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2018 Was Earth's Fourth-Hottest Year on Record: NOAA and NASA Report (cnbc.com)
The string of hotter-than-average annual temperatures continued in 2018, as Earth experienced its fourth-hottest year on record, according to NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration [PDF]. From a report: Also in 2018, the United States suffered 14 weather and climate disasters with costs surpassing $1 billion during a warmer- and wetter-than-average year, NOAA reports. Global temperatures across land and sea were 1.42 degrees Fahrenheit above the 20th century average, making 2018 the fourth-warmest year since record-keeping began in 1880, NOAA said in a report Thursday. In a separate report, NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies said global temperatures were 1.5 degrees above the 1951 to 1980 mean, also the fourth highest going back to 1880.
The 2-degrees Fahrenheit increase in global temperatures since the late 19th century has been driven largely by growing carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions from human activity, said the institute's director, Gavin Schmidt. The conclusion reaffirms NASA's long-established finding that man-made emissions are driving climate change, which President Donald Trump and some senior administration officials frequently challenge. By both agencies' measures, Earth has now recorded its five hottest annual average temperatures in the past five years. "2018 is yet again an extremely warm year on top of a long-term global warming trend," Schmidt said in a press release.
The 2-degrees Fahrenheit increase in global temperatures since the late 19th century has been driven largely by growing carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions from human activity, said the institute's director, Gavin Schmidt. The conclusion reaffirms NASA's long-established finding that man-made emissions are driving climate change, which President Donald Trump and some senior administration officials frequently challenge. By both agencies' measures, Earth has now recorded its five hottest annual average temperatures in the past five years. "2018 is yet again an extremely warm year on top of a long-term global warming trend," Schmidt said in a press release.
The summary points out that 2018 was the fourth hottest year on record, but neglects to mention that the three hotter years were all this decade, with 2016 being the hottest since records began.
Of course, nothing with stop the global warming deniers...
And if you can't discuss that without shouting HERETIC!!!!, err, "denier", you're just another religious fanatic.
I wont' call you any of those things. I'm just calling you completely misinformed by fossil fuel industry propaganda. When we can see glaciers and ice caps melting at an alarming rate, average sea temperatures rising to the point that marine life is being damaged (let's remember how many billions of people depend on the sea), it becomes quite clear that the climatologists have been holding back the bad news. We have until 2030 to get our collective acts together or future generations are going to be screwed. And they will look back on us with utter contempt for our stupidity - not ignorance -stupidity.
If anything, that falsifies CO2 based global warming because there was warming before there was abnormally high CO2.
There is indeed an underlying warming trend that has been going on since the 1600s. There is a longer warming trend that began abruptly 11,700 years ago, triggering the Holocene glacial retreat.
The current warming trend, presumably induced by CO2, is happening faster, and overlaying that longer and gentler warming trends.
The existence of these long term trends does not falsify AGW.
you need more than "it is warmer", because "it will be warmer" was the best guess prior to any thought of CO2 base warming
Absolutely. You can't just say "it's getting warmer". The important question is "how much warmer?"
Yes, the sun heats the Earth, but CO2 slows the rate at which that heat escapes.
"As for the 420ppm is nothing" B.S. - The atmosphere is composed primarily of nitrogen(~78%), oxygen(~21%), and argon(~0.9%), all of which are transparent to infrared radiation, and thus irrelevant to the greenhouse effect that keeps our planet from being a frozen ball of ice. That leaves the last 0.1% of trace gasses for greenhouse warming - and over 93% of that is CO2. (There's also water, but that varies wildly and self-regulates through evaporation and precipitaion)
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Wait, you are saying that the temperature has been increasing over the past 200 years. Right when we started massively burning fossil fuels.
And this is supposed to falsify the claim that CO2 cause global warming?
thankfully, we have proxy data for years before that. And guess what, it's pretty flat overall, even if there was a medieval warm period.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Even the medieval warm period warmed much more slowly than what happened in the past 200 years.
Wait, you are saying that the temperature has been increasing over the past 200 years. Right when we started massively burning fossil fuels.
The amount of fossil fuels burned 200 years ago was negligible. The warming trend in that era was likely caused by variations in solar radiation, heightened volcanic activity, and changes in ocean circulation. The Little Ice Age was ending, so the increase in temperature was more of returning to normal. 1816 was known as the Year without a Summer, or more colloquially as "Eighteen hundred and froze to death". From there, there was nowhere to go but up.
Fossil fuel consumption didn't add appreciable CO2 to the atmosphere until the 20th century, when temperature rises appear to have accelerated.
200 years ago was, when new methods to make steel were invented, when the United Kingdom began to built its railway system and the European countries followed. 200 years ago was, when settlers in the Americas cleared the forests. Don't underestimate the amount of industrialization that was going on 200 years ago! The first steam boat was built 215 years ago, and the first transatlantic cable was laid 155 years ago -- with a 700 feet long steel steamship, the SS Great Eastern, built 160 years ago.
BTW, according to NOAA satellites, 2019 was the 14th hottest year and 2018 was the 23rd hottest year.
1. This is not surface temperature. They call it "lower atmosphere," but from a satellite perspective, "lower" means temperature about 5 km above the surface. The discussion you're replying to here is about surface temperature.
2. The satellites (despite what Spencer implies) don't measure temperature. They measure intensity of oxygen microwave emission on the integrated optical path between the satellite and the ground. They use a algorithm to "correct" this data to subtract out noise and turn the line-averaged intensities into altitude-dependent temperatures (by basically subtracting out the upper atmosphere from the data using upper-atmosphere data from a different wavelength), but there is some amount of disagreement over how to accurately correct the data, and different groups come up with different answers. There's a Wikipedia article on it here: that gives a good introduction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Summary, this is measuring a different thing, and the meaning of the data is somewhat less clear.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
The big "but" here is that emitting carbon dioxide is only one of the forcing factors. The other big big forcing factor in carbon dioxide that's affected by humans is due to deforestation . There was a enormous amount of deforestation going on in the 1800s.
The amount of non-fossil fuels burned 200 years ago was not negligible. The fuel for steam engines may have been renewable, but it was not renewed. The vegetation removed in cropland conversion wasn't all used as building materials either. Fossil fuel consumption was dwarfed by land use emissions until the second half of the 20th century, while the latter started adding appreciable CO2 to the atmosphere in the second half of the 19th century.