NOAA data for February shows cold European winter, warming world
The US government research centre the National Atmospheric and Atmospheric Association provide a monthly assessment of surface temperatures around the world. It’s a useful resource – although pretty detailed, it gives a picture both of what temperatures are doing around the world, and how they’re changing over time.
The overall conclusion for the month was:
The combined global land and ocean average surface temperature for February 2011 was 0.40°C (0.72°F) above the 20th century average of 12.1°C (53.9°F). This ties for the 17th warmest such value on record.
As part of the report, NOAA have graphed February temperatures over the past 130 years. The weight of where above-average years are falling is pretty obvious.
They’ve also produced geographical maps of temperature over the past winter, which show pretty clearly the cold weather we’ve had in Europe.
This short term temperature mapping is interesting is only a small part of the bigger climate picture. Temperature rise rightly gets a lot of attention – it’s one of the primary things that people focus on to try and determine how the planet is changing.
But it’s worth remebering that it’s not the only sign that the world is warming – as described by scientist Andy Dessler in this video which is worth a watch:
if [temperature rise] was the only thing we had, there are lots of ways these data could go bad. What scientists do is we look for coherence, find lots of data that are independent but tell you exactly the same thing… if you ask why scienitsts are so confident the earth is warming, it’s because we have lots of data.