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.
We had a cold January here as well, same here on our PG&E bill, mostly gas isage increased big time... and December was definitely cold as well..
Some of the things meteorologists are credited with saying make me want to hang my head in shame.
Ay caramba! ;-}
Oh no! You're not a meteorologist are ya MM?
ROFL!
There's a well-known programming term for that -- GIGO.
Garbage In; Garbage Out.
Click the links.
Whatever would give you that idea (besides my screen name)?
Yah, think, maybe???
Hmmm, what goes up ...,
.
heard AlGore is having another of them global "warming" meets of his in July ;O/
I stopped reading here...garbage in, garbage out.
What El Nino?
El niño...he very bad meester.
Are they?
We're freezin' our arses off here in SE Michigan.
Gee, I wonder what set the record 21 years ago? Global cooling? And how about the record before that? And before that? And what's so special about 10 degrees? Why is that the set point? Why not 11 degrees?
"Records" are a funny thing. There are some obvious ones, like a record high or low temperature, but they're all relative to how long you've been measuring the record. For instance, I go to the city league baseball games in summer. Last season, one player hit two homeruns in a single game. If that was the only game I saw all summer then I would think that two homers was average for that player. But since I went to the games all summer, I know that two homers/game is above average for that player, but I don't know what his homerun record is for previous years. Perhaps he used to hit 5 homeruns/game and 2 homeruns/game is below average.
My point is that weather has been happening for millions of yeats. We really don't know where the "average" is, and we certainly don't what a record is.
Sorry, I should proof read my posts better. My point is why don't we believe scientists? I mean evolution and global warming are what 90-95% of scientists agree on. Why do we not? Because we are Christian? Are all of these educated people actually duped or are they part of some conspiracy? I am struggling with this. Can't I believe in Religion and Science, Faith and Reason?
see my last post
forget about it. this is why i left the republican party. we can't have a logical discussion. are we all hacks? my goodness. let's grow up. i just might become a democrat to protest. i am at wits end.
30 years ago we didn't know what dna was. 30 years ago we didn't wear seatbelts. 30 years ago we didn't have computers. 30 years ago we didn't treat cancer. 30 years ago jimmy carter was president for pete's sake. are you really going to compare one article in a magazine to all the study that has gone on in the last 30 years? is it a big conspiracy? i hope so, but.......
Explain the 72 hours we had of temps below 0F and the high of -3. Not to mention of 9 feet of snow in upstate newyork
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