Steve Goddard reminded me that we’ve had “220 Years of Global Warming in Philadelphia”
Starting in 1790, a prominent Philadelphia resident named Charles Pierce started keeping detailed records of the weather and climate, which has been archived on Google Books.
His report from January, 1790 is below:
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 vs. January, 2010 which had a mean temperature of 32 degrees – 12 degrees cooler than 220 years ago. So far, February is even colder.
Here’s what GISS says about the temperature. Note Philly is now about where it was in 1950.
The water temperature in the Delaware River was close to freezing and was frozen over for part of January, 2010 – so it is unlikely that many boys were swimming there this year.
Yes, this is just one month, so here is a more detailed analysis from WUWT.
Richard M (04:56:33) :
…
So, a couple of degrees warming is going to cause all those impacts? ROTFLMAO … You’ve been reading WWF, Greenpeace, etc. articles way too much.
For the rest of us, we check history and guess what? None of those situations accompanied a couple of degree warming
When in ‘history’ have we seen a couple of degrees of global warming? Are you referring to actual recorded history or to palaeoclimate?
Ron,
Nobody uses the average of Tmax and Tmin. The “responsible” parties take that number, and apply half a dozen corrections which drive older temperatures down and newer temperatures up leading to this adjustment scheme.
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/img/climate/research/ushcn/ts.ushcn_anom25_diffs_urb-raw_pg.gif
Which “amazingly” leads to a warming nearly identical to the adjustment. In any other branch of science that would lead to the authors being laughed out of the room.
Richard M (05:07:35) :
Icarus (02:46:17), Hansen’s statement makes no sense whatsoever.
All you have to is look at the CO2 linear increase based on the exponential increase in CO2 emissions. The Earth is having no problem sequestering CO2 at an increasing rate. That means we will not see his “modelled” levels of CO2 in the atmosphere EVER. And of course, that pretty much demolishes his conclusions.
What natural mechanism(s) do you think can sequester CO2 indefinitely at an exponential rate, and on the sort of timescales we’re discussing (decades rather than millennia)?
Next, try to understand why the Earth had a habitable climate with 30% less radiation from the sun … could there possibly be a thermostat controlling the climate? Could this possibly be something called H2O? Could it be anything else? Why would that effect stop now?
I don’t understand the logic of your point here. Higher global temperature from anthropogenic influences would lead to an increase in atmospheric water vapour, would it not? And that would be a positive feedback, would it not? How would that ‘control the climate’ in any sense that would make you dismiss the possibility of substantial global warming? Perhaps you’re arguing that clouds would constitute a negative feedback that would counteract both the warming from anthropogenic influences and the positive feedback (greenhouse warming) from increased atmospheric water vapour – is that it?
Icarus,
The geological record shows zero correlation between CO2 and temperature.
http://ff.org/centers/csspp/library/co2weekly/2005-08-18/dioxide_files/image002.gif
That is why it is very difficult to find any geologists who are worried about this.
# Steve Goddard (15:20:19) :
carrot eater,
The average tells you nothing about the distribution. Suppose you have 10 numbers 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 100, 0, 0, 0. The average is 10, but the median is zero.
Not my understanding, Steve.
Averages which may be derived from this sequence
– 20, 20, 20, 20, 20, 30, 30, 20, 20, 20 –
Mean: 22 (total of all values divided by total number of readings)
Median: 25 (mid – point value i.,e, mean av. of 5 & 6 in tis case)
Modal: 20 (the value that occurs most)
So choose an average to suit your viewpoint.
Compare vs. January, 2010 which had a mean temperature of 32 degrees – 12 degrees cooler than 220 years ago. So far, February is even colder.
But those older thermometers measured at least 10 degrees warmer compared to newer ones! Here’s the link:
http://www.nasa.giss.temp.adjust\fudge
Tim Clark
Your link did not work so do not know if you were serious . The claim is complete nonsense. The older records have been examined within an inch of their lives and if anything have now been adjusted to be slightly under the real warmest temperatures when looked at in conjunction with anecdotal accounts.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/11/14/little-ice-age-thermometers-%e2%80%93-history-and-reliability/
Tonyb
Icarus,
Increased water vapour means more clouds, which means more reflection of incoming short wave radiation from the sun.
@Steve Goddard (06:12:32) : Nobody uses the average of Tmax and Tmin.
I do.
I’m still studying it, but GHCN raw (not adjusted) is Tmean with only a few quality controls (throw out extreme values) and some fill in for missing data (FILNET).
