Global Warming in Texas

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!

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.

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

Would, also, be a great project for Germany, and England.

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.

Don’t worry. After a few adjustments Hansen will work his magic and the data will become a kooky stick,

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…..

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.

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.

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?

Speaking of global warming, does anybody know the average temps for Vancouver? Accuweather shows 44F as the average high for this time of year, but the MSM keeps talking about how ‘climate change’ is affecting the games.
I also caught the bit last night on NBC’s Olympic coverage about how polar bears are endangered and how their numbers are decreasing in Canada.

kristen,
The UK Met Office forecast in December that 2010 will be the hottest year ever globally. Right after they made that forecast, the UK plunged into a deep freeze and has not warmed back up yet.
“The gods, too, are fond of a joke.”
– Aristotle

You think Brenham is a good rural station. Between 1980 and 2008, it shows warming of 0.4 C/decade.
You think San Antonio is showing UHI. Between 1980 and 2008, it shows warming of 0.44 C/decade.
So you can’t just eyeball SAT, and decide it’s just UHI.
Interestingly, the cooling in Brenham from 1900 to 1940 was introduced by the adjustments. The U-shaped curve is *not* in the raw data. Although, to be fair, the raw data post 1980 is also a bit wonky.
“Does UHI skew the overall temperature data for Texas? Absolutely. ”
Concluding that will require a bit more work than noting there are a few big cities in Texas, and showing 4 plots (including rural ones) that have recent warming.
If you don’t like any old stations, there’s been a CRN site in the vicinity at Palestine since 2003. You could see how well it correlates with USHCN stations over that time period.

Someone posted in the Guardian that LI et al 2004 supports the Jones 1960 china UHI study which shows no significant UHI influence in the global data set.
Is the Li 2004 study reliable.

I guess George Bush knew.

Is it a sort of mind-set, or just a form of religious weather fanaticism? If it’s too hot, that’s naturally caused by global warming; if it’s too cold, that’s also caused by global warming; if it’s too dry, that’s surely caused by global warming; if it’s too wet, that’s doubtless caused by global warming; if it’s too windy, that’s unquestionably caused by global warming; if it’s too calm … whoa, when can it ever be too calm?
Oops — maybe it can never be calm enough to suit the politicians on Martha’s Vineyard who adamantly oppose wind farming in Nantucket Sound because that would spoil their pristine views. Maybe all this stuff depends on whose eco-religion is being being schismatized.

Oliver K. Manuel (04:35:50)
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
Remember the Clock of the end of the world? Who were its promoters?
I think that it has happened a few years back in the past, when science replaced experimentation (empireia-practice) by speculation and all kinds of nightmarish cosmological theories appeared since then and its discoverers promoted by the MSM as show business stars. In this endeavour humanity missed a lot and was deceived a lot as with the current Climate-Gate.

Even rural stations have to be carefully vetted. Look at the significant UHI effect Hinkel found at little Barrow, AK.

The only one with a more upward trend is the one at, you guessed it, at the airport!
Is this one of those suspect sites in and around airports that Anthony talks about?
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA

imapopulistnow (07:17:10) :
> “I think it would be an interesting exercise to pick the 100 most rural temperature stations and plot the combined change in temperature over the last 100 years. This would provide a raw data base to compare UHI and AGW data manipulation against.”
It’s been done a few times. Most notably in “Global rural temperature trends”, Peterson et al, GRL 26: 329-332 (1999)

Re: Oliver K. Manuel (Feb 16 04:35),
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.
I take great exception to this blanket statement of yours.
It certainly is not true in my field, particle physics, which in my 40 year experience I saw changing views and research directions several times.
Climatology is in this state because of the corruption of the money and the power politics behind it. If politicians had not climbed on the band wagon this AGW would have been a scientific fad, and they exist, that would be overturned by better data and theories without spreading misery to the world. No other scientifice discipline has been preempted like that ( except nuclear physics during WWII for the creation of the bomb).
Certainly some science is popularized, and it should be, but to call it fairy tales is beyond the pale.
You do not sound very reasonable:
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.
That neutrinos oscillate I know for sure, and the errors are not climatology errors and the scrutiny of the data was intense. Judging from this the value I give to this paragraph of yours is very low.
I can state with Terry Pratchett that the earth is a disk riding on four elephants which ride on a turtle and the sun is a ball of flame going around them and the elephants lift up their legs for the sun and moon to go by without colliding with them. Lovely books where light has such low velocity that it pours down the mountains.
So are you peddling science fiction ?

