One wonders why the story of a new paper covered on WUWT: NCAR: Number of record highs beat record lows – if you believe the quality of data from the weather stations did not include the 1930’s and 1940’s and earlier, conspicuously missing from the NCAR graphic below:
From: “The relative increase of record high maximum temperatures compared to record low minimum temperatures in the U.S.”Authors: Gerald A. Meehl, Claudia Tebaldi, Guy Walton, David Easterling, and Larry McDaniel Publication: Geophysical Research Letters (in press)
The answer: those decades are inconvenient to the conclusion Meehl makes from a cherrypicked portion of the US data. There were many many temperature records during this period. For example, Richard Alan Keen writes in email:
My book, Skywatch West, covers the weather and climate of the 11 western states, plus Alaska, plus 6 western Canadian provincs and territories.
The chapter on temperature extremes includes a chart of the occurrences (by decade) of the all-time extreme temperatures for each of the 18 states, provinces, and territories (a total of 36 records in all).
Some fun statistics from this are:
- Of the all-time record maximum temperatures, 10 occurred before 1940 (the first six decades), and 8 after (the second six decades).
- For record minimum temperatures, the reverse is true: 8 records before 1940, 10 afterwards.
- Half of the records – 8 maximum and 10 minimum, a total of 18 – occurred during the middle three decades of the 1930’s, 40’s, and 50’s, and of these nearly a third of the total (10) were during the 1930’s alone.
- No records occurred in the 2000’s up to the publication date of the book (2004). Since then Arizona’s record maximum was tied, but not broken, in 2007.
cheers, Rich
Here is his graphic:
Granted this is not the entire USA dataset, only western states, and one could say that I’m engaging in the same sort of cherrypicking that Meehl et al engages in by illustrating it here. But there’s more.
Let’s look at all the US data then. Last year in this thread on Climate audit David Smith writes:
The graph in #127 may be overly influenced by single extreme heat waves or cold snaps. So, here’s a look at broader populations.
The first is a look at the decades in which summer high temperature records were set. This covers the contiguous US for the three typically hottest months (June/July/August). A single nationwide event would affect the records for one month but not for all three, so this plot should be less-influenced by single extreme events.
The appearance is similar to the record high plot of #127.
Here is a similar plot except that it is for record lows in December, January and February:
There appears to be a modest downward trend in extreme cold events.
(Note: The final bar in each chart covers 2000-2003 (records posted as of May 2004) and is prorated so as to make an apples-to-apples visual display.)
Here’s the combination of the two:
Conclusion – the 1930s in the US were rough.
Note: The trendlines for all three graphs are essentially flat (no trend) if the prorated early 2000s are excluded from the trend calculations.
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Maybe someone has linked to this already:
http://newsbusters.org/blogs/tim-graham/2009/11/15/newsweek-admits-74-percent-gore-letters-are-critical-fail-publish-any
Another example of media manipulation.
The Journals and scientists that publish this nonsense are now going to get caught out everytime because of the internet, data availability and very able statisticians. They will HAVE to adapt or perish. You wonder whether it is worthwhile subscribing anymore to these journals… I am amazed that the journal editors are not obviously checking the raw data before accepting submissions or before letting IPCC friendly reviewers make a judgment……This is another one that will only boost the skeptics viewpoint.
Conclusion – the 1930s in the US were rough.
Assignment: Go find someone from the 30’s who remembers what it was like.
The stories I am getting from No. Calif. are it was no picnic here.
What was it like where you live?
Pointing to broken records as proof of a trend is meaningless anyway. Records will always be broken.
This is nothing new. IT’s funny how you’d think they’d want to include it (“look how high it is!”) but b/c it’s so high, it causes future trends to go down, lol.
THis is no different than the standard method of using charts incorrectly, when putting the lower limit of the Y-axis at some number other than zero, thus forcing a look of “anomolies”, visually accentuating the difference between values.
It’s just another “buyer beware” thing in my opinion. Same with voting. We have the power to stop this nonsense…all we have to do is vote these hucksters out.
rbateman Said:
“Conclusion – the 1930s in the US were rough.
