Global Climate Change Science News

[Tero]

Plus, you get warm just from chopping wood!

[Seth]

Uh-oh, the conspiracy crumbles even more....

Satellite Data Says 2014 Actually Wasn’t The Warmest On Record
10:58 AM 01/12/2015



Michael Bastasch
Contributor

Climate scientists and environmentalists sounded the alarm this year after Japanese climatologists reported 2014 was the warmest year on record based on global surface temperature readings.

But satellite temperature data shows that 2014 was not even close to be the warmest on record. In fact, 2014 was only the 6th warmest year on record, according to the Remote Sensing System (RSS) satellite data set that measures the lowest few miles of the Earth’s atmosphere.
RSS and UAH data show 2014 was not even close to being the warmest on record. (Graph courtesy of Steven Goddard)

RSS and UAH data show 2014 was not even close to being the warmest on record. (Graph courtesy of Steven Goddard)

Climate scientists John Christy and Roy Spencer with the University of Alabama, Huntsville (UAH) said, ”2014 was third-warmest, but barely.” UAH is home to the other major satellite climate dataset.

Christy said, “2014 was warm, but not special. The 0.01 degree Celsius difference between 2014 and 2005, or the 0.02 difference with 2013 are not statistically different from zero. That might not be a very satisfying conclusion, but it is at least accurate.”

Christy noted that from 2002 to 2014, temperatures have warmed at a rate of 0.05 degrees Celsius per decade which he calls “statistically insignificant.” Since 2002, global temperatures have averaged about 0.18 degrees Celsius warmer than the 30-year baseline average, according to Christy.

RSS and UAH satellite data show there has been no global warming for 18 years and three months — a so-called pause in global warming that has lasted since the late 1990s and continued through 2014.

“The Great Pause is a growing embarrassment to those who had told us with ‘substantial confidence’ that the science was settled and the debate over,” Christopher Monckton, the 3rd Viscount Monckton of Brenchley and a climate skeptic, wrote in his analysis of the near two-decade pause in warming. “Nature had other ideas.”

“Though approaching 70 mutually incompatible and more or less implausible excuses for the Pause are appearing in nervous reviewed journals and among proselytizing scientists, the possibility that the Pause is occurring because the computer models are simply wrong about the sensitivity of temperature to manmade greenhouse gases can no longer be dismissed, and is demonstrated in a major peer-reviewed paper published this month in the Orient’s leading science journal,” writes Monckton, who has been studying and writing on global warming for years.

Surface temperature datasets that government climate agencies generally rely on for global temperature averages are based on readings from thousands of weather stations, buoys and ships across the world.

Based on these reading, the Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA) declared 2014 the hottest on record, hitting 0.63 degrees Celsius above the 20th century average global temperature. But 2014 was only 0.05 degrees warmer than 1998, the next hottest year on record, according to JMA data.

Surface temperature records, however, still show pause in global warming over the last 10 to 15 years, despite 2014 being declared the warmest on record by Japanese scientists.

As for the continental U.S., 2014 was only the 34th warmest, as record cold temperatures plagued the beginning of the year.

“Very warm conditions dominated the West, with four states having their warmest year on record, while the Midwest and Mississippi Valley were cool,” said the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “The Northern U.S. was wet, and the Southern Plains were dry; the national drought footprint shrank about 2 percent.”

NOAA is set to release its own global climate assessment for 2014 later this week. It’s expected the agency is will also declare 2014 the warmest on record.

[Seth]

Double uh-oh!

Daily Caller News Foundation
Snow covers the mountains around the Swiss mountain resort of St. Moritz December 9, 2012. REUTERS/Arnd Wiegmann
Study: US Weather Stations Exaggerated Warming In Western Mountains
5:01 PM 01/12/2015



Michael Bastasch
Contributor

The world may be warming, but not as much as some U.S. weather stations have shown. A new University of Montana study found that western U.S. weather stations have been showing more warming in the temperature record than has actually been observed.

The Snowpack Telemetry (SNOTEL) station network, the country’s main mountain climate station network, has shown that high elevations are seeing temperatures rise more quickly than lower elevations, harming snowpack and water resources. But Montana Climate Office researcher Jared Oyler found that western mountain temperatures were inflated between 217 and 562 percent.

