Thursday, June 18, 2015

Temperature Records Are Falling

The National Centers for Environmental Information has released the latest climate numbers for May and they are smoking hot.  In fact, last month represents the hottest May in the instrumented record.
Source: NCEI
And the Northern Hemisphere spring (March–May) was also the warmest on record.

Source: NCEI
And globally, January–May was the warmest on record.

Source: NCEI
And also globally, June–May was the warmest on record.

Source: NCEI
In 1979, the National Academy of Sciences issued a report entitled Carbon Dioxide and Climate: A Scientific Assessment.  Some snippets from the executive summary seem appropriate today.
"For more than a century, we have been aware that changes in the composition of the atmosphere could affect its ability to trap the sun's energy for our benefit. We now have incontrovertible evidence that the atmosphere is indeed changing and that we ourselves contribute to that change. Atmsopheric concentrations of carbon dioxide are steadily increasing, and these changes are linked with man's use of fossil fuels and exploitation of land. Since carbon dioxide plays a significant role in the heat budget of the atmosphere, it is reasonable to suppose that continued increases would affect climate."

"These concerns have prompted a number of investigations of the implications of increasing carbon dioxide.  Their consensus has been that increasing carbon dioxide will lead to a warmer earth with a different distribution of climatic regimes."

"If carbon dioxide continues to increase, the study group finds no reason to doubt that climate changes will result and no reason to believe that these changes will be negligible."

"However, the study group points out that the ocean, the great and ponderous flywheel of the global climate system, may be expected to slow the course of observable climate change. A wait-and-see policy may mean waiting until it is too late."

7 comments:

  1. Surface instrumental records have been shown to be corrupt since they have to be tweaked to account for heat island effect/urbanization/de-forestation, how much to tweak each station is a guess which makes the data almost useless for small changes which are shown in the charts. The latest RSS satellite monthly global mean surface temperature anomaly dataset is much less corrupt and shows no global warming for the last 18 years 6 months while at the same time CO2 has continued to increase at a faster and faster rate. Those that believe that CO2 was the cause of global warming that DID occur from the mid/late 70's all the way through the mid/late 90's can't explain the pause in the current warming when CO2 has continued to increase at a faster and faster rate and is currently at a all time high in 2015.

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    1. Hmm... Interesting. I am very curious to know why the polar ice caps are melting and why are glaciers disappearing?

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    2. What you ignore is that 93% of the climate warming has occurred in the oceans: http://www.skepticalscience.com/global-warming-stopped-in-1998-intermediate.htm. The atmosphere accounts for just over 2% of the warming, so what you are really saying is that you don't think the climate system has warmed for the past 18 years because one data set (RSS) suggests that 2% of the climate system hasn't warmed for the past 18 years.

      And by the way, RSS is not without its own "corruption". Even Roy Spencer thinks that RSS has a cold bias because of the correction they are applying to the decaying orbit of the old NOAA-15 satellite. Furthermore, potentially "corrupt" land stations can be removed from NOAA analyses, which shows that the last year over oceans is still the warmest for their record: http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/global/201505.

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  2. I moved to Utah in 1973, and the temperature anomaly in those charts exactly matches my personal experience here.

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  3. This spring was the earliest I've seen hummingbirds by a month. Are they a canary in a coal mine?

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    1. They canary has been dead for a long time.

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  4. While working in our garden near u of u, we noticed a number of hummingbirds quite early this spring

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