NOAA graphs: 62% Of Continental US Below Normal In 2010

Now these are temperature variances I can believe in. Where I live in Idaho, the temperature this summer has only hit 90 or above twice this past July (one high was 90; the other was 92), and the month before it, June, saw similar high temperatures–NOTHING like I’ve seen in the past, where we’d have several weeks of continuous highs in the 90’s. And there’s no 90-or-above high temperatures predicted for the next 10 days, either. Yes, I’ve been wondering about their “hottest year evah!” pronouncements, that we’re now finding are just a bunch of lies. Pretty obvious they’re consistent with the rest of this administration. Lies, all lies! Time for a House and Senate cleaning!

But this is expected under the dangerous global warming the Earth is experiencing. And this is weather, not climate. And the US is a tiny part of the globe. And there are always going to be short term fluctuations. And how can you, a non-climatologist, disagree with professional, credentialed climatologists who are scientists? When you get this peer reviewed then you can talk.
Have I gotten all of the AGW defenses out of the way yet?

What is the period being used to define “normal”?

The interesting times will have global warming conferences in snow storms.

This is all good news. I knew that the cold weather in the Northern hemisphere this winter was below average. I can see that the winter weather in this years Southern hemisphere in very cold aswell. I am totally mystified how the CRU and the Met office can confidently state that 2010 is on course for the hottest year on record. WHERE???
The main problem for us all, in the realist camp, is how do we get this sort of information into the Main Stream Media?
They seem oblivious to any of this information especially the BBC. Last night on a Nature programme they spent the majority of the time talking about water shortages and that the climate is changing so that there will be far less water with dryer summers. This was filmed at different location in the UK and every shot shown was in torrential rain. How they did not see the irony is beyond me!!!
We need to recruit a figure head/famous person / important person/Statesman/ top scientist to be publically voicing all this information in Newspapers and Television. With out a major leader we cannot get this information past the editors of the media.
ANY IDEAS????
James

Has anyone else noticed that the AGW Story is very similar to the classic book and movie “Catch 22”? ‘When the majors is, he’s out; when the major’s out, he’s in‘. Then there’s Milo’s money making ‘chocolate covered cotton balls’. And, ‘the only way you can be sent home is if you’re crazy, and the only way you can be certified crazy is if you refer yourself to the shrink, but if you do that you can’t really be crazy so you’re not crazy and can’t go home.’ There’s just thousands of similarities. Y’hep! The Milo Minderbinders are finally sitting in the Cat Bird Seat and managing the World’s Everything for us. When you stop to think of it, really, I guess we deserve it. I know that’s very hard to swallow, kinda’ like chocolate cover cotton balls, but think about it, doesn’t it explain everything that’s happening? Really?

Joe Lalonde says:
August 2, 2010 at 4:35 am
The interesting times will have global warming conferences in snow storms.
—————————————–
It’s already happened. In Copenhagen there were hoards of people moaning about Global Warming shivering in the cold. Now, there’s normally nothing funny about folks shivering in the cold, but in that case the irony was inescapable.

These are NOAA maps :
For questions, comments, or suggestions, please contact:
Natalie Umphlett – Regional Climatologist – High Plains Regional Climate Center
[It doesn’t matter if this information is available on public sites, we do not publish emails and phone numbers ~ ctm]

For July, that’s probably about right for what I’ve seen traveling around, except Memphis is probably red right now.
Well, be careful what you wish for! You just might get it and then some during this cycle.

ditto on 899’s comment above
If NOAA’s data shows western Washington as above normal for this year, their data is poo. Gov. Gregoire declared a disaster because of our lack of sun and warmth earlier this summer. Even now, after a few warm days, we’re in a pattern that feels like early June or September.

Having said what I did in my last comment (hopefully it doesn’t get censored…please?) keep at it, guys. I like to read sites like TreeHugger, then move on to WUWT for the much-needed dissent.

off topic….does anyone know how to access UAH raw data? my reason is simple…i keep hearing alarmists say this is on track to be the warmest year on record. of course, we know that this isn’t going to happen with a strong (in all likelihood) la nina coming on, but in the mean time i would love to show my friends that this isn’t even the hottest half year on record. according to RSS and HadCrut, it is not, but i can’t get UAH. you can guess what GISS says!
here is where i used to check the data but it hasn’t updated since February:
http://vortex.nsstc.uah.edu/public/msu/t2lt/tltglhmam_5.2

What nonsense. You know just as well as I do (I hope!) that it is meaningless to look at US data only. Nobody said that US temperatures were record-high. Why not look at global data instead (http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/get-file.php?report=global&file=map-blended-mntp&byear=2010&bmonth=1&year=2010&month=6&ext=gif, http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/), oops, they show record warming, better not show those!

How can you possibly state that this year would NOT be the warmest year ever recorded on the planet, by stating that 2% of the worlds area (being the USA) is not the warmest ever? There is actually more on this planet than the USA. Look for example in Russia (only twice the size of the USA) and Europe.
Btw., the last El Nino was not the 2nd strongest, merely average.

Every place else is getting hotter than everywhere else. The USA is everywhere else, obviously.

Regeya,
I don’t know where you are getting the idea that the Red-Blue map shows Illinios as only 0-2 degrees above average. Okay I see where you’re getting that from. Well that’s a map that is averaging the temperatures out over seven months and we did have a average to below average winter this year in the midwest states.

Lennart
HadCrut, RSS and UAH do not have 2010 as #1 so far, and we have five months of La Nina still to go. I always assume that the audience has some deductive and comprehension skills.

No-one has yet explained what is the base-line for Steve’s first anomaly map.
What is Jan-July 2010 being compared with, please? Surely this is important? I’ve been reading Chiefio’s Musings for long enough to know that it is.
I would like to use this anomaly map myself, elsewhere, but I know the first question will be “compared to what?” Last year, last decade, last century?
So, please, someone, explain.

Hmmm, I think I see Carefree, AZ on the two color map!
It would be interesting to compare these maps with a map of poorly sited climate stations.

I am pleased to see my observations confirmed. It seems to me that Florida has enjoyed its usual weather this July, but the local news has reported a couple of so-called record highs and continues to talk about the heat wave. I emailed the reporter and put him on to Anthony’s weatherstations site, which does not have a picture of our local weather station at this time.
Pardon my being a broken record, but a lot of confusion is generated by the fact that meteorologists report a daily high, a low, and an average. As you know, I really dislike the “average” because it is a contrived number and not an empirical observation. The confusion comes when the reporter says that we have a record high today of 97 and then compares that to the highs for earlier years but cites the average temperature of 84. Upon discovering these numbers, ordinary readers simply put down the paper.

Sincere apologies everyone, I spoke too soon!
http://www.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/8646289.stm
Good old Auntie Beeb, never let e good story go to waste!

@stevengoddard
“HadCrut, RSS and UAH do not have 2010 as #1 so far, and we have five months of La Nina still to go”
Oh, indeed, only the second warmest year on record according to those data.
And what about your claim “We keep hearing from NOAA and in the press about 2010 being the hottest year ever. Apparently, objective and unbiased scientists are rushing this incorrect information”
You claim it is incorrect that 2010 is (upto now) the hottest year ever. But how on earth do you want to prove that with US data only? When you accuse someone of giving incorrect information you should back that up, otherwise it is just slander.
But I guess you know that 2010 is upto now the warmest or second warmest year on record, whether you look at data from nasa, noaa, hadcrut or UAH.

The vast majority of this map appears to be in the 0 to -2 or 0 to +2 range. However, it also appears that the +2 to +4 and +4 to +6 and +6 to +8 cover more area than the corresponding below average temperatures. Therefore it seems that simply comparing the area of the above and below anomalies may be over simplifying this data. If the magnitude of the above and below temperatures are factored in, will the same conclusion be reached.

Milanovic, that NOAA artwork is pure nonsense, so as your trolling attitude.
First, the biggest red blobs are placed exactly on areas, where no meteorological stations are located, like inside Africa or Greenland.
Second, for example Slovakia has experienced 1,5 °C above 1951-1980 anomaly during the Jan-June period. But NOAA artwork claims 2-3°C against warmer 1971-2000 “normal”. This is just mistake of 100-200%, or more than twice the warming since 1900.

There is no doubt about it….the cooling is happening. I have to say I am a real fan of the pixel count.
The strong El Nino managed to pull the PDO out of the negative briefly and by a very small margin. The future is heavy weighted with a cooling bias which is influenced by ocean/atmosphere cycles that are solar driven. These coincide with a quiet Sun which adds to the dilemma.
The next northern hemisphere winter will be huge.

Milanovic writes:
“What nonsense. You know just as well as I do (I hope!) that it is meaningless to look at US data only. Nobody said that US temperatures were record-high.”
Are you in the US? We have been bombarded from every side by claims that not only is this the warmest year ever in the US and worldwide but that the warmth in the US proves AGW. For those of us in the US, this is part of an on-going conversation and argument.

jks says:
August 2, 2010 at 5:31 am
Summer was very late in coming to the Pacific Northwest. California included.
All NOAA’s ‘hottest ever’ did for them was to turn the local opinion against it.
It’s getting so bad that folks get up off thier duffs to change the channel when the Warmists start in with thier fire & AGWstone sermons. Isnt’ Sunday morning supposed to be the Religious TV slot?

Ric Werme writes:
Lack of sun implies lack of stars, implies lack of radiational cooling. Perhaps the daily average wasn’t that far from “normal” with elevated low temps offsetting depressed high temps.
You might think so, but the lows have been unusually low as well.

About the last comment on the Philly July temps being cooler than in years in the 1700’s and 1800’s – I would suspect that the urban heat effect on temperatures is even worse now than during those times.
And wasn’t there a post on this site that described a silly method that made it being the “warmest winter ever” – something like taking the days from November-March and only recording the 15 highest temps days, not even an average highs of all days. And, this method was an “official” one. I need to keep track of all those “you gotta be kidding posts”.

mjk
The rest of the globe? Neither HadCrut, RRS nor UAH have 2010 as #1 so far.

regeya said:

The real bummer for our area is that we HAVE been above average … and nighttime temperatures have been staying warm enough that veggies aren’t producing. Did I mention that Illinois is heavily reliant on agriculture?

regeya, you will be relieved to know that Illinois crop yields will be potentially record-breaking this year. At worst, crop yields are predicted to be be above average. Here is an excerpt from a July 25th news article [1]:

Farmers say hot weather has helped but may be too much
Farm bureaus and orchards in Southern Illinois are reporting strong crop yields despite scattered rainfall and high temperatures, but the hot weather could turn a potential record harvest into an above average harvest.
Larry Miller, Franklin County Farm Bureau manager, said early planting and a warm spring led to a strong start for the corn crop. He said the heat continued through pollination and helped the corn rapidly mature.
Miller said the warm conditions that led to the strong start for the corn crop are becoming more problematic as the season progresses.
“I think we lost some yield because of the heat,” Miller said. “The old-timers used to say everyday above 90 degrees will take a bushel off (the yield).”
Miller said the corn crop was in a good position to be one of the best crops ever, but with the potential of this summer to be one of the hottest summers on recent record, he is expecting the near-record harvest to be an above average harvest.

regeya, surely this news will come as a relief to you. Additionally, given your grave concerns about how weather conditions impact crop yields in Illinois (which, as you mentioned, is heavily reliant on agriculture), you will no doubt consider this summer’s weather to be a blessing rather than a “bummer”.
1. http://www.thesouthern.com/news/local/article_12bf9ba0-97a6-11df-b321-001cc4c03286.html

Lennart says:
August 2, 2010 at 5:35 am
How can you possibly state that this year would NOT be the warmest year ever recorded on the planet, by stating that 2% of the worlds area (being the USA) is not the warmest ever? There is actually more on this planet than the USA. Look for example in Russia (only twice the size of the USA) and Europe. ..
_____________________________________________________
He did (Moscow and surrounds hot, record cold elsewhere)
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/08/01/kold-in-kazakhstan/
And South America and the Oceans (Record cold with 400 deaths)
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/07/30/frozen-tropics-as-la-nina-takes-hold/
And the Arctic (below normal temp)
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/07/28/giss-arctic-vs-dmi-arctic-differences-in-method/
And Australia (heat in areas without weather stations)
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/07/27/the-australian-temperature-record-the-big-picture/

“Philadelphia finished July with an average temperature of 80F. That is one degree cooler than the years 1793 and 1838”
Yet, somehow, Philadelphia is in the warmer-than-usual area. I live on the New Jersey coast some 30 miles east of Philly.
I’d say we’re about normal. March and July were warm, but April, May and June were cool. After a hot July temperatures have slacked off a lot and we may be on the way down. There was dew on the car this morning.
No way are we 2-degrees above normal as the top graphic indicates. So I’d really like to see the numbers behind it.

rbateman says:
August 2, 2010 at 7:11 am
jks says:
August 2, 2010 at 5:31 am
Summer was very late in coming to the Pacific Northwest. California included.
All NOAA’s ‘hottest ever’ did for them was to turn the local opinion against it.
It’s getting so bad that folks get up off thier duffs to change the channel when the Warmists start in with thier fire & AGWstone sermons. Isnt’ Sunday morning supposed to be the Religious TV slot?
_____________________________________________
I am not Religious, but I sure think Gaia has a sense of humor. Freeze the cojones off the fruits and nuts in the far west to wake them up and give the politicians a taste of the fires to come. snicker

The BBC are desperately trying to link selected local events to their fire’N’floods narrative without actually saying it out loud.
In the minds of the viewer they have already implanted the idea of a world consumed by droughts and floods and fires and biblical furies so now all that needs to be done is carefully place stories side by side, flog them to death and hope the viewer draws the desired conclusions. The BBC seem to screaming ‘look we told you the world would descend into flames and flood and now look whats happening’.
The BBC has been studiously avoiding all stories about the very cold winter in the southern hemisphere as if they have placed a news blackout on the southern hemisphere for the duration, no news from the Antarctic that they last year claimed was about to enter a death spiral and a childish news blackout from south America and the Antipodes.
The BBC has become nothing less than a soviet style/Warsaw pact media outlet spewing political lies while hiding the truth from the people.
Sad and pathetic? Of course but the BBC is merely serving its own financial and political aims.

Shows a good (partial) agreement with US population density map. Except for Florida and Gulf coast. But in other regions you can clearly see the population hot spots. UHI?

One valid purpose of WUWT is the global reach of readers and commenters. I find it quite interesting when people from all over comment that their local environment is not consistent with the global climate reports. I sometimes say the same thing about my local area, Los Angeles in southern California, USA.
This is a most valuable thing, as it does not take much for those in control of the global data to make up anything they want to suit the agenda they push so hard. If enough people from enough places say something like, “It may be warm globally, but certainly not here,” then the globalists’ claims can be shown to be false.
This is one way that attorneys refute the testimony of experts in a trial, by calling a great number of non-expert witnesses to testify against the expert. The jury soon realizes the expert is wrong.
Having said that, it has been abnormally cold in Los Angeles all of this year.

I have an off-ish topic question for someone.
We’ve all been hearing about how the first half of the year was “the warmest half year ever” and how “June 2010 was the hottest ever on record”. I’m curious. We are just coming out of a fairly strong El Nino condition. What is the general lag time of temps to normalize after El Nino fades? Would the El Nino effects on climate and temps be responsible for the higher alarming temperature readings?

What about Alaska? Is it now an island? Have you sold it to the Chinese to pay your national debt?
[REPLY – Does Urban Heat Island count? ~ Evan]

markinaustin says:
August 2, 2010 at 5:26 am
but i can’t get UAH here is where i used to check the data but it hasn’t updated since February:
If you want UAH data in the same format you are using now the go here.
http://vortex.nsstc.uah.edu/public/msu/t2lt/tltglhmam_5.3
Note it is a new product number 5.3 so back up 5.2 and replace the entire set with 5.3.

Lennart says:
August 2, 2010 at 5:35 am
“How can you possibly state that this year would NOT be the warmest year ever recorded on the planet, by stating that 2% of the worlds area (being the USA) is not the warmest ever? ”
I’ve heard that the contiguous US has the most (or among the most) reliable historical & current temperature record, so using it as a check to global trends makes sense.

Steve, E.M,
I ran a 10 cent check on Western WA temps about a month ago, comparing to NOAA’s data then….. and they NOAA were more than 1 deg too warm for my area. I pulled the info from Accuweather. Looking at what E.M. linked to, and with everything else I’ve seen, (often from each of you) I suspect NOAA may be engaged in wholesale fraud on temp adjustments. It’s beyond tweaking.

If I believed Barber, I would be planning my winter vacation for sunbathing in Barrow.

Western Washington temps are being skewed by above average temperatures January – March. Due to El Nino, they were significantly warmer than average last winter. But the months of April through July have been terribly cold, except for a few hot days in mid-July. Vegetable gardening has been frustrating and unproductive. The honey bees struggled to survive the spring – only a few made it as far as I can tell. My blooming perennials are consistently 4 weeks behind normal.
My electric bill shows the following daily average temps, 2009 vs 2010:
Jan 09 40 Jan 10 45
Feb 09 41 Feb 10 45
Mar 09 42 Mar 10 46
Apr 09 50 Apr 10 49
May 09 57 May 10 53
Jun 09 62 Jun 10 57
Jul 09 66 Jul 10 62
As La Nina takes hold, Washington State is falling rapidly into the “Blue Zone” of your map.

Steve,
We were running a bit warm in Western WA when the El Nino was still present. The weather flipped like a switch when El Nino faded. The oceans mean everything. What hasn’t been clear is what drives those ocean temps up and down.
A microwave heats by exciting water molecules with wavelengths that cause resonance. What if TSI remained fairly constant, yet the composition of TSI, shifting slightly, sometimes increases the distribution of wavelengths to those that better excite seawater, warming the oceans, and driving the whole climate system up and down?

MinB says:
August 2, 2010 at 9:08 am
Lennart says:
August 2, 2010 at 5:35 am
“How can you possibly state that this year would NOT be the warmest year ever recorded on the planet, by stating that 2% of the worlds area (being the USA) is not the warmest ever? ”
I’ve heard that the contiguous US has the most (or among the most) reliable historical & current temperature record, so using it as a check to global trends makes sense.
________________________________________________________________________-
A J Strata has an article about error in the temperature measurement that shows a map of the world with the error for the temperature readings from the IPCC report.
http://strata-sphere.com/blog/index.php/archives/11420

E.M.Smith says:
August 2, 2010 at 9:49 am
“If it truly were “the hottest ever” globally, it ought to also be “the hottest ever” in a very large number of individual places. And it isn’t.”
Bingo.

