Politics from the Palouse to Puget Sound

Friday, February 08, 2008

January 2008: Second Coolest January Worldwide in 15 Years

And according to data from Remote Sensing Systems of Santa Rosa there has been a significant global drop in temperature of 0.63 degress Centigrade in the past 12 months. That goes a long way towards explaining the significant global winter weather events of the past year, including here in the Inland Northwest.

I have heard of the Sports Illustrated jinx. Is there a Nobel jinx?


2 comments:

Bruce Heimbigner said...

Based on that data I would not be celebrating that global warming if a hoax.

The first chart shows a steady increase in global temps since 1979, even if you don’t throw out the ‘98 and ‘08 anomalies. Furthermore, this January was a couple tenths of a degree warmer than 30 years ago.

And so the last 12 months have been cold? – That is meaningless data when talking about climate change.

Unknown said...

You're right that one year does not make a trend. But it certainly skewers some of the predictions made for 2007 and makes all the global warming "consensus" look a little less reliable.

For example, the UK Meteorological Office predicted that "2007 is likely to be the warmest year on record globally."

Some scientists, however, are worried we are entering a Maunder Minimum, in which case we are going to have do a complete 180 degree shift in policy and prepare for dramatically cooler conditions that will have devastating global effects.

According to the Skeptical Scientist website:

The difference in solar radiative forcing between Maunder Minimum levels and current solar activity is estimated between 0.17 W/m2 (Wang 2005) to 0.23 W/m2 (Krivova 2007).

In contrast, the radiative forcing of CO2 since pre-industrial times is 1.66 W/m2 (IPCC AR4), far outstripping solar influence. And that's not including the extra CO2 to be added to the atmosphere in upcoming decades. In other words, the warming from CO2 dwarves any potential cooling even if the sun was to return to Maunder Minimum levels.


So if we do get colder because of a Maunder Minimum, I think its safe to say that the theory of anthropogenic global warming (and Al Gore's career) is officially dead.