Dr. Roy Spencer’s site has posted the UAH MSU temperature for January 2011 and, as we see, the warm temperatures are gone. A La Nina (cool equatorial Pacific water surface temperature) is raging and is linked to playing a role in the storms now hitting Australia and the US.
Let’s recall that just a few short years ago climate “scientists” were claiming that La Ninas were expected to become rare and that the Pacific would find itself more and more in an El Nino mode. Things are turning out differently though. Time to get back to the drawing board for the 7,000th time.
Source of graphics: Dr Roy Spencer’s site
And what’s with global warming causing more preciptiation? The data also suggests the opposite, at least oceanic.
Trend here is downwards for that too. Using the global warming theory, the warmth is supposed to cause more precipitation, and so this indicates the globe is cooling.
For the catastrophe junkies out there who need their daily dose of catastrophic signs, it looks like a cold turkey day today. Maybe the crack-catastrophe pushers GISS and PIK can help you.
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UPDATE: http://www.accuweather.com/video.asp?channel=vblog_bastardi
Well there is some wave trend in global precipitation (the AMSR-E above one is for oceans only) but looks like inverse PDO, SOI or MEI curve.
http://climexp.knmi.nl/data/iprca_0-360E_-90-90N_n_su_mean1a.png
When the global temperature is exactly as in 1980, does it mean US blizzard or Yasi typhoon are still caused by “globally warmer” atmosphere or not?
Pierre – I can’t remember where, but I’m pretty sure I read that the La Niña has peaked and Pacific waters are beginning to warm again.
This information seems to be at variance with implications from the UAH data. Joe Bastardi also is predicting colder winters over the next several years due to the La Niña.
But if it’s on the way out?
Can you resolve this information? If I’ve got it wrong, so sorry for taking your time.
Great blog. Always check it out.
BobW
Go here for the predictions. Take your pick, they all look blue through next October.
http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/analysis_monitoring/lanina/ensoforecast.shtml
Significant portions of ocean SST warm during La Nina, but it doesn’t mean an end to La Nina.
Pierre can you please remove my e-mail adress from comment #70 or 71, i would appreciate it thank you. What are the argo bouys temp readings saying, are they cooling all around or just in certain areas.
sorry from the CO2 is cool thread.
Again, this is called cherry picking data. You’re claiming an end to global warming based on about 6 months of data.
Just move your eyeballs one inch to the left. Look at the last El Nino. What happened after that? Doh! Temps dropped like rock. Down nearly a full degree! Was that not a time everyone on the skeptic side was claiming the end of global warming?
But what has transpired since? We just came through the warmest decade in the instrumental record.
Not only are you cherry picking, you’re also counting chickens.
I can understand your irritation. The bet is already starting off so badly for the warmists.
Pierre… Now you are double counting your chickens. 😉
I believe I said previously that, coming off an El Nino I would expect a cooler year. I also expect the overall warming trend to continue through the decade.
Gotta love these guys. Short-term cooling from La Nina means global warmth is gone. What does that make short-term warming from El Nino? Catastrophic warming?
We’re trying to keep warm here in southern New Mexico. The temperature this morning at dawn at our house was -10°F, then the outdoor sensor died. The low in Alamogordo, NM, this morning was -3°F, setting a new low for any date in February by 8 degrees. The last record low was in 1962. The records go back to 1914. Yes, I know very well that this is weather, but records were set yesterday and today all across the U. S. mid-west.
It doesn’t look good. Global temperatures have dropped by 0.2°C in one month. Ocean temperatures have dropped a similar amount in the last 6 months.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/01/03/global-sea-surface-temperature-continues-to-drop/
The sunspot count doesn’t look like it will get above 25 anytime soon.
http://sidc.oma.be/html/wolfjmms.html
And is way below any predictions.
The cosmic ray count is still close to the maximum:
http://cosmicrays.oulu.fi/webform/query.cgi?startdate=1965/01/01&starttime=00:00&enddate=2011/02/03&endtime=20:42&resolution=44640&picture=on
Which generates clouds.
You thought it was cold so far? You have not seen it yet!
And now everyone wants to tax CO2, so it will cost more to heat and light our houses, drive to work, or do anything else that uses energy. Wait until they find out that I grow half my heat. (So far, it’s all deadwood off my five acres. But that may change.)
If you want to see what the world will look like by the end of the decade, read Charles Dickens. That will describe the world economy and the climate. We can change the economic part of that prediction, but not the climate part.