Pamela
Remember that South America doesn’t count. Neither does the US or Siberia. The North Pole only counts if you have no data. The South Pole doesn’t count because of ozone. Europe normally doesn’t count, except for two weeks in 2003 and 2010. La Nina doesn’t count either.
La Nina is just plain cheating!

Enneagram says:
August 2, 2010 at 9:34 am
In south America many vegetable prices have increased because of the record lower temperatures, so expect the same next NH winter.
BTW.-Next global warmers sinful pleasures jamboree at Cancun will be something to really enjoy watching…:-)
Do you thin we can get Gaia to make it snow at the Cancun jamboree if Al Gore goes? Or at least a very cold miserable rain? ( just on the conference area of course)

John C
One million people die each year in automobile accidents around the globe. Are you willing to risk your life getting in a car?
A very high percentage of people born with breasts or prostate glands develop cancer during their life. The best way to prevent this from happening is radical surgery as a teenager. That is the only safe approach for cancer avoidance.

Layne Blanchard says:
August 2, 2010 at 9:54 am
Steve,
…A microwave heats by exciting water molecules with wavelengths that cause resonance. What if TSI remained fairly constant, yet the composition of TSI, shifting slightly, sometimes increases the distribution of wavelengths to those that better excite seawater, warming the oceans, and driving the whole climate system up and down?
__________________________________________________________
It does see this NASA article:
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/sdo/news/sdo_eve.html
“…Solar minimum is a quiet time when we can establish a baseline for evaluating long-term trends,” he explains. “All stars are variable at some level, and the sun is no exception. We want to compare the sun’s brightness now to its brightness during previous minima and ask: is the sun getting brighter or dimmer?”
The answer seems to be dimmer. Measurements by a variety of spacecraft indicate a 12-year lessening of the sun’s “irradiance” by about 0.02% at visible wavelengths and 6% at EUV wavelengths…”
Other Articles of Interest:
http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2010/05feb_sdo/
http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2010/15jul_thermosphere/
http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2008/23sep_solarwind/

“Philadelphia finished July with an average temperature of 80F. That is one degree cooler than the years 1793 and 1838, and tied July 1791, 1798, 1822, 1825, 1828, and 1830. July was almost as hot as it was 217 years ago, when CO2 was at 290 ppm.”
So how, pray tell, does anyone say the Climate is changing when the average July temp is less than that in 1793?

Here’s a problem for the warmists to answer: What exactly is the temperature in Philly? My in-laws live to the west of Philly a few miles and I live North of Philly. Sunday while driving home from dinner, I noticed that their house was 72F on the car thermometer. On the highway it was 78F. Off the highway and heading north on a secondary road it was 76F. Arriving at my place it was 68F. This trip took 45 minutes and the weather didn’t change over that time. At Philly International Airport it was 79F. So I ask you, what was the temperature? Comparing back to 1793 which number do you use? There’s an 11 degree spread in the data just sampling around the region and there’s barely a 1 degree difference between now and 1793? And Philly didn’t have an UHI back in 1793. So why do we believe in Globull warming? AS I’ve stated in the past, I guess globull warming is occuring everywhere but Philly.

Gail Combs says:
August 2, 2010 at 9:57 am
From your link:
The UB team discovered that these additional sulfates cause cosmic rays to have a more pronounced effect on Earth by spurring the formation of small droplets in the atmosphere that, in turn, cause the formation of a type of cloud that does not produce rain.
I will think on this one a while, the altitude of the sulfates while high in the stratosphere coincide with rain. When they dissipate out and drop back down the rain slows down it seems. But its hard to tell what’s really going on because by then the solar output also will have changed. But it clearly remains cloudy without rain for periods of time, and that’s a good possibility that cosmic rays could have that effect.
What they talk about in the 1930’s though… there were a lot of eruptions. But they weren’t blowing high into the stratosphere.
Anthony, do you recall that graph that was posted about volcanic gasses in the stratosphere, measured by the Air Force and compared to solar cycles?
KLIUCHEVSKOI Kamchatka Peninsula (Russia) 1931  Mar 25  4 ANIAKCHAK Alaska Peninsula 1931  May 1  4
ANIAKCHAK Alaska Peninsula 1931  May 11  4?
FUEGO Guatemala 1932  Jan 21  4
AZUL, CERRO Central Chile 1932  Apr 10  5+
KHARIMKOTAN Kuril Islands 1933  Jan 8  5
SUOH Sumatra (Indonesia) 1933  Jul 10  4
KUCHINOERABU-JIMA Ryukyu Islands (Japan) 1933  Dec 24  4?
RABAUL New Britain 1937  May 29  4?
MICHOACAN-GUANAJUATO México 1943  Feb 20  4
You see that after 1933 the larger eruptions began to stretch it out with 4 years or more between eruptions. Note the number near the equator.
But a troposphere loaded with volcanic gasses and particulate, with a clean and clear stratosphere not deflecting solar rays away, seems to me to be the formula for getting hot down low. That’s what I think may have happened in the warm 1930’s.

John C writes:
“My question is what are we willing to gamble for our future? Wouldn’t it be simply better to think about reducing our energy/carbon footprint intelligently and ahead of time?”
There is a very famous and time honored version of this argument. It was authored by Pascal. It goes like this. If God exists and you make no attempt to submit to God then you will suffer eternally. If God exists and you submit to God then you will be rewarded eternally. If God does not exist and you submit to God then you will perhaps waste your Sunday mornings. If God does not exist and you do not submit to God then you have Sundays mornings free. So, what you gonna do? Given that the downside is eternal suffering, you are going to church right? So, John C, tell me, are you going to church?
Any problems with Pascal’s argument are also problems with your original argument and all versions of the now popular, so-called, “Cautionary Principle.” I am sure that Lisa Jackson will proclaim that the EPA advises that everyone start attending church immediately.

Still looks like the most heating is where the thermometers are fewest

The bills are starting to come in for this buffoonery. The Scottish Government’s “ambitious” climate change act is expected to cost £8 billion pounds (Sterling) over the next decade, whilst lowering CO2 emissions by 42% (as if). This on top of existing charges which are starting to filter through to gas and electricity bills, though they’re not highlighted on the bills of course.
This from a country of approximately 5 million people…

Layne Blanchard writes:
‘“If it truly were “the hottest ever” globally, it ought to also be “the hottest ever” in a very large number of individual places. And it isn’t.”’
The “global temperature number,” the “global temperature average,” or whatever they want to call it has always been a pure fiction with no reasoned jusfitication whatsoever. It is a tool for propaganda and nothing more.