MJK,
You seem to have forgotten about Europe, Russia, Central Asia, the North Atlantic and North Pacific which have all been exceptionally cold. The “average” global temperature tells you nothing about the distribution. Russia is by far the largest country on earth. Your claim that the vast majority of land was above normal is not accurate.
http://www.remss.com/data/msu/graphics/tlt/medium/global/ch_tlt_2010_01_anom_v03_2.png

wws,
I used to live in Spring, Texas just north of Houston. We would often have frost in the morning when downtown Houston was in the fifties.
I also remember driving south from Phoenix, Arizona on I-10 one night in July, 1985. Temperature in Phoenix was close to 100 degrees and 20 miles south (same elevation) was in the 70s.

anna v @ 7:47:49 Wow, did you just reveal your ignorance. Everyone knows the world is supported on the backs of a series of turtles and it’s turtles all the way down.
=============================

The way I’d do the temperature record analysis:
1) Construct a global synthetic temperature field covering 100+ years with known time variation
2) Add known (time-varying) amounts of UHI at the positions of urban centres
3) Add known amounts of measurement noise
4) Use the coordinates and timespans of GHCN stations as sampling points on this synthetic “raw” temperature field. Apply the GHCN processng algorithms as normal.
5) See if the temperature trend you get out matches what you know you put in. For extra credit, simulate the effects of microsite effects, site relocations and instrumental response functions.

Steve Goddard (08:01:31) :
Steven, I think the link to the global map you provide supports my point very nicely. The areas of red/yellow (warm) significantly out weigh the areas of blue (cooler). It shows precisely why we had the global record in January despite the cool spots in SE U.S, Europe and Russia. P.S you might want to look up a defintion of Central Asia- the region is covered in red/yellow (i.e warmer than normal).
http://www.remss.com/data/msu/graphics/tlt/medium/global/ch_tlt_2010_01_anom_v03_2.png

MJK,
We are having an El Nino, so most of the Pacific is above normal.
I was arguing your assertion “The vast majority of the world’s land mass is significantly above normal.” That isn’t true. The land temperature average was heavily skewed by Greenland and Canada, but that does not provide any information about the distribution.

Jim Steele (08:45:00) :
“Using the logic that the MWP was not a “global phenomenon”, because only the northern hemisphere provides enough evidence but not enough from the southern, so why then doesn’t a cold northern hemisphere suggest likewise that the present warming is indeed not global.”
January relative warmth is considered global simply because it shows up in the global mean. Likewise, the MWP would be considered global if it shows up in the global mean. In neither case is it required that the temperature anomaly be actually uniform throughout the Earth.
But fixating on a single January is missing the point. A single January is weather, not climate. The real story is in the trends. The trend is for warming everywhere on Earth except for a part of Antarctica and a couple patches of ocean. If you take a snapshot of the Earth at any given moment, you will definitely find some cold spots, but even in those spots, if you look over time, you’ll see a general (but noisy) warming trend.

By the way, Brenham is the home of Blue Bell Ice Cream, one of the most popular brands in Texas. I don’t know how big their facility is, but clearly they would require a great deal of refrigeration equipment that could contribute to a mini-UHI. Would be interesting to see where the weather station is sited relative to their plant.

Steven Goddard, thanks for precise, individual examples of climate change/no change (and if these familiar oscillations continue we on Earth will be most fortunate). Your explanation of temps in Texas help all readers to see and understand the experimental proof (if our instruments are well sited and well regulated) necessary to assess global warming/cooling.
Anna v and Kim, I like “This is Turtle Island”.

I like those four graphs. I can comprehend their minor drawbacks and then place some faith in each one of them. The biggest drawback other than the tricky UHI factor is that they are mean averages which can be very misleading. If we now take the mean temperature for Brenham on any given day and combine this with the mean temperature for, say, the Antarctic Peninsular, on the same day, then what I have then is not a fact in the mathematical sense, but a non integer detached from all reality. Proceed from there around the world, and, given the very best of data, I am left to wonder whether there is any justification for attempting statistical analysis of the resulting figure.
It seems to me that climate scientists are giving the statistical system more credit than it deserves.

