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Twelve-month long drop in world temperatures wipes out a century of warming

Over the past year, anecdotal evidence for a cooling planet has exploded. China has its coldest winter in 100 years. Baghdad sees its first snow in all recorded history. North America has the most snowcover in 50 years, with places like Wisconsin the highest since record-keeping began. Record levels of Antarctic sea ice, record cold in Minnesota, Texas, Florida, Mexico, Australia, Iran, Greece, South Africa, Greenland, Argentina, Chile -- the list goes on and on.
No more than anecdotal evidence, to be sure. But now, that evidence has been supplanted by hard scientific fact. All four major global temperature tracking outlets (Hadley, NASA's GISS, UAH, RSS) have released updated data. All show that over the past year, global temperatures have dropped precipitously.

A compiled list of all the sources can be seen here. The total amount of cooling ranges from 0.65C up to 0.75C -- a value large enough to wipe out nearly all the warming recorded over the past 100 years. All in one year's time. For all four sources, it's the single fastest temperature change ever recorded, either up or down.

Scientists quoted in a past DailyTech article link the cooling to reduced solar activity which they claim is a much larger driver of climate change than man-made greenhouse gases. The dramatic cooling seen in just 12 months time seems to bear that out. While the data doesn't itself disprove that carbon dioxide is acting to warm the planet, it does demonstrate clearly that more powerful factors are now cooling it.

Let's hope those factors stop fast. Cold is more damaging than heat. The mean temperature of the planet is about 54 degrees. Humans -- and most of the crops and animals we depend on -- prefer a temperature closer to 70.
Historically, the warm periods such as the Medieval Climate Optimum were beneficial for civilization. Corresponding cooling events such as the Little Ice Age, though, were uniformly bad news.

DOUG
Galt, are you so stupid you have failed to look at the charts we have on global warming threads to see that there is a clear WARMING trend?

And a warming of the planet does not entail that the planet never cools. We do still have a winter, when the Northern Hemisphere cools. But the AVERAGE temperature is still warming steadily from year to year.

Do your homework and quit looking like an idiot.

Doug- you miss the point- the temperature has plummeted so much this winter that the average is now way DOWN.

Global warming is being exposed as the greatest "Group Think" fiasco since Leisure Suits.

Smile and rejoice- the earth shall live and prosper- Thank God!

Your very cold pal,

John Galt

John Galt wrote:Doug- you miss the point- the temperature has plummeted so much this winter that the average is now way DOWN.

DAR
Hey dumkauf, have you completely run away from defending the last piece of crap that you posted and I roasted? Of course you have. Because you are an intellectual coward.

GALT quotes
"All four major global temperature tracking outlets (Hadley, NASA's GISS, UAH, RSS) have released updated data. All show that over the past year, global temperatures have dropped precipitously."

DAR
Hmmm, let's check the GISS site and see what it actually says:

GISS Surface Temperature Analysis
Global Temperature Trends: 2007 Summation

The year 2007 tied for second warmest in the period of instrumental data, behind the record warmth of 2005, in the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) analysis. 2007 tied 1998, which had leapt a remarkable 0.2°C above the prior record with the help of the "El Niño of the century". The unusual warmth in 2007 is noteworthy because it occurs at a time when solar irradiance is at a minimum and the equatorial Pacific Ocean is in the cool phase of its natural El Niño-La Niña cycle.

Figure 1 shows 2007 temperature anomalies relative to the 1951-1980 base period mean. The global mean temperature anomaly, 0.57°C (about 1°F) warmer than the 1951-1980 mean, continues the strong warming trend of the past thirty years that has been confidently attributed to the effect of increasing human-made greenhouse gases (GHGs) (Hansen et al. 2007). The eight warmest years in the GISS record have all occurred since 1998, and the 14 warmest years in the record have all occurred since 1990.
LINK

DAR
Turns out the source for the claims in Galt's idiotic, 100% horseshit, article is a global warming denier quoting himself. As a commentator points out:

"...the links provided don't go back to the actual hadcrut data. Instead, it goes to this... denier website

Which links data on it's own site...

DAR
Roasting conservatives. It's like taking candy from a baby. A really stupid baby. When they aren't being dishonest they are just profoundly ignorant.

Now, maybe Galt is so dumb he wants to cherry pick the single cool month of January '08 and try to get a cold trend out of this. Will that work? No.

The average temperature in January 2008 was 30.5 F. This was -0.3 F cooler than the 1901-2000 (20th century) average, the 49th coolest January in 114 years.
NOAA.gov

So this one isolated month, which by itself means nothing, falls right in the middle of the last 114 year span. This is your trend that supposedly reverses global warming? Suggestion: stop repeating junk from dishonest GW deniers. It only makes you look foolish.

For a nice detailed roast of your junk, by very patient and polite scientists, readers might want to check out this timely article which deals with the above material directly:

***
Uncertainty, noise and the art of model-data comparison

Gavin Schmidt and Stefan Rahmstorf

"John Tierney and Roger Pielke Jr. have recently discussed attempts to validate (or falsify) IPCC projections of global temperature change over the period 2000-2007. Others have attempted to show that last year's numbers imply that 'Global Warming has stopped' or that it is 'taking a break' (Uli Kulke, Die Welt)). However, as most of our readers will realise, these comparisons are flawed since they basically compare long term climate change to short term weather variability.

