Globally, Winter of 2009-2010 was Second Warmest on Record
posted 15th March 2010 in Environment, Science by Jim
Hoo boy, but that last winter we had was cold, wasn’t it? I mean, it was so cold you had to burn all your Al Gore books just to stay warm, didn’t you, ha ha? That’s what you might think if you paid attention to the various editorial cartoonists who figured out as if for the first time that by gum, winter’s colder than summer. But how did this past winter compare to winters past?
NASA’s Goddard Institute maintains monthly records of direct measurements of temperature over the ocean and land at numerous locations across the globe, dating back to 1880. Each month, they measure the temperature anomaly at a location: its difference from the 1951-1981. Here’s the average global anomaly for the months of December, January and February of each winter season, starting from the winter of 1880-1881 and ending up at the winter of 2009-2010:
That’s the combined temperature anomaly based on global observations over both land and water; results are similar for land-only observations. In either case, this past winter turns out to have been the second warmest on record.
Tags: 2009-2010, anomaly, climate, giss, global warming, temperature, winter
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It’s really unfortunate that most Americans (let alone the rest of the planet) don’t understand how climate change is going to impact their children’s future (and from then on) in a negative way and at the rate it’s changing, we’re seeing it already.
Most Americans don’t spend much time outside in touch with nature any more. To them, climate is only noticed when weather gets in their way.
Well, this is going to be a “game changer” for humanity now that methane is bubbling up from the oceans, tundra, and permafrost and feeding into the loop of accelerating climate change (as was predicted). It’s only a matter of time before it severely impacts our ability to grow food, causes a rise in tropical diseases and pests far north of their usual locales, increases droughts and floods, causes more severe storms, raises ocean levels, depletes freshwater reserves, . . .(and on and on).
Is there a reason this graph does not begin until the 1880′s which is considered the end of the “Little Ice Age?” It is expected that temps would warm then. Can the graph be extended back to give a better picture of temp fluctuations before and after the LIA, rather than just after? Does NASA have that data?
The end of the “Little Ice Age” was about 1850 according to most sources I read. This temperature source is from direct temperature measurements around the world at the same stations over time. 1880 is the starting date because it is the date from which enough temperature stations were collecting data to be able to generate reliable temperature anomaly data. It’s a statistical reason.
If you look at temperature reconstructions of the last 1000 years — a different method — the warming since 1880 is clearly above that 1000 year average.
So how does the 2nd warmest winter in X years create the greatest extent of Arctic sea ice seen in the last decade? See the graph here:
http://www.ijis.iarc.uaf.edu/en/home/seaice_extent.htm
Two answers:
1) even your own graph shows today’s extent is NOT the greatest extent of Arctic sea ice seen in a decade. That was in 2003.
2) weather does not equal climate. Weather is short-term fluctuation. The weather in the Arctic is that for the last month, the Arctic sea ice extent has approached but has not equaled or surpassed the 1979-2000 average sea ice extent for the focal day of the year. Climate is a long-term trend. The climate in the Arctic is that in recent years, the Arctic sea ice extent has been consistently below the 1979-2000 mean extent.
We’ll see what changes occur in the climate as time unfolds. But don’t oversell what’s happened in the past one-month period, Jim R. Wait and see.