Re: Global Land Temperature Sets Record for March

On Fri, 18 Apr 2008 02:36:42 -0700 (PDT), JCE <jcbepstein@xxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

From http://www.noaa.gov/newsarchive.html

One thing to note is that the USA is not the world when it comes to
looking at the global picture.

Note that there is nothing discussed about the cause, so CO2
and Cosmis rays are out of the loop on this report.

****



NOAA: U.S. Temperatures Near Average in March as Global Land
Temperature Sets Record

Western U.S. Snowpack Healthiest in a Decade

April 17, 2008

An analysis by NOAA?s National Climatic Data Center shows that the
average temperature for March in the contiguous United States ranked
near average for the past 113 years. It was the 63rd warmest March
since record-keeping began in the United States in 1895.

The average global land temperature last month was the warmest on
record and ocean surface temperatures were the 13th warmest. Combining
the land and the ocean temperatures, the overall global temperature
ranked the second warmest for the month of March. Global temperature
averages have been recorded since 1880.

The complete analysis is available online.

High Resolution (Credit: NOAA)

U.S. Temperature Highlights
? In the contiguous United States, the average temperature for March
was 42°F, which was 0.4°F below the 20th century mean, ranking it as
the 63rd warmest March on record, based on preliminary data.
? Only Rhode Island, New Mexico and Arizona were warmer than
average, while near-average temperatures occurred in 39 other states.
The monthly temperature for Alaska was the 17th warmest on record,
with an average temperature 3.8°F above the 1971-2000 mean.
? The broad area of near-average temperatures kept the nation?s
overall temperature-related residential energy demand for March near
average, based on NOAA?s Residential Energy Demand Temperature Index.

U.S. Precipitation Highlights

High Resolution (Credit: NOAA)
? Snowpack conditions dropped in many parts of the West in March,
but in general, heavy snowfall during December-February has left the
western snow pack among the healthiest in more than a decade, with
most locations near to above average.
? Nine states from Oklahoma to Vermont were much wetter than
average, with Missouri experiencing its second wettest March on
record. Much of the month?s precipitation fell March 17-20, when an
intense storm system moved slowly from the southern Plains through the
southern Midwest.
? Rainfall amounts in a 48-hour period totaled 13.84 inches in Cape
Girardeau, Mo., and 12.32 inches in Jackson, Mo. The heavy rainfall
combined with previously saturated ground resulted in widespread major
flooding of rivers and streams from the Missouri Ozarks eastward into
southern Indiana.
? From March 7-9, eight to 12 inches of snow fell from Louisville,
Ky., to central Ohio. In Columbus, an all-time greatest 24-hour
snowfall of 15.5 inches broke the old record of 12.3 inches set on
April 4, 1987.
? In the Southeast, a powerful tornado moved through downtown
Atlanta on March 14, causing significant damage to many buildings.
This was one of 90 tornado reports from the Southeast in March.
? Rainfall in the middle of March improved drought conditions in
much of the Southeast, but moderate-to-extreme drought still remained
in more than 59 percent of the region.
? In the western U.S., the weather pattern in March bore a greater
resemblance to a typical La Niña, with especially dry conditions
across Utah, Arizona, Nevada, and California. March was extremely dry
in much of California, tying as the driest in 68 years at the
Sacramento airport with 0.05 inches, a 2.75 inch departure from
average.
Global Highlights
? The global land surface temperature was the warmest on record for
March, 3.3°F above the 20th century mean of 40.8°F. Temperatures more
than 8°F above average covered much of the Asian continent. Two months
after the greatest January snow cover extent on record on the Eurasian
continent, the unusually warm temperatures led to rapid snow melt, and
March snow cover extent on the Eurasian continent was the lowest on
record.
? The global surface (land and ocean surface) temperature was the
second warmest on record for March in the 129-year record, 1.28°F
above the 20th century mean of 54.9°F. The warmest March on record
(1.33°F above average) occurred in 2002.
? Although the ocean surface average was only the 13th warmest on
record, as the cooling influence of La Niña in the tropical Pacific
continued, much warmer than average conditions across large parts of
Eurasia helped push the global average to a near record high for
March.
? Despite above average snowpack levels in the U.S., the total
Northern Hemisphere snow cover extent was the fourth lowest on record
for March, remaining consistent with boreal spring conditions of the
past two decades, in which warming temperatures have contributed to
anomalously low snow cover extent.
? Some weakening of La Niña, the cold phase of the El Niño-Southern
Oscillation, occurred in March, but moderate La Niña conditions
remained across the tropical Pacific Ocean.