This one JonesII (09:21:05) has no meaning without this posted before:
JonesII (09:13:49) : Your comment is awaiting moderation

Quote: Jerry (06:33:48) :
OT, but Oliver K. Manuel made some fascinating claims:
“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.”
Can someone here give me some good links about these ideas? I’d like to read more, in detail.
Thanks!
– – – – – – – – –
Reply to Jerry:
1. Go to my research profile, with links to several papers: http://myprofile.cos.com/manuelo09
2. Join the discussion about neutron repulsion:
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/neutron_repulsion/join or
mailto:neutron_repulsion-subscribe@yahoogroups.com
3. Read the recent paper and backtrack the references:
“Earth’s Heat Source-The Sun”, Energy and Environment 20 (2009) 131-144
http://arxiv.org/pdf/0905.0704

Frank (06:39:29) :
“It is unfortunate that UK newspapers seem to be the only ones who will present the facts.”
Maybe the US media cannot keep the lid on anymore?
Wall Street Journal;
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703630404575053781465774008.html?mod=WSJ_article_MoreIn

The 6th Grader UHI video, once again! 😎

MJK,
If you looked at an equal area projection centered over Asia you would see that there are about equal areas of land “significantly” above and below normal. Russia is a huge country. You also don’t see Antarctica because RSS doesn’t include it.

re – Mike C in NS (10:58:04) :
From the “Peter and his Dad” video, where they compared Rural vs Urban sites within in the US:
Global Warming US Cities Getting Warmer

In the study, rural sites are within 100 km of the urban site.
They chose these sites in Texas
R Boerne 29.8 N 98.7 W 425722530080 rural area
U San Antonio/I 29.5 N 98.5 W 425722530000 1,324,000
Both sites have continuous data for 1904 to 2006, with no gaps, per GISS. Here are my spreadsheet calculations for these two sites.
Average Annual Temp Deg C for 1904 to 2006
Boerne ________________18.6
San Antonia/I__________20.0
Difference______________1.4
Linear trend Deg C per 100 yrs
Boerne ________________-0.33
San Antonia/I___________ 1.22
Trend of deltas__________1.55
Looking at the data-
The temperature differences are at least 1 DegC higher at Urban “San Antonia/I” every year after 1943.
By 1984 the annual temperature differences have grown to about 2 DegC, and continue to average 2 degrees difference for the 23 years 1984 through 2006.

typo
the Urban site is “San Antonio/I” (not San Antonia, which was my poor typing).

anna v (07:47:49) quotes Oliver K. Manuel (Feb 16 04:35):
“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.”
OM : The above is factually correct. I should have also included our most trusted news media – BBC, CBS, PBS, NBC, etc.
– – – – – –
av: “I take great exception to this blanket statement of yours. It certainly is not true in my field, particle physics, which in my 40 year experience I saw changing views and research directions several times. . . .
OM: You worked in particle physics? Did you publish any papers? Please provide a link to your research profile.
– – – – – –
av: Certainly some science is popularized, and it should be, but to call it fairy tales is beyond the pale.
OM: A spade is a darn shovel: Modern astronomy, astrophysics, cosmology, etc. are fairy tales.
There is not a ball of Hydrogen anywhere in the universe, but this lightest of all elements covers the surfaces of almost all of them.
Wake up!
– – – – – –
av: You do not sound very reasonable:
OM: You do?
– – – – – –
av quotes OM: “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.”
OM: That is what the data tell us.
– – – – – –
av: That neutrinos oscillate I know for sure, and the errors are not climatology errors and the scrutiny of the data was intense.
OM: What detectors did you use to independently conclude that “neutrinos oscillate I know for sure”?
I made a few measurements on double beta decay, a very slow decay process that produces two neutrinos (v):
(A,Z) => (A, Z ± 2) + 2 e + 2 v
Our measurements confirmed that basic conservations laws are preserved for these neutrino producing events over time periods up to ~10^24 years [Nuclear Physics A453 (1986) 26-44; Nuclear Physics A457 (1986) 285; Nuclear Physics A 481 (1988) 477-483; Journal of Physics G: Nuclear and Particle Physics 17, S221-S229 (1991); Nuclear Physics A529 (1991) 29-38].
And you claim to have independent evidence neutrinos oscillate away before they can travel from the core of the Sun to the neutrino−detectors here on Earth?
– – – – – –
av: Judging from this the value I give to this paragraph of yours is very low.
OM: I will await information on your neutrino detector.
– – – – – –
av: I can state with Terry Pratchett that the earth is a disk riding on four elephants which ride on a turtle and the sun is a ball of flame going around them and the elephants lift up their legs for the sun and moon to go by without colliding with them. Lovely books where light has such low velocity that it pours down the mountains.
OM: You just did.
– – – – – –
av: So are you peddling science fiction ?
OM: No, you’ve got that market cornered.
– – – – – –
I look forward to details of you neutrino measurements.
With kind regards,
Oliver K. Manuel
Emeritus Professor of
Nuclear & Space Studies
Former NASA PI for Apollo