Assignment: Go find someone from the 30’s who remembers what it was like.
The stories I am getting from No. Calif. are it was no picnic here.
What was it like where you live?”
The internet has plenty of stories:
The most visible evidence of how dry the 1930s became was the dust storm. Tons of topsoil were blown off barren fields and carried in storm clouds for hundreds of miles. Technically, the driest region of the Plains – southeastern Colorado, southwest Kansas and the panhandles of Oklahoma and Texas – became known as the Dust Bowl, and many dust storms started there. But the entire region, and eventually the entire country, was affected…
“The impact is like a shovelful of fine sand flung against the face,” Avis D. Carlson wrote in a New Republic article. “People caught in their own yards grope for the doorstep. Cars come to a standstill, for no light in the world can penetrate that swirling murk… We live with the dust, eat it, sleep with it, watch it strip us of possessions and the hope of possessions….
The impact of the Dust Bowl was felt all over the U.S. During the same April as Black Sunday, 1935, one of FDR’s advisors, Hugh Hammond Bennett, was in Washington D.C. on his way to testify before Congress about the need for soil conservation legislation. A dust storm arrived in Washington all the way from the Great Plains. As a dusty gloom spread over the nation’s capital and blotted out the sun, Bennett explained, “This, gentlemen, is what I have been talking about.”
http://www.livinghistoryfarm.org/farminginthe30s/water_02.html
Now all the Soil conservation methods introduced such as grass filter strips, fence line tree wind breaks are about to be eradicated by Waxman’s new Food Bill HR 2749 that has already passed the house.
See HR 2749: Food Safety’s Scorched Earth Policy: http://farmwars.info/?p=1284
This illustrates that the observed warming is not the world getting warmer so much as it is the world getting less cool. Interestingly enough, this is the type of pattern we expect to see from the UHI effect, where asphalt concrete and steel gain take longer to radiate heat than the surrounding natural lanscape.
My Parents:Pop an Eastern Oregon Cowboy-tophand of the BarMC- had stories of streams drying up cattle dying on the range,-of NE Oregon.Mom grew up in the
NW Kansas are she was the daughter of a Railroad Agent and spent time teaching
the Rancher’s kids of Smith County in One room schools .This was the Dust Bowl.She had to place towels in window sills to keep the dust out.Drive with the headlights on
in her 1919 whippet(quite a car for it’s day BTW) .Pop drove his Model A pickup
and in 1933-34-35 fought several forest fires that were only controlled by what passed for winter….
How about that? Mr. P Gosselin (05:25:24) :
Bruce Hall has done a similar analysis:
http://hallofrecord.blogspot.com/2009/11/critique-of-october-2009-ncar-study.html
I’ve never understood the rational behind tracking daily max-min temperatures except perhaps it’s fun. I’m willing to bet a lot of these record breakers are relatively small. A day at 87 tops a day at 86 in the books.
In any case, the number of extremes highly depends upon the values of previous extremes. Assuming most of the maxima/minima have already been hit, one would expect a downward trend in their numbers.
There is also a problem with binning the counts by decades. Counts from 1999 are lumped with counts from 1990 when perhaps they should be lumped with 2000. This only makes sense (and not much at that) if the data were cyclical.
Rather than perpetrating this questionable statistical exercise, why not point out the real problems associated with it ?
Maybe we have used up all the records for our current climate. Additionally if you stop looking then there are fewer records. Has the number of surface stations used in the temperature product been reduced? Has that reduction also been carried forward into the Min Max record product? Of course has the station siting had an effect on the records?
>>>Go find someone from the 30’s who remembers
>>>what it was like.
You mean someone like Wiki? Dirty Thirties, they were called, apparently.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dust_Bowl
.
.
Wiki also has this, which suggests that the Dust Bowl was not simply bad agriculture.
“the most severe heat wave in the modern history of North America.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1936_North_American_heat_wave
It must have been all those CO2 emissions.