Oyler’s analysis of SNOTEL weather stations says the “extreme warming observed at higher elevations is the result of systematic artifacts and not climatic conditions.” When these “artifacts” are removed, SNOTEL data shows there is no accelerated warming in western U.S. mountains.

“With artifacts removed, the network’s 1991–2012 minimum temperature trend… is statistically indistinguishable from lower elevation trends,” writes Oyler. “Moreover, longer-term widely used gridded climate products propagate the spurious temperature trend, thereby amplifying 1981–2012 western US elevation-dependent warming by +217 to +562%.”

“In the context of a warming climate, this artificial amplification of mountain climate trends has likely compromised our ability to accurately attribute climate change impacts across the mountainous western US,” Oyler writes in his study.

So what caused this artificial warming? It turns out that sensor changes have biased SNOTEL temperature readings. The SNOTEL network consists of 700 weather stations that monitor temperature and snowpack in western mountains ranges. Scientists use these weather stations to study the impacts of global warming on mountain hydrology and ecology.

“Observations from other station networks clearly show that the western U.S. has experienced regional warming,” Oyler said. “But to assess current and future climate change impacts to snowpack and important mountain ecosystem processes, we need accurate observations from the high elevation areas only covered by the SNOTEL network.”

For years, climate scientists have been saying global warming will harm skiing and snowboarding as snowpacks in the mountains decrease. Some scientists went so far as to say children growing up in the 21st century may never experience snow.

“Children just aren’t going to know what snow is,” Dr. David Viner, a scientist with the climatic research unit at the University of East Anglia, told the UK Independent in 2000.

Viner predicted that global warming would make snow a “very rare and exciting event.” In 2004, Viner once again predicted there would soon be no snow in the Scottish mountains.

“Unfortunately, it’s just getting too hot for the Scottish ski industry,” Viner told the UK Guardian in 2004. “It is very vulnerable to climate change; the resorts have always been marginal in terms of snow and, as the rate of climate change increases, it is hard to see a long-term future.”

“Adam Watson, from the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology in Banchory, Aberdeenshire, believes the industry has no more than 20 years left,” the Guardian reported in the same article.

[Seth]

Volcanoes to the rescue!

Volcanoes ARE cooling Earth: Aerosols from small eruptions have reduced global temperatures and tropical rainfall

Volcanoes may have cooled the Earth by 0.05°C to 0.12°C since 2000
Scientists had overlooked the role of aerosols from small eruptions
The aerosols accumulate between the stratosphere and troposphere
This layer of the atmosphere is difficult to study as clouds obscure it
Eruptions through 1990s and 2000s have contributed to warming 'pause'
Global temperatures plateaued since 1998 after rapid warming in 1990s
The findings mean models predicting climate change need to be revised

By Richard Gray for MailOnline

Published: 11:32 EST, 12 January 2015 | Updated: 13:11 EST, 12 January 2015

Small volcanic eruptions over the past 20 years have been protecting the Earth from global warming, according to a new study.

Scientists have confirmed that droplets of sulphur-rich aerosols spewed into the upper atmosphere by volcanoes have been reflecting sunlight away from the Earth.

Until recently it was thought that only particularly large eruptions had any noticeable affect on the climate.

Scroll down for video
Eruptions of volcanoes like Tavurvur in Papa New Guinea in 2006 had a greater impact on the climate in the past 15 years than had previously been appreciated and may require climate models to be revised
+5

Eruptions of volcanoes like Tavurvur in Papa New Guinea in 2006 had a greater impact on the climate in the past 15 years than had previously been appreciated and may require climate models to be revised

However, the new study has confirmed results from the end of last year that showed these small eruptions can have an accumulative impact on global temperature.

This could have helped decrease the global temperatures by between 0.05°C to 0.12°C over the past 15 years.
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GLOBAL WARMING HASN'T STOPPED - THE HEAT IS JUST HIDING

Instead of eruptions, some scientists claim one of the causes of the ‘plateau’ in sea-surface temperature is a change in the exchange of ocean water.