MJK,
I did an equal area projection of land areas from Spencer’s image and removed colored areas where temperatures were close to normal.
http://docs.google.com/View?id=ddw82wws_40642t373gp
Most of the land surface is close to normal, but the large January land anomaly was dominated by portions of Canada and Greenland.

Dave in Delaware (11:47:16) :
“By 1984 the annual temperature differences have grown to about 2 DegC, and continue to average 2 degrees difference for the 23 years 1984 through 2006.”
That tells you that the two stations have similar trends over that time period. Absolute temperatures are not important here; trends are. If UHI causes a steady offset of 2 C over the period of interest, then UHI is not important to the analysis over that period.
The relevant slopes are during the period of purported warming. I’ll go 1980 to current, in USHCN data (not GISS; these stations stop in 2006 in GISS)
Linear trend, Raw, deg C/decade
Boerne +0.27
San Antonio Airport +0.30
Linear trend, adjusted, deg C/decade
Boerne +0.28
San Antonio Airport +0.44
If you were thinking Boerne was a good UHI-less station, then there was real warming there in the last ~30 years. It’s there in the raw data, it’s there in the adjusted data.
San Antonio Airport shows a similar trend in the raw data, and a bit stronger in the adjusted. Go figure, but it can happen. I’d have to check how much of that was TOB, and how much of it was homogenisation.

The AGW fabulists have completely misused the term “climate”, and attempting to claim that “climate” and “weather” are entirely different things is preposterous. Climate is defined by no more than a collection or series of weather events. The cry that a few local warm weather events in other parts of the world offsets the reasonably measured cold weather events across widespread areas in the US, Europe and Asia beggers belief. So exactly how many temperature stations are monitored in Asia or China, or South America or Africa? Using highly localized warm weather events at a few points across the planet to ballyhoo their fabulist beliefs and then crying foul when measured widespread cold weather events across the US and Europe are cited is the height of arrogance.
The lack of world wide temperature measuring stations, and lack of assurance of even quality control at the few temperature measuring stations there are in other parts of the world demonstrates that it is no more than dogma the AGW fabulists are spouting.
Anthony has well demonstrated that our own temperature measuring stations measure other than the general or “average” temperature of the air in many instances, beyond the immediate extremely local area of the measuring stations, and there has been no generally accepted methodology of making all of the “adjustments” to the raw temperate data that these fabulists have been making.

carrot eater (09:13:44) :
Jim Steele (08:45:00) :
“Using the logic that the MWP was not a “global phenomenon”, because only the northern hemisphere provides enough evidence but not enough from the southern, so why then doesn’t a cold northern hemisphere suggest likewise that the present warming is indeed not global.”
January relative warmth is considered global simply because it shows up in the global mean. Likewise, the MWP would be considered global if it shows up in the global mean.

