Two days ago I highlighted a news story from the Washington Post Arctic Ocean Getting Warm; Seals Vanish and Icebergs Melt dated from November 2nd 1922. That brought a flood of interest and some other interesting finds along with it as other readers contributed what they found on the story.
One of the most interesting finds was a study published in the Monthly Weather Review in September 1933 Titled: IS OUR CLIMATE CHANGING? A STUDY OF LONG-TIME TEMPERATURE TRENDS.
The first page of the original article is below:
Click this link for the full PDF of the article.
What is most interesting about this article is that it stems from a realization that the regular weather patterns they used to know were now acting differently. For example this form the article:
The phase of weather, or climate, that is attracting attention at the present time is not these short-period changes from warm to cool, and vice versa, for they are always present, but rather an apparent longer-time change to cool periods that seem to be less frequent and of shorter duration, and warm periods that are more pronounced and persistent.
And when you look at some of the city temperature graphs presented in the article, such as the one below, the parallels between them and some graphs presented in the present day are striking:
There is even the familiar argument and rebuttal about the Urban Heat Island effect:
It has been suggested that these tendencies to abnormally high-temperature records in recent years may be more apparent than real, in that data cited are nearly always from large cities where the thermometers may have been unduly affected by artificial influences that do not obtain in the open country. We have examined this phase of the matter and find that the suggestion is not well taken.
In the concluding remarks, the is the recognition of climate change to a warmer regime:
All of these confirm the general statement that we are in the midst of a period of abnormal warmth, which has come on more less gradually for many years.
Of course we all know what happened next, 1934 became the hottest year on record, the dust bowl and great depression occurred, followed by World War II. The climate changes again, a return to a colder phase lasting all the way until about 1978 when the “new ice age” was being discussed. Then the great PDO shift occurred and warming has been the norm since then.
There wasn’t any push then to accept blame for the change or to take action to change the climate. Many people look to the graph below though and see something other than natural variations.
The difference today is that during this warming phase, much like what led up to 1934, had a significant El Nino year of 1998, and it set off alarm bells. Because unlike in the 30’s, when this paper was written, somebody was ready to step in with a cause that they believed could be modified by action- man made CO2.
Yet as this graph recently published on ICECAP by Joe D’Aleo shows, it appears that the Pacfic Decadal Oscillation (PDO), combined with the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO) is a good fit to the instrumental surface temperature record of the last 100 years:
We could all learn a little bit from our weather history. We could all step back a bit and look at what previously happened in our climate changes before we make a rush to judgement to try to “fix” a problem that is very likely just another natural variance on the upswing, soon to be followed by a downturn.
There are quite a number of articles on “climate change” in the past, for further reading, try looking at some of these article links submitted by readers of this forum from the New York Times newspaper archives. Just click on the date. Thanks to Tim Blair for compiling the list below from our reader submitted links as well as his own research.
• 1923:
Glaciers have disappeared and land once covered with field ice is bare.
• 1924:
Glaciers are moving from their age-old beds, pouring greater quantities of ice into the sea than recorded history has known. Broad areas of land are sinking to new levels. A number of islands have disappeared.
• 1930:
The Alpine glaciers are in full retreat. Out of 102 glaciers observed by Professor P.L. Mercanton of the University of Lausanne and his associates more than twothirds have been found to be shrinking.
• 1935:
The great glaciers of the West, last remnants of the Ice Age on continental United States, have been retreating from their strongholds in the mountains at double time since last year.
• 1947:
A mysterious warming of the climate is slowly manifesting itself in the Arctic, engendering a “serious international problem,” Dr. Hans Ahlmann, noted Swedish geophysicist, said today.
There are also many reports of the climate turning colder:
• 1895:
The question is again being discussed whether recent and long-continued observations do not point to the advent of a second glacial period, when the countries now basking in the fostering warmth of a tropical sun will ultimately give way to the perennial frost and snow of the polar regions.
• 1961:
Winters Since ‘40 Found Colder In Studies by Weather Bureau; Data Indicate, a Reversal of a Warming Trend That Began in 1881
• 1961:
After a week of discussions on the causes of climate change, an assembly of specialists from several continents seems to have reached unanimous agreement on only one point: it is getting colder.
• 1975:
Scientists Ponder Why World’s Climate Is Changing; a Major Cooling Widely Considered to Be Inevitable
• 1978:
An international team of specialists has concluded from eight indexes of climate that there is no end in sight to the cooling trend of the last 30 years, at least in the Northern Hemisphere.
Thus nature, and the NYT, balances itself. The paper really should return to the Grandfather Index of climate judgment:
• 1934:
America is believed by Weather Bureau scientists to be on the verge of a change of climate, with a return to increasing rains and deeper snows and the colder Winters of grandfather’s day.