You can seem me use GHCN raw (not adusted) to feed the released CRU perl gridding and averaging scripts. No TOB adjustments. No UHI adjustments.
http://rhinohide.wordpress.com/crutemp/
And while I see your point that the released CRU data sets drive older temps down, as does GISTEMP, as does GHCN adj – none of those data sets appear to me to drive recent temps up. They all compare remarkable well to GHCN raw (not adjusted) in recent decades. And they all show strong correlation with UAH and RSS for annualized anomaly averages and similar trends for the last 3 decades.
Next big step – Reconstruct GHCN raw from daily reports – much like I did for the Jan aves for those three stations above. (Still looking for aggregated daily data links if anyone has them)
‘Carrot Eater’, I’ll post code and stuff this weekend on my site.
Now we’re really bouncing around disparate topics, instead of staying on anything like the original topic.
Steve Goddard (06:12:32) :
That graph is for the US only. About half is based on TOB, which like it or not, has clearly described justifications. Anyway, the 0.5 F you see there over ~40 years – not at all equal to the warming over the US over that span, which is more than that. Note that it’s F, not C.
The same graph, done globally, shows no such bias anyway.
Steve Goddard (06:14:41) :
If you consider both changes in solar and CO2, while also keeping track of volcanism and tectonics, you get quite good explanations for most of the geological history. You might want to look into the faint sun paradox. For the last 800k years, here’s an easy graph to make. Granted, the temps in this one are from the Antarctic, and are not necessarily indicative of the globe.
http://moregrumbinescience.blogspot.com/2010/01/co2-and-temperature-for-800000-years.html
Ron Broberg (08:04:41) :
Few things in there, which you might already appreciate; I can’t tell.
TOB is only explicitly done on the USHCN part. There is no separate step for TOB in the GHCN.
Adjustments are generally done so that the final adjusted dataset is aligned with the current observations. Meaning, if something happened to a thermometer such that from 1950 onwards, it reported with a constant offset of -.2 C compared to the previous, you could either move the post-1950 up by .2 C or the pre-1950 down by .2 C. When working with anomalies, it doesn’t matter which you do, but when using absolutes, the preference would be to move the old data down, so that new data coming continuously in can be just tacked on the end.
You want to reconstruct the whole ball of wax from daily reports? Good luck; the GHCN uses monthly averages as its input, not daily. The GHCN-D (d for daily) will be of some help, but it’s not complete.
ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/ghcn/daily/
It can also be browsed using the climate explorer
http://climexp.knmi.nl/selectdailyseries.cgi?someone@somewhere
But you won’t get complete global coverage this way; you could go fishing around for SYNOP reports I guess, but I don’t know of a single archive.
The GHCN is built off of monthly reports, not daily.
carrot eater,
As I have been explaining on another thread, CO2 tracks temperature in the Vostok cores, because CO2 solubility in seawater decreases with increasing temperature. As ocean temperatures increase, CO2 outgasses. Thus we see increase in temperature followed a few hundred years later by increases in CO2. And vice-versa. Some people have tried putting the cart in front of the horse.
However, the CO2 changes over the last 800,000 years are very small compared to the last 600 million years.
According to the Niels Bohr Institute in sunny downtown Copenhagen:
“Over the last 40 million years the CO2 level in the atmosphere has fallen from 1000-2000 ppmv to a minimum of 180 ppmv 20,000 years ago. Not since the Perm period circa 250 million years ago has the CO2 level been so low.”
I was once very startled at the extraordinary rate of plant growth that ensued in a 1600ppm environment I created at home. This taught me that contemporary plants are, in fact, famished (Except for those lucky enough to dwell in a C02-enriched city like Brooklyn, where trees grow twice as big as their rural counterparts!).
Icarus, you said:
“Earth can escape from snowball conditions because weathering slows down, and CO2 accumulates in the air until there is enough to melt the ice and snow rapidly, as the feedbacks work in the opposite direction.”
Why does weathering slow down when glaciers form and flow over continents?
Are the Great Lakes a consequence of reduced weathering?
Why would atmospheric C02 “accumulate” or increase as a consequence of less weathering?
i.e., What is the mechanism for that?
And, do you have any peer-reviewed papers to support these unusual claims?
Cheers,
Leon.
Icarus (05:58:15) :
When in ‘history’ have we seen a couple of degrees of global warming? Are you referring to actual recorded history or to palaeoclimate.
Yes, both. Sorry, but I don’t subscribe to Mann’s fraudulent rewriting of history.
