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Really don’t think so, no, just don’t

February was the warmest month in recorded history, climate experts say

Winter in the Northern Hemisphere is unlikely to be that really. Even if we were to try and balance the two hemispheres we’d be talking about sometime around an equinox, no? Possibly even the month after one?

29 thoughts on “Really don’t think so, no, just don’t”

  1. The “Age of Credible Lies” is in the past now.

    We are in the “Age of Just Say Anything and Pray for Internet Mugs”.

  2. Bloke in North Dorset

    “Nor is this jump in global temperature a freak triggered by an unusually severe El Niño, say researchers. “It is the opposite,” said Professor David Vaughan of the British Antarctic Survey. “This is a catch-up of a recent hiatus that has occurred in rising global temperatures. We are returning to normality: rising temperatures. This is an absolute warning of the dangers that lie ahead.””

    So, 15 years or whatever of stable temperatures is an anomaly but 2 months of abnormally warm temperatures is enough to make long term projections with absolute certainty?

    We really are taken to be gullible fools.

  3. I read this amusing piece of trivia about the film The Revenant:

    Some of the filming occurred near Calgary, where unpredictable chinook winds have produced spring-like conditions in the dead of winter for as long as weather has been recorded. Evidently unaware of these chinooks, Leonardo DiCaprio attributed a sudden thaw to the unprecedented effects of global warming, much to the amusement of locals and Canadian media.

  4. That is really badly written. All that article delivers is confusion, fear, and hypertension.

    I tried decoding it, and if I understood it correctly what is referenced is the average global surface temperature as provided by NASA (http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/tabledata_v3/GLB.Ts+dSST.txt).

    The numbers are very high from October 2015. I would double- and triple-check my sensors before committing that into the public domain. Given who the people at NASA are, they are likely doing that by default.

    You may take issue with their methodology, but that is a separate discussion.

  5. The whole of Africa provides just twenty two data sets, statistics for the Arctic are from “smoothing” temperatures from an Arctic aerodrome and applying them in a 1000km radius, many stations are affected by urbanisation since their beginning or are simply badly sited near tarmac or exhausts, the earth has been steadily warming since the Little Ice Age(good) and its been an el Nino year where weak winds over the Pacific have left warm water to drift over a large proportion of the earth’s surface rather than driving the upwelling of cold water. Nothing unprecedented or inexplicable.

  6. meh.. Main wind direction this winter due to position, speed and angle of stratospheric winds for Europe: Southwest.

    Which means UK, and most of the west-euro coast has had warm air and *lots* of rain coming in. With overcast skies acting like a blanket.
    It’s not as if Winter hasn’t tried., It’s been cold enough further up the continent. Still is… All that cold air simply got pushed into Germany, and hasn’t had a chance to roll our way, except for a couple of days.

    So far, “global warming” is doing exactly what is expected of it for Europe: greater contrast at the ocean/continent border, more precipitation in the coastal areas due to increased evaporation, higher wind averages due to the greater temperature/pressure differentials.
    But nothing dramatic, and still very much dependent on how the jetsream runs this year around.
    And nothing you can’t engineer for.

    And really.. Try a couple of clear nights in a row this time of year and see how much frost you suddenly get..

  7. ‘February was the warmest month in recorded history, climate experts say’

    Don’t get your WEATHER report from CLIMATE experts.

  8. “This is a catch-up of a recent hiatus that has occurred in rising global temperatures”: by what magic mechanism does Earth do catch-ups? There would a Nobel in physics available for anyone who produced sound evidence for that, and a good theory to explain it. It wouldn’t count if your theory was that magic dragons stored up energy for eighteen years and then released it all by exhaling fire.

  9. The jump in global temperatures is caused by an unusually strong El Niño. But then, the so-called “pause” was also relative to an unusually strong El Niño.

    So whatever the effect the cause is always the same ? That’s handy.

  10. We have an upward trend in temperatures caused by carbon dioxide emissions. On top of that, we have various climate oscillations, the El Niño cycle being the most important. Any large increase in the short term is likely to be due to El Niño, as is the relative fall between El Niño peaks. The fact that the current peak is about 0.3K above the 1998 peak gives you an idea of the AGW trend.

  11. Any large increase in the short term is likely to be due to El Niño, as is the relative fall between El Niño peaks.

    From BINDs quote: “Nor is this jump in global temperature a freak triggered by an unusually severe El Niño, say researchers. “It is the opposite,” said Professor David Vaughan of the British Antarctic Survey. “This is a catch-up of a recent hiatus that has occurred in rising global temperatures. The Prof seems to disagree with you.

    This is the problem with AGWers, particularly the catastrophists the arguments seem to constantly shift and are often contradictory.

