It’s Hot But Don’t Blame Global Warming
By Cynthia Barnett – 2/1/2009
FloridaTrend Magazine
Morton D. Winsberg fell in love with Florida more than 50
years ago, but the Illinois-born geographer never quite got used to the dog days
of summer.
In recent years, the Florida State University professor emeritus and author
of a book called “Florida Weather” began wondering: Is global climate change
making Florida’s hot season longer and hotter? With help from geography students
and researchers at FSU’s Population Center and Florida Climate Center, Winsberg
and co-author Melanie Simmons gathered and analyzed temperature data from 57
Florida weather stations going back six decades.
Their research showed that the hot season in Florida has gotten a lot hotter
— and longer — in some places, but not at all in others. The change, however, is
unrelated to global warming, the increase in the average temperature of the
earth’s atmosphere. Rather, they found, it’s a function of the lesser-known
phenomenon of local warming. The analysis “shows that weather can be very
local,” says Winsberg, “and also that weather can be a function of population
growth.”
Winsberg found the most notable climate changes along the state’s
southeastern coast, where development and wetlands drainage have been heaviest.
In most areas he analyzed, the heat is getting more intense. Of the 57 weather
stations, 49 saw an increase in the number of days with an average temperature
of 80 degrees. When it came to the length of the hot season, the biggest
increase was in Hialeah, with a 72-day increase, followed by Miami, with a
45-day increase.
Neither the intensity of the heat nor the increasing number of hotter days
was related to water temperatures in the Atlantic and Gulf, a fact that
surprised Winsberg. The heat trends also weren’t consistent across the state. In
fact, some areas, notably in the northeast part of the state, saw a shorter hot
season and a decrease in the number of dog days.
That evidence leads Winsberg and FSU meteorologists to blame the hot spots on
local land-use changes that accentuate the urban “heat-island” effect — the
pools of heat that large, dense concentrations of people produce in their local
climates. Cutting down trees, draining wetlands and pouring concrete all make a
place hotter, as anyone who’s walked across an asphalt parking lot on a summer
day knows, Winsberg says.
|
Geographer Morton Winsberg’s research suggests that local land-use changes — urban development and draining wetlands — may be contributing more to local climate change than global warming. [Photo: Jeffrey Camp] Contagious Energy Geographer Morton Winsberg retired a decade ago, but you wouldn’t know if from his teaching load, his research output and the hours he spends on the Florida State University campus. At 78, Winsberg no longer worries about getting his work published or being recognized by fellow academics. He had even been teaching Latin American and Florida geography at FSU for free until last year, when FSU put him back on the payroll. Winsberg is happy taking advantage of office space, grad students and GIS equipment so he can keep digging into weather and other interests. “I don’t play golf,” he explains. “I prefer to play with aggregate data.” Winsberg spent his career traveling the globe and writing about 100 research papers on topics as diverse as Jewish agricultural colonization in Argentina and Irish suburbanization in Boston, Chicago and New York. His favorite trip: Backpacking across northern Spain, following a medieval pilgrimage route to Santiago de Compostela, reputed to be the burial site of St. James. Winsberg says he dreaded becoming the sort of retiree “who kept up with the world via “I wanted to keep feeling useful and to be useful,” Winsberg says. He passed up royalties from his “Florida Weather” book so it would be more affordable ($16.95 at upf.com). In addition to his work on weather, his post-retirement writings include the book “Atlas of Race, Ancestry, and Religion in 21st-Century Florida.” He is currently researching the locations of megachurches, particularly those within metropolitan areas. Colleagues say he’s the only “emeritus” professor they know who spends as much time on campus as he did before retiring. “I’ve never talked to Mort about weather when he was not extremely excited about it,” says Melissa Griffin, Florida’s assistant climatologist. “He has this energy that flows out of him, seeps out of him, and other people catch it.” |
On a regional level, state climatologist David Zierden says, historical
records show that southeastern Alabama, Georgia and north and central Florida
have not experienced steady warming, but rather relatively warm periods, such as
the 1930s through the 1950s, followed by relatively cool periods, such as the
1960s through the 1980s.
|
State climatologist David Zierden says Winsberg’s data bolsters his belief, backed up by other Florida studies, that climate changes driven by land use ‘are as important or more important in Florida than what has happened here to date due to greenhouse gases.’ [Photo: Ray Stanyard] |
Heavily drained or developed areas bucked those trends, however. The most
dramatic example in Winsberg’s study is the difference between Belle Glade, in a
part of the Everglades drained for sugar production, and undeveloped Everglades
City. Since 1950, Belle Glade has seen a 32% increase in its number of dog days,
while Everglades City has seen a 3% decrease. The transformation of swampland
around Belle Glade to farmland appears to have caused a significant rise in
temperatures. “The draining of the Everglades and the upturning of all that
black soil has really changed the local climate in that area,” says Zierden.
