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Last January Was the Hottest Global Temperature Anomaly In Recorded History
merbs writes: NASA has released its global temperature data for January 2016, and, once again, the record for the hottest month in recorded history has been shattered. At a time when these kinds of records are broken with some regularity, it takes a particularly scorching month to raise eyebrows in the climate science community. It has to be the hottest hottest month by a pretty hot margin. Sure enough, last January did the trick: It was 1.13 C warmer than the global average of 1951-1980 (the benchmark NASA uses to measure warming trends)—in other words, a full 2F warmer than pre-1980 levels.
Here in Michigan- it's been a fine spring so far!
Another consultant who stuck it out.
"We are the Priests, of the Temples of Syrinx..."
How many near consecutive broken records does it take for weather extremes to no longer be called 'anomalies'?
I eagerly await the forthcoming rational, thoughtful, and respectful discourse from both sides!
... Where's the popcorn?
#DeleteChrome
Yeh, just remember Valantines day in the US was -14C: the Hottest Febuary 14th 2016 ever!!
It's just weather.
I say that with a maximum of snark, but it truly is just weather. El Niño weather, to be precise. And the inflammatory headline is the usual nonsense, contradicted by its own summary. It says recorded history began in 1951. My parents might have something to say about that.
Why do we have to put up with such bullshit reporting? Does Slashdot really make that much money off of the page views driven by irate commenters?
No it isn't, yes it is, etc., etc., etc.
Have you read my blog lately?
How many near consecutive broken records does it take for weather extremes to no longer be called 'anomalies'?
The "anomaly" is defined as the difference in temperature from the reference baseline. Even if that difference were zero, it would still be called the temperature anomaly-- it would be an anomaly of zero.
FAQ: https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/moni...
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Since an average is just that, an average, how did January 2016 compare to the highest January in those 30 years?
Used to be a lot warmer many times in history. Around year 1000, and for many generations, norsemen grew grains in Greenland. Antartica and Svalbard had tropical climate millions of years ago. It appears the earth was overall a lot wetter when is was warmer, which makes sense. Probably also a lot more violent weather.
Maybe a new ice age would be more devastating than a wet heatwave.
don't cut it off www.mgmbill.org
136 years is a few milliseconds on climatic and geologic time scales.
Slashdot is wondering what happened to their old tech/geek audience, while allowing the radical liberal activists and brainwashed "global warming" propagandists to take over the site - the same way Digg was destroyed.
If the new owners want to see a future for slashdot, the first thing to do is kick out these idiot Global Warming activists.
You know what? I'm a radicalised global warming (no scare quotes) activist. You know why? Because I live in a perfect island paradise in the South Pacific.
Only these days, it ain't so perfect. First, we got hit with the most powerful cyclone in the history of this region. Then we got 8 months of extreme drought thanks to the most powerful El Niño event in recorded history.
Neither cyclones nor the ENSO cycle are abnormal here. We are situated just south enough of the equator that we get an average of about 1.5 cyclones in our territorial waters every year. And ENSO has pretty much defined our climatic cycles since before humans ever inhabited here.
But the severity of these events, and the abnormality of weather events in recent years, is indisputably increasing. This year alone, we've seen record high regional temperatures, cyclones crossing the equator—an hitherto unknown event—and just this week, we saw a weak hurricane reverse its path, redouble its strength to Category 3/4, and now we're waiting for it to make landfall in a country that is about 1000 miles from where the storm's typical path would be. We've also seen cyclonic storms forming outside of the tropical belt, and... well, the list goes on.
Have I been brainwashed? Yes. Brainwashed by the evidence. You can cite all the skepticist bullshit you like, because I'm watching my climate change right in front of my eyes. And yes, I know the difference between weather and climate. I also know that virtually all of the climate prediction models call for increasingly wide fluctuations in weather behaviour, and that fits pretty much perfectly with the evidence in front of me.
So respectfully: If I and my ilk have ruined Slashdot for you, then good. Feel free to fuck off out of here and leave the conversation to rational adults.
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
Ppl will continue to scream that America with less than 15% of total emissions, and dropping, is responsible, while china with more than 33% ( mid 40s% according to oco2 ) is OK to continue growing it. Far better to die, than to break political correctness and survive.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
One thing I see missing from all of these Global Warming articles is any semblance of actual science.