Icarus (06:14:10) :
What natural mechanism(s) do you think can sequester CO2 indefinitely at an exponential rate, and on the sort of timescales we’re discussing (decades rather than millennia)?
Oh, how about the ones that are doing it right now. Can you show any evidence that the Earth is not capable of sequestering Man’s small contribution to the overall carbon cycle? Nope, you can’t. So, you are just making it up as you go along. Until such a time that atmospheric CO2 starts increasing faster you have nothing to stand on. In fact, you can’t even scientifically support the claim that man’s contribution is responsible for increased CO2. You can only claim you don’t know anything else that might do it (argument of ignorance).
I don’t understand the logic of your point here. Higher global temperature from anthropogenic influences would lead to an increase in atmospheric water vapour, would it not? And that would be a positive feedback, would it not? How would that ‘control the climate’ in any sense that would make you dismiss the possibility of substantial global warming? Perhaps you’re arguing that clouds would constitute a negative feedback that would counteract both the warming from anthropogenic influences and the positive feedback (greenhouse warming) from increased atmospheric water vapour – is that it?
Yes, I did state H2O was the thermostat. H2O in the form of clouds when the atmospheric content of water vapor increases. Of course, this is ignored or underestimated in all the activist papers and models that want to achieve a predetermined conclusion.
And this doesn’t even touch other mechanisms (like increased convection) that move more heat to higher altitudes and latitudes. Nature loves negative feedbacks.
You also seem to be confused in general. Most of the skeptics here don’t doubt there is some effect of increased CO2. They believe there are other processes involved in Earth’s complex climate system that are so poorly understood that drawing conclusions on such poor knowledge is just plain silly. Could the claims of CAGW turn out to be true, possibly, but no one knows and the claims of the IPCC, Hansen and others that they have 90-100% knowledge of the climate system is [self snip].
Steve Goddard (08:35:14) :
It’s actually a good bit more complicated than that; the solubility pump alone doesn’t explain the observed changes in CO2 over the ice ages. The precise mechanism through which CO2 responds to changes in temperature in the ice age cycles is still an active subject of research.
But anyway, again, things work pretty well on the longer time scale that you mention. Put together changes in solar forcing, tectonics, volcanoes and CO2, and you can roughly explain much of the inferred temperature history of the Phanerozoic, which is a pretty long time.
You do realise the sun used to be much fainter?
carrot,
The fact that the some people believe the sun was fainter affects the absolute temperature.
Using GHG theory, temperature should still track CO2 – which it doesn’t.
Steve Goddard (10:04:23) :
“Using GHG theory, temperature should still track CO2 – which it doesn’t.”
Using the theory, the temperature should track the sum of all forcings. Which it does.
carrot,
Sounds to me that you re acknowledging that “forcings” besides GHG dominate the geologic record.
carrot eater (10:44:05):
Could you please list all “forcings”? Thanks.
Charles Peirce (not Pierce) begins his journal on “Weather in Philadelphia” with a clear explanation of the method and logic of his record of Atmospheric and Weather data, including a summary and informative comments on each and every month over a period of 57 years. A remarkable and commendable achievement, which nicely covers the period from immediately prior to the industrial age up to the middle of the 19th Century, by which time the national recording of weather had began. His logic of averaging the temperatures recorded “just prior to dawn”, 2 pm and 10 pm (the coolest, the hotest and the one following the most rapide rate of cooling) is sound. His results, averaged over each month are likely to be within an accuracy range of +/- 1deg F. If only the AGW climatists would be so open, clear and accurate with their work. Note: Peirce correctly refers to “Atmosphere and Weather”, not climate.
P.S. Does the Earth have a “Climate”? If so, could someone please define it!
carrot eater (17:52:24) :
You give the impression of knowing how an ice-age starts?
I was of the impression this was beyond the scientific knowledge at the moment. Do you have any links to such a theory?
I’m interested.
One possible explanation for the declining temperatures is that there seems to have been an exceptionally active period of small volcanic eruptions in the decades around 1800. Due to the nature of evidence, the timing is necessarily uncertain, but the beginning of the activity can be plance in the 1780s, particularly to the eruption of Laki in Iceland in 1783.
An oddity in the graph is that it does not show the effect of Tambora in 1815. This was an impressive volcano — the biggest in the last few centuries — and it produced the infamous “year without summer” in 1816. If the graph is correct, Tambora had no effect on winter temperature in Philadelphia. This would be interesting and — if factually accurate, i.e., supported by other evidence — possibly significant.
After 220 years of global warming, Philadelphia is expecting a foot of snow today.