New studies promote Arctic cooling fears

Well, I’m pretty sure the temperature in R’Lyeh is around 4 C, so endo or exo, he lies dreaming in the cold. Lovecraft no doubt found these temperatures (and those around the Mountains of Madness) horrifying, because he was hypersensitive to the cold and once collapsed because of a sudden temperature shift in a single day. He would have loved “global warming”, assuming that he or anybody else could detect it in their anecdotal life experience living in a single location. After all, the total global warming since 1850 is less than 1 C in all the anomaly models, and this 1 C has to be compared to an annual variation of perhaps 50 C throughout most of the temperate and polar regions, as well as year to year or day to day local variations much larger than this.
Or, we could express it in terms of latitude and growing zones. A growing zone in the US is defined to be a specific 10 F minimum temperature range. While there is a lot of topology in growing zone maps (which depend on e.g. height above sea level and location in the jet stream as much as on “strictly latitude”) on average a growing zone, a bit over 5 C, is perhaps 250 miles across north to south across the US. What we are talking about as all of the climate change that has occurred from 1850 to the present so far is the moral equivalent of moving from Goldsboro to Durham in NC. Goldsboro’s average temperature is 62.05°F. Durham’s is 59°F. Oops, that is too far — a shift of 1.7 C, almost twice the supposed climate shift since 1850, probably because Goldsboro is roughly 60 crow-flying miles closer to the coast than Durham, even though it is only maybe 30 miles further south. If we round our a list of nearby cities/airports: Raleigh NC (20 miles away) is 60.8°F or just about exactly 1 C warmer, RDU airport (in between is 60.45°F, Burlington (around 30 miles) is 59.6°F, Smithfield (40 miles) is 59.75°F (and located directly in between Raleigh and Goldsboro and yet it’s a full degree F cooler than Raleigh and well over 2 F cooler than Goldsboro, go figure).
People just don’t have any perspective on this. 0.7 C is pretty much exactly the total global anomaly from 1900 to the present. This is the scale of the climate shift that is supposedly going to wipe out whole species of (fill in your favorite small fluffy animal, pretty little wildflower, ecologically important insect, endangered freshwater clam, whatever) any year now. If I dig up a plant in my back yard and carry it to somebody’s yard in Raleigh, a twenty-five minute drive East, the plant will clearly suffer from the “climate shift”, and if I tried taking it to Goldsboro at 1.7 C warmer, that’s very close to the climate shift expected from a doubling of CO_2 alone with no feedback and could end up being the total anomaly shift by 2100 very easily indeed, even according to the IPCC, even if we do little to nothing about CO2.
Obviously, any plant or animal growing happily in my back yard is doomed if I drive it to Goldsboro and let it go or plant it there. The climate shift will be too severe! It will languish and die!
Right.
Most people — let’s try again — no human being alive could detect a climate difference between Durham and Raleigh, or Durham and Chapel Hill, or Durham and Smithfield, or even Durham and Goldsboro. They’re all in the same growing zone. On any given day, at any given hour, one or another of the these will be warmer or cooler than the others, and if we actually measured temperatures in the country — where I live, for example, as opposed to at the airport or at some downtown location — we might find that there is a 1 C shift from one part of Durham to another without even leaving the city limits. Azaleas dug up in Forest Hills are clearly doomed if they are transplanted to Loch’nora.
This is sheer lunacy. This is the “warming signal” that is supposedly being resolved by the process that produces the global anomaly, the climate shift we are all supposed to fear, the climate shift that will lead to mass extinctions and worse.
Or is it just climate noise?
That, my friends, is so very, very, difficult a question to answer. It is very difficult to answer now that the averages I’m reporting have been “adjusted” using techniques that deliberately smooth out the noise inherent in the direct measurements and supposedly correct for things like instrumentation changes or time of observation changes or location changes, each with a small pile of assumptions that are very difficult to retroactively go back and “prove” as the proof once again requires the separation of a presumed signal from unknown noise plus unknown natural variation. Goldsboro very likely does have a slightly different climate, as it is on the border between the piedmont and the coastal plain of NC, and is right at the tip of the “sandhills” region as well. Maps of NC precipitation show huge differences as one sweeps across these different geographical locations — the sandhills seem to favor thunderstorm formation relative to the piedmont, and the coastal plain gets a lot more than either one. There is a strong correlation between precipitation and elevation and surface topography and temperature even within a growing zone:
http://climate.ncsu.edu/images/climate/sandhills_July_precip_big.jpg
(the red band outlines the Sandhills).
Climate models, of course, are blind to most of this. Cell sizes are typically at least 100×100 km, which could put Raleigh, Durham, Chapel Hill, Smithfield, and Goldsboro all in a single cell and assign that cell a single temperature, a single probability of generating a thunderstorm. But there is a two inch difference in the average July rainfall in Durham and in the Sandhills region only fifty miles south, or in Goldsboro sixty miles east by southeast. The cell size cannot even resolve the variations in rainfall and climate models, as far as I know, are completely blind to the variations in underlying soil types evidenced by this map:
http://climate.ncsu.edu/images/climate/sandhills_soils_big.jpg
that are clearly correlated with the precipitation, surface albedo, heat transport variations associated with summer thunderstorms (which are further convolved with height above sea level and position in the general atmospheric circulation patterns and the state of the locally relevant decadal oscillation patterns and their phases, the AO and NAO):
https://climate.ncsu.edu/climate/patterns/NAO.html
At a guess, natural shifts in almost any of these patterns can likely produce decadal or inter-climate-model-cell “climate” shifts as large or larger than any predicted to be “catastrophic”, shifts that naturally lead to floods or droughts or heat waves or cold snaps that are “extreme” compared to some sort of ill-defined running mean that “climate shift” is supposedly referred back to.
rgb