Note that a significant portion of the above normal should be expected to be increasing in temperature over time due to continuous addition of roof tops, black top, heat expelled from buildings due to more airconditioners, etc. in the more populated and growing population centers of the country….like the Northeast. All weather and climate held constant, these areas will get warmer.

The growing desperation of Warmists who visit this and other blogs is palpable. The flimsy climate model-driven science (as opposed to empirical evidence) supporting AGW’s shaky theoretical framework is now under assault by a growing body of respected meteorologists, climatologists, geologists and astrophysicists who refuse to stand by as the scientific method (which emphasizes skepticism and dissent) is trashed and replaced by politically driven “consensus science.”
As Geoff Sharp observed above, the combination of a quiet sun, negative PDO (characterized more La Ninas and weaker and fewer El Ninos) and, perhaps, increased volcanic activity will usher our planet into another period of long-term cooling –sooner rather than later.
As declining solar activity pushes earth towards another Dalton Minimum or, heaven help us, a Maunder Grand Minimum, today’s alarmist predictions of global warming will eventually border on tragicomedy.
CO2 is good (rising food production); warm is good (Holocene Optimum); cold is bad (Little Ice Age), as recent news reports from cold-stricken Peru confirm.

It is warm where it matters… The population centers of the northeast. That is all that the alarmists care about. Large numbers of people, and liberal people for the most part, in their heated crosshairs.

I belived the mystery with GISS lies at the pole. NASA extrapolates and fills in the empty grid cells at the poles based on some undocumented extrapolation alogrithim. If you subtract the poles from the GISS data sets, you subtract out much of the “record” heat.

With all arguments brought in to show that the US , 2% of the global surface , is actually cooling what are you imagining that the answer of the agw-proponents will be ? This is proof of lowering of CO2-emissions caused by their multi year efforts to change our society and that the first real implementations are starting to bear fruit as indicated by falling us temperatures contrary to the overheating in the arctic and in the antarctic leading to a larger supply of sweetwater freezing faster than the saline water did before . This is unmistakeable proof that the efforts of the USA as the forefront of climatological hygiene are clearly visible and we shall demonstrate the world that our practices for the come-on good are working . Of course this is baloney , but be sure that you are going to see a lot more of it to get cap and trade installed .

Paul says:
August 2, 2010 at 12:44 pm
Steve, your comment about Philadelphia being 1 deg cooler than average peaked my interest considering that I live there. It seems you can glean different conclusions from the data based on how you look at it (surprise!). Based on average temp, which is (high+low)/2, we are slightly cooler than the “historical average”. But if you look at “average high” (sum of all highs in Jul)/31 we were at 90 F, which is 7 F above the historical “average high” of 83. So which is a more meaningful statistic? I understand that the average temp better represents the total heat content in atmosphere. But is it any wonder that folks are convinced it is getting hotter out when the daily high temp is consistently above the average? Any what is the explanation for that? UHI?

Hi Paul,
I bet your humidity was on average lower this year. That will cause hotter days and cooler nights which won’t effect average but will sure effect the sum of daytime highs.

Paul : “Any [idea] what is the explanation for that?”
What I noticed this summer has been, up until recently, the fairly low humidity. So cloud cover has been minimal. So the daytime temperature has climbed pretty high. But night time temperatures have dropped too because the heat has not been retained.

Jim G says:
August 2, 2010 at 11:59 am
Natural insulation consists of the Earth itself. If a portion of your home is below ground, it will be warmer in the winter and cooler in the summer.

A very interesting site is the OK Mesonet http://agweather.mesonet.org/
Under the “learn more” tab….
“The Oklahoma Mesonet consists of 120 automated stations across Oklahoma. There is at least one Mesonet station in each of Oklahoma’s 77 counties. At each site, the environment is measured by a set of instruments located on or near a 10-meter-tall tower. The measurements are packaged into “observations” every 5 minutes, then the observations are transmitted to a central facility every 5 minutes, 24 hours per day year-round. The Oklahoma Climatological Survey at OU receives the observations, verifies the quality of the data and provides the data to Mesonet customers. It only takes 5 to 10 minutes from the time the measurements are acquired until they become available to the public. ”
They have photos of all the sites, actually you can check out the location from multiple views. Even the ones in OKC are located in fields, away from anything that could generate heat. A very interesting site to check out. If only all weather recording sites were this open for all to see.