Where are the sensors physically located? How many are there? Have they ever moved? Been replaced? Are the temperatures an aggregate? Mean? Median? What raw data are they gathering? Are these the same sensors that spawned the last 10 "hottest day ever" stories? Or was that a different set? How often are they recording? Etc. Etc. Etc. I'm sorry but a single number does not adequately convey the wildly varied data across nearly 200 million square miles of land and sea over a 31 day period. You just can't tell me that this impossibly massive amount of data filters down to "113," and that's supposed to scare me?
I'm not trying to debunk climate change or AGW here. But I can only see so many of these "hottest month/year/day ever," in short succession before I start to question the validity of the science behind it all.
This signature is false.
And by "recorded history" they're referring to the time temperature records begin, which is 1978 - less than forty years ago. Of course, using the expression "recorded history," which to most people means something like the 5-10,000 of civilization, makes this sound a lot more alarmist. Which I'm sure was the intent.
When we have a cold snap the global warming types say "it's just weather"
The last time we had a "coldest month in recorded history" was 1893.
so when we have a warm month here and there I believe I can rightfully say that "it's just weather".
Our global temperature is the sum of a secular warming trend and natural variability. Any new "hottest month" record is going to be the result of both together. Remove the secular warming trend and we would not have had a record. Remove natural variability and every month would be a record.
And yeah, nukes sound great. Let's get building.
Where i live it has been impressively cold this january, more so than usual. So is it a new ice age or global warming?? I dont really care anymore ;)
This raises the question of climate change. It should be conveyed and understood that we are in a phase of âoeicehouse earthâ that is abnormally cool for the planet. While this phase has lasted the entirety of human civilization and would have drastic consequences for many species should it end, it must be understood that temperatures and CO2 levels have normally been far higher. âoeWe find that CO2 emissions [during the Cretaceous] resulting from super-plume tectonics could have produced atmospheric CO2 levels from 3.7 to 14.7 times the modern pre-industrial value of 285 ppm.â http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/... âoeWe are talking about carbon dioxide levels 6 to 10 times the present carbon dioxide level. When you have high amounts of carbon dioxide in an atmosphere up to a certain limit, which is considerably higher than it is now, the result is green plants grow very much better... And it is precisely at this time that the recovery from the first dinosaur extinction takes place. When the super plumes come and carbon dioxide increases, and the oxygen correspondingly increases as a result of photosynthesis... And yet the super plumes did not last forever and they started to die at the end of Cretaceous.... In any event, large dinosaurs really required to be living in an oxygen tent. An atmosphere in the neighborhood of 35 percent oxygen would be considerably more compatible with large dinosaurs than one in the neighborhood of 28. And so this suggested to me that this was perhaps a significant reason for the first dinosaur extinction, and probably one of the major factors in the second, the terminal dinosaur extinction, other than the birds. It also neatly tied together all of the really bizarre features about the Cretaceous... The Cretaceous is clearly a green house period as opposed to the present ice house that we have... Well, the rich carbon dioxide of course provides for a much greater biogenic diversity.â http://www.ucl.ac.uk/.../sloan... âoeThe earth is currently in an icehouse stage, as ice sheets are present on both poles and glacial periods have occurred at regular intervals over the past million years... Earth is more commonly placed in a greenhouse state throughout the epochs, and the Earth has been in this state for approximately 80% of the past 500 million years... Permanent ice is actually a rare phenomenon in the history of the Earth, occurring only during the 20% of the time that the planet is under an icehouse effect.â https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Flint used to be an ok working-class factory town before they closed the factories, though it's been rapidly downhill since, and of course before the criminally incompetent water administrators poisoned everybody who was left while drinking bottled water at the office.
I've only been there once, back in the 80s, staying overnight because my connecting flight to Exciting Dayton Ohio got cancelled because of fog. If you needed to find a motel near the airport, fast food that was still open, and coffee in the morning, it was as good as anywhere else.
The parts of Detroit and Windsor Ontario I was in around 2007 were ok also - we were bidding on upgrading data center equipment for GMAC (oops, the financial crash trashed that project), and we had some generic office space in some suburb near them. I did drive through the business parts of downtown (which were ok) and went to Windsor for dinner - there's good Middle Eastern food there, and I'd never driving south into Canada before.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
The unedited data before the past is tweaked cooler and the present hotter.