They believe this exchange is occurring between warm, surface waters and cold, deep waters below 2,300ft (700 metres) – as if the warming is ‘hiding’ underwater.

Easterly trade winds of the Pacific Ocean have increased significantly over the past two decades and as a result are blowing higher volumes of warm surface sea water to deeper depths.

Stronger trade winds blowing from South America to Australia have had the net effect of cooling surface temperatures by a global average of between 0.1°C and 0.2°C,

This would be enough to account for the apparent hiatus in global average temperatures over the past 15 years.

The warm water won’t hide below the surface forever: scientists believe that it may re-emerge later or affect other climate indicators, such as sea level or ocean circulation.

Since 1998, the warmest year on record, the steep increase in global temperatures seen during the 1990s has levelled off, failing to match computer model predictions for climate change.

This pause, or hiatus, has been blamed on weak solar activity and increased uptake of heat by the world's oceans.

The UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change last year concluded that the deep oceans had been responsible for absorbing an increasing amount of heat, but warned that this could not continue indefinitely.

However, in a paper published in November last year, atmospheric scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found that small volcanic eruptions in the early 21st century, which had been largely overlooked, were responsible for up to a third of the hiatus in warming.

Now researchers at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, in California, have found signs of the effects from eruptions from the late 20th century and early 21st century in the atmospheric temperature, moisture and amount of sunlight reflected from the atmosphere.

They also found that the eruption of Pinatubo, a volcano on the island of Luzon in the Philippines, which last erupted in 1991, also caused a drop in tropical rainfall.

'The fact that these volcanic signatures are apparent in multiple independently measured climate variables really supports the idea that they are influencing climate in spite of their moderate size,' said Mark Zelinka, a climate scientist at Lawrence Livermore and one of the authors of the new study.
This graph shows average land and ocean temperature anomalies between 1961 and 1990 around the world

This graph shows average land and ocean temperature anomalies between 1961 and 1990 around the world
Small eruptions from volcanoes like Japan's Mount Ontake throw sulphuric acid and aerosols into the air but many of these may have been accumulating unnoticed as a layer between the troposphere and stratosphere

Small eruptions from volcanoes like Japan's Mount Ontake throw sulphuric acid and aerosols into the air but many of these may have been accumulating unnoticed as a layer between the troposphere and stratosphere
The apparent mismatch between observed temperature increases and predictions from climate change models has led to some to claim that global warming has stalled, as seen by the black line in the graph above

The apparent mismatch between observed temperature increases and predictions from climate change models has led to some to claim that global warming has stalled, as seen by the black line in the graph above

'If we wish to accurately simulate recent climate change in models, we cannot neglect the ability of these smaller eruptions to reflect sunlight away from Earth.'

The findings confirm the work of Dr David Ridley, a climate scientist at MIT who was the lead author on the November study on volcanos.

He found that droplets of sulphuric acid and aerosols were accumulating at the intersection between the stratosphere and troposphere layers of the atmosphere.

Using ground, air and space based instruments, Dr Ridley and his colleagues were able to get a better estimate of the aerosols accumulating in these layers, around six to nine miles above the Earth's surface.
Globally, there are thousands of volcanoes, like this one in Russia, throwing aerosols into the atmosphere

Globally, there are thousands of volcanoes, like this one in Russia, throwing aerosols into the atmosphere

Previously they had been missed as most satellite measurements of volcanic aerosols are restricted to the parts of the stratosphere higher than nine miles as cloud cover can interfere with measurements below that.

This means, particularly around the poles where the stratosphere extends down to six miles above the surface, a significant chunk of volcanic aerosols were being missed.

He estimated that that since 2000 volcanoes may have caused cooling of between 0.05 degrees C and 0.12 degrees C.

Dr Benjamin Santer, who led the new study, said: 'This new work shows that the climate signals of late 20th- and early 21st-century volcanic activity can be detected in a variety of different observational data sets.'
Incredible footage of Iceland's Bardarbunga volcano (Related)

Professor Ross McKitrick, an environmental economist from the University of Guelph in Canada, said the results could mean that climate models that are used to inform policy decisions are inaccurate.

