[Vision2020] NASA Website Error: 1-15-13: NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies: Global Temperature Update Through 2012

[Ted Moffett]

Note error on NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies website, quoted
below, which I recognized immediately.

Anyone with even cursory knowledge of Earth's global average surface
temperature over the last two decades knows that in part due to a super El
Nino in 1998, 1998, according to some global temperature data sets, is one
of the ten warmest years on record:
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cmb-faq/globalwarming.html
"A dramatic global warming, at least partly associated with the record El
Niño, took place in 1998."

I suspect on the NASA website quoted immediately below its a simple typo
that should read 1998, rather than 1988.

Note that in the lower down NASA website temperature summary, referenced in
the subject heading, they do not make this error indicating 1988 as one of
the ten warmest years, indicating that since 1998 all ten warmest years
since 1880 have occurred.

http://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/news/20130115/
NASA Finds 2012 Sustained Long-Term Climate Warming Trend

Jan. 15, 2013

"NASA scientists say 2012 was the ninth warmest of any year since 1880,
continuing a long-term trend of rising global temperatures. With the
exception of 1988, the nine warmest years in the 132-year record all have
occurred since 2000, with 2010 and 2005 ranking as the hottest years on
record."
-----------------------------------------------

Introductory comments pasted in ...  Full summary at website below:

http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/719139main_2012_GISTEMP_summary.pdf

Global Temperature Update Through 2012
15 January 2013
J. Hansen, M. Sato, R. Ruedy

Summary. Global surface temperature in 2012 was +0.56°C (1°F) warmer than
the 1951-1980 base period average, despite much of the year being affected
by a strong La Nina. Global temperature thus continues at a high level that
is sufficient to cause a substantial increase in the frequency of extreme
warm anomalies. The 5-year mean global temperature has been flat for a
decade, which we interpret as a combination of natural variability and a
slowdown in the growth rate of the net climate forcing.

An update through 2012 of our global analysis1 (Fig. 1) reveals 2012 as
having practically the same temperature as 2011, significantly lower than
the maximum reached in 2010. These short-term global fluctuations are
associated principally with natural oscillations of tropical Pacific sea
surface temperatures summarized in the Nino index in the lower part of the
figure. 2012 is nominally the 9th warmest year, but it is indistinguishable
in rank with several other years, as shown by the error estimate for
comparing nearby years. Note that the 10 warmest years in the record all
occurred since 1998.

The long-term warming trend, including continual warming since the
mid-1970s, has been conclusively associated with the predominant global
climate forcing, human-made greenhouse gases2, which began to grow
substantially early in the 20th century. The approximate stand-still of
global temperature during 1940-1975 is generally attributed to an
approximate balance of aerosol cooling and greenhouse gas warming during a
period of rapid growth of fossil fuel use with little control on
particulate air pollution, but satisfactory quantitative interpretation has
been impossible because of the absence of adequate aerosol measurements3,4.

Below we discuss the contributions to temperature change in the past decade
from stochastic (unforced) climate variability and from climate forcings.
------------------------------------------
Vision2020 Post: Ted Moffett
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mailman.fsr.com/pipermail/vision2020/attachments/20130125/44487c53/attachment.html>