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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.

16 of 393 comments (clear)

  1. What the Anomaly is by Geoffrey.landis · · Score: 5, Informative

    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
  2. Re:Well then by Alwin+Henseler · · Score: 3, Informative

    ... Where's the popcorn?

    Spread all over the land... Climate is changing so fast, the corn popped before they could harvest.

  3. Re:Higher than Average... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    See for yourself: http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/tabledata_v3/GLB.Ts+dSST.txt

    January 2016 was not only 0.3C hotter than the previous record-holder (2015, unsurprisingly), but 0.8C hotter than any single January in the 1951-1980 baseline. It's also 0.6C hotter than any single month in that range. It's a lot, given that the global mean is so consistently stable.

  4. Re:So? by Geoffrey.landis · · Score: 4, Informative

    Many of the environmentalists worried about the climate do, in fact, advocate nuclear power.

    James Hansen, for example, is probably the most well known person warning about climate change. He is strongly in favor of nuclear power. He stated:

    ..continued opposition to nuclear power threatens humanity’s ability to avoid dangerous climate change.
    We call on your organization to support the development and deployment of safer nuclear power systems as a practical means of addressing the climate change problem.... in the real world there is no credible path to climate stabilization that does not include a substantial role for nuclear power

    citation: http://grist.org/news/more-nuk...
    http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes....

    Or, check out this one:
    http://www.takepart.com/articl...

    --
    http://www.geoffreylandis.com
  5. Re:So? by Hussman32 · · Score: 1, Informative

    There are irate posters on both sides. Scientists, those that continue to review the evidence and not assume they are correct when an association has not satisfied all criteria for proof of causation, would note that California had 200 year long droughts when Heidelberg first started as a university, long before the industrial revolution or little ice age. Then the weather/climate would rapidly shift.

    Climate science is far from settled. Most of the peer-reviewed papers are cautious in their conclusions. Most of the journalists that misreport and misunderstand the conclusions in the abstracts resort to calling people religious terms like 'deniers.'

    --
    "Who are you?" "No one of consequence." "I must know." "Get used to disappointment."
  6. Re:YAA (Yet Another Anomaly) by Layzej · · Score: 5, Informative

    Part of the bias towards reporting heat records vs cold records is due to the fact that we haven't had any record cold months in over a century. The last time we had a record for the coldest month in recorded history was 1893 The last time we had a "warmest month in recorded history" was December. The prior record was October.

  7. Re:So? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    If 1951 - 1980 are the baseline with zero anomaly level ... why are there so many wild swings in that range? Just a 2-year span has nearly half a degree of fluctuation from one August to the next. Almost every month had at least a quarter-degree swing from one year to the next. That's not the stability upon which you should build your baseline.

    Year Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec
    1963 -03 +18 -15 -05 -10 +02 +09 +23 +19 +14 +15 -01
    1964 -06 -11 -24 -31 -26 -09 -07 -23 -28 -30 -21 -30

    (plus signs and leading zeros added by me to try any maintain formatted columns)

  8. Re:And yet by DNS-and-BIND · · Score: 5, Informative

    Wow, what a cheap shot! Way to make it America's fault...again. I've got some bad news for you, and it comes from one of your own high priests. Close your eyes...this is going to hurt.

    The fact is that even if every American citizen biked to work, carpooled to school, used only solar panels to power their homes, if we each planted a dozen trees, if we somehow eliminated all of our domestic greenhouse emissions, guess what â" that still wouldnâ(TM)t be enough to offset the carbon pollution coming from the rest of the world.
    If all the industrial nations went down to zero emissions...it wouldnâ(TM)t be enough, not when more than 65 percent of the worldâ(TM)s carbon pollution comes from the developing world.
    -- John Kerry, at the Paris summit, 2015

    --
    Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
  9. icehouse earth by emil · · Score: 3, Informative

    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/...

    1. Re:icehouse earth by Geoffrey.landis · · Score: 5, Informative

      Wow, a long comment that's mostly correct, but seems to mostly be irrelevant.

      The main point-- that the Earth right now is in the middle of an ice age is indeed accurate. Earth is much cooler than it is on the average-- in fact, most of the time, Earth doesn't have frozen water at the polar caps!