"Our Climate Numbers Are a Big Old Mess
By PATRICK MICHAELS
April 18, 2008

President George W. Bush has just announced his goal to stabilize
greenhouse-gas emissions by 2025. To get there, he proposes new
fuel-economy standards for autos, and lower emissions from power
plants built in the next 10 to 15 years.

Pending legislation in the Senate from Joe Lieberman and John Warner
would cut emissions even further ? by 66% by 2050. No one has a clue
how to do this. Because there is no substitute technology to achieve
these massive reductions, we'll just have to get by with less energy.

Disko Bay, Greenland: Temperatures on the island are no warmer than
they were in the mid-20th century.

Compared to a year ago, gasoline consumption has dropped only 0.5% at
current prices. So imagine how expensive it would be to reduce overall
emissions by 66%.

The earth's paltry warming trend, 0.31 degrees Fahrenheit per decade
since the mid-1970s, isn't enough to scare people into poverty. And
even that 0.31 degree figure is suspect.

For years, records from surface thermometers showed a global warming
trend beginning in the late 1970s. But temperatures sensed by
satellites and weather balloons displayed no concurrent warming.

These records have been revised a number of times, and I examined the
two major revisions of these three records. They are the surface
record from the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change (IPCC), the satellite-sensed temperatures originally published
by University of Alabama's John Christy, and the weather-balloon
records originally published by James Angell of the U.S. Commerce
Department.

The two revisions of the IPCC surface record each successively lowered
temperatures in the 1950s and the 1960s. The result? Obviously more
warming ? from largely the same data.

The balloon temperatures got a similar treatment. While these
originally showed no warming since the late 1970s, inclusion of all
the data beginning in 1958 resulted in a slight warming trend. In
2003, some tropical balloon data, largely from poor countries, were
removed because their records seemed to vary too much from year to
year. This change also resulted in an increased warming trend. Another
check for quality control in 2005 created further warming, doubling
the initial overall rate.

Then it was discovered that our orbiting satellites have a few faults.
The sensors don't last very long and are continually being supplanted
by replacement orbiters. The instruments are calibrated against each
other, so if one is off, so is the whole record. Frank Wentz, a
consulting atmospheric scientist from California, discovered that the
satellites also drift a bit in their orbits, which induces additional
bias in their readings. The net result? A warming trend appears where
before there was none.

There have been six major revisions in the warming figures in recent
years, all in the same direction. So it's like flipping a coin six
times and getting tails each time. The chance of that occurring is
0.016, or less than one in 50. That doesn't mean that these revisions
are all hooey, but the probability that they would all go in one
direction on the merits is pretty darned small.

The removal of weather-balloon data because poor nations don't do a
good job of minding their weather instruments deserves more
investigation, which is precisely what University of Guelph economist
Ross McKitrick and I did. Last year we published our results in the
Journal of Geophysical Research, showing that "non-climatic" effects
in land-surface temperatures ? GDP per capita, among other things ?
exert a significant influence on the data. For example, weather
stations are supposed to be a standard white color. If they darken
from lack of maintenance, temperatures read higher than they actually
are. After adjusting for such effects, as much as half of the warming
in the U.N.'s land-based record vanishes. Because about 70% of earth's
surface is water, this could mean a reduction of as much as 15% in the
global warming trend.

Another interesting thing happens to the U.N.'s data when it's
adjusted for the non-climatic factors. The frequency of very warm
months is lowered, to the point at which it matches the satellite
data, which show fewer very hot months. That's a pretty good sign that
there are fundamental problems with the surface temperature history.
At any rate, our findings have not been incorporated into the IPCC's
history, and they probably never will be.

The fear of a sudden loss of ice from Greenland also makes a lot of
news. A year ago, radio and television were ablaze with the discovery
of "Warming Island," a piece of land thought to be part of Greenland.
But when the ice receded in the last few years, it turned out that
there was open water. Hence Warming Island, which some said hadn't
been uncovered for thousands of years. CNN, ABC and the BBC made field
trips to the island.

But every climatologist must know that Greenland's last decade was no
warmer than several decades in the early and mid-20th century. In
fact, the period from 1970-1995 was the coldest one since the late
19th century, meaning that Greenland's ice anomalously expanded right
about the time climate change scientists decided to look at it.

Warming Island has a very distinctive shape, and it lies off of
Carlsbad Fjord, in eastern Greenland. My colleague Chip Knappenberger
found an inconvenient book, "Arctic Riviera," published in 1957 (near
the end of the previous warm period) by aerial photographer Ernst
Hofer. Hofer did reconnaissance for expeditions and was surprised by
how pleasant the summers had become. There's a map in his book: It
shows Warming Island.

The mechanism for the Greenland disaster is that summer warming
creates rivers, called moulins, that descend into the ice cap,
lubricating a rapid collapse and raising sea levels by 20 feet in the
next 90 years. In Al Gore's book, "An Inconvenient Truth," there's a
wonderful picture of a moulin on page 193, with the text stating
"These photographs from Greenland illustrate some of the dramatic
changes now happening on the ice there."

Really? There's a photograph in the journal "Arctic," published in
1953 by R.H. Katz, captioned "River disappearing in 40-foot deep
gorge," on Greenland's Adolf Hoels Glacier. It's all there in the open
literature, but apparently that's too inconvenient to bring up.
Greenland didn't shed its ice then. There was no acceleration of the
rise in sea level.

Finally, no one seems to want to discuss that for millennia after the
end of the last ice age, the Eurasian arctic was several degrees
warmer in summer (when ice melts) than it is now. We know this because
trees are buried in areas that are now too cold to support them. Back
then, the forest extended all the way to the Arctic Ocean, which is
now completely surrounded by tundra. If it was warmer for such a long
period, why didn't Greenland shed its ice?

This prompts the ultimate question: Why is the news on global warming
always bad? Perhaps because there's little incentive to look at things
the other way. If you do, you're liable to be pilloried by your
colleagues. If global warming isn't such a threat, who needs all that
funding? Who needs the army of policy wonks crawling around the world
with bold plans to stop climate change?

But as we face the threat of massive energy taxes ? raised by
perceptions of increasing rates of warming and the sudden loss of
Greenland's ice ? we should be talking about reality.

Mr. Michaels is senior fellow in environmental studies at the Cato
Institute and professor of environmental sciences at University of
Virginia."
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120847988943824973.html?mod=googlenews_wsj
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: explain this
    ... The Warming Earth Blows Hot, Cold and Chaotic - Subtle Rises in Temperature ... to rank 2008 based on world-wide land and sea-surface temperatures through ... The U.S. Climate Change Science Program analyzed North America's climate ... climate records for the last 56 years and, in a report released last month, ...
    (rec.music.classical.guitar)
  • Re: Gore - A Pathetic Embarrassment To US Science - so sey the y lying GOP shills
    ... There are measurements of atmospheric temperatures and how ... and the Arctic ice cap is shrinking. ... comprehensive mass survey of the entire Greenland ... Is Global Warming Changing the Arctic? ...
    (soc.retirement)
  • Re: Gore - A Pathetic Embarrassment To US Science - so sey the y lying GOP shills
    ... There are measurements of atmospheric temperatures and how ... and the Arctic ice cap is shrinking. ... comprehensive mass survey of the entire Greenland ... NASA Scientists Find Major Ice Melting at Poles ...
    (soc.retirement)
  • Six Steps to Hell (or Happy Fucking Earth Day)
    ... according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate ... Six thousand years ago, when temperatures were ... As global warming bites, the western US ... globally warming methane and carbon dioxide in immense quantities. ...
    (alt.gathering.rainbow)
  • Cold Busted: NBrrrC
    ... What Happened to Global Warming? ... Climate correspondent, BBC News ... Average temperatures have not increased for over a decade ... Ocean cycles ...
    (rec.music.artists.springsteen)
Loading