NOAA: 2010 Hottest Year on Record So Far

treehugger.com:

Continuing the trend from the previous month, NOAA reports that May, the period from March to May, and from January to May all have had the hottest combined global land and ocean surface temperatures since records began in 1880.

Read the whole story: treehugger.com

Comments

[al gonzo]

11:21 AM on 06/30/2010

I wonder what impact 2010 eruptions of Eyjafjallajökull was on global weather
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_eruptions_of_Eyjafjallaj%C3%B6kull
The one in 1783 had some dire consequences; even helped spark The French Revolution:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/apr/15/iceland-volcano-weather-french-revolution
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laki

[DocSkull]

10:55 AM on 07/11/2010

Eyjafjallajökull is certain to have an impact, but human produced CO2 far exceeds that from volcanic eruptions. Perhaps we should reduce emissions by an equal amount.

[ReedYoung]

06:01 PM on 06/24/2010

This was the 303rd consecutive month with a global temperature above the 20th Century average. The last month with below average temperatures was February 1985.
http://www.noaanews.noaa.gov/stories2010/20100615_globalstats_sup.html

[fumes]

09:47 AM on 06/22/2010

''The heat that we feel from sunlight, a fire, a radiator or a warm sidewalk is far infrared.''

CO2 does not absorb or re-radiate in the FIR spectrum..

next!

[Publicola]

11:07 AM on 06/22/2010

Downthread Fumes wrote: ''The heat that we feel from sunlight, a fire, a radiator or a warm sidewalk is far infrared.''

Now Fumes writes in response to his own statement: "CO2 does not absorb or re-radiate in the FIR spectrum.. next!"

Nice to see that you are talking to yourself, Fumes.

in any event..

when are you going to stop denying..

that greenhouse gases send longwave (infrared) radiation back to Earth?

you'll never understand even the basics of global warming science..

until you understand that basic fact of physics, you know.

[ReedYoung]

09:15 PM on 06/22/2010

Uh, fumes, it's the fact that it does NOT "re-radiate in the FIR spectrum" that DEFINES it as a greenhouse gas. And as I explained to you already, absorption of ANY wavelength of light warms a substance.

[StephenBP]

06:49 AM on 06/22/2010

I believe that Exusian has knocked fumes' argument senseless, and it appears to have lost any coherency at all. Many thanks to Exusian for the link elsewhere to the study in the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences study that shows "....97-98% of the climate researchers most actively publishing in the field support the tenets of ACC outlined by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change; and 2) the relative climate expertise and scientific prominence of the researchers unconvinced of ACC are substantially below that of the convinced researchers. " On the whole anthropogenic climate change or global warming argument, you can side with the scientists, or you can side with the three college dropouts ( Rush, Sean, and Glenn) and their oil company supporters. I'll side with the scientists.

[fumes]

05:56 AM on 06/22/2010

Infrared light lies between the visible and microwave portions of the electromagnetic spectrum. Infrared light has a range of wavelengths, just like visible light has wavelengths that range from red light to violet. "Near infrared" light is closest in wavelength to visible light and "far infrared" is closer to the microwave region of the electromagnetic spectrum. The longer, far infrared wavelengths are about the size of a pin head and the shorter, near infrared ones are the size of cells, or are microscopic.

Far infrared waves are thermal. In other words, we experience this type of infrared radiation every day in the form of heat! The heat that we feel from sunlight, a fire, a radiator or a warm sidewalk is far infrared. The temperature-sensitive nerve endings in our skin can detect the difference between inside body temperature and outside skin temperature. Far infrared light is even used to heat food sometimes - special lamps that emit thermal infrared waves are often used in fast food restaurants!

Shorter, near infrared waves are not hot at all - in fact you cannot even feel them. These shorter wavelengths are the ones used by your TV's remote control.

http://science.hq.nasa.gov/kids/imagers/ems/infrared.html

[Publicola]

08:54 AM on 06/22/2010

fumes: "long wave radiation is heat and heat is directional.. it can't be sent back.."

hey fumes..

when are you going to stop denying..

that greenhouse gases send longwave (infrared) radiation back to Earth?

you'll never understand even the basics of global warming science..

until you understand that basic fact of physics, you know.

[fumes]

09:38 AM on 06/22/2010

lol..

and when are you going to realize that what went up..

is not the same stuff coming back!

[Publicola]

11:02 AM on 06/22/2010

fumes: "lol.. and when are you going to realize that what went up.. is not the same stuff coming back!"

lol..

and what exactly do you mean by "same stuff" here, Fumes?

unlike you..