  12. We seem to be saying the same thing, but I’m being clearer about it.

    AGW deniers have spend years banging on that the “pause” since 1998 disproves the whole thing. It would be admirable if they’d now admit that the last six months’ data show they were wrong.

  13. AGW deniers have spend years banging on that the “pause” since 1998 disproves the whole thing. It would be admirable if they’d now admit that the last six months’ data show they were wrong.

    Hold on, you may think you’re being clear but what is it that you are saying ? That the last six months rise, which you have previously said is caused by El Nino, is in fact evidence of a longer term rise, in which case why mention EL Nino at all ?

    The AGW deniers as you call them ( the usual dismissal of anyone who is sceptical of anything in the AGW narrative ) have been “banging on” about the pause because the models predicted something that didn’t happen, which has just been glossed over by warmists as though it was of no consequence. The subsequent adjustments of past temperatures and fiddling round the edges of recent temperatures are enough to raise an eyebrow of anyone who takes an interest in the subject or should be.

  14. “February was the warmest month in recorded history, climate experts say”

    That would be the modern recorded temperature history, that goes back just over 100 years, then would it? 100 years in the history of a 4 billion year old planet, that has had repeated glacial and interglacial periods over the last 500 thousand years. That must be a pretty magical 100 year period for it to be declared as important as all that.

  15. Bloke in Costa Rica

    I don’t even know what a ‘global average temperature’ is. It doesn’t strike me as a physically meaningful statistic.

  16. Yes we are told that 18 years pause is not long enough to qualify as a trend to disprove ‘warming’. But six months of temperature rises is enough to demand we admit we are wronng!

    Idiot!

  17. Is this the warmest ever spell in the present interglacial? Not even close, if one can trust the inferences from the Greenland ice cores.

    Well then, did the twentieth century see the fastest ever rate of increase in temperature in the present interglacial? Nope, if one can trust the inferences from the Greenland ice cores.

    I’m fed up with environmental hysteria, usually from people who either know negligible amounts of physics or chemistry, or who do know a bit but expect to base a career on ignoring that knowledge.

  18. Hold on, you may think you’re being clear but what is it that you are saying ? That the last six months rise, which you have previously said is caused by El Nino, is in fact evidence of a longer term rise, in which case why mention EL Nino at all ?

    Evidently I wasn’t as clear as I thought.

    The increase relative to a year ago is caused by El Niño. The increase relative to the last big El Niño peak in 1998 is caused by global warming.

  19. SJW,

    You are fighting a losing battle here. I understand the point that you are trying to make. The fact is you simply won’t make much headway with your arguments. The problem is the extremists on both sides have been dominating the discussion. In reality we have an energy structure that has been rapidly evolving for centuries. It’s not going to change overnight no matter how many windmills we throw up.

  20. So Much For Subtlety

    Social Justice Warrior – “The increase relative to a year ago is caused by El Niño. The increase relative to the last big El Niño peak in 1998 is caused by global warming.”

    And what caused the even warmer weather in the 1930s?

    Liberal Yank – “The problem is the extremists on both sides have been dominating the discussion. In reality we have an energy structure that has been rapidly evolving for centuries. It’s not going to change overnight no matter how many windmills we throw up.”

    When it comes to science, people ought to be extremists. Schrödinger’s cat may be alive or dead, but the indeterminate nature of that annoyed Schrödinger no end. The cat must be alive or it must be dead. It can’t be 50% dead according to whatever the latest opinion poll says.

    Although, of course, if the power structure has been evolving rapidly, it can change overnight.

  21. “This being science, changes to the calculations and the reasons for them are meticulously documented.”

    Funny that the changes almost without exception make the past cooler and present warmer though isn’t it? How very convenient to someone trying to ‘prove’ that man is affecting the climate that the changes make an inconvenient truth (that the 1930s were hotter than (or as hot as) today in the US) disappear.

    And its not the only time. Global temperature dataset after dataset are constantly ‘reassessed’ and each time the past gets colder and the present warmer, never the other way around. Odd isn’t it that ALL the mistakes they find just happen to improve their argument?

  22. If you follow the link, you’ll see that some of the adjustments went the other way. It’s not a matter of finding mistakes: they’re refining the methods.

    NOAA, NASA, the Met Office, the Japanese Meteorological Agency, and Berkeley Earth all calculate their own temperature series. The five plots are different, but qualitatively they say the same thing. Richard Muller at BEST started off thinking the others were all doing it wrong, but reported that:
    “When we began our study, we felt that skeptics had raised legitimate issues, and we didn’t know what we’d find. Our results turned out to be close to those published by prior groups. We think that means that those groups had truly been very careful in their work, despite their inability to convince some skeptics of that. They managed to avoid bias in their data selection, homogenization and other corrections.”

    This alleged global conspiracy by all these scientists is tin-foil hat stuff.

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