Hiatus? What hiatus?
August 2014 was the warmest August on record. Three of the last 12 months have been the warmest for that calendar month, but one of them (November) was in 2013.
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Susan, I did follow the topic. If you read it carefully I pointed out it´s important not to be biased by short term trends. You will also notice I don´t engage nor respond to personal attacks. This allows us to keep the discussion focused on the subject at hand.
If I may point out, lets say 2014 turns out to be a record warm year. This is reasonable considering there´s an El Niño event in the horizon. The El Niño could unload a lot of energy kept under the surface in the Eastern Pacific.
But if and when the El Niño unloads energy from below the surface we may see an interesting offseting phenomenom: the increased albedo from the growing ice cover does reduce the incoming energy at this point in time.
Where does this lead? Is the world warming? Of course it is. El Niño unloads energy stored under the surface. That energy doesn´t appear by magic. On the other hand the increasing ice cover is very probably a weather trend, but if you want to track weather trends you do have to account for it.
And this is what prompted my comment about weather and not climate. People tend to hang over every minute weather wiggle and shake, without considering the long term climate issues. Long term, it´s going to get warmer.
However those who claim all climate wiggles are caused by CO2 (or the Sun, or the comets, or whatever) are bound to have a few missed calls.
[Straw man argument. -mt]
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Don't forget weather isn't climate. If the current absence of warming has indeed ended due to an "ENSO step" then you could have a point. However, it's prudent to wait a couple of years before we can start worrying about surface warming renewal. Some say the surface won't warm appreciably until the late 2020's....
There's also an interesting event taking place in the Antarctic region. The sea ice extent has reached a new satellite era record. This could lead to increased albedo over the next few months and possibly offset the El Niño warming influence. It's going to be an interesting 18 months as we watch the climate oscillate and the different phenomena struggle against each other.
Fergus, yes this is nonsense but it's not obvious nonsense. It was a close call whether to let it through. But ad hominem responses will not help.
This is an obvious climate ball play, but hey, it's not off topic or rude. Play the ball or ignore it please.
As you say, Michael. I have spent a lot of time recently with F. and hence my uncharacteristically strong criticism. I hope people ignore him.
Yes, mt, FL posts frequently in a variety of places and occasionally seems to show a glimmer (on his own topic, I once found him interesting). Fergus was very patient with him and devoted an entire post to trying to provide an entry into actual climate science thinking, but it appears to have been all for naught since Fernando does not seem to like applying himself to the subject at hand. By the way, Fernando, you could fix that, by sticking to the topic wherever you go.
OK, taking my own advice about sticking to topic, news is it's likely we will have more Arctic incursions (avoiding that polar vortex thing) while the Arctic goes back and forth with its new minimum approaches, seems to be a feature to have hot north and cold further south. My expert meteorologist friend (the one who gave me advance notice of Sandy) confirms. It's unfortunate that a large part of the US is going to have some continuing cool spells for a bit, given that most people don't get that local short-term weather is not climate.
Perhaps an update is due? October (and September) are now available.