I realize that a substantila portion of the IR radiation emitted by the Earth is absorbed by greenhouse gases including CO2, and the re-emitted as IR radiation - much of which is "sent" back to Earth!

when are you going to stop denying..

that greenhouse gases send longwave (infrared) radiation back to Earth, Fumes?

[Exusian]

10:09 AM on 06/22/2010

fumes never tires of demonstrating his complete lack of understanding of the physics of the greenhouse effect.

What goes up, or rather what IR wavelength gets absorbed by each species of greenhouse gas, is exactly the same wavelength as that species emits back down, up or sideways.

But the key concept that fumes fails to grasp is that most of the absorbed IR energy is not emitted as new photons at all, but is instead converted to kinetic energy through collision with other gas molecules, most of those being O2 and N2, thus directly warming the atmosphere. And those then warmer gases radiate IR that can be absorbed again.

[Exusian]

10:51 PM on 06/21/2010

Fumes wrote down thread: "CO2 is ir-active only in the middle range of the spectrum"

Ahem...., which would be the thickest part of the IR emission spectrum.

CO2 clips off the 4-4.5 micron toe of the IR emission curve, which doesn't really count for much since emission there is so low, but it absorbs very deeply indeed in 14 to 17 micron band, right at the thickest part of the curve.

H2O absorbs in two broad bands of the emission curve: across the full 5 to 7.5 micron slope of the curve, and in the shallow end of the 17 to 100 micron slope, but no where does it absorb anywhere near as deeply as CO2 does.

It's the area under the curve that tells you where the work gets done, and the area under the curve is why CO2 accounts for ~20% of the greenhouse effect even though there is only 1/10 as much CO2 in the atmosphere as there is water vapour.
That and the fact that CO2 is well mixed through the top of the troposphere and into the stratosphere, where there is hardly any water vapour at all.

http://www.globalwarmingart.com/images/7/7c/Atmospheric_Transmission.png
http://www.xylenepower.com/Mars_EarthM.gif
http://astrobiology.arc.nasa.gov/workshops/1996/palebluedot/images/earth_gass_spec.gif
http://acd.ucar.edu/textbook/ch15/fig3.jpg

[ReedYoung]

02:35 PM on 06/21/2010

What the Tree Hugger article fails to remind the reader is that this was **specifically** predicted last year by climatologists, and particularly by NOAA or NASA, if I recall correctly.

For several years, Solar astronomers had been observing an unusually long lull in Solar activity. Whereas the Sun's output usually fluctuates on a schedule of approximately 11 years, that cycle is also known to vary between 9 and 14 years long. The most recent cycle took 13 years to complete, which is within expectations, but just barely, so it was published in some articles for non-scientists, that you wouldn't have to pay to read.

Sometime in the past year or two (I don't recall the exact date from memory), Solar astronomers started observing Sun spots again, an indication that the Sun's output would begin increasing again, and by last autumn, Solar activity had picked up enough to predict that, based on a combination of global warming and natural variation (the Sun), this would be a new record warm year. Now, half the data is in and **all** of it supports their prediction for this year.

And because the Sun's cycle lasts 9 - 14 years, the peak will take about half that, 4 - 7 years to reach, so the next several years will all be quite hot, if not all record-setters although that is very possible.

[fumes]

04:43 AM on 06/21/2010

E=mc2..

Einstein's formula also accounts for the heat in our planet's crust, which is kept warm by a steady barrage of E = mc2 conversions occurring within unstable radioactive elements such as uranium and thorium. "When they decay, some of the mass is lost and a little energy is created, and that keeps the crust warm," says John Rigden, a physicist at Washington University in St. Louis and author of Einstein 1905: The Standard of Greatness (Harvard, 2005). "So the temperature of the outer Earth, the crustal matter, is directly related to E = mc2."

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/einstein/legacy.html

[gallon]

09:10 AM on 06/21/2010

Unbelievable. Is someone paying you to troll? Just because Einstein had a great equation does not lead to the your conclusion that the temp of the Earths surface is directly related to that equation. There are many many other factors involved.

[fumes]

09:42 AM on 06/21/2010

lol..

not my conclusion!

[Publicola]

10:36 AM on 06/21/2010

lol..

hey fumes..

when are you going to stop denying..

that greenhouse gases send longwave radiation back to Earth?

you'll never understand basic global warming science..

until you understand that basic fact of physics, you know!

