A picture is worth a thousand words:
It isn’t global.
This is weather, not climate. It is caused by a persistent blocking high pressure pattern. In a day or two, that red splotch over the eastern USA will be gone.
Image from Dr. Ryan N. Maue of WeatherBELL
h/t to Joe Bastardi
UPDATE: Dr. Roy Spencer puts it in perspective
June 2012 U.S. Temperatures: Not That Remarkable
July 6th, 2012
I know that many journalists who lived through the recent heat wave in the East think the event somehow validates global warming theory, but I’m sorry: It’s summer. Heat waves happen. Sure, many high temperature records were broken, but records are always being broken.
And the strong thunderstorms that caused widespread power outages? Ditto.
Regarding the “thousands” of broken records, there are not that many high-quality weather observing stations that (1) operated since the record warm years in the 1930s, and (2) have not been influenced by urban heat island effects, so it’s not at all obvious that the heat wave was unprecedented. Even if it was the worst in the last century for the Eastern U.S. (before which we can’t really say anything), there is no way to know if it was mostly human-caused or natural, anyway.
“But, Roy, the heat wave is consistent with climate model predictions!”. Yeah, well, it’s also consistent with natural weather variability. So, take your pick.
For the whole U.S. in June, average temperatures were not that remarkable. Here are the last 40 years from my population-adjusted surface temperature dataset, and NOAA’s USHCN (v2) dataset (both based upon 5 deg lat/lon grid averages; click for large version):
Certainly the U.S drought conditions cannot compare to the 1930s.
I really tire of the media frenzy which occurs when disaster strikes…I’ve stopped answering media inquiries. Mother Nature is dangerous, folks. And with the internet and cell phones, now every time there is a severe weather event, everyone in the world knows about it within the hour. In the 1800s, it might be months before one part of the country found out about disaster in another part of the country. Sheesh.
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The only “global” thing in that picture is cooling. Wonder if the MSM will report that? No, I don’t really.
To you with your low human science and pedantry it may appear to be merely yet another meteorological ‘blocking high’, of the sort that cause the Russian heatwave two years ago, but to those of the Climate Illuminati is revealed the real transcendental Truth of the anger of the Global Warming god. Amen, and pass the collection tin.
Um, sarc.
This is a normal summer for the Mid-Atlantic region. I just noted that National AP (Weah DC) was 102 degrees. But also noted that north of DC in Frederick Co MD that the temps are 95–not a record breaker for here.
Usually the high is located off shore and called a Bermuda High which brings very hot, humid and lots of POx. But the high is on-shore. Haven’t heard of any POx warnings in the local weather/nes media.
History will show that AGW theory will rank with “evil spirits” in terms of logical reasoning.
Maybe if we sacrificed a few virgins all the bad weather will go away?
I keep hearing about how winter in the southern hemisphere has been colder than normal, and the anamolies in that figure give credence to that idea. Same thing for summer in the British isles. Course, I fully expect that all these incidents will be somehow linked…you know, global warming is causing the ‘insane’ heat in the US while also causing summer to be cool and wet in Britain and winter to be chillier in Australia.
And Great Britian is having one of the coolest and wetest summers in 100 years. But don’t let actual data get in the way when saving the Earth is in the balance, not to mention more government research grants.
Bill
Thankfully it is moving away. We are still so short of water that we are looking at crop failure, possibly total crop failure.
Please can you send all that ‘global warming’ over here to the UK? It hasn’t stopped raining since April 1st. Some April Fool that was!
Does put the heatwave in perspective. Maybe UAH is biased somehow, they have the last few months going warmer. Of course this map is for July, which of course is not tallied yet.
Shall we wait and see what the UAH Global Temperature Update will do for July? Shall we?
http://www.drroyspencer.com/wp-content/uploads/UAH_LT_1979_thru_June_2012.png
And then we will see what July will be for a month globally. A cool one or a warm one. If it gets a little bit higher than June, 2012 will be the third or fourth warmest year on record.
And what about the rapid decline of Arctic Sea Ice this year:
http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/
If it was really that cold on Earth as you people claim we would not be seeing such rapid ice loss.
Well I guess you are right Mr. Watts. Pictures can say more than a thousand words.
REPLY: Clinging to your graphs and religion Mr. Kuipers? – Anthony
Same thing happened in Russia a couple of years ago and it was also blamed on global warming.
misterjohnqpublic says:
July 7, 2012 at 10:36 am
Maybe if we sacrificed a few virgins all the bad weather will go away?
———————————————————————————————————————
Send them to me. I will take care of them – umm, the weather, that is…
The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation has taken advantage of the first real summer (37 C in Waterloo) we have had in years to schedule a rabidly pro-AGW show that includes some lout claiming that ‘ocean acidity is up 33% because of global warming’.
And you thought no one was keeping track!
