NASA: “It is nearly certain that a new record 12-month global temperature will be set in 2010″ - "Warming hasn't stopped"

Must-read draft paper: "We conclude that global temperature continued to rise rapidly in the past decade" and "that there has been no reduction in the global warming trend of 0.15-0.20°C/decade that began in the late 1970s."

NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) has released a draft paper “Current GISS Global Surface Temperature Analysis.” It is a must read for warming junkies, but, as James Hansen notes in an e-mail, “it is too long for popular use.” So Hansen offers “some of the main conclusions,” as well as a description of a rather shocking hack of the GISS website (all of which is reprinted below). The first conclusion is:

1) Contrary to popular belief, global warming has not stopped nor has the rate of warming even slowed down in the past decade (Figure 21).

The paper predicts a new record 12-month global temperature record, and says the calendar year (2010) is likely to set the global surface temperature unless “El Nino conditions deteriorate rapidly by mid 2010 into La Nina conditions” [as happened in 2007]. NASA notes:

This new record temperature will be particularly meaningful because it occurs when the recent minimum of solar irradiance (http://www.pmodwrc.ch/ pmod.php?topic=tsi/ composite/ SolarConstant) is having its maximum cooling effect.

Here are the rest of the summary conclusions of the paper, from Hansen’s email (I put in one relevant figure):

(2) 12-month running mean temperature is more revealing than the usual annual-mean graph, doing a better job of characterizing individual El Ninos, volcanoes, e.g., as well as providing an up-to-date assessment of annual mean temperature (Figures 9b and 10b).

(3) A new global temperature record (for the period of instrumental measurements) will be set within the next few months (Figure 10b and accompanying information).

(4) Urban effects on the analyzed global temperature are small (not a new conclusion) (Figure 3 and several more) – we account for it via satellite nightlight (Figure 1) identification of remote stations that are used to adjust the long-term trends of urban stations.

(5) Upside-down weather in the Northern Hemisphere this winter (Arctic warm, mid-latitudes cold) coincides with the most extreme Arctic Oscillation in the period 1950-2010. The AO fluctuations from year to year are mostly weather noise, i.e., unpredictable chaotic fluctuations. There seems no reason to anticipate frequent repeat performances – on the contrary, the slight long-term trend of the AO is toward more positive values and the (greenhouse gas driven) global warming trend has a larger effect than the AO trend on regional temperature, as well as on global temperature. Of course winter weather will always be highly variable and those places cold enough to have snow can expect greater amounts from an atmosphere containing more water vapor. The AO indices for the past three months are remarkable (Figure 15a), yet the cold temperature anomalies are relatively small compared to say the late 1970s (Figures 15b, 16, 17).