It was apparently without even consulting James Hansen, or others at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), that Washington Post journalist Juliet Eilperin ran the prediction on October 13th, that 2005 would be the warmest year on record, click here for more detail.
It was Hansen’s prediction much earlier in the year, that 2005 would be very warm, click here to download a file with notes from Hanson in response to the article.
Luckily for Eilperin, Hanson stands by his February prediction, that 2005 will be very warm.
He wrote on 3rd November with reference to the data and graphs in the attached file:
“For the first nine months of the year, 2005 is 0.02C cooler than 1998 in our land-ocean temperature index, and is tied with 2002 as the second warmest year in the period of instrumental data. The graph in the lower right shows that 1998 and 2002 were relatively cool in the last three months of the year, by more than the typical variation of the global temperature anomaly (Figure 3).
Therefore, there is a better than 50% chance that 2005 will move up in the rankings by the end of the year.
Considering also the continuing effect of the current planetary energy imbalance, we conclude that there is no reason to change the statements that we made in February and April (see above). It is now clear that 2005 surely will have been an abnormally warm year, comparable to the warmest year on record (1998), despite not being pushed, as in 1998, by a large El Nino. It is noteworthy that September 2005 was the warmest September in the 125 years of data.
Of course, it will be interesting to see how 2005 ranks compared to 1998 at the end of the year. However, for scientific purposes, the important result (already clear) will be that the trend of global temperatures toward global warming is now so steep that in just seven years the global warming trend has taken temperatures to approximately the level of the abnormally warm year of 1998. The steep global warming trend that began in the late 1970s (Figure 1) is continuing.”
It is good luck, if not good science, when the February prediction is still good in November!
All of this does ‘throw a spanner in the works’ for John McLean and some others who have claimed it is not getting warmer – because recent years have been cooler than 1998.
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Thanks to David Jones for sending me the Hanson notes in response to the Washington Post article.
Jennifer Marohasy BSc PhD has worked in industry and government. She is currently researching a novel technique for long-range weather forecasting funded by the B. Macfie Family Foundation.