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Warmest 12-Month Period Recorded In US
First time accepted submitter seanzig writes "Dr. Jeff Masters of Weather Underground provides a good overview of the State of the Climate Report from NOAA's National Climatic Data Center (NCDC). May 2011 through Apr. 2012 broke the previous record (Nov. 1999 — Oct. 2000). A number of other interesting records (e.g., warmest March on record) and stats emerged. It just presents the data and does not surmise anything about the causes or what should be done about it."
The winter gardening this year was out of sight.
If it stays like this, I might never have to buy veggies again.
Hooray for warming!
Panic!
Because either the world is ending, or there is going to be a massive flamewar. Decide which one you want to panic over.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
1) Buy Ten-foot-pole.
2) Rent a flame retardant Hasmat suite (too expensive to buy it).
3) Hire some bystander who is oblivious to contents of manilla envelope.
4) Send innocent bystander on fools errand to present climate data.
5) While in underground bunker; DUCK!
>>"ad space available -- low rates!!!"
Any bets on how long it'll before they start swarming in here claiming that 17xx / 18xx / 19xx was so much hotter; how this was really the coldest period on record and that James Hansen is a commie?
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
Let me fill in the blanks for you. It's getting warmer because of anthropogenic carbon emissions. And no matter what you think should be done about it, nothing is going to be done about it because people are not going to agree on a common course of action.
So, better get used to it: it's going to get a lot warmer. But why that may be unpleasant and costly for some, it's not going to be the end of civilization.
...is trending cooler.
Enough cooler, apparently, to more than balance out the relatively local heat we've seen in the US, which is caused by a regional weather situation that's also apparently starting to change.
This report ignores Alaska, the actual statement is "Ten warmest 12-month periods for the contiguous U.S.". So it was the warmest as long as you ignore about 40% of the country, which they also claim Alaska had more snow than any other year since 1955.
If this is what passes for proof of AWG I think I'll choose to ignore it from now on.
Part 1
It just presents the data
"just" makes it sounds like thats a bad thing. That's excellent science. Professional and respectable and my hats off to Dr Masters
Part 2
and does not surmise anything about the causes
Well, I think there's little disagreement that a "large" fraction is human caused, although obviously some small fraction is natural variation. "natural climate" is not a flat horizontal line as some demand.
Part 3
or what should be done about it.
Excellent. Usually part 3 is the establishment of a neo-pol pot regime, or national socialism, or some financial scam to make the rich richer and the poor poorer, or most commonly meaningless feel good frippery that will do absolutely nothing but "raise awareness".
I'm opposed to most of those solutions, along with a HUGE percentage of people who are in, or in my case have been abandoned by, the Republican party. Despite my/our disagreement being with Part 3, we get slandered and our words are twisted around into being deniers of Part 1 or Part 2. Very annoying. I will admit that at least some of us basically troll for fun by denying part 1 and part 2 above, because we hate the "solutions" to part 3.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Wonder what has Fox News to say now?
They have repeatedly claimed that snow implies that Global Warming is a hoax.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=P...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MN7-k-RXvSQ
This is why I don't like the arguers against AGW, they resort to such cheap shots that it's hard to take them seriously. It definitely works on their target demographic though.
Note: I am in no way implying that a hot summer is evidence of global warming.
This space for rent.
Excellent! Converting vast swaths of Canada and Siberia to arable land, combined with increased CO2 in the atmosphere to help vegetable growth, damn!
I'm glad we thought to do this and stave off a mass murderous ice age, which occur with disturbing regularity and short frequency.
Praise humanity!
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Your garden depends on winter to periodically kill diseases and pests.
At least that's what all my environmentalist friends tell me when we have an unusual cold spell.
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
Reports like this are like a tin can on a fence for anti global warming people. At the time I write this, I see dozens of posts saying "and now all the global warming people will take this as proof", and not one global warming person taking it as proof.
For the record, this is not proof of global warming. It is a very extreme regional climate event of the type that climate change theory predicts will become common, but you can't attribute individual events to the long-term trend.
For the record, this means jack diddly in terms of global temperature change, the contiguous US is too small to matter. The past 3 months did not set a global record. However, it has been pretty warm: global temperature this year so far is in the top 25%... just like every other year this century.
