Guest post by Steven Goddard
http://www.dontmesswithtexas.org/
Dallas, Texas broke their all time record snowfall record this week. How does this compare with earlier Februaries in Texas? February can be a very warm month in Texas. San Antonio hit 100 degrees on February 21, 1996. December and January can also be very hot, with San Antonio reaching 90 degrees on Christmas Day 1955 and 89 degrees on January 30, 1971.
Brenham, Texas is a relatively rural area (population 13,500) centrally located between San Antonio, Houston and Dallas. They have a good temperature record extending back nearly 120 years. According to USHCN records, Brenham was at least as warm 100 years ago as it is now.
Dublin, Texas is another good rural site west of Dallas (population 3,700) which also shows no warming over the last 100 years. Note the big drop in temperatures for both sites around 1960.
Temple, Texas (near Waco) is more of an Urban Heat Island with a population of 60,000 but still shows a similar pattern. The UHI effect is clearly visible over the last 30 years.
Do the Urban Heat Islands of Dallas, Houston, Austin and San Antonio show warming? Absolutely. Does UHI skew the overall temperature data for Texas? Absolutely. San Antonio is the seventh largest city in the US. Houston is the fourth largest city in the US and Dallas is the eighth largest city in the US.
CNN warned yesterday “More Snow Is Coming South” Alarmists blame this on global warming. What would they say if it hit 100 degrees this week in February, like it did in 1996? What do readers think?
Speaking of global warming, does anybody know the average temps for Vancouver? Accuweather shows 44F as the average high for this time of year, but the MSM keeps talking about how ‘climate change’ is affecting the games.
I also caught the bit last night on NBC’s Olympic coverage about how polar bears are endangered and how their numbers are decreasing in Canada.
Peter of Sydney, (04:31:39)
I just did Google ( Percentage of the world that is uninhabited ) this is what came up,
Now if it is true, then we need to think very carefully were we place weather recording stations.
44% of the world is uninhabited
94.6% of the USA is Rural open space.
90% of the worlds population lives on 20% of the land mass
I wonder if the ” Climate modelers” entered, or even calculated on one of the above ? any bets?
kristen,
The UK Met Office forecast in December that 2010 will be the hottest year ever globally. Right after they made that forecast, the UK plunged into a deep freeze and has not warmed back up yet.
“The gods, too, are fond of a joke.”
– Aristotle
OT, but Oliver K. Manuel made some fascinating claims:
“Earth’s heat source is not a ball of Hydrogen (H), it is not heated primarily by H-fusion, solar neutrinos do not oscillate away to preserve fairy tales, neutrons repulsion powers the stars and the cosmos, nuclear matter is dissociating rather than fusing together in our vibrant universe, etc., etc.”
Can someone here give me some good links about these ideas? I’d like to read more, in detail.
Thanks!
Other than 3 1/2 years of college I’ve lived all of my 47 years in Temple. Temple also is showing all the other bad signs of land use changes. Crowding new houses on small lots which results in more runoff. Then the city needs bond elections to try to fix drainage problems. Taking more land for new buildings while existing buildings sit empty. A lot of people in the area live in smaller communities and work in Temple. Those people know that it is warmer in a city than in the country. Too bad politicians and agenda driven scientists don’t have this common sense.
“Alarmists blame this on global warming. What would they say if it hit 100 degrees this week in February, like it did in 1996? What do readers think?”
I’m fed up with the media bias and propaganda It is unfortunate that UK newspapers seem to be the only ones who will present the facts.
I think that it sucks, quite frankly.
You think Brenham is a good rural station. Between 1980 and 2008, it shows warming of 0.4 C/decade.
You think San Antonio is showing UHI. Between 1980 and 2008, it shows warming of 0.44 C/decade.
So you can’t just eyeball SAT, and decide it’s just UHI.
Interestingly, the cooling in Brenham from 1900 to 1940 was introduced by the adjustments. The U-shaped curve is *not* in the raw data. Although, to be fair, the raw data post 1980 is also a bit wonky.
“Does UHI skew the overall temperature data for Texas? Absolutely. ”
Concluding that will require a bit more work than noting there are a few big cities in Texas, and showing 4 plots (including rural ones) that have recent warming.