As Jones II points out, the MWP was global. Here are some studies from an earlier post here at WUWT:
Canada:
Five thousand years of sediment transfer in a high arctic watershed recorded in annually laminated sediments from Lower Murray Lake, Ellesmere Island, Nunavut, Canada
Cook, T.L., Bradley, R.S., Stoner, J.S. and Francus, P. 2009; Journal of Paleolimnology 41: 77-94
“Recent temperatures were the warmest since the fourteenth century, but similar conditions existed intermittently during the period spanning ~4000–1000 varve years ago.”
http://www.geo.umass.edu/climate/papers2/cook2008.pdf
Data – http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/metadata/noaa-lake-6195.html
Summer temperatures in the Canadian Rockies during the last millennium: a revised record
Luckman, B.H. and Wilson, R.J.S. 2005; Climate Dynamics 24: 131-144
“The reconstruction shows warm intervals, comparable to twentieth century values, for the first half of the eleventh century, the late 1300s and early 1400s.”
“In fact, 1434 (1.69°C) showed the warmest reconstructed summer, followed by 1967 (1.46°C) and 1936 (1.45°C).”
http://www.geos.ed.ac.uk/homes/rwilson6/Publications/LuckmanandWilson2005.pdf
South America:
A quantitative high-resolution summer temperature reconstruction based on sedimentary pigments from Laguna Aculeo, central Chile, back to AD 850.
von Gunten, L., Grosjean, M., Rein, B., Urrutia, R. and Appleby, P. 2009.; The Holocene 19: 873-881
“Our data provide quantitative evidence for the presence of a Medieval Climate Anomaly(in this case, warm summers between AD 1150 and 1350; T = +0.27 to +0.37°C with respect to (wrt) twentieth century)…”
http://www.geography.unibe.ch/lenya/giub/live/research/see/publikationen/articles/Von-Gunten-et-al_2009_HOL_summer-T-Aculeo.pdf
Tropical glacier and ice core evidence of climate change on annual to millennial time scales
Thompson, L.G., Mosley-Thompson, E., Davis, M.E., Lin, P.-N., Henderson, K. and Mashiotta, T.A. 2003; Climatic Change 59: 137-155
“This composite δ18Oice record shows enriched δ18Oice from 1140 to 1250 AD, possibly reflecting the ‘Medieval Warm Period’…”
http://bprc.osu.edu/Icecore/Thompsonetal-climatic-change-2003.pdf
Africa:
A preliminary 3000-year regional temperature reconstruction for South Africa
Holmgren, K., Tyson, P.D., Moberg, A. and Svanered, O. 2001; South African Journal of Science 97: 49-51
“Medieval warming with a maximum at around AD 1500 and a pronounced warm episode around 100 BC were prominent features of the record.”
http://www.sabinet.co.za/abstracts/sajsci/sajsci_v97_n1_2_a12.xml
The Little Ice Age and medieval warming in South Africa
Tyson, P.D., Karlen, W., Holmgren, K. and Heiss, G.A. 2000; South African Journal of Science 96: 121-126
“The climate of the interior of South Africa was around 1oC cooler in the Little Ice Age and may have been over 3°C higher than at present during the extremes of the medieval warm period.”
http://home.arcor.de/gheiss/Personal/Abstracts/SAJS2000_Abstr.html
China:
Alkenone-based reconstruction of late-Holocene surface temperature and salinity changes in Lake Qinghai, China
Liu, Z., Henderson, A.C.G. and Huang, Y. 2006; Geophysical Research Letters 33: 10.1029/2006GL026151
“Oscillating warm and cold periods could be related to the 20th century warm period, the Little Ice Age, the Medieval Warm Period, the Dark Ages Cold Period, and the Roman Warm Period.”
http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2006/2006GL026151.shtml
Climate variability in central China over the last 1270 years revealed by high-resolution stalagmite records
Paulsen, D.E., Li, H.-C. and Ku, T.-L. 2003; Quaternary Science Reviews 22: 691-701
“The changes include those corresponding to the Medieval Warm Period Little Ice Age and 20th-century warming lending support to the global extent of these events.”
http://www.barlang.hu/pages/science/angol/QSR2003_691.pdf
New Zealand and Indonesia:
Short-term climate change and New Zealand temperatures during the last millennium
