9 ms·
February breaks global temperature records by 'shocking' amount
- mathgenius 11y agoMore here at John Baez's blog: https://johncarlosbaez.wordpress.com/2016/03/03/global-temperature-spike/ https://johncarlosbaez.wordpress.com/2016/03/03/global-tempe...
- msravi 11y agoSince the graph plots "monthly mean global surface temperature" how do we know that it is not skewed by large temperature increase in a few urban cities, versus a widespread increase across the globe? The reason I ask, is that higher urban temperatures can be explained by local effects rather than global effects, and we need to be sure where the problem is to tackle it effectively. Is there per-city/region data that goes back a significant number of years to do this sort of study?
- anon1385 11y agoYes that data exists. No, urban effects don't account for much of the temperature rise. http://www.skepticalscience.com/urban-heat-island-effect.htm http://www.skepticalscience.com/urban-heat-island-effect.htm In the case of last month in particular a lot of the biggest anomalies were in the arctic where there are no urban cities (see the map in the Guardian article).
- mSparks 11y agoI wonder what that graph looks like if you scroll it back 10000 years... You know during the ice age. Wish these climate nutters would stop trying to send us back there. It wasn't very nice.
- th0waway 11y agoI'd have to disagree with the UHI paper because of personal experiences in my own life - I live outside a major metropolitan city. Over the past twenty years, I have noticed that the heat-island has expanded as the city has expanded. There is a noticeable difference. Any measurements made within the heat-island are affected.
- Arnt 11y agoSure, lighthouse logbooks for example.
- hackuser 11y agoIt seems very unlikely that all those local anomolies coincidentally aligned and were so extreme that they resulted in this extreme, first-in-history, global event.
- mkesper 11y agoFrom that blog: Keep in mind that it took from the dawn of the industrial age until last October to reach the first 1.0 degree Celsius, and we’ve come as much as an extra 0.4 degrees further in just the last five months. As of Thursday morning, it appears that average temperatures across the Northern Hemisphere have breached the 2 degrees Celsius above “normal” mark for the first time in recorded history, and likely the first time since human civilization began thousands of years ago.
- barney54 11y agoWe are in the middle of a powerful El Niño. Let's see where global temperatures are in 6 months when El Niño fades.
- tremon 11y agoprobably even warmer: The month did not break the record for hottest month, since that is only likely to happen during a northern hemisphere summer, when most of the world’s land mass heats up.
- hackuser 11y agoEl Ninos have been occurring for (thousands? millions? billions?) of years, yet nothing like February ever happened before.
- writtles 11y agoI didn't realize the scope of our data went back that far!
- Nutmog 11y ago"highest in recorded history" is quite a misleading statement. What if used daily measurements instead? Maybe the peak would have been some other time. What if you looked at specific places, their peaks would all be at different times, and many would be wildly far from that baseline by tens of degrees C. What if you averaged over a whole year instead of just a month? This peak will surely flatten out if you do that. What if you averaged over several years or any other time period? So it's not as if people haven't experienced this type of climate before. We didn't even know we'd had it until the satellite told us! That's how hard it is to notice. Yet we easily notice the difference in local temperature from day to day because the swings are much more massive.
- fsloth 11y agoCould some climatologist say does this imply something specific based on existing models and simulations or does it mean we are in an unknown territory?
- anon1385 11y agoI'm not a climatologist but I don't think it puts us in unknown territory. You have to consider what the known influences on the system (e.g. volcanic eruptions, solar variation) have been doing and what the known internal cycles (e.g. el nino) have been doing When you do that then you find Feb was well above the long term trend line, but not by a staggering amount (i.e. it's similar to things we have seen before): https://tamino.wordpress.com/2016/03/13/surprise-but-not-shock/ https://tamino.wordpress.com/2016/03/13/surprise-but-not-sho... It does confirm that there was never any 'pause', it was just natural short term cycles (la nina) masking the long term trend. We will likely be above trend for a bit due to el nino, as happened in 1997/1998. Longer term it will average out. (Average out to a steady increase in temperature that is).
- anc84 11y agoClimate change scares me so much yet I feel completely helpless that I rather hear nothing about it. The effects have been known for years but those in power completely ignore or even sabotage attempts to act. What's the point in hearing about it if there is practically nothing I can do but worry?
- jensen123 11y agoWell, you can at least move to some other place that will be less affected by it. For example, if you currently live in Florida, you could move to Michigan. So, I think it's useful to hear about it.
- jonsen 11y agoHow would you predict local effects? A change in climate is a change in overall dynamics. Precise local effects is not at all predictable, I think.
- mirimir 11y agoThere are regional climate models. But at least sea level is relatively straightforward. Even the gravitational and geostatic effects of large chunks of ice. And getting further from the equator will also be generally good.
- pascalo 11y agoOr you get used to it early by moving to a place like Adelaide, Australia, where you 3 or so have 42C plus days in a row in summer and they already have built a desalination plant during the last proper drought.
- tonyedgecombe 11y agoIt's interesting that people consider flooding the biggest problem, I would have though wide spread crop failures would be the main problem.
- 11y ago
- rogersmith 11y ago"The global surface temperatures across land and ocean in February were 1.35C warmer than the average temperature for the month, from the baseline period of 1951-1980." Earth having been around for millions of years, how statistically significant is a 29 years period in the grand scheme of things?
