The Last Three Months Were the Hottest Quarter On Record

New submitter NatasRevol (731260) writes The last three months were collectively the warmest ever experienced since record-keeping began in the late 1800s. From the article: "Taken as a whole, the just-finished three-month period was about 0.68 degrees Celsius (1.22 degrees Fahrenheit) above the 20th-century average. That may not sound like much, but the added warmth has been enough to provide a nudge to a litany of weather and climate events worldwide. Arctic sea ice is trending near record lows for this time of year, abnormally warm ocean water helped spawn the earliest hurricane ever recorded to make landfall in North Carolina, and a rash of heat waves have plagued cities from India to California to the Middle East." Also, it puts to bed the supposed 'fact' that there's been a pause in temperature increase the last 17 years. Raw data shows it's still increasing. bizwriter also wrote in with some climate related news: A new report from libertarian think tank Heartland Institute claims that new government data debunks the concept of global climate change. However, an examination of the full data and some critical consideration shows that the organization, whether unintentionally or deliberately, has inaccurately characterized and misrepresented the information and what it shows. The Heartland Institute skews the data by taking two points and ignoring all of the data in between, kind of like grabbing two zero points from sin(x) and claiming you're looking at a steady state function.

Comments

Re: The Heartland Institute

[Glock27]

So, you like them because they're untainted by facts? Good point. No, great point, wouldn't want to be led astray by facts.

Actually the summary is fairly untainted by facts. For instance:

Arctic sea ice is trending near record lows for this time of year, abnormally warm ocean water helped spawn the earliest hurricane ever recorded to make landfall in North Carolina, and a rash of heat waves have plagued cities from India to California to the Middle East.

Yikes, that all sounds alarming right?

Except...

1) Arctic sea ice is actually currently above last year's level, which was already a rebound of over 25 million square km more than the previous year at the minimum extents.

2) The ocean waters in the North Atlantic hurricane region are right around average for this time of year, by no means "abnormally warm".

3) "Rashes of heat waves plague" various places every summer, and always have. NOAA recently reinstated 1934 as the hottest year in the US on record.

The article attacking the Heartland data does have a minor point, but it is absolutely true that temperatures have been essentially flat for around 17 years, while CO2 has been at the highest levels in history. There have been quite a few peer reviewed papers trying to explain this pause, so it's clearly a real phenomena. We'll see if it continues, the El Nino this year is now expected to be a fairly minor event.

At this time, the forecasters anticipate El Niño will peak at weak-to-moderate strength during the late fall and early winter (3-month values of the Niño-3.4 index between 0.5oC and 1.4oC).

Re:The GISS adjusted^^^ dataset

[Rei]

The raw data shows the same warming trend. And the adjustments are there for a good reason - otherwise the deniers would be complaining even more about the heat island effect and siting / instrumentation problems than they even are today (oh, and to head people off, the warming trend gets even stronger when you outright remove the "bad", "artificially hot" meteorological stations the deniers complain about). And all of the adjustments are cross-checked by a variety of peer-reviewed verification methods. For example, the heat island effect on stations is (among other methods) cross-checked by comparing windy days with still days, as wind greatly reduces the heat island effect.

In short, to anyone who thinks they've got some killer reason why the adjustments are wrong, simply write a paper, go through peer-review like everyone else has to do, and viola, you're part of the actual scientific debate and I'll take you seriously. Until then...