Wood Romances

Most of the GMST temperature data is in for 2024, and as most predicted, it was the warmest year on record, though perhaps by a larger margin than expected. El Niño conditions developed in 2023, and typically the following year becomes the warmest year on record. When large El Niños developed in 1997 and 2015, it was the following year that became record years, and this pattern continued again.  Above, here's how 2024 looks in several major datasets. I put the 2-sigma uncertainties for HadCRUT5 in dotted lines. This graph is set to the 1951-1980 mean (left scale), and this allows you to see that most of the variability between the datasets occurs in the late 19th century. The right scale is offset to show the warming above the 1850-1900 baseline for HadCRUT5 with the 1.5°C target as a dotted horizontal line. Below I set the same data to the 1850-1900 baseline and plotted centered 30-year means from HadCRUT5; this has the effect of better showing warming for each dataset above ...

I keep a spreadsheet of the major Global Mean Surface Temperature (GMST) datasets. The numbers for December 2021 and the year of 2021. So I plotted the data from NASA, NOAA, JMA, Berkeley Earth (BEST), and HadCRUT5. The year ended up basically in a statistical tie with 2018 as the 6th warmest year on record and both 2018 and 2021 are the warmest La Nina years on record. It's amazing to me how much agreement there is between these datasets. To illustrate, I calculated the average of all of the above and plotted the average with the 95% confidence intervals from the HadCRUT5 dataset. The average seems to consistently fall within the 95% confidence interval for HadCRUT5. I also decided to do a little calculation to update the when we can expect to hit 1.5 C if we continue at the same pace. To estimate this I used basically the same method used in the IPCC 1.5 C report. I took the HadCRUT5 dataset and calculated 30 year trends (centered) through 2005. Then I took the 30 year trend (0.2...