The idea of local climate change may seem contrarian at a time when
scientists and policy-makers focus on global warming and its causes, primarily
the release of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
But Florida’s top global warming scientists, including Harold Wanless, chairman
of geological sciences at the University of Miami, agree that greenhouse gases
don’t seem to be impacting Florida’s temperatures. When it comes to global
warming, Wanless says, sea-level rise — caused by warming elsewhere,
particularly the Arctic — is the chief threat to Florida. Wanless predicts
Florida’s seas will rise three to five feet by century’s end.
As state and national policy-makers work to mitigate damages from the rising
seas, Winsberg says he hopes local officials and Floridians will use his data to
think more wisely about land-use changes and wetlands drainage.
“People just dread when the hot season begins, and they are so relieved when
it’s over,” says Winsberg. “We don’t want to extend the suffering.”
Dave (08:56:40) :
It is the answers you got that are duff. The temperature data from ice-cores are from oxygen isotopes, not CO2. The smearing problem is much smaller for the ice itself than for the contained gases. It is actually possible to measure and count the annual layers almost back to the last ice age. There is really no doubt that very rapid climatic changes occurred both at the beginning, during and at the end of the last ice-age. These changes were on the order of 5 degrees over time periods not longer than a few decades. They may have been even faster, but such short time intervals are difficult to measure. These sharp changes are confirmed by many other lines of evidence such as sea-bottom deposits, end moraines and changes in fauna and flora, though it was only through the ice-cores that it was realized just how fast these changes were (at least ten times faster than the warming during the 20th century). Fortunately for humanity the last time this happened was 8200 years ago. As for why it happens, no one knows for sure. Abrupt changes in air circulation arfe probably involved as are changes in the calving rates of glacier, but what is cause and what is effect is unclear. It is very unlikely to be due to GHG changes, unless there are natural mechanisms that can change GHG concentrations much faster than us humans, and the smearing of CO2 values in ice is much worse than we have thought.
Weather and climate – big difference of course.
Regarding rapid climate change and ice cores:
You are probably remembering reference to the 8,200 BP Event. The Greenland ice cores show a ~5C drop and about 3C in Antarctica. The temporal resolution of the cores is sufficient to indicate that this change was on the order of a decade. The subsequent warming, of the same magnitude as the fall, took about ten times as long.
There’s lots to read in “The Oceans and Rapid Climate: Past, present, and future” (D. Seidov, B.J. Haupt, and M. Maslin, Eds.), AGU, Washington, DC.
You’ll want to borrow it from a library as it’s a tad expensive to buy.
The cause of the 8.2kYBP Event was theorised to be due to the melting of the Laurentide ice sheet and the subsequenbt draining of Lake Agassiz into the Atlantic. Unfortunately, recent geological work shows the cooling preceded the draining. So it goes in real science.
Where has Winsberg published his findings? Just in his book “Florida Weather,” or also elsewhere?
I’m in the big blue area in the middle of Florida, just south of Ocala which lost 18 “dog days” per year since 1950 according to the research. During the recent cold snap my wife asked if we really moved to Florida! (But, Bill Marsh “come on down, the water was fine this morning” – In the heated pool.)
It should be clear to all that at least part of the measured 0.6 degree C “global” warming since 1950 is due to the encroachment of artificial heat islands on reporting stations. Does anyone know what percentage of that 0.6 degrees is explained by local development biases in the readings? Could “global” CO2 readings also be biased, in part, by local effects?
Does anybody know what part of the 0.6 degrees is real warming? Most of the real warming is due to sunspot cycle and Earth orbit variations as Anthony and others have proved.
But, some part is due to human burning of previously-sequestered CO2 (coal, oil, natural gas).
Let us hope the two-year pause in sunspot activity continues a while longer. A weak Cycle 24 could give us a decade or more of “breathing room” for rational development of alternative energy technology that does not further wreck the economy and depress living standards. In a decade or so, when it becomes clear even to the alarmists that warming has stabilized or reversed, they will claim it was Kyoto and government carbon cap and trade actions that cured global warming, and we will all celebrate together!
