The Last Three Months Were the Hottest Quarter On Record 552
New submitter NatasRevol (731260) writes The last three months were collectively the warmest ever experienced since record-keeping began in the late 1800s. From the article: "Taken as a whole, the just-finished three-month period was about 0.68 degrees Celsius (1.22 degrees Fahrenheit) above the 20th-century average. That may not sound like much, but the added warmth has been enough to provide a nudge to a litany of weather and climate events worldwide. Arctic sea ice is trending near record lows for this time of year, abnormally warm ocean water helped spawn the earliest hurricane ever recorded to make landfall in North Carolina, and a rash of heat waves have plagued cities from India to California to the Middle East." Also, it puts to bed the supposed 'fact' that there's been a pause in temperature increase the last 17 years. Raw data shows it's still increasing.
bizwriter also wrote in with some climate related news: A new report from libertarian think tank Heartland Institute claims that new government data debunks the concept of global climate change. However, an examination of the full data and some critical consideration shows that the organization, whether unintentionally or deliberately, has inaccurately characterized and misrepresented the information and what it shows.
The Heartland Institute skews the data by taking two points and ignoring all of the data in between, kind of like grabbing two zero points from sin(x) and claiming you're looking at a steady state function.
Re:The study focuses soley on Japan (Score:5, Informative)
It wasn't just Japan. According to the article, the Japan Meteorological Society did do a study that focused on Japan, but NASA ran a similar study using different methods that got virtually the same results in a completely different part of the world.
Re:The GISS adjusted^^^ dataset (Score:4, Informative)
lololololololol, were you expecting anything else?
Certainly a link [boston.com] to ice measures from various places on Earth and a discussion of how various models have held up to measurement over the past decade, regarding their predictive value.
Oh, nevermind - shut up and pay your carbon tax.
Re:let me solve this right now (Score:4, Informative)
CO2 does NOT absorb sunlight in significant quantities. It's lowest wavelength absorption band is in the short-wave IR where the solar incidence is already very weak.
What CO2 does that makes it a greenhouse gas is that it prevents long-wave IR emission from the Earth into space, therefore helping to keep some of the energy that reaches the Earth from leaving.
Please get your "facts" straight.
Re: The Heartland Institute (Score:5, Informative)
So, you like them because they're untainted by facts? Good point. No, great point, wouldn't want to be led astray by facts.
Actually the summary is fairly untainted by facts. For instance:
Yikes, that all sounds alarming right?
Except...
1) Arctic sea ice [uiuc.edu] is actually currently above last year's level, which was already a rebound of over 25 million square km more than the previous year at the minimum extents.
2) The ocean waters in the North Atlantic hurricane region are right around average [wxug.com] for this time of year, by no means "abnormally warm".
3) "Rashes of heat waves plague" various places every summer, and always have. NOAA recently reinstated 1934 as the hottest year in the US on record.
The article attacking the Heartland data does have a minor point, but it is absolutely true that temperatures have been essentially flat for around 17 years, while CO2 has been at the highest levels in history. There have been quite a few peer reviewed papers trying to explain this pause, so it's clearly a real phenomena. We'll see if it continues, the El Nino this year is now expected to be a fairly minor event [noaa.gov].
Coldest first half in the US since 1993 (Score:1, Informative)
Re:The study focuses soley on Japan (Score:5, Informative)
This looks like a temperature map of the WHOLE EARTH [jma.go.jp] to me, found on the source site after about 10 seconds of terribly difficult clicking on a couple of buttons.
Re: 1800s (Score:5, Informative)
I thought the MWP was a full three degrees warmer then the 1990's. Which were warmer then now.
What you think, is, of course, your own problem (although the "a full three degrees warmer" must come from some very creative interpretation of the record). But how do you get the ideas that the 1990's were warmer than it is now? The 1990s were about 0.2 degree C colder than 2013, and this year will most likely be warmer still. There was one exceptional year (1998) that was marginally warmer than 2013. Of course, these short-term trends are heavily influenced by noise, so the significance of these results is low. But that's no reason to make wrong claims.
Re:Check those numbers, submitter (Score:5, Informative)
You obviously didn't actually look at the articles.
The deltas are increasing. They have not actually been flat for a while, like since the 60s.
Re: The Heartland Institute (Score:5, Informative)
Your second chart shows a positive temperature anomaly over most of the area covered.
Re:The GISS adjusted^^^ dataset (Score:5, Informative)
The raw data shows the same warming trend [guim.co.uk]. And the adjustments are there for a good reason - otherwise the deniers would be complaining even more about the heat island effect and siting / instrumentation problems than they even are today (oh, and to head people off, the warming trend gets even stronger [noaa.gov] when you outright remove the "bad", "artificially hot" meteorological stations the deniers complain about). And all of the adjustments are cross-checked by a variety of peer-reviewed verification methods. For example, the heat island effect on stations is (among other methods) cross-checked by comparing windy days with still days, as wind greatly reduces the heat island effect.
In short, to anyone who thinks they've got some killer reason why the adjustments are wrong, simply write a paper, go through peer-review like everyone else has to do, and viola, you're part of the actual scientific debate and I'll take you seriously. Until then...
"Supposed fact" (Score:5, Informative)
You know when they're using weasel words like this they're being disingenuous:
"Also, it puts to bed the supposed 'fact' that there's been a pause in temperature increase the last 17 years. Raw data shows it's still increasing."
"Since 2000, temperatures have been warmer than average, but they did not increase significantly. Data courtesy of NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center. Since the turn of the century, however, the change in Earth’s global mean surface temperature has been close to zero." Note also CO2 rose the entire tie, it just didn't get any warmer for 17 years.
This is an NOAA.gov stateent based on NOAA data. And they disagree with this? Ok, what's the source of their data? Have they told the NOAA they're wrong yet?
http://www.climate.gov/news-fe... [climate.gov]