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?
Ed Scott wrote:
It’s too late so why are they so concerned? We now live in an age where science is of no consequence.
————————————–
New Study Shows Climate Change Largely Irreversible
http://www.noaanews.noaa.gov/stories2009/20090126_climate.html
FIrst, increases in CO2 will “lock in” … cause? sea level rise. So, higher CO2 causes a warming of the oceans, it’s not warmer oceans resulting in the outgassing of CO2?
Second, we’re supposed to worry about 3.2 feet of sea level rise in 900 years with CO2 at 600ppm?! That’s less than 0.5 inch in TEN YEARS!
And how typical that they focus on drying with no consideration for regions that will be wetter. Correct me if I’m wrong, but wouldn’t thermal expansion of the oceans mean increased evaporation and therefore increased precipitation somewhere in the world? Surely that increased precipitation can’t all be over the ocean?
Ron de Haan wrote:
There’s also the (former) policy of fire prevention causing crowding, increased competition for resources/sunlight, non-renewal of soil (no ash). Fire prevention could also have artificially decreased tree mortality.
Steve Berry (09:49:42) :
In your link to bbc, a website I rarely visit anymore because I figure going there supports their company, and well, Im into passive resistance..if no one read their crap, maybe they would get the idea to stop, anyhow. Look at the backgrounds of the trees they are showing, its all green and lovely but the tree in the foreground is sick. Then go look up pine beetle, gypsy moth and the variety of other forest pests that have been ravaging our national forests since the no burn policy got put into effect. Many of our forests are infected and sick. Global warming? I think not. Man made? You betcha! Just one example of mans attempt to control his environment going awry.
vukcevic (06:05:13) :
Im with ya there. Nasa shows a change of tone starting about 1995. I wont even guess what happened at that time.
I have a question for everyone. If I told you tomorrow was going to be 5 degrees warmer than it was today in your neighborhood, would you go into a fit.. throw yourself on the ground and scream the sky is falling?
The truth of the matter is that we humans, no matter what part of the world we live in (cept maybe dead on equator), experience a greater change of temp due to the noise they call seasons then ever shows up on one of those goofy anomaly charts they show us. Heck the hockey stick appeared on a chart that had a whopping 1 degree above the 0 line. Most of the wicked heat spells the world experiences lately is measured is in 1/100ths of a degree. So when you read stuff like this: “Currently the warmest year on record is 1998, which saw average temperatures of 14.52 degrees Celsius – well above the 1961-1990 long-term average of 14 degrees Celsius.” Do you realize that the disastrous heat they are talking about is 52/100ths of a degree over the entire world and its been averaged?
Anthony feel free to snip me anytime you need to. I find myself getting frustrated and less eloquent lately.
Evert Jesse (06:43:51)
the obvious answer is volcanic eruptions: but before they releave pressure
is there a heat build up? geologists don’t care if the planet is .5C warmer first LOL.
but what is bad is that the oceans deep water has huge pressures that buffer any change; that you could have a 20% increase, and not realize it for years.
oh well.
Ked5,
I understand the GCR cloud formation theory, but so far it hasn’t been proven. I don’t know if there are records of albedo going back too far, but since 2005 and the “Watts Step” has there been any documented increase in albedo?
Does anyone have a clue as to how much albedo would have to change to have an effect? I hate to postulate but maybe the slight drop in TSI and a slight increase in albedo could cause some cooling. Separately insignificant but taken together?
Someone commented “its the sun stupid”, we need a smoking gun before making claims like that.
It might be interesting to look at the year 1775 in New England. I have read that one reason the locals were able to revolt against the king was because the spring and summer were kindly, and crops were good. The battles of Concord and Lexington were fought on a “hot” day (for April in New England.) However what caught my attention were notes about getting hay crops in during May, and picking cherries in June. Both usually happen later.
The ice-core records don’t catch these short-term peaks and valleys. And, of course, Mann somehow manages to “smoothes out” the English producing wine in Roman times, and Vikings growing crops in Greenland during the MWP.
However our current hot spells get the press howling about the end of the world, while our cold spells seem to reduce reporters to an embarrassed silence…..for the time being.
Pierre Gosselin (05:55:11) : I meant hockey stick
Sure you did …. uh huh…. right …. ;=}
I liked it better in the ‘original’ form. Got quite a chuckle!
Adolfo Giurfa (08:05:42) :
You can find here: http://www.giurfa.com/lima.jpg […] from 1754 to 1856.