• 1936:
The recent severely cold weather, following, in the main, many mild Winters, has caused people throughout the country to ask: “Does this portend a return to the reputed cold Winters of ‘granddad’s day’ years ago?”
Yep; all over the US, that’s exactly what people were asking. But listen to folks from the actual Granddad’s Day era and they’ll tell you the real cold was earlier still:
• 1890:
Is our climate changing? … The older inhabitants tell us that the Winters are not as cold now as when they were young …
Also, there are fewer mastodons. Last word to the ominously-named, but perfectly sensible, Mr Scarr:
• 1924:
Some People Always Think the Climate Is Changing, But Mr. Scarr Says There Is Nothing in His Records to Justify the Notion
I looked at ICECAP for that graph and couldn’t find it – does anyone have the link to that article? Thanks.
REPLY: See his paper: http://icecap.us/images/uploads/US_Temperatures_and_Climate_Factors_since_1895.pdf
And then, of course, we have hysterically funny (as well as just plain hysterical) contemporary articles like this.
Perhaps 50 or 100 years from now someone on a blog will reference this article as evidence of some of the nitwittery of the late 20th and early 21st century.
Dave, thank you for pointing out the quote from Phil Jones. He is presumably sticking to the Hadley Centre prediction that the average global anomaly this year will be 0.37 That would be in the top ten, but would also be cooler than any of the last 7 years.
However the average error in the Met Office predictions over the last 9 years is 0.07, so that means we can expect either 0.44 or 0.30 if this is an averagely “accurate” prediction. With such a wide margin of error I wonder why the Met bother with these annual predictions. What possible use are they? All they do is show everyone how bad the climate modellers are at predicting global temperatures even one year ahead.
Is it just a coincidence that 8 of the 9 Phil Jones predictions of the next year’s global average temperature anomaly have been over-estimates? And that if one takes the sign of the error into account the Met is on its way to predicting 6 degrees too much warming during the coming century.
Wow, a whole 8 hours! And since WAY back in 1982! Run for your lives!!
Stan,
The largest omission in the document you cited IMO is the following:
“…by the Nobel Piece Prize-winning…”
Anthony, you are giving people the wrong link. This is the one you want to give people:
http://icecap.us/images/uploads/US_Temperatures_and_Climate_Factors_since_1895.pdf
REPLY: Thanks for pointing that out, I made the link copy/paste in haste, and didn’t check it.
Anthony,
You could go back even further. In the 1400’s the French poet Francois Villon was already complaining “Mais où sont les neiges d’antan” (But where are the snows of yester years). I guess he was living during the MWP?
Also, it may be good to remember that in 1933, people still believed that continents were fixed. Seventy years from now, will people look back at us and laugh at our ignorance?
This must be one of Anthony’s best posts. I am giving him a standing ovation.
What caught my eye was how they used yearly temperature summations in their charts. That avoids all of the issues involved with averages and I have not seen that used before.
I hate averages, because they hide the real data. Often, the diviations from the averages end up being the most important information.
I know how busy you are. Hate to even mention something that would add to your work load. Maybe a reader has access and time to give a look at the back issues of NatGeo. They are currently one of the leading scaremongering tub thumpers. The current issue features a story where they draw a line across the Sahara desert asserting that this is where the desert recieved 6 inches of rainfall during the 30’s, 40’s, 50’s, and 60’s, then they draw another line to show how much further south the 6 inch rainfall line was during the 70’s,80’s, and 90’s – (as if that mattered in 2008!).
National Geographic as a magazine stretches back into the 1880’s – I would be very surprised, if in the stories from the early 20th century, it isn’t chocked full of climate change scare mongering.
And I would dearly love to see their current climate change apple cart take a tumble.
Well even GISS shows the warm period alluded to in these articles. The only question in my mind is, were the warm 1930s limited to NOAM, or global (or something in between)?
My mother has talked about the great heat wave in 1936. She lived in Detroit at the time and said it was quite a memorable experience.
Detroit’s killer heat wave of 1936
http://info.detnews.com/redesign/history/story/historytemplate.cfm?id=134&CFID=10427031&CFTOKEN=84350957
People really have been dumbed down to believe we live in “unprecedented” times.
My grand dad was born in 1884 and talked about the cold durning WWI and how many men died in the trenches due to disease (flu and such) due to the cold. My dad was born in 1918 and talked about how hot it was in the mid 30’s and how everything dried up and made the depression even worse. but that he remembered the year without a summer and how terrible it was when all the crops failed. It must have been terrible times. The face is that it tells us that we are not in the midst of unusual climate change.
