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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.
That's why the article talks about the five hottest years on record (the last five years, with 2018 being the fourth hottest), and not about the weather of a few days.
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...
Satellite data, last I heard, has 2018 ranked sixth hottest of all time, so technically you're correct if you're talking about the RSS dataset.
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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.
This is not a statistically valid way to confirm CO2 based global warming. For example, according to human measurements that I have access to:
Members of the class of years in the "five hottest years on record"
* Every year from 1850-1855
* Every year from 1866-1870
* Every year from 1877-1878
* Every year from 1887-1888
* Every year from 1896-1897
* Every year from 1913-1914
* 1921
* Every year from 1926-1928
* Every year from 1936-1944
etc, etc
The global temperature appears to have had a positive slope for at least 200 years. If anything, that falsifies CO2 based global warming because there was warming before there was abnormally high CO2. So the warming trend of the last 200 years should raise the bar for confirming CO2 based warming, not be used as evidence. (As in, you need more than "it is warmer", because "it will be warmer" was the best guess prior to any thought of CO2 base warming)
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Sort of - this is where the real dragons lay.
If you take a chaotic process and average it, you get noise out. So it has not been demonstrated that averaging out the weather (almost certainly a chaotic process) produces anything of value.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
It is an open question weather (sic ;}) simulations of Earth's climate have any value at all. All averaging values together does is send the signal through a low pass filter. That, by itself, is not enough to say it has any relevance to anything.
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NASA does not have a long-standing finding that Mankind is driving climate change; they have a long-standing belief, and have made statements, but still no scientific proof.
They have a hypothesis, which is incorporated into a model, and the model is compared to measurements.
That's the way science is done.
So far, the model is supported by the evidence, and the null hypothesis-- that climate is not being influenced by human emissions of greenhouse gasses-- is very strongly ruled out by the evidence.
If you want to not believe the model, what you do is need to find an alternative model that is not contradicted by the evidence-- one that fits the measurements better than the standard model. So far, such an alternate model has not been put forth.
This is how science is done. "Scientific proof" really is a word used by popularizers; it's not used by scientists. Scientists talk about whether a model is supported by the evidence or not. So far, the models are.
BTW, according to NOAA satellites, 2019 was the 14th hottest year and 2018 was the 23rd hottest year.
http://www.drroyspencer.com/la...
Personally, I think the satellite data set is better - it is harder to mess with, avoids the problems of only measuring near humans, and measures more of the system in question.
But again, none of this really says anything about proving CO2 based AGW.
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I've been hearing this a lot more frequently recently, and I wonder what you think scientific "proof" is, and what happens when something is scientifically "proven"?
The reason I ask is that I'm married to a scientist (as it turns out a geophysicist), and as a technologist I've spent decades of my life dealing with scientists and scientific data, and I do not believe I have ever heard a scientist utter the word "proof" in connection to any scientific question. I've heard lawyers, politicians and other laymen do so... even science teachers. I've seen movie scientists talking about proving things. But never actual scientists, at least not when they're talking among themselves.
I think this is because "proof" presupposes something that's outside the scientific paradigm -- establishing a kind of unassailable truth.
It is simply factually false to say there are no findings that there has been warming, but I think you are using "finding" in a way that a scientists would not. There have been findings that contradict the warming hypothesis all along, as well as findings that support it. But when you look at systematic reviews, they have for decades now concluded that the bulk of the evidence is overwhelming in favor of anthropogenic climate change. But I have a feeling that isn't really "proof", which seems to mean "beyond any possible doubt".
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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.
That'd only show CO2 was not the *sole cause* of warming (which should be obvious) - if you'd demonstrated significant warming before significant CO2 (which you haven't).
There are many short-term causes (like ENSO et al) and weaker long-term causes (like orbital cycles, and changes in solar output & vulcanism) - even colonisation can have an indirect effect. None of these come close to accounting for the dramatic temperature rise we've observed.
But CO2 does. We've measured its effect in the lab, and measured the amount we've added to the atmosphere, and confirmed it with measurements from GOSAT and the Orbiting Carbon Observatory 2 - and guess what? The rise is nearly all due to greenhouse gases.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
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.
It's so absurd to try and make sweeping assessments of things like climate based on a record that's less than 40 years old. We started tracking data in the 80's...
You might want to read the summary a bit more carefully.
since record-keeping began in 1880
That would be 140 years, not 40 years.
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.
The global temperature appears to have had a positive slope for at least 200 years.
I notice you fail to give any source for your assertion.
Here is a graph of temperature data reconstructed back to 1850:
http://berkeleyearth.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/land-and-ocean-sea-ice-comparison-large-1024x788.png
The slope has a marked increase after 1900.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
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.
Pollution will us much quicker than fucking Global warming.
You accidentally a word there.
you put a stop to pollution, your fucking Global Warming crisis will disappear.
Sure, as long as you include CO2 pollution.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Sort of - this is where the real dragons lay.
If you take a chaotic process and average it, you get noise out.
No, in fact you're wrong here. If you average noisy data, you get less noisy data.
This is fundamental to measurement theory.
https://www.electronicdesign.com/analog/understand-tradeoffs-increasing-resolution-averaging
http://www.ni.com/white-paper/3488/en/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signal_averaging
https://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tutorials/image-averaging-noise.htm
ENSO has no effect in global warming.
Neither El Nino nor La Nina are warming or cooling phenonema.
Both effects only shift the areas where it is particular warm and areas where it is particular cold around. That is all.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
"Beyond any possible doubt" is, as you say, not something scientists adhere to, since it's possible to doubt everything. However, I think it is also important to say that science also does produce findings that are "beyond any reasonable doubt". And deniers like that guy pick and choose what understanding best agrees with their already-made decision.
Those who do not learn from commit history are doomed to regress it.
Whatever, another article about how we are all doomed.
Here's what I want to see, solutions that work. Wind and solar don't work because without massive levels of storage to even out the varying load to the varying demand then it simply cannot keep the lights on. Also, add up all the resources needed to build all these windmills, solar panels, and batteries, and you will find yourself a situation that will destroy the economy and/or the environment in trying to dig up all the materials needed.
You think wind and solar don't have any environmental impact? Where do you think all that steel, aluminum, copper, concrete, rare earth elements, and so on come from? We dig it out of the ground, that's where it comes from. Same for the batteries, that stuff has to be dug up, refined, machined, molded, and transported to the construction site. This takes energy and materials. Energy and materials we cannot produce in any meaningful time frame.
We need solutions, not another restatement of the problem. Seems no one wants to speak of what that solution might be.
Oh, and I give citations on why the solutions brought up so often will not work.
http://www.roadmaptonowhere.co...
http://cmo-ripu.blogspot.com/2...
https://www.withouthotair.com/
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
Measuring temperatures on land surfaces and sea surfaces gives a misleading sense of the heating of the planet. Almost certainly 2018 is the warmest year in recent times if you consider the total heat content of the seas. Deep ocean temperatures are rising but there is not yet systematic measurement of the deep seas. But as long as CO2 keeps rising, it's very likely that total heating of the Earth does too. Every year is the hottest year on record and the capacity of the deep ocean to moderate surface temperatures via mixing with surface water and cooling the air is being diminished.
"He took a duck in the face at 250 knots." -- William Gibson, Pattern Recognition