It was the hottest March in both satellite records (UAH and RSS), and tied for the hottest March on record in the NASA dataset. It was the hottest (or tied for hottest) January through March in all three records.
The record temperatures we’re seeing now are especially impressive because we’ve been in “the deepest solar minimum in nearly a century.” It now appears to be over. It’s just hard to stop the march of anthropogenic global warming, well, other than by reducing greenhouse gas emissions, that is.
NASA’s prediction from last month is standing up: “It is nearly certain that a new record 12-month global temperature will be set in 2010.”³ Actually, NASA made that prediction back in January 2009:
Given our expectation of the next El Ni±o beginning in 2009 or 2010, it still seems likely that a new global temperature record will be set within the next 1–2 years, despite the moderate negative effect of the reduced solar irradiance.”
Of course, there never was any global cooling “” see Must-read AP story: Statisticians reject global cooling; Caldeira “” “To talk about global cooling at the end of the hottest decade the planet has experienced in many thousands of years is ridiculous.” Indeed, the overwhelming majority of the warming went right where scientists had predicted “” into the oceans (see “How we know global warming is happening”):
Figure: “Total Earth Heat Content [anomaly] from 1950 (Murphy et al. 2009). Ocean data taken from Domingues et al 2008.”
Yes, some people are unable to actually click on links, so let’s review another JGR article, “Global hydrographic variability patterns during 2003–2008” (subs. req’d, draft here) details an analysis of “monthly gridded global temperature and salinity fields from the near-surface layer down to 2000 m depth based on Argo measurements.” Background on Argo here. Their findings are summed up in this figure:
Figure [2]: Time series of global mean heat storage (0–2000 m), measured in 108 Jm-2.
Still warming, after all these years! And just where you’d expect it. The study makes clear that upper ocean heat content, perhaps not surprisingly, is simply far more variable than deeper ocean heat content, and thus an imperfect indicator of the long-term warming trend.
NASA’s draft paper reported: “We conclude that global temperature continued to rise rapidly in the past decade” and “that there has been no reduction in the global warming trend of 0.15–0.20°C/decade that began in the late 1970s.”
NOAA points out that both satellite data sets show about the same amount of warming as the land-based record, “which increased at a rate near 0.16°C/decade (0.29°F/decade) during the same 30-year period” “” once you remove the expected stratospheric cooling from the satellite records (see NOAA discussion here).
After the endless disinformation-based global cooling stories of the past few years, it’s time for the media to start do some serious fact-based global warming stories.The top figure is from Roy Spencer’s blog.
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