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.