Jennifer Marohasy

a forum for the discussion of issues concerning the natural environment

Climate4you Update July 2011

By

THE climate update for July 2011 indicates:

“The Northern Hemisphere was characterised by regional variability. Below average temperatures extended across western North America, most of the North Atlantic and Europe, and central Russia. Above average temperatures characterised eastern North America, western Russia and eastern Siberia.

The Southern Hemisphere in general was close to average 1998-2006 conditions, with the exception of parts of the Antarctic. Most other land regions experienced below average temperatures.

Also the near Equator temperatures conditions were close to average 1998-2006 conditions.

The Arctic was characterized by a relatively high variability of surface air temperature deviations from the 1998-2006 average. The European Arctic sector had below average temperatures, and also Alaska and parts of Russia and western Siberia were relatively cold. Most of the Canadian sector and eastern Siberia experienced above average temperatures.

Most of the Antarctic continent experienced high average temperatures, the only major exception being the Antarctic Peninsula…

“All five global temperature estimates presently show stagnation, at least since 2002. There has been no increase in global air temperature since 1998, which however was affected by the oceanographic El Niño event. This stagnation does not exclude the possibility that global temperatures will begin to increase again later. On the other hand, it also remain a possibility that Earth just now is passing a temperature peak, and that global temperatures will begin to decrease within the coming years. Time will show which of these two possibilities is correct.

More information here:  http://www.climate4you.com/Text/Climate4you_July_2011.pdf

From:  Ole Humlum, Professor of Physical Geography  Department of Physical Geography, Institute of Geosciences  University of Oslo, Box 1042 Blindern, N-0316 Oslo, Norway

Reader Interactions

Comments

  2. el gordo says

    Spangles…I’m a big fan of Girma, both of us are banned from Deltoid along with Tim Curtin.

    Jen, the graph taking us to 2011 is more dramatic and telling.

  3. Mack says

    Thankyou Ole Humlum for combining all these graphs and really giving everybody the best that sattelite data can provide. I must admit tracking climate is worse than watching grass grow.
    EG, I tried posting on Deltoid too once; (nothing offensive or OT) but was ignored (not posted); wonder why 🙂 Hands firmly clapped over the ears maybe?

  6. Luke says

    US heatwaves doofus. Jeez try to keep up with own local news. Typical sceptic nong reaction.

  7. bazza says

    Spangled has observed that the data might fit the pendulum hypothesis that he found on whatsup. There was also a useful quote attached from Feyneman “Details that could throw doubt on your interpretation must be given, if you know them.” I bet he can think of a few other details that better drive a long term upward trend with a dash of ENSO.

  8. spangled drongo says

    But bazza, are you starting from the null hypothesis or the CAGW hypothesis?

    When there have been many warming periods during the holocene with each cooler than the previous one, we are in a fundamentally cooling pattern and the null hypothesis is the only logical starting point.

    Holocene opt, Minoan WP, RWP, MWP, CWP.

  9. James Mayeau says

    Luke, if you can’t make yourself understood that’s not my problem.

    So you’re talking about heatwaves in the lower forty eight.

    Hmmmmm. Nah. You’re still full of it.
    http://www.sacbee.com/2011/08/21/3851740/more-mild-weather-coming-this.html

    If you’re not fed up with the unseasonably cool days, you’ll appreciate what’s coming for Sacramento this week, according to the National Weather Service.
    The outlook “continues to be as good as it gets,” NWS meteorologist Johnny Powell said today.

    Look for clear skies, highs in the mid-80s today and upper 80s on Monday, Powell said, with southerly breezes of up to 10 mph that continue to usher in marine layers that keep the Sacramento area cool.

    “We’ll have mid-90s through the rest of the week,” Powell said. “There are no heat waves or 100-degree days in sight. It’s absolutely fabulous for this time of year.”

    That makes several years in a row for Sacramento. Climates changing – just not in the direction it was supposed to.

  10. el gordo says

    ‘Hands firmly clapped over the ears maybe?’