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/global/
We've had unusually warm or record warm years for 12 to 15 years. There's evidence of it going back to the early 80s. So far it's following the predicted pattern, there's that nasty science, including the southwest being more mild. A shift in the jet stream was supposed to keep Arizona and Southern California mild compared to the rest of the country. Arizona has had a mild winter and now we are well into May with no 100 degree days. Some would call this proof global warming or climate change is false but it's due to the fact they haven't read what the models predicted. I've heard ridiculous claims that it was supposed to be 10 degrees warmer by now so it's false. I never read a single model that predicted that. The worst scenarios are for a roughly 10 degree increase in some areas in a hundred years, not ten. Three to five was the most likely outcome but we are actually running on the high side of all the models so it's likely to be worse than the best case scenario. Look at the statistics. If some one rolled ten or twelve sixes in a row with dice and could predict 90% of his rolls would that be proof of psychic powers? I think even James Randi would accept that as proof. We're seeing the same consistency in weather model predictions. People have claimed the lack of killer hurricanes as proof that it's all a lie while ignoring the explosion in deadly tornadoes. Also tornadoes are happening earlier and later in the year and they are happening from Maine to Southern California. Two places where they are very rare. Other factors can moderate hurricanes but tornadoes are cause by the mixing of warm and cool air. You have the right conditions you tend to get tornadoes. Usually there's only a portion of the country where conditions are right but now they can happen almost anywhere.
It was a very pleasant year. A gentle winter. Years like this come around time to time. So do nasty winters like the three where we had temperatures of under -25ÂF for weeks on end. Then there was the year where it snowed here every month, including June, July and August. Nasty. These things happen. According to recorded history they've been happening for millennia. According to studies of other things these warming and cooling cycles have been happening for hundreds of millions of years. In fact, traditionally, the Earth has been warmer than it is now. In fact, live and diversity flourished during the warming periods. People are upset because things are changing and they don't like change. Life is change. Change is life.
All of this global warming hysteria is distracting people from the real issue: pollution.
Weather is climate now.
1) Post some random hot button article
2) Wait for people to make hundreds of idiotic and poorly informed ex recto assertions
3) ???
4) Profit!
Sure, and it is a valid point when one has a few weeks of cold or even a few months of cold. And by the same token, a year like this one by itself isn't that useful data. It is when data like this year is part of a larger pattern that it becomes a problem. In this context one has a very hot year by a variety of different metrics and that's on top of a gradual increase in average temperature over the last twenty years. Weather and climate are different, but lots of weather change over the long-term is eventually a sign of climate change.
Maybe, I've been alive too long, but I remember at least one much warmer winter. Not that I want to sound like I'm complaining, as warm winters are better then the other kind.
http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/SolarCycle/
Hmmm.
Matches periodicity, not intensity.
Of course if it's the subatomic particle stream
causing cloud seeding, then sunspot number
may be moot in lieu of intensity.
-AI
For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion
That is *exactly* the case, but we're talking about temperatures at the point where the phase change occurs, not the local weather.
Water evaporates faster the warmer it is - warm air heats the surface and speeds the process. Warmer air can also hold more water as water vapor, which is why 70% humidity in the dead of winter is actually still fairly dry air while 70% humidity during a heat wave is oppressively wet.
Clouds form when a body of that warm, moist air (a warm front) collides with a body of cold air (a cold front) and rapidlly cools down, causing the water vapor to condense around dust particles into microscopic water droplets, which eventually coalesce into drops/flakes/hailstones too large to remain suspended in the turbulent air and fall to the ground as precipitation.
Note though that you need to BOTH wet air and a something to cool it to get precipitation. The wetter the air and the faster the cooling the harder it will rain. If you lack either component, nothing happens. That's why Antarctica rarely gets snow; they've got plenty of cold, but rarely get warm, wet air since it's all cooled off and dumped it's moisture before it reaches them.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Invade Canada! Its obvious that they've stolen our cold air!
It's nice to know there are (last ditch) ways to cool down the climate using Mt. Pinatubo as an example.
"Information in the fifth chapter of the book about global warming proposes that the global climate can be regulated by geo-engineering of a stratoshield[5] based upon patented technology from Nathan Myhrvold's company Intellectual Ventures.[6]"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SuperFreakonomics#Global_warming_section
Nobel Prize Winner Cruzen:
"Professor Crutzen has proposed a method of artificially cooling the global climate by releasing particles of sulphur in the upper atmosphere,along with other particles at lower atmospheric levels, which would reflect sunlight and heat back into space. The controversial proposal is being taken seriously by scientists because Professor Crutzen has a proven track record in atmospheric research. If this artificial cooling method actually were to work, then we would be able to help reverse the effects of the pollution caused by the burning of fossil fuels, buying us time to find a permanent energy replacement. This could be crucial in helping maintain the planets integrity and livability. [9]"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_J._Crutzen#Global_warming
Humans are evil twisted creatures. The sooner we all die off, the sooner the planet might be able to evolve something with some sentience.
