Breaking: The great ice age of 2008 is finally over -- next stop, Venus!
One month's worth of data laughable as proof of global cooling
Posted by Joseph Romm (Guest Contributor) at 11:11 PM on 14 Apr 2008
A top NASA scientist just emailed me the breaking news: "The ice age expired!"
Even more shocking: the rate of warming this year has been just about unprecedented in the historical record -- even faster than I had predicted just last month based on the NASA data from February.
Just look at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies dataset. While January's land-ocean global temperature was a mere +0.12 degrees C above the the 1951-1980 average and the February anomaly was +0.26 degrees C -- the March anomaly was a staggering +0.67 degrees C.
(Warning: the following chart is not suitable for children or those who believe in global cooling. Please cover their eyes since the 2008 data, plotted in red below, might give them nightmares.)
This leading NASA scientist was himself stunned by the "temperature derivative" -- geek speak for the rate of change. At this rate, I'm afraid we have only a couple of decades before the Earth becomes another Venus.
My advice to you: Hug your children, make love to your spouse, sell your beachfront property, and then spend your entire life savings as quickly as possible -- assuming, of course, that three months of data can be used for climate projections. And, heck, if one month's data is good enough to get stories on climate cooling from leading journalists at the Wall Street Journal ("Little Ice Age? Cold Snap Sparks Cooling Debate") and The New York Times ("Climate Skeptics Seize on Cold Spell"), three months ought to be enough for front page stories that change your entire life.
Our changing weather climate
When we first reported this story, the Earth was in the death grip of an Ice Age that had lasted an unprecedented four or five weeks, nearly one-millionth the duration of recent Ice Ages. Earlier this year, websites were trumpeting bleak headlines like "Solar Activity Diminishes; Researchers Predict Another Ice Age" or "Twelve-month long drop in world temperatures wipes out a century of warming." Or, for those who prefer geek-talk over bleak-talk, it was time for an "Update on Falsification of Climate Predictions," as Roger Pielke, Jr. put it.
As noted above, even traditional media got suckered interested. I mean, who wouldn't take a month's data over a century's? What does it matter that, as NASA has explained:
"The eight warmest years in the GISS record have all occurred since 1998, and the 14 warmest years in the record have all occurred since 1990" and 2007 tied with 1998 for Earth's second warmest year in a century.
What is such data again a cold friggin' January (well, technically it was No. 31 warmest on record since 1880, but, man it certainly felt cold compared to January 2007, the warmest January on record -- and what matters more than perceptions and spin)? Yes, we're in a La Niña cooling event and a short-term minimum of solar irradiance, as NASA explained -- but why let the facts confuse anything?
Sure, the U.K.'s Hadley Center folk -- whose data was also being used to push the global cooling nonsense -- had themselves explained that the eight warmest years in the 150 global temperature record are, in order, 1998, 2005, 2003, 2002, 2004, 2006, and 2007 and that:
Another way of looking at the warming trend is that 1999 was a similar year to 2007 as far the cooling effects of La Niña are concerned. The 1999 global temperature was 0.26 degrees C above the 1961-90 average, whereas 2007 is expected to be 0.41 degrees C above this average, 0.15 degrees C warmer than 1999.
(Financial planning note: The Hadley data for March give us a couple more decades before we become Venusians. Their January anomaly was +0.056 degrees C, February anomaly was +0.26 degrees C, and March anomaly was +0.430 degrees C. So, you should still hug your children, make love to your spouse, and sell your beachfront property [duh, double duh, and triple duh], but you might want to hold onto some of the family's gold jewelry for your kids.)
Now, I did predict way back in early March that Venus-like warming was in our future. But again, who could really expect the media to reverse all of its climate stories on the basis of one month's data? I mean, be serious!
But surely the April data deserves some mention by The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, no?
One more thing. Based on my own general circulation model running on my souped-up laptop, I'm going to go out on a limb here and predict that the remarkable warming of the last couple of months won't continue at the same pace over the next two months. If this prediction proves as accurate as my March prediction, I do think it will vindicate all of the analyses presented on this blog both in the past and for all time. I mean, who else is out there making accurate predictions -- other than, say, the overwhelming majority of climate scientists? And they don't count, do they?
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