    Mack, the Deltoidians are a sensitive lot, easy to startle. On thinking about it I went back to see what was said and found a ‘prediction’ which appears to be coming true. Just luv scienz.

    On the surface all looks normal, but just below the surface the temperatures in the equatorial Pacific have gone seriously cold. We can expect La Nina to dominate over the coming decade and large floods in the land of Oz.
    http://www.nodc.noaa.gov/OC5/3MHEATCONTENT/

    Posted by: el Gordo | May 17, 2010 5:58 PM

  12. Mack says

    Yes saw your comments EG (comment no.23) Prediction right on the nail. (shame the link dosn’t work for me? anymore.) Funny how the site owners get rapidly nervous and censorship wracked on these believer blogs.

  14. Mack says

    Looking at Ole’s graph,
    Starting at 1987 a flat line could be drawn to about 1994-1995.
    A rising straight line up to 2003.
    A flat line again to the present.

    ie. Not consistant with our steadily increasing output of CO2.

  16. gavin says

    Sadly, you guys can’t read a trend so I could take your bet on the next turning point high or low however just to be fair, all of you need to go back another decade or so first.

  17. spangled drongo says

    “all of you need to go back another decade or so first.”

    So that’s all it takes to prove AGW, hey gav?

    As I said above, try going back a little further:

    Holocene opt, Minoan WP, RWP, MWP, CWP.

    Based on those periods, the present trend falsifies the AGW theory.

    And whether the next move is high or low [within usual bounds] isn’t gonna alter that.

  18. bazza says

    Spangled, re your -whether the next move is high or low [within usual bounds] – I doubt usual bounds apply to your unallterable logic – more likely usual leaps!.
    So back to your beloved pendulum. What was/were the force/s for the the diverse 5 you referred to- Holocene opt, Minoan WP, RWP, MWP, CWP-and is there a different one this time? ( and of course no resorting to Occam).

  20. spangled drongo says

    bazza,

    Logic only needs to ask: “why couldn’t whatever caused previous WPs, also be causing this one?”

    IOW, if the climate is doing what comes naturally, it ain’t broke, so why fix it.

  21. spangled drongo says

    eg,

    I think you could be right and we could be in for more flooding.

    That rehearsal we had in Brisbane in January could be repeated with the accompaniment of a long overdue cyclone plus a king tide, which is what usually happens and par for the course.

    Imagine the doom screamers.

  22. el gordo says

    ‘Imagine the doom screamers.’

    Yep spangles…I don’t think we will see another drought around here for at least a decade and I want Flannery to pay for all those unnecessary desal plants.

  23. James Mayeau says

    About Greenman3610: Greenman Studio LLC is a graphic design and animation studio located in Midland, MI. Owner Peter Sinclair is a longtime advocate of environmental awareness and energy alternatives. An award winning graphic artist, illustrator, and animator, Mr. Sinclair runs Greenman Studio from his home in Midland, MI.
    Mr. Sinclairs cartoons and illustrations have appeared in newspapers around the world, and his work has been profiled in numerous publications, including the New York Times, The Utne Reader, and HaAretz of Jerusalem.

    He makes a living selling polar bear drawings to Andy Revkin, the world wildlife fund, the NRDC, and assorted other enviro cranks. That makes him a thousand times more morally compromised then anyone featured at Desmog blog, or Source Watch.

    from the link Luke provides to Sinclair’s youtube channel.

  24. James Mayeau says

    Now a look behind the curtain.

    Climate Crocks – (Peter’s blog); current post featuring a couple reports on how offshore wind farms “have a positive impact” on sea bird populations (Mostly an excuse to highlight some of Peter Sinclair’s artwork via an Youtube advert for Areva Wind Turbine – but I digress.)

    In the body he quotes from a Guardian article;

    It is the evidence proponents of offshore wind farms have been waiting for: a Dutch study has found that offshore wind turbines have “hardly any negative effects” on wildlife, and may even benefit animals living beneath the waves.

    The researchers reached their conclusions after studying a wind farm near Windpark Egmond aan Zee, the first large-scale offshore wind farm built off the Dutch North Sea coast.