but here in north central WV (not in the mountains) we also received a little bit of snow in April, and we haven't had that in I don't know how long. In fact, I believe I had less than 3" of snow all winter despite the previous year experiencing about 3 feet so it doesn't mean anything. So yeah March was warmer than usual but April was also colder than usual. It doesn't mean anything. There still were days when the records weren't reached in March here in WV, records that have stood for decades but we came close to them. So if the record highs were set decades ago then what does that tell you about this year? That's right, it is nothing special. Obviously I'm extrapolating local climate to being global climate, but then again, so did this report when it collected stats for a single country rather than the world. Apparently it was just a bit warmer than it was 10 years ago based on averages and I know the report isn't drawing any conclusions readers will, including me. This data isn't anything out of the ordinary and never will be. There is no general trend as can be easily gathered by the data depicted in the top 10 warmest 12 month period in the US chart in the report.
this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom. -- Lincoln, Gettysburg Address
I live in north-central Arizona and I can tell you for a fact that it's colder this year than last year and last year was colder than the previous five years. Five years ago, the flower garden was planted in late March and I could have breakfast on the back terrace. Last year and this year, it's too cold to plant and too chilly to even have lunch outside. This is B.S. I question the location of the temperature sensors.
Location is critically important. As an alumnus of Boston University, I often wondered about the air-quality sensors positioned in Kenmore Square which is the confluence of five very busy city streets and often had bumper-to-bumper rush hour traffic. Yet the air quality for the surrounding area was extrapolated from this location. Of course it's going to bias the results.
If you're going to use an acronym, proper practice is to spell it out first.
Bring it on. Where I live, winter is six months long and there's only three-month growing season.
Liberty in your lifetime
Most AGWers act like AGW is as proven as gravity. So well proven that skepticism is deemed irrational. Given that I would have to assume that every year would be the hottest year on record. At least on a global scale. Was this assumption on my part of a continuously rising average global temperature every year incorrect? To me, even if global temperatures did rise steadily every year it wouldn't prove AGW. It would merely prove TGW or Temporary Global Warming. But I have to admit I am surprised at the implication that every year is not hotter than the one before. Surely there must be an obvious trend like that or people wouldn't be so convinced of the reality of AGW.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
Yes, it was a record setting warm winter in the contiguous 48 states... but it was an extremely cold winter in Alaska (see ABC news story for example) and in parts of the former Soviet Union.
If somebody wanted to select just those parts of the global temperature data for this past winter, he could honestly write a story with a bold headline shrieking about record cold weather and then warning about the potential nightmare of a new ice age, lamentations about man's impact of the planet, etc. all designed to manipulate the public (the story would be honest about the data subset, but would obviously be misleading and manipulative in the larger sense). The point is that one should always be wary of anybody on any side of an argument when they run with a data subset whose boundaries are political lines on a map rather than some boundary that isolates the data within the boundary from affecting or being affected by things outside the boundary.
"Data" is only valid/important/relevant when it is not manipulated, adjusted, pre-selected, etc.
I think we are in the interesting part of Climate change right now. Energy levels (not temperature) have increased dramatically in a rather short time and the climate is trying to find a place for all that extra energy now. So the oceans are cycling rapidly (Nina/Nino phases), precipitation levels etc are changing. In essence we're cycling rapidly between extremes. Anecdotally in Utah, last year we had the largest snows on record, and this year is probably the driest on record. For my entire childhood (I'm nearly 40) these cycles were nearly a decade long now they are a cycling in a year.
This will probably continue for a decade or three as the system tries to stabilize the energy levels and sink some of the temperature increase into the oceans, etc. The models aren't perfect and the deniers point to that, but the reality is we simply don't know how the climate will stabilize these energy levels, we can only make predictions based on previous climates we have rudimentary knowledge of. I'll likely be dead long before the worst of climate change hits (major shifts in breadbasket areas), but I know I'm going to live during the most erratic climate change this world's ever seen.
The scariest part to me is how to plan for the future because there is one thing the models do predict and that's the bad weather (the kind that kills people) is going to increase dramatically. I was hoping the SW would get wetter as the models predict but it appears, at least during my lifetime, things are just going to get more erratic making it very difficult to predict and manage scarce water resources.
