February global temperatures for 2008 have started to come out with UAH lower troposphere temperatures the first off the blocks. As reported by Anthony Watts global temperatures were stable with a slight increase of 0.05C from the january 2008 global temperature.

However, the big change in the UAH this month was in the southern hemisphere, continuing to decline to -0.21C from 0.02C the previous month.

Update: RSS reports a global increase of +0.06C and southern hemisphere change of -0.12C.

It will be interesting to see what happens to global temperatures in March 2008. In past years, downswings in temperatures have rapidly rebounded to higher levels. There is some evidence that this downswing corresponds with a discrete change in ocean circulation, in which case we may not see a rebound this time. Here are the links to the data sets.

Predictably, there has also been much side-talk on the blogs about ‘a single year does not a trend make’. For the record, I did an analysis here which showed that when the non-normality of changes in climate is taken into account, events of this magnitude are actually not that unusual.