      And the climate was indeed much warmer (along with much higher levels of CO_2) during much of the Cretaceous. Rising CO_2 is NOT going to destroy the world-- the world has functioned just fine with higher temperatures and higher CO_2. It will adapt

      The tricky part is-- we've sort of built our civilization around the climate we currently have. Flooding the seacoast, turning farmland into desert (and tundra into farmland) all these would disrupt our civilization abruptly.

      --
      http://www.geoffreylandis.com
  10. Re: Raw data? Methods? by bloodstar · · Score: 5, Informative

    Here, let me get you started... A nice climate archive to start https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cdo-... If you want to do some validation checking you can go through all the individual stations and check the data. One place is: https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/data... Another if you don't trust NOAA and want the absolute rawest data: http://mesowest.utah.edu/ Some of your questions on why certain corrections were made are explained here: https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/moni... And I find it incredibly sad that you think very little science has been done. That couldn't be further from the truth. Take the time to read some papers and do some of your own independent research.

    --
    "The bass, the rock, the mic, the treble. I like my coffee black, just like my metal" - Mindless Self Indulgence
  11. Re: YAA (Yet Another Anomaly) by Geoffrey.landis · · Score: 5, Informative

    So what is 18 years of global temperature? I've been told its also weather since 18 years is far too short of a time to count for climate. But now 1 month counts as climate?

    lols

    Now, that's very peculiar. Why did you pick eighteen exactly, no more and no less? Why not, say, twenty? Why eighteen?

    We should always be suspicious when some very unusual number like that gets thrown up as baseline to compare against. Some blog somewhere told you to say eighteen years. Why?

    Here's the data:
    http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gist...

    OK, now we can see. Yes, eighteen years ago-- 1998-- was indeed a high point-- more than one standard deviation above the trend line. (Note that anthropogenic warming isn't instead of random variation-- it is in addition to random variation.) But, if you pick 1998 exactly as the starting point-- no more, no less-- up until 2013 you could kind of squint, and say "look, no warming since 1998". Pick the year before 1998 to start the graph, and the warming trend is clear. Pick the year after 1998 to start the graph, and the warming trend is clear. But if you picked 1998 exactly, no more, no less, up until 2013 you could draw the graph and make it almost look flat.

    Except, that was then. As of now, even with the high point at 1998... the overall warming trend is very obviously clear.

    --
    http://www.geoffreylandis.com
  12. Re:YAA (Yet Another Anomaly) by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    First: It is highly unlikely that you lived 120 miles from the nearest observation point. 1978 was a while ago, but unless you were in far southwestern Texas, they probably still had wayyyy better coverage than that in your area.

    Second: They don't just "substitute records from places over 120 miles away". Nobody does that. For places where weather stations are further apart, they use a method called bias-corrected statistical downscaling, based on a model of how temperature and precipitation correspond to topography. These models are calibrated based on k-fold validation, so we know they're actually very good at interpolating patterns. There is some error associated with it, but it is quite small. I would bet you money that they know exactly how hot that Christmas was, to within a tolerance of a degree or two.

    Third: Let's say your little town in the middle of BFE had some sort of crazy localized temperature anomaly that couldn't be picked up even by sophisticated methods. So what? That means almost exactly nothing when talking about global average temperatures. It's one grid cell out of hundreds of thousands, maybe millions.

    If you want a decent look at how these things are actually calculated (and what the observation station layout looks like), here's a good paper:

    http://www.prism.oregonstate.edu/documents/Daly2008_PhysiographicMapping_IntJnlClim.pdf

  13. Re:YAA (Yet Another Anomaly) by phantomfive · · Score: 3, Informative

    The global warming models have error bars

    The error bars weren't wide enough.

    --
    "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
  14. Re:So? by fuzzyf · · Score: 3, Informative

    As Michael Chrichton pointed out once, it's odd that Nasa changed the 1880 temperature chart after publishing it.

    I couldn't find a good link, but this blog covers it pretty good:

    https://stevengoddard.wordpres...

    I'm not saying that global warming, or climate change, or whatever you want to call it doesn't happen. I'm just a bit sceptical about the "Either you are with us or you are against us"-mentality of it all.
    Let's do what we can to compesate and at the same time be open to information for all sides.

  15. Here is raw data you all ignore... by PortHaven · · Score: 3, Informative