While the press is hyperventilating over NASA GISS recent announcement of the “Hottest Decade Ever“, it pays to keep in mind what happened the last two years of the past decade.
According to NCDC, 2009 temperatures in the US (53.13F) were the 33rd warmest and very close to the long term mean of 52.86F.
Generated from http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/research/cag3/na.html
Since 1998, according to NCDC’s own figures, temperatures in the US have been dropping at a rate of more than 10 degrees F per century.
Generated from http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/research/cag3/na.html
For 2009, all regions of the US were normal or below normal except for the southwest and Florida.
Temperatures in Alaska were also slightly below the long term mean. Three of the last four years have seen below normal temperatures in Alaska.
A few fond memories from 2009 :
Americans suffer record cold as temperatures plunge to -40 16th January 2009
Jul 28, 2009 Chicago Sees Coldest July In 67 Years
Aug 31, 2009 August Ends With Near-Record Cold
Oct 14, 2009 October Cold Snap Sets 82-Year Record
And my personal favorite:
From: Kevin Trenberth <trenbert@xxxxxxxxx.xxx>
To: Michael Mann <mann@xxxxxxxxx.xxx>
Subject: Re: BBC U-turn on climate
Date: Mon, 12 Oct 2009 08:57:37 -0600
Cc: Stephen H Schneider <shs@xxxxxxxxx.xxx>, Myles Allen <allen@xxxxxxxxx.xxx>, peter stott <peter.stott@xxxxxxxxx.xxx>, “Philip D. Jones” <p.jones@xxxxxxxxx.xxx>, Benjamin Santer <santer1@xxxxxxxxx.xxx>, Tom Wigley <wigley@xxxxxxxxx.xxx>, Thomas R Karl <Thomas.R.Karl@xxxxxxxxx.xxx>, Gavin Schmidt <gschmidt@xxxxxxxxx.xxx>, James Hansen <jhansen@xxxxxxxxx.xxx>, Michael Oppenheimer <omichael@xxxxxxxxx.xxx>
Hi all
Well I have my own article on where the heck is global warming? We are asking that here in
Boulder where we have broken records the past two days for the coldest days on record. We
had 4 inches of snow. The high the last 2 days was below 30F and the normal is 69F, and it
smashed the previous records for these days by 10F. The low was about 18F and also a
record low, well below the previous record low. This is January weather (see the Rockies
baseball playoff game was canceled on saturday and then played last night in below freezing
weather).
Trenberth, K. E., 2009: An imperative for climate change planning: tracking Earth’s global
energy. Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability, 1, 19-27,
doi:10.1016/j.cosust.2009.06.001. [1][PDF] (A PDF of the published version can be obtained
from the author.)
The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a
travesty that we can’t. The CERES data published in the August BAMS 09 supplement on 2008
shows there should be even
h/t to Steve Goddard
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“There has been very little reduction in US grain production of food varieties.”
THere has been very significant change. The biofuel production has increased the market price for corn. This results in more corn being planted on land that had been growing wheat and soy. That results in wheat and soy prices going up.
Want to know what the current USDA “surplus” food reserve is right now? Something close to ZERO. There is no longer any surplus of wheat and corn that can be sent to places experiencing famine. It’s simply doesn’t exist anymore. And what we consider to be “feed” or “field” corn is what is used for corn meal, corn oil, and things like corn chips and corn flakes. Once it is processed though a biofuel plant, the only thing it is good for is animal feed. There isn’t a market for Kellogg’s Biofuel Waste Flakes (yet).
But there is hope. Biofuel plants are shutting down and new construction is being halted because it hasn’t turned out to be as profitable as it was touted to be. It turns out that good old petroleum is a more efficient source of energy. It ends up costing energy to produce biofuel. You can’t get as much energy out of it as it takes to produce and distribute. A society that had nothing but biofuel available would run out of energy as it would take more fuel to produce and deliver it than it yields.
What happens is that when these harebrained politicians get on some bandwagon and authorize millions or billions in spending of taxpayer money, the economic reality eventually comes home to roost and the projects are put out of their misery.
Andrew30 (17:41:01) :
Sometime around May of this year in sub-Saharan Africa there will be about 30-50 million people who would love to get their hands on that ‘feed corn’.
Andrew, around May there will still be feed corn in silos all over the US. Now, all you have to is get somebody to buy it and sell it in Africa. Are you up to the job?
