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

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

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

>> the most intense hurricane ever observed in the Western Hemisphere...and record central pacific hurricane activity.

I believe the biggest knock on Gore's "Inconvenient Truth" movie was the prediction of lots of new super-hurricanes that hasn't come true, especially not in recent years. I'd be careful trying to link the two again...

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

[KenDiPietro]

I'm kinda sick of fuck-sticks who accept all (so called) science as fact w/o question then brow beat those who may be a little more cautious

No shit! Can you imagine how bad the world be if every single uneducated prick wasn't seen as being as capable of understanding incredibly complex issues on equal footing as those who have studied these issues for decades? I mean, let's face it, your opinion should be every bit as valid as these experts because we all know your gut feeling is without question far more valuable than mountains of accumulated data.

By the way, should you be stricken with cancer, you might shun those very same scientists and make up your own cure based on your beliefs. I'm sure the rest of us here would broadly support your efforts.

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

[Anonymous Coward]

Every one of the warmest years on record has occurred in the last 20 years. Currently, virtually every year is either "warmest year on record" or "almost the warmest year on record." There hasn't been a candidate for "coldest year on record" in living memory. It's unlikely anyone currently alive will see another one because Earth's mean surface temperature has risen a full degree C since 1917 (the most recent of the 10 coldest years on record), which is about 10 times the typical annual variability.

Continued massive CO2 emissions are continuing to acidify the upper layers of the ocean and, if not abated, threaten to implode the foundation of the oceanic food chain by killing off diatoms and reducing their growth rates. Simultaneously (and ironically), improved emission controls for fossil fuels have greatly *reduced* aerosol emissions, increasing earth's effective insolation (or rather, returning it nearer to pre-industrial levels) at the same time heat trapping is getting more efficient.

The gulf stream is decelerating due to all the meltwater pouring into the north atlantic.

Virtually every glacier in the world is in full-on retreat.

Ice chunks the size of small US states have broken off of Antarctica in the last few years.

Rising surface temperatures in the subarctic are melting permafrost, permitting decay (with associated methane release) and destabilizing shallow methane calthrate deposits of unknown but possibly substantial extent.

But don't panic, there's no reason at all to worry. There are absolutely no signs that our activities are destabilizing things or threatening to set off/accelerate a potentially catastrophic nonlinear chain reaction. Climate change and its negative effects are a liberal conspiracy. Just like physics, chemistry, biology, record keeping and computer modelling. Keep calm and keep strip-mining earth's resources!

The next 100 years are going to be... "interesting."

Re:Not according to satellites

[dywolf]

2015 is virtually certain to beat 2014's record as the planet's warmest year since record keeping began in 1880

Not according to satellite data cherry picked and misrepresented by well known serial climate liar Roy Spencer

FTFY.
Plus, unless you just have no clue how to read a chart, the chart at your link clearly does show warming.
which is probably the rest of the climate science community stopped taking Roy Spencer seriously a long time ago.

For more his greatest hits, check out:
https://www.skepticalscience.c...
http://thinkprogress.org/clima...

Re:Not according to satellites

[russotto]

Oh my god, there was a hiatus in the warming, whatever shall we do?

Well, satellite temperatures don't show everything, we'll blame it on that.

But wait, surface temperatures show a hiatus too!

Oh, we'll just carefully examine all the datasets for signs of a systemic error in favor of cooling, and correct for each of those errors until the hiatus goes away.

MISSION ACCOMPLISHED.

(Note that the procedure described produces invalid results even if all the systemic errors in favor of cooling actually exist and are correctly accounted for)

Re:What was "Adjusted" this year?

[hey!]

You could, but you'd get a less precise tracking of changes in recent years.

You basically have three choices here:
(1) Limit yourself to in instruments and stations in use in 1850.
(2) Add new stations and technologies but ignore their effect on the average.
(3) Add new stations and technologies then use statistical techniques to find the approximation that best fits the datapoints you have.

Simply limiting yourself to the instruments you had in place in 1850 is bound to *overestimate* the amount of warming. That's because the land-based instruments are likely to be overwhelmed by waste heat generated by urban sprawl. Instruments that were in quiet rural suburbs are now in the center of cities with hard, heat-catching surfaces like asphalt and concrete, surrounded by buildings heated with what by 1850 standards are vast amounts of energy. So even if you tried approach 1 you'd still have to adjust the figures (in this case discounting some of the spurious "warming" you're seeing) to get a reasonable estimate of change.

The instrumental "global average temperature" is an artificial construct in any case. We know there must *be* a global average temperature, but we can't measure it directly, short of measuring the temperature continuously over very point on the surface of the Earth. All we have are discrete measurements taken from a finite number of stations. You need some kind of model for how representative you think those measurements you do have are of the whole.

Re:OR....

[hey!]

There is no such thing. Oh, there's remote sensing, but you have to ground truth that. And it leaves you in the dark about anything that happened before the 1990s when the first climate observation satellites were launched.