    Anti-wind farm campaigners have often argued that wind farms can have a negative impact on bird populations, while some critics have voiced concerns that offshore wind farms could prove disruptive to marine life.

    However, Professor Han Lindeboom from the Institute for Marine Resources and Ecosystem Studies at Wageningen University and Research centre, said that the new study revealed little evidence of negative effects on local wildlife.

    “At most, a few bird species will avoid such a wind farm. It turns out that a wind farm also provides a new natural habitat for organisms living on the sea bed such as mussels, anemones and crabs, thereby contributing to increased biodiversity,” he said.

    “For fish and marine mammals, it provides an oasis of calm in a relatively busy coastal area.”

    “This, of course, is not the first study to show that offshore wind is benign.” comments Sinclair.

    Right out of the gate the report he highlights isn’t what he claims. It immediately downgrades “a positive effect” to “hardly any negative effect”.

  25. James Mayeau says

    When you click through to Professor Han Lindebloom’s study we find out the dirty little truth, “The number of birds that collided with the turbines was not determined but was estimated to be quite low on the basis of observations and model calculations.”, and that “various bird species avoid the wind farm altogether” turning the area into a sort of dead zone for birds.

    The conclusion of the report?

    Against such a background, a wind farm can contribute to a more diverse habitat [for crabs and barnicles – JM] and even help nature to recover. However, the rotating blades can also have a significant disruptive effect on some species of birds. The researchers therefore suggest that, for the purpose of generating energy, special areas be designated in the sea for wind farms. Unavoidable effects, such as a local reduction in the numbers of some bird species would then have to be accepted, but by choosing the location appropriately, these effects can be minimised.

    Did anybody doubt that fish crabs and barnicles would be unaffected by windfarms?

  26. James Mayeau says

    In short Sinclair is a liar. On a par with Al Gore. Just the sort we would expect Luke to link from in a pinch.

  27. spangled drongo says

    In the US: “Collisions with wind turbines killed an estimated 20,000 to 37,000 birds per year in 2003, with all but 9,200 of those deaths occurring in California”

    I’ll bet those offshore wind farms kill plenty of birds, particularly raptors. It’s just that there is little evidence left lying around.

    Which suits Sinclair’s story.

  30. gavin says

    SD; I can go after your links to see where they should lead. Your last was a beaut so follow these arguments with a smile hey.

    http://www.skepticalscience.com/lessons-from-past-climate-predictions-akasofu.html

    But recall that I also say current global temp increase as measured by modern instruments is not linear and earlier measurement cannot support your LIA- MWP as fact because those thermometers can’t be related to each other or anything we have available today.

    So do the right thing and put a horizontal line through that bit that wobbles around in gross uncertainty. This way is at least fairer than calling the most recent temp charts “linear” in their rise as some would have us doing on behalf of increased fossil fuel extraction.

  31. Luke says

    James – done like a dinner – lays smoke, changes tack, goes the big ad hom. Piss weak rebuttal you clown.

  32. James Mayeau says

    Luke – you’re a legend in your own mind. Next you’ll be linking to the IPCC cover page.

    “James – chew on that, mate.

    http://www.ipcc.ch/

    HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHA”

    Ewww! Got me good that time.

  33. Minister for Truth says

    http://nofrakkingconsensus.com/2011/08/23/the-journal-of-climate-the-ipcc/

    Luke mates up to their old tricks…shonkademia has never heard of, nor had to bother about conflicts of interest and separation of powers etc

    Just more of the same manipulative crap to keep the money flowing …but then why should they worry about it everyone is doing it

    Large bonuses to Blue Scope steel bosses on a day they put off 1000 workers, unions paying the legal bills of persons caught spending someone elses money in knock shops, just to keep an incompetent Govt in power and Bob Brown happy….incompetent french electrical company treating Australian employees in an out rageously HR disgusting manner thats from the dark ages…and on it goes…etc

    …so why should shonkademia worry

    go for it fellas,everyone else is

  34. spangled drongo says

    I wonder how much effect on arctic sea ice levels these icebreakers, shipping and generally increased scientific polar activity financed by “catastrophe grants” is having?

