Wood Romances

Berkeley Earth just released a new version of the GMST dataset, and it has 4 times the spatial resolution of the previous version of the data set at 0.25° x 0.25° (that's about 30 km at the equator). Visually, the difference is pretty striking when viewing temperature anomalies as a map. Here, for instance are 2022 global temperatures relative to a 1981-2010 mean. The time series has also slightly different from the previous version. Comparing the new high resolution dataset to the previous version, global temperatures in the base period appear to be slightly higher, lowering the amount of current warming above the 1980-1900 mean slightly. However, current warming rates appear to be slightly higher, at about 0.22 °C /decade instead of 0.21 °C /decade for the last 30 years. Here's how 30-year trends have changed across the dataset. To illustrate this, in a recent post , I calculated the warming above the 1850-1900 mean in the three datasets that go back to 1850, and the current ...

Recently NOAA released v. 5.1 of their global GMST dataset and, aside from adding full global coverage, it extended the dataset back to 1850. This gives us a third GMST dataset that goes back to 1850. Since the IPCC uses the 1850-1900 mean as a baseline to represent "preindustrial" temperatures, this gives us three datasets to use to calculate the amount of warming we've experienced above preindustrial levels. The IPCC has set a target of +1.5°C above preindustrial temperatures, where +1.5°C is a 30-year average above the 1850-1900 mean. The IPCC estimates that 2011-2020 averaged +1.1°C above preindustrial levels. But the question I have is, where are we now, and when will we cross the +1.5°C and +2.0°C targets if we continue warming at current rates? To answer this question, I took the data I've already downloaded from NOAA (monthly), HadCRUT5 (monthly) and Berkeley Earth (annual). The NOAA dataset is current through January 2023 and the other two are current through...