That is one flat trend! Out to be easy to see if recent data are near those temps…
Ian M (14:20:31) :
. Using “heat efflux from earth” I found information on actual heat efflux at:
http://esrc.stfx.ca/pdf/grl-1.pdf
The number was around 80 mW/sq m. Very small relative to IR radiation.
Doesn’t that ‘very small relative to IR’ kind of depend on time of day, latitude, and time of season?… I could see it being very large relative to IR in, oh, Antarctica during the night in the local winter…
Ralph B. (21:30:16) :
I understand the GCR cloud formation theory, but so far it hasn’t been proven.
[…]
Someone commented “its the sun stupid”, we need a smoking gun before making claims like that.
All new ideas start as claims before they are proven. We need to make claims like that to find the smoking gun and then to prove it! (Speculation -> hypothesis -> research -> proof)
FWIW, take a look at:
http://exp-studies.tor.ec.gc.ca/e/ozone/Curr_allmap_g.htm
and scroll down to the ‘anomaly’ page. Watching this day to day can be very interesting. The present charts, 1/25 and 1/26 show rather a lot of missing ozone world wide. -10% to -25% or so over most of the world surface (though for some odd reason the N.Pole is higher than normal.)
Why does this matter? Ozone plugs the 9-10 micron IR band. Less ozone, more IR can leave the planet taking heat with it. The sun is the driver for making ozone, and cosmic rays can break it down.
When the sun goes quiet, we get more GCR breaking down ozone and making clouds. Thus a two fold driver to the cooler side.
Proven? Nope. Provable? Yup (and also falsifiable). So I’d suggest that we have a plausible testable mechanism that just needs proving or falsification.
Novoburgo (05:43:28) :
Peter (04:23;06) asks:
“where would be the best place to look for old records which can be compared to this period?”
I spent a couple of satisfying afternoons at the local library going through microfiche records of our local paper.
A much better source is an online site where you can do keyword searches through hundreds (maybe thousands by now) of newspapers, mostly from the US & Canada. Once you’ve set up your search template on the search page, you can search through a long time series of a paper and harvest the hits, then click on them one at a time to go straight to the temperature data for the day.
(Note–the site is a bit awkward and cranky and there are tricks to navigating it and using the search feature that take time to learn. Also, I haven’t done a temperature search myself–I’m drawing on my experience with searching for other material.)
The cost is $12/month on a month-by-month basis, or $6/month if an annual subscription is bought. (I.e., $72/year.) I think there’s a free one-week (or so) trial subscription. Here’s the link:
http://www.newspaperarchive.com
Ralph B. (21:30:16) :
I understand the GCR cloud formation theory, but so far it hasn’t been proven. I don’t know if there are records of albedo going back too far, but since 2005 and the “Watts Step” has there been any documented increase in albedo?
Does anyone have a clue as to how much albedo would have to change to have an effect?
Albedo has been measured:
Eos, Vol. 87, No. 4, 24 January 2006 , BY E. PALLÉ, P. R. GOODE, P. MONTAÑÉSRODRIGUEZ,
AND S. E. KOONIN
http://www.iac.es/galeria/epalle/reprints/Palle_etal_EOS_2006.pdf
As you can see in fig 2, the inverted plot agrees with the temperature trends, particularly as there has been somewhere a statement that albedo is constant since 2006.
I used the toy mode at http://www.junkscience.com/Greenhouse/Earth_temp.html
to do the temperature from albedo calculation from fig 2, and the trend is there, the magnitude is exaggerated compared to real data.
Ralph B. (21:30:16) :
p.s. to albedo
http://www.bbso.njit.edu/Research/EarthShine/
Elsewhere I made an observation that winters were becoming less cold on average overall, but summers were not showing any great overall change. I am pleased to see that no less an illustrious team than Jones et al agree with my observations and I am expecting them to share their tens of millions of research funds with me immediately.