    http://www.awi.de/en/news/press_releases/detail/item/rv_polarstern_reaches_north_pole/?tx_list_pi1%5Bmode%5D=6&cHash=e4f4e0a501e31c702c3e9f2195b7ceb5

    But just have a butcher’s hook at what the North Pole was like over 50 years ago during a cold period:

    http://www.ihatethemedia.com/photo-north-pole-submarine

    “So do the right thing and put a horizontal line through that bit that wobbles around in gross uncertainty.”

    gav, I’ve been trying to tell you that for yonks. And when you do you find that there is less than half a degree above or below that line [0.35c] so that when reduced to the nearest whole degree the line is simply horizontal.

    AGW falsified. Nothing to see here.

  37. TonyfromOz says

    spangled drongo,
    thanks for that link to the Submarine images at the North Pole showing virtually no ice.
    If I may be facetious for a moment.

    Neille Shute (Norway) wrote a wonderful book in 1957, ‘On The Beach’.

    My Mum was a big fan of Shute from his earlier novels ‘A Town Like Alice’ and ‘In The Wet’, and as young boy, they were some of the first novels I ever read, when she sort of urged me into that reading thing, after first trying to coerce me with the dead boring (for a young boy, anyway) ‘A Tale Of Two Cities’.

    I loved his novel, ‘On The Beach’, which did appeal to young boys, and when they made it into a movie, they filmed it in and around Melbourne in 1959, that same year of the first image off the USS Skate surfacing at the North Pole.

    What with that Polar Ice melt that same year, perhaps they might have made the Movie with a different ‘boat’, instead of the fictional USS Sawfish (USS Scorpion in the novel) perhaps maybe a vessel measured in cubits.

    Funny, I can’t remember worldwide flooding that year. (Thank you Mister Archimedes)

    Perhaps gavin may wish to tell us how they ‘doctored’ the image.

    Incidentally, the boat used in the movie was not of US origin, as the USN refused access to their nuclear subs, so the boat used was a Royal Navy diesel electric sub, HMS Andrew.

    Tony.

  38. spangled drongo says

    Tony,

    You struck a chord with your books. During the latter half of the ’50s I was in far west Qld and Neville Shute and Arthur Upfield were highly prized. And wasn’t it a big deal when Gregory Peck, Ava Gardener and Fred Astaire came to Melbourne? And A Town Like Alice with Virginia McKenna and Peter Finch was heart wrenching stuff.

    Brings it all back. I would have commented on Boney and Upfield but my recollections of specifics are pretty hazy however he was a great and enjoyable author who portrayed the bush and aboriginals very well.

    At one stage I was “apprenticed” to an aboriginal rainmaker and got to know the pre-siddown-money aboriginals fairly well.

    It was a different world. I was lucky to experience it.

  39. TonyfromOz says

    Spangles,
    off topic I know, so apologies Jennifer.

    I collected those Upfield novels over the years, and again, thanks to my Mum who told me never to get rid of any books, I kept them all. I started in the late 60’s and didn’t find that last one I was missing until the late 90’s. I read a lot of them as I got hold of them. As a much younger man, and the crime fiction was the thing during those first readings.

    Later, when I was attempting to place them in the order of writing, I read them all again, and took notes this time.

    Each novel, at that subsequent reading, was an absolute revelation. I had missed so much during the first reading, concentrating on the perceived main subject, when all along, Upfield had his ulterior motive right at the forefront of each novel with the crime almost secondary.

    Those novels are almost impossible to find now, in any form. I’ve even tried (numerous) second hand book stores, and they tell me that anything from Upfield does not even make it to the shelves, so long is the waiting list. They come in to those stores from deceased estates now, and disappear during the unpacking of the boxes.

    I was asked by the owner of the Official Upfield Publishing site to put all I had from my notes onto the Internet, and thankfully, the owner of the site I contribute at allowed me to do just that at my Upfield Home Page at the link above.

    If any of you ever see any ‘Bony’ novel by Upfield, then get hold of it, and as you read it, read between the lines. You will not be disappointed.