If you don’t like any old stations, there’s been a CRN site in the vicinity at Palestine since 2003. You could see how well it correlates with USHCN stations over that time period.
Facts, schmacks! These are Climate Cultists, the Green Gang of Briffa, Hansen, Jones, Mann, Trenberth et al. that over twenty years from 1988 has stopped at nothing to propagandize their collectivist Statist agenda that bit dust as Climategate last November and as the ultimately corrupt, incompetent IPCC’s “COP15” in Copenhagen.
Anyone thinking to persuade Warmists by citing objective, rational evidence that AGW is nothing but a cap-and-trade, hyper-politicized con-job, will be sadly disappointed. Gore and his acolytes are in this for the money, not the so-called science. Climatology is not an empirical, experimental exercise, but a classificatory discipline akin to botany, incapable by nature of projecting valid outcomes.
In fact, in logic, and in law, it is impossible to “prove a negative”. The burden is not on dissenters from Gore’s false consensus to disprove his Green Gang theses, but solely on him and and his peculating academic, media, political enablers to definitively prove them right. Meantime, as Reid/Pelosi-crats waffle and fuss with Barry-O in train, citizen taxpayers will tightly hold the stakes.
Someone posted in the Guardian that LI et al 2004 supports the Jones 1960 china UHI study which shows no significant UHI influence in the global data set.
Is the Li 2004 study reliable.
I live about 90 miles east of Dallas – I have some great pics of our heaviest snowfall in 30 years. (some locations it was heaviest ever recorded) 9″ at my house.
I drive in and out of Dallas regularly – the UHI effect is especially noticable about 2 – 3 hours after sundown. When driving through town (it can take up to an hour to get across the metroplex, depending on what interstate you’re on) it is easy to note a fairly constant temperature. I’m using my vehicle thermometer, but absolute accuracy isn’t important – I’m just looking at relative change, which doesn’t depend on calibration. When I get about 10 – 15 miles out of town and into the fields and countryside surrounding the city, I note that the temperature I read will immediately drop by 5 – 6 degrees. Now I’m sure that magnitude of change is because the fields cool off much faster than the concrete and asphalt surfaces do; but isn’t that the entire point of the UHI effect?
I have replicated this observation many times at different times of year and this range is fairly consistent over time for clear days; heavy rain and other precip events negate it, which isn’t surprising.
I guess George Bush knew.
Oliver K. Manuel wrote “Climatology is not the only science that has been terribly disgraced by consensus “group science.”
Since the return of Apollo with the first lunar samples in 1969, the same consensus “group science” has taken control of our most prestigious journals (Nature, Science, etc) and research institutions (NAS, NASA, DOE, Cal-tech, Harvard, University of Chicago, University of Bern, etc) and reduced astronomy, astrophysics, planetary science, solar and space sciences, nuclear and particle physics to popular fairy tales.”
Great point – group science is an oxymoron. I think the best way to avoid group science is to foster independent learning, and individual (and varied) learning systems. The best way to promulgate group science (or any “group think”) is to make sure education is uniform and all children are taught the same dogmas from the same pulpit.
Is it a sort of mind-set, or just a form of religious weather fanaticism? If it’s too hot, that’s naturally caused by global warming; if it’s too cold, that’s also caused by global warming; if it’s too dry, that’s surely caused by global warming; if it’s too wet, that’s doubtless caused by global warming; if it’s too windy, that’s unquestionably caused by global warming; if it’s too calm … whoa, when can it ever be too calm?
Oops — maybe it can never be calm enough to suit the politicians on Martha’s Vineyard who adamantly oppose wind farming in Nantucket Sound because that would spoil their pristine views. Maybe all this stuff depends on whose eco-religion is being being schismatized.
I think it would be an interesting exercise to pick the 100 most rural temperature stations and plot the combined change in temperature over the last 100 years. This would provide a raw data base to compare UHI and AGW data manipulation against.
Oliver K. Manuel (04:35:50)
Since the return of Apollo with the first lunar samples in 1969, the same consensus “group science” has taken control of our most prestigious journals
Remember the Clock of the end of the world? Who were its promoters?
I think that it has happened a few years back in the past, when science replaced experimentation (empireia-practice) by speculation and all kinds of nightmarish cosmological theories appeared since then and its discoverers promoted by the MSM as show business stars. In this endeavour humanity missed a lot and was deceived a lot as with the current Climate-Gate.