The funniest part about Climate Change and the Deniers is that the government is planning for it. The military and defense planners and many others are planning for summers where the Arctic passage that's never existed becomes a reality. And before people say this is because of Obama I'll point out this planning started under GW Bush. Those in the know and with power and influence are causing our government to react like Climate change is not only a reality but something that's very important strategically including how to get to all that oil that's in the arctic that no one ever thought would be accessible. This includes a certain pair of brothers that are highly invested in carbon based energy and fund much if not all of the deniers making plans to drill and tap that oil when the ice melts permanently.
It's sad but I don't think the US will change course on climate change until it's far to late to matter. I'd like to see the construction of 1000 nuclear reactors in the US and a shutdown of most of the coal power plants along with increased gas prices that drive the adoption of electric vehicles. The gas will likely happen on it's own anyway but coal won't stop without outside forces because the US has so much of it.
According to this source "The longest continuous temperature record is the Hadley Centre's Central England Temperature series. It starts around 1850." considering that is only 160 years it and comparing it to the time man have been on earth that would be equivalent to a person saying "this is the hottest I have been in the last few milliseconds. Perhaps is the time frame was larger I could believe it was an issue.
It was warmer duing medeval and roman times and many times prior to that.
The Earth's climate changes all the time. It gets warmer and it gets cooler. Looking at the historical records of temperatures around the world - ice layers is usually how that is done and comparing that to CO2 levels does not show a correlation - at least not in history. Solar output is correlated to world temperatures much more than CO2 levels.
To me, that doesn't mean that recent increased CO2 levels are or are not causing increased temperatures, just that it hasn't been that way in the last 200 million years. It doesn't take much to find this raw data at .gov websites from ice cores taken in Greenland, Iceland, Anartica, Chile, Switzerland, China, and New Zealand.
I can make a chart to show anything you want with this data, being selective on what I show, but if you put the raw data together and create the graph yourself, you'll might better understand that correlation and causation are not the same thing.
At first I was thinking "Great, now denialists will be even more embarrassed about using graphs that only go from 2000 (an unusually warm year) to 2008 (an unusually cool year) to show that the Earth is cooling." Then I realized that in a few years there will be another unusually cool year and they will just start their graphs at 2011 and end on that year.
I'll likely be dead long before the worst of climate change hits (major shifts in breadbasket areas), but I know I'm going to live during the most erratic climate change this world's ever seen.
Guess you didn't follow what happened to the wheat crop this year. Guess what? The breadbasket area has been hit hard already. We're further along on this progress than you think.
I'd like to see the construction of 1000 nuclear reactors in the US and a shutdown of most of the coal power plants along with increased gas prices that drive the adoption of electric vehicles.
I'd like to see us start trying to catch up on the solar production we fucked off on since the 1970s, when a panel could be expected to have most of its output for twenty years, yet repaid the energy cost of production in seven. Today a thin-film panel can be expected to last about fifteen years, and it pays off the energy cost of its production in three. I'm tired of hearing about how solar can't fill our needs when we're not even using it to fill the needs we can fill with it now. And I want to see us use a lot less energy; we piss away a lot of energy needlessly at pretty much all levels of society.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
That is not science. That is manipulation of statistics.
I am in all agreement that AGW is real, but I want to compare apples to apples. We are talking Global Warming here. So what was the data for the globe during this time frame?
but here its still frosting in may(PNW). Every time its clear at night it almost freezes again. last summer didn't have a day over 95. so its 'cool' to think that the whole world is warming, but what i see with my own eyes suggests differently. but we'll get that carbon tax implemented one way or the other... :-)
I am from the snowiest place in Alaska. In a single month this year we received over 300 inches. Snow is always associated with warm, low-pressure systems. In Alaska, during winter, you can pretty much assume that any moisture present in the air is not there due to local evaporation. So it's a trivial conclusion that more snow in Alaska is caused by more evaporation in warmer parts of the world.
HOWEVER
It makes no sense to evaluate snowfall differently from other types of precipitation. If all of the rain this winter had fallen as snow, like it usually does, and as it does in the mountainous regions, we would have set all-time records for snowfall in a single season.
As another poster has noted, average annual temperatures in Alaska have risen by about six degrees F. That's more than enough to turn snow into rain. It's enough to melt glaciers on a scale that staggers belief. We have glacier lookouts built, where tourists could walk fifty feet and touch a glacier, except that in the 15-20 years since it was constructed, the glacier has retreated to the point where it is viewable only by strong eyes or a telescope. Nor is this an isolated incident: icefield mass and density has been dropping almost universally across the region, and I mean dropping like a rock. You can think of this as being something like the Great Lakes evaporating over the same time period; there's a stupendous amount of water involved.
