Global Temperatures Keep Falling

According to the latest UAH satellite measurements, global average lower tropospheric temperature has dropped to levels that has made September the coolest in 10 years.

In fact, global temperatures are now below they were three years ago, i.e. before a very strong El Nino temporarily drove up global temperatures by 0.6 deg C at their peak in February 2016. Since then, they have dropped by even more (0.7 deg C) and nobody knows whether they may decline any further.

The ongoing downturn illustrates that repeated claims by the UK Met Office and other meteorological organisations that most of the rapid warming in 2015 and early 2016 was primarily due to CO2 emissions rather than a super-strong El Nino were spurious and ill-considered.

Even worse is the recent statement by Elena Manaenkova, the World Meteorological Organisation’s deputy secretary general. Commenting on the current IPCC meeting in South Korea, she claimed that “the sustained warming trend shows no sign of relenting.”

In reality, the opposite is happening: global temperatures have been falling sharply since 2016 while the 21st century warming trend is half of what most climate models predicted, slowing rapidly.

The real question is whether or not global average temperature remains at current levels in coming years, i.e. levels we have seen for most of the 21st century, with the exception of two short-lived El Nino events (in 2009/10 and 2015/16). Time will tell.

Dr Roy Spencer has now published the data for September 2018: