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.
Tuesday, February 26, 2008
Temperature Monitors Report Widescale Global Cooling
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3 comments:
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/research/2007/ann/ann07.html
"The year 2007 the 10th warmest year for the contiguous U.S., since national records began in 1895, according to preliminary data from NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C. The year was marked by exceptional drought in the U.S. Southeast and the West, which helped fuel another extremely active wildfire season. The year also brought outbreaks of cold air, and killer heat waves and floods. Meanwhile, the global surface temperature for 2007 was the fifth warmest since records began in 1880."
realism, What's your point? That we're seeing an upswing in temprature because climate is variable, or because the current trend is predictive?
My point is that weather is chaotic and unpredictable. Global warming doesn't mean that everywhere on earth is getting continually warmer with no interruption.
Worldwide, the first 5 months of 2007 were tied with 1998 as the hottest same period on record. In 1998, however, there was strong el Nino, unlike last year.
Additionally, the finding the highest recent peak and comparing from that point to assess a trend is deeply dishonest. Looking at that chart, the "0" point on the Y axis represents the "average" temperature from 1960-1991. As you can see, even looking just at the end of the chart, that supposedly "low" temperature was still .037 degrees above normal.
What this article and Game are dishonestly doing is comparing the value of the peaks against the values of the valleys. As a more intellectually honest exercise, why dont you compare the recent peaks of that graph against the older peaks and the recent valleys of the graph against the older valleys.
What you will see then (although I doubt you'll be honest enough to admit) is that the high temperatures have been gradually getting higher and the low temperatures are also gradually getting higher.
That is called global warming, and it is caused by human activity, not solar.
"The most commonly cited study by skeptics is a study by scientists from Finland and Germany that finds the sun has been more active in the last 60 years than anytime in the past 1150 years (Usoskin 2005). They also found temperatures closely correlate to solar activity.
However, a crucial finding of the study was the correlation between solar activity and temperature ended around 1975. At that point, temperatures rose while solar activity stayed level. This led them to conclude "during these last 30 years the solar total irradiance, solar UV irradiance and cosmic ray flux has not shown any significant secular trend, so that at least this most recent warming episode must have another source."
You read that right. The study most quoted by skeptics actually concluded the sun can't be causing global warming. Ironically, it's the sun's close correlation with Earth's temperature in the past that proves it has little to do with the last 30 years of global warming."
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