Saturday, August 01, 2009

Chart of the Day

Remember just last week, when the left-o-sphere erupted over the George Will/Mark Steyn quip that "If you’re 29, there has been no global warming for your entire adult life."? As previously discussed, the left's objection was fact-challenged. And now, the Department of Commerce's NOAA agrees (huge .pdf--see pages 23-24; footnotes omitted):

source: NOAA, State of the Climate 2008, figure 2.8a (draft)

[Caption:] Monthly global mean temperature anomalies (with respect to 1961-90 climatology) since 1975, derived from the combined land and ocean temperature dataset HadCRUT3 (gray curve). (top blue curve) The global mean after the effect of ENSO that has been subtracted is also shown, along with (bottom blue curve, offset by 0.5°C) the ENSO contribution itself. Least squares linear trends in the ENSO and ENSO-removed components for 1999-2008 and their two std dev uncertainties are shown in orange.

[The paper continues:] Observations indicate that global temperature rise has slowed in the last decade (Fig. 2.8a). The least squares trend for January 1999 to December 2008 calculated from the HadCRUT3 dataset (Brohan et al. 2006) is +0.07±0.07°C decade--much less than the 0.18°C decade recorded between 1979 and 2005 and the 0.2°C decade expected in the next decade (IPCC; Solomon et al. 2007). This is despite a steady increase in radiative forcing as a result of human activities and has led some to question climate predictions of substantial twenty-first century warming (Lawson 2008; Carter 2008).

El Niño–Southern Oscillation is a strong driver of interannual global mean temperature variations. ENSO and non-ENSO contributions can be separated by the method of Thompson et al. (2008) (Fig. 2.8a). The trend in the ENSO-related component for 1999–2008 is +0.08±0.07°C decade, fully accounting for the overall observed trend. The trend after removing ENSO (the "ENSO-adjusted" trend) is 0.00°±0.05°C decade, implying much greater disagreement with anticipated global temperature rise.
No kidding.

(via Roger Pielke Jr)

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