I think you are oversimplifying this problem. That is typical when people have an agenda. I hope this is not the case here.
RE Tom_R (18:36:32) :
No cooling since 1998, no cooling since 2001. Unless you can show me the stats, please don’t make that claim.
And at the risk of repeating myself, future temperatures are not based on extrapolating recent temperatures.
Deech56 (18:37:50) :
C’mon, people were all over the place saying that it has been cooling since 1998 even before the current El Niño. 1998 gets picked because people who ant to “show” temperature dropping want to start with a high year. For noisy data like surface temperature, any 10-12 period is too short to show significance.
So, in other words it doesn’t matter whether it’s a valid comparison ???? Your reply shows bias.
Whether something has statistical meaning depends on many factors. Since we know about ~400 year periods like the LIA and MWP we might need a lot more data points than you think to achieve anything reasonable. Anyone can lie with statistics. I’ve done it many times myself just to make a point.
Don’t get caught up in some silly notion that 30 years is magic. I can get all kinds of data points driving up a mountain but it won’t tell me anything about where I will be when I finish the drive down the other side.
That’s one of the big problems in climate. The science has only some vague ideas about all the possible interactions. I still think it’s about at the same stage as medical research was in the 1960s.
Deech56 (18:37:50) :
“Significance” has a precise statistical meaning and just requires some calculations to show this. 30 years is usually the standard because with that many data points, the confidence interval becomes narrow enough to show the trend.
So we agree that saying the decade is the warmest on record** is just an exercise in hand waving?
And what is ‘precise statistical meaning’? That sounds like jumbo shrimp, corporate ethics, military intelligence, etc.
Deech56 (18:55:02) :
And at the risk of repeating myself, future temperatures are not based on extrapolating recent temperatures.
Are you sure? Just because it’s done using computer programs does not change the facts. The programs are set up with only one conclusion possible. Remember, they assume minimal natural climate factors. Hence, they program GGs and feedbacks as pretty much the only possible driver of temps. They base this on the homogenized temperature record.
In fact, I suspect I could come up with a linear transform from some of their model parameters to the amount of the warming projections.
Is anyone (I ask again) measuring average daily temperatures other than by adding the days’ maxima and minima and halving the totals?
Currently, a cloudy summer day which starts with an overnight low of 10C, reaches a steady 20C and, for ten cloudless minutes in the arvo, briefly reaches 26C, is recorded as having an average temperature of 18C; another day starts with an overnight low of 8C and reaches 26C and stays that warm for most of the day (and accodingly feels warmer, and is warmer than the previous day), but it is recorded as having an average temperature of 17C; a subsequent cloudless day, after an overnight low of 0C, from early in the morning reaches 32C and stays at that temperature until late in the evening, is recorded as having an average temperature of 16C.
We could suppose that if today’s temperatures dropped to -50C and then rose to 90C a statistician would tell me that the the average for the day was a pleasant 20C.
There must, surely, be a better way of measuring warmth and coolth than by simply averaging the extremes. I for one should like to see charts which show the range of temperature as well as as an average of the warmest parts of the day (the four highest hourly temperatures divided by 4, perhaps). Do such data already exist which could be tabulated thus?
Anthony writes:
I booted you off WUWT once for your trolling, here and because of the things you say elsewhere about me. So here we are again, with you under a new handle. Get your own blog, write your views there all you wish, but stop clogging up mine with your constructs about “crafting”. I write about things that interest me, I find this interesting, and so do my readers.
I think Paul K2 makes perfectly reasonably scientific analyses of how you choose to analyze the data, Anthony. You may not like it, and you may not like how he picks apart your methods. But to threaten him with with being booted off for any reason other than committing profanity or ad hominem attacks here strikes me as an attempt by you to silence the scientific inquiry.
REPLY: Oh please. Paul K has no interest in “scientific inquiry”, his mission and an anonymous commenter (under a new handle now) is that of what is called a “concern troll”. You’ll note that there are many other people that post comments here that I and others may disagree with but they don’t get booted, however Paul K has a history here of trying to spin things into the way he wants them, while blaming me for not writing them the way he wants them. I pointed out things published by NOAA/NCDC I thought were interesting, he turned into a nefarious “crafting” on my part. He’s been spewing loads of ad hominen elsewhere, and his purpose here is to setup situations under the “concern troll” guise. He’s simply not worth my time. Let him disagree elsewhere. He’s had plenty of say here, my choice to boot him. There’s a bout a half dozen people out of the thousands that comment here that I’ve made the same choice for, all with similar MO’s -A
Richard M (18:51:07) :
A flippant comment if there ever was one.
