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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!
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.
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.
"Well, I think there's little disagreement that a "large" fraction is human caused, although obviously some small fraction is natural variation."
I don't know whether this is disingenuous or you just don't understand.
The whole reason there even exists controversy about this in the first place, is that the signal is very small in relation to the noise: any human-caused differences are so small in relation to the natural variations that it has been nearly impossible to detect (if, indeed, it has actually been detected).
"some small fraction is natural..." is not the real situation at all. The problem is the opposite: the vast majority of it is natural. Any scientist, even the staunchest AGW supporter, will admit that if he/she has any pretension to honesty at all.
Do you have a link for that somewhere? I will have to listen to some folks in some other forums tooting their horn as they jump up and down in joy over this news, and I'd like to temper their excitement.
Again how is more snow show that the warming trend is wrong? Snow is a product of moisture in the atmosphere not the temperature (unless it rises above say around 38 degrees). I would argue that more moisture is a product of warmer temperatures due to evaporation.
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
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/
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.
thank you for being an exhibit of enviro-nazis being what they at heart are: mankind haters.
That said, it's just silly to infer that extra snow means the globe isn't warming.
Indeed. In the process of joining conclusions backwards to supporting evidence, may denialists indeed use such an argument. The smart ones move onto smarter arguments, but nothing that hasn't already been definitively answered for someone willing to look.
Political reasoning is abhorrently dishonest, even in really smart people. Curiously enough, the mind prevents us from seeing just how dishonest we are being with ourselves. We really could solve our problems with politics didn't involve so much head-in-ass time.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
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.
Ahhhh yes....
Let's compare all those highly-accurate satellite temperature measurements with the satellite data from only 200 years ago when Ben Franklin lofted the first earth observing satellite.... oh, wait, ....nope.... I guess we have no such data. Oh, alright, lets use the highly-calibrated thermometer data from way back 200 years ago when some sea captain measured the temperature somewhere (plus or minus 200 miles from a point in the mid-Atlantic) using his very accurate mercury thermometer that was carefully calibrated to the NIST standards.... oh, wait, nope.... no such traceable calibration and the candle-light made reading that thermometer within 1/10th of a degree relative to a scratch in the brass frame a bit tough.... not to mention that the guy was tired and did not see any reason to worry too much about being too precise...
That was not working too well... let's use the hyper-accurate temperature measuring device all Americans prefer to use when they can afford it: tree rings. Yes, a thermometer from 200 years ago has a few calibration issues and the satellites were not very good 200 years ago, but everybody who believes in science knows that a tree ring or some muck from the bottom of a river is accurate to within 1% of a degree! Why, I for one, chop down a tree and check the tree rings for every morning....why bother with a thermometer when an axe and a precise temperature tree are available?
All the hype about "record" and "all-time" high or low temp data is manipulative and speculative. There were no humans (not scientists, nor even amateurs) taking and recording temperature data on 80% of the North American continent before 300 years ago, and the planet is at least 6000 years old (Grin) so we are statistically blind to most of the temperatures for world history. If you plug-in the actual age of the Earth, you know that we know, with calibrated precision, next to nothing about the long-term "global temperature". Comparing data from highly-accurate, calibrated and traceable, modern scientific instruments to creative and imaginative speculation about past temperatures is extremely dishonest and anti-science, but a great way to write a paper and get more taxpayer funds for another year of "research", which beats the hell out of flipping burgers
I'm no luddite... I used to design and build scientific instruments and now work in aerospace, but I am outraged but the so-called scientific climate studies that are done by people who have (and I will be charitable here) apparently forgotten some of the most-basic rules of science in order to score political points or stay popular with their peers. Rules like:
1. Different data sets measured two different ways with two different types of instrument cannot be honestly compared without a common calibration.
2. Data collected with two identical instruments still cannot be compared if one of them lacks traceable calibration
3. You can never gain absolute precision by using additional imprecise data. (in other words: if you sum-average or in other ways lump-together a bunch of data that is accurate to 1 percent, you may get a more-precise idea of what your imprecise measuring device thought it saw, but you have absolutely not obtained a better-than 1 percent measurement of what was actually there... and such data manglng actually reduces absolute precision)
They used to teach this stuff in first-year science classes several decades ago...
"Yes, we know WUWT fans such as yourself place a low value on "understanding the actual science", so much so that you haven't even bothered to link to the graph your banging on about. I can't prove you're an astroturfer, but I see this particular debating tactic as inconclusive evidence for the affirmative."
I am not a "fan" of any site, pro or con. And you can take your personal remarks and stuff them. Further, I wasn't commenting about any particular graph, but in fact the majority of them in regard to AGW... if they contain any error margin information at all. And if you really know much of anything about AGW, then you already know this. I don't see you trying to refute it. You'd rather cast aspersions on my personally. But then, we already knew that.
"I can't prove you're an astroturfer, but I see this particular debating tactic as inconclusive evidence for the affirmative."
You can't prove I'm an astroturfer because I'm not an astroturfer. It doesn't get any simpler than that.
And I can't prove you're a vindictive asshole with an axe to grind in regard to me, either. But then, I really don't need to. I'll let others decide just how obvious that is.