If volcanic eruptions are masking some of the impacts of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide, then the climate may be more sensitive than previously thought, or changes in aerosols could be responsible for some of the temperature changes attributed to carbon dioxide.

He said: 'If small variations in volcanic activity turn out to have larger and more persistent climatic effects than previously thought, this should have important implications for how climate models are parameterized and how greenhouse gas attribution studies are done.

'The study seems to me to raise the possibility that commonly-used historical reconstructions of volcanic dust forcing may not have been all that reliable.

'Climate modelers rely on dust veil indexes that use measures of known historical volcanic activity to estimate optical effects in the atmosphere.

'These are then used to estimate natural forcings over the 20th century, which are then used in greenhouse gas signal detection (attribution) studies.

'If the historical reconstructions weren't capturing the full magnitude of volcanic effects on the climate, as this study suggests, that presumably means those attribution studies need re-examination as well.'

[Seth]

Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear, what WILL the AGW alarmists do now?

Earth’s CO2 Levels Pass Global Warming ‘Milestone’… Nothing Happens
2:36 PM 01/13/2015



Michael Bastasch
Contributor

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Atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide have averaged above 400 parts per million since the beginning of 2015, passing what climate scientists say is the symbolic point of no return for catastrophic global warming.

“Because of the likely major negative ramifications of CO2-induced warming on the climate, it serves as an important reminder: if we want to bequeath a liveable climate to future generations, we need to act now and not delay,” said Christopher O’Dell, a scientist at Colorado State University who also works on NASA’s climate satellite mission.

This is not the first time atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations passed 400 parts per million. The 400 ppm mark was first reached in March 2013. Environmental groups argue that passing carbon dioxide levels of 400 parts per million “is an ominous sign of what might come next.”

The eco-group 350.org says that “this is yet another sign that our dependence on fossil fuels is out of control.” The group argues that fossil fuels need to be phased out in order to bring carbon dioxide levels down to 350 part per million.

NASA scientists have also sounded the alarm on carbon dioxide levels passing 400 ppm. The government scientists argued it showed the need for mankind to stop using fossil fuels and switch to using green energy.

“We’ve put the planet on a high-carb diet for over a century. Time to get lean and go green,” said Dr. Josh Willis, an ocean warming and sea level rise expert at NASA.

But despite all the warnings about rising carbon dioxide levels, the Earth has not shown a warming trend for nearly two decades and weather has not gotten more extreme, as many scientists predicted.

Satellite datasets show that 2014 was not the warmest on record, rather, last year ranked as the 3rd and 6th warmest on record depending on which dataset is used. Japanese scientists reported that 2014 was the warmest on record by only 0.05 degrees Celsius — a statistical tie with 1998 — based on surface temperature readings.

As for the U.S., 2014 was only 34th warmest on record based on surface temperature readings. But even that estimate may be running hot, as a recent study points out that mountain weather stations have inflated temperature readings for years.

Not only have temperatures been flat for the last 18 years and three months, but there has been no rash of extreme weather events either.

University of Colorado climate scientist Roger Pielke, Jr. points out that the number of tropical cyclones making landfall globally is below what it was in 1970. Pielke wrote that “2014 had 10 total landfalls. This is second lowest (tied with 4 other years) since 1970.”

“The past four years have seen 50 total landfalls, the lowest four-year total since 1982,” Pielke added.

As for hurricanes, a category 3 or higher storm has not hit the U.S. since 2005, meaning the U.S. is still in the longest hurricane drought its seen since the early 20th Century. Pielke said that since “1900 US hurricane seasons have seen more than 20% less landfalls and are more than 20% less intense.”

Pielke even told Congress in 2013 that global warming was not making weather more extreme. In fact, extreme weather events are trending downward in many cases.

“It is misleading and just plain incorrect to claim that disasters associated with hurricanes, tornadoes, floods or droughts have increased on climate timescales either in the United States or globally,” Pielke told the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee in 2013. “It is further incorrect to associate the increasing costs of disasters with the emission of greenhouse gases.”

[Seth]

Ack! Thpthp!

