Call me crazy, but I ran the average annual temperatures from Environment Canada for Alert, Nunavut, through a graph to see what the trendline would look like. I figured that Alert would be much more immune to regional greenhouse effects as a result of cloud cover, which Toronto obviously suffers from, as well as other large urban centres who take temperature recordings near airports.

The data record is extraordinarily consistent. The average annual temperature in the Arctic has ranged between -16 to -18 Celsius from 1951 to 2005, with a mean temperature of -18 Celsius. Which is interesting because the past five years on record have recorded temperatures ranging from -19.4 Celsius to -16.7 Celsius. That’s a variance from the mean temperature of 1.4 degrees colder and 1.3 degrees warmer, which is quite a bit on both sides. The average temperature for the past decade has been -17.5 Celsius, or 0.5 degrees warmer than the previous 54 years on record.

The warmest year on record in Alert, the high Arctic, took place in 1981 at -15.9 Celsius. The second warmest year was 1998 at -16.3 Celsius. It’s true that the nineties appear to have been responsible for the main variance along the timeline, with two of the three warmest years occurring in the nineties, while two in the top six come from the eighties. Only 2005 made it into the top ten for warmest, the time period which is cited as leading up to the great Arctic warming period in the late “aughts”. But 2004 ranks as the second coldest on record in 54 years of data, at -19.4. The coldest of all was in 1979 at -19.7.

But because Alert has a huge temperature range swing, I decided to graph average winter and summer temperatures as well, to see what the variance is there. Instead of the entire summer, I chose July as being clearly the warmest month, and February as the coldest month, even though the average difference between January, February, and March is only a degree. This gives a five month spacing between temperature readings, instead of the proper six, but it will more accurately reflect record cold and record warm temperatures.

Alert July Temperature Variance 1951-2005: Environment Canada

What’s interesting about this graph is that it shows very little variation over the long term, but perhaps surprisingly, the trendline shows a decline in temperatures over the past 54 years in Alert during the summer. The average summer temperature has been 3.5 Celsius in July, with the past 10 years showing a warming variance of an almost statistically insignificant +0.2 Celsius. The warmest July on record occurred in 1956, at 6.2 Celsius, while the second warmest was in 2003 at 5.8 Celsius. Five of the six warmest July’s in Alert occurred in the fifties and sixties. The coldest July was recorded in 1955 at 0.7 Celsius. The last year for which temperature data is available, 2005, is ranked 40th warmest from 54 years of data.

Alert February Temperature Variance 1951-2005: Environment Canada

The fluctuations for February were very surprising, particularly the massive cold snap in 1979. The trendline over the past 54 years is almost a complete flatline. If it’s getting warmer in the winter, it certainly hasn’t happened over the past 20 years. The average temperature, despite massive fluctuations from year to year, has been -33.4 Celsius. The past ten years of data has been -33.2 Celsius, which is again just +0.2 degrees warmer. The warmest February on record was -26.6 Celsius in 1978, while the second warmest occurred in the last year of the data set, 2005, at -27.3 Celsius. The top 10 warmest years have a great variety of time periods, with two occurring in the sixties, and three in the eighties. The coldest February on record occurred in 1979 at -43.9 Celsius, with the second coldest occurring during the “warmest decade” in 2002, when it hit -39.2 Celsius.

Make of all this data as you will. Adding in the years 2006-2009 is unlikely to influence the results significantly, but if anyone has that data set, feel free to pass it along.