.
Finally. Temperature data reported as a 3 month average. The cyclical nature of these records would be less choppy if the 3 month averages were reported thus as a moving 3-month average:
JFM
FMA
MAM
AMJ
MJJ
JJA
JAS
ASO
SON
OND
NDJ
DJF
and back to
JFM
Hmmm, a Caspar Amann associate?
DAV (06:22:43) : “Assuming most of the maxima/minima have already been hit, one would expect a downward trend in their numbers.”
There are ways around this. One is to take that theoretical expectation and remove it and see what the departures look like. It would be pretty easy, just have a y intercept at the maximum possible number of records and exponentially decay to an asymptote at zero.
The second way, which was done by Bruce (see my post above) is to give a tie to the newer record. This is not such a good method, however because it turns a downward bias into an upward bias, and means that records in the past will slowly dissappear even if they aren’t surpassed.
They tried to get rid of the Medieval Warm Period. Are they trying to get rid of the Dust Bowl years too? Maybe they just didn’t consider how quickly people would be reminded of the 1930’s and how that would make them look suspect.
Read Steinbecks ‘grapes of wrath’ that will tell you how hot it was in the US during the 1930’s.
Tonyb
It must have been a difficult time to live through the depression, drought, and the dust bowl. It makes me sympathetic to my grandparents for always yelling about me cleaning my plate, every drop, when eating because, they said, not everyone used to have a full plate of food to eat.
This type of “analysis” is absurd as is the paper by Meehl et al. You can have more records set in the 1930s but if you are still adding 10 to 20% as many records going forwards each decade, you could be adding on to the records of the thirties (its harder to break the thirties record so you do it fewer times). Imagine this was a graph for one place, then each record added, even if the number is fewer going forward would make it hotter than the 30s for those days. Similarly, for track and field: imagine the number of times the one mile race record was broken in each decade. You may find a fair number in the 1950s and 1960s and then it slows down, but each time it is broken, it is a new record – faster than in the 50s and 60s.
It is not only to be expected that the number of records going forward get fewer on average, but, if the records are a result of random variation as many sceptics believe, then predicting the number going forward is possible using permutations. Take the last record in your series and one can expect on average: the natural logarithm of “n” records going forward were “n” = number of years (or decades in this instance). I don’t have time but one could check out the randomness of the records in these articles going forward from, say, the decade of 1900 using this simple test and, more exciting still, can predict the average number of new records going forward (anyone?).
My Dad was a teenager in the 30’s. He lived in Memphis Tn. He tells of people driving their cattle from the Arkansas side of the river (Mississippi) to islands in the middle of the river due to lack of water any distance from the river. OF course this caused over grazing on the islands and soon the cattle were dying by the thousands. Dad said that you could see the carcasses floating down the river for months. He also mentions that houses back then were not insulated or nearly as air tight and the dust was everywhere. Dad will be 92 in March and is very lucid in his memory. According to him the 30’s were a tough time for real.
Bill Derryberry
I pay attention mainly to my local environment, which at present means southeastern Wyoming, but I have noticed among weather records for this area the disproportionate number of heavy snowfalls and outbreaks of arctic air that occurred after 1950 as opposed to before 1950. Mr. Keen now shows that this is a general pattern over a much larger region.
There are lies, there are damned lies, and then there are statistics.
I have learned never believe a dataset. It is too easy to think that data does anything but help explain and model the world. Our Datasets are imperfect but our interpretation can be even worse.
This is not to say don’t use them, just don’t simply believe them, even if you modeled it yourself. I cannot tell you how many times one mistake, or a skipped observation period, ( such as not placing in the 1930’s ) will give me a different answer then what I expected.
It is unfortunate that the press gets a hold of things like this and touts it rather then critically examine it.
Bruckner8 wrote: It’s just another “buyer beware” thing in my opinion. Same with voting. We have the power to stop this nonsense…all we have to do is vote these hucksters out.
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Try voting out the EPA. Not gonna happen.
Or the IPCC, for that matter.