Wilson, A.T., Hendy, C.H. and Reynolds, C.P. 1979; Nature 279: 315-317
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v279/n5711/abs/279315a0.html
Climate and hydrographic variability in the Indo-Pacific Warm Pool during the last millennium.
Newton, A., Thunell, R. and Stott, L. 2006; Geophysical Research Letters 33: 10.1029/2006GL027234
“The warmest temperatures and highest salinities occurred during the Medieval Warm Period (MWP)…”
http://www.cfa.harvard.edu/~wsoon/MiyaharaHiroko08-d/NewtonThunellStott06-ITCZsouthLIA.pdf
Data – http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/pubs/newton2006/newton2006.html
Greenland:
Oxygen isotope and palaeotemperature records from six Greenland ice-core stations: Camp Century
ohnsen, S.J., Dahl-Jensen, D., Gundestrup, N., Steffensen, J.P., Clausen, H.B., Miller, H., Masson-Delmotte, V., Sveinbjörnsdottir, A.E. and White, J. 2001; Journal of Quaternary Science 16: 299-307
http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/82002932/abstract
Holocene environmental variability in southern Greenland inferred from lake sediments
Kaplan, M.R., Wolfe, A.P. and Miller, G.H. 2002; Quaternary Research 58: 149-159
“Intervals of ameliorated limnological conditions occurred between 1300 and 900 and between 500 and 280 cal yr B.P., briefly interrupting the decreasing trend in productivity that culminated in the Little Ice Age. Increased lake productivity during the latter half of the 20th century, which reflects the limnological response to circum-arctic warming, still has not reached peak Holocene values.”
http://faculty.eas.ualberta.ca/wolfe/eprints/Kaplan%20et%20al%20QR%202002.pdf
Russia:
800-yr-long records of annual air temperature and precipitation over southern Siberia inferred from Teletskoye Lake sediments
Kalugin, I., Daryin, A., Smolyaninova, L., Andreev, A., Diekmann, B. and Khlystov, O. 2007; Quaternary Research 67: 400-410
“Comparison of these reconstructed Siberian records with the annual record of air temperature for the Northern Hemisphere shows similar trends in climatic variability over the past 800 yr.”
http://epic.awi.de/Publications/Kal2006a.pdf
Environmental changes in the northern Altai during the last millennium documented in Lake Teletskoye pollen record
Andreev, A.A., Pierau, R., Kalugin, I.A., Daryin, A.V., Smolyaninova, L.G. and Diekmann, B. 2007; Quaternary Research 67: 394-399
“Around AD 1200, regional climate became warmer and more humid than present, as revealed by an increase of Siberian pine and decreases of dry herb taxa and charcoal contents.”
http://epic.awi.de/Publications/And2005g.pdf
Antarctica:
Oxygen-isotope (δ18O) evidence of Holocene hydrological changes at Signy Island, maritime Antarctica
Noon, P.E., Leng, M.J. and Jones, V.J. 2003; The Holocene 13: 251-263
“Strong similarities with other Holocene proxy records from the Weddell Sea and Antarctic Peninsula Region are apparent, including the mid-Holocene climate optimum followed by the Neoglacial and, most recently, late twentieth-century climatic warming.”
http://cat.inist.fr/?aModele=afficheN&cpsidt=14975253
Unstable climate oscillations during the Late Holocene in the Eastern Bransfield Basin, Antarctic Peninsula
Khim, B.-K., Yoon, H.I., Kang, C.Y. and Bahk, J.J. 2002; Quaternary Research 58: 234-245
“The late Holocene records clearly identify Neoglacial events of the Little Ice Age (LIA) and Medieval Warm Period (MWP). Other unexplained climatic events comparable in duration and amplitude to the LIA and MWP events also appear in the MS record, suggesting intrinsically unstable climatic conditions during the late Holocene in the Bransfield Basin of Antarctic Peninsula.”
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6WPN-47G345R-3&_user=10&_coverDate=11%2F30%2F2002&_rdoc=1&_fmt=high&_orig=search&_sort=d&_docanchor=&view=c&_searchStrId=1209278974&_rerunOrigin=scholar.google&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=949091ba6045406504bbb94039472b0d

