2010: The hottest year on rec…….never mind [Reader Post]

Years ago near to where I live my family and I frequented a Chinese restaurant whose food was excellent. With amusement we noted that many of the meals were described as

“Our chef’s most favored dish.”

So when I read an article about the climate and it contains the phrase

“the world’s most respected climate scientists”

I cannot stop thinking about the restaurant and begin laughing out loud. It holds the same meaning to me as does the menu.

NPR provided a good example not long ago.

The year 2010 tied 2005 with the warmest year on record. That makes 34 consecutive years where the global temperature is higher than the average temperature in the 20th century. Last year was also the wettest.

The article quotes John Christy of the University of Alabama:

John Christy, a professor of atmospheric science at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, sees the same general warming trend in his measurements of global temperature. Those are based on satellite measurements of the planet’s air from the surface up to 35,000 feet.

“The take-home lesson is that if you have an El Nino, you’re going to have a hot year,” he says. “But I just finished shoveling eight inches of global warming off my driveway this Monday here in Alabama. So whatever the globe is doing, your local weather can have a completely different picture, that’s for sure.”

(emphasis mine)

We’ll get back to that later. 2010 was the hottest year on record, even before 2010 was over.

Even as negotiators in Cancun struggled Friday to reach a modest climate accord at the U.N.-sponsored talks here, new temperature readings released by NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies show 2010 now ranks as the hottest climate year on record.

But hold on a minute. Maybe it wasn’t THE hottest- maybe it was only tied for the hottest:

According to climatologists at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA) Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York, 2010 was a very hot year. While anyone who witnessed the Vikings Metrodome collapse might not have seen this coming, NASA says that data from 1,000 climate stations shows 2010, as a whole, to be statistically tied for being the hottest year in recorded history.

NOAA gets in on the “tied” mantra.

According to NOAA scientists, 2010 tied with 2005 as the warmest year of the global surface temperature record, beginning in 1880. This was the 34th consecutive year with global temperatures above the 20th century average. For the contiguous United States alone, the 2010 average annual temperature was above normal, resulting in the 23rd warmest year on record.

And NASA insisted that warming continues unabated.

Global warming has neither stopped nor slowed in the past decade, according to a draft analysis of temperature data by NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

Now take note of this from David Rose’s article the Daily Telegraph:

But buried amid the details of those two Met Office statements 12 months apart lies a remarkable climbdown that has huge implications – not just for the Met Office, but for debate over climate change as a whole.

Read carefully with other official data, they conceal a truth that for some, to paraphrase former US Vice President Al Gore, is really inconvenient: for the past 15 years, global warming has stopped.

~~~~~~

Actually, with the exception of 1998 – a ‘blip’ year when temperatures spiked because of a strong ‘El Nino’ effect (the cyclical warming of the southern Pacific that affects weather around the world) – the data on the Met Office’s and CRU’s own websites show that global temperatures have been flat, not for ten, but for the past 15 years.

(emphasis mine)

Global warming has halted. And an El Nino can raise global temperatures. Hold that thought.

Over at Anthony Watts’ WUWT John Kehr expresses frustration with data coming out of CRU:

The longer I am involved in the global warming debate the more frustrated I am getting with the CRU temperature data. This is the one of the most commonly cited sources of global temperature data, but the numbers just don’t stay put. Each and every month the past monthly temperatures are revised. Since I enter the data into a spreadsheet each month I am constantly seeing the shift in the data. If it was the third significant digit it wouldn’t bother me (very much), but it is much more than that.

The data keeps changing. Downward.

Sep 10th, 2010: January 2010 anomaly was 0.707 °C

Jan 30th, 2011: January 2010 anomaly is now 0.675 °C

That is a 5% shift in the value for last January that has taken place in the past 4 months. All of the initial months of the year show a fairly significant shift in temperature.

Again at WUWT, Dr. David Whitehouse examines a number of databases and points out some really important details.

These five temperature databases I examine give the monthly temperature to thousandths of a degree which is superfluous. When rounded up to a more physically sensible 0.1 deg almost all of the differences between the years of the past decade go away, but that is another story, and not the subject of this post.

He notes that 2010 was an El Nino year. So was 1998, the “hottest year on record.”

He concludes:

Many press reports said that 2010 was a near-record breaking year despite the cooling influence of a La Nina later in the year. What was omitted however was mention of the fact that the reason why the year was marginally warmer than previous years was because of the warming El Nino.

Contrary to press reports the evidence is that 2010 was a year no different from all of the years 2001-2009 with the exception of a moderate to strong El Nino that elevated temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere’s Spring, and a cooling La Nina later in the year. The standstill seen in global temperatures since 2001 continues.

El Nino is described this way:

El Niño is defined by prolonged differences in Pacific Ocean surface temperatures when compared with the average value. The accepted definition is a warming or cooling of at least 0.5 °C (0.9 °F) averaged over the east-central tropical Pacific Ocean. Typically, this anomaly happens at irregular intervals of 2–7 years and lasts nine months to two years.[5] The average period length is 5 years. When this warming or cooling occurs for only seven to nine months, it is classified as El Niño/La Niña “conditions”; when it occurs for more than that period, it is classified as El Niño/La Niña “episodes”.[6]

Even NPR recognized that 2009-2010 was going to be a strong El Nino year. El Nino petered out in May and was replaced by a La Nina.

La Nina is associated with cooler Pacific temperatures.

And snowfall in the Northeast.

There is a very strong potential of heavier than normal snowfalls along the eastern seaboard of the United States at that time especially affecting the Southeastern, Mid-Atlantic, and Northeastern states with drought spreading from southern Texas along to the Gulf states and into parts of the central Midwest.

The picture comes into focus. An El Nino is associated with elevated global temperatures but even with the strongest El Nino on record 2010 was not the warmest year on record and record cold is blasting many parts of the globe.

And it’s a lot colder now than it was 1000 years ago.

We’re not warming. We may be entering a lengthy period of cooling.

From Miami to Maine, Savannah to Seattle, America is caught in an icy grip that one of the U.N.’s top global warming proponents says could mark the beginning of a mini ice age.

And that’s according to our most favored respected scientists.

DrJohn

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