Tim Ball does a Denier Don on the top of a very cold ice sheet in Greenland

Globally, what were the coldest 300 years since civilisation? In the past 10,000 years? What were the warmest and what were the coldest and how do they compare to the 21st century. It's an interesting question and one to which there doesn't seem to be a definitive answer. The best answer looks to be the coldest 300 years in the Little Ice Age.

There have not been a lot of attempts to reconstruct global surface temperatures of the entire Holocene. It's tricky. One of the hardest things is getting an indication of what has happened in the southern hemisphere. There's not much land down here compared to the northern hemisphere and the seas are deep. Still, intrepid scientists have been putting the pieces of the puzzle together.

The PAGES 2k Consortium has been working out past temperatures in different parts of the world, and reporting other aspects of past climates. It's an ongoing project.

Marcott13 was a reconstruction that caught the eye of the denialati. I don't know what it was that they didn't like about it but I think it still holds the record for the greatest number of protest articles from deniers in the shortest amount of time. Probably the fact that it showed how warm it's starting to get these days, compared to the past, didn't endear the work to the denialati.

Deniers have lost it - utterly, completely - it's the heat!

Deniers have all gone completely nuts. It must be the heat.

2014 is the hottest year - and deniers protest

Since NASA and NOAA declared 2014 as the hottest year on record, there have now been six protest articles at WUWT. The latest is archived here.

David Rose at the Daily Mail kicked the deniers into stupidsville. He got his numbers up the spout and decided it was all too uncertain. He confuses deniers by writing that observations  are "subject to a margin of error". Well, duh. Of course they are. How does he know that? Well guess what - the scientists told him so. Yep, those very same scientists who told him how hot last year was. By using the trigger word "admit", David tries to kid his readers that the numbers are somehow wrong. Deniers are dumb when it comes to climate. Their brains stop working. And David Rose knows they are dumb enough to fall for word play. (Anthony Watts knows his WUWT readers are dumb. It's dumb deniers who are Anthony Watts' target market. He uses the same cheap journalist trick on them in his "claim" headlines. It works with his target audience, but that's all it works with.)

Bob Tisdale is confused, miffed and bewildered by record hot seas at WUWT

Update - see below - plus there's also an addendum with a map showing all the places which broke new heat records in 2014.


The record heat is causing much confusion at WUWT. Bob Tisdale in the comments invited me to write an article about his latest protest at the record hot 2014 (archived here). Well, not exactly invited, what he suggested was that rooter come here to make his points about Bob Tisdales article - twice - here and here. (Both times he finished in passive-aggressive fashion in the style of Willis Eschenbach, writing through gritted teeth "have a good day" after calling rooter a "troll".

Heat-addled brains and a competition: Judith Curry vs Phil Plait

It shouldn't surprise anyone. It happens every time there's a hottest year on record. Deniers go barmy. Crazy, Round the twist. Barking mad. The heat addles their brains.

One person that may surprise, though, is Judith Curry. It won't be news to you that she's been behaving more and more like a science disinformer/denier. You know that already. No what is surprising is just how far into denial she's sunk and how far she's moved away from science of late.

Confirmed - 2014 was the hottest year on record

NOAA and NASA have jointly confirmed 2014 as the hottest year on record. Here is the chart of GISTemp, including the latest data for December 2014:

December came in at 0.72°C, the second hottest December on record. 2006 (0.74°C), was the hottest. The previous second warmest was 2003 (which was 0.71C).  (Corrected from earlier version h/t Jim Milks). The previous hottest calendar years were 2005 at 0.65°C and 2010 at 0.66°C above the 1951-2010 mean. This year was 0.68°C above that mean, despite there being no (official) El Nino.

Andrew Freedman reported that "There is less than a 1-in-27 million chance that Earth's record hot streak is natural". Nature News has a report about the hottest year, as does Justin Gillis of the New York Times, and Chris Mooney at the Washington Post. While the Union of Concerned Scientists pinched my line about how 65% of people living today have never ever experienced a year where the global average temperature is less than the twentieth century average.

Here's a video from NASA showing how Earth has warmed since 1880 :

You can read the NOAA global report here. Some highlights:

• During 2014, the average temperature across global land and ocean surfaces was 1.24°F (0.69°C) above the 20th century average. This was the highest among all 135 years in the 1880–2014 record, surpassing the previous records of 2005 and 2010 by 0.07°F (0.04°C).
• Record warmth was spread around the world, including Far East Russia into western Alaska, the western United States, parts of interior South America, most of Europe stretching into northern Africa, parts of eastern and western coastal Australia, much of the northeastern Pacific around the Gulf of Alaska, the central to western equatorial Pacific, large swaths of northwestern and southeastern Atlantic, most of the Norwegian Sea, and parts of the central to southern Indian Ocean.
• During 2014, the globally-averaged land surface temperature was 1.80°F (1.00°C) above the 20th century average. This was the fourth highest among all years in the 1880–2014 record.
• During 2014, the globally-averaged sea surface temperature was 1.03°F (0.57°C) above the 20th century average. This was the highest among all years in the 1880–2014 record, surpassing the previous records of 1998 and 2003 by 0.09°F (0.05°C).

If you're wondering how WUWT will handle the news, well Bob Tisdale promised an article showing how it was nothing but sunlight-fueled oceans that caused the warming, or because the oceans were hotter, or some nonsense like that. He can't or won't explain why or how this can happen when the sun isn't putting out any more energy than before. His main concern is to try to persuade anyone who'll still read his tripe that it's got nothing to do with CO2 or the greenhouse effect. His article hasn't appeared yet, but that will be the gist of it, though I expect he'll say it in many more words.

The Angry Year: Australia's hottest 12 months on record

Australia's had its Angry Summer made worse by humans, now it's just had its hottest 12 months from spring to winter on record.  From The Age:

Australia has just experienced its warmest 12 months since climate records began.

Data monitoring by the Bureau of Meteorology shows the average temperature throughout Australia in the year to August 31 was 1.11 degrees above the long-term average. (Note from Sou - that's the 1961-1990 average, which is warmer than preceding periods)

The nation's fourth-warmest spring on record morphed into the hottest summer on record. And now the seventh-warmest autumn has been followed by the third-warmest winter Australians have ever experienced.

In Victoria, it was the warmest winter on record, just pipping the winter of 2005.

In New South Wales, it was the second warmest, eclipsed only by the winter of 2009.

And across the nation, winter was 1.29 degrees warmer than the long-term average – defined as the years from 1961 to 1990 (which were themselves warmer than the first half of their century).

Read the rest here in The Age.

And the dreadful thing is that we could be electing a government that is pretty well intent on making the climate worse, with a potential PM who doesn't care about climate change or global warming and has even said it's "crap".  What to do?  Let's just hope the Senate doesn't cave.