Jennifer Marohasy

a forum for the discussion of issues concerning the natural environment

Climate4You Update May 2011

By

Dear all.

Please find below a link which will take you directly to a monthly newsletter with meteorological information updated to May 2011:

http://www.climate4you.com/Text/Climate4you_May_2011.pdf

All temperatures in this newsletter are shown in degrees Celsius. Previous issues of the newsletter, diagrams and additional material are available on http://www.climate4you.com/

All the best, yours sincerely,
Ole Humlum

Ole Humlum, Professor of Physical Geography, Department of Physical Geography, Institute of Geosciences, University of Oslo, Norway

Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. John Sayers says

    Thanks Ole – I’ve admired your site for years now, I even emailed you to thank you.

    It’s so good to see all the data in similar charts with equal X/Y relationships.

    We still believe it’s going to rain if there is a ring around the moon. 🙂

  2. Ian Thomson says

    Good post. You can “see” the Humboldt Current in clear dark blue. Cold water flowing out from E Antarctica will be replaced by warmer water in the West . Is that right ?

  3. el gordo says

    Yeah…. thanks professor and Jen for posting it, a valuable link in our battle against ‘unreason’.

  4. el gordo says

    Ideally, I would love to be able to grab an appropriate graph and take it away…. in the heat of battle one needs a simple sharp response.

  6. bazza says

    So el Gordo , which one would you pick? “I would love to be able to grab an appropriate graph and take it away…. in the heat of battle one needs a simple sharp response.”
    I liked the story about the tablets back 3000 BC and how much of what are now the hallmarks of civilisation grew out of a shift to a more variable climate ( was it more ENSO ish?). It was a case of ” new gods for new odds”. Adversity was the catalyst for change.

  8. el gordo says

    ‘…..which one would you pick?’ Depends on the debate at the time.

    Followed up your historical interest and found that from about 4000 BC we see the beginning of the modern Sahara, Arabian and Indus area deserts.

    From this time Mesopotamia begins to dry out, with monsoon rains moving south.

  10. spangled drongo says

    From WUWT:

    Quote of the Week:

    “…it was clear that the first and greatest need was to establish the facts of the past record of the natural climate in times before any side effects of human activities could well be important.” HH Lamb on establishing the Climatic Research Unit at University of East Anglia [H/t Tim Ball]

  11. Ian Thomson says

    El Gordo,
    Apparently- in the Sahara – It went from lakes and crocs ,to desert , IN 20 YEARS.
    Are we even vaguely prepared for this kind of thing ?
    If it should get cold , NASA and others think it might , we have the tech to maybe survive.
    I bet we do not use it .

  13. el gordo says

    ‘….we have the tech to maybe survive.’

    Indeed we do and hopefully free enterprise will help people stay put, we could do without a mass migration in the 21st Century.

    Nothing unusual is happening, no tipping point in sight, not that I would recognise the beginning of a new dark age even if it was staring me in the face.

  14. bazza says

    Thanks Spangled for the link to a Greenland graph which you state “It’s probably not 100% accurate [what long term proxies are?] but this conveys the general situation, I feel:” Could you clarify which “general situation” and why the graph conveys it.

  15. spangled drongo says

    “I know GISS keep ‘correcting’ their data but can anyone tell me why?”

    Ian George, that’s right, we seem to get a different result with each new graph. This GISS graph shows the actual temp difference between 1960 and 2011 as 0.2 c and 1960 was during the “cool period”:

    http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/gistemp/from:1960/to:2011/plot/gistemp/from:1960/trend

    Bazza,

    The “general situation” being the bigger picture, as per that quote of the week:

    “…it was clear that the first and greatest need was to establish the facts of the past record of the natural climate in times before any side effects of human activities could well be important.” HH Lamb on establishing the Climatic Research Unit at University of East Anglia [H/t Tim Ball]

    What it all boils down to really. And as some wise person said, if the temps above and below the line were rounded off to whole degrees, there wouldn’t be a graph at all, just a horizontal line.

  16. spangled drongo says

    “if the temps above and below the line were rounded off to whole degrees, there wouldn’t be a graph at all, just a horizontal line.”

    Bazza,

    That was meant to be in relation to the modern warming period, not necessarily earlier warm periods where variations were possibly greater in both temps and SLs.

  17. Ian George says

    The BOM love to say how we have warmed from 1960. So using GISS data, I quite like comparing these two maps.

    First one shows anomalies from 1960 – 2010.
    http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/do_nmap.py?year_last=2011&month_last=05&sat=4&sst=1&type=anoms&mean_gen=0112&year1=1960&year2=2010&base1=1951&base2=1980&radius=1200&pol=reg

    The next is from 1900-2010.
    http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/do_nmap.py?year_last=2011&month_last=05&sat=4&sst=1&type=anoms&mean_gen=0112&year1=1900&year2=2010&base1=1951&base2=1980&radius=1200&pol=reg

    From comparing the two maps, Australia has only had a minimal difference in temps over the past 110 years but more warming since 1960 ie cherrypicking the start-point from the middle of the ‘cool’ period between 1945 and 1975.