Last week I posted a chart showing Mean Temperatures above Pre-Industrial for the six northern and five southern Weather Stations I am monitoring. Seasonal warmth relative to the Pre-Industrial baseline was greatest in Mumbai and least in Cape Town. Below is a graph showing the experience of both places in the 2021 Meteorological Year so far. I have used Warming Rate figures because, being finer grained, they make the differences between the two places clearer. (My IPCC units are probably proprietary – I haven’t seen them used anywhere else. One unit is the rise in mean global temperature each year if 1.5°C above Pre-Industrial is to be reached in 2040, from the one degree posited at the end of 2017.)

One IPCC unit is equivalent to 0.02174°C and three years 7 months have passed since the end of November 2017. At Week 29 of the 2021 meteorological year the IPCC projection has reached a global figure of 1.07733 degrees above Pre-Industrial. Cape Town is doing us all a service by being well below the global average. For the year to date, however, Sydney is currently the coolest of my eleven stations. The running mean temperature there has been dropping steadily since December, whereas Cape Town it is rising.

I used a Ten Year average mean temperature for each weather station to establish a Pre-Industrial baseline (Met Years 2008/9 to 2017/18). Below is a Table to show the relationship between mean temperatures, IPCC units and mean temperatures above Pre-Industrial. It may seem rather excessive to show these to five decimal places (except for the Warming Rate in IPCC units) but I’ll do it just this once! (The default order of the Weather Stations is west to east, north then south with my local station, Durham Tees an added extra to the Ten Station “study”.)

You will have to take on trust my Mean Running Temperatures for the 10 Years and 2021 but you may find it fun to do your own math to arrive at the current temperatures above Pre-Industrial and the “Warming Rates”. The P-I colour coding is simple – red for Danger (2°C and over), orange for above Paris but below 2°C, green for Goldilocks, (not too warm, not too cold). I have highlighted Koltsovo’s running mean temperature – over half way through the year and it is still in the blue.

Another perspective on this year’s temperatures-to-date is to compare them with 2020 at Week 29.

That Koltsovo is 3.73°C cooler than last year is quite staggering but four of the stations are warmer,  reducing the Global 10 figure to just a little over half a degree. There are thousands of other weather stations reporting so there is no telling if these figures indicate the onset of the expected Grand Solar Minimum.

Mark of Man 62 · Filey Beacon