[Exusian]

10:15 AM on 06/21/2010

While true, the heat diminishes the further up within the crust you go because the solid crust insulates the lower crust and mantle. As a result less than 0.1% of earth's surface heat budget comes form geothermal activity.

In other words, this is nothing more than an attempted distraction from the thread topic: the fact that 2010 is setting temperature records.

[chrisd3]

11:24 AM on 06/21/2010

Yes, and this is not the first thread in which fumes has somehow confused "crust" with "atmosphere." It's been quite a while since I was in high school, my my recollection is that those are two different things.

It would also be interesting to know exacly how this is causing the climate to change.

[Exusian]

11:18 AM on 06/20/2010

.....continued

Though undoubtedly cooler than the MWP, the LIA also varied regionally. It's drivers are better known and include several large volcanic eruptions (aerosol dimming) two periods of low sun spot activity (reduced insolation), and reforestation of abandoned agricultural land in the wake of wide scale epidemics in Europe and the New World (albedo change, drawdown of atmospheric CO2), but they too are spread over a pretty wide period of time and geographical area.

[Exusian]

11:17 AM on 06/20/2010

SFTor: "We had the MWP and the LIA. How large would you say the temperature swing was between these periods, and what was the driver, going in and out of both periods?"

The temperature range between the MWP and the LIA was around 1C, with each about .5C above and below the global average of 1900.
We're currently around .4C above the MWP, and around .2C to .4C below the peak during the HCO.

See the 2kyr and 12kyr global temperature plots at Global Warminmg Art:
http://www.globalwarmingart.com/wiki/File:2000_Year_Temperature_Comparison_png
http://www.globalwarmingart.com/wiki/File:Holocene_Temperature_Variations_Rev_png

I am not aware of any agreement on what the drivers of the MWP were, which is not surprising since the MWP is not seen as a single global event, but rather a grouping of warmer regional events separated by both geography and time that none the less had a global effect centered around the year 1000. Three possible drivers I heave read about are a lower than average number of explosive volcanic eruptions (low aerosol dimming), a more active sun (more insolation), and an increase in land clearance for agriculture as human population increased (albedo change, soil carbon, methane and N2O release).

continued...

[realpolitic]

04:45 AM on 06/21/2010

Man, you are a font of knowledge. Great summary!

[SFTor]

12:17 PM on 06/21/2010

Here is what seems to be a pretty good reconstruction:

http://www.worldclimatereport.com/index.php/2008/02/11/a-2000-year-global-temperature-record/

The Loehle reconstruction uses data points from around the world, and seems to suggest that the MWP and LIA were global phenomena.

My impression was always that the epidemics (The Black Death and its return every generation until about 1700) were in part caused by the reduced immune resistance in the inadequately fed population at the time, which again was a result of less favorable climatic conditions and reduced agricultural output,

[Publicola]

02:16 PM on 06/21/2010

Loehle's paleoclimate reconstruction was debunked.

Loehle didn't even know that 'BP' ('Before Present') means 1950 in paleoclimatology - an understandble mistake for a non-paleoclimate scientist to make (heh), but not for someone who is presenting himself as such an authority on paleoclimate that he is challenging the scientific consensus.

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/12/past-reconstructions/

[Exusian]

05:09 PM on 06/21/2010

Correction: here is a reconstruction that you like.

The problems with Loehle's reconstruction start with the fact that it was published in the non-scientific journal Energy & Environment and go downhill from there.

Do read the dismemberment of the paper at RealClimate that Publicola provided the link to, and this one here as well:
http://web.archive.org/web/20071226051459/http://thatstrangeweather.blogspot.com/2007/11/loehle-reconstruction.html

[Exusian]

11:15 AM on 06/20/2010

SFTor wrote: "I am not saying that CO2 only increases by temperature increase."

Good, at least we can agree on that.

SFTor asked "can you truly say that this mechanism is not in effect at this time?"

Yes. By direct measurement CO2 is known to be increasing in sea water, which is causing the pH of sea water to decrease, which means that the ocean is still a net absorber of CO2.

Think about it for a moment: for the ocean to become a net emitter of CO2 it would first have pass through a point where absorption is equal to emission. Only after that equilibrium point could the ocean become net emitter of CO2.

SFTor: "The amount of CO2 added by human activity is within the uncertainty level of how much CO2 is actually present in the atmosphere."

Sounds like you need to read up on how CO2 is measured in the atmosphere. I think you'll find that it is a good deal more accurate than you have been led to believe.

[realpolitic]

04:46 AM on 06/21/2010

Isn't it temperatures increases with co2 release?

