Yes, La Nina was largely the reason for the slight cooling this year. Deniers will say that it's because we're at the solar minimum, but, as usual, they are wrong. Solar activity has very little effect when you're simply looking at temperatures year by year. If solar activity was low over the next several decades, then we might see some effect, but one year of low solar activity has negligible effect.

Case in point: the world experienced a similar cooldown in 2000 -- yet solar activity was much higher back then. The common variable with our current cool down? La Nina.

Next winter, we're either going to have a weak Nina or neutral conditions (La Nada). Those who are obsessed with "the second coming of the negative PDO" will need to keep waiting...and waiting...and waiting...for something that may never happen.

OK everybody remember this in 2 months when we have a day where it is 10 degrees above normal somewhere and Hansen and the rest of the AGWers are running around screaming that AGW is knocking at the door with a scythe. And can you just imagine the Goreacle with the news.

I predict that Hansen wil be one of the first to declare that a hot temp is a CLEAR indication of AGW and we should all take heed.

Make sure Katie is ready to rush over to Hansen's office to get that soundbite when the Northeast has a hot day in May.

Hansen just can't stay out of policy prescriptions and he certainly will not be deterred by facts contrary to his preprogrammed agenda. That said, there is nothing unexpected in this latest dissertation. His aside about "future large sea level change, species extinction, and various other impacts" is non-specific enough to satisfy the AGW alarmists as well as being irritating to those critical of his line of thought and more concerned with facts.

Oh, another horrible side effect from "Global Warming pollution" (what ever that is supposed to mean) - it now increases allergies! See
http://www.canada.com/vancouversun/news/story.html?id=13cb2081-2291-4566-bb6b-19dd0ddcc38c

Dr. Hansen - another snake oil salesman!! Stick your "global warming" where the sun don't shine (and where it's probably cold). True we are experiencing a warming trend - but.......
is all this hoopla really necessary? I have never seen in my lifetime, and I'm 65, such an orchestrated panic such as I'm seeing now - except maybe for the phony "cold war" between the U.S and Soviet Russia.
The French revolution was orchestrated in order to destroy a stable way of life and it's happening again thru "scientists" and politians (like Al Gore(bachov)) to destroy our way of life. Think about it.......

Good to see Hansen setting himself up in a falsifiable, short term prediction - again.

He predicted a "Super El Nino", California flooding and record heat through 2007, but instead we got drought, cooling and eventually La Nina.

No doubt he can and will continue to bump the GISS numbers upwards to minimize the damage to his reputation, but fortunately we have Christy and Spencer at UAH to keep the satellite data honest.

The Illinois Wesleyan presentation is exceptionally ugly in that he shows all kinds of short term Greenland data hinting at unprecedented warming - yet fails to mention his own data which unequivocally show that temperatures were higher in Greenland 60 years ago than they are now.
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/gistemp_station.py?id=431042500000&data_set=1&num_neighbors=1
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/gistemp_station.py?id=620040630003&data_set=1&num_neighbors=1
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/gistemp_station.py?id=634011520003&data_set=1&num_neighbors=1
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/gistemp_station.py?id=431043600000&data_set=1&num_neighbors=1

(In the corporate world, withholding critical, relevant information from the public often lands people in jail.)

From the US Weather Bureau - Nov. 2, 1922

The Arctic ocean is warming up, icebergs are growing scarcer and in some places the seals are finding the water too hot, according to a report to the Commerce Department yesterday from Consul Ifft, at Bergen, Norway.

Reports from fishermen, seal hunters and explorers, he declared, all point to a radical change in climate conditions and hitherto unheard-of temperatures in the Arctic zone. Exploration expeditions report that scarcely any ice has been met with as far north as 81 degrees 29 minutes. Soundings to a depth of 3,100 meters showed the gulf stream still very warm.

Great masses of ice have been replaced by moraines of earth and stones, the report continued, while at many points well known glaciers have entirely disappeared. Very few seals and no white fish are found in the eastern Arctic, while vast shoals of herring and smelts, which have never before ventured so far north, are being encountered in the old seal fishing grounds.

http://docs.lib.noaa.gov/rescue/mwr/050/mwr-050-11-0589a.pdf

So the warming trend wasn't caused by elnino?