The insane AGW driven mentality to convert food into low CO2 Ethanol is the problem. AGW proponents like you create the demand using scare tactics backed up by lies based of fiction and the companies that fund the fiction create the products and reap the profits.
“The price of raw sugar worldwide has increased to its highest level since 1981, as supply concerns grow. Global sugar prices have been pushed up by growing demand in Brazil for sugar to be turned into ethanol for vehicle fuel, and a sharp fall in production in India, the world’s largest sugar consumer.”
http://www.businesspundit.com/sugar-shortage-hits-india-pakistan/
The AWG green movement is killing people today; and it will continue to starve, deprive and destroy people until it is completely exposed for what it is. A pack of lies.
It is an evil agenda you seen intent on supporting.
Deech56 (18:55:02)
Actually, there’s a lot of cooling going on and stats to show it. You only need to look at the valid met stations for proof. I see from your posts that you hunger for number crunching so maybe you could run a check on the example Down Under (11:20:24).
Remote met stations were 0.6 deg C cooler this millennium than in 1881-1890.
Met stations in cities or airports overheated by about 1.6 deg C.
Applying the Test for Two Independent Variables, the difference between the two is significant at a confidence level of 99.98%. That’s significant. 90% wouldn’t do, except of course for the IPCC hell-bent on peddling its flights of fancy!
>> Deech56: And at the risk of repeating myself, future temperatures are not based on extrapolating recent temperatures. <<
The effect is the same. Future temperatures are based on a computer model where some parameters are calculated by using the increase in recent temperatures. Twelve years is sufficient to question the CO2-driven premise. One does not need as long a period to cast doubt on a theory as one does to verify it. As I said before, unlike the Warmist camp, no one here is claiming the ability to predict the future based on twelve years of cooling.
Since we are making charts for the US temps. Can anyone explain why there was literally no trend in either direction for over 70 yrs in the US?
WHAT’S UP WITH THAT!!
That’s correct! From 1921-1997 there was no trend whatsoever.
http://climvis.ncdc.noaa.gov/tmp/graph-Jan2322:52:281555480957.gif
Even a “Regular Joe” like me can make data sing a tune I like to hear.
Time to abandon all the surface temperature monitoring and rely on satellite readings. Even Hansen admits that satellites are the best, but he cannot manipulate them the way he can surface readings. Satellites are the future, surface readings with all their known problems, as evidenced by the myriad corrections required belong in the Smithsonian museum.
Depends on the application; user-accessible contacts generally call for battery with internal fusing at some level … think: “product liability” when all else fails (contacts become inadvertently shorted) as inevitably SOMEONE will have that situation arise (I have, for instance, and it happened when ‘things met’ in my briefcase unknown to me until afterwards).
.
.
Deadman (19:26:31) : says “Is anyone (I ask again) measuring average daily temperatures other than by adding the days’ maxima and minima and halving the totals?”
I think the whole purpose of using the max and min daily temp average wasn’t to find the most precise actual daily temp, just a simplified method of getting a data point to use to compare other future and past points.
The complex method you propose may give you a more precise measure of a daily temp at some location but it woud require many more numbers for each reference point.
It does not matter if all you use is the average of high and low as long as all your reference points you are comparing are using the same consistent system.
The test is to see if the aveage temp is going up, down or staying the same. Carbon Dioxide will absorb infrared. This will cause some heat and the atmosphere will then radiate some of the heat back to earth rewarming the cooled ground. The AGW theory is not bad science to propose. The bad science is trying to force it into a fact by any means. Carbon Dioxide in the atmosphere will act as warming influence but how much and what other cooling factors exist is a mystery. Manipulating data is the worst thing a scientist can do. Just give the Truth the best you are able in the humble mindset of a good scientist. Being aware that the human mind can’t know it all.
Wanna bet it doesn’t matter? Have you ever checked to see whether or not an average of the MIN-MAX air temperatures are a reasonably accurate indicator to an accuracy of tenths of a degree or a whole degree C of the daily average heat content of the PBL (Planetary Boundary Layer) at an individual surface observation station when compared to the continuous daily air temperature record for the same station?