Fairly obvious that any stable baseline is undesirable for the climate "scientists", also hence the narrow starting window as a point of consideration...
With too much or too stable data, it makes it a lot harder to rig numbers to show what you want!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
You really should read up on the methodologies. It's not like these are unknown issues. And, no, airport sited stations are not the only data sources.
Up front: I am NOT a climate change denier but merely someone who likes to see arguments presented in a proper fashion.
To compare short, indeed very short, periods to a rather long term average is playing with a stacked deck and does nothing for credibility. How many short term high temperatures were within that long term average? I know for a fact that there were quite a few, with some temperatures in the '60s making the current "trend" appear insignificant.
For credibility to be established, let alone maintained, comparisons have to be of equivalent units. You can't compare apples to oranges and then claim the pears are too red.
in other words, a full 2F warmer than pre-1980 levels.
Simply devalue the degree Fahrenheit. Most of the world uses Celsius, so few people will be affected by it. And at a stroke you've managed what governments all over the world do when faced with an annoying problem: redefined it out of existence. The final step would be to rename Climate Change to something else, reset all the counters so that all old measurements cannot be converted. Then just carry on as if nothing had happened.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Dear new Slashdot owners,
(and I don't mean this as a red-rag for the ASCII-only crowd, please consider before downmodding)
It's a pet peeve of mine when foreign letters are mangled on here; it detracts from the discussion.
El Ninyo being an illustrative example of why entry of foreign characters contained within common Latin-variant alphabets should be supported.
One poster above has successfully entered the right html escape code but it's an input-dev pain in the rear, especially if you have an enye character on your Spanish keyboard!
Please consider...
That is an bold claim to do. Can i please have your source data and and an description of your analysis methodology please? No? Well then you are full of shit!
And per head, China is still below the US.
I sure as fuck didn't shovel two feet of 'partly cloudy' from my driveway last month.
January 2016 is THIS January.
January 2015 was LAST January.
January 2017 is NEXT January.
English 101.
The Earth is BILLIONS of years old. We launched the first Weather satellite approx 50 years ago and that one could not measure global temperatures. I'll be EXTREMELY generous and say we have 50 years of global temp data out of one billion years (generously discarding a much larger number more realistic and more beneficial to my position). Let's see now: 50/1000000000 (simplified to 1/20000000) ....... and based on THAT we're suppose to say "hottest ever"?????
Truckloads of manure pretending to be science as an enabler of a political ideology.
www.wattsupwiththat.com
TOTAL BULLSHIT.
Last January through end of February where I live was the coldest I can ever remember (and everyone I talk to). 9 days of below zero in January. 17 days below zero in Feb.
Climate Scientists have it all wrong.
We've been recording temperature data for less than 0.00001% of the lifespan of the planet, and they're still pompous enough to think they are identifying a trend.
Have you ever fallen asleep at the keybhanusdiog?
A month or even a year is too short to use as a period in talk about climate. I know that the public relates well to that talk but it's not appropriate.
We're still here.
Northern Hemisphere Summer is warmer than Winter globally basically because there is more land surface area north of the equator. (Oceans moderate seasonal temperature changes.) August 2014 might be the hottest Month but as Gavin Schmidt points out the whole method is based on anomalies so getting to the hot month might not be possible. https://twitter.com/ClimateOfG...
The problem with the thinking in this article is the following:
- if it's the hottest on record, it's global warming
- if it's the coldest on record, it's global warming
- if it's just average, then climate is not weather and shut up you science *denier*
See the problem?
And burr.....it brought back the winter...
And most of the research resulted in the understanding that data collection is extremely inaccurate. That many of those former remote temperature measurement sites are now next to urban structures.
That the overlaying of modern, historical, and prehistoric temperature data relied upon the opinions of scientists, thus subject to bias.
And that all the models to date have proven woefully poor and inadequate at their predictions. Showing that their understanding is far from complete.
NONE OF THIS MEANS WE SHOULDN'T STOP POLLUTING THE AIR AND OCEANS
http://www.surfacestations.org...
Stop pumping out billions of gallons of water from prehistoric aquifers to irrigate our crops. Where do folks think that water goes? In the oceans...
