Despite the headlines that make their way into the news from time to time, global temperatures have actually started to cool over the last several years. Now, there is very little to debate that according to all of our man-made devices and measurements, temperature s have been climbing on planet Earth since the 1970’s. According to most research, the planets’ temperature has risen more than a degree Celsius since 1972. But here’s the kicker, the temperatures appear to have peaked in 2007, and has actually been slowly dropping since then… and here is your proof from the same man-made devices that tell us its warming.
This show the global average temperature anomaly from 2005 to today where the blue line is the 30 day mean temperature across the planet. Temperature anomaly is the temperature compared to average. The average period showed on this chart would be considered the most recent, from 1981 to 2010. If you average all the numbers together, it shows a steady drop in temperature from about .4°C above the average to less than .2°C above the 30 year average. I have drawn in a rough estimate of the trend in red.
Granted, it’s not much of a decline, and we are still considered to be warmer now then we were even in the early 90’s, but is this a sign that our warming has halted? Or is it just a brief reprieve?
This brief cooling could also be responsible for our recent jump in sea ice, which is actually up quite dramatically from its low 2 years ago. Temperature affects are always delayed on the planet, so it would take several years of cooling before an increase in sea ice would be evident. Interesting data… I guess we will just have to wait and see.