WRONG AGAIN: Greenland’s Ice Sheet Defies Critics With 4-Year High
12:09 PM 01/13/2015



Michael Bastasch
Contributor

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Despite fears that global warming is harming the Arctic region faster than the rest of the world, Greenland is defying climate scientists and currently growing at its fastest rate in four years.

The Danish Meteorological Institute reports that Greenland’s ice sheet has seen more growth so far this year than in the last four years. Greenland’s growth in 2015 is also higher than the mean growth for 1990 to 2011.
(Courtesy of the Danish Meteorological Institute)

(Courtesy of the Danish Meteorological Institute)

Greenland has been a curious case in the global warming debate. On the one hand, scientists and environmentalists have pointed to it as a prime example of a country being impacted by global temperature rises. Greenland is home to the world’s second-largest ice sheet and scientists say it’s melting at an accelerated rate.

But a paper from earlier this year found that only about half the warming impacting Greenland is due to global warming, the other half is due to natural oceanic cycles originating in the tropical Pacific.

“The pattern of the changes in the tropical Pacific that are responsible for remarkable atmospheric circulation changes and warming in Greenland and the Canadian Arctic are consistent with what we would call natural variability,” said David Battisti, co-author of the study and a professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Washington.

On the other hand, Greenlanders themselves have benefited from a shrinking ice sheet as it’s allowed them to access natural resources and lands previously unattainable under heavy ice coverage.

“We simply refuse to go under as a culture because of climate change,” Prime Minister Aleqa Hammond told Reuters in January 2014. “We have to adapt because the ice is disappearing and hunting is no longer the main source of income.”

“But climate change gives us a new chance to survive because our minerals become accessible so we’ll adapt,” Hammond said. “We are one of the very few countries around the world where climate change is giving us benefits.”

Greenland removed a ban on exporting uranium last year, against the wishes of Denmark, as foreign companies become more interested in pulling minerals out of the ground as more areas open up.

But it shouldn’t be too surprising that Greenland has defied dire predictions. The Arctic region as a whole has been more or less stable in recent years, stumping scientists who said it would be ice-free by now.

“The Antarctic is actually growing and all the evidence in the last few months suggests many assumptions about the poles was wrong,” Dr. Benny Peiser, director of the Global Warming Policy Forum, told the U.K. Express.

“Global sea ice is at a record high, another key indicator that something is working in the opposite direction of what was predicted,” Peiser said. “Most people think the poles are melting… they’re not. This is a huge inconvenience that reality is now catching up with climate alarmists, who were predicting that the poles would be melting fairly soon.”

[Seth]

As the crickets chirp awaiting commentary from the AGW alarmists, this just in:

Daily Caller News Foundation
Great Other Game of Thrones / Game of Thrones Youtube screenshot
Scientists Fear Another ‘Little Ice Age’ Is On The Way
11:41 AM 01/21/2015



Photo of Michael Bastasch
Michael Bastasch
Contributor

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Winter is coming.

Last year may have been the warmest on record, but it has done little to quell the fears of scientists arguing that declining sunspot activities could bring on another “little ice age.”

Shrinivas Aundhkar, director of India’s Mahatma Gandhi Mission at the Centre for Astronomy and Space Technology, said declining amounts of sunspots being observed in the last two solar cycles could mean a “mini ice age-like situation” is around the corner.

“The sunspots that can be seen on the sun have comparatively less temperature compared to other surfaces on it,” Aundhkar told people at a lecture entitled “Get Ready for Little Ice Age.”

“The sun undergoes two cycles that are described as maximum and minimum,” Aundhkar said. “The activity alternates every 11 years, and the period is termed as one solar cycle. At present, the sun is undergoing the minimum phase, reducing global temperatures.”

For years now, scientists have been warning that fewer observed sunspots could mean the Earth is heading for a cooling period. This view, however, has not been adapted by many scientists studying global warming, who say that human activity and natural climate cycles are warming the planet.

High sunspot activity has been associated with periods of warming on the Earth, like the period between 1950 and 1998. Scientists have noted that low sunspot activity has coincided with cooler periods, like the so-called “Little Ice Age” that lasted from the late Middle Ages to the 19th century, where temperatures were much cooler than today.