Not all surface weather observation stations use a LiG (Liquid in Glass) thermometer to measure air temperatures. Some observations are made with thermographs using a continuous [paper] strip recorder. When you watch the changes in air temperature occurring during a FROPA (Frontal Passage) or adiabatic winds gusting, you can see how very brief or brief special weather events can cause the recording of an extraordinary Minimum or Maximum daily air temperature for only a few minutes or a few hours of the day. If you average all of the temperatures each minute of the day, each half hour of the day, each 3 hours of the day, each 6 hours of the day, each 12 hours of the day, or the MIN-MAX of the day, doing so can result in minor or major differences in the computed daily average temperatures.
Some geographic locales and regions experience significantly more of these special weather events than others. In some of the temperate latitudes, for one example, frontal passages and/or thunderstorm activity with associated severe convective activity and temperature volatility can become so regular in a season, you can nearly set a clock by their regularity. TOBS adjustments typically distort the average temperature records in relation to the geographic patterns in which these brief temperature excursions occur.
What effect do you suppose a squall line of thunderstorms and a frontal passage with severe thunderstorm activity has upon historic air temperatures when there are historic differences in the amount of such storm activity depressing average air temperatures as the cold upper air goes into a downdraft to the surface weather stations more often in the past than the present or more often in the present than the past?
Hey hey!!!
Now everyone can use Jim and Gavin’s code to get exactly the same results….
Awesome!! now they will really be able to get a consensus!!
_Jim (20:38:11) :
Depends on the application; user-accessible contacts generally call for battery with internal fusing at some level … think: “product liability” when all else fails (contacts become inadvertently shorted) as inevitably SOMEONE will have that situation arise (I have, for instance, and it happened when ‘things met’ in my briefcase unknown to me until afterwards).
Some applications call for “smart batteries” that require some sort of signal to trigger the full current release. For example, I carry a spare cellphone battery in a shirt pocket that could have loose change, no problems with it.
But as I was thinking of them, that would be a fuse inside the battery casing. Thus after one short or otherwise strong overload, you would have an otherwise good working battery permanently unusable due to an inaccessible fuse.
If you really wanted a dead-safe battery, and considering the likely industrial nature of a “brick-sized” battery, self-resetting circuit breakers could be used. Simple mechanical ones, as would be preferred for ruggedness, are generally heat triggered and best detect overloads, they would likely work better at arctic temperatures with fast resets, although they might also let through more current than the rating at those temps without proper calibration. There are also fast-acting magnetic breakers that detect shorts, and combination units like the normal ones found in home and commercial electrical panels.
If they were lazily saying “fuses” instead of “circuit breakers,” possibly I could see where that could be a problem. But then I would think the extreme cold could possibly keep a breaker from resetting or even tripping, not that it could affect the default closed-contact state and yield an open circuit with no power.
@ur momisugly Deech56:
You can’t do statistics like that. Every global temperature point includes errors because it is an average of thousands of temperature stations, which you are not including in your statistics. This is why some global temperature graphs show confidence intervals, which you neglect.
In summary, your calculated P values are worthless.
D. Patterson (21:37:43) :
You make good points and I am aware of these local variations (I have felt the sudden rapid drop in temp as a storm moves in and the warming after when the sun breaks back out).
But I am doing my own study of temps by logging daily temps (high-low) and observing record highs and lows. The daily log average (mean of high and low) is very variable in respect to the long term daily average for any given day. But the long term mean is very stable. I think when you start adding the many data points all the extreme fluctuations of the daily basis are smoothed out.
I also log the difference between the daily high and low. It has an extreme variance on the daily basis (anywhere from almost 30 F difference to just a few), but the average daily difference is very stable on a daily basis (around 19 or 20F). (For reference I live near Omaha Nebraska and am using this as my data base).
I also record the mean of the record high and low temp for a given day. The difference is considerable. January is up in the 60F range and lows are around -20F. The mean between the record high-low comes fairly close to the average daily mean.
I am more concerned with the extrapolation of unknown grid temps by using some measured temp several miles away. I think this is where you can run into your greatest errors made worse if you have a particular viewpoint you are trying to prove (if it be for warming or cooling you can eaisly bias the data when making a mathematical guess).
Thanks for you thoughts. I like the thought process on this web page. A lot of intelligent thinking people. Gives one hope for the Human Race!