Can I draw someone’s attention to this? http://hadobs.metoffice.com/hadcet/graphs/stations2mean_2009.gif
It’s the Central England Temperature. I may be me seeing reds under the bed, but I’ve tried contacting the Met office to ask them to explain, and they didn’t reply. I constantly watch this page on their site, and up until today only the middle graph was showing data. Both of the other graphs were blank – so I assumed the January data for the CET was coming from only one station (Rothamsted Cambridge). The CET is currently showing a -0.5c anomaly for January (even though it felt cooler than that), and the February anomaly is a huge -3.5c down. However, today the bottom graph (Stonyhurst Squires Gate) suddenly started showing data – and entirely above 0 degrees c! How so, when the temperatures have been so low in the UK? Clearly something is wrong with the Stonyhurst data, but the Met Office have added the graph anyway. The Met Office have always answered my emails, but have remained strangely silent on this enquiry – it was sent on Feb 6th.
http://news.scotsman.com/latestnews/Global-warming-is-not-our.4966808.jp
Willem de Rode (09:46:30) :
The article describes very clearly a antropogenic induced warming that could influence weatherpatters all over the globe. And the consequences could be very negative for the humans, wherever they are on the world.
No, it doesn’t. We are talking about a warming which you yourself said is limited to rather small areas. Since the area is limited, it’s effect on global temperatures will also be limited, and in fact negligible. Yes, the people who live in those areas will of course feel the effects of the localised warming. No one says otherwise. What is the alternative? To not have cities? The livability of cities is an interesting discussion in its own right, but has little to do with global climate. As far as minimizing “the impact of human presence on this earth”, I assume you are talking about pollution, and things like clear-cutting forests, etc., which again, has nothing to do with climate, and which are things we should of course be trying to minimize. No one says otherwise.
It is you who is counting angels on a pinhead, Willem.
I have commented on this before, if you look at a trend map from the US, you will see warming in South Florida (check) Houston, Southern California, Boston-NY Megopolis, some around Albany NY (state capitol for a huge state) and Burlington, VT, and cooling trends in the upper mid west where the decades long trend has been “last person to leave please turn out the lights.”
The whole thing is a crock.
The IPCC and the rest of AGWers people have really put all their eggs in one basket.
Land use change is underrated as a factor in climate change. So is the UHI effect. Any natural causes of climate change are completely denied, of course. The problems of the world must be linked to carbon pollution or the whole house of cards will come tumbling down.
My question is, at what point do these local climate changes become regional or global? Is this a contributor to global warming, or is most of the observed warming an artifact of poor data collection and bad analysis?
Anthony,
You might want to check this one out. Gray has really cut loose on Hansen.
Claude Harvey
http://www.examiner.com/x-219-Denver-Weather-Examiner~y2009m2d10-Battle-of-the-climate-scientists–Gray-versus-Hansen-part-2?comments=true
Looks like this undeniable “Antropogenic Local Warming” could easily influence weather station/sattelite readings and skew the whole picture. Excellent post. thank you…
Dr Peilke, Sr, has pretty much stated that land use changes and their impact on local climate have been understated. Studies like this support this I believe.
Jim Steele (07:30:26) : Thank you Jim…from where I sit, you pretty much nailed it. As a field environmentalist here in south FL, I commonly come across clumps of cyprus trees that are high and dry…15 plus feet above the current water table, yet it is apparent that the area was once under 2-3 feet of water 4-6 months out of the year. We have drained far more wetlands than than is generally appreciated…thousands of square miles. Agreed..people have to live some where…but we need to be aware of the unintended consequences of our actions…
Thanks,
cdl
Dave (08:56:40) :
“Thanks to those who answered my question.
The main response I seem to be getting is that the data was probably duff, and that there arent really events where you get a discrete movement in temperature.
Apart from the response which suggested that the last ice age ended very quickly.
I am sure though that I read somewhere evidence that the glaciers that created the Great Lake depressions apparently melted away in no time at all.
Would still like to keep the question open. Is there any evidence for large and discrete temperature changes on earth? And by that I mean a change of 4 – 5 degrees C, happening within a year.
If there is evidence for this, I would like to see a lot of money spent on it trying to find out why it happens”.
Dave,
Aichim Brauer, Potsdam University Geological Science after studying lake sediments in the Eiffel region.
Take a look at the following link:
http://sci.tech-archive.net/Archive/sci.archaeology/2008-08/msg00020.html
They have found proof of fast shift in temperatures due to change in wind patterns
causing glaciation within a period of 1 – 2 years.
Regards,
Ron
I came across this extract from a book on slavery:
“At six o’clock in the morning the overseer forces the poor slave, still exhausted from the evening’s labors, to rise from his rude bed and proceed to his work. The first assignment of the season is the chopping down of the forests for the next year’s planting, using a scythe to hack down the smaller trees. This work normally goes on for two months, depending upon the type of jungle being cut and the stamina of the slaves.
