The hottest year.

[Masquerouge]

@Masq: Yes, and only the temps since 2000.

Urederra, you should make that clear in your OP. The correction was only for temperatures in the US...

 

[Ziggy Stardust]

Where you just as convinced that we were headed for an ice age in 70s? We had the same hype, same "scientific consesus", but in the end it turned out to be completely wrong.

I was born in '72.

And about that ice-age:

http://environment.newscientist.com/channel/earth/climate-change/dn11643

Climate myths: They predicted global cooling in the 1970s

Indeed they did. At least, a handful of scientific papers discussed the possibility of a new ice age at some point in the future, leading to some pretty sensational media coverage (see Histories: The ice age that never was).

One of the sources of this idea may have been a 1971 paper by Stephen Schneider, then a climate researcher at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, US. Schneider's paper suggested that the cooling effect of dirty air could outweigh the warming effect of carbon dioxide, potentially leading to an ice age if aerosol pollution quadrupled.

This scenario was seen as plausible by many other scientists, as at the time the planet had been cooling (see Global temperatures fell between 1940 and 1980). Furthermore, it had also become clear that the interglacial period we are in was lasting an unusually long time (see Record ice core gives fair forecast).

However, Schneider soon realised he had overestimated the cooling effect of aerosol pollution and underestimated the effect of CO2, meaning warming was more likely than cooling in the long run. In his review of a 1977 book called The Weather Conspiracy: The Coming of the New Ice Age, Schneider stated: "We just don't know...at this stage whether we are in for warming or cooling – or when." A 1975 report (pdf format) by the US National Academy of Sciences merely called for more research.

The calls for action to prevent further human-induced global warming, by contrast, are based on an enormous body of research by thousands of scientists over more than a century that has been subjected to intense – and sometimes ferocious – scrutiny. According to the latest IPCC report, it is more than 90% certain that the world is already warming as a result of human activity (see Blame for global warming placed firmly on humankind).

But my point simply was that you betting money is not that impressive. Since there are higher stakes allready on the table.

Oh wait, I allready said that

 

[Masquerouge]

Where you just as convinced that we were headed for an ice age in 70s? We had the same hype, same "scientific consesus", but in the end it turned out to be completely wrong.

The ice age was not scientific consensus but media overexposure that for some reason you seem to remember as scientific consensus.

EDIT: crosspost with Ziggy.

 

[Urederra]

For some reason this part of the article was missing from the OP. It seems to have created a little bit of confusion, so I thought I'd post it anyway.

You're welcome

I let the opinions out and I only posted facts, expressly to avoid confusion. As I said in the OP...

follow the link for the full article and the opinions....

The corrections are really big deal. Why? Because the big report ICCP released at the beginning of the year was based on those skewed temperatures. The report was actually focused on the computer models simulations the IPCC ran to predict what the global temperatures would be in the next 30-100 years. Anybody how have studied maths knows that extrapolation gives more uncertainty than interpolation, and the extrapolated results can change a lot if you skew the last results of the set of data. That is even more important for computer simulations since the computer calculates the temperatures for the following year based on the temperatures of the previous ones, and the newly calculated temperatures are used to estimate the temperatures of the following years. So, if you have an error in the last set of data, that error is carried and augmented in the following years, so the last IPCC temperature estimations have the error committed by NASA multiplied by a factor. And that factor gets bigger as the simulations run longer.

So, it seems that the IPCC has to rerun the calculations with the new data, and the computers they use generate heat, which contribute to global warming. Oh, Heisenberg principle applied to the macroscopic world. (kidding)

I saw this article a week ago on some random web site, and was wondering how long it was gonna be before somebody was gonna post it.

But not in major news media. If the error had the opposite sign I guess it would have been top news.

I remain undecided on whether it's happening and whether it's really people who are causing it.

It is sad that we have to repeat that over and over and over...

Urederra, you should make that clear in your OP. The correction was only for temperatures in the US...

I just copied and pasted the first article I found about the news. I am not sure now that the temperatures are not skewed elsewhere. I mean, why the satellites only skewed US temperatures?

 

[Masquerouge]

I just copied and pasted the first article I found about the news. I am not sure now that the temperatures are not skewed elsewhere. I mean, why the satellites only skewed US temperatures?

But upon reading your OP I was under the impression that all temperatures were found to be flawed, while right now we only know for certain it's only the US temperatures...

 

[onejayhawk]

But upon reading your OP I was under the impression that all temperatures were found to be flawed, while right now we only know for certain it's only the US temperatures...

This is true. Taking the temperature of the planet is difficult. Depending on the method, the baseline can get really short. For the longerbaseline, there are problems, related to urbanization, with a lot of locations.

J

 

[LordRahl]

Makes you wonder what other measurements are off...

 

[Till]

Where you just as convinced that we were headed for an ice age in 70s? We had the same hype, same "scientific consesus", but in the end it turned out to be completely wrong.

bitfatron did a little research on the "ice age scare" in the 70s. I recommend checking out his results and maybe re-evaluate the use of that particular argument in the future.

Edit: x-post with Ziggy.

 

[onejayhawk]

Makes you wonder what other measurements are off...

It isnt that measurements are off, but that conditions are not controlled. In many cases the sprawl of urban areas causes temperatures to increase at a test location which had been well outside urban areas 100 years ago. This is a well documented phenomenon. However, if you want 100 years of data, you have to use it anyway and make adjustments. This inevitably leads to heated discussions about how to make the adjustments.

As a friend of mine used to say of his engineering labwork, "Fudge factor exceeds experimental result."

J

 

[Urederra]

Mean global temperature data still show the 2005 is the warmest year on record. Further, the 5-year mean temperatures in the U.S. continue to show a warming trend.

According to an article posted by Che Guava some days ago, the global warmest year is 1998.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/6939347.stm

Currently, 1998 is the warmest year on record, when the global mean surface temperature was 14.54C (58.17F).

You're welcome

Don't mention it.

 

[Ziggy Stardust]

edit: missread.

Well, one of them is wrong.

edit 2: Hang on, Means can be determined on a different scale can't they? Did both of them use 5 years?

 

[Urederra]

The 5-year mean temperature is another way to interpret the data. The temperatures of the last five years are taken and the mean temperature is calculated. That is supposed to give a better picture to study trends because you wash out odd years.

But the mean global temperature for a year does not take into account the other four previous years. The discrepancy might be because one is global mean surface temperature and the other might be atmospheric, I don't know.

 

[Ziggy Stardust]

Indeed, so it's quite possible they are both correct.

Statistics are fun aren't they?

 

[JerichoHill]

We probably did more harm to the atmosphere in the beginning of the industrial age and all the soot-factories in Europe than anything we've done in the modern era.

Of course, hearing that you really aren't impacting something until decades down the road isn't what the politicos want.

The abuse of statistics on both sides of the global warming debate is preposterous.

 

[JerichoHill]

The 5-year mean temperature is another way to interpret the data. The temperatures of the last five years are taken and the mean temperature is calculated. That is supposed to give a better picture to study trends because you wash out odd years.

But the mean global temperature for a year does not take into account the other four previous years. The discrepancy might be because one is global mean surface temperature and the other might be atmospheric, I don't know.

A mean does a horrible job of taking out odd years because it still allows them undue influence. I beleive what you are referring to would be the MEDIAN.

 

[Urederra]

Maybe to wash out is not the proper verb. They use the mean, as you can see in the graph below. What I wanted to say is that by taking a five years mean, you can see trends more easily. The influence of odd years are diluted over a longer period of time, but they still have an influence.