An addition to this post on 5 year averages/ But today I am using data from the UK. I had to first calculate the 1971-2000 anomalies. I started using that baseline because Canadian data that I downloaded already had the 1971-2000 normals calculated.

The last 5 years are on average .66C cooler than the previous 5 years, and .16C colder than the 5 year period before that, and also .1C colder than the period  starting in the late 1980s.

As I noted in the blog post on Washington, the thing that struck me about this graph is that previous 5 years were not hotter than many, many other periods. By not hotter I mean the positive anomalies were not larger. What made the previous 5 years “warmer” was the absence of really large negative anomalies. The recent 5 year period saw the first anomaly colder than -4C  since the 1980s and two colder than -2C  when there had not been any in the previous 10 year period. The occasional really cold anomaly is part of climate. I wonder why they went away? And why did they come back?