Temperature Trends for the last 60 months – HadCrut

While no conclusions regarding long-term trends can or should be suggested based on short-term trends, we can at the very least look at them to get insight on the current direction of temperature. It is a footnote of interest, but I’ll present it just the same.

The Data
Most pertinent points I wanted to make on the data were presented in the previous post, so please refer to that for the details.

What is presented here is the trend over the last 60 months, which had been an upward slope that was brought back down thanks to the cooler anomalies (on a year over year basis) of the last 16 months. For all practical and measurable purposes, it shows pure flatness over the five year period, meaning no significant indicated trend in the temperatures over that period one way or the other.

Chart below:

Trend Line over Last 60 months – HadCrut

The next chart is simply a point of comparison. The highest slope value in recent years occurred with the 5-year period ending April 2004. The five year slope does wobble a lot thansk to it’s shortness. Every data point has higher influence than in longer curves, so to see the change from 2004 is not necessarily a surprise, but it is worth noting that we have not seen a trend line reach those levels in 8 years.

Peak 60 Month Trend Line

Finally, I just wanted to graphically show what has transpired with the slopes over the last number of months in response to the lower anomalies. A longer view chart would have gone back to the 2004 peak to show the continual decline in slope measurements.

Trend in recent 60-month slopes