Hot globe was a very cold year at the South Pole, very average year in Australia

I call it Met Bureau Bingo. Ultimately there are so many hair-splitting quixotic variants of weather stats that a dedicated team can always find a record. Here are some other trends that didn’t make the media.

We all heard about the record heat in the Arctic, but we didn’t hear about the unusual cold in Antarctica where running twelve month averages are equal to the lowest recorded since satellites began in 1979.

So carbon dioxide causes a hot Arctic and a cold Antarctic, and both at the same time.* Where’s the global warming?

Ken Stewart looked at the UAH 6.0 version of all the major regions. The graph below is a 12 month running average of the Southern Polar area. The last low “dotpoint” covers the whole last year to March. Pretty cold.

There’s a bit more error with satellites at the poles, so I won’t crack the second decimal and declare it a “record”. Maybe it was. Maybe it wasn’t. Maybe records are irrelevant worthless distractions. What’s 40 years out of 4 billion? Nitpicking.

Reader Phill suggests that the cold at the pole may be connect to the El Nino, see his interesting thoughts below. Scott of the Antarctic died in an El Nino year, caught in the coldest March. Curious.

Hot March in Australia, not hot year

We heard about how warm autumn nights made the hottest March in Australia, but we didn’t hear about the most ordinary year that the last 12 months was. Slightly cooler than average, if you care, but who would?

We’ve had 21 years of no warming downunder. We have to stop that. So fire up the windmills and put another $Billion on the barbie.

Some Pauses have stopped some have not, but it really doesn’t matter

Ken Stewart looks at the UAH 6.0 version (the beta updated version on trial) and finds that The Pause is still 18 years and 10 months, in the 12 month running averages (but not the graphs of monthly data where the Pause has stopped) — the “Pause” may disappear any month — and reappear any month after that. Jennifer Marohasy looks at the data and calls the Pause over, see Regional Variability in Global Temperatures.



I look at a messy squiggle-graph and say we won’t know for years til the El Nino washes out and the La-Nina-whatever washes in out and in. And it doesn’t matter. The Pause was long enough already to show the models are busted. Nothing that happens in 2016 can change that. From one monster El Nino spike to the next lies one inconsequential third of all human emissions of CO2.

Jennifer Marohasy has an interesting graph showing just how accurate the UAH set is compared with one station in Australia. See Chart 2 UAH compared to Richmond. Nice. The UAH data for Australia is a pretty good fit for one thermometer in Richmond which is a bit wierd. I’d like to know about other stations too…

Should we panic about one hot month, or look at the trends?

El Nino’s and cold South Polar zones. From Reader Phill:

Meteorologist Susan Solomon wrote a book the “The Coldest March” about the Scott’s death in the Antarctic in 1912. “March” referred to both Scott’s march back from the Pole and the month March 1912. (1911/12 was an El Nino year). Scott’s second in command was the meteorologist George Simpson, who went on to work with Indian Meteorological Services and to become the longest serving Director of the Meteorological Office in London. Simpson observed that there were strong correlations between pressure anomalies in Australia, both in the south and particularly the north, and in Antarctica. He argued that Scott had been hampered by exceptionally cold weather that was related to these pressure oscillations and that 9 years out of 10 he would not have had the extreme cold that he met. Susan Solomon searched the modern data and found only one year that matched Scott’s temperature data and that was the El Nino year 1988. So just perhaps another cold March way down south is all simply part of the package.

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* Hot and cold simultaneous poles? It’s a kind of quantum antientanglement where CO2 molecules made from the same car go to opposite poles and produce opposite effects. Someone give me a grant…

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