I would love to empathize with GISSNASA, but as a scientist myself, unfortunately I would not rely on data such as this (sharp drop (2000) due to removal of gauge from building to green ground)
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/gistemp_station.py?id=425722950003&data_set=1&num_neighbors=1
(and apparently its quite repetitive....) See here for details of why
http://wattsupwiththat.wordpress.com/2008/03/24/how-not-to-measure-temperature-part-54-los-angeles-the-city/
Compared with other temp sources (RSS, Hadcrut, UAH) its hard to believe NASA is still generating this data

Re NPR Concerning you story about Antarctica ice today
I find it amazing that you have not checked the facts
from IPCC sites
University of Illinois
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/current.365.south.jpg
Antarctic ice ABOVE normal for past 6 Months and growing dramatically
Sea Ice Index (type in search) SH ice 35% ABOVE 2008
World mean global temperatures DECLINING since 2004 Hadcrut Hadley decline very marked recently
http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/climon/data/themi/g17.htm
To date declines again very marked Univ Alabama
http://discover.itsc.uah.edu/amsutemps/
pick your atmospheric height
Also there is intense volcnic activity underwater in that area
so increasing ice in SH + warm waters underneath = ice cracks off and melts?
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/01/080120160720.htm

It is rather interesting that when temps go up it is evidence of global warming and how mankind is destroying the natural order of things with CO2 emissions, however when we have a cooling trend it is just a natural fluctuation. I bet this really screws up his hockey stick.

Reply: It's actually Mann's hockey stick, not Hansen's.

We misleaders have been discussing the latest 10-year trend, but Hansen continues to chose 20 years so that the positive "noise" of a series of El Ninos, rising solar (recall, there's a 2- to 5-year lag on solar), and a rising AMO all contribute to the positive trend.

Speaking of El Nino, this graph may look like global temperature anomaly, but it's not.

http://tinypic.com/fullsize.php?pic=2cwlj6c&s=3&capwidth=false

It's a running total of NINO3.4 data that illustrates the cumulative effect of El Nino/La Nina events. It's discussed here.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZ5OG6TMKBg

Not discussed in the video is a study in 1994 that found remnants (Rossby waves) of the 82/83 El Nino more than 10 years later.
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v370/n6488/abs/370360a0.html

From its abstract: "These changes may have influenced weather patterns over the North American continent during the past decade, and demonstrate that the oceanic effects of El Nino events can be extremely long-lived." It's also discussed here:

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1511/is_n1_v16/ai_15957999/pg_1

As I understand it from everything I have read lately on the subject the cooling trend began in 1998 and is now about ten years old. This was partly confirmed by recent data released by NASA and findings from their Aqua satellite. According to Jennifer Marohasy these findings have been accepted by the head of the IPCC. Am I wrong about this?

It would be rather difficult to disagree with the proposition that weather patterns fluctuate, wouldn't it? After all, it has been going on for millennia, hasn't it?

Oops, my mistake. Hansen used 30 years, which really exploits solar, El Ninos, and the AMO to make a positive trend.

Well, at least here in Scandinavia (Stockholm) it has been the warmest winter (Dec-Feb) ever. For 3 straight months there was no single snow day and I never had to scrape my car windows. Reply: That's hard to believe, you must have kept the car in the garage right? The only other reason was that it was cloudy or windy much of the time at night.

That has never happened before in my 30+ lifetime.

Welcome back, Brett.

Do you agree with Hansen's viewpoint?Reply: Obviously, we will know more about what this trend meant in years to come, but I tend to agree with Hansen at this point in time. It is really just a blip on the big screen right now and it is just not long enough of a trend to draw any meaningful conclusions in terms of long term GW, but it has my interest. Ask me again in a few years, I could change my mind.

I find the Hansen piece cited in the thread-starter far more persuasive than anything the contrarians have posted here. It is also more persuasive than anything that came out of the contrarian revival-meeting recently held in New York, and certainly provides more insight than the endlessly repetitive daily weather reports our contrarians have been flooding the board with all winter.

What? The climate fluctuates? That's brilliant! Do I agree with his viewpoint on AGW? No. He has been wrong on more than one occasion. He didn't see this "noise" coming, but he knows where it's going. Sure he does.

"The ability is indispensable for figuring out how the world works, but also makes us liable to identify a pattern early on and then fit data to it, or even to see patterns in "noise" - cardinal sins in science."

It would be nice not to hear endless ad hominem attacks on Hansen. Or straw men thrown up all over the site. It would be nice to discuss this scientifically.

Remember that Hansen is one of the most respected scientists in the world. He is a member of the very prestigious National Academy of Sciences. And two recent posts on this site, on diminished old ice in the Arctic and the collapse of the Wilkins Ice Shelf, lend support to Hansen's hypothesis regarding the potential dangers of "fast-feedback" effects causing ice sheet disintegration.

