Guest Post by Steven Goddard
January, 1790 was a remarkable year in the northeastern US for several reasons. It was less than one year into George Washington’s first term, and it was one of the warmest winter months on record. Fortunately for science, a diligent Philadelphia resident named Charles Pierce kept a detailed record of the monthly weather from 1790 through 1847, and his record is archived by Google Books. Below is his monthly report from that book.
JANUARY 1790 The average or medium temperature of this month was 44 degrees This is the mildest month of January on record. Fogs prevailed very much in the morning but a hot sun soon dispersed them and the mercury often ran up to 70 in the shade at mid day. Boys were often seen swimming in the Delaware and Schuylkill rivers. There were frequent showers as in April some of which were accompanied by thunder and lightning The uncommon mildness of the weather continued until the 7th of February.
Compare that to January, 2009 with an average temperature of 27F, 17 degrees cooler than 1790. One month of course is not indicative of the climate, so let us look at the 30 year period from 1790-1819 and compare that to the last 10 “hot” years.
According to several of the most widely quoted climate scientists in the world, winters were much colder 200 years ago than now – yet the boys swimming in the Delaware in January, 1790 apparently were unaware.
Another interesting fact which can be derived from Charles Pierce’s data, is that January temperatures cooled dramatically during the period 1790-1819 – as can be seen in the graph below. The cooling rate was 13F/century. What could have caused this cooling? We are told by some experts that variations in solar activity can only affect the earth’s temperature by a few tenths of a degree. CO2 levels had been rising since the start of the industrial age. The downward trend is fairly linear and does not show any sharp downward spikes, so it is unlikely to be due to volcanic activity. What other “natural variability” could have caused such a dramatic drop in temperature?
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Now that is very interesting. Keeps getting back to Sunspots, because there definitely wasn’t significant amounts of anthropogenic CO2 being produced by industry back then….
Probably won’t find this in the mainstream media, well not until they decide to create an Ice Age bandwagon and make a catastrophe out of natural variation and jumble science with fantasy again.
…. Anyway, it’s kind of reassuring to know that we’ve been there before.
How long before some one claims Charles Pierce was a schill for big oil?
It will be interesting to see how this evidence is discounted.
Thank you for this wonderful post.
IMHO, there is one factor that makes a direct comparison between the Pierce records and today impossible; the urban heat island effect. In other words, the UHI is surely making today’s data for the city warmer than it otherwise would have been. If I’m right on that, the real temperature difference is therefor larger than you have shown, and the cooling even more significant.
Is it just me, or does Solar Cycle 4’s decline look very similar to 24’s? the shape of the slope looks very similar to me.
OT. HadCruT finally in! Scroll to the bottom – right hand side. All those 0.4s, then a 0.3! http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/temperature/hadcrut3gl.txt
Well it wasn’t the sun. That giant flaming ball that is so big that our entire planet could fall into it and not even make a respectable splash couldn’t possibly affect things here.
Since the cooling was harmful and caused crop failures and other problems, it has to have been anthropogenic. My guess is soot from burning coal.
(and for the humor impaired, yes, this was intended as sarcasm)
How did Pierce do his measurements?
http://climatetrek.wordpress.com/2007/02/16/hottest-january-in-record/
. . . It may be cold comfort during a frigid February, but last month was by far the hottest January ever. . . . The scientists went beyond their normal double checking and took the unusual step of running computer climate models “just to make sure that what we’re seeing was real,” Easterling said.
Sigh.
I do not understand something…I have read several articles (here and elsewhere) showing sunspot numbers and temperature following each other. What we have not yet found though is why that is. If it was just once then it would be coincidence but from the graphs I have seen global temps seem to follow sunspots. I hold Leif in high regard and he has thrown the BS flag on just about every instance of attempted correlation. Whats more he backs up his flag with his version of instant replay…hard data.
Is there something that we just haven’t looked at yet?
Dear Anthony
Just about OT but more an excuse to indicate another impressed learner lurking.
Do Tambora in 1815 and the year without a summer in 1816 show in those records.
In Ulster/Ireland there was a famine in 1817 – I suppose following a reduction in temperatures in 1816
I have seen some contemporary weather notes made by a relative and 1816 isn’t mentioned as unusual which has always puzzled me
I wonder if Pierce attempted to influence the nature of the measurements….
That was very intersting. I wonder how many such old diaries exist worldwide.
Such spells of unusual warm, or cold, weather can be found anywhere. Unusual weather is in fact not unusual.
If the observations mentioned above occurred today, or especially when Gore testifies this week, think of the doomsday panic he and the media would try to unleash.
But when Gore testifies later this week, looks like more cold weather.
http://wxmaps.org/pix/temp1.html
If we are lucky, the heating system will bonk out just before Gore testifies.
Good Job, as allways very interesting. By teh way, we have some very good records in Switzerland, they are accessible via :http://www.meteoschweiz.admin.ch/web/de/wetter.html on top one can choose the language. One station reaches back 150 Years, not much warming there? Keep the pressure up.
Regards from the cold snowy Swiss Mountains. Freddie
This morning several Maine stations are again establishing new record daily lows. It’s becoming commonplace this month.
Steve Goddard
Before we start blaming the Dalton Minimum – what was the pennsylvania record like before and after the DM period.
