Guest post by Steven Goddard
http://www.dontmesswithtexas.org/
Dallas, Texas broke their all time record snowfall record this week. How does this compare with earlier Februaries in Texas? February can be a very warm month in Texas. San Antonio hit 100 degrees on February 21, 1996. December and January can also be very hot, with San Antonio reaching 90 degrees on Christmas Day 1955 and 89 degrees on January 30, 1971.
Brenham, Texas is a relatively rural area (population 13,500) centrally located between San Antonio, Houston and Dallas. They have a good temperature record extending back nearly 120 years. According to USHCN records, Brenham was at least as warm 100 years ago as it is now.
Dublin, Texas is another good rural site west of Dallas (population 3,700) which also shows no warming over the last 100 years. Note the big drop in temperatures for both sites around 1960.
Temple, Texas (near Waco) is more of an Urban Heat Island with a population of 60,000 but still shows a similar pattern. The UHI effect is clearly visible over the last 30 years.
Do the Urban Heat Islands of Dallas, Houston, Austin and San Antonio show warming? Absolutely. Does UHI skew the overall temperature data for Texas? Absolutely. San Antonio is the seventh largest city in the US. Houston is the fourth largest city in the US and Dallas is the eighth largest city in the US.
CNN warned yesterday “More Snow Is Coming South” Alarmists blame this on global warming. What would they say if it hit 100 degrees this week in February, like it did in 1996? What do readers think?
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Isn’t It predicted to be one of the hottest summers this year also
I have lived in Texas all of my life. We have always had droughts, floods, sandstorms and blizzards ( in the Panhandle ). I have fished on a lake on December 24th in a t-shirt. I have hunted in November wearing every piece of warm clothing I owned.
My point is, except for moving from SW Texas to NE Texas and experiencing a lot more rain, everything is basically the same.
This past week I saw more snow, 12″, than I ever have in my 61 years here in Texas. The past 9 summers have been reasonably mild, as have the winters. Consequently, we have had fewer tornadoes and hurricanes the past few years.
I personally hope the weather continues it’s up and down swings. Nothing I , or we can do to change it anyway and it gives us old fogies something to talk about other than politics!
How long will it take to make a simple comparison of rural against urban stations, the writing is on the wall.
Rob, I asked a similar question some time ago. It would be a very useful exercise. I truly believe that climate change temperatures trends should exclude all readings taken from urban and other developed areas such as airports for the simple reason they are poisoned by urban heat island and other man-made factors a they develop and expand over time. It’s obvious to anyone with half a brain that most developed areas have a bias to warmer temperatures that otherwise would not exist if the areas were in their original natural state. So, only naturally located readings should be used.
I wonder how well correlated UHI is with central air conditioning installations…
I’ll bet that and paving gravel and chipped stone parking areas at the types of locations where the stations have been are extremely well correlated with the observed increases in temperatures, especially at some “rural” sites.
In fact, I’ll bet you that there’s a pretty decent correlation between El Nino and La Nina adjusted temperture anomalies and 5 year average in asphalt sales in the US.
I’m just sayin’…
Thank you, Steven Goddard, for keeping the spotlight of public attention focused on Climategate iceberg and the lying scoundrels that have violated the most sacred fundamentals of science.
I have been an active researcher for 50 years now.
I can assure you that much, much more filth will come floating to the surface as the Climategate iceberg melts.
Climatology is not the only science that has been terribly disgraced by consensus “group science.”
Since the return of Apollo with the first lunar samples in 1969, the same consensus “group science” has taken control of our most prestigious journals (Nature, Science, etc) and research institutions (NAS, NASA, DOE, Cal-tech, Harvard, University of Chicago, University of Bern, etc) and reduced astronomy, astrophysics, planetary science, solar and space sciences, nuclear and particle physics to popular fairy tales.
Earth’s heat source is not a ball of Hydrogen (H), it is not heated primarily by H-fusion, solar neutrinos do not oscillate away to preserve fairy tales, neutrons repulsion powers the stars and the cosmos, nuclear matter is dissociating rather than fusing together in our vibrant universe, etc., etc.
Keep up the good work!
Oliver K. Manuel
Emeritus Professor of
Nuclear & Space Sciences
Former NASA PI for Apollo
Something simple, all stations in towns of 15,000 population, or less. Original data. No “homogenized” data.
Time to drive a stake into the heart of this vampire, once, and for all.
Would, also, be a great project for Germany, and England.
To me the most interesting feature of the rural datasets is that the recent warming spell fails to achieve the height or duration of the 1930s warming spell.
One could also argue that being downwind of the Pacific that prticular part of the world is highly sensitive to ENSO / PDO influences and more likely than other locations to give an accurate reflection of the overwhelming oceanic influences on global tropospheric air temperatures.
Far from being concerned about a warming trend one could fairly argue that in fact there has been a global net downward trend since the first part of the 20th Century but in many locations it has been disguised by or even overridden by UHI effects and misguided warmist ‘adjustments’ in completely the wrong direction.
