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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."
It gets hot, steamy, wet and wild!!!
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.
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.
The actual data this press release is based on is here.
Versions of this data released to the media generally don't include error bars, though they should. But the methodology is the same as Hansen's 2006 paper:
"Estimated 2-sigma error (95% confidence) in comparing nearby years of global temperature (Fig. 1A), such as 1998 and 2005, decreases from 0.1C at the beginning of the 20th century to 0.05C in recent decades (4)."
Thus, the data errors are just a little smaller than the year-to-year variations, but are far, far smaller than the century-long trend. Which is why Hansen stresses that it doesn't really matter exactly which year is the hottest on record: what matters is how this decade stacks up to the rest of the 20th century.
The trend is flat since 1998.
No it's not. 1998 was an outlier, as anyone with more than half a brain can tell by looking at the data. By definition, trends do not rely on outliers.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
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?
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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.
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.
You make it sound like they threw out the less reliable data set and kept the good one
Well yes that's in fact what they did. The problem is deciding how much of the less reliable data to throw out. Upon discovering that a (small) number of trees displayed anomalous results in the 1960s, they could have i) decided there was something wrong (eg. chemical treatment) with these particular trees and excluded these trees only. ii) decide that a small number of anomalous trees invalidated dendrochronology and throw out all tree-ring data or iii) excluded that data from the years which included the anomalous tree ring data given that the instrumental record rendered it unnecessary anyway. The first would have been cherry picking and the second deliberately blinding oneself. Sensibly they chose the last option.
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
That is an outright LIE. There is nothing silent or secret about this. The problem encountered and the method used to deal with it was discussed in the original 1998 Mann et al. paper in Nature.
Now I don't think that you are suffering from projection. You are simply easily duped.
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