The past few years have seen more and more scientists argue that declining solar activity likely means cooler temperatures ahead. At the end of 2013, for example, German scientists predicted a century of global cooling based on declining solar activity and ocean oscillation cycles.

“Due to the de Vries cycle, the global temperature will drop until 2100 to a value corresponding to the ‘little ice age’ of 1870,” wrote scientists Horst-Joachim Luedecke and Carl-Otto Weiss of the European Institute for Climate and Energy.

Earlier that year, Professor Mike Lockwood of Reading University told BBC News that declining solar activity has set the stage for global cooling.

“By looking back at certain isotopes in ice cores, [Lockwood] has been able to determine how active the sun has been over thousands of years,” the BBC reported. “Following analysis of the data, Professor Lockwood believes solar activity is now falling more rapidly than at any time in the last 10,000 years.”

Aundhkar now argues that winter temperatures have dropped in the North Pole, causing severe winters, like the so-called “polar vortex” experienced by the U.S. last winter.

“This has also triggered the jet stream, which is active in the northern parts of the globe to shift in inter tropical climate zone like India,” Aundhkar said. “As a result, cold wind conditions were witnessed during the last two years. The unseasonal hailstorms in November and December are a result of the influence of the jet stream. This has also led to steady weakening of magnetic energy of the sun, leading to mini ice age like situation.”

Aundhkar’s explanation for harsh winters runs counter to the explanation given by White House science czar John Holdren, who said that global warming was driving freezing and snowy winters.

In a White House video from last year, Holdren claimed a “growing body of evidence suggests that the kind of extreme cold being experienced by much of the United States as we speak is a pattern that we can expect to see with increasing frequency as global warming continues.”

But Aundhkar disagrees. He argues that Earth is heading for another cooling period like the 17th century, when sunspots were very quiet.

“The Earth may be heading towards a mini-ice age period, which is similar to what was observed in the 17th century,” Aundhkar said. “During the time, the sunspots on the Sun were absent. This led to a drop in northern hemisphere temperature by 2-3 degrees. The current scenario is almost the same. Such climatic conditions might affect the agricultural pattern and health and trigger disasters in the worst scenario.”

[rainbow]

http://time.com/3677814/greenland-ice-s ... -drainage/

“The fact that our lake appears to have been stable for at least several decades, and then drained in a matter of weeks — or less — after a few very hot summers, may signal a fundamental change happening in the ice sheet,” said Howat.

[Animavore]

Should I be suspicious that just about all the articles Seth just posted are by Michael Bastasch of The Daily Caller? A conservative blow-hole which once refuted itself on global warming?

http://mediamatters.org/blog/2013/09/05 ... man/195744

[macdoc]

From someone that DOES know statistics....

Thoughts on 2014 and ongoing temperature trends
Filed under: Climate Science El Nino Instrumental Record Reporting on climate — gavin @ 22 January 2015

Last Friday, NASA GISS and NOAA NCDC had a press conference and jointly announced the end-of-year analysis for the 2014 global surface temperature anomaly which, in both analyses, came out top. As you may have noticed, this got much more press attention than their joint announcement in 2013 (which wasn’t a record year).

In press briefings and interviews I contributed to, I mostly focused on two issues – that 2014 was indeed the warmest year in those records (though by a small amount), and the continuing long-term trends in temperature which, since they are predominantly driven by increases in greenhouse gases, are going to continue and hence produce (on a fairly regular basis) continuing record years. Response to these points has been mainly straightforward, which is good (if sometimes a little surprising), but there have been some interesting issues raised as well…


Records are bigger stories than trends

This was a huge media story (even my parents noticed!). This is despite (or perhaps because?) the headline statement had been heavily trailed since at least September and cannot have been much of a surprise. In November, WMO put out a preliminary analysis suggesting that 2014 would be a record year. Earlier this month, the Japanese Meteorological Agency (JMA) produced their analysis, also showing a record. Estimates based on independent emulations of the GISTEMP analysis also predicted that the record would be broken (Moyhu, ClearClimateCode).