    With respect to what he wrote about, he was decades ahead of his time. Even one of the most militant aboriginal activists around, Gary Foley, thinks Upfield’s novels talked about these things with a great deal of insight decades before the subject became ‘main stream’.

    Tony.

  40. TonyfromOz says

    Incidentally, Spangles touches on something that some of you may perceive as ‘mumbo jumbo’, that of Aboriginal rain makers.

    This was the province of the Tribal Shaman, incorrectly labelled over the years as medicine man, witch doctor, or purveyor of black magic, all of them totally incorrect.

    This Shaman was in fact the power behind the throne of every tribal head man. He was the only able bodied man excused from the main task of ‘hunter gathering’. Schooled over the years by the preceding Shaman, he took over when that revered Elder ‘went back to his totem’, or became too old to function in the position.

    To that end he had to be many things, and one of them was in fact an expert ‘reader’ of the weather.

    He’d look a prize goose if the head man asked him to have what was loosely termed a rain dance with the Churinga Stones, and no rain came.

    So, if the weather was exceedingly dry, and he knew the signs to look for, he would go to the head man and suggest that it was time for them to get ‘the stones’ and do that dance, when conditions looked like rain.

    The rain would come, and the ‘white’ perception of black magic was furthered, if you can see that.

    Some of you scoff, but use simple logic and it only stands to reason.

    I expand on that in part of this Post at my Upfield site.

    I can’t wait for the feedback on this.

    http://papundits.wordpress.com/2011/04/23/tonys-notes-from-the-bony-novels-part-17/

    Tony.

  41. Johnathan Wilkes says

    Tony,
    Damn right you are Tony!
    My hobby is punting on horses, we have a small club, sort of, and I can tell you, I only ever give tips when I’m sure, well as sure as anyone can be with racing, that my selections are bound to win or at least to place.

    Therefor my strike rate is high and I’m regarded as a guru!

    Nobody asks or knows about my failures, simply because they are never been told about them.

  42. el gordo says

    It does make sense, Tony, otherwise the shaman would lose his job.

    In droughty times with endless crop failure the villagers would come to him and suggest a rain dance might be a good idea, but he would have to put them off by saying ‘the gods are not happy because of our indiscretions.’

    Weather and climate appear as chaos so I don’t think the shaman had any ability to predict the end of a long drought, anymore than our modern day crystal ball gazers ….ie models.

  43. spangled drongo says

    Bit more o/t Jen, sorry.

    Tony,

    John Sayers, who posts here, was initiated by a Shaman, I understand.

    Old Walter, the rainmaker I worked for, had me writing letters to all surrounding rainmakers in tribes within a radius of about 200 miles. He couldn’t read or write but he sure could communicate and he would organise a joint effort of “big medicine” when he reckoned the time was opportune. The ingredients were crushed Kopi stone [a sort of mica] mixed with the kidney-fat of a water dwelling animal.

    He never failed to produce the goods. Sometimes it just took a bit longer than others.

  46. spangled drongo says

    Some of Nigel Calder [fromGWPF]’s conclusions:

    “Hall of Shame

    “Retracing those 14 years, what if physics had functioned as it is supposed to do? What if CLOUD, quickly approved and funded, had verified the Svensmark effect with all the authority of CERN, in the early 2000s. What if the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change had done a responsible job, acknowledging the role of the Sun and curtailing the prophecies of catastrophic warming?

    “For a start there would have no surprise about the “travesty” that global warming has stopped since the mid-1990s, with the Sun becoming sulky. Vast sums might have been saved on misdirected research and technology, and on climate change fests and wheezes of every kind. The world’s poor and their fragile living environment could have had far more useful help than precautions against warming.

    “And there would have been less time for so many eminent folk from science, politics, industry, finance, the media and the arts to be taken in by man-made climate catastrophe. (In London, for example, from the Royal Society to the National Theatre.) Sadly for them, in the past ten years they’ve crowded with their warmist badges into a Hall of Shame, like bankers before the crash.”

    And we wouldn’t be having a carbon tax and all the disruption associated with it.