In a comment in another posting Adolfo put up a link to the Unisys sea surface temperature anomaly map. Now I’m looking at it every day or two too…
And it shows a very cold dagger in the heart of the Pacific.
Sea Surface Temperatures 16 October 2010 from Unysis
Here is a live chart:
Sea Surface Temperatures - From Unisys
You can click on these for a larger sized image.
Original image and more from Unisys
This is a bit of a worry… Yes, those are -4 C scale excursions.
What is in the heart of the Pacific now tends to slowly spread toward the North Pole. It takes about 18 years to get there, and it does get blended a bit on the way. But this pattern has been holding for a while now. (This image is just one day, but it’s been like that for quite a while). The implication of this is that we are headed into a significant cooling event. It just needs a longer integration over time and some geographical spread to be felt in a big way.
I also note in passing that cold blob over arctic Russia. Cold time in Moscow coming soon…
My interpretation of the warm blobs along the Asian Pacific coast and the North American / Greenland Atlantic coast is that those are blobs of warmth doing the “lava lamp world” thing, headed up to the Arctic to dump their heat to space. The return path along the North American Pacific coast is already looking quite cool (and it has been cool all year in California).
The southern hemisphere also has some ‘warm blobs’ but they are a rather tepid warm now (the greenish blobs). Most of the southern ocean is already normal to cool. Not a lot of warmth down under.
As Actual Temperatures
Looked at in actual temperatures, it’s clearly cold around the bottom and top of the world. And the middle is getting a spike of cold in the center of it.
Marine Temperature Map from Wunderground
Live map:
Live Map of Marine Temperatures from Wunderground
Where the currents run up the western sides of South America and Africa, the cold water is clearly entrained northward. In the Northern Hemisphere, we’ve already got cold waters and it’s still the hot part of the year (just entering Autumn).
It will be fascinating to watch this slowly unfold…
FWIW, we’re having a cold rain in the San Francisco Bay Area today.
For most of the last 25 years or so, we’ve gotten through Halloween without rain. Sometimes we get a bit before Halloween, but not much. I can only remember being rained out on Halloween once (and when you are raising kids, you remember these things…) Somehow I suspect this year is going to make #2. (And the first one was about 20+ years ago…)
Typically I’m picking tomatoes and squash, clearing the last of the corn, and working in an “Indian Summer” weather pattern about now. We had that for about 1 week a bit ago. Sometimes we get warm enough for tomatoes all the way through November (my latest harvest was early December one year about a decade back). Today I’m thinking about wood in the fireplace and checking the yard for anything that’s not rain proof… November activities…
It’s going to be a long cold winter, I fear.
Super Typhoon Megi
In the middle of that Eastern Pacific hot blob is Super Typhoon Megi headed for Luzon, Philippines. A Cat 5 at the moment. This link has a nice picture showing where it is relative to the sea surface temps:
http://www.globalsurfnews.com/news.asp?Id_news=49150
While the ‘Warmers’ will undoubtedly start shouting that this is evidence for “climate chaos” or some such hype, to me it is the physics that have meaning. We have a stupendous quantity of water evaporating from the surface, being transported to the upper atmosphere, and condensing to rain and hail. The quantity of that heat in the ocean being dumped to space by this process is astounding.
With that kind of action cooling the hot spots, they will not stay hot for long.
So the cold bits of the planet are cold. The center of the Pacific is getting spiked down. The hot spots are dumping heat to space at a tremendous rate. And even the cold places are getting a lot of rain (so more heat dumped to space). Clearly the heat flow is off planet.
But the ocean is a large place. It will take many years to cool. IMHO, we’re in a race condition between the ocean heat storage and the solar funk / slumber. And it will be 2030 before we know who wins and by how much.
Musings from the Chiefio 
Chiefio: Great to read your blog as always. This rang my chimes:
“We have a stupendous quantity of water evaporating from the surface, being transported to the upper atmosphere, and condensing to rain and hail. The quantity of that heat in the ocean being dumped to space by this process is astounding.”
I am in a longstanding argument with a friend who suffers from Warmism and whenever I offer that point –the gigaJoules of energy being convected away, right quick, and unfailingly, thanks to the hydrological cycle– he just stares blankly. Won’t do the math, doesn’t want to know. …More than anything else, that refusal to look at physical reality is what persuades me that Warmists are a religious cult.
Keep up the great work. And good hunting on the investment side of things. Wish I’d bought gold, am thinking of buying silver. As you say, a long hard winter ahead.
Halloween Oct 31,1972
An historical 3+ ft of wet, condensible snow in NE Colorado (still a record for date to this day). I remember clearly because the local keystone kop tried to run a bunch of us in for barricading traffic with the snow forts we built on main st around 2am. I protested he was the only fool out in a car. He then called my dad. An event that lives in infamy at family get-togethers.
Wonder what these maps looked like then.
@E.M.Smith
We are living in “interesting times”, hope not so “interesting” though :-).
Last winter, at -12 degrees of latitude, on the west coast of SA, we had two degrees centigrade less of minimum temperature. It seems that it is at the “bottom” rather than the average that changes are felt.
It looks that the same happens in the economic world.
In these days, as many of you may also know, I came up with a sudden inspirational event: The almost sudden realization of the Unity of the Field, which I have detailed in a little essay here:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/38598073/Unified-Field
Out of which we arrive at the conclusion that all planets of our solar system, having a whole field which comprises the gravitational field and the emission field, have different emission fields which are expressed in their eccentricities, as the emission field opposes gravity at 180 degrees. The astounding fact, which most surely influences climate is the variation of our Moon’s field from positive to negative (when it “sucks” energy) in both of its extreme positions, at perigee and at apogee:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/39678117/Planets-Moon-Field
This will be more interesting I am sure, and useful, perhaps for Climate Guru Richard Holle, a regular in this blog.
Pingback: Global Warming Fraudsters Now Say ‘Go Veggie’ To Save Planet « THE INTERNET POST