16 January 2013
NASA: 2012 Was 9th Warmest Year on Record. The 9 Warmest Years Have All Occurred Since 1998.
Posted by Dan Satterfield
Image from NASA
After the news a couple of weeks ago that the USA had its hottest year on record, NASA and NOAA released the global temperature data today. NOAA pegs it as the 10th warmest and NASA has it as 9th. They both do separate and slightly differing analyses. The bigger story here is that all 9 of the hottest years on record have occurred since 1998. (See below)
NOAA has it's list showing the top ten years also all since 1998.
In case someone tells you it’s the sun. It’s not and claiming so is absolutely ridiculous.
From James Hansen NASA GIS. Click image for details.
NASA press release image showing the forcings on Earth's temperature. One reason we did not set a new record this year is the La Nina event that saw a large area of colder than normal water in the Pacific. Greenhouse gases are only one of the drivers of Earth's temperature, but the graph shows clearly that the gases are increasingly becoming dominant.
It was James Hansen (who predicted back in the early 1980’s) that by the beginning of the new century, the rising greenhouse gases would become strong enough to rise above the noise of the natural temperature fluctuations An amazing prediction that turned out to be uncannily accurate.
The Northern Hemisphere warming has been the most pronounced (as predicted) because of the larger land area.
More from NASA:
2012 marks the 36th consecutive year (since 1976) that the annual temperature was above the long-term average. Currently, the warmest year on record is 2010, which was 0.66°C (1.19°F) above average. Including 2012, all 12 years to date in the 21st century (2001–2012) rank among the 14 warmest in the 133-year period of record. Only one year during the 20thcentury—1998—was warmer than 2012. The global annual temperature has increased at an average rate of 0.06°C (0.11°F) per decade since 1880 and at an average rate of 0.16°C (0.28°F) per decade since 1970.
(entire press release is here.)
Final note:
Anyone who tells you that this rise in temperature is some natural swing is telling you something that every major scientific body ON THE PLANET disagrees with. The first thing you should ask them is what they know that NASA/NOAA, the AMS, the Royal Society, and the National Academies of every first world and most second world nations do not know. You should also ask them why they have not published (in a peer-reviewed journal) what they know that these scientific groups do not.
Hansen et al. have estimated the planets energy imbalance at .58 watts per sq. meter averaged over every meter of the Earth. The paper is here. An even more in-depth paper which I highly recommend to my fellow on air meteorologists is here.
My two favorite quotes about science seem apropos here:
“Science is what we do to keep from lying to ourselves” Richard Feynman.
“The laws of physics are real, everything else is politics”. Neil de Grasse Tyson.
Dan Satterfield has worked as an on air meteorologist for 32 years in Oklahoma, Florida and Alabama. Forecasting weather is Dan's job, but all of Earth Science is his passion. This journal is where Dan writes about things he has too little time for on air. Dan blogs about peer-reviewed Earth science for Junior High level audiences and up.
Hey Dan. Great post, and you cite some great data. What concerns me, though, is that the data are incomplete for the conclusions you are reaching for. What I mean specifically is your final note “Anyone who tells you that this rise in temperature is some natural swing… etc”. Your data certainly seems to support that paragraph. But there are two problems:
1. Global temperatures have been rising, on average, for the entire Holocene period, and most significantly in the last 500 years. Any statement that the warming we are experiencing is not natural must include temp data at least that far back. You have not – making it appear that temperatures were stable prior to industrialization. Plenty of evidence exists to show that’s not true.
2. Your data on ‘estimated climate forcings’ are model-generated, if I’m not mistaken, and are not real evidence of anything. They are predictions, and should be treated as such. In your article, you treat them as evidence that human activity is causing warming.
I love your quotes at the end, and I very much agree. Especially the one regarding politics. But it goes both ways – I’m often disturbed to see climate science used as political ammunition. You have not done so, but others do. And in the end, we’re all after the truth 🙂
Doug,
1. Global temps. have NOT been rising for much of the Holocene. It is likely that before the present warming due to greenhouse gases, that we peaked in the earlier Holocene. Over the last 500 years the temps. actually cooled more than warmed. i.e. The little ice age etc.
2. The forcings estimates are based on observations and model data and are rigorous with the uncertainty indicated. Increasing greenhouse gases cause more heat to be trapped. This is understood to a molecular level and has been for many decades. Models run that do nOT include the increasing co2 cannot reproduce the global temp record over the past century and those that include all the known factors do a very good job of it. If that is not a smoking gun, then nothing is.
The planets temperature is a radiation balance problem at it’s heart. The temp. of the planet is controlled by only 3 factors.
1. Solar radiation input
2. Albedo
3. Greenhouse gas levels.
Dan
Hi Dan. The very definition of the Holocene is the epoch since the last glacial period, and there is ample data to show that global temperatures increased as much as 8C over the last 12,000y, since the start of the Holocene. I didn’t mean to imply that the rise has been steady; indeed, there have been many local highs and lows, but the Earth takes time to reach equilibrium. Sea levels, for example, have been steadily rising over the course of the Holocene.
The little ice age is one of these local lows, and although studies vary, there is also ample evidence to show that global temperatures have been increasing at least since 1600CE, a local low that followed a high at around 1000CE. This is almost 300y before the start of industrialization, and is information that is often left out of modern climate change discussion. It’s a key point, don’t you think!
Finally I will not go into a debate of using modelling as a ‘smoking gun’ but I will explain my skepticism. The logic of using knowledge at the ‘molecular level’ to predict changes at a global level is tenuous. A model that agrees with the past does not mean we understand the global system as a whole enough to correctly predict the future. I am saying there may (and likely are) other factors we do not understand that can will affect the global system in ways we can’t model.
To summarize, what I’m saying here is that natural processes are a significant factor in climate change. This is obvious to geologists, who are well used to studying the overwhelming power of nature. I’m not saying human activity is irrelevant, but it must be placed in the proper context. To properly understand natural processes, we need to look at information farther back than just 100 years, which is less than a blink of an eye on the Earth’s timescale.
Doug,
I do not think you will find anyone who does not think that we have natural internal oscillations in the Earths climate. Those have little to do with the irrefutable fact that increasing greenhouse gases cause warming. There is also little scientific doubt that the sensitivity to doubling the CO2 levels is around 3C and that figure has changed little in 50 years. Is all of the warming over the past decade anthropogenic? Who knows but the odds are that most of it is. No one has been able to identify any other factor. The most important point though is that EVEN IF THEY DID-the planet’s temp. is still controlled by the 3 factors I mentioned in the previous.
Does someone have – or link to – the actual temp for each year going back to 1998. Not the anomaly – departure – just the average temp for each year. NASA’s and Hadcrut would be nice.
Gary, your question is answered here: http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/abs_temp.html
Excellent overview,Dan. The only sensible conclusion is: Get out of the fossil fuels asap. http://ufbutv.com/2013/07/19/dismantle-the-oil-age/
where do the remaining years since 1998 place? in the top twenty?
to the searcher: With the exception of 1998, every year since 2001 has been warmer than any year since we began keeping more-or-less accurate records in 1880: http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/tabledata_v3/GLB.Ts+dSST.txt