ABC News warned us back in 2007 that New York city would be underwater by June 2015.
Meh.
No real climate scientists ever actually predicted New York would be underwater by 2015. Not even the most extreme of the models predicted that. This is a 2100 scenario, not a 2015 prediction,
The bottom line, don't get your science information from TV Morning specials. The media loves doomsday predictions.
When one reads the article headline and summary that we had the hottest month in "recorded history", one who is not a climatologist would think that goes back to Babylonian times or perhaps even further. (That is what "recorded history" means to most people.) I imagine that there are many rubes in the public (some of them perhaps even television news anchors) who would believe that, most of whom won't read beyond the first paragraph.
Do you in the global warming advocacy wish to be taken seriously? Then correct these hack jobs whose interest lies in grabbing attention rather than accurate reporting. A person whose concern is swaying the public is not a scientist: he is a politician.
... the fallacy that our climate is static is the number 1 reason I dont believe much of this debate
...2. No scientist has ever claimed the climate is static.
the tempa go up, the temps go down, constituent ingredients that make up our atmosphere change,
No. The temperatures change for reasons. The constituent gases of the atmosphere change for reasons.
yet Earth keeps on ticking, there is NOTHING we can do for this,
Well, you are of course totally wrong. We not only can change the climate, we have.
we ride on the Earth, hang on tight and make whatever adjustments you need to to survive.
And, in order to survive the adjustment we will have to make is to stop emitting fossil CO2.
This post is pretty much accurate: no, climate scientists don't claim that the climate is static. What they claim is that the natural sources of variation have been measured, and do not explain the rapid (on a geologic scale) temperature rises we currently see.
The anthropogenic warming is not instead of natural variations. It is in addition to natural variations. But we are now very very accurately measuring the climate forcing factors. They're just not large enough to cause the current warming trend.
The only part I have to take exception to is the final line: "in order to survive the adjustment we will have to make is to stop emitting fossil CO2."
No; global warming may be disruptive, but that's going a bit too far. It's not going go cause extinction.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Define abruptly....
OK, fair point. "Abruptly" here means "on a time scale of decades to centuries."
This is rapid on a scale of climate, and even on a scale of human civilization, but slow on a scale of human lifetime.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
So, when you're wrong, your response is to ignore the point and bring up something else.
This is an example of "ABCs": Argument By Changing the subject
Carbon Dioxide is 0.04% of the Earth's atmosphere and 3% of that is man-made, which comes to 0.0012%. Who would put any money (like billions of dollars) on 0.0012%? And even if there is "global warming", the planet thrives with warmer temperatures and more CO2 - so why listen to the Chicken Littles? Anybody considering solar activity in this scenario? Now NASA releases global temperature data for January 2016...so what? It will just get modified next year as it always does, because next year it will be colder and they'll have to lower this year's temperature to make it look like the temperature is still trending upwards - just like they retroactively flattened out the 1930's warming period. Besides, February has been a bit on the nippy side...
So you get negatively modded two points for saying the F word regardless of context from the get go? This makes me a sad panda.
Should get moderated down. Does not advance the conversation.
Then Europe would probably be the worst offenders, but that's just a guess.
Averages and percentages are statistics for the small-minded.
>No; global warming may be disruptive, but that's going a bit too far. It's not going go cause extinction.
You are probably partly right - but only probably and definitely only partly.
Partly because we aren't the only species around and it will cause lots of others to go extinct, much smaller climate shifts than this have caused mass extinctions before - and those happened SLOWLY.
Probably because you may be overestimating our ability, and speed, of adaptation. 97% of all species that ever existed are extinct (at least), we have no idea what our breaking point may be. We are far more dependent on other species than we realize and any of THEIR extinctions could prove to be the end of us, there are other impacts which could prove to be more than we can deal with. We have no real defense against virusses right now and one major aspect of climate change is to seriously shift the distribution of insects - which means spreading diseases to new areas. A disease that only existed in a sparsely populated place where the rare cases that got it always died but weren't very many... could be the plague that takes us out if climate change moves it to a highly populous area.
