Texan Aviator

Well, not exactly...

Twelve-month long drop in world temperatures wipes out a century of warming.

Over the past year, anecdotal evidence for a cooling planet has exploded. China has its coldest winter in 100 years. Baghdad sees its first snow in all recorded history A First! Snow Falls in Baghdad . North America has the most snow cover in 50 years Forget global warming: Welcome to the new Ice Age, with places like Wisconsin the highest since record-keeping began. Record levels of Antarctic sea ice, record cold in Minnesota, Texas, Florida, Mexico, Australia, Iran, Greece, South Africa, Greenland, Argentina, Chile -- the list goes on and on. Record Cold for Northern Minn.: 40 Below
No more than anecdotal evidence, to be sure. But now, that evidence has been supplanted by hard scientific fact. All four major global temperature tracking outlets (Hadley, NASA's GISS, UAH, RSS) have released updated data. All show that over the past year, global temperatures have dropped precipitously.
A compiled list of all the sources can be seen here. January 2008 - 4 sources say “globally cooler” in the past 12 months « Watts Up With That? The total amount of cooling ranges from 0.65C up to 0.75C -- a value large enough to wipe out most of the warming recorded over the past 100 years. All in one year's time. For all four sources, it's the single fastest temperature change ever recorded, either up or down.
Scientists quoted in a past DailyTech article DailyTech - Solar Activity Diminishes; Researchers Predict Another Ice Age the cooling to reduced solar activity which they claim is a much larger driver of climate change than man-made greenhouse gases. The dramatic cooling seen in just 12 months time seems to bear that out. While the data doesn't itself disprove that carbon dioxide is acting to warm the planet, it does demonstrate clearly that more powerful factors are now cooling it.
Let's hope those factors stop fast. Cold is more damaging than heat. The mean temperature of the planet is about 54 degrees. Humans -- and most of the crops and animals we depend on -- prefer a temperature closer to 70.

Historically, the warm periods such as the Medieval Climate Optimum were beneficial for civilization. Corresponding cooling events such as the Little Ice Age, though, were uniformly bad news.

Update 2/27: The graph for HadCRUT (above), as well as the linked graphs for RSS and UAH are generated month-to-month; the temperature declines span a full 12 months of data. The linked GISS graph was graphed for the months of January only, due to a limitation in the plotting program. Anthony Watts, who kindly provided the graphics, otherwise has no connection with the column. The views and comments are those of the author only.

DailyTech - Temperature Monitors Report Widescale Global Cooling

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shinysideup

Al Gore's Gulfstream is ready to scramble to respond to any crisis!

The San Francisco Citizen » Blog Archive » Earth Hour Comes to San Francisco - Lights Out for One Hour.


After last night’s Earth Hour of partial darkness from 8:00-9:00 PM, the lights on the “architectural necklace” of the western span of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge came back to life on the north side first. (Unfortunately, didn’t get a look at the troubled eastern span last night - it was probably darkened also.)
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The lights on the suspension cables of the western span of one of the busiest bridges in the world are just for decoration, not for navigation safety or whatever. Pretty. They sure make a big difference to the look of San Francisco at night when they are turned off.

Question: Turning off these decorative lights for an hour saves enough electricity to power Al Gore’s house (his actual house, not his San Francisco condo in SOMA that’s visible on the right) for how many minutes?

Answer: About 13 minutes. Let’s work on that math, after the jump.

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lap

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rodger_wilco

Have you guys ever heard of Ted Turner? Is he a scientist or something?

Turner: Global Warming Will Cause Mass Cannibalism, Insurgents Are Patriots | NewsBusters.org

davinci

I'm imagining you guys all with your thick horned rim glasses, high water too tight jeans snort-laughing and hi-fiving each other each as you dig up some stupid trivia someone who shares your character wrote on the internet...

it really is kind of hysterical....

anyway...didn't mean to interrupt....as you were............

coolyokeluke

Twelve Months of Cooling Doesn’t Make A Climate Trend « Watts Up With That?

Twelve Months of Cooling Doesn’t Make A Climate Trend
5

03

2008
NOTE: This was posted on ICECAP today, and I’m copying it here. See my further notes below.

By Dr. John R. Christy.

I have been flooded this week with calls and e-mail messages concerning a story that has appeared on various Internet sites, in which the claim is made that cooling global temperatures over the past twelve months in some way negate or eliminate any global warming that might have happened over the past 100 years.

“Here is my perspective on this issue: Twelve months of data does not make a trend, especially in a system as complex and slow moving as global climate, and even more so when the cause for that short-term cooling is as reasonably well understood and well documented as a switch from a minor El Nino Pacific Ocean warming in January 2007 to the La Nina cooling event now taking place.

