1. How Earth’s temperature is reflected on smaller geographic scales Gordon J. Aubrecht, II SOS-AAPT, Saturday 9 March 2013

3. But what about the “pause” in the rise in T over the past decade?

5. An important paper was published yesterday in Science.

7. Fig. 1. Comparison of different methods and reconstructions of global and hemispheric temperature anomalies. (A and B) Globally stacked temperature anomalies for the 5° x 5° area-weighted mean calculation (purple line) with its 1s uncertainty (blue band) and Mann et al.’s global CRUEIV composite mean temperature (dark gray line) with their uncertainty (light gray band). (C and D) Global temperature anomalies stacked using several methods (Standard and Standard 5° x 5° Grid; 30° x 30° Grid; 10-lat: Arithmetic mean calculation, area-weighted with a 5° x 5° grid, area-weighted with a 30° x 30° grid, and area-weighted using 10° latitude bins, respectively; RegEM and RegEM 5° x 5° Grid: Regularized expectation maximization algorithm in filled arithmetic mean and 5° x 5° area-weighted). The gray shading [50% Jackknife (Jack50)] represents the 1 envelope when randomly leaving 50% of the records out during each Monte Carlo mean calculation. Uncertainties shown are 1s for each of the methods.

8. Compare to Büntgen et al. (2011) T for Europe: 2,500 years
Ulf Büntgen, Willy Tegel, Kurt Nicolussi, Michael McCormick, David Frank, Valerie Trouet,, Jed O. Kaplan, Franz Herzig, Karl-Uwe Heussner, Heinz Wanner, Jürg Luterbacher, and Jan Esper, “2500 years of European climate variability and human susceptibility,” Science 331, 578 (2011).

9. Perhaps you’ve seen articles about the ice-free Arctic this week … and heard that 97% of the GIS surface melted in July …

10. The “27% rule” says that we use the high 27% and low 27% to distinguish the top from the bottom student exam scores (or of any set of data). This paper says 21%. Note the quote: “Use of 27%, however, is not far from optimal.” (The rule statistics actually say that the range should be 14% to 27%.)

11. Using the 27% rule …

12. Monthly anomalies, 27% rule.

13. Decadal monthly anomalies, 27% rule
Decadal monthly anomalies, 27% rule. NOAA & GISS (27% of 133 years → 36 years); HadCRUT4 (27% of 163 years → 44 years).
NOAA, upper left; GISS, upper right; HadCRUT4, lower

14. The three global databases’ decadal anomalies

15. Top 10 warmest years. NOAA. GISS. HadCRUT4. US. Ohio. 1. 2010. 2010
Top 10 warmest years NOAA GISS HadCRUT4 US Ohio NOAA GISS HadCRU US Ohio this decade 80% 80% 80% 40% 20% preceding decade 20% 20% 20% 30% 20% percent of world area 100% 100% 100% 1.89% 0.02% percent of US area %

16. Conclusions: The three global databases agree well with one another (now). The warming signal is inescapable. It is bigger than any other excursion over the past 2500 years.

17. US temperature history
1.93% of Earth’s area

18. US decadal temperature history

19. Where daily record highs were broken or tied in March 2012.

20. Australia
1.51% of Earth’s area

21. Australia decadal

26. Germany
0.07% of Earth’s area

27. Germany decadal

28. Ohio
0.23% of Earth’s area

29. Ohio decadal

30. English Midlands
0.0056% of Earth’s area

31. English Midlands,

32. English Midlands, decadal

33. Comparisons

34. Areas relative to Earth: US. 1. 9269% Australia. 1. 5082% Germany
Areas relative to Earth: US % Australia % Germany % Ohio % English Midlands %

35. Conclusions: There is greater variation in smaller areas of Earth—the smaller the area, the greater the variation. This is the case until about the 1980s. Since 1980, these smaller areas are exhibiting warming similar to one another and to Earth as a whole.