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When searching for continental trends in climate I could not find clear sources broken down to regions or continents.

My question is: is it proper to talk of global warming as a homogenous trend or is there actually a difference between trends when the data is broken down per continent or region for example. Can anyone point me to clear sources on climate change trends per region or continent?

A hypothetical example would be: while the south-American climate remains stable polar climates warm up. Or, the poles warm up faster than south-American climate.

St.Clair Bij
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Is climate change homogenous globally?

Not at all. The Arctic (both the Arctic Ocean and far northern land masses) has and will continue to experience greater temperature changes than other parts of the Earth. Other than the Arctic, land masses have and will continue to experience greater temperature changes than the oceans.

The warming seen to date is a portrayed below. This image portrays annual temperature anomalies averaged over the last ten years, with anomalies relative to a 1951 to 1980 baseline.

Image portraying temperature anomalies averaged over the last ten years, compared to a 1951 to 1980 baseline. Arctic regions have experienced the greatest increases. A small number of spots have experienced cooling. Temperature changes are far from uniform.
Source: https://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/maps

Can anyone point me to clear sources on climate change trends per region or continent?

The IPCC reports is always a good start. The most recent is the fifth assessment report. The site I used to make the above map, Global Maps from GHCN v3 Data is also a good source.

David Hammen
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  • I love that you can see the water around antarctica cool as the land sheds its icecap. – John Apr 01 '17 at 15:38
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    @John Wait, I thought that Antarctica was not shedding its land icecap. Why do you think that it is? I thought the North-South temperature divide seen on the map had to do with the oceanic conveyor. – kingledion Apr 02 '17 at 00:24
  • @kingledion - What makes you think that? Antarctica is shedding its land icecap, particularly West Antarctica. – David Hammen Apr 02 '17 at 03:16
  • Shedding the ice cap should make it warmer not colder. Most of the ice lost has been along the tail of islands that reaches up towards the southern tip of south America. Note - that's the "Hot spot" in the otherwise, region that is warming the least. It's also worth measuring how many pixels in a map that size is actually lost ice-cap. Not all that many I would think. Sea ice covers a lot of surface area. Ice caps, a good deal less. I think @kingledion is right. – userLTK Apr 02 '17 at 07:01
  • The land position is drawn right on the map you don't have to guess. Plus you can look at a map on a longer time scale (start at 1950 instead of 2007)to see how exaggerated the trend is over the long run. https://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/maps/ I was just surprise you could see it over such a short time period. Set it for 1950-2017 and you can see the massive cooling greenland's ice loss is causing too. – John Apr 02 '17 at 12:26
  • @John The link you sent was only for Feb 2017. I re-did the map for the last 5 full years. To be honest, I am seeing very little heating or cooling effect either way in West Antarctica or the Southern ocean. I will investigate more, and probably pose this as a new question. Thanks for the link to the map-maker DavidHammen, I didn't know about that. – kingledion Apr 02 '17 at 22:41
  • Are you looking at anomalies or trends? The link just takes you to the site, I could not get a link to an individual setting that worked, and I couldn't edit the post after I realized. – John Apr 03 '17 at 00:41