This becomes immediately clear when looking at the following graph:



The red line is the annual global-mean GISTEMP temperature record (though any other data set would do just as well), while the blue lines are 8-year trend lines - one for each 8-year period of data in the graph. What it shows is exactly what anyone should expect: the trends over such short periods are variable; sometimes small, sometimes large, sometimes negative - depending on which year you start with. The mean of all the 8 year trends is close to the long term trend (0.19ºC/decade), but the standard deviation is almost as large (0.17ºC/decade), implying that a trend would have to be either >0.5ºC/decade or much more negative (< -0.2ºC/decade) for it to obviously fall outside the distribution. Thus comparing short trends has very little power to distinguish between alternate expectations.

So, it should be clear that short term comparisons are misguided, but the reasons why, and what should be done instead, are worth exploring."

The rest of the article...

D.

Thanks Dar. Shall we gather around the fire of truth and enjoy a piece
of roasted Galt?

Galt, out of respect to Ayn Rand you should change your handle. Additionally,
Rand's Galt never had any use for god.
Rand was an atheist.
.

Darrel wrote:Roasting conservatives. It's like taking candy from a baby. A really stupid baby. When they aren't being dishonest they are just profoundly ignorant.

DOUG
With his head up his ass and the diaper on, Galt is not in much of a position to assess evidence.

LaWood wrote:Thanks Dar. Shall we gather around the fire of truth and enjoy a piece of roasted Galt?

DAR
Absolutely. But that boy has no balls, he only knows how to run.

More on these ditto-head ostriches:

***
Climate Change: The Ostrich Brigades
By Stephen Leahy
Inter Press News

Wednesday 05 March 2008

Brooklin, Canada - Colder than usual January temperatures in the United States have brought the climate change deniers out of hibernation, flooding websites, and opinion and letters pages about the "great global warming hoax". They even organised their own conference on denial in New York City this week.

"Global warming is not a global crisis" declared the Heartland Institute, organiser of the "International Conference on Climate Change". Heartland is a well-known right-wing lobby group which accepted more than half a million dollars from oil giant ExxonMobil between 1999 and 2005, according to Exxon documents disclosed by Greenpeace, and thousands of dollars more from the tobacco industry.

Not surprisingly, in a statement issued Tuesday, they insisted that all efforts "intended to reduce emissions of CO2 be abandoned forthwith".

"Manmade global warming is a total hoax. It has no basis in fact," shouted Rush Limbaugh, a U.S. conservative radio host, on his Feb. 27 show, which draws as many as 13 million listeners.

"Record snows and cold are being reported from all over the northern hemisphere this winter," Limbaugh claimed.

There is more to the northern hemisphere than the U.S. and Canada. Yes, it has also been cold in China and the Middle East, but it has also been very warm in Britain and most of Europe. In early February, it was balmy 14 degrees C in Edinburgh, Scotland, which is the city's normal average temperature in July. In Moscow, Russia, the most northern capital city in the world, the forecast this week is rainy and about 3 degrees C, instead of the normal snowy and -10 degrees C.

These temperatures prove nothing. It is just weather. However, climate is completely different than the daily variations in temperature in any one place. Climate is the total of all weather occurring over a period of years in a given place. A cold January means it is winter in the U.S., nothing more.

But Limbaugh went on to claim that NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies latest data shows that "global temperatures have dropped precipitously" in the last year, when in fact NASA reported that 2007 was the second warmest year on record.

Refuting this seemingly endless flow of erroneous information, not to mention outright lies, has become a no-win proposition. Most scientists no longer waste their time, feeling that giving any attention to these self-titled "global warming sceptics" simply encourages them and their sponsors - corporate interests in the fossil fuel industry, among others.

Far from fading away as the world struggles to come to grips with the reality of climate change, deniers in the U.S. are making their last stand. The Washington Post reported last month that a new group, backed by the coal industry and its utility allies, are waging a 35-million-dollar campaign to fuel opposition to U.S. legislation to slow climate change.

Despite the overwhelming scientific evidence that Earth is warming, and fast, even respected newspapers like the Wall Street Journal and Canada's National Post continue to print opinion articles claiming an Ice Age or global cooling is imminent. Even though there is no science behind this, the "facts" are often distorted and comments from scientists willfully misrepresented, which are then cited on websites and blogs for months and even years.

Those who deny humans are causing climate change will continue to do whatever they can to confuse and delay action. And they can be convincing, by citing well-known experts and twisting their views and findings. So here's a couple of common sense tips to add to your radar.

Denier Tip 1: It is relatively easy to check out a suspect claim with a simple Google search. A reader recently told this reporter that global warming is really caused by variations in the sun's activity. His proof was a "science" article from Investor's Business Daily that said this was the conclusion of the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research, a well-known research centre in Germany. A quick check of the Institute's website revealed their actual conclusion: "Solar activity affects the climate but plays only a minor role in the current global warming." It's in English and still posted on their website.

Denier Tip 2: Follow the money. Who benefits from denying climate change? It's not too hard to figure it out. General Motors Corp. Vice Chairman Bob Lutz, the head of new product development, recently told reporters in Texas that global warming was a "total crock of shit". He had previously written a blog entry deriding efforts to force car companies to build smaller, more fuel efficient vehicles as "like trying to address the obesity problem in this country by forcing clothing manufacturers to sell smaller, tighter sizes".

LINK