2009 Hottest Year on Record in Southern Hemisphere

[Kernos]

http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/co ... 113/2?etoc

By Eli Kintisch
ScienceNOW Daily News
13 January 2010

The United States may be experiencing one of the coldest winters in decades, but things continue to heat up in the Southern Hemisphere. Science has obtained exclusive data from NASA that indicates that 2009 was the hottest year on record south of the Equator. The find adds to multiple lines of evidence showing that the 2000s were the warmest decade in the modern instrumental record.

Southern Hemisphere temperatures can serve as a trailing indicator of global warming, says NASA mathematician Reto Ruedy of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York City, given that that part of the globe is mostly water, which warms more slowly and with less variability than land. Ruedy says 2009 temperatures in the Southern Hemisphere were 0.49°C warmer than the period between 1951 and 1980, with an error of +/- 0.05°C.

That makes 2009 the warmest year on record in that hemisphere. That's significant because the second-warmest year, 1998, saw the most severe recorded instance in the 20th century of El Niño, a cyclic warming event in the tropical Pacific. During El Niño events, heat is redistributed from deep water to the surface, which raises ocean temperatures and has widespread climatic effects. But last year was an El Niño year of medium strength, which Ruedy says might mean that the warmer temperatures also show global, long-term warming as well as the regional trend.

The data come a month after announcements by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and by the World Meterological Organization that the decade of the 2000s was warmer than the 1990s. (NOAA estimates that the decade was 0.54°C warmer than the 20th century average. The 1990s, by comparison, was 0.36°C warmer by their measure.)

Meanwhile, NOAA is expected to announce possible record highs in the tropics when it releases its final report on 2009 temperatures on Friday. "This is one of the coldest winters we've experienced in a while up here in the northern latitudes," says Derek Arndt of NOAA's National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, North Carolina. "But we're piling up a lot of heat in the tropics."

[Merlyn]

With the flooding of the NE US in the "ocean state" we don't see our promise of change being real.
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2010/03 ... ing-plans/
Rather we see Obama working like Sara Palin!

[Ladywytch]

Take my word for it, after living through summer here in Australia, it was the worst in my memory.
And now as we are starting to dip our toes into Autumn, we see the signs of an extremely cold winter coming.
Queensland's Tourism motto is 'Beautiful One Day: Perfect The Next'.
I think we may have to come up with something else and soon because the days of a moderate climate have passed.
I am preparing for a very chilly winter and a summer next to equal or surpass last in heat, humidy and downright misery.

M

[Merlyn]

The climate change issue faces many aspects.
The mild, less aggressive climate we have had in the states, coupled with the imaginary prediction of warmer and warmer winters left our entire country unprepared for the natural climate change the earth does. We have returned to the cold cycle.

In essence, when CO2 level becomes high, precipitation is the result. This is how the earth cooled as the blanket of CO2 created storms and rain for millions of years.
This natural cycles cools the earth, as it is the normal result. So quite possibly, we may well have triggered a cooling cycle, and also possibly started down the road to an ice age.

This would really be a disaster, considering the lack of fossil fuel we will soon have if we don't stop wasting it commuting to work, and such.
I agree, the natural signs point to coming cooling, not warming. And this is the result of a tipping point of too much CO2 in the atmosphere.

I hate to tell the scientists that the answer is in the trees, live ones, that is, not dead ones.
But as far as I can tell, the warming is going to trigger a cooling which may last a very long time.

Prepare, and the worst that can happen is you don't need what you save for a long winter.
In light,

[Aurora]

I have to agree with Ladywytch, the summer here was just nasty, hot humid and with very little rain, and you can definitley feel the cold coming already.

hopefully we will wake up as a species to the problems we a creating before we end up in an ice age

[Merlyn]

We well may see extremes, not just in climate,
Change in the earth is inclusive of many forms.

Redistribution of climate is a very likely future as so many things happen. The recent occurrence of earth quakes can also trigger climate change.
We see them obviously change our landscape, however they also affect the ocean floor and can be a warning of volcanic eruptions, possibly to come.

How the ocean currents affect climate is an entire study of itself, redistributing thermal currents across the globe. We do have to expect this kind of change will happen, as it has happened before, however these changes will most likely not be what was, and with the complexity of climate, earth and ocean changes, solar and human emissions and so on, we cannot expect the past to predict our future.

This is the trouble with a hot year or a cold winter, in essence averaging out change. To say on average, a 5 degree change colder can mean an ice age, is a reality.
Several things can trigger this. To have a 3 degree warmer change will indeed trigger precipitation and redistribution of water across the globe.

About the only thing we can say is going to happen, is the climate will change.
How where and when obviously isn't something we can predict any more than this record cold winter we just had.
None of the computer model climate change predictions had this correct, however.... the farmer's Almanac did, the trees predicted it, and the cycles of 20 and 30 years were due.