Despite Annual Recurrence of Winter, Global Warming Continued in 2009
Posted January 15, 2010 in Solving Global Warming
Recent cold weather in the Eastern United States and England has inevitably led to casual chatter about what happened to global warming. Of course, a few weeks of unusual (but not unprecedented) cold weather over a very small fraction of the earth’s surface has no bearing on the fact that heat-trapping pollution is driving global warming. It is winter after all, and no one ever said that global warming will abolish the seasons.
So we need to look at global data and long-term trends, not local weather. Fortunately, that’s just what NOAA, NASA, and the UK Met office do. Today, NOAA released complete data for 2009 showing that it was tied with 2006 as the 5th hottest year on record. This confirms reports from December, based on not-quite-complete data, that the 00s (January 1, 2000 – December 31, 2009) was the hottest decade on record. Hotter than the 1990s, which was hotter than the 1980s. In fact, NOAA said today that 00s “shattered the 1990s value.”
So does this torrent of data mean that climate change deniers will pack up their laptops and go home? Hardly. Yesterday the National Center for Public Policy Research, a self-described tool of the “conservative movement,” attacked the Obama Administration for approving a research grant to Michael Mann, one of the scientists who has been viciously attacked based on stolen emails. Climate change deniers claim the emails show that he manipulated data to exaggerate the magnitude of global warming in recent decades. This story was dutifully amplified by the Fox News-Rush Limbaugh echo chamber. In reality, Mann’s conclusion was confirmed by an independent review conducted by the National Academy of Sciences. For more about Michael Mann, see the Philadelphia Enquirer’s excellent story and to get the facts on the whole swifthack/climategate email story see my previous post and this new video.
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Comments
Global Patriot — Jan 15 2010 09:32 PM
It has been interesting to hear people say that a few feet of snow dispels the notion of climate change. It seems that weather in the moment is easier to understand that examining decades of scientific data.
Dave Reid — Jan 16 2010 08:05 AM
@Global Patriot I'd say it is science in the moment, as it seems very similar to the evolution "debate" in part because it is a process that takes too long a time to see the change.
tony — Jan 16 2010 09:20 AM
Yes the average temperature in the 2000s was the hottest in 130 years of records.But the IPCC model prediction of 0.2C per decade has not been observed.
Tim O'Brien — Jan 16 2010 10:34 AM
Without heat-trapping gases we would not be here.
The last heating cycle was natural(not man-made) and ended around 1998. We are now in a cooling cycle.
Evidence of climate change does come from multiple sources, but evidence of "global warming" ("global warming" was the original name for "climate-change" - ever wonder why it was changed?) comes from one secretive, highly-funded,agenda driven and polical source.
The use of the term "climate-deniers"is despicable and the intention is to brand people who disagree as similar to holocaust-deniers.
The "vast body of evidence showing the world is warming because of man-made greenhouse gas emissions" comes from highly-funded IPCC agenda-driven "scientists".
A much more vast body of evidence from much more independent and highly qualified sources show that man has little or no effect on climate.
The ice-cover changes are natural and ice-cover is now rapidly increasing (as we are now in a cooling period!).
The polar bears are doing fine, their population is at its greatest for 30 years.
The US industrial base has been decimated and millions of jobs lost because of this
"bad science" of global warming - the country is quickly turning into a third world police state.
1700 jobs were lost in the UK because of the closure of one environmentally friendly steel works in an attempt to lower the UK's "carbon footprint", resulting in a massive financial transfer to the owners of the steelworks, which will now transfer the work to India where they will be eligible for further financial recompense.
You should check if someone in the IPCC has any connection with this company?
Carbon Dioxide is not a pollutant and there would be no life without it!
Increased levels of Carbon Dioxide are shown to be beneficial.
Wake up and smell the coffee - it really is a scam.
tim
Arno Arrak — Jan 16 2010 12:10 PM
Let me tell you about the temperatures released from NOAA, NASA, and UK Met Office that Dan Lashof, director of the "Climate Center" relies on: they are cooked. They have been cooked since the late seventies when they started to report rising global temperatures. And they are still being falsified. When James Hansen reported in 1988 that greenhouse warming had arrived he used these temperatures to back up his claim. There had been no cooling whatsoever for thirty years until this supposed greenhouse warming started in the late seventies. This means that Hansen's warming in 1988 was a mere ten-year-old warming trend. I guess he thought ten years was not enough to base a warming theory on so he claimed the warming had been going on for twenty five years as he spoke. Twenty five years before him the climate story was the coming ice age. Time Magazine, Newsweek, and The New York Times all had stories on global cooling and remedies like covering the arctic ice with soot to stop the cooling were suggested. Satellites cannot see any of that Hansen cooling but what they do see is a multi-year global temperature oscillation, up and down by half a degree. Comparing satellite data with NASA, NOAA and Met Office data it turns out that in the eighties and nineties they cherry picked the oscillating temperature peaks and either raised up the interverning low temperatures or completely obliterated them. That way an oscillating real temperature curve was turned upward to create a rising temperature curve that was then reported to be a result of that AGW - Anthropogenic Global Warming. And now we are supposed to do penance for this warming by paying money to those poor people in backward countries who did not get a chance pollute the air with carbon dioxide. This is all insanity but the science establishment and the politicians have bought into it and a cap-and-trade law designed to tax us for the sin of polluting the air is being pushed through Congress right now. I assure you, none of this will have any influence on global temperature because what you have been told about anthropogenic global warming is a lie - it does not exist.