I wrote a post last winter about how the snow doesn’t mean that climate change is over.
Well, it’s snowing again.
And the warming on a global scale still hasn’t stopped:
October 2010 temperature anomalies relative to the period 1951-1980 from the NASA GISS webpage.
Tags: Climate change, Climatology, Snow, UK weather, winter
Andy Russell's weather and climate blog 
November 27, 2010 at 3:52 pm |
You have, I assume, noticed that most of the warming GISS reports occurs in places where there are almost no actual temperature measurements. Is that just a coincidence?
November 27, 2010 at 6:14 pm |
Good point. I’m not sure how many Arctic stations there are these days. Might be a nice post – looking at GISS, CRU and satellite obs.
All the same, the point I wanted to get across was that climatology requires a wider view than whatever happens to be happening wherever you are at one point in time.
UPDATE: I had a look at one of the Hansen papers and it looks like there are over 100 stations north of 65degN after 1900 so that’s not bad coverage.
November 28, 2010 at 12:36 pm
Can you give us a reference for this paper you mention?
November 28, 2010 at 12:43 pm
It’s the one I mention in a comment further down this thread:
Hansen and Lebedeff (1987)
I couldn’t find a decent plot of where those stations are though.
November 28, 2010 at 1:32 pm
There’s a map here.
November 28, 2010 at 2:01 pm
Thanks. There’s a slightly more useful version of the map here.
November 27, 2010 at 8:33 pm |
Andy, if you look at the Vostok ice cores, for the last 400,000 years it has warmed every 100,000 years and then stopped warming and plunged 10C back to the ice age.
It is supposed to be warm now. AGW might be a valid theory it wasn’t supposed to be warm.
It will stop soon, and most of the planets population will then starve to death.
November 27, 2010 at 9:48 pm |
Thanks for the comment.
I thought that the most similar situation to our own in the long ice core records was Termination V, which occurred around 420,000 years ago. You can see it in the EPICA Dome C data here.
If so, maybe things aren’t as bleak as you suggest: we might have another 10000 years before the next glacial.
November 28, 2010 at 3:53 am
Its even worse if you look at the Greend land Ice Core.
http://mclean.ch/climate/Ice_cores.htm
The temperatures warmed 10,500 years ago wiht pretty high peaks, then one good peak 3200 years ago, and the temperautre peaks have been getting lower and lower.
I think this interglacial is done. Within 1000 years it will be back to an ice age.
November 28, 2010 at 9:00 am
Do any of the Greenland cores go back to Termination V though? That’s the best analogue of our own situation, Milankovitch-wise.
Of course, the other interesting thing about the ice cores and other long records is that the that current CO2 concentration has not been seen for a long time. We’re out on a bit of limb here!
November 28, 2010 at 9:53 pm |
Termination V is not relevant Andy.
Milankovich peaks are very sharp and end very abruptly.
November 29, 2010 at 8:09 am
Well, the plot you link to shows exactly why Termination V is relevant: you have to go back 420 000 years before ε and e are anything like today.
Whilst this isn’t proof that we’re in for a long interglacial, it certainly doesn’t imply that a glacial is imminent.
November 27, 2010 at 11:13 pm |
Andy, can you tell me why GISS uses 51-80 as their basic? I always felt that 66-95 would be a more representative baseline, half of a cold period and half of a warm period.
November 28, 2010 at 7:27 am |
I think it’s more to do with the period with the best data rather than the most representative variation.
If you look at Fig. 4 of this Hansen paper from 1987 you can see a big peak in stations after 1950. No idea why that is mind.
November 28, 2010 at 11:40 am |
[oops, I tried editing my own response but I seem to have deleted your comment, sorry. Can’t remember exactly what it said but it was an interesting point about inadequate climate records and the Jones et al. (1990) Nature paper on UHI being a bit of a gift to the sceptic/denier side of the argument – AR]
November 28, 2010 at 1:27 pm |
I completely agree that the climate community’s data is not half as good as it could be. That said, I’m amazed that we have as much as we do. Loads of pre-1990s data must be gone because it wasn’t archived properly, people moved on and no-one anticipated how important it would become.
I suppose the other way of looking at this is that it’s brilliant that we have what we do. And it’s all down to some really hard work of people like Jones that these records are available.
There’s a nice series of blog posts on the Protons for Breakfast blog (here, here and here with some background here) that try to simplify one of the issues to do with recovering old data.
December 3, 2010 at 9:18 am |
[…] This post is from January 2010. I put a temperature anomaly plot from October 2010 here and I’ll do one for November 2010 as soon as the data is […]
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