The last time Earth was this hot..

[Robert]

hippos lived in Britain

It’s official: 2015 was the warmest year on record. But those global temperature records only date back to 1850 and become increasingly uncertain the further back you go. Beyond then, we’re reliant on signs left behind in tree rings, ice cores or rocks. So when was the Earth last warmer than the present?

The Medieval Warm Period is often cited as the answer. This spell, beginning in roughly 950AD and lasting for three centuries, saw major changes to population centres across the globe. This included the collapse of the Tiwanaku civilisation in South America due to increased aridity, and the colonisation of Greenland by the Vikings.

But that doesn’t tell the whole story. Yes, some regions were warmer than in recent years, but others were substantially colder. Across the globe, averaged temperatures then were in fact cooler than today.

To reach a point when the Earth was significantly warmer than today we’d need to go back 130,000 years, to a time known as the Eemian.

For about 1.8m years the planet had fluctuated between a series of ice ages and warmer periods known as “interglacials”. The Eemian, which lasted around 15,000 years, was the most recent of these interglacials (before the one we’re currently in).

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/0...ppos_lived_in_britain_thats_130000_years_ago/

 

[metalman]

Snow falls in the Sahara desert for the first time in more than 37 years

 

[Robert]

Snow falls in the Sahara desert for the first time in more than 37 years

37 years, eh?
So, has 2016 been below average temperature?

Let's have a look:
The last time the earth was this cold was.... well, final results for 2016 are not in yet but it's looking like it was colder last year.

And it was colder still the year before that.

This year is predicted to be hottest yet.

Still, pretty cool to get snow in the Sahara.

 

[Robert]

Wouldn't normally post a local weather story in a global climate thread but what's good for the goose, etc...

Arctic heatwave could break records

Temperatures at the North Pole could be up to 20 degrees higher than average this Christmas Eve, in what scientists say is a record-breaking heatwave.

 

[Robert]

Last time the Earth was this warm, sea level was a whole lot higher

Sea surface temperatures during the last interglacial period peaked 125,000 years ago, and these were 0.5±0.3°C warmer than the late 1800s. However, temperatures from 1995-2014 were indistinguishable—0.1±0.3°C cooler. In other words, it appears that temperatures today are now equivalent to the warmest from the last interglacial period, when sea level was much higher.

(Note that these are sea surface temperatures; the atmosphere has warmed more quickly.)

So if the planet stopped warming and stayed where it is today, the past gives us an idea of how much sea level rise we could expect to see in the long-term future. It would take much more than a century to complete that rise, but we are looking at well over five meters of elevation in the ocean.

 

[metalman]

NOAA shows the Earth red hot in December, with record heat in central Africa.

The NOAA has almost no temperature data from Africa, and none from central Africa. The temperatures are fill in temperatures from a smoothing and fill-in algorithm. The algorithm likely based on latitude and distance from the ocean under prevailing wind direction. NOAA is extrapolating climate data over vast geographic distances while implying, their modeling algorithms were just as reliable as the real observed/on-site data collected.

Satellite data shows that NOAA’s” record hot regions in Africa were actually close to normal.

Seems the fill-in algorithm has a big bias to show warming

Then this pseudo data is entered into the global temperature calculation, which also has a bias to show warming, and presto!
EVERY YEAR IS A NEW HOTTEST YEAR EVER

 

[metalman]

Wouldn't normally post a local weather story in a global climate thread but what's good for the goose, etc...

Arctic heatwave could break records

by some amazing coincidence, an area where most of the data points are determined by fill-in-algorithm

 

[metalman]

 

[Robert]

The record-breaking heat that made 2016 the hottest year ever recorded has continued into 2017, pushing the world into “truly uncharted territory”, according to the World Meteorological Organisation.
...
“Arctic ice conditions have been tracking at record low conditions since October, persisting for six consecutive months, something not seen before in the [four-decade] satellite data record,” said Prof Julienne Stroeve, at University College London in the UK. “Over in the southern hemisphere, the sea ice also broke new record lows in the seasonal maximum and minimum extents, leading to the least amount of global sea ice ever recorded.”