Robbie says (July 7, 2012 at 10:59 am)
——-
Take a look at Aqua 5, normally a good precursor of UAH figures. It rose high in early June (to above 2011 levels) but has now fallen back.
http://discover.itsc.uah.edu/amsutemps/execute.csh?amsutemps+002
But I wouldn’t want to trump your ‘1 month = climate’ with my ‘2 weeks = climate’. 🙂
It is a perfect world and perfect debate stance when you can follow heat waves from region to region and call them global warming without revisiting the prior cases as you move along. At least that is the current scheme until something else comes along to topple it. That something will be a further span to 20 or 25 years of flat or declining GLOBAL measures of ocean temps and sea level non-rise. We will also see extreme attempts to deflect attention from the PDO, AMO, and solar cycle decline effects.
Hey Robbie!! You got the balls to come back next month and give us your prognostication?
Be aware that that map is not an equal-area projection. Along the equator it is cooler than average, and that is underemphasized by this map (remember Mexico is bigger than greenland), and the warmer areas, being away from the equator, are overemphasized.
OT: It really bugs me that the ice area maps (actually, any “area” map) never seem to be an equal-area projection.
It is, in my opinion, an error to attribute any single event, whether it’s a derecho, a heat wave, or a hurricane, to climate change. That’s weather.
On the other hand, as the statistics of weather shift, that’s climate change. And what we’re seeing are the weather statistics moving (see http://tinyurl.com/cgnaj79 for a discussion and data) to hotter and higher energy events.
It’s just like lung cancer – any individual case might be from a genetic issue, accidental exposure to toxins or radiation, or just plain bad luck. But the changing statistics of increasing lung cancer (which was in the past extremely rare) are almost wholly attributable to smoking rates.
So no, this particular heat wave cannot be directly attributed to climate change. But we’re certainly going to see a lot more more of them, with fewer cold events, as climate averages change and the weather dice get loaded more and more heavily to the hot side…
Robbie said: “If it gets a little bit higher than June, 2012 will be the third or fourth warmest year on record.”
If this happens, and it could, why should we care? We have been coming out of the Little Ice Age for 150+ years. Is it surprising if the general trend is upwards? What is problematic for you and your buddies is that for 15 years we have been basically flat. If CO2 was such a strong catalyst then the past 15 years should have led to inescapable warming…..they have not.
For fun, let’s remember this quote by Gavin Schmidt from 2007. The first enumerated points were questions put to Dr. Schmidt and his response follows. Basically, if this year (“year 5” of his points) doesn’t exceed the warmest year on record in all 4/5 indices, the condition has been met for Gavin to question Anthropogenic Global Warming….how much you wanna bet he finds a way to NOT question it?
“(1) If 1998 is not exceeded in all global temperature indices by 2013, you’ll be worried about state of understanding
(2) In general, any year’s global temperature that is “on trend” should be exceeded within 5 years (when size of trend exceeds “weather noise”
(3) Any ten-year period or more with no increasing trend in global average temperature is reason for worry about state of understandings
I am curious as to whether there are other simple variables that can be looked at unambiguously in terms of their behaviour over coming years that might allow for such explicit quantitative tests of understanding?
[Response: 1) yes, 2) probably, I’d need to do some checking, 3) No. There is no iron rule of climate that says that any ten year period must have a positive trend. The expectation of any particular time period depends on the forcings that are going on. If there is a big volcanic event, then the expectation is that there will be a cooling, if GHGs are increasing, then we expect a warming etc. The point of any comparison is to compare the modelled expectation with reality – right now, the modelled expectation is for trends in the range of 0.2 to 0.3 deg/decade and so that’s the target. In any other period it depends on what the forcings are. – gavin]”
I really do wish we could have Global Warming in the UK. The weather is cold and, to put it mildly, wet!
@ur momisugly Robbie
And then we will see what July will be for a month globally. A cool one or a warm one. If it gets a little bit higher than June, 2012 will be the third or fourth warmest year on record.
At the end of June the UAH YTD temp is 0.146C above the 1981-2010 average.
I suggest we all panic now.
When it is hot it is climate change.
when it is cold it is weather.
Se how easy it is ?
Yet, much of the NH mid-latitude land areas are rising at a rate of over one deg F (over 0.6 deg C) per decade. See Figure 3 of the 2012 GRL paper by Judah Cohen. Draft here:
http://web.mit.edu/jlcohen/www/papers/Cohenetal_GRL12.pdf
By 2100, most (over 70%) of the summer days in the Midwest will exceed 90 deg F, unless we reduce AGW.
Extreme hot weather similar to the last week’s excessive heat wave will occur every other summer week in the future!
http://www.ucsusa.org/assets/documents/global_warming/climate-change-illinois.pdf
Quick analogy based on what I happen to be doing at the moment:
Let’s say you’re trying to cook an omelet. You mix the eggs and pour them in a pan. You put the pan on a thing that’s labeled as a “warmer”.
Ten minutes later, 1/3 of the egg is fried, and 2/3 is frozen.
What have you done to the eggs on average? Have you cooked them? No, you haven’t done anything to the eggs on average. The question is completely meaningless.
Yep… summer in the northern hemisphere and winter in the southern hemisphere… makes sense!