- anon1385 11y agoThose 29 years are just a baseline that's used by convention. You can pick whatever period you want to use as a baseline and it doesn't change the result (i.e. the absolute magnitude of the anomalies will change but not the relative change which is what we are interested in).
- adaml_623 11y agoYou have a expected lifetime of ~70-80 years and I assume you've already been around for 18. Go and stand in a Sauna for a few hours and tell me how statistically significant that few hours is to you.
- rogersmith 11y agoSo I go to the sauna for a few hours right? Reach abnormal temperature for a statistically insignificant period of time wrt to my expected lifetime, then a few minutes later after I left the sauna my temperature is back within average expectations. What was your point again? To clarify: my point is, even only taking into account only the period during which it has been inhabited by mankind, Earth has probably reached hotter and colder averages than what we've experienced over the past half century. Mankind did fine.
- adaml_623 11y ago"So I go to the sauna for a few hours right? Reach abnormal temperature for a statistically insignificant period of time wrt to my expected lifetime, then a few minutes later after I left the sauna my temperature is back within average expectations. What was your point again?" My point was that you're dead. In a Sauna for a few hours. You will die. Statistics and average lifetime are not relevant.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- ekianjo 11y ago> The global surface temperatures across land and ocean in February were 1.35C warmer than the average temperature for the month, from the baseline period of 1951-1980. Since when do we make conclusions based on outliers? We need to see something like a 5 years trend before we can confirm if the Feb temperature is really unusual or part of a real increasing trend. The guardian should know better.
- anon1385 11y agoWhat conclusion have they made?
- ekianjo 11y agoIt's all in the title of the post, with "shocking" and all.
- mathgenius 11y agoWell I guess we would want to know the standard deviation of these numbers (for each month), and therefore work out how often we would expect to see such a 1.35C difference from the mean in febuary. Is it 1 in 100 years? or 1 in 100000? or what?
- ekianjo 11y agoYeah, and the problem is that our database for reliable temperature measurements is counted in decades and not even hundred of years. So hardly telling.
- mathgenius 11y agoA few tens of febuaries is enough to get an estimate of the standard deviation, no? And also, don't we have ice core samples going back thousands of years? This should indicate more about the occurrence of large scale variations in temperature. I'm not going to argue minutea because I don't have a spare life that I can devote to climate science. I just assume they are getting it right.
- Nutmog 11y agoWhen we would occasionally get an extra cold day or cold winter, climate change deniers would say "where's the global warming if it's so cold?" and the response would be "you have to average it over decades, not just cherry pick the anomolies." Here they're cherry picking an anomaly. Any actual dramatic change will gradually become more and more certain as it sustains itself over months, years and decades. We won't just suddenly notice it oneday.
- yread 11y agoAccording to http://cdn.thinkprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/02101202/UAH2-16-638x357.jpg http://cdn.thinkprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/0210... we haven't had a month with temperature below baseline since 2012/2
- Oletros 11y ago> When we would occasionally get an extra cold day or cold winter, climate change deniers would say "where's the global warming if it's so cold?" and the response would be "you have to average it over decades, not just cherry pick the anomolies." Well, what should be said is that weather is not climate > Here they're cherry picking an anomaly. How so?
- danieltillett 11y agoAn observation from down under - we are currently stuck in the endless summer. It has just gone on and on and shows no sign of cooling off.
- douche 11y agoHow does this stack up against other periods when the earth was considerably warmer than the Little Ice Age period that we are moving out of now? Have we gone beyond the levels of the Medieval Warm Period, or say the Jurassic period?
- stillsut 11y agoRoughly equal to Medieval Warm Period in terms of global mean temperature. Areas the size of Europe (~3% of the total area) might show significant differences between then and now in average yearly temperature, with the global average being equal. The most important comparison to compare Earth's current temperature to is called the 'Holocene Optimium' which is the current high point (10kya) in the glacial/inter-glacial cycle. It's thought to have been 0.5C-2.0C warmer than today.
- skylan_q 11y agoIT'S THE END OF THE WORLD (again)
- basicplus2 11y agohttps://cbdakota.wordpress.com/2015/10/08/dukes-dr-brown-believes-temperature-records-are-being-deliberately-tampered-to-support-man-made-global-warming-theory/#more-7624 https://cbdakota.wordpress.com/2015/10/08/dukes-dr-brown-bel... Have a read and have a look at the graph here and compare and contrast...
- Oletros 11y agoFor sure, a really unbiased site
- basicplus2 11y agotry reading what is written, examine what is presented, research who says what, examine the evidence and draw your own conclusions, it will help in all areas if your life
- Oletros 11y agoI have read what is written but sorry, WUWT and Robert Brown are not exactly examples of honest reporting. And, to be sincere, the site the link pertains to is just another denier site and not even a very smart one
- falcolas 11y agoIn Montana, US, it really was a shocking amount. Averages in the 40's and 50's (Fahrenheit), where we should be in the 20's and 30's. No new snowpack to speak of. It's fair to say forest fires this year are going to be pretty bad. I'm personally not looking forward to another August where we can't see the sun for the smoke.
- geraldoramos 11y agoWe are trying to do something here. If at least we find a more efficient way to distribute climate change real facts, we can accelerate the time that emerging science discoveries takes to break resistance. Here is our first attempt: http://warming.world http://warming.world