They way I’d do an UHI in the temperature record analysis.
1) Pick 100 stations at random.
2) Throw away any obviously low quality records.
3) Use the raw data for trend analysis.
4) See how well these trends correlate with various factors.
Even rural stations have to be carefully vetted. Look at the significant UHI effect Hinkel found at little Barrow, AK.
I lived near Dublin during the summer of 1980. During that time we had a record heat wave with 45 consecutive days over 100 degrees. There doesn’t seem to be a corresponding temperature increase on the chart for June/July of 1980.
The only one with a more upward trend is the one at, you guessed it, at the airport!
Is this one of those suspect sites in and around airports that Anthony talks about?
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA
‘Climategate’ scientist attacks bloggers
http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/shortsharpscience/2010/02/climategate-scientist-attacks-bloggers.html
imapopulistnow (07:17:10) :
> “I think it would be an interesting exercise to pick the 100 most rural temperature stations and plot the combined change in temperature over the last 100 years. This would provide a raw data base to compare UHI and AGW data manipulation against.”
It’s been done a few times. Most notably in “Global rural temperature trends”, Peterson et al, GRL 26: 329-332 (1999)
I went into basic training 7 Dec 1978. I’m from Phoenix. I thought San Antonio, that’s desert right. I froze my ~ off! Went below zero Christmas eve. Looking at the chart, I guess I chose the wrong year to join the service 🙂
Re: Oliver K. Manuel (Feb 16 04:35),
Since the return of Apollo with the first lunar samples in 1969, the same consensus “group science” has taken control of our most prestigious journals (Nature, Science, etc) and research institutions (NAS, NASA, DOE, Cal-tech, Harvard, University of Chicago, University of Bern, etc) and reduced astronomy, astrophysics, planetary science, solar and space sciences, nuclear and particle physics to popular fairy tales.
I take great exception to this blanket statement of yours.
It certainly is not true in my field, particle physics, which in my 40 year experience I saw changing views and research directions several times.
Climatology is in this state because of the corruption of the money and the power politics behind it. If politicians had not climbed on the band wagon this AGW would have been a scientific fad, and they exist, that would be overturned by better data and theories without spreading misery to the world. No other scientifice discipline has been preempted like that ( except nuclear physics during WWII for the creation of the bomb).
Certainly some science is popularized, and it should be, but to call it fairy tales is beyond the pale.
You do not sound very reasonable:
Earth’s heat source is not a ball of Hydrogen (H), it is not heated primarily by H-fusion, solar neutrinos do not oscillate away to preserve fairy tales, neutrons repulsion powers the stars and the cosmos, nuclear matter is dissociating rather than fusing together in our vibrant universe, etc., etc.
That neutrinos oscillate I know for sure, and the errors are not climatology errors and the scrutiny of the data was intense. Judging from this the value I give to this paragraph of yours is very low.
I can state with Terry Pratchett that the earth is a disk riding on four elephants which ride on a turtle and the sun is a ball of flame going around them and the elephants lift up their legs for the sun and moon to go by without colliding with them. Lovely books where light has such low velocity that it pours down the mountains.
So are you peddling science fiction ?
CONTIGUOUS UNITED STATES [WINTERS ONLY] 1962-1989 LAST COOL SPELL
Total number of winters 28
Number of winters below norm 18 or 64 %
Number of winters where AMO is negative 24 or 86%
Number of winters AO is negative 20 or 71%
Number of winters where PDO is negative 16 or 57 %
Number of winters NAO is negative 13 or 46 %
So you can see that if the next 20-30 year climate cycle will be cool again, Texas will likely have cooler winters once this current El Nino passes by mid year. Next winter could be colder with no El Nino to warm things, because the AO, AMO, PDO and NAO may all be in the cool phases most of the time during the next few decades especially AO and AMO and PDO.
MJK,
You seem to have forgotten about Europe, Russia, Central Asia, the North Atlantic and North Pacific which have all been exceptionally cold. The “average” global temperature tells you nothing about the distribution. Russia is by far the largest country on earth. Your claim that the vast majority of land was above normal is not accurate.
http://www.remss.com/data/msu/graphics/tlt/medium/global/ch_tlt_2010_01_anom_v03_2.png