Posted on 02/15/2007 6:35:24 PM PST by NormsRevenge
WASHINGTON It may be cold comfort during a frigid February, but last month was by far the hottest January ever.
The broken record was fueled by a waning El Niño and a gradually warming world, according to U.S. scientists who reported the data Thursday. Records on the planet's temperature have been kept since 1880.
Spurred on by unusually warm Siberia, Canada, northern Asia and Europe, the world's land areas were 3.4 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than a normal January, according to the U.S. National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C. That didn't just nudge past the old record set in 2002, but broke that mark by 0.81 degrees, which meteorologists said is a lot, since such records often are broken by hundredths of a degree at a time.
That's pretty unusual for a record to be broken by that much, said the data center's scientific services chief, David Easterling. I was very surprised.
The scientists went beyond their normal doublechecking and took the unusual step of running computer climate models just to make sure that what we're seeing was real, Easterling said.
It was.
From one standpoint it is not unusual to have a new record because we've become accustomed to having records broken, said Jay Lawrimore, climate monitoring branch chief. But January, he said, was a bigger jump than the world has seen in about 10 years.
The temperature of the world's land and water combined the most effective measurement was 1.53 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than normal, breaking the old record by more than one-quarter of a degree. Ocean temperatures alone didn't set a record.
In the Northern Hemisphere, land areas were 4.1 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than normal for January, breaking the old record by about three-quarters of a degree.
But the United States was about normal. The nation was 0.94 degrees Fahrenheit above normal for January, ranking only the 49th warmest since 1895.
The world's temperature record was driven by northern latitudes. Siberia was on average 9 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than normal. Eastern Europe had temperatures averaging 8 degrees Fahrenheit above normal. Canada on average was more than 5 degrees warmer than normal.
Larger increases in temperature farther north, compared to mid-latitudes, is sort of the global warming signal, Easterling said. It is what climate scientists predict happens and will happen more frequently with global warming, according to an authoritative report by hundreds of climate scientists issued this month.
Meteorologists aren't blaming the warmer January on global warming alone, but they said the higher temperature was consistent with climate change.
Easterling said a weakening El Niño a warming of the central Pacific Ocean that tends to cause changes in weather across the globe was a factor, but not a big one. But Kevin Trenberth, director of climate analysis at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, said El Niño made big changes worldwide that added up.
Temperature records break regularly with global warming, Trenberth said, but with a little bit of El Niño thrown in, you don't just break records, you smash records.
As much of the United States already knows, February doesn't seem as unusually warm as January was.
Even with global warming, you're not going to keep that cold air bottled up in Alaska and Canada forever, Easterling said.
I saw that too. Still scratching my head to figure out what he meant...there could be some implications of less than stellar scientific work if it means he had to tweak the computer program to match the stats.
Our temperatures here in Virginia are 10 to 20 degrees below average this month. It will be 11 degrees here tonight. Ask me if I buy the global warming junk!
I would think one would have to keep in mind how active the sun is? More intensity, nence warmer water ... or volcanic activity on the sea floor causes it... ??
Good questions, too bad I'm a amateur "rocket scientist" and not an astroclimatologist. But I don't believe we could do it all by our lonesome or actually have as much influence as some say in a year. :-}
Froze our butts in January here in Arizona.
BULL! It's so cold here I don't have an a$$ anymore. It froze off!
I ACTUALLY heard a weatherman on TV mention that the record cold
(the number of days the cold stayed below 10 degrees every night broke a record that was set 21 years ago)
....that the cold was caused by global warming!!
Latest Weather Channel Headline: 02-15-07
METEOROLOGISTS DECLARE GORE'S GLOBAL FLATULENCE NOT WARM ENOUGH!
It's COLD AS SH*T here in Atlanta, you TREE-HUGGING LEFT-WING GOOFBALLS (not you Norm).
That's what I remember, too. The hot weather triggered rumors about a link between unusually hot weather in off seasons and earthquakes.
So following this logic, obviously February is showing us the "dangers" of global cooling.
I heard on the news that some country had the first snow they have seen in over 60 years. Darn! I can't remember where they said it was though.
We're running about 7 degrees below average up here for the month. I'd be surprised if the wind chill got much above 0 today. 37 degrees the other day felt good.
" It will be a very active hurricane season..."
Seem to recall Algore saying the same last year. Hmmmm......
Yesterday's record high was 72 in 1967. Yesterday's actual high - +7 degrees.
How do they come up with this crap? People are literally dying from the cold, and they have the nerve to offer up this fecum.
How can it be the coldest January ever if they've only been keeping records since 1880?
Ever is a very long time.
You read that right; you can't trust the thermometer; you know how they lie; let a computer model tell you what you want to hear.
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