A C Osborn (08:06:13) :”…As to Satellite temperatures, they do not even reflect reallity, showing Hot Spots in the Northern Hemisphere where there is Currently Ice & Snow with some of the lowest temperatures ever recorded.”
The formation of ice and snow involves the release of latent heats of vaporization and freezing. The solid water falls to the surface; the heat remains in the atmosphere, creating higher temperatures at the elevations monitored by satellite.

Thanks to Henry chance and the link to Climateprogress.
I browsed through the site that is full of doomsday predictions, and found the following link: http://climateprogress.org/2009/04/12/australia-southwest-global-warming-drought-wildfire/
I started feeling sorry for myself living in Australia – hey we won’t even have enough water to drink and we will have to drink only beer. Tough. But then confirmed that rainfall in Australia is on an upwards trend:
http://www.bom.gov.au/cgi-bin/climate/change/timeseries.cgi?graph=rain&area=aus&season=0112&ave_yr=T
For most of Australia the chances of more than average rain in the next 3 montsh is 50% or better (the lower probablity is in the very wet areas that are NOT drought affected):
http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/ahead/rain_ahead.shtml
In the last week we had:
Floods in Brisbane: http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/ahead/rain_ahead.shtml
Floods in Sydney: http://www.smh.com.au/environment/flood-warning-from-bureau-20100213-nyen.html
Floods on the NSW South Coast: http://news.smh.com.au/breaking-news-national/south-coast-farwest-are-disaster-zones-20100216-o3xm.html
nd in the last month we had quite a bit of water in the Darling River which flows into the Murray
http://www.smh.com.au/environment/floodwater-to-quench-lakes-at-murray-mouth-20100119-mj6q.html

Joshua Hedlund (05:37:09) :
You were asking about published papers about snowfall trends.
I’ve got one, at least:
Changnon, et al, “Temporal and Spatial Characteristics of Snowstorms in the Contiguous United States”, JOURNAL OF APPLIED METEOROLOGY AND CLIMATOLOGY, 45:1141-1155 (2006).
There is no simple take-away message. They report a slight increase in US snowfall over the 20th century, with complicated spatial patterns and a great deal of variability.

Oops.. messed up the link to the floods in Brisbane in my previous post. This is it:
http://media.smh.com.au/national/national-news/brisbane-suburbs-in-flood-1129336.html

Corey (13:31:51) :
Simply listing a bunch of locations, and saying they were warm at some point in a 400 year span isn’t good enough. One has to combine them and get an actual global record over time. In any case, the whole thing isn’t that significant, anyway.
AusieDan (14:51:21) :
I hadn’t seen that video before. Has anybody got a written list of all the stations they used? I’d have used a lot more rural stations, but it’s still an interesting approach.

Oliver K. Manuel, my first clue to the truth of the climate scandal was the tone taken by the participants. The sun may be a ball of iron, but you are not persuasive.
========================

Steven,
It seems like determining the global temp is quite complicated and fraught with sensor issues. Why not rely more on ocean levels? The ocean is a natural integrator of planet energy and it is relatively simple to measure the ocean level.

There is a graph at the end of the following post elsewhere, if you skip to the end (not to do with this) it might be interesting. Shows a variety of time series for the gridcell in Texas.
Crutem3 (from 1874)
Hadcrut3
GHCN RVose
RSS tlt
UAH tlt
http://daedalearth.wordpress.com/2010/02/17/take-stock/

Ref – Oliver K. Manuel (04:35:50) :
“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 (to wit) 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.”
________________________
Maybe I’m stupid, but I didn’t read the above to insult anyone except the “group science mob” that are represented by people like Mann in many fields and the “science journel” mob that are out to sell magazines and NOT to publish serious research findings and updates.
If I’m wrong, let me wallow in my ignorance.

The more I read about “global temperature” the more I associate it (and the problem it presents) the same way as when we talk about weather and climate –getting a “BIG” picture from a zillion or less little pixel readings). I also wonder how we’d do it on any other planet or if we lived on the Sun. Adding up all the hotspots and coldspots and doing some old fashioned division I don’t think would give us the same answer we have for what we say the temperature is for any of these other heavenly bodies when we measure it millions of miles away.
Still think we need to put a satalite or two out there, say 50 million miles away, and measure it as if Earth were a speck in the universe. That’s the only way to be sure. Right?
Maybe that Mars Rover that’s stuck would look up and give us a reading or two every so often. That would be cheaper.

