Their excellent climate summary is here: State of the Climate | Global Analysis | Annual 2009 As noted in the earlier post on the NASA GISS global estimate, the temperature differences among the top-ranked years are small and not statistically significant. (There's no statistically significant disagreement between the NOAA estimate and the GISS estimate). In case it's not clear from reading the report, the main contributor to the high ranking was warm sea surface temperatures. NOAA provides a nice comparison of surface and satellite data, with links to explanations of the adjustments needed to remove the effects of stratospheric cooling from the data. They then present unadjuste and adjusted mid-trophospheric data, compared to the surface temperature record. Although the long-term pattern of lower to higher temperatures is apparent in the satellite data, there's clearly more variance. For example, if the UAH satellite data are taken at face value, the temperature anomaly in 2008 was more than twice as large as any other measured temperature anomaly over the period, and 1979 was so cold it is off the chart. Since global average surface temperature anomalies don't actually show such extreme behavior, there is clearly some degree of disconnect between the satellite-based inference of mean temperatures in a roughly eight-mile-high stack of air, and the thermometer-based surface temperature series. That said, they appear to show roughly similar patterns if not identical magnitudes. All together, it's a nice summary of climate trends through 2009.
Wow Chogan that's fascinating. Are you telling me that after we came out of a Little Ice Age and experienced a general warming trend for 150 years, which seemed to peak in 1998 due to an incredibly strong El Nino that we are still having "record high" (last 150 years or so) years? Wow, that's fascinating.
Weather (lol) or not we call any given year the 5th warmest or the second warmest or the 9th warmest is really an academic exercise. It is sort of like, asking Socrates if he would like ice with his hemlockade. Or dining at the captains table on the Titanic, neither action could change the eventual outcome. In spite of what some folks would like to think, the trend lines are clear to anyone with any common sense. What humans are putting and have put into the air are having and are going to have a significant effect on climate going forward. The only argument(s) that has any merit is how much, how fast and what if anything we can or are willing to do about it.
Do you realize that the slope of your trend is dominated by the "cool" 2008, right? If we happened to pick the 8-9 years ending with 1998, we'd see a trend of 0.3C/decade, or double that the actual trend is. Or if we look at your trend, it slopes slightly down appx 0.05C/decade - dominated by the "cool" 2008. It's not statistically significant. Edit: I only say "cool" 2008" because 2008 is about the 10th warmest year on record in the past 130.
Naw, let's throw out the hot year in 2002 instead. It will have the same effect. You completely missed my point - there will be bumps and valleys in the temperature due to various events. Temperature does not rise or fall in a straight line! It still doesn't change the fact that 9 out of 10 of the warmest years on record happened in the 21st century, and 11 out of the last 12 years are also at the top of the list.