I believe that we would be better served to prepare to adapt to what ever the climate serves up rather than to try to change the climate. We are due historically for a change and I believe it is happening now. I do hope it dosen’t get to cold that would be much worse than some warmer. what ever we must adapt.
Bill
Here is a link to the Illinois State Climatologist’s web site:
http://www.sws.uiuc.edu/atmos/statecli/Climate_change/iltrends.htm
Check out the temp graph. And, comment from the state climatologist “For temperature, the 1800s were considerably cooler with a remarkable warming trend through about 1940, followed by a cooling trend through the early 1980s. While temperatures have warmed in recent years, they were not as warm as the 1930s.”
Again from the Illinois State Climatologist:
http://www.sws.uiuc.edu/atmos/statecli/Climate_change/toptenlist.htm
“Here are the 10 warmest years in Illinois based on the 1895-2006 record. Normal is defined as the 1971-2000 average. The state-wide normal temperature for Illinois is 51.7 degrees F.
Unlike global and U.S. temperature records, the warmest year on record in Illinois was 1921. Three of the 10 warmest years came from the 1930s decade. The two most recent entries were 1998 and 2006.”
That’s very interesting. I think the whole global warming issue is kind of alarmist. Sigh.
REPLY and FYI: Your email address used landed this post in the spam filter, I only caught it by opening up the holder to look for something else. The words that makeup the email address are the reason, you may want to think about a different email address.
On the thread of climate worries — do we remember the 2007 Georgia drought and what it was blamed on? Almost four months ago, forecasters said the drought would worsen because of La Nina. Since then, the rainfall has been noticeably above normal. (I do not intend to start a religious discussion, but I think it can bring a light-hearted smile when one observes that the change came after Governor Perdue took a lot of grief for publicly praying for rain — who would have thought?!)
I’m a tad ambivalent towards global warming, and tend to get turned off when talking to doom and gloom environmentalists, but I do like that the alarms causes people to give a little more attention to “green energy”.
This of course is a whole other world of woes but seems like a tiny step in a direction beneficial towards the earth…That said I enjoyed your article. Thank you for putting it together.
It all goes to show that we ignore history. We seem to research more and more but learn less. We also make explanations more and more complicated when the obvious is staring us in the face. Global climate changes all the time. What history does prove is that we live on a dynamic planet whose climate cannot be controled by human intervention.
[…] specifically, I’m writing this in response to What’s up with that?’s post on climate trends being recognized in the early post-industrial era of the 1920’s and […]
The true cause of the 70-years cyclic climate changes is the modulation of the thermonuclear energy conversion process within the core of the Sun by the action of galactic vacuum density waves on this star (see below).
A Compilation of the Arguments that Irrefutably Prove that Climate Change is driven by Solar Activity and not by CO2 Emission
Dr. Gerhard Löbert, Otterweg 48, 85598 Baldham, Germany. March 6, 2008.
Physicist. Recipient of The Needle of Honor of German Aeronautics.
Program Manager “CCV, F 104G” (see Internet).
Program Manager “Lampyridae, MRMF” (see Internet)
Conveyor of a super-Einsteinian theory of gravitation that explains, among many other post-Einstein-effects, the Sun-Earth-Connection and the true cause of the global climate changes.
I. Climatological facts
As the glaciological and tree ring evidence shows, climate change is a natural phenomenon that has occurred many times in the past, both with the magnitude as well as with the time rate of temperature change that have occurred in the recent decades. The following facts prove that the recent global warming is not man-made but is a natural phenomenon.
1. In the temperature trace of the past 10 000 years based on glaciological evidence, the recent decades have not displayed any anomalous behaviour. In two-thirds of these 10 000 years, the mean temperature was even higher than today. Shortly before the last ice age the temperature in Greenland even increased by 15 degrees C in only 20 years. All of this without any man-made CO2 emission!
2. There is no direct connection between CO2 emission and climate warming. This is shown by the fact that these two physical quantities have displayed an entirely different temporal behaviour in the past 150 years. Whereas the mean global temperature varied in a quasi-periodic manner, with a mean period of 70 years, the CO2 concentration has been increasing exponentially since the 1950’s. The sea level has been rising and the glaciers have been shortening practically linearly from 1850 onwards. Neither time trace showed any reaction to the sudden increase of hydrocarbon burning from the 1950’s onwards.
3. The hypothesis that the global warming of the past decades is man-made is based on the results of calculations with climate models in which the main influence on climate is not included. The most important climate driver (besides solar luminosity) comes from the interplay of solar activity, interplanetary magnetic field strength, cosmic radiation intensity, and cloud cover of the Earth atmosphere. As is shown in Section II, this phenomenon is generated by the action of galactic vacuum density waves on the core of the Sun.
