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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.
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.
Nobody presented it as proof of AWG. It says so in the goddamned summary.
Wait, AWG? I don't think the American Wire Gauge is in dispute here.
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?
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.
Nobody presented it as proof of AWG. It says so in the goddamned summary.
Wait, AWG? I don't think the American Wire Gauge is in dispute here.
It's a pain in the fucking ass. Now we've got AWG and metric cable types. I'm supposed to be able to find a substitute for a discontinued cable, specs in AWG, but replacements in metric, and every. single. fucking. time. I have to work out the characteristics because the sizes aren't exactly the same.
"But Beardo, why not just use the next biggest size and leave the conversion to the philosophers?"
Because weight is a critical factor, that's why.
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ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
More snow does not mean cooler temps. More snow means more moisture in the air.
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
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/
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.
...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.
2011 was the ninth warmest year on record despite the cooling influences of La Nina. What period are you taking your trend off? The last three-four years?
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.
Two, over 80% of Alaskans believe climate change is happening, and over 55% believe it's human caused. I'm pretty sure those are both the highest for any "red" state. Why? We've warmed 3.0 degrees (C) in the last 50 years, which is more than a little insane. We (not me personally, I've only been here a few years) have watched it happen. Yes, this year, was a little bit below normal, mostly driven by interior regions (Fairbanks), while the coast, especially the north coast, was still above normal.
But don't worry, I'm sure they'll be able to remove the "contiguous" qualifier soon enough. For instance, every day in April, save one, was above-normal. But I'm sure that won't change what you believe either.
Those who fail to understand communication protocols, are doomed to repeat them over port 80.
Do you have data to back this claim up? It is true that Europe had a cold snap http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_European_cold_wave where some countries, including France and Italy reported record low temperatures. But even given that, global temperature average on both land and air for February http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/global/2012/2/were slightly above average and were very high for March http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/global/2012/3 Since February was the height of the cold snap in Europe, and the global temperatures were still high, I'm not sure where you are getting your estimate.
So I am wrong, care to educate me, o' weather scientist. Are you saying moisture density in the air is not increased by heat? And why would it have to be colder for more snow. I find that snow is more likely to fall closer to the freezing point, in fact the temperature generally rises when it snows.
Basically what I am saying is it can get too cold to snow (well not really but the probability the conditions for snow are vastly reduced), below 0F you really don't get much precipitation. Snow requires a few things to occur before you see those white flakes. 1 Moisture saturation, the more moisture in the air means the higher probability of snow, 2. Temperature, must allow the ice crystals to stay frozen on their way down, 3 a temperature difference between the lower atmosphere and the area where snow develops. On really cold days there is not enough heat to drive the saturated air to the very cold layers of the atmosphere where snow forms
Oh wait you said I was wrong? Hmm guess not.
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
Except snow doesn't form down here, it forms high up in the atmosphere, to get that water up there you have to have heat to drive the saturated air up. Notice it snows far heavier on the warmer winter days. Once the temp drops well below freezing the chances of snow are greatly reduced.
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
Ok read your article. It seems the primary reason for the increased ice in the Bering sea as compared the rest of the arctic, which has seen a decline in sea ice coverage, was due to winds blowing the ice down to the Bering strait where it backed up until the ice wall finally collapsed and the ice then flowed into the Bering sea while the low temperatures helped keep it frozen.
Not sure what point you are trying to make with it, as it even mentions the record highs in the continental US.
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
Have you lived anywhere cold? Every year it snows the most when the high is around 20 degrees or so. The cold cold cold days are clear and windy.
FFS, it's a joke. I dare you to come up with something about how AWG (cables) can be controversial.
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ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
How is it inconvenient for the pro-science group? The increased snowfall (and the warmth of the contiguous states) has a known cause - the change in the jet stream. And the change in the jet stream has a known cause - a change in the arctic oscillation. And climate theory indicates that one of the things that happens when you lose the summer arctic ice cover is that the arctic oscillation changes. And what has been causing the summer arctic ice cover to disappear? Global warming. So, while this doesn't say that global warming caused the increased snow in Alaska as well as the warm winter in the contiguous US, it would be astoundingly incorrect to call this an "inconvenient fact".
What? Why do you think it matters when the period begins?
Suppose the headline read "Climate scientists find that in the continental U.S. that 137 of the last 138 samples from a rolling 12 month average were cooler than the period Nov 1999 to Oct 2000"
Now, why do you think that it doesnt matter? Seriously... why?
"His name was James Damore."
I also heard AWG makes a much better whooshing sound than metric cables when you swing them around over your head.
9th warmest. not the warmest. So warmest period for a small region like the continental US not really significant. also, La Nina moves heat around, doesn't make it vanish.
thank you for being an exhibit of enviro-nazis being what they at heart are: mankind haters.