Well I just got back from doing a little bit of climatic research myself.
Specifically; I assigned myself the task of researching the effect of the La Nina anomaly on the state of fishing in the Sea of Cortez; in the Loreto Bay Marine Sanctuary actually.
This time of the year; June through mid August is normally prime fishing time for Dorado/Mahi-mahi/Dolphin fish (Coryphaena hippurus) in the Loreto Bay region; and sport fishermen as well as meat fishermen descend on the town to fish them.
Tipping point (Scientific Term) for Dorado is a surface water Temperature of 30 deg C or 86 deg F whichever comes first; and air temperatures over the Sea are in the low 90s with relatively high humidity; so you sweat like a pig out there on the water.
So this year the air Temperatures over the Sea; about mid day were 88 deg F; with only moderate humidity; and the SSTs at least the top one cm of water were only 82 deg F by mid day.
So no to very little Dorado (I caught one), and no Sardinas; the common chumming baitfish. So even the Pelicanos were starving. The lack of Dorado, and Sailfish or Marlin was somewhat compensated by an unusual good number of big Rooster fish (Nematistius pectoralis). Usually only schoolie two pounders are around in small numbers; but this July, there were a good number of fish in the 35-55# range. My son and I double hooked one about 25#; which had a death wish; and sadly it did not survive so became dinner for our guide.
But I digress; I really wanted to do some independent climate research; well weather at least; and cloud formation to be specific.
On our final day (last Saturday) we spent about five hours idling along the Western shore of Isla Carmen; which is 6-9 miles off the Baja Peninsula opposite Loreto.
As the sun rose East of Carmen, I took some striking photos of a large swath of “clouderpuffs” that hung over the sea just West of the island; maybe at 2000 metres altitude +/- 50% (3:1 obligatory Climate fudge factor). They were very thin and transparent; and I could see the moon through one of the puffs; and they were going nowhere with not a breath of wind.
On the other hand; over the mainland, there was not a hint of a cloud, and the morning sky was crystal blue with no haze.
This part of the Baja Peninsula has some very high steep mountain cliffs; and by road you have to sneak through the one pass about 20 miles or so South of Loreto; and are then barred from the Eastern coast for many miles by those steep impassable mountains.
Once the sun got up, the air temperature (in the shade) went to 88 deg F, and the surface water was again 82 deg F as it had been about every place I measured during the week.
At about 11 AM local time (MST) , a dozen or so wispy clouder puffs appeared over the very Eastern edge of the peninsula from Loreto south as far as I could see; once again at the higher end of the 2km or so height range. There were a handful of wispy lenticular clouds much higher > 10-12 km but out over the sea itself; but the interesting thing was these puff balls over the peninsula; well they were more like disks than balls; rather thin and all at the same height independent of the ground profile. They were highly diffuse white and shone in all directions; and they were not moving. Many of the individual puffs each cast a distinct shadow right on the peaks and steep walls of that Eastern edge of the mountsins; so you could see they were not moving relative to the ground.
As we moved slowly along the shores of the island, I watched those puff clouds grow and develop. The tops remained all at the same height, and the puffs slowly grew downwards in thickness, and expanded radially, so they eventually started to merge into larger accumulations; yet they moved in no direction from where they appeared; there simply was no detectable wind anywhere.
By 1:15 PM, when we finally bugged out for the shore and lunch, there was a long nearly unbroken line of thse clouds all sitting right on the Eastern edge of the land. The clouds had now thickened downwards to the point that they now were distinctly dark underneath; and they apparently had run into a brick wall, as the bottoms now had flattened out into a flat base, not unlike the trailing flatform behind a mid west thunderhead; and now the tops had started to grow cauliflower tops, and become quite three dimensional.
Well I’m no meteorologist so I don’t have any idea what causes all this observed behavior; but I do have a sort of hypothesis; pure conjecture you understand; as to what might have been happening; hypothetically of course, since I’m no expert.
The air Temperatures in downtown Loreto at 2:30 PM were in the low 90 deg F region with modest humidity; but the rock temperatures are a lot hotter than that.
So by 11 AM those high desert Mountains are hot hot hot, setting up a vertical air convection, that sucks up air right on the Eastern edge of the mountaisn where they join (and rise out of) the Sea of Cortez. (and of course also inland)
With the air Temperatures being 88 deg F in the air, and the SST being 82 deg F; it is clear that the air must be getting heated BY THE SUN, and not (much) by conduction from the sea surface. Water vapor in the air would intercept a significant amount of incoming sunlight longer than 750 nm; and heat the air; while the bulk of the solar spectrum would penetrate deeper into the sea (which is extremely clear); so it doesn’t have too much immediate effect on SST. LWIR thermal radiation from the atmosphere heated by the sun, and thermal radiation from the 82 degree sea surface captured by water vapor, and the all powerful CO2, seems to do little to elevate the SST; but there must be some small surface heating; but more likely offset by evaporative cooling; since the LWIR is absorbed in the top 10 microns or so (say 63% of it); so that would add more of that feedback H2O factor to the atmosphere.
This moisture enhanced air over the sea, will get sucked into the space vacated by the hot rocks updraft; and carried aloft to where temperatures are dropping.
Eventually at about 2km +/- 50% or so, the temperature reaches the dew point for that moisture content; and a thin cloud wisp forms.; casting a shadow on the rocks below. The top of the cloud wisp now starts reflecting sunlight back towards the sun; which is pretty much directly overhead; and other sunlight which penetrates the thin cloud is highly scattered from moisture droplets, and now radiateds from all sides of the thin cloud. The over head sun, is not even hitting the vertical sides of the cloud; so there really isn’t much (solar) reflection coming off those clouds; it is mostly from internal scatter.
So now the sunlight underneath the cloud is attenuated from albedo reflection on top, and internal scattered losses, as well as simple absorption by the water droplets in the cloud, and any water vapor.
So the air under the cloud starts to cool due to lower sunlight, so that too drops to the dew point, and the cloud thickens downwards. The colder air under the cloud cools the surrounding air column by conduction and or convection so the periphery of the cloud bottom cools, and the cloud diameter expands.
As the cloud thickens; the transmitted sunlight drops further, and eventually a visible darkening of the cloud bottom is detectable by eye; and probably much sooner with appropriate instrumentation.
So now we have a cooling air column building downwards from the bottom of the cloud; meeting a rising hot air column from the hot rocks of the mountains, and all containing a water vapor content that is preset by the SST and air Temperature over the Sea of Cortez adjacent to the mountains.
Eventually the cooling and hot air columns reach an altitude under the cloud; where the temperature can no longer fall below the dew point; the heat from the rocks is able to maintain the air Temperature above the rocks, without any help from the sun; and the cloud engine runs out of steam (pun intended) and the flat cloud bottom develops.
Of course the convective air flow doesn’t stop at this point so it keeps feeding moist air into the cloud layer, and the cloud starts to grow vertically as well as expanding its perimeter till the clouder puffs merge into a continuous layer; which gets darker on the bottom as the cloud thickens and blocks more sunlight.
By the time we got back to lunch; a continuous (more or less) string of clouds stretched all the way from Loreto South to the Horizon; sitting right on the edge of the land/sea interface.
Interestingly there was no cloud over Loreto itself; which must be something of an UCI; Urban Cool Island; since the natives have planted a whole lot of greenery throughout the town so even though the streets are damn hot; there is a lot of greenspace; enough to interrupt the cloud engine.
Yes a separate cloud string developed North of Loreto; but not as prominent; since the rocks are not as high and steep up there.
Well all of this of course is pure conjecture; with very little peer reviewed input; but it does suggest; to me at least; that in fact it DOES get colder under a cloud; and it doesn’t matter how thin and wispy or how high the cloud forms; it still cools down under the cloud; despite the arrival of vast quantities of heat either from vertical convection currents or LWIR EM radiation captured by GHGs including H2O and the might CO2.
Yes anecdotal of course; and I know you Meteorologists are laughing your heads off, at such a dumb idea; but I did say it was highly speculative; which really is in keeping with the finest traditions of climatology.

