meet half way and make some of the changes while we debate, the changes that will improve life even if global warming was a myth: better fuel economy means less reliance on Arab countries and less pollution.
I think you will find many, many outdoor types agree with me. I'm not Johnny Huntalot, I just fish regularly and I am outdoors a lot. I also live in a county with no manufacturing, few humans, and yet we fail EPA every month from pollution from areas 90 miles from here in two different directions. (between Charlotte and Greensboro/Winston-Salem, NC) If you bother to ask, and don't ask in framing the question around global warming, you will find that most people like the idea of reducing pollution and dependence on Arab oil. Over half the nation has consumption warnings on fish from our lakes due to years of dumping PCBs in the water, for instance.
Many people who enjoy the outdoors, live in the south and are either Republican or Libertarian (like myself) or otherwise conservative at least fiscally, would agree with half the points if you don't make it a debate about global warming. There are reasons to doubt the motives on some people on both sides of the debate. The smart money avoids the debate and simply focuses on things we all already agree on. You keep harping about "global warming", you tune out half the people who would agree on half the ideas you would like to see implemented. Does it matter if people disagree on the reasons, if they agree with you on at least some of the methods?
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
The location of the sensors matters a great deal to the accuracy of the historical record. A sensor located in a city of 5,000 in 1950 is not providing an accurate comparison if that city is now 200,000. And did they move the sensor (which happens frequently) and how do the prevailing winds in combination with the urban heat island effect that sensor now that the city has quadrupled in size?
Actually, data errors are NOAA's fault as they're the ones providing the raw data. The mistakes usually get corrected on their own when the records are reviewed (such as when the hurricane season gets reviewed at the end of the season). Most errors may not get discovered for awhile, as they are not used to make a sensationalized public release.
But McIntyre and Watts like to play the conspiracy card, and either encourage (or at the very least don't discourage or correct) erroneous data/conclusions of their own or that of their participants. Every single mistake is vindication for them and their audience. It's all the proof they need to mischaracterize the thousands of climate scientists in the world as evil, money-grubbing, fascist socialist bastards bent on world domination.
Basically they do the same thing the IDers do to the theory of evolution, only with less Jesus. Every now and again they discover an error, which is good because it makes the science that much better. But they have yet to do anything meaningful in discrediting the current body of climate science. The papers I know about authored by McIntyre on the subject have been ripped to shreds. Their collective postulations about weather stations was thoroughly debunked (though, of course, they continues to deny it). Most of their other arguments that I've seen in the climate community have been torn apart piece by piece by experts in the field.
It's possible to be a skeptic without being an asshole. I work with a few skeptics. We have interesting conversations ranging from analytical methods to atmospheric dynamics. But the only time McIntyre and Watts are brought up is when we either want to laugh or when we want to point out how NOT to do something.
~X~
The issue with this, and the reason why CO2 continues to legitimately get the majority of attention, is that methane's half-life in the atmosphere is much, much, much shorter than CO2. As a result, adjusting methane emissions is less urgent, because the effects of the methane in the atmosphere vanish on much shorter timescales- the CO2 just keeps compounding.
So, while methane is a much more powerful greenhouse gas on, say, a 1-year timescale, the comparison is much more complicated averaged over the duration of the substance's lifetime in the atmosphere.
The ringing of the division bell has begun... -PF