The next step is the destruction of the large trees, and this, like the previous work, continues for twelve hours each day. At night the slaves return home, where evening work of two or more hours awaits them, depending upon the character of the master. They set fire to the devastated jungle, and then they cut and stack the branches and smaller tree trunks which have escaped the fire and which, occupying the surface of the earth, could hinder development of the crop.
These mounds of branches are again burned, and the result is a sad and devastating scene! Centuries-old tree trunks which two months before had produced a cool, crisp atmosphere over a broad stretch of land, lie on the surface of a field ravaged by fire and covered with ashes, where the slaves are compelled to spend twelve hours under the hot sun of the equator, without a single tree to give them shelter.
This destruction of the forests has exhausted the soil, which in many places now produces nothing but grasses suitable for grazing cattle. The temperature has intensified, and the seasons have become irregular. The rains at times damage the crops, and at other times there is not rain at all. The streams and certain shallow rivers, such as the Itapucuru, have dried up or have become almost unnavigable, and lumber for building has become very rare, or is only found at a great distance from the settlements.”
This was written in 1865.
You do not have to have urbanisation to bring about a warmer surface. Draining the land or tree clearing will do it. All glider pilots will tell you the best places to get lift and it’s not forest or lakes. Draining the land or lowering the water table is much the same as driving a car with a half empty radiator. All of the Mediteranean has been cleared of nearly all of the forests that grew there. What you won’t see on Google Earth is the lowered water tables on Continents like the US, India, Africa, China. There a lot of ‘locals’ here and a lot of ‘heat islands’. The number of these is only going to increase.
The problem with the comparison presented by the article is that Hansen isn’t a climate scientist, Gray is.
jp (09:25:28) :
Why are the SOHO sunspot and other pictures more than 2 days old ???????
From Soho:
The Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) is passing through a telemetry
keyhole. This is causing a temporary delay in transmission of Daily Sun images. Updates will resume shortly.
“”” George M (06:27:18) :
Dave (02:10:10) :
You might want to go over to Climate Audit and read the several threads on the accuracy and reliability of ice cores to report temperatures. If my fading memory is correct, there seems to be some question about whether the dissolved CO2, which is the indicator for temperature, actually remains unchanged in each strata while the ice is in place, and after the core is removed. “””
Well your memory has certainly faded.
Dissolved CO2 is NOT a proxy for temperature. The ice core temperature proxy is the O18/O16 ratio in the entrapped atmosphere pockets; not the CO2.
This always bothered me, since I couldn’t see O16 and O18 transmuting into each other as a function of Temperature.
Evidently it is childishly simple; H2O18 and H2O16 have different evaporation rates at a given temperature. Likewise D2O whether D2O18 or D2O16 have different evaporation rates.
So presumably ice core O18/O16 ratios are proxies for ocean SURFACE temperature; but that begs the question “WHERE ??” I have no idea just where Vostok region or DOME-C ice is supposed to have originated ocean wise; but to me it is a highly iffy connection. I don’t dispute the evap differences; but I would be very suspicious of any claims for the origin of this water vapor, since we don’t know anything at all about ocean behavior 730,000 years ago.
If you have ever done any chemical process control in a manufacturing environment, you learn very quickly to monitor any variable parameter you want to control, right at the process point where you want that parameter to have a prescribed value.
You DO NOT measure SOMETHING ELSE in a location that is SOMEPLACE ELSE, and then try to infer some cause and effect relationship, between what you measure, and what you want to control; that leads to sometimes fatal errors.
George
Virginia has cooled according to the GISS records since the 1930s, the trend since the late 1800’s is up but I think some of that is due to uncertain temperature records and changes in the number of stations. The down trend since the 30s is probably due to the 30’s having been really warm in the US. All the current stations have been in use since 1931. When I was playing with my global temperature model I thought that sunspots play a role in temperature but I’m not sure how big of one. The problem with the sunspots is that so many other effects are larger, temperature correlations with just sunspots come out very very low, if you take out variations do to volcanoes and ocean temperatures the sunspots standout better. It does look to me that there has been some real warming based on the satellite records, and subtracting out effects from the oceans, volcanoes and sunspots, but I’m not really sure what is causing the warming.
Mort Winsberg once spent a sabbatical at Otago University in Dunedin, NZ, and he is still remembered here with great affection. Lovely to see he is still as active as ever and making important real science contributions.
latest sunspot graph updated for January….wow
http://www.solarcycle24.com/graphs/sunspotgraph.gif
“”” Bruce Cobb (11:53:38) :
Willem de Rode (09:46:30) :
The article describes very clearly a antropogenic induced warming that could influence weatherpatters all over the globe. And the consequences could be very negative for the humans, wherever they are on the world.