Many, many fake skeptics have questioned the positioning of the sensors. In fact, some have put together a study of that and the data they found was that there was a problem with the sensors - there was a slight bias to underreport the warming. It wasn't for all the sensors and it wasn't a large amount, but it showed that the sensors did not make things seem warmer than they really are. In addition, a number of studies have shown that the positioning of the sensors isn't really affecting the trends. In fact, remove all the urban sensors you dislike and you get pretty much the same results.
Your anecdotal comment about north-central Arizona is just that - anecdotal. I'm in central New Mexico and I can tell you it was warmer here this winter. My dad in central Illinois was complaining about the lack of a real winter this year. All anecdotal - that's why scientists actually measure these things and look at large areas - to remove personal biases and look at overall climate/weather rather than local climate/weather.
The other problem with your calling B.S. is that there was a measured change in the jet stream last winter that is known to have caused the warming. This is an actual fact and, really, not all that hard to understand. Whether this was due to climate change or just an odd weather system is irrelevant since it actually happened.
Bring it on. Where I live, winter is six months long and there's only three-month growing season.
Liberty in your lifetime
Every year it snows the most when the high is around 20 degrees or so. The cold cold cold days are clear and windy.
Being from Wisconsin, I have to agree that the warmer winters tend to have the most snow. Cold winters tend to have the most accumulation while warmer winters tend to have the most precipitation. Once you get below 10f, the chance of snow drops dramatically. Below 0f will give you a very clear sky and snow almost never falls when the temp is below 0f.
The biggest snow storms tend to happen around 30f-34f.
Actually, La Nina years do depress the global atmosphere average temperature by pushing heat down into the ocean. El Nino years do the opposite, they pull heat up from the oceans and increase global average temperature. The effect is small (about 0.04C for each) but when El Nino and La Nina conditions are taken into account, it creates a much clearer picture of the earth's warming trends.
Fanatically anti-fanatical
An addendum to that. The global temperature in 2011 was the warmest ever for a La Nina year.
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...
As your link says, we have ice-core data going back up to about 750,000 years. This gives CO2 and temperature readings for the last 8 ice ages. Over this period CO2 has varied between about 180 and 300 ppm.
Currently, CO2 is at about 390 ppm, significantly higher than at any point in at least the last 750,000 years. Since CO2 drives temperature, we can expect global temperatures to rise to higher than at any point in the last 750,000 years.
You are a luddite when it comes to climate science. Or science in general since your arguments wouldn't even stand up to the most basic scrutiny of a peer-review.
How about you take your clearly superior intelligence and read up on the subject. You can start with the IPCC report which explains the research very well in laymen's terms. After that, you can read the thousands of referenced scientific papers on the subject.
Or if that's too much, you could go ahead and write a paper without doing any background research that explains the current observations without using AGW. Submit it and win a Nobel (assuming your paper doesn't get absolutely destroyed for the child-like logic you use here). That's a cool million for you right there for the taking. Easy as pie.
Global warming isn't some new theory someone pulled out of their ass a couple years ago. It's over 120 years old. Scientists have been predicting a warming world due to increases in greenhouse gases since before the computer was invented. So if you can come up with a plausible theory that explains how all the current science was built on nonsense you'd be the scientific equivalent of Einstein.
~X~
Your assumption would be incorrect. Natural variability means that short term temperature variations occur. A true measure of the temperature of the Earth would look not only at atmospheric temperatures but ocean temperatures as well (and even land temperatures). On average about 90% of the warming that occurs each year goes into the oceans. But cycles such as El Nino/La Nina cause large transfers of energy between the oceans and the atmosphere so in the short term the atmosphere can cool. A recent statistical analysis found that it takes 17 years of temperature records to distinguish the signal of the global warming trend from the short term noise of natural variability. So it's not realistic to expect temperatures to monotonically increase year after year. It's only examination of the longer term records that will give you the true trend in temperature.
True skepticism is not irrational. For example Richard Mueller of the BEST study was skeptical of the existing temperature analyses (CRU, GISS, NOAA) until he got the results from his work which matched the others well. He was willing to be convinced by the evidence. What's irrational is using the same old arguments time and time again which have been thoroughly debunked or are just unscientific to begin with. What's irrational is to be unwilling to be convinced by the evidence because it doesn't fit your worldview.
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.
Here's a nice movie from the NASA CO2 satellite:
http://airs.jpl.nasa.gov/news_archive/2010-03-30-CO2-Movie/
You can see that global CO2 levels rise fairly evenly, with Antarctica only lagging the Northern Hemisphere by a few years. Over the time scales involved in the ice cores this lag would be invisible. Also note the scale: it's 360 to 390 ppm, so although the colours look dramatic, the differences being shown are mostly less than 10% of the total and roughly equal to the annual variation.