Funny, the plum trees started blooming in January here on the west coast this year.
Funny these guys claim global warming is just a “natural cycle”, but they seem shocked that surface temperatures cool during a La Nina cycle.
Every anomaly zero crossing from positive to negative should be celebrated with a bonfire of “An Inconvenient Truth” copies.
Dirk… Did you know that Spencer and Christy “adjusted” that very zero axis in January? They switched from a 20 year to a 30 year base line which effectively moved that zero axis up from it’s previous position.
What would you be saying if Hansen made similar adjustments to the GISS data set?
Isn’t it the usual way of doing things in climatology to use the last three full decades as the baseline? It’s only Hansen who doesn’t do it. And yes, Rob, i know that, and i know that this doesn’t nullify the entire warming that happened throughout the 20th century.
As it is well known and transparent how an anomaly relates to a given baseline, i don’t consider it fraudulent – maybe that’s why GISS doesn’t do it; doesn’t fit the house style. It is also not, opposed to GISS’ standard operating procedure, a distortion of past temperatures. So Gavin and James probably don’t like it.
No, it wouldn’t be the normal way to do it, to use the full data set as the baseline. That would mean you’d have new baseline every ten years. The idea is just to keep the baseline stable. In fact, I suspect that the UAH is just trying to conform to the 30 year standard now that they have more than 30 years of data.
Also, it’s not just Hansen. CRU also uses a 30 year baseline.
“That would mean you’d have new baseline every ten years. ”
You got the idea. No, i didn’t invent it. Assuming that a scientist has mastered the art of adding numbers, he or she should be able to interpret anomalies correctly when told about the baseline used.
Especially as an anomaly makes no sense at all without defining the baseline it is compared to.
Dirk… The point is, there’s no point to adjusting the baseline after it’s been established. It doesn’t change the data. It just sets the zero axis.
And back to your original post, the zero axis has no particular meaning. Neither does crossing the zero axis.
BUT… If you had a 20 year trend line and THAT crossed the 30 year baseline, then you might have something there. As it is temps have only dropped down to the long term rising trend line.
You do notice that Roy Spencer always avoids adding a trend line to his data…
I do not think that Celsius and Fahrenheit were cheating. I always have to remember Fahrenheit = 1.8 * Celsius + 32. Is that correct? Arguing about base lines is the same as arguing about zero points on our scales.
If Hansen will move from 1951-1980 normal to something less than 50 years old, we will no doubt applause.
UAH moved to standard 30-year long baseline, because we all know that the only thing that matters is 30-years long normal and its linear trend.
Juraj V….. You realize, don’t you, that changing the baseline does absolutely nothing to the relative data, don’t you? So it wouldn’t even matter if Hansen used one date in 1880 as the baseline, or chooses the same baseline as UAH. It’s just setting the zero axis. Everything else is measured as an “anomaly” off that point.
The GISS baseline makes sense because… Why? (tick, tick, tick…) Times up.
No. Sorry, not because that fit the warmist propaganda pamphlets. Because guess when the started publishing the data? The first published results for GISTEMP were in Hansen 1981. So, that 1951-1980 baseline is was just the most recent 30 years. Changing the baseline after that is meaningless.
It makes sense to GISS because that was a cool period.
Ed… You’re saying it made sense to start studying global average temperature at the end of a period of cooling? Whether they change the baseline after their initial publication of the data makes no difference to the results.
Come on, Ed. You know better.
It sure helps the Public Relations, and for them, that is what counts.
Ed… Would you have had them set the baseline exactly when? Would it have made sense to set the baseline for, say, 1921-1950? Earlier? Would it have made any difference? And does it really make any difference today.
Don’t forget GISS and the CRU use different 30 year baselines.
Oh Ed come on, you’re supposed to have a physics background. You should know that baselines are completely irrelevant. It doesn’t matter if the anomaly is 0.8 or 0.6 or 0.2°C. The trend is the same no matter what your choice of baseline.
The baseline is only relevant when it assists the narrative. The selection has nothing to do with physics. When I select an anomaly map on the GISS website, I select a baseline that includes both a warm and a cool period, an average baseline, so that the result does not mislead. The GISS default baseline misleads by intent.