You seemed to have missed a very important word in NOAA’s report (here’s a hint, it’s right in the title). Give up? It’s global. I know it’s hard to understand, but there’s more to the world than the US.

Tamsie
It is OK to extrapolate across 1200km with no data, and also to ignore the US because it has the wrong data.

Paul
I didn’t say Philadelphia was cooler than average. I said it was cooler than the record.

I am sorry, but we never get to normal in Reno. We are always above it in summer. Lows are 15 degrees above normal. Same with Bridgeport, down 395, that has no large population. Global warming at elevation is obvious. And the glaciers are melting down by Bridgeport.

milanovic says:
August 2, 2010 at 6:22 am
@stevengoddard

“HadCrut, RSS and UAH do not have 2010 as #1 so far, and we have five months of La Nina still to go”

“Oh, indeed, only the second warmest year on record according to those data. ”
————————
Is it December the 31st 2010 yet or is this April 1st 2011?

Tamsie says:
August 2, 2010 at 3:27 pm
You seemed to have missed a very important word in NOAA’s report (here’s a hint, it’s right in the title). Give up? It’s global. I know it’s hard to understand, but there’s more to the world than the US.
———–
REPLY: There’s more to the world than the Russian heatwave. There’s more to the world than the 1976 UK heatwave. There’s more to the world than the 100s killed by cold in South America including the Amazon. The fact is local events are reported by alarmists as a sign of global warming and they ignore cold weather events. This blog can report what the hell it likes, if you don’t like it then produce your own hottist blog.

To tamsie at 3:27pm –
I’m not sure what report you are looking at – the post title refers to continental US temperature and the NOAA map is of the US, not the world. And, I believe most people are talking about their observations in the United States.
Since we are here, we can help improve the weather reporting in the US by noting the differences of our observations vs the official reports. We can also observe the weather stations to see if they are properly sited.
We cannot control the reporting in other parts of the world.
But, by helping pointing out problems in the US reporting, we can only hope to help others improve the reporting in their countries.

I have written many articles in recent weeks discussing the discrepancies between GISS, HadCrut and satellite global temperatures, and how GISS is the only one showing 2010 as #1.
I always expect that readers will take the time to actually read the articles.

Karen says:
August 2, 2010 at 5:08 am
From Climate4you.com it looks like climatologists are using 1960 to 1990 as the “Normal” time period.
[REPLY – NASA/GISS uses 1950 – 1980 as its baseline. ~ Evan]

The Australian Bureau of Met states:

It is also worth noting that the period 1961-90 is regarded internationally as the standard reference period
That’s why I love standards – there are so many to choose from.

Note that the GISS anomaly is based on the daily means. The daily means are affected as much by the change in daily minimum as much as, or more than the change in the daily max. So the high temperature may not change, but if the overnight low is higher, then the daily mean will be higher, thus the anomaly will be higher . Higher overnight lows can be attributed to UHI.
Here too, it’s been cooler than normal.
KSJC Yearly Chart 2010

I think they still got the west too warm! LA hasn’t strayed far out of the 60sF this summer – today is typical:
http://www.intelliweather.net/imagery/intelliweather/tempcity_nat_640x480.jpg
Haven’t you got a good friend Calif. climatologist friend who can comment on this Anthony?

Tamsie writes:
“You seemed to have missed a very important word in NOAA’s report (here’s a hint, it’s right in the title). Give up? It’s global. I know it’s hard to understand, but there’s more to the world than the US.”
We do not deal in fiction. And the Global Temperatue has always been a fiction, never justified by any sort of reasoning whatsoever. Reminds me of training engineers to use an linear programming model to distribute beverages around the US. When the model solved, it generated a number which was labelled the “cost of this shipping system.” It took me months to explain to some engineers that the number was simply an artifact of the solution method used in the model. I learned quickly that the best way of training engineers is to deliver a hard slap to the face whenever an idiotic claim is made. It works so well because, after my introduction of the technique, the engineers compete to be the first to slap the next engineer to utter an idiocy.

Why don’t you just look to UAH tropospheric anomalies to convince yourself that this is an exceedingly warm year world-wide. Seems fairly evident, but means nothing unless that long-term running average continues to increase.

wrote a small ruby script that processes this image w/o the binary +/- downsampling used in this post (red vs. blue). http://gist.github.com/505776 #read comments to get it working properly
output:
“weight freq
7 110
5 1428
3 5366
1 17780
-1 34463
-3 4116
-5 124
actual shows -0.08902456339628 degrees C below average
WUWT shows -0.221165223153012 degrees C below average ( 248% difference )”
average is below baseline, though high’s go higher than the lows go low

Travis
NOAA will have the US well above average for July.

My last comment needs some correction since Steve’s map from HPRCC shows the year-to-date temperatures for the U.S., not the month of July. My point remains, however; when NOAA comes out with the year-to-date temperatures for the U.S. through July, I expect they will show that the country as a whole was roughly at or above “normal” for the seven-month period.
Consequently, HPRCC’s July map clearly shows the U.S. above normal as a whole. Even California–which got a lot of attention here for having cool temperatures in coastal cities like San Diego and San Francisco–probably finished the month above normal as a state; the cooler-than-normal temperatures were confined mainly to the coastal regions.
http://www.hprcc.unl.edu/maps/current/index.php?action=viewmap&map_type=&daterange=Last1m&year=&product=TDept

Owen says:
August 2, 2010 at 8:06 pm
Why don’t you just look to UAH tropospheric anomalies to convince yourself that this is an exceedingly warm year world-wide. Seems fairly evident, but means nothing unless that long-term running average continues to increase.

Not really no. In the Pacific Northwest it’s been well below average for months. Apart from a handful of hot days, it’s been downright cool.