This is also despite the fact that differences of a few hundredths of a degree are simply not that important to any key questions or issues that might be of some policy relevance. A record year doesn’t appreciably affect attribution of past trends, nor the projection of future ones. It doesn’t re-calibrate estimated impacts or affect assessments of regional vulnerabilities. Records are obviously more expected in the presence of an underlying trend, but whether they occur in 2005, 2010 and 2014, as opposed to 2003, 2007 and 2015 is pretty much irrelevant.

But collectively we do seem to have an apparent fondness for arbitrary thresholds (like New Years Eve, 10 year anniversaries, commemorative holidays etc.) before we take stock of something. It isn’t a particularly rational thing – (what was the real importance of Usain Bolt’s breaking the record for the 100m by 0.02 hundredths of a second in 2008?), but people seem to be naturally more interested in the record holder than in the also-rans. Given then that 2014 was a record year, interest was inevitably going to be high. Along those lines, Andy Revkin has written about records as ‘front page thoughts’ that is also worth reading.



El Niños, La Niñas, Pauses and Hiatuses

There is a strong correlation between annual mean temperatures (in the satellite tropospheric records and surface analyses) and the state of ENSO at the end of the previous year. Maximum correlations of the short-term interannual fluctuations are usually with prior year SON, OND or NDJ ENSO indices. For instance, 1998, 2005, and 2010 were all preceded by an declared El Niño event at the end of the previous year. The El Niño of 1997/8 was exceptionally strong and this undoubtedly influenced the stand-out temperatures in 1998. 2014 was unusual in that there was no event at the beginning of the year (though neither did the then-record years of 1997, 1990, 1981 or 1980 either).



So what would the trends look like if you adjust for the ENSO phase? Are separate datasets differently sensitive to ENSO? Given the importance of the ENSO phasing for the ‘pause’ (see Schmidt et al (2014), this can help assess the underlying long-term trend and whether there is any evidence that it has changed in the recent decade or so.

For instance, the regression of the short-term variations in annual MSU TLT data to ENSO is 2.5 times larger than it is to GISTEMP. Since ENSO is the dominant mode of interannual variability, this variance relative to the expected trend due to long-term rises in greenhouse gases implies a lower signal to noise ratio in the satellite data. Interestingly, if you make a correction for ENSO phase, the UAH record would also have had 2014 as a record year (though barely). The impact on the RSS data is less. For GISTEMP, removing the impact of ENSO makes 2014 an even stronger record year relative to previous ones (0.07ºC above 2005, 2006 and 2013), supporting the notion that the underlying long-term trend has not changed appreciably over the last decade or so. (Tamino has a good post on this as well).



more

- See more at: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/ar ... r0tSh.dpuf

[Seth]

More bad news for Warmists:

World
A duck flies over the frozen waters of the port of Milwaukee as another round of arctic air blasts the midwest keeping the wind chill in the negative numbers, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin February, 6, 2014. REUTERS/Darren Hauck
Study: Arctic Emitting Methane For Over Two Million Years
10:39 AM 02/07/2015



PG Veer

The Arctic Ocean has been seeping methane for longer than humans have been roaming the Earth, according to new research published in Geophysical Research Letters.

This gas, emitted among others by burning/drilling natural gas, has been worrying environmentalist groups because a thaw in the Arctic permafrost might free up more methane, accelerating global warming and the Arctic meltdown.

But this new study shows that the Arctic Ocean seabed has been emitting methane for at least 2.7 million years. “We know from other studies in the region that the sediments we are looking at in our seismic data are at least 2.7 million years old. This is the period of increase of glaciations in the Northern Hemisphere, which influences the sediment,” says Plaza Faverola, one of the research, in an interview published on Anthony Watt’s blog.

In other words, the last Ice Age changed the composition of the soil, making it susceptible to emit methane. The study also shows that emissions can be influenced by earthquake activity. These underwater methane columns can be as tall as 800 meters (over 2,600 feet), taller than Dubai’s Burj Khalifa tower, the world’s highest human structure.

These emissions may have influenced temperatures in the past. Researchers believe that bursts of increased temperatures in the past are linked with high methane emissions as shown by studying glaciers.