You can put a base line in any time series you want to but the one you use needs to show what you want it to. When i got into this AGW thing i used to think that we were talking about 5 to 10 degrees difference, but here lately with all the graphs i have been seeing, we are arguing about a few tenths of a degree ethier way. Looking at 50 and 100 yr. graphs the same thing IMO, unfortunately some people have jumped on the band wagon to push agendas or make money, not just science but the banking industry and wow have politicians found a feed trough to feast on. Weather just like climate is a constant variable, weather in the very short term and climate in the very long term. Looking back in history, recorded and geologic the climate has made changes albeit slowly and a couple of times quickly, the weather for different regions keeps moving right along.
Dear Grayman,
I have the same experience. Well, 10 degrees makes the difference with an Ice Age. It seems that with modern satellite measurements not much change can be detected. The older ground station measurements are other stuff. I analyse the GHCN data base, and I am now working on a peculiar problem. Using best methods, the total amount of warming depends on the method of analysis. I suspect that one method is better in controlling for subtle bias. I go on in silence, because the problem is quite difficult. So far my best method tells that in three centuries the earth warmed one degree Celsius, probably recovery from LIA. Don’t tell this to Rob, because this is not peer-reviewed science.
By the way: as far as I know, a meta-analysis of climate research has never been done. This is peculiar, regarding the enormous budgets available for AGW research. In meta-analysis, studies get a quality index. In medical research for example an one-shot case study scores low with respect to a study using the Golden Standard. Sometimes it is found that claimed effects depend on the quality of methods. This is what I mean. Global warming and therefore AGW may be an artefact of poor research. Dangerous subject, but I like that.
In Tucson where I spend the winters to escape the cold of my home in Colorado today 15000 customers were cut off from natural gas because there was not enough gas in the interstate pipeline from Texas to Arizona to meet demand. Temperatures tonight will easily surpass the all time Febuary low temperature record. Shelters have been set up to house the people whose gas has been cut off. There is not a space heater in town.
During the last 100 years, the temperature changed by something like 0.6 °C. Is that much? Well, the world hasn’t noticed. This temperature change is smaller than the range in which the temperature of the human body is naturally moving – and be sure that warm-blooded animals like us and birds use sophisticated mechanisms to keep the temperature this constant – otherwise the variations would be much higher (for cold-blooded animals, the oscillations are much higher)
smaller than the temperature accuracy that most of us may “feel” in a rooma small fraction of the temperature difference between night and the early afternoon at a given place equivalent to the warming we experience if we move to a lower altitude, by 100 meters equivalent to the warming induced by moving 100 km towards the equator, equivalent to the one-week seasonal warming in the Spring or cooling in the Fall at a fixed place equivalent to the change of the global mean temperature resulting from a transition from La Nina to El Nino equivalent to the cooling induced by a large volcano eruption such as 1991 Mt Pinatubo equivalent to 5-10 percent of the temperature difference between interglacials and ice ages smaller than the typical difference between the average monthly temperature at a given place during January YYYY and January YYYY+1 equal to the difference between the global mean temperature in January 2010 (warmer) and January 2011 (cooler) 2 percent of the total warming induced by the greenhouse effect on Earth.
Any sensible comparison shows that regardless of the cause, the temperature trend we have been observing in the instrumental era is totally negligible. Nevertheless, some people – especially the people inclined to be infected with the climate panic – often suggest that we shouldn’t compare temperature changes caused by different things.
If a temperature variation is totally negligible, what’s there to ‘cherry pick’ Rob. The answer is Nothing, Nada, Zero.
http://motls.blogspot.com/2011/02/do-causes-of-temperature-changes-matter.html
‘Global warming’ morphs into ‘global weirding’…
http://www.bostonherald.com/news/opinion/op_ed/view.bg?articleid=1314036
The term “global weirding” came from the Thomas Friedman book, Hot, Flat and Crowded, which came out in Sept of 2008.
Dana
4. Februar 2011 at 00:36 | Permalink | Reply
“Funny these guys claim global warming is just a “natural cycle”, but they seem shocked that surface temperatures cool during a La Nina cycle”.
Dana, I don’t share your ‘humor’.
You’re busting every remark made on this blog with absolutely no merit.
I sense a serious character flaw here.
Get professional treatment.
Maybe Dr. Sanity provides some help as he offers insides about a real problem you could sink your teeth in instead of the insignificant 0,6 degree Celsius temperatures increase we have measured since the last Little Ice Age.
http://drsanity.blogspot.com/2011/02/all-our-yesterdays.html
Ad hominem. But of course Pierre has no problem with his buddies insulting me.
