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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."
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...
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.
Maybe we'll have five days of spring this year!
Way ahead of you. Since 1996 I haven't even eaten veggies.
"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.
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.
Unless you have a disease and pest garden
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/
...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.
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.
I am personally rather indifferent to the whole GW/AGW affair. That said, it's just silly to infer that extra snow means the globe isn't warming. For example, consider: if 100 billion tons of ice melts at the poles, and global snow levels then increase, in winter, when was the water cooler: 1) when it spent all year round being ice, or 2) when it spends 4 months a year as ice? If you guessed #1, you'd be right.
Of course, I can ask the question a different way, and just make you mental. If the globe is warming, and the average temperature goes up, would it be possible for the increased water vapor as it traveled across the poles to actually generate an expanding ice sheet? If you agreed that it was possible, you'd be right.
Now the part that will make you mental is that these two questions imply answers that could be superficially viewed as contradictory. I'm fun at a party, eh?
C//
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.
How are they not ?
Random deviations in a chaotic system (like weather) are not bound to any duration. All you know is that random deviations have a finite duration, it can be arbitrarily long (including effectively infinite, meaning until the end of the earth).
It is saddening that people are even arguing this. You don't grasp the complexity of the problem. The reason we believe global warming occurs is that many different readings -not all- point in the same direction. All measurements, regardless of their duration are subject to random deviations, which by definition have random durations. Some probably have durations measured in millions of years.
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...
"Forget what's posted on blogs and social sites, go browse the wealth of material provided by the IPCC, or NAS, or the Royal society, or CSIRO, or NASA, or NOAA, or WMO or any other reputable and independent scientific institution, even the WP page on AGW is informative for this purpose."
Or not.
Before we go about talking about how "independent" these sources are, we should look a little closer at the facts. And among those facts, you will find that the majority of research papers supporting the AGW concept have shared either data or methodology with the folks at Hadley Centre and CRU. And yes, that includes NASA, and NOAA, and very definitely the IPCC.
The fact is that the "climate science" community is very small, close, and insular. You will find that most researchers have either co-authored papers, or referenced each others' papers in their own papers. It is a very incestuous field.
In any case, one must be careful about willy-nilly tossing about words like "independent". Due to its small size, globally climate science researchers are scarcely independent at all, compared to most disciplines.