Not Just Hot: Striking NASA Data Visualizations Show Warmer And Wilder Summers

Yes, this has been a hot summer. And there have been other hot summers recently.

But it’s not just hot, it’s also been wild. More record temperatures, larger areas of drought more damaging storms. Is this significant, or just a roll of the dice?

According to NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, it is significant. And to the extent that we are rolling dice, those dice are increasingly “loaded.” The videos above and below, from its Scientific Visualization Studio, show the “Shifting Distribution of Northern Hemisphere Summer Temperature Anomalies, 1951-2011″ in terms of time and space. Simply put, this means how the number and severity and locations of extreme climate events has changed over the last 60 years in the world’s most populous regions.

Climate skeptics have disputed the accuracy of Goddard’s surface temperature database, but what is shown in these visualizations is that the distributions of climate events has shifted by an entire standard deviation. I will leave it to the data scientists to debate how much data fudging would be required to move the needle that much, but my suspicion is that it could only be achieved through wholesale data fabrication—not the “contamination” or “adjustments” that Anthony Watts and others have claimed.

According to NASA, the bell curve graph of the time series animation above:

shows how the distribution of Northern Hemisphere summer temperature anomalies has shifted toward an increase in hot summers. The seasonal mean temperature for the entire base period of 1951-1980 is plotted at the top of the bell curve. Decreasing in frequency to the right are what are defined as “hot” anomalies (between 1 and 2 standard deviations from the norm), “very hot” anomalies (between 2 and 3 standard deviations) and “extremely hot” anomalies (greater than 3 standard deviations). The anomalies fall off to the left in mirror-image categories of “cold, “very cold” and “extremely cold.” The range between the .43 and -.43 standard deviation marks represent “normal” temperatures.

As the graph moves forward in time, the bell curve shifts to the right, representing an increase in the frequency of the various hot anomalies. It also gets wider and shorter, representing a wider range of temperature extremes. As the graph moves beyond 1980, the temperatures are still compared to the seasonal mean of the 1951-1980 base period, so that as it reaches the 21st century, there is a far greater frequency of temperatures that once fell 3 standard deviations beyond the mean.

As the graphic indicates, each bell curve shown through the time series represents the distribution of anomalies over an 11-year period.

Stanford Professor Noah Diffenbaugh posted this video to his Google+ page and explained that, “observations show that summer temperatures that were extremely hot in the middle 20th century have become much more common in recent decades. This observation enhances the robust observation that global mean temperature has been increasing (“global warming”). It also confirms previously published analyses that show that extreme hot events have been increasing over many areas of the globe in recent decades.” This research is based on the peer-reviewed paper, Perception of Climate Change, by James Hansen, et al.

Diffenbaugh has already added his voice to this debate in, “Observational and model evidence of global emergence of permanent, unprecedented heat in the 20th and 21st centuries, A letter, in which he writes, “Given the severe impacts of extreme heat on natural and human systems, we attempt to quantify the likelihood that rising greenhouse gas concentrations will result in a new, permanent heat regime in which the coolest warm-season of the 21st century is hotter than the hottest warm-season of the late 20th century.”

The map series (above), “Summer Temperature Anomalies for the Northern Hemisphere, 1955-2011,” places this same data in a spatial context:

This visualization shows a flat map of the Earth with summertime temperature anomalies for the Northern Hemisphere. This analysis compares observed seasonal mean temperatures (June-July-August) to the seasonal mean temperatures during a base period from 1951 to 1980.

The colors correspond to statistical standard deviations from the seasonal mean of the base period. The hot anomalies are defined as “hot” (orange); “very hot” (red); and “extremely hot” (bown). The cold anomalies are defined as “cold” (light blue); “very cold” (dark blue); and “extremely cold” (purple). Regions in white fall within the normal category.

The visualization shows the increasing occurrence, in particular, of “extremely hot” temperatures since 2000. While these temperatures were experienced by less than 1 percent of land areas during the base period, about 10 percent of land areas have experienced these summer temperatures since 2000. These extreme heat events include the heat waves in Europe in 2003, Russia in 2010, and Texas and Oklahoma in 2011.

No data is shown below the equator because this only uses Northern Hemisphere June-July-August temperature data. The visualization shows the data for 1955, 1965, 1975 and then 1985-2011.

From a content perspective, the question is how much information do we need to shift our cultural framework to accomodate this new reality? A well-researched article from the The Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard, written following the social debacle of hurricane Katrina, compared the cultural factors of how the climate story is told in the press in Germany and the U.S. In “Culture Contributes to Perceptions of Climate Change,” researchers Hans von Storch and Werner Krauss write, “it becomes critical to examine how the rhetoric of the public discourse and that of the scientific community intersect to create climate politics and guide the direction of research. This societal rhetoric is not ancillary to ‘real science’ but serves as a critical determinant of scientific attitudes and explanations.”

As much as the anti-science attitude of many climate skeptics is troubling, skepticism is, in fact, the basis of science. More striking, perhaps, is the more unified atitude in Germany that von Storch and Krauss describe in their article. The German concept of “Klimakatastrophe” popularized by a famous cover of Der Spiegel magazine in 1986, is almost universally embraced there, and has led to very decisive legislation and alternative energy adoptation.

But even NASA’s Hansen knows that he is couching his certainty in statistical correlation. Speaking of this summer’s weather, he says that it is of another order of extremity, “Such anomalies were infrequent in the climate prior to the warming of the past 30 years, so statistics let us say with a high degree of confidence [italics mine] that we would not have had such an extreme anomaly this summer in the absence of global warming.”

As impressive as Germany’s response has been, any social order that squelches debate, even for well-intentioned reasons, is in danger of mass delusion. Historically, such delusions have had catastrophic social consequences. Our real debate should be about the scale of our impact and of our potential response. It may be more accurate to say that we, as a species, are participating in this global process. We are both bystanders and, as Dylan Rattigan says, “greedy bastards.”

What our role in this is, is debatable, but it is important to remember that all of life is the flow of energy from the sun through all of our terrestrial systems. As Duke University professor Adrian Bejan writes, “The constantly morphing global vasculature is climate: temperature zones, wind speed, diurnal temperature change, and more.” In other words, we are climate, and the debates we have are, ultimately, with ourselves.