Global Warming: Is It About To Start?

While Paris is helding the COP21, the NCEP pool of weather stations has reached a new record: a anomaly higher than +1,4F (+0,8C) against its average temperature measured between 1981 and 2010. Only in the beginning of 2002 something closed to that had happened. At that time the same pool of weather stations was not able to cross the anomaly line of +1,4F.

The two graphs below show the situation now, and tell us how the global temperature in the near past has sharply increased, reaching a threshold never experienced before.

Graph 1: Global Temperature Anomaly Between 2005 and 2015

Graph 2: Global Temperature Anomaly Between 1988 and 2005

Notice that Graph 2 doesn’t show any moment where the global temperature was able to cross the +1,4F (+0,8C) threshold, the point where we are nowadays.

Although we’ve been massively bombed from parts of the media, NGOs and some weather institutions (mainly those that are funded by IPCC) that claim CO2 as the main cause of global warming, some climatologists point the ongoing El-Niño as the main responsible for this recent warming shift, because this phenomenum is often related to warming periods of our planet. That is also my point of view.

The 2015 El-Niño can be seen in the map below as that reddish area located in the central part of the Pacific Ocean. Strong reds represent greater positive anomalies.

Map 1: 2015 El-Niño

The last time Earth experienced a suddenly shift in its temperature was in 2002. At that time El-Niño was among us, but weaker. That is what the map below shows to us.

Map 2: 2002 El-Niño

Because its intensity, it is very likely that the ongoing El-Niño will increase its impact on the line shown by Graph 1, hence the temperature trend will probably remain positive in the near future. However, I believe that, besides El-Niño, the heat urban island effect (HUIE) plays an important role on the NCEP pool of weather stations as they can be affected by a changing environment throughout the years. The graph below tries to support my belief, showing the global temperature evolution through satellite measurements over the lower layer of our atmosphere.

Graph 3: Satellite Based Temperature of the Global Lower Atmosphere

The assessment of this graph allows us to notice that there is no correlation between this one and Graphs 1 and 2. On Graph 3 the globe highest temperature was reached in 1997 during the strongest El-Niño ever registered on Pacific. But what is the reason of this difference? From my point of view the satellite temperature measurements seem to be purer as they don't suffer any interference from the lack of standard found over all weather stations located on Earth. On the ground there are weather stations which their surrounding areas have suffered many changes through time. There are also some reading mistakes. Nevertheless, these mistakes shouldn't result on any relevant problems as they are not capable of building up a graph trend.

In the other hand, satellite measurements are standardized, though this method may be considered exotic for some people. Its first measurement was made in 1979 by NOAA when they sent satellites to outer space carrying instruments which measure the natural microwave thermal emissions from oxygen in the atmosphere. The intensity of the signals these microwave radiometers measure at different microwave frequencies is directly proportional to the temperature of different deep layers of the atmosphere. These measurements started to be registered and then compared with today's data. This allowed us to construct Graph 3, a rich and pure information of the global temperature!

To sum up and to answer the question from the headline, I think that it is still too early to claim that global warming is going to take off from now on. Not only because what we've just seen on Graph 3, neither because I am a radical skeptical climate amateur. Actually, it is because I see the climate main drivers - El-Niño, La-Niña and Sun Cycles - still playing a much more important role to this issue rather than uncontrolled CO2 emissions into our atmosphere. In fact, it's been hard to me to find a correlation between the global temperature trend and CO2 emissions. Yet, I consider myself an open minded curious climate amateur, therefore this point of view might change as new data starts to clear up things. I really look forward to what is coming next!