Sorry O/T but an excellent round up of research into the UHI in North America can be found on “CO2 Science”.
http://www.co2science.org/subject/u/summaries/uhinorthamerica.php
What you haven’t looked at yet is the rest of the records from around the world. Especially for the decade of the 1790’s, which is noted in literature in places such as Russia, China, India, Japan, Australia, etc.
Else you are going to get hit with cherry-picked data every time from anyone wanting to whip the rug out from underneath.
Remember, climate is the whole enchilada.
Put it all together and the graph from Philadelphia might look like the best case scenario for a warmist point of view.
David M. Ludlum wrote a series of American weather books, one of which is titled, “Early American Winters: 1604-1820.” In it he tells the tale of the winter of 1779-80, when the snow started falling in November and just didn’t stop. This is the winter after Washington’s storied Valley Forge freezeout. Washington’s troops were wintering in Morristown, N.J. — one writer said it made Valley Forge of the previous year look like a picnic.
All of the New York harbor from New Jersey to the lower section of Long Island Sound was frozen to the point of cavalry and multiple cannons being hauled between Manhattan and Staten Island, and several Hessian troops abandoned their posts and walked the 12 miles across Long Island Sound from Lloyd’s Neck to Stamford, CT. Ludlum says that the Connecticut Courant in Hartford provided the most complete temperature record. The temperatures reportedly reached 16 below zero. Even if that temperature isn’t completely accurate to the degree, it was obviously as cold as the severe cold the New York area suffered through in the winter of 1933-34.
I wonder how 1779-80 and 1933-34 fall as to solar minima and maxima. After all, they’re just local weather events.
For the Western World, the data is being cooked right before our very eyes to meet political agenda.
For the Russians, they are noting with grim determination what is coming down the pipe, and they are banking on it, literally.
Kinda makes you wonder, does it not?
Pierre raises an interesting point. Can anyone suggest where would be the best place to look for old records which can be compared to this period? It does seem to keep coming back to sunspots. No idea why. how, etc. and correlation is not necessarily causation, but the current period is freezing my butt, and putting paid to the AR4 projections. -24C this morning. Not pleasant.
Response to Rob B. question
As I understand the sunspot/global temperature theory, it goes as follows and is based on the idea that low-level cloud cover is the earth’s primary temperature control mechanism:
Cosmic radiation “seeds” such clouds. Solar wind generated by sunspot activity diverts cosmic radiation away from the earth. Fewer sunspots translates to more low-level cloud cover and lower temperatures.
A very interesting article, which shows us that before the 20th century there was not some sort of climatic Golden Age, with predictable mild springs, warm summers and snowy winters every year (and which, according to AGW theory, was thrown out of kilter by industrialisation and CO2.) The amount of variability appears to have been huge, in the 18th and in any century. In 1776, Washington’s army was crossing the Delaware, which was swarming with ice floes; in 1777-78 they were freezing in Valley Forge. The mild January of 1790 would probably have got people sounding the alarm about CO2-induced “climate chaos”, had the same pattern occurred 200 years later.
@Ralph B. (02:24:57)
Sunspot correlations are only approximate at best, and rely on an 11-year running average, but there does seem to be a rough correlation. Of course we must expect that other things also affect temperature, so trying to make disproofs of sunspot correlation based on a few years of data is misguided.
Hopefully we find a better solar measurement than sunspots for predicting temperature, but then we will only have data going back a few decades (which makes proof/disproof hard – perhaps harder than sunspots, since short-term variations in temperature caused by other factors will make such predictions harder).
Ralph B.
As I understand it, the objection to the sunspot-temperature correlation being meaningful (in the scientific sense) is that we don’t have a mechanism to explain it. Obviously the correlation is there, but is there some third factor we haven’t found yet that explains both? Or do two long-term cycles happen to be coinciding for the last couple of hundred years that make it only look like there is a connection? Until a mechanism is proposed and confirmed, we won’t really know.
To find a mechanism by which solar cycles influence climate, someone would need to come up with an hypothesis that demonstrates how solar variability might cause (for example) water molecules to behave slightly differently to produce an overall warmer or cooler effect, or perhaps more or less wator vapor in the atmosphere, which over time influences the climate. Something like that.
Some kind of mechanism is needed, a testable hypothesis, before we can really call it science. The correlations tell us that something is going on (maybe), but until we have a mechanism, we’ll never be quite sure what, and we’ll never really be able to make accurate predictions.
Thank you Steven Goddard for this fine article,
The most essential point made is the fact that our current temperatures are well within “NORMAL” parameters and AGW is a “HOAX”.
Forget the endless discussions about CO2 and if you have any doubts left pay a visit to the web site of the late John. L. Daly: http://www.john-daly.com/stations/stations.htm
Although most temps end by 2001/2002 you will see that most temps (raw data) are…flat and many of them show cooling, a trend that continues today.
Also read the article “On top of the world” about the Arctic or any other article of interest.
It’s nice to see that AGW has an history and the warmists have created a habit to keep pushing for the same subjects over and over again to make their point.
Scaring the public with non existing catastrophic events based on rigged data to serve a political agenda!
Disgusting.
It’d be interesting to see if there is any correlation between tree-rings and temperatures in the vicinity covered by this and other diarists.