A review

2016 Temperature Records

To nobody’s surprise, all of the surface datasets showed 2016 to be the warmest year on record.


Barely more surprising is that all of the tropospheric satellite datasets and radiosonde data also have 2016 as the warmest year. (from me: the ones the science deniers have relied on for the past several years to deny there has not been any warming)


Coming as this does after the record warm 2015, and (slightly less definitively) record warm 2014, the three records in row might get you to sit up and pay attention.

There a few more technical issues that are worth mentioning here.

Impact of ENSO

The contribution of El Niño to recent years’ anomalies in the GISTEMP data set are ~0.05ºC (2015) and ~0.12ºC (2016), and that means the records would still have been set even with no ENSO variability.


Do I have to mention the ‘pause’?

Apparently yes. The last three years have demonstrated abundantly clearly that there is no change in the long term trends since 1998. A prediction from 1997 merely continuing the linear trends would significantly under-predict the last two years.


The difference isn’t yet sufficient to state that the trends are accelerating, but that might not be too far off. Does this mean that people can’t analyse interannual or interdecadal variations? Of course not, but it should serve as a reminder that short-term variations should not be conflated with long term trends. One is not predictive of the other.

Another reminder from a post I made a few weeks ago,……….

Quote Originally Posted by S Landreth View Post
Just for the deniers who for the past few years kept bringing up the satellite data graph showing it hasn’t warmed in 18 years and 8 months,……..