“The 0.59 C drop we have seen in the past 12 months is unusual, but not unprecedented; April 1998 to April 1999 saw a 0.71 C fall. The long-term climate trend from November 1978 through (and including) January 2008 continues to show a modest warming at the rate of about 0.14 C (0.25 degrees F) per decade.

“One cool year does not erase decades of climate data, nor does it more than minimally change the long-term climate trend. Long-term climate change is just that “long term” and 12 months of data are little more than a blip on the screen.”

Dr. John Christy is Professor of Atmospheric Science and Director, Earth System Science Center, The University of Alabama in Huntsville

Icecap Note: John is absolutely correct that we can’t make assumptions about one year’s trend either up or down. The story he references used the Hadley CRU land and ocean based data and of course John Christy, Roy Spencer and Phillip Gentry are using satellite derived lower tropospheric data. Satellite is widely recognized as the most accurate method for the assessment of change. The following plot of the last decade of the satellite derived global temperatures shows how the global climate is strongly influenced by El Nino and La Nina as John notes.

Note from Anthony: When the DailyTech first posted this story and referenced my blog as the source of th compilation, without ever interviewing me or asking me a single question, I notified them immediately of my concerns. Shortly after that I published this ”Update and Caveat” (below) on the original post. Dailytech graciously made a changes to the wording at my request, but by then the genie was out of the bottle.


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The website DailyTech has an article citing this blog entry as a reference, and their story got picked up by the Drudge report, resulting in a wide distribution. In the DailyTech article there is a paragraph:

“Anthony Watts compiled the results of all the sources. The total amount of cooling ranges from 0.65C up to 0.75C — a value large enough to erase nearly all the global warming recorded over the past 100 years. All in one year time. For all sources, it’s the single fastest temperature change ever recorded, either up or down.”

I wish to state for the record, that this statement is not mine: “–a value large enough to erase nearly all the global warming recorded over the past 100 years”

There has been no “erasure”. This is an anomaly with a large magnitude, and it coincides with other anecdotal weather evidence. It is curious, it is unusual, it is large, it is unexpected, but it does not “erase” anything. I suggested a correction to DailyTech and they have graciously complied.



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This demonstrates how one story written in one place can often go repeated, without being challenged or double checked. This happens in many types of news reports. In my 25 years in TV, I’ve seen this happen at the local level, all the way up to the national level. We’ve seen it happen with global warming stories too. The ease of electronic immediacy in reporting often runs over the accuracy in reporting, be it blogs, websites, TV or radio, the issue is the same.

AviatorTx

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This post is my personal opinion only. I make no claim of being an actual XJT employee, nor do I play an XJT employee on TV. All statements are made only as that of a private tax paying citizen of the United States. No affiliation with Expressjet, Expressjet Holdings, or ALPA are expressed, nor implied.

coolyokeluke

We've gone around and around on this one...it's called derived data. I suppose we don't know what people looked like thousands of years ago either before people started sculpting and painting on cave walls.

AviatorTx

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__________________
This post is my personal opinion only. I make no claim of being an actual XJT employee, nor do I play an XJT employee on TV. All statements are made only as that of a private tax paying citizen of the United States. No affiliation with Expressjet, Expressjet Holdings, or ALPA are expressed, nor implied.

Chuychanga

It could consistently get cooler over a 100 year period even in the middle of a period of global warming. Global warming periods last many millions of years. 100 years doesn't mean ****. 100 years is a miniscule amount of time, geologically speaking. To say that because it got cooler for a few years means the earth generally isn't generally getting warmer on a much larger scale is a very myopic way to view the issue.

It's like saying today is cooler than yesterday, therefore it's not possible that summer is approaching, we must be headed for winter. Or, "XJT stock has gone up two days in a row, why are all these idiots bitching about the stock price?"

The earth has been alternately warming and cooling since the beginning. There have been several Ice Ages, each followed by periods of global warming, to the point where the earth was probably completely ice-free even at the poles. We are at the very very beginning of one of those periods right now. Within these periods there are also smaller scale periods when the ice caps alternately advance and retreat. It has happened before, it is happening now, it will happen again after the next ice age in a few hundred million years.

The most significant question is not, "Is the earth getting warmer?" It is getting warmer, as we are just barely coming out from the last Ice Age.

The significant question is, "Are humans responsible for it?" The general consensus among geologists is that we are not responsible for it, but are probably helping it along a little quicker.

Either way, us humans are very insignificant. There is nothing we can do to stop processes that are hundreds of millions of years in the making. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't try slowing it down a little bit to try and lengthen this very short period of time that the earth is comfortably inhabitable by humans.