Very little in the 100's of papers he has written has be called into question. So let's talk about this as adults. Data in one paper that changed numbers by a few hundredths does not negate one of the most successful careers (despite recent censorship)in American science.

That's funny, over half of last year was in an El Nino. However, Hansen has probably "adjusted" the ENSO so that it is more in line with his statements.

Hi gettingcold,

Most people here are concerned with the data, not the personalities.

To give you a feel for how absurd the press coverage of the Antarctic ice, consider this...

The infamous broken chunk of the Wilkins Ice Shelf is 415 km2 in area. That is less than the amount of new ice forming every hour in the Antarctic. Before today is over, about 100,000 km2 of new sea ice will form around Antarctica.

Even more ridiculous is the fact that some of the scientists involved in these ice panics are lacking the common sense to even consider the obvious structural considerations involved in the break up.

"Ice shelf collapse is not as simple as we first thought," said Professor Glasser, lead author of the paper...."our new study shows that ice-shelf break up is not controlled simply by climate. A number of other atmospheric, oceanic and glaciological factors are involved. For example, the location and spacing of fractures on the ice shelf such as crevasses and rifts are very important too because they determine how strong or weak the ice shelf is".
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/02/080210100441.htm

Well, duh .......

According to Swedish Met. Inst. (www.smhi.se) it was the warmest winter since 1756 in Stockholm. Average temperature was +2.1C for Dec-Feb. We have had essentially no clear skies at any time, but a constant cloud cover and transport of warm Atlantic air, efficiently preventing any radiation cooling during nights.
In Sweden everyone believes in Global Warming now.

1) So does La Nina explain why ocean temperatures have NOT increased(they have cooled) since global measurementts began 5 years ago?
2) Kevin Trenberth at the National Center for Atmospheric Research says it's probably going back out into space. The Earth has a number of natural thermostats, including clouds, which can either trap heat and turn up the temperature, or reflect sunlight and help cool the planet.
3) That can't be directly measured at the moment, however. "Unfortunately, we don't have adequate tracking of clouds to determine exactly what role they've been playing during this period," Trenberth says.
4) Translation: We don't know what causes changes in temperature and climate. When you folks (scientists) have an actual clue, come back to us (the public) with the complete story so we can then decide for ourselves what IF anything needs to be done. Until that day, shut up and stop with the scare tactics!

Dr. Hansen is sadly aligned with a position and carrying water for the Gore GW crusade. We have seen this time and time again with science advancing and with dogmatic extremists purging opposing viewpoints.
I think he's clearly lost objectivity and is defensive now because of the rising tide of evidence that refutes his core belief.
In a nut shell that is really the problem.
Once established as a belief with many scientists there is a knee jerk reaction to dismiss critics without ever answering the argument.
This should never have been a debate with political overtones and sadly that is just about all it is now.
GW isn't a problem, global pollution IS.
The cult pushing GW will discredit those trying to stop pollution and waste.
That is the true legacy of Al Gore, the exact opposite of what his followers think they are accomplishing.
Future generations will scoff at environmental claims because this cult cried "wolf" to gain power; and it is obvious they still cling to the concept desperately.

Paul: Don't forget the 3-month lag between ENSO and global temperature.

Mark: Your assessment of our reaching solar minimum misses a major point: There's a 2- to 5-year lag between solar irradiance and global temperature. Since the secondary solar max wasn't reached until Feb 2002, the globe has a few more years of reacting to the drop to the current min. Go take a look at the monthly global temperature data and figure out when the current recession in global temperature began. That's strange. It peaked in January 2007, almost exactly 5 years after the secondary part of the solar max was reached.

By the way, Mark, some of us prefer the new handle, delayer-denier.

Hi BT,

I noticed your complaint about "weather reports" and was thinking back to one of our first conversations - where you were bragging about playing tennis Christmas week 2006. I'm inclined to think that "weather reports" like record northern hemisphere snowfall, record Antarctic sea ice, and spring arriving three weeks late are more relevant that your tennis match.

Apparently the only relevant weather reports are those which can be used to support global warming. Perhaps you can be more creative (like much of the AGW community) and explain to us why bitter cold and snow are due to CO2 induced warming.

I'm looking out the window at yet another snowstorm, about the fourth or fifth in the last two weeks.

Who knows? This important debate is about to turn me off, with its lack of moderation, its certainties and its hysteria.

Actually...no, it wo