A Different View of Global Temperature Data

I decided to resurrect the NCDC Absolute Global Temperature data from an earlier series of posts and plot the monthly Absolute Global Temperature data of 2008 against the monthly values of the individual years from 2000 to 2007. Refer to Figure 1.
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Figure 1

2008 (RED) started with the lowest global temperatures of the new millennium, a result of the significant La Nina event, then wavered back and forth from month to month, but no monthly temperature this year rose above the highest of the monthly temperatures for the past nine years. Presently, global temperatures are in the vicinity of those during 2000 and 2001.

Figure 2 illustrates the monthly global temperatures for this year (RED) versus the average monthly global temperatures for the prior 15 years (GREEN). For the past few months, global temperatures are close to matching the average of the monthly values for the period of 1993 to 2007.
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Figure 2

SOURCE

NCDC Absolute Temperature can be calculated using the monthly anomaly data ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/anomalies/monthly.land_and_ocean.90S.90N.df_1901-2000mean.dat
and the Global Mean Monthly Surface Temperature Estimates for the Base Period 1901 to 2000 listed in the table located about two-thirds of the way down the following webpage. http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/research/anomalies/anomalies.html