4. The extremely close correlation between the changes in the mean global temperature and the small changes in the rotational velocity of the Earth in the past 150 years (see Fig. 2.2 of http://www.fao.org/DOCREP/005/Y2787E/y2787e03.htm), which has been ignored by the mainstream climatologists, leaves little room for a human influence on climate. This close correlation results from the action of galactic vacuum density waves on the Sun and on the Earth (see Section II). Note that temperature lags rotation by 6 years.
5. From the steady decrease of the rotational velocity of the Earth that set in in Dec. 2003, it can reliably be concluded that the mean Earth temperature will decrease again in 2010 for the duration of three decades as it did from 1872 to 1913 and from 1942 to 1972.
6. The RSS AMSU satellite measurements show that the global temperature has not increased since 2001 despite the enormous worldwide CO2 emissions. Since 2006 it has been decreasing again.
II. Physical explanation for the strong correlation between fluctuations of the rotational velocity and changes of the mean surface temperature of the Earth
Despite its great successes, the gravitational theory of the great physicist Albert Einstein, General Relativity, (which is of a purely geometric nature and is totally incompatible with the highly successful quantum theory) must be discarded because this theory is completely irreconcilable with the extremely large energy density of the vacuum that has been accurately measured in the Casimir experiment.
Seaon Theory, a new theory of gravitation based on quantum mechanics that was developed eight decades after General Relativity, not only covers the well-known Einstein-effects but also shows up half a dozen post-Einstein effects that occur in nature. From a humanitarian standpoint, the most important super-Einsteinian physical phenomenon is the generation of small-amplitude longitudinal gravitational waves by the motion of the supermassive bodies located at the center of our galaxy, their transmission throughout the Galaxy, and the action of these waves on the Sun, the Earth and the other celestial bodies through which they pass. These vacuum density waves, which carry with them small changes in the electromagnetic properties of the vacuum, occur in an extremely large period range from minutes to millennia.
On the Sun, these vacuum waves modulate the intensity of the thermonuclear energy conversion process within the core, and this has its effect on all physical quantities of the Sun (this is called solar activity). This in turn has its influences on the Earth and the other planets. In particular, the solar wind and the solar magnetic field strength are modulated which results in large changes in the intensity of the cosmic radiation reaching the Earth. Cosmic rays produce condensation nuclei so that the cloud cover of the atmosphere and the Earth albedo also change.
On the Earth, the steady stream of vacuum density waves produces parts-per-billion changes in a large number of geophysical quantities. The most important quantities are the radius, circumference, rotational velocity, gravitational acceleration, VLBI baseline lengths, and axis orientation angles of the Earth, as well as the orbital elements of all low-earth-orbit satellites. All of these fluctuations have been measured.
Irrefutable evidence for the existence of this new, super-Einsteinian wave type is provided by the extremely close correlation between changes of the mean temperature and fluctuations of the mean rotational velocity of the Earth. (see the figure referred to in Section I.4). Einsteinian theory cannot explain this amazing correlation between two physical quantities that seem to be completely unrelated.
While the rotational velocity of the Earth and the thermonuclear energy conversion process on the Sun react simultaneously to the passage of a vacuum density wave, a time span of 6 years is needed for the energy to be transported from the core of the Sun to the Earth’s atmosphere and for the latter’s reaction time.
As can be seen, super-Einsteinian gravitation reveals the true cause of climate change.
Certainly we need to look at history — and I’m reluctant to say it’s the climate change side that is ignoring history. I’m not sure that these charts support a claim that current warming is incidental, as I’ve argued at
http://timpanogos.wordpress.com/2008/03/20/icebergs-in-florida-history-anecdotes-or-data/
Great clips, Rev. Most amusing.
If you are doing any analysis with the USHCN database, remember that the historical temperature record has been adjusted to increase the trend by 0.53F up to 1999 (we don’t how much they have adjusted the trend after 1999.)
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/img/climate/research/ushcn/ts.ushcn_anom25_diffs_urb-raw_pg.gif
Ed Darrell, they’re not only ignoring history, they’re adjusting and rewriting it!
Anthony, great stuff!
In spite of one of the coolest summers I can ever recall [I haven’t been sailing for 4 months] the local MSM still preach AGW.
When’s the class action gonna start?
Doc G.,
What’s your take on the oceanic oscillations which correlate so well with the temperature ups and downs of the last century? Do you consider the PDO/AMO cycles to be solar-driven as well, or do you regard the correlation as coincidental?
Also, what do you think of the accuracy of the recent measurements and the reliability of the usually suspect proxies?