Hi Dana, I can be guilty of it myself, my apologies. I am trying to not do that, i would rather the discourse be a good discussion than attacks as discussion leads to better understanding everything.
Thanks grayman – unfortunately I don’t think many people here are interested in gaining a better understanding of the climate.
From you? From skepticalscience, who deny the influence of UHI on temperature records? That’s chutzpah.
Dirk… Where is the UHI effect influencing the satellite record? No air conditioning units are in orbit affecting those readings.
The UHI effect was a really interesting idea at first. But it’s been tested. Even pulling out all of the poorly sited stations and using only well sited stations (as defined by Anthony Watts) there is virtually no difference.
I am continually dismayed how you guys keep harping on a phenomenon that has been thoroughly disproven.
Exactly Rob. Yes, we at Skeptical Science “deny” an effect which has been filtered out of the surface temperature record – which has been proven through much data analysis – and which doesn’t exist in the satellite data.
That you deny simple facts like this is why you’re called “deniers”.
Rob Honeycutt
3. Februar 2011 at 21:04 | Permalink | Reply
‘Funny, the plum trees started blooming in January here on the west coast this year’.
What is the real message you’re sending us Rob.
Do you want to say that the recent cold front that covered 1/3 of the US territory in snow and ice was an insignificant event because the freaking plum trees are blooming at the West Coast?
Do you want to say that Ed Carls report about what’s going on New Mexico (Ed Caryl 3. Februar 2011 at 17:31) is an insignificant event because the freaking plum trees are blooming at the West Coast.
You’re continues attempts to take the moral high ground with remarks about blooming plum trees and cheap shots from the hip about (‘base lines’ 9Rob Honeycutt 4. Februar 2011 at 04:15) and ‘Cherry Picking” in an attempt to torpedo sensible postings from people like Ed Carl and our host Pierre Gosselin here get noticed and to be really, really honest with you I am fed up with it.
Why don’t you come up with real arguments that enrich our discussions here. Or is this too much asked for?
Have a go at it, expand your vocabulary beyond words like ‘Cherry Picking, and Plum Trees’ because it really make you look like a Fruit Cake.
R de Haan… I guess I have to be a little more literal with you. My point about the plum trees is that they ARE blooming early this year but that is weather. Usually the north coast is rainy through March and into April. Again, like the cold where Ed is, that is weather. Sorry if that set you off.
Ed understands the baseline discussion. Maybe you shouldn’t worry about it.
What I have been posting here for the past several weeks is fully backed up by a broad body of scientific research.
They certainly have a problem in New Mexico
http://apnews.myway.com/article/20110204/D9L5RP6G1.html
Blocking of new power plants triggers nationwide blackouts.
(At least we’ll have 1 million electric cars on the road by 2015 taking the strain from the grid and keeping us snug and warm.
Fortunately power outages effect our political establishment as well so I expect a policy change soon)
http://www.prisonplanet.com/obamas-blocking-of-new-power-plants-triggers-nationwide-blackouts.html
About those blooming plum trees again.
They are supposed to bloom at his time of year.
In fact they are a little late this season.
http://sfcitizen.com/blog/2011/01/26/its-mid-winter-so-our-flowering-plum-trees-are-blooming-2011s-season-is-a-little-late-actually/
Just looked at the plum trees this article is talking about. They are talking about a variety of non-fruiting plum that blooms early. Every summer we walk around our neighborhood with our kids eating actual fruit-bearing plum trees. People around here hate them because the drop rotting fruit all over their cars through the summer months. We love them because we can pick basketfuls of the plums and eat till our heart’s content.
But again, my point was about weather as opposed to climate.
Cross country skiing and Global Warming
http://www.ourmidland.com/voices/general/article_377280ea-301a-11e0-a830-0017a4aa4fba.html
The major snow storm of February 1
http://icecap.us/images/uploads/The_Major_Snowstorm_of_February_1.pdf
Great picts.
This is very interesting: In the following article, the writer correctly states that rising food prices are what brought Mubarak down; and that this has been predicted by The Guardian when we had the first food price riots back in 2008.
But the writer gullibly swallows the “AGW dun it” line by the warmists.
http://www.forward.com/articles/135144/
When you look at Roy Spencer’s UAH temperature graph you see that 2008 had a sharp El Nino / La Nina transition temperature drop and we have one now.