[Exusian]

10:06 AM on 06/21/2010

It's both, RP, an increase in CO2 will produce an increase in temperature, while an increase in temperature will produce an increase in CO2 as the ocean and soil warms.

[realpolitic]

10:01 AM on 06/22/2010

Yes, thanks.

[realpolitic]

08:20 AM on 06/20/2010

"The most important result found by these researchers is that the warming in recent decades has brought global temperature to a level within about one degree Celsius (1.8°F) of the maximum temperature of the past million years. According to Hansen, "That means that further global warming of 1 degree Celsius defines a critical level. If warming is kept less than that, effects of global warming may be relatively manageable. During the warmest interglacial periods the Earth was reasonably similar to today. But if further global warming reaches 2 or 3 degrees Celsius, we will likely see changes that make Earth a different planet than the one we know. The last time it was that warm was in the middle Pliocene, about three million years ago, when sea level was estimated to have been about 25 meters (80 feet) higher than today.""

http://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/news/20060925/

[realpolitic]

08:17 AM on 06/20/2010

"One of the findings from this collaboration is that the Western Equatorial Pacific and Indian Oceans are now as warm as, or warmer than, at any prior time in the Holocene. The Holocene is the relatively warm period that has existed for almost 12,000 years, since the end of the last major ice age. The Western Pacific and Indian Oceans are important because, as these researchers show, temperature change there is indicative of global temperature change. Therefore, by inference, the world as a whole is now as warm as, or warmer than, at any time in the Holocene."

http://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/news/20060925/

[StephenBP]

08:12 AM on 06/20/2010

"Over the last 150 years, carbon dioxide (CO2) concentrations have risen from 280 to nearly 380 parts per million (ppm). The fact that this is due virtually entirely to human activities is so well established that one rarely sees it questioned." - Eric Steig, Dec 22, 2004
We know that humans have burned something like 500 billion metric tons of carbon thus far, enough to raise the atmospheric concentration of CO2 to the current levels, less that aborbed by plants and by the ocean .
CO2 produced from burning forests or fossil fuels has a different isotopic concentration than the CO2 in the atmosphere,which is continuously replenished with heavier isotopes from cosmic ray reactions. Plants prefer but do not exclusively absorb the lighter isotopes of carbon.
Measuring the isotope ration in tree rings shows us that the 13C/12C ratios change just when massive human burning of fossil fuels begins. Calculating the ratio in the tree rings and comparing it to known atmospheric ratios gives a very clear indication of human fossil fuel and forest burning.
Now, can someone explain what it is that prompts people to try to dispute science with fossil fuel funded fabrications? Money? Political loyalty? Fear of economic dislocation of their oil stocks?
BTW, the carbon dioxide level has risen somewhat since 2004. In May, 2010 it was measured at 392.94 ppm. Have a wonderful, scientifically aware day!

[Exusian]

12:48 AM on 06/20/2010

...continued

And even further back, build up of CO2 in the atmosphere to levels hundreds of times present values caused by vulcanism and the suspension of silicate rock weathering by global glaciation is the most likely mechanism that could have ended the Snowball Earth episodes of the Cryogenian period. CO2 lead temperature, as shown by the cap carbonate rock layers that punctuate the episodes.

As for your speculation that the current CO2 increase is simply due to the ocean warming lag from the Roman or the Medieval Warm Periods, besides the fact that ocean CO2 is increasing, and besides the isotope signature, and besides the simple fact that we know how much fossil carbon has been and is being burned, there is the little matter of the cooler period of the Little Ice Age, which means that there was no sustained 800-1000 year ocean warming to produce a current slug of CO2.

It's a perfect example of mutually exclusive global warming/climate change denier arguments.

[SFTor]

02:36 AM on 06/20/2010

thank you for your thoughtful response, Exusian,

but I still don't see how we can be so sure. The amount of CO2 added by human activity is within the uncertainty level of how much CO2 is actually present in the atmosphere.

[realpolitic]

06:37 AM on 06/20/2010

What?

[Publicola]

12:05 PM on 06/20/2010

Clarify whatever it is that you are trying to say here - what "uncertainty level" are you talking about?

[SFTor]

03:11 AM on 06/20/2010

OK, I understand. We had the MWP and the LIA. How large would you say the temperature swing was between these periods, and what was the driver, going in and out of both periods?

[realpolitic]

06:40 AM on 06/20/2010

The temperature driver of the Little Ice Age was very likely low sunspot activity.