Candide - direct El Nino for the first few months and then 7 months of lag before La Nina starts to reduce temperatures. Sounds like an El Nino controlled year to me.

A long, long, time ago

In first-year chemistry (for engineers)...

I was required to perform a lab "experiment" (really a demonstration of principle), based on our previous experiment, the Bomb calorimeter.

In this subsequent and marginally more advanced "experiment", rather than merely assessing the outputs of a first-order exothermic reaction, we were required to monitor the *temperature* of a mixture of materials in the presence of a reaction that produced a previously calibrated amount of "heat" (really "energy" that the simpler system registered as increased temperature). The more complex system involved not just a liquid and a negligible gas volume, but a large gas volume, some liquid and in later segments of the experiment, some ice.

It was noted that there were:
Pressure differences, suggesting a change of state.
Volume differences in the fluid, suggesting thermal expansion, neglecting evaporation.
A reduction in the mass of ice, and in it's density (achieved by only one lab group due to careful technique).
Barely significant (in terms of measurability) change in average temperature.

The same amount of "heat" still went in.

What happened when the thermal buffers were exhausted, you ask?

The bacteria died.

Rusty.

Malrob - tnks for that.. will look..

Curmudgeon
And also look up the complete debunking of McLean and Carter.

Peter A. when the debunkers come up with a forecast as accurate as that of deFreitas, McLean and Carter then maybe I will believe them. But I am still waiting.

And what 'accurate forecast' would that be exactly, malrob?