Hachijojima, Isolated Rural Island In Pacific, Shows No Warming In 80 Years

By Kirye
and Pierre Gosselin

Hachijojima is a volcanic Japanese island some 287 kilometers south of Tokyo, to which it belongs. 7,522 people live on its 63 km² of area.

Image cropped from Google Maps.

What makes Hachijojima interesting climatically is its rural, non-urban features – in the middle of the ocean –  making station siting there less prone to factors that could corrupt the data, such as airports, asphalt, concrete, steel and other heat-sink-acting infrastructure.

Today we look at data from the Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA) going back almost 80 years. Hearing all the claims about a rapidly warming world from the media, many readers would think that there must be warming happening there as well. The data have a surprise in store.

Summer

Now that summer has ended, we plot the latest data to see if summers have indeed been warming at this island.

Data source: JMA

As the above data show, there has been virtually no trend at all over the past 80 years. Warming? Still no sign of it at all.

Winter

Next we look at the mean winter temperatures at this location since 1947:

Data source: JMA

Like summer, also winter has shown no long-term trend one way or the other. Where’s the bad climate change news here?

Annual

To round out the analysis and to summarize, we plot the annual mean temperature data recorded for Hachjojima:

Data source: JMA

Interestingly, the annual temperature behavior appears to follow a cyclic behavior that very much resemble some ocean surface temperature cycles we see from around the globe, like the PDO or AMO. Climate indeed changes, but what we see above it cannot be due to anything anthropogenic.