Global temperatures continued to slide in May 2008. Meteorologist Anthony Watts details the cooling temperatures in a report titled “Global Temperature Dives in May.” The new global temperature data reveals a whopping three quarters of a degree Celsius drop in temperatures since January 2007.
Watts reported late yesterday that the cooling is “equal in magnitude to the generally agreed upon ‘global warming signal’ of the last 100 years.”
“Confirming what many of us have already noted from the anecdotal evidence coming in of a much cooler than normal May, such as late spring snows as far south as Arizona, extended skiing in Colorado, and delays in snow cover melting in many parts of the northern hemisphere, the University of Alabama, Huntsville (UAH), published their satellite-derived Advanced Microwave Sounder Unit data set of the Lower Troposphere for May 2008,” Watts reported on June 3.
“It is significantly colder globally, colder even than the significant drop to -0.046°C seen in January 2008,” Watts explained. The updated global temperature chart is
here)
“But even more impressive is the change since the last big peak in global temperature in January 2007 at 0.594°C, giving a 16 month change in temperature of -0.774°C which is equal in magnitude to the generally agreed upon ‘global warming signal’ of the last 100 years,” he added.
Climatologist Dr. Roy Spencer, formerly of NASA and currently principal research scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, commented on the new data. “If you exclude the anomalous 1992 cooling from the Pinatubo volcano eruption, it’s the coolest May in 20 years,” Spencer said.
Physicist Dr. Lubos Motl, formerly of Harvard University, also reacted to the new temperature data. “The global anomaly was -0.17 °C, the coldest reading after January 2000 and the third coldest monthly figure after September 1993. Yes, I mean that anomaly-wise, May was even colder than all the cool months of 2008, despite the dramatically weakening La Nina that now seems likely to change to ENSO neutral conditions this month. For example, the month-on-month cooling from April 2008 was by 0.19 °C while May 2008 was more than 0.75 °C cooler than January 2007. The average anomaly for the first five months of 2008 is negative. 1994 was the last year whose average annual anomaly was negative,” Motl wrote on June 4. (
LINK)
“The Sun has been spotless at least for 9 days. The standardized May sunspot number was 2.9, equal to April, and the solar flux was even slightly lower than in April, namely 68.4,” Motle wrote.