“Globally, minimum temperatures appear to be warming at a faster rate than
Maximum temperatures (Karl et al., 1993), particularly since the 1950s (IPCC,
2001), possibly associated with a change in cloud cover. Jones et al. (1999)
found no significant increase in very warm days in the Central England
Temperature series in recent years, but there was a marked decrease in the
frequency of very cold days. A decrease in the diurnal temperature range has
also been found in Northern and Central Europe (Heino et al., 1999)”
in the UK Winter temperatures have constantly fluctuated throughout recorded history and our expectation of very cold snowy winters was popularised by Charles Dickens who drew on his experiences of the little ice age, although ironically, his life time also saw some of the warmest records in the entire CET series. Our top five warmest winters are; 1733 1868 1833 1988 1974
Going further back, the MWP also had some notably warm winters. This scientific study is entitled; “Winter air temperature variations in western Europe during the Early and High Middle Ages (AD 750–1300)” which demonstrates that MWP winters were similar to the 20th century
http://hol.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/8/5/535
We also have many references to the Roman warm period that were previously cited here, which demonstrate the alpine passes were considerably more ice free than the present;
http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2007/may16/hannibal-051607.html
and glaciers much higher in altitude. This is the original German version of the study
http://alpen.sac-cas.ch/html_d/archiv/2004/200406/ad_2004_06_12.pdf
a much shorter English language version is here;
http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=772
As also previously cited here the 1000 year long records of the Byzantine Empire demonstrate warmth throughout the empire during these known periods and show many other climatic changes. As the climate warmed and became drier we also have their plans of the extensive irrigation systems they built.
There are numerous contemporary records of climate change from the Venerable Bede, The Anglo Saxon Chronicles, through to Pepys. In the US this comes from the extensive weather records of Thomas Jefferson;
http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/JEFFERSON/ch07.html
“A change in our climate however is taking place very sensibly. Both heats and colds are become much more moderate within the memory even of the middle-aged. Snows are less frequent and less deep. They do not often lie, below the mountains, more than one, two, or three days, and very rarely a week. They are remembered to have been formerly frequent, deep, and of long continuance. The elderly inform me the earth used to be covered with snow about three months in every year. The rivers, which then seldom failed to freeze over in the course of the winter, scarcely ever do so now. This change has produced an unfortunate fluctuation between heat and cold, in the spring of the year, which is very fatal to fruits. From the year 1741 to 1769, an interval of twenty-eight years, there was no instance of fruit killed by the frost in the neighbourhood of Monticello. An intense cold, produced by constant snows, kept the buds locked up till the sun could obtain, in the spring of the year, so fixed an ascendency as to dissolve those snows, and protect the buds, during their development, from every danger of returning cold. The accumulated snows of the winter remaining to be dissolved all together in the spring, produced those over flowings of our rivers, so frequent then, and so rare now. “
The following, condensed from the records of the Hudson Bay company, demonstrate that climate change is not a new phenomena.
“Over the fifteen years between 1720 and 1735, the first snowfall of the year moved from the first week of September to the last. Also, the late 1700s were turbulent years. They were extremely cold but annual snow cover would vary from ‘extreme depth to no cover’. For instance, November 10th 1767 only one snowfall that quickly thawed had been recorded. June 6, 1791 many feet of snow in the post’s gardens. The entry for July 14, 1798 reads ‘…53 degrees colder today than it was yesterday.”
As well as actual instrumental records we have available to us thousands of such records as the ones above, with first hand accounts that show the lives of real people. In my own town the fortunes of those involved in fishing were made and lost over hundreds of years as climate altered and warm water Pilchards were replaced by cold water Herring and vice versa. The warmth in the latter part of the 18th century caused social dislocation as the Cod moved north to cooler waters and men stayed away longer to reach Newfoundland. The reliability of fish as a temperature proxy is well known;
http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=PaEPcGJOxOQC&pg=PA39&lpg=PA39&dq=pilchards+climate+change+devon&source=web&ots=S8Dq9v3O4f&sig=l4VMl6UBROkm4qAtPGWkGS2or5E&hl=en&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=1&ct=result#PPA39,M1
The Bronze Age inhabitants of nearby Dartmoor farmed the tops of the modest peaks and retreated as temperatures cooled-their dwellings are still there and have been subject to numerous studies over 150 years. The MWP inhabitants also farmed the tops in the MWP- we know the crops they grew and their slow descent down into the valley as climate cooled is recorded.
Instead of respecting this vast volume of material demonstrating that climate constantly changes and historically this current episode is nothing out of the ordinary, some people choose to rely on highly theoretical computer models which even their originators admit are highly flawed and unreliable.
Why can’t we take them at their word and accept this is a very new science built on many unproven foundations?
TonyB
E.M.Smith (02:38:04) :
“That is one flat trend! Out to be easy to see if recent data are near those temps…”
Recent data it is almost the same. Look at the 1806 peak of about 35°C. We had a similar peak (38°C) in 1998 El Nino; now we are having lower temperatures.
TonyB (12:01:21) : [… wonderful stuff elided …]
Why can’t we take them at their word and accept this is a very new science built on many unproven foundations?
Masterful post, just beautiful! Thank you.
Nick (17:01:19) :
Check out http://wattsupwiththat.com/resources/#div-comment-65319
for an introduction to WorldPress/HTML tags.