So, as someone whose life has been affected by Global Warming to a greater degree than all but a few, may I offer you a very personal "Fuck you." It's bad enough to have assholes fucking up your home, without active opposition to the idea that it's even happening.
1999?
The earth is over 4.5 billion years old, I am sure there were a few warmer days at some point in time.
Anyways I have absolutely no worries about the Earth. Humans are not going to destroy the planet, the Earth existed long before we arrived, and it will last long after we are gone.
Global warming is a social/economical issue, period. Yes some animal species are going to go extinct, but what many don't realize is that new ones emerge all the time too. But species extinction is nothing new only that Greenpeace and Peta exist now to make us feel guilty because some rare form of spotted slug couldn't handle a .1 degree change in temperature of some puddle in the middle of the Andes or something, or some cute species like the lazy Panda evolved to only eat one form of inefficient food source that Ikea decided makes a good chopping board.
The problem with our current society is that a few thousand years ago if an area of the world became uninhabitable, people moved. Today people are locked by regional and political borders so as their lakes and rivers dry up, crops fail, or their sea levels rise, instead of doing something sensible like migrate they are forced to have to stay because governments will not tolerate mass exodus or emigration.
Global warming is not an ecological disaster, period. The ice caps melted, and the ice caps grew and expanded over and over and over again. The earth has recovered from FAR worst disasters then a rise in CO2 levels, and there are scientific studies that have shown the earth can combat a rise in CO2 (i.e. plant life thrives off of CO2 and suck up all the CO2).
We have to stop treating this like some ecological disaster and stop feeling guilty just because we are initiated with scenes of polar bears on floating chunks of ice from the WWF. We are not going to STOP global warming, period. The biggest factor overlooked in Global Warming is that the sun's solar output is nearing its peak levels and does so every few thousand years or so. The sun is far more powerful then people give it credit for, and while CO2 might factor into trapping a little of that energy against the earth, ultimately the sun is what is causing the warming trend.
Global warming is an artificial "disaster" caused by politics.
Instead of shoving Green environmentalism down everyone's throats the world's governments should start forming contingency plans to start accepting global warming and start dealing with the aftermath. How will the world handle mass exodus and transplanting large population centers? You driving a Hybrid or composting is not going to stop some Pacific Rim family from being swept out to sea because of an increase in Tsunamis and Cyclones. Sorry, thinking otherwise makes you incredibly vapid and naive, pretty much a smug douche in every aspect.
That is the crux of why people are all about environmentalism these days. Environmentalism is easy. Its easy to lecture reducing your carbon footprint. Its easy to assume we have some control over environmental change. Its easy to buy into yippie concepts like carbon offset taxes and LED lighting. Its easy to point fingers and blame. An entire economic market has arisen to make it easier for people to feel less guilty about Global warming by spending money.
By happenstance the combination of the invention of social networking, CO2 levels and high solar output have combined into the perfect storm of slander and finger pointing that is hiding the obvious truth, its going to get a lot worse before it gets any better. So lets stop focusing on the "marketing" of environmentalism and start thinking about how to DEAL with global warming.
Whether we caused it, or the Earth was already in the process of doing so, Global Warming is HERE. Its not coming, its not irreversible, and its not going to stop because of clever marketing or the incessant guilt driven by smug and futile non-profits.
How we deal with it is more important then why it happened. What do we do NEXT? I would like to know, but its just easier not to think about it and instead bicker and lay blame.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
The above was implying that trends should be completely ignored in systems where there is some noise (which is what I was trying to say above in the portion you quoted). There's no point trying to dignify it with specifics such as those you've given that the above poster would never have thought of. I don't think he's even using the same definition of chaos, he's only trying a petty little trick to suggest that all of the data is worthless.
Now do you see where he is coming from? There is no point trying to second guess and dignify his response when I doubt he will respect or agree with any mathematics that you bring to the table.
Wow. Someone's real mad I stepped on his holy cow.
I stand by that statement btw. The scientific method is hypothesis -> repeatable experiments -> theory. Ever since physics experiments started costing millions or billions it is very fair to say that.
But I guess for you science is just a different religion. With no buts and ifs and essentially no explanations, just a number of statements one must be punished for disobeying. And that you do such a thing immediately after making an obviously wrong statement is telling. I wonder if someone like you actually pretends he's helping science move ahead ?