carrot eater (12:54:29) :
I’ll go 1980 to current, in USHCN data (not GISS; these stations stop in 2006 in GISS)
Linear trend, Raw, deg C/decade
Boerne +0.27
San Antonio Airport +0.30
Linear trend, adjusted, deg C/decade
Boerne +0.28
San Antonio Airport +0.44
If you were thinking Boerne was a good UHI-less station, then there was real warming there in the last ~30 years. It’s there in the raw data, it’s there in the adjusted data.
San Antonio Airport shows a similar trend in the raw data, and a bit stronger in the adjusted. Go figure, but it can happen. I’d have to check how much of that was TOB, and how much of it was homogenisation.
=================================================
Where to start?
I have analyzed the temperature datasets for the South Texas Region, 16 ways to Sunday: Raw vs. “value added”. Urban vs. Rural. Annually, monthly, Tmax, Tmin. 1885-2009, 1905-1940, 1942-2009, etc. Throw in wind and precipitation.
The San Antonio station had 2 major moves in 1940 & 1942, with significant changes in both latitude and elevation, moving from a growing downtown, north to a (then) rural airport (at a higher elevation).
Boice et al (1996), using urban San Antonio and rural Boerne, New Braunfels, and Poteet (1946-1990), showed a San Antonio UHI of 5.4° F / Century.
Boerne was an oddity in that study, showing some signs of UHI.
Growth of SA is mostly to the NW, N, and NE.
Boerne is NW of SA.
Wind in SA is from the SE to the NW, 3+ months a year.
Using urban San Antonio and rural Boerne, Beeville, Llano, Blanco, and Luling (1942-2009), my results showed SA UHI ≈ 3° F / Century.
And there is no UHI stagnation in SA. Recently completed freeway widening (to 10 lanes each), a new cloverleaf interchange, and an under construction 3rd terminal (all near the airport sensor), ensure that SA UHI continues to increase.
All 5 rural sites showed cooling. Average = 1.2°F/C.
Boerne was again an outlier, showing less cooling than the other 4 rural sites.
Results got strange trying to analyze Tmin and Tmax trends by month.

Tom in Texas,
I wrote up a piece this morning showing visual comparisons of San Antonio vs. Boerne and Luling. Might be up tomorrow.

I should have noted that I found the Reuters piece on Drudge.

AndyW,
Canada is 99.9% covered with snow from one end to the other. The snow line is far south of the Canadian border. Not much to talk about there in a discussion of snow extent, is there?
http://climate.rutgers.edu/snowcover/chart_daily.php?ui_year=2010&ui_day=47&ui_set=0

re carrot eater (12:54:29) : “Absolute temperatures are not important here; trends are. If UHI causes a steady offset of 2 C over the period of interest, then UHI is not important to the analysis over that period.”
Carrot, I used GISS data because that is what “Peter and his Dad” used, and I was able to replicate their results.
You chose to ignore the trend in the paired data. Taking the difference each year, then looking at the trend in those differences, I said that the AVERAGE difference was 1.4 DegC over the years 1904 through 2006, and that the SLOPE for that time period was 1.55 DegC per century. In other words, there was a gap and the gap was growing.
My comment about a gap of 2 degrees was intended to show the size of the gap in the later years ( 1.4 over all, but over 2 after 1984)
So let’s look at the trend in the differences after 1984:
In 1984, the difference was 1.97, and by 2006 the difference was 2.34. The SLOPE of the differences using all values 1984 through 2006 shows 0.5 DegC per century increase in the temperature difference.
Since the difference was not constant over that period, it would suggest that UHI was important to the analysis over that period. Or maybe it tells us something about the GISS algorithm to ‘adjust’ for UHI.

What happened in ~1955 in Texas? A good number of stations have some discontinuity then.

Steven Goddard,
“One problem with using sea level as a thermometer is that it is affected by other factors like glacial melt. Another problem is that it reflects local water temperatures rather than air temperatures. Sea level trends vary a lot from place to place. In some locations sea level is falling and in other places it is rising”
Thanks for the link to the awesome sea level map.
What is wrong with including glacial melt? Isn’t glacial melt partially a result of climate energy?
This is my uneducated wag but isn’t the the total energy in the oceans and seas a key climate factor? Does most of the climate energy at any instant come from the oceans and seas?
The sea levels on the map seemed mostly up. Aren’t the sea levels useful at least in a relative sense?
Given that the surface sensor temperature DBs are crap, how do the temp trends look if you just use satellite measurements that do not include any UHI spots?
Is the climate science community outraged by the behavior of the climategate perpetrators? Have any polls been taken to see the reaction of climate scientists as a group?
It has been suggested that climate science should take an open source approach in the future to restore the confidence of the public in climate science ethics. Do you think this will happen?

Steve Koch,
Glacial melt is pretty minimal at this point in the glacial cycle. It has very little impact on the overall energy balance of the earth.