The data are pretty much out now on how 2008 fared on the warming/cooling stakes. Let's remind ourselves that the year began with the various climate and meteorological centres predicting that 2008 would be a very hot year. The arctic ice cap was going to melt (which in and of itself would not be unusual, since it has melted many times previously), polar bears were going to face extinction, glaciers were going to shrink, skifields were going to be denuded of snow, etc, etc.
Once again they were proved to be wrong. The University of Alabama has published the atmospheric satellite temperatures measures for 2008. This is where global warming (as caused by carbon dioxide emissions) is supposed to be showing up primarily (if the theory were to be true). Embarrassingly, there is no such evidence.
They have produced this very helpful graph.
Dr Roy Spencer provides the following commentary on the graph:
Latest Global Average Tropospheric Temperatures
Since 1979, NOAA satellites have been carrying instruments which measure the natural microwave thermal emissions from oxygen in the atmosphere. The signals that these microwave radiometers measure at different microwave frequencies are directly proportional to the temperature of different, deep layers of the atmosphere. Every month, John Christy and I update global temperature datasets that represent the piecing together of the temperature data from a total of eleven instruments flying on eleven different satellites over the years. As of 2008, our most stable instrument for this monitoring is the Advanced Microwave Sounding Unit (AMSU-A) flying on NASA’s Aqua satellite.
The graph above represents the latest update; updates are usually made within the first week of every month. The smooth curve in the graph is a fourth-order polynomial fit to the data, which smooths out the large amount of monthly variability in the data and helps reveal the underlying ‘trends’. (There is no claim that this curve has any predictive power for the coming months or years.)
Thus, in the troposphere, the atmosphere is not warming. So far the twenty first century has proved a dud for temperature pyrotechnics. So much for the predictive models of the global warmanisers.
Meanwhile, down on the surface of the planet, the northern hemisphere is in the midst of a very very cold winter. The World Climate Report stated recently:
The data are just in from the National Climatic Data Center and they show that for the year 2008, the average temperature across the United States (lower 48 States) was 1.34ºF lower than last year, and a mere one-quarter of a degree above the long-term 1901-2000 average. The temperature in 2008 dropped back down to the range that characterized most of the 20th century.
Christopher Booker of The Telegraph has noted that the warmanisers are so locked in to their narrative that they are now systematically and habitually screening out data and observational facts.
The warmists are so locked into their general narrative that the plummeting temperatures and abnormal snowfalls of the past two winters have thrown their army of media groupies into quite a tizzy. The BBC did at least deign last week to notice the worst snowstorm to hit Las Vegas for 30 years, but without mentioning the freak snow and ice storms affecting many other parts of the US, as far south as New Orleans. The BBC was also quick to pick up from Pravda the unusual lack of snow in Moscow, without mentioning Siberia's record freeze that lowered temperatures to -60C.
Meanwhile, global sea ice has expanded rapidly in the past year. Michael Asher reports that
Thanks to a rapid rebound in recent months, global sea ice levels now equal those seen 29 years ago, when the year 1979 also drew to a close.
Ice levels had been tracking lower throughout much of 2008, but rapidly recovered in the last quarter. In fact, the rate of increase from September onward is the fastest rate of change on record, either upwards or downwards.
The data is being reported by the University of Illinois's Arctic Climate Research Center, and is derived from satellite observations of the Northern and Southern hemisphere polar regions.
The amount of sea ice is now at levels last seen twenty-nine years ago.
How will 2009 fare? Well it's starting out to be deja vu all over again. The metereological offices are predicting (surprise, surprise) that 2009 will be an extremely warm year. Meanwhile, sunspot and general solar activity remains at very low levels. Sun Cycle 24 is now very late in getting started--two years late in fact.
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