Europe's warmest autumn in 500 years
Results hint that Europe may be in for a warm winter.
Do you still have roses in bloom in your English garden? Then you might not be surprised to hear that Europe is experiencing the warmest autumn since Columbus first sailed to America.
Read the story here.
Comments
I have problems with this story, Europe's warmest autumn in 500 years. Most of Europe's heat comes from the Atlantic current without which Europe would be as cold as Labrador and the spectacle of hanging a thermometer up in England and then telling us it must be "Global Warming" doesn't make sense.
Posted by: L. Espenshade | December 4, 2006 09:39 PM
I don't think it's a question of "hanging a thermometer up in England." As they say, "the signal is consistent over the whole European land mass, from Iceland to Greece." And, from what the Goddard map shows, Labrador too is 1 to 2 degrees warmer.
Posted by: Marc Andre Belanger | December 5, 2006 08:22 PM
Have they been keeping records of temperature for more than 500 years, or how do they get this data?
[Editor's note: It is from historical records. This is explained in the story - have a read!]
Posted by: JR | December 5, 2006 09:06 PM
If this is the warmest autumn in 500 years, how can the cause be global warming? I'm pretty sure it wasn't global warming back then, so why is it all of a sudden the reason now?
I get a kick out of these stories like this one that tout "record-breaking temperatures" as signs of global warming, when the record that's being broken was from close to 100 years ago. They're "record-breaking" because it was this warm before!
(I know this story doesn't specifically point to global warming, but it insinuates it.)
[Editor's note: pls note that the warmest 30 years in the past 500 have been the most recent 30 years, the warmest decade has been the most recent one, and the warmest year is the most recent - so that's a clear trend, though the reason behind it is unknown.]
Posted by: Dylan Bennett | December 6, 2006 02:19 AM
"I'm pretty sure it wasn't global warming back then [500 years ago]." The article never says that it was this hot 500 years ago, it says that the data doesn't go further than that.
Posted by: Marc Andre Belanger | December 6, 2006 08:22 PM
Number of science reviews in this field have linked solar activity to the climate change. Rise in global temperature is always accompanied by the rise in CO2 concentration. Human contribution may be significant but it is not critical. By far the greatest amount of CO2 is released by the world’s oceans; they are also the largest absorbers. The release of CO2 is not, but its absorption is affected by the Sun. The culprits are UV and gamma radiations reaching the oceans’ surface during periods of high sunspot activity.
Some 2 years ago I wrote:
Increased solar activity results in an increase of the harmful radiation, reducing bio-mass of the oceans’ surface plankton through process of sterilisation by irradiation. Result of this is reduced uptake of CO2 from the atmosphere and rising in the ‘green-house’ effect. Reverse process takes place during reductions in the solar activity.
Posted by: Vukcevic | December 8, 2006 11:25 AM
I just read the original Xoplaki article. My biggest question is how they concretely handle historical information before Fahrenheit 1714 invented the mercury thermometer. What kind of observations allowed a precision of about ±0.5K even at the beginning of the record.
Cheers
Posted by: Georg Hoffmann | December 8, 2006 11:28 AM
Pretty accelerating temperature rise. If this is going to continue we will see something really abnormal. I believe that we are seeing an unprecedent weather anomaly. I am in West Siberia now and native people here are confused by the weather too. They are unable to predict weather by observation nature.
Posted by: Lubos Straka | December 9, 2006 10:34 AM