The Top Weather/Climate Events of 2015 (wunderground.com)

Layzej writes: With only a few stations left to report, 2015 is virtually certain to beat 2014's record as the planet's warmest year since record keeping began in 1880. The new record was caused by the long-term warming of the planet due to human-caused emissions of heat-trapping gases like carbon dioxide, combined with a extra bump in temperature due to the strongest El Niño event ever recorded in the Eastern Pacific. Record warm ocean temperatures in the tropics in 2015 led to a global coral bleaching event, which is expected to cause a loss of 10 — 20% of all coral worldwide. Weather Underground recounts several other records that accompanied the heat including the most intense hurricane ever observed in the Western Hemisphere, the ongoing agricultural fires in Indonesia — the most expensive disaster in Indonesia's history estimated at $16 billion in damages, flooding in America and India, and record central pacific hurricane activity.

Comments

Re: So...a year with fewer hurricanes = no warming

[Anonymous Coward]

There's that, and then every other prediction in the movie turning out to also be a farcical lie.

Re:Not according to satellites

[Cyberax]

Satellite data put it at least in the top 3 years. Oh, and there's no "hiatus" any more.

Re:So...a year with fewer hurricanes = no warming?

[sjames]

So you take the most powerful hurricane ever to be evidence AGAINST a prediction of super hurricanes?

Re:What was "Adjusted" this year?

[Old97]

Stations sample at a point. Adding more stations is adding more sample points. The distribution of the locations of the stations is no longer the same and that skews the sample, i.e. it's representation of the entire planet is different so you have to change the weightings so you aren't giving more weight to areas that have a different station density.

Re:Does anyone have a list of the hottest years?

[hey!]

Here's the data.

If you look through the data you'll see these are the ten coldest years after 1849, coolest first:
      1911, 1909, 1904, 1908, 1862, 1910, 1903, 1864, 1917, 1893.

These are the ten hottest years prior to 2015, hottest first:
    2014, **2010, *2005, ***/++1998, **2003, *2006, **2009, **2002, *2007, 2013.

I've also noted El Niño years with stars and La Niña with plusses:
* = weak El Niño year
** = moderate El Niño year
***/++ = 1998 started as a very strong El Niño and ended as a moderate La Niña.

2015 is an El Niño year (which tend to be hot), but is not in this dataset yet. Note that 8/10 of the top 10 years have an El Niño component, except 2013 and 2014, which were "ordinary" but very warm years.

I didn't note the ENSO (El Niño / Southern oscillation) status for the coldest years, because all ten of the coldest years are before 1912 and there is no reliable ENSO data for before 1950 so far as I know. However it's a safe bet that many of these were La Niñas, which tend to be colder than average. The last colder-than-average year was 1985, which was a La Niña; all six La Niña years since have been warmer than the 1850-2014 average. The last "ordinary" (non-ENSO) year that was colder than average was 1970.

Here is the average temperature anomaly by decade:
Decade Anomaly
1850 -0.3174
1860 -0.3296
1870 -0.2548
1880 -0.3
1890 -0.3623
1900 -0.4099
1918 -0.2494
1930 -0.1182
1940 -0.0036
1950 -0.061
1960 -0.0535
1970 -0.0769
1980 +0.0943
1990 +0.274
2000 +0.4622
2010 +0.4998 // partial, obviously

Note that all the decades up to the 70s are colder than the "average" year because "average" is dominated by the acceleration of warming from the 90s to present.

I hope this helps.

Here is the adjustment

[Geoffrey.landis]

Here is the "adjustment" you're referring to:
http://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-...

The recent correction is the difference between the black line and the red line. The temperature rise between 1959 and 2014 is about 0.9C. The adjustment, in the last two years, is just barely large enough to see, about 0.05C. Over the full period analyzed, the new global analysis changed the observed rate of warming from 0.065C/decade to 0.068C/decade, less than the noise.

Really, I need to point out that analyzing data sets is what science does. But, if you actually look at the data, even if you throw out the new corrections entirely, it doesn't make a difference. The corrections didn't change whether warming exists or not.

That image is from this article: http://arstechnica.com/science...
For reference, here is the paper with the adjustments explained: http://www.sciencemag.org/cont...
(Karl, et al., "Possible artifacts of data biases in the recent global surface warming hiatus," Science Vol. 348 no. 6242, 26 June 2015: pp. 1469-1472
DOI: 10.1126/science.aaa5632)