There were dozens of homo species on this planet not so long ago (we're still discovering new ones). Only two of those survived the last major climate change. Just two - and the other survivor was confined to a tiny tropical island and probably never experienced it. They were around until 18-thousands years ago at least, that's the age of the most recent fossils we have - but most dead bodies don't fossilize, it's entirely possible they were actually around until as recently as 10 or even 5 thousand years ago, hell it could be 1000 years ago or less. The may have survived right until *we* arrived on their island !
Either way - the fact is, while we as a species probably would not go extinct - it is a possibility. It's a very remote and absolute worst-case-scenario possibility, but it's not non-existent (and frankly the risk of an asteroid taking us out is quite a lot bigger). But billions of dead bodies, maybe half of us gone, maybe 3 quarters ... that's the MODERATE risk. That's the hedging your bets on the MIDDLE of the picture outcome.
That's hardly a shocking outcome, killing 25% of the world's population is so easy we've done that TO EACH OTHER... TWICE in a single century ! And make no mistake, in a bad climate scenario, whatever number of people are killed by crop failures and diseases and floods and storms... we would kill 10 times as many ourselves.
Every crop failure won't just cause a famine, everyone of them will also cause a war as hungry people fight their neighbours for food.
That's what the "nah, we'll just adapt like we've always done" crowd never mentions... our history is full of evidence of just HOW humans adapt to calamities - we do it by killing each other in droves.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
"warmer than the global average of 1951-1980 (the benchmark NASA uses to measure warming trends)"
This is the most recent example of the failed credibility that demands I question the premise. What, the data from 1981-1990 isn't useful? Why not? Why not to 2000? Do the numbers somehow not fit the expectations? Give me a reason.
Cherry-picking the data in drug research is being shown to have caused a few drugs to be released with either no efficacy or, worse, serious side effects that render them dangerous...
Just give us the data. No, wait, we can find the data.Just not from you.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
I don't believe the summary justified the sensationalist nature of this phrasing. It might be possible to justify it. It might not. But stating it without justification isn't acceptable.
Surely you could supplement your anecdotes with some actual, relevant proof that they are caused by man-made co2? Seriously, first someone sould prove it! What, cause and effect is no longer important is these advanced times? Why do you eagerly assume that co2 is responsible for any of what you are experiencing? Did the big, bad Carbon monster cause the dust bowl of the 1930's then too? The present physics of radiative gasses tells us that additional atmospheric co2 has a rapidly diminishing effect. The water content of Earth's atmosphere is orders of magnitude greater in it's influence of temperatures. Without causal link between co2 and the so called feedbacks, the "climate science" has nothing. Well nothing but an epic chicken little/boy who cried wolf story, brought to us by greedy authoritarian fascists.
Welcome to the climate change cult, its the new age eco-religion, complete with techno elite priests for the idiot masses. If you like your doctor/standard of living, you can keep your doctor/standard of living. - Obama. OMFG, now thats LOL!
And so, with that, a big Fuck Off, to all these self righteous, do-gooding busybodies, and an even bigger Fuck Off to every other politically ambitious fool, and to their followers!
nice argument, but it then puts the 29/30 year baseline into the same category!!.
So, use the whole data set. Temperature is rising, and the rise is higher than the error bars.
Data is here:
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gist...
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
As usual, the libertarian Climate Denialists are out in force.
Do the Koch bothers pay in shares for this stuff?
Not really any different from any other record: records are always to within the accuracy of the measurement.
When you look at, say, the world's record for the 100 meter dash, when Nesta Carter broke Maurice Greene's record with a time of 9.79 seconds, compared to Greene's 9.80 seconds, do you really think that the margin of error is less than 10 milliseconds? But it's the best measurement we have
People are interested by records. Measurements have errors.
In any case, if 2014 turned out not to be the record high, then 2010 had the record-- either way, the record is within the last few years. And 2015 beat them both-- it was high enough above 2014 (and 2010), that it was outside the measurement error as a record-breaking year-- it is the undisputed world record.
All of the candidates for warmest year ever recorded are in the last few years (before 2010, the record had been 1998)-- that is hard to explain as measurement error.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Doing some basic research by going to the Australian Bureau of Meteorology, their report says overall Australia was only 0.21 degrees above the base line...that's a pretty significant difference!
http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/...
I'd love to know how GISS comes up with these over-inflated figures?
Shit happens and it's usually caused by assholes