[Animavore]

Good news even

[Seth]

It's all coming undone for the Warmists:

he fiddling with temperature data is the biggest science scandal ever
New data shows that the “vanishing” of polar ice is not the result of runaway global warming
The “vanishing” of polar ice (and the polar bears) has become a poster-child for warmists. Photo: ALAMY
Christopher Booker

By Christopher Booker

10:15PM GMT 07 Feb 2015



When future generations look back on the global-warming scare of the past 30 years, nothing will shock them more than the extent to which the official temperature records – on which the entire panic ultimately rested – were systematically “adjusted” to show the Earth as having warmed much more than the actual data justified.

Two weeks ago, under the headline “How we are being tricked by flawed data on global warming”, I wrote about Paul Homewood, who, on his Notalotofpeopleknowthat blog, had checked the published temperature graphs for three weather stations in Paraguay against the temperatures that had originally been recorded. In each instance, the actual trend of 60 years of data had been dramatically reversed, so that a cooling trend was changed to one that showed a marked warming.

This was only the latest of many examples of a practice long recognised by expert observers around the world – one that raises an ever larger question mark over the entire official surface-temperature record.

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Following my last article, Homewood checked a swathe of other South American weather stations around the original three. In each case he found the same suspicious one-way “adjustments”. First these were made by the US government’s Global Historical Climate Network (GHCN). They were then amplified by two of the main official surface records, the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (Giss) and the National Climate Data Center (NCDC), which use the warming trends to estimate temperatures across the vast regions of the Earth where no measurements are taken. Yet these are the very records on which scientists and politicians rely for their belief in “global warming”.
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Homewood has now turned his attention to the weather stations across much of the Arctic, between Canada (51 degrees W) and the heart of Siberia (87 degrees E). Again, in nearly every case, the same one-way adjustments have been made, to show warming up to 1 degree C or more higher than was indicated by the data that was actually recorded. This has surprised no one more than Traust Jonsson, who was long in charge of climate research for the Iceland met office (and with whom Homewood has been in touch). Jonsson was amazed to see how the new version completely “disappears” Iceland’s “sea ice years” around 1970, when a period of extreme cooling almost devastated his country’s economy.

One of the first examples of these “adjustments” was exposed in 2007 by the statistician Steve McIntyre, when he discovered a paper published in 1987 by James Hansen, the scientist (later turned fanatical climate activist) who for many years ran Giss. Hansen’s original graph showed temperatures in the Arctic as having been much higher around 1940 than at any time since. But as Homewood reveals in his blog post, “Temperature adjustments transform Arctic history”, Giss has turned this upside down. Arctic temperatures from that time have been lowered so much that that they are now dwarfed by those of the past 20 years.

Homewood’s interest in the Arctic is partly because the “vanishing” of its polar ice (and the polar bears) has become such a poster-child for those trying to persuade us that we are threatened by runaway warming. But he chose that particular stretch of the Arctic because it is where ice is affected by warmer water brought in by cyclical shifts in a major Atlantic current – this last peaked at just the time 75 years ago when Arctic ice retreated even further than it has done recently. The ice-melt is not caused by rising global temperatures at all.

Of much more serious significance, however, is the way this wholesale manipulation of the official temperature record – for reasons GHCN and Giss have never plausibly explained – has become the real elephant in the room of the greatest and most costly scare the world has known. This really does begin to look like one of the greatest scientific scandals of all time.

[Tero]

Booker was discredited long ago with asbestos etc. They don't come any more crooked than Booker.

[Hermit]

Booker was discredited long ago with asbestos etc.

And Einstein's last published contribution to science was his approval of earth crust displacement and rejection of tectonic plate movement. I suppose that discredits his previous publications.

Guilt by association used to be de rigeur in law courts, but the various consorting squads have been disbanded decades ago. You are no longer considered to be a criminal on account of being seen, intentionally or inadvertently in the company with known criminals. Isn't it about time we stop judging the validity of a theory promoted by a person on the basis of other theories that are held by the same person, which are known to be discredited, and evaluate each on its own merits (or lack thereof) instead?