RE Richard M (19:07:00) :
Let me expand on what I wrote. Anyone who chooses 1998 as a starting point to make any kind of conclusion is on thin ice. Why? Two reasons:
1. Almost any temperature trend using such a short period (1998-2009) will be statistically insignificant.
2. A change in starting year ±1 will affect the conclusion; therefore, the data are not robust.
Another point is the inconsistency in the arguments here – I read about doubt in any surface measurements, yet see people making all kinds of statements (“It’s cooling.”) based on these measurements. There is talk about the MIA and MWP and cycles (“…we know about ~400 year periods…”), but what are these conclusions based on? Nobody here likes the proxy records, so what other data are there? I won’t go into regional vs. global measurements.
And why the slam on medical research of the 1960s? We had antibiotics, vaccines for smallpox and polio and were developing vaccines against the other childhood diseases. The structure of DNA was known and the genetic code was being unraveled. The Surgeon General declared that smoking was harmful and the harmful effects of DDT were publicized. Of course we know more now, but the medical researchers were on the right path and were shown to be correct. There were naysayers back then, like the tobacco companies that waged a campaign to sow doubt about the science, but I’m not sure you want me to go down that path. Hmmm…maybe we are at the same stage as medical research back then.
” Kevin Kilty (14:44:45) :
RE Deech56 (07:38:23) :
Slope = -0.57 degC/decade, SE = 0.26 deg/decade, 10 degrees of freedom
T = 2.15 – not significan
I haven’t done a survey of all textbooks, but basic statistics books will often state a rule of thumb that t>2 is significant.”
Before you do the calculation, you have to choose a level of significance. That level depends on the problem. 2 Examples:
1) Chance of survival of an operation?
Sigma=2 if it is cancer, sigma=3 or more if it is just a mole.
2) Chance of having enough gas for a trip?
Sigma=2 if it is in a car, sigma=3 or more if it is in an airplane.
The important thing is to decide BEFORE doing the calculation, and NOT adabt the choice to the result.
>> Deech56: Another point is the inconsistency in the arguments here – I read about doubt in any surface measurements, yet see people making all kinds of statements (“It’s cooling.”) based on these measurements. <<
One does not have to believe the data presented by the person one is refuting in order to argue that they are inconsistent with the conclusion. If catastrophic global warming is occurring, then the US temperature would not be expected to sit at the long term average 32 years later, especially considering the large positive adjustment made to the temperature vs. time.
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/img/climate/research/ushcn/ts.ushcn_anom25_diffs_urb-raw_pg.gif
Oh please. Paul K has no interest in “scientific inquiry”, his mission and an anonymous commenter (under a new handle now) is that of what is called a “concern troll”. You’ll note that there are many other people that post comments here that I and others may disagree with but they don’t get booted, however Paul K has a history here of trying to spin things into the way he wants them, while blaming me for not writing them the way he wants them.
Oh please back at you: if the above were true for every post here, then you would be threatening most of your posters with banishment as well. When you write a post that purports to be science and use 1998 as a starting date for your analysis, you freely open yourself up to the scientific inquiry of “why 1998?” to every amateur (and maybe a few professionals) out there.
I see repeated un-scientific gibberish from a wide cross sections of individuals here and none of that seems to bother you except when poster in question hits the nerve of challenging you scientific methods.
And if you genuinely have a problem with the “anonymous commenter” then you should set up a robust registration system where you can verify identities. After all, on the Internet no one knows you’re a dog. Now excuse me while I dig up a bone in the yard and scratch some fleas.
Roger Sowell (09:19:55) :
“dekitchen: interesting points. Still, how do climate scientists explain that parts of the earth are cooling, while CO2 continues to increase? Physics is impartial, and does not allow CO2 to work its warming in some areas but not in others. If CO2 causes warming, then that warming will be observed in all locations.
The fact that the U.S. is cooling, and has done so for more than a decade, indicates that something other than CO2 is responsible for temperature increases AND decreases.”
I agree with this, and it is a good proof that the CAGW hypothesis has been falsified. This hypothesis required that a massive amplification would take place to cause a sprial of ever warming temperatures, while the real world has started cooling.
It’s a great pity that we can no longer trust IPCC climate science even to do a simple thing, like giving a trustworthy estimate of global average temperature. It makes any solid scientific work on climate very difficult to do.