2014 Record Warm Year

The NY Times reports today on a study showing that the global atmospheric temperature hit a new record
In the annals of climatology, 2014 now surpasses 2010 as the warmest year in a global temperature record that stretches back to 1880. The 10 warmest years on record have all occurred since 1997, a reflection of the relentless planetary warming that scientists say is a consequence of human emissions and poses profound long-term risks to civilization and to the natural world.
 And as they point out, this happened without an El Nino.  An El Nino has been forecast for this year but it didn't happen, but when it does we will have a very hot year.  The El Nino is independent of global warming due to the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere, as I've explained elsewhere, and so that makes this years record all the more disturbing because it the record is more due to the underlying increasing trend in temperature that it would be otherwise.

There recently has been some concern that the increase in atmospheric temperature was slowing down.  The data do suggest a slowdown, but this study shows that the increase appears to be back. What will be interesting now is how the global warming deniers are going to respond.  The content of the response will have to do with how much they are affect by data as opposed to emotion.  I believe emotion dominates the deniers, and so the response will be digression and nitpicking.

For one thing, it wasn't a record year for the U.S. which experienced some severe cold in 2014 (and 2015) from an errant jet stream allowing arctic air to flow south.  The fact that this cold air is simply in the wrong place because of the jet stream and is not actually colder than usual is hard for some people's minds to get around.  So it is likely that this record year is not going to slow the deniers down.







Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Alaska Crushes Record For Hottest December

Image
Alaska crushes record for hottest December as Arctic sea ice hits record low In its hottest December ever recorded, Alaska was a stunning 15.7°F above the 20th century average. And the year ended with Arctic sea ice hitting an all-time record low. While the East Coast had a cool December and New Year’s week, Alaska baked. Last Tuesday, Anchorage hit 48°F , warmer than southern cities from Atlanta and Jacksonville to Houston and New Orleans. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) reported this week that Alaska averaged 19.4°F for the month, topping the previous record (1985) by a whopping 2.1°F. “That’s really quite astonishing,” said Rick Thoman, the National Weather Service’s climate sciences and services manager for the Alaska region. As he explained to the Anchorage Daily News , “Usually you’re breaking those by a tenth of a degree or two-tenths of a degree.” The Arctic as a whole was so warm in December that Arctic sea ice set a new end-of-year record lo
Read more

The World My Grandchildren Will Inherit

Image
I went to a presentation at the University of Washington by Professor Raftery of the Statistics and Sociology Departments of a recent paper of his and colleagues (Alec Zimmer, Dargan M.W. Frierson, Richard Startz, and Peiran Liu) in the Journal Nature, entitled Less than 2 °C warming by 2100 unlikely   (link behind a paywall) . Their paper is a response to a need to provide a statistical forecast for global temperatures.  What the IPCC has previously provided are "scenarios" based on "expert" thinking.  Raftery has previously developed statistical methods for estimating world-wide migration patterns that has been adopted by the United Nations.  At the presentation he presented a statistical model for forecasting global temperatures. Their result is a 90% interval forecast of 2 to 4.9 degrees Centigrade with a median of 3.2 degrees. Their backtesting strongly supported the median.  He also  said " that the data suggested that future improvements in ca
Read more