URL didn’t get through. I’ll try once more:
I hate it when results are presented but the data or code is “private,” so for anyone curious about my calculation of the average cooling per pixel in NOAA’s map (0.089 degrees), the Mathematica notebook is now webbed at:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/9188291/NOAAmap.nb

@E.M.Smith
“So if THEY can rant about “hottest ever” in the USA (or even smaller subsets of it) then WE can look at subsets and cry foul when it doesn’t match reality. Gander, meet goose.”
True, I am not so interested in “hottest ever”, “coldest ever” claims, certainly not on a regional scale, this goes for both sides. But what Steven Goddard is saying
“Apparently, objective and unbiased scientists are rushing this incorrect information to press before La Niña spoils their party”
And this is simply untrue, it IS correct that 2010 is (upto now) the warmest or second warmest year according to a variety of temperature sources. Accusing scientists of giving incorrect information is without giving any evidence whatsoever (because US data is no evidence whatsoever) is, in my opinion, very wrong.
“If it truly were “the hottest ever” globally, it ought to also be “the hottest ever” in a very large number of individual places. And it isn’t.”
Well, I don’t know whether it is the hottest ever, but it is hot in MANY places, the whole of Russia, for example. And really, it is very easy to check their calculations if you like. People have been complaining about these temperature data, that they don’t trust the corrections etc, but fact is, that all these corrections change the overall picture hardly and you can check it all for yourself!
(if you are really interested in the data, check http://residualanalysis.blogspot.com/ and his GHCN processor. You can download it and play around with the raw data)

It’s been hot this summer in Europe and parts of Siberia too, although the winter was quite cold. Dry in England, particularly the South and East – we usually find our droughts don’t last too long, but 2010 has been dry, dry, dry here.
The sun is perking up too……..
Word is that wheat in the US is bumper, it’s bad in Canada, Russia, so prices are currently high but may tail off………..
The scaremongers are reporting the floods in Canada, no doubt others will mention the record crop in the southern 49.
Jigsaws with missing pieces…………

James Sexton,
Especially when speaking in terms of degrees Fahrenheit, I’d consider an anomaly of -0.089F to be essentially “normal”. I said: “I expect they will show that the country as a whole was roughly at or above “normal” for the seven-month period.” It’s a better analysis than Steve Goddard’s, and likely closer to what NOAA will come out with in their monthly report in a couple weeks. Thanks to SF James and bbttxu for doing the calculations.

Be very, very afraid, beware the global warming taking place everywhere but here, where here is defined as anywhere.

steve goddard,
you have that backward. you can overlay a box on the image from los angeles, CA to morehead, NC on the bottom and lakeside, OR to colbrook, NH on the top. horizontal pixel is the same for both.
the northern boundary is 4123 km
http://www.movable-type.co.uk/scripts/latlong-map.html?lat1=44.893945&long1=-71.495075&lat2=43.585489&long2=-124.172459
the southern boundary is 3780 km
http://www.movable-type.co.uk/scripts/latlong-map.html?lat1=34.052375&long1=-118.243790&lat2=34.740484&long2=-76.751003
more km packed into the same number of pixels necessarily means that a northern pixel contains more km^2 than a southern one for the same associated value assigned to a pixel.
cooler, southern regions are over-reported compared to the warmer, northern regions, so that -0.089 F anamoly may actually be closer to 0 if not positive.

Travis
It is the aspect ratio of the pixels that I am concerned about, not the temperature readings.
Even if you do integrate the temperatures across all pixels, the average temperature still comes up negative.

steve goddard and travis,
i too have been concerned with the “aspect ratio” of the pixels, so i did a little experiment—take a transect of the larger states from S to N and see how their areas (found at wikipedia) compare to the number of pixels they represent in the image used for analysis in this post
behold…
st pixels km^2 km^2/pixel
tx 6579 696241 105.827785377717
co 2263 269837 119.23862129916
wy 2002 253348 126.547452547453
mt 2823 381156 135.018065887354
as you can see from the km^2/pixel, the area represented by one pixel in montana (N) is 27% larger than one in texas (S). corollary, a pixel in mt is valued at 79% of a similarly weighted pixel in tx.
the cards are clearly stacked in favor of the south influencing the average temperature for the US. remember that, in spite of this bias, the average of all temps (forgetting this present analysis) is negative at less than 1/10th of 1 degree F, or -0.089 deg F, for the time period
the majority of (undervalued) (+) anomalies occur in the N, whereas the majority of (overvalued) (-) anomalies occur in the S.
if a true value for each pixel, calculated from it’s weight and (now) N-S location, could be tallied for each pixel, i trust Travis’ gentlemanly proposition would come out in his favor.
in summary, pixel counting is a fun pursuit (i enjoyed this), but rather useless for doing any revelatory “gotcha” science. code here: http://github.com/bbttxu/wuwt-strike

Travis
But there is a big difference between “positive” anomalies and “record” anomalies.

@stevengoddard
I hate that, when I am wrong 🙂 Thanks for correcting me, I was indeed lo0king at the wrong data previously, my apologies.
But could you still respond to my question earlier: why do you claim that “Apparently, objective and unbiased scientists are rushing this incorrect information”, while the information is correct? (Ok, some data show 2010 as second warmest, but others do show 2010 (upto now) to be the warmest. You may think it is not very relevant (as I do, temperature records don’t say too much I think), but to claim it is “incorrect information” is simply wrong. And although I believe global records don’t mean very much, regional data, as you show, are really not relevant.

Travis says:
August 3, 2010 at 11:11 pm
RE: Steve Goddard August 3, 2010 at 9:38 pm:
“But there is a big difference between “positive” anomalies and “record” anomalies.”
You keep moving the finish line. Who said that the U.S. was experiencing record heat this year? Certainly not me, and not NOAA either, to my knowledge. If I remember correctly, NOAA’s year-to-date for the U.S. had 2010 ranked between 30th and 40th warmest. Certainly nothing alarmist there, though it seems you want there to be.
If you want to talk about it in the context of global anomalies, then NOAA and GISS both show 2010′s YTD as warmest on record through June.
Begging your pardon, but …
First you remark: “… NOAA’s year-to-date for the U.S. had 2010 ranked between 30th and 40th warmest. ”
Then you follow that up with: “… NOAA and GISS both show 2010′s YTD as warmest on record through June.”
It can’t be both …

Re: 899 August 4, 2010 at 8:50 am
What bbttxu said, except in reverse. The 30th to 40th rank was for U.S. temperatures ONLY. The warmest/second warmest rank applied to the GLOBAL mean, not just the U.S.

Re: 899
I’m not sure what you find illogical. Nothing in my statement (or rather NOAA’s) is contradictory. The U.S. was nowhere near its warmest, but other parts of the globe were sufficiently warm to make the global temperature mean as warm as it has ever been since they started keeping track of such things. What part of this is illogical? Am I not understanding your disagreement? What in that statement leads you to automatically conclude that the datasets are either corrupted or manipulated?