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Thursday, January 21, 2016

Watching the global thermometer - year to date GISTemp with a scorching hot December 2015

Sou | 4:37 AM Go to the first of 15 comments. Add a comment
Every month since March, I've posted a chart of the progressive year-to-date global average surface temperature, from GISS. This is the update with December included, so it's the final for the 2015 year. The explanation has been included with each update together with what seem to be things to watch. The next article will be in April (to March) or May.

The main article for the 2015 year can be found here.

Worth noting: Hottest December on Record by 0.34 °C

  • 2015 is by far the hottest year on record - see my previous article.
  • The year to date average up to and including December is 0.87 °C above the 1951-1980 mean.
  • December was an average of 1.12 °C above the 1951-1980 mean and is the hottest December on record, beating the previous hottest by a whopping 0.34 °C. The next hottest was December 2014 (0.78 °C).
  • June, October, November and December this year were the hottest on record for the respective months.
  • The highest anomaly this year is December at 1.12 °C, October was next at 1.06 °C, followed closely by November at 1.05 °C.
  • The lowest anomalies this year so far were April at 0.73 °C, and July also 0.73 °C above the 1951-1980 mean.
  • Gavin Schmidt and Tom Karl said that this year would have been the hottest even without the El Nino.
  • You can read more about the 2015 year on this other article.




Explaining the chart


The chart is a progressive year to date average, or running mean, for all years from 1995 to the present. What that means is for January each year, it just shows the anomaly for January. For February it shows the average of January and February for each year. For March, its the average of the monthly anomaly from January to March.

If you look at December, each year shows the annual average temperature for the full year. For November, each year has the average for the year up to November, not including December. (As before, I've made it extra large because of all the fine detail.)

Data Source: NASA GISS - GHCN-v3 1880-09/2015 + SST: ERSST v4 1880-09/2015

Related updates

15 comments:

  1. WUWT totally silent on the subject. Instead something by Worrall about the Davos shindig.

    What a contrast with the furore about 2014 being "probably not" the warmest year ever.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. It's not the first time Anthony Watts has tried to twist what someone says. It's one of his favourite pastimes.

      Shame he doesn't know the meaning of the word "belie". (Anthony has a tiny vocabulary, and misuses words he's heard somewhere but of which he doesn't understand the meaning.)

      Delete
    2. 'Belie' indeed! Good grief! Certain personality types really do like to toss around 'clever' words they don't actually understand, don't they?

      And what a transparently petty, manipulative misinterpretation of Freedman's original tweet! No-one who wasn't so motivated misunderstood it.

      The bloody-minded campaign to always cast science exponents/proponents in the most dismal possible light reminds me of Whitlam's observation that if he walked across Lake Burley-Griffin Murdoch's headlines would loudly proclaim 'Gough Fails to Swim!'.

      Delete
  2. Sou, not to steal your thunder/rain on your party (just has to be a weather-related idiom, doesn't it? :-) ... but I think you might have got a few figures wrong. FTA:

    * The year to date average up to and including December is 1.12 °C above the 1951-1980 mean.

    * December was an average of 1.21 °C above the 1951-1980 mean and is the hottest December on record, beating the previous hottest by a whopping 0.34 °C. The next hottest was December 2014 (0.78 °C).


    I think you'll find those numbers are actually 0.87 °C (not 1.12 °C, for January through December) and 1.12 °C (not 1.21 °C, for the month of December only)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thanks, MM, fixed. (I was working off another baseline for the previous article, and picked the number from the wrong worksheet. My bad.)

      Delete
    2. Living in Australia (Vic) Sou would have been up all night crunching numbers and preparing graphs.

      Delete
  3. Replies
    1. And and ... it actually cooled from March 2015 to September 2015 until the UHI kicked in again!

      Delete
    2. And and ... it actually cooled from March 2015 to September 2015 until the UHI kicked in again!

      Delete
  4. Sou, you're not doing your mental state any good by your obsession with global warming. You need to consult a psychiatrist this unhealthy obsession before your health suffers too much.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Aaw, I dunno, Harry. It's kind of sweet to have a complete stranger so concerned for my mental well-being. I wonder does he care as much about the mental health of climate conspiracy theorists at WUWT, or have I earned a special fond place in his heart?

      He cares about HotWhopper readers too, not just me.

      Delete
  5. I think we are reaching the denier endgame

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. When the lobbyist funding runs dry, maybe.

      While there is money in climate change denialism, it will keep going.

      Delete

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