Joe Romm on climate progresws Jan 2009 says drought in the southwest is permanente. No floods in LA, no bluizzards in Arizona and no snow Houston and Dallas.
http://climateprogress.org/2009/07/11/drought-news-once-in-a-century-texas-drought-stunting-crops-drought-twice-as-likely-to-lead-to-mental-health-problems/
He was wrong.
I suppose that is raw data!? You are not allowed to use that!! Send it to the Hockey Team and you will get back the correct graph. Regards from colder than normal Swiss mountains. Fred
Don’t worry. After a few adjustments Hansen will work his magic and the data will become a kooky stick,
Texas winters are usually enjoyable with clear blue days with temps occasionally in the 70s. The monotony of mild winters is sometimes broken by blue northers where the temperature drops 50 degrees in 30 minutes (accompanied by 50 mile per hour winds). This winter was just dull and grey and cold.
But one of the things I’ve learned from this site, is we got exactly the winter one would expect in an el nino year. Not climate change, just weather.
Your “clearly visible. 30 year UHI on Waco looks identical to your non-UHI Brenham. Just sayin’.
OT but is anyone digging for old peer reviews or news about “less snow” to show the double standard? We have the “snowfalls are a thing of the past” and I found stuff from circa 2004 blaming GW for Ski industry troubles due to declining snowfall…..
I think the Nobel should be taken away from Gore & the IPCC. For those who agree don’t forget to sign the petition: http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/nomorenobel/
Ecotretas
Nice graphs, Steven. Can we see them with the entire range of temps including the standard deviations? Just wondering if they show the narrowing of the extremes and SD that I’m seeing here.
My next video should be done today and posted. In there I’m suggesting how future graphs should be displayed. The video covers combining data to fill gaps in records.
Same graph in Scandinavia.
http://joannenova.com.au/2010/02/scandinavia-gate/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+JoNova+%28JoNova%29
In Statistics we meet the notion of the “null hypothesis”, i.e., that the current situation is indistinguishable from the previous situation; the notion that it’s “business as usual”.
The discipline of Significance Testing asks the following question: “If today is different to yesterday (as it always is to some extent) how sure are we that the change is something qualitatively new as opposed to being within the known and familiar range”. Significance limits may be set at 90%, 95%, 99% or elsewhere, according to circumstances. In layman’s language, we’d say, “It’s less than certain, but it’s good enough for me.”
I hereby propose a detailed study of the Urban Heat Island Effect. Its null hypothesis would be: “that there is, to 99% significance, no difference between temperatures at the centre of 100,000-population towns and a temperatures at a 10km perimeter.” And then let the facts speak.
The Gore Brigade have failed to demolish the null hypothesis that temperatures in recent decades are insignificantly different to those of past centuries. The general public continue to believe in this null hypothesis. This is not surprising: beneath the byzantine complexity of Statistical Method lies a solid core of common sense, a quality which sadly disappears in some scientists who place their seat on the gravy train before their professional integrity.
I grew up in Texas and learned one very important thing: don’t go to Galveston without shoes on if you don’t want your feet to burn on the asphalt.
Steven,
Thanks for this post but you are starting to sound like a broken record……So South East U.S and parts of Europe and Russia are having a cooler than normal winter. Does this disprove GLOBAL warming? Of course not. The vast majority of the world’s land mass (e.g Africa, Australia, South America, Alaska, NW U.S, Canada, the Middle East, Central and South East Asia, Greenland, Antarcitica) —and let’s not forget the world’s oceans– were significantly warmer than normal last month (breaking a new Global Janaury record in the satellite data). http://www.drroyspencer.com/. And who knows, February could break a record as well.
The fact is that most of the readers to this blog happen to live in the U.S and Europe so think the cooler than normal temperatures in those regions are being felt by everyone else on the planet. I can assure they are not.
As we all know, record high temperatures now outnumber record low temperatures in the US two to one. Global warming amounts to about 0.7°C over the last 50 years, far less than the seasonal temperature range, and far less than the natural variability of the weather, so the records of individual weather stations don’t contradict global warming any more than individual weather events do. The natural variability in the climate system means that only long-term trends over large areas can be used to infer (or contradict) changes in climate, and those trends all show changes consistent with warming (i.e. melting glaciers, climate zones shifting polewards and uphill, declining snow cover etc.)
You know what they say about the weather around here (Houston) – “if you don’t like it, just stick around for a day or two – it’ll change”
Bit like the climate really……………. it changes
I lived in Austin Texas for three wonderful years. I remember very clearly one winter (either ’83 or ’84) when we had snow (lying on the ground – around 4- 6 inches I think), and ice on the roads. The temperature, as I recall, was down to around 16F. Maybe my memory’s not to good, but it was certainly well below freezing.
Rob, Peter, et al:
I’m not sure rural vs urban should be a preoccupation. A rural site can show “uhi” effect even though it’s not technically urban. Temple, in the above post, is well out of town in an area I would consider rural. But it’s at a water treatment plant which pretty clearly has some recent construction that may have affected the readings.
The real mind blower is that MMS shows that Temple was closed December 2, 2003. So where do those last 6 years (with the huge temperature spike) come from?
OK, make that 5 years.