No, it doesn’t. We are talking about a warming which you yourself said is limited to rather small areas. Since the area is limited, it’s effect on global temperatures will also be limited, and in fact negligible. Yes, the people who live in those areas will of course feel the effects of the localised warming. No one says otherwise. What is the alternative? To not have cities? The livability of cities is an interesting discussion in its own right, but has little to do with global climate. As far as minimizing “the impact of human presence on this earth”, I assume you are talking about pollution, and things like clear-cutting forests, etc., which again, has nothing to do with climate, and which are things we should of course be trying to minimize. No one says otherwise.
It is you who is counting angels on a pinhead, Willem. “””
Actually Urban Heat Islands are a good thing; if properly accounted for.
Yes a blacktop parking lot in the middle of Miami, may get very hot during the noonday sun.
That is wonderful. That highly absorbing black surface is tied to the rest of the solid planet, through some layer of earth/rock/whatever, that has some thermal conductivity. The rate of thermal energy conduction (sometimes erroneously called “heat”) from the surface to the planet is a linear function of the temperature rise of that surface from the underlying ambient temperature. Also there is also a linear conduction effect between that heated surface and the bottom of the atmosphere, and the hotter the surface, the hotter the atmosphere bottom gets, and the greater is the upward convection of that heated air, which conveys thermal energy into the upper atmospher for removal to space by radiation. Convection trumps conduction.
In addition of course, that hot blacktop, is an excellent radiator of thermal energy roughly according to the blackbody radiation law, which is a 4th power of the surface temperature. So the conduction to the solid planet goes linear with temperature rise above equilibrium, while the radiation goes as 4th power of the surface temperature.
Actually, because of the Wien Displacement law, the hotter the surface, the shorter the wavelength at the peak of the thermal radiation spectrum, and the peak spectral radiant emittance of the surface actually increases as the fifth power of the surface temperature, which is even faster than the total radiation. Why the spectral peak radiant emittance is important, is because the CO2 Infra_red absorption spectrum lies at 13.5 to 16.5 microns, centered at 14.77 microns, so the hotter the emitting surface, the further down the emission spectrum the CO2 absorption line slides, and the less heating influence CO2 has. At +60 deg C surface temp, the spectral emittance peak is at about 8.7 microns, which is even below the 9.6 micron Ozone absorption line, let alone the 14.77 micron CO2 band.
The overall result is that the maximum cooling rate of the earth occcurs at these urban heat islands in the peak of the noonday sun; similarly in tropical deserts, where the surface temperature can exceed +60 deg C.
In contrast, at the Antarctic polar lows which can get down close to -90 deg C, the total radiant emittance can be only 1/12th of that at the tropical highs; so the polar regions are highly ineffective at cooling the planet, whereas UHIs are very effective.
The problem arises when you measure the temperature at a UHI, and then for some reason apply that temperature to some place that may be 1000 miles away, as if it is relevent to what is happening at that location.
All of which is a funtion of the fact that the global surface sampling regimen used by Hansen, and fed into his GISS AlGorythm violates the Nyquist Sampling Theorem by orders of magnitude, making any recovbery of meaningful data, including the global average of the data quite impossible.
No amount of statistical prestidigitation; and no central limit theorem, can rescue you from the aliassing noise that results from violation of the Nyquist criterion.
So even if the models were correct; which they are not; the data that goes into them is garbage.
And if you get lucky and get the right answer anyway; which you would never be able to confirm; the answer is quite meaningless, since temperature has no simple relationship to the total energy flux occurring at some arbitrary lcation with unknown terrain thermal characteristics.
So GISS and the like, has about as much scientific validity, as performing a statistical analysis, on the numbers in your local telephone directory; namely none at all.
George
Jane HM asked:
“Could they please do a similar study looking at the minimum temperatures in winter in Florida? We’ve had more nights below 20F here in north Florida this year than in the past few years. The cold this year has noticeably killed a lot of vegetation which has the potential to turn Florida into a bushfire tinderbox if there’s a dry spring/summer later in the year.”
Jane, lots of folks in my area are doing controlled burns now in anticipation of the wildfires that will develop later in the season if the La Nina pattern continues. Our dry season is extra dry this year. My pasture and yard is the epitome of dead, dried vegetation.
This year’s weather was, IMO, reminiscent of the late 70s/early 80s in NE FL when snow flurries in the winter were not uncommon. (No snow flurries observed so far this year that I have heard of. ) I know, because I was working construction then and it was so cold we would set a fire in a pile of scrap wood and stand in it to warm up!
latest sunspot is 23!