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?
I have a great hypothesis. There has been a terrible mistake about carbon, it is dioxide that is the problem. I have computer models that prove that dioxide is warming the planet, or maybe cooling the planet, but whatever it is, let’s ban dioxide. Sorry, I am feeling a bit faint, but let’s go green, ban dioxide, er, why can’t I breathe, help?
Icarus (06:03:46) :
MJK (06:03:08) :
You can quote your Global Temperatures as much as you like, when the ACTUAL temperatures from real stations all over the world are looked at they show no SIGNIFICANT global warming.
As to Satellite temperatures, they do not even reflect reallity, showing Hot Spots in the Northern Hemisphere where there is Currently Ice & Snow with some of the lowest temperatures ever recorded. That one hasn’t been looked at yet as we they don’t release the Raw data.
Antarctica is warming, since when?
I have often wondered about the effects of Air conditioning is having on UHI but now with the advent of the Heat Pump I must also wonder if there will also be a lowering of the day time max during the winter months in the urban areas for the same reason air conditioning might in the summer. I also must wonder what effect several billion 800 to 1000 watts street lamps might have on the temperature lows during the night time hours. there are so many man made possibilities that can effect the temperature. The only effect that CO2 might have to this is that it takes energy to operate or power these things. What little man has to do with the “normal” temperatures isn’t the amount of CO2 emitted but the amount of energy produced and consumed. Our production methods and consumptions methods could be very much improved and possibly will be in the near future relatively speaking. GHG isn’t what is causing the heat, it is what moderates the temperature to within a variable spectrum making our climate livable. We should be more worried about adaptation to the variability in climate than in the control of the climate. Adaptation to world wide climate we can do. Control of world wide climate we can not. I can at present control the temperature range in my home to a comfortable level in my home. I can’t control the temperature level in my community outside my home to a comfortable level. I Wonder what makes these climate gurus think that we can control the temperature to a “comfortable” level world wide. Adaptation is the way to go. To bad that we are going to have to spend time and resources to disprove a hypothesis that can’t be validated.
Bill Derryberry
wws,
I used to live in Spring, Texas just north of Houston. We would often have frost in the morning when downtown Houston was in the fifties.
I also remember driving south from Phoenix, Arizona on I-10 one night in July, 1985. Temperature in Phoenix was close to 100 degrees and 20 miles south (same elevation) was in the 70s.
Icarus,
The claim that record high temperatures are twice as frequent as record low temperatures is bogus. It is an artifact of the fact that the total number of record temperatures (both high and low) was very small during the year when the study was made. The ratio of two small numbers in a series with a large standard deviation is meaningless.
anna v @ur momisugly 7:47:49 Wow, did you just reveal your ignorance. Everyone knows the world is supported on the backs of a series of turtles and it’s turtles all the way down.
=============================
Sorry about the last post, it was a mere error based on an interview given by an ageing hippie living in a tent in the Himalayas, it will not happen again, I am an expert and can’t be expected to check every apocalyptic scenario I advise world leaders to accept as gold-plated science. Not to worry, I have discovered the real enemy. It is Di-Hydrogen Monoxide, that is the killer and the real greenhouse gas. Give me some (more) funding and I will prove it. Ban di-hydrogen monoxide, save us. Em, I need some di-hydrogen monoxide free beer. Anyone got some?
The way I’d do the temperature record analysis:
1) Construct a global synthetic temperature field covering 100+ years with known time variation
2) Add known (time-varying) amounts of UHI at the positions of urban centres
3) Add known amounts of measurement noise
4) Use the coordinates and timespans of GHCN stations as sampling points on this synthetic “raw” temperature field. Apply the GHCN processng algorithms as normal.
5) See if the temperature trend you get out matches what you know you put in. For extra credit, simulate the effects of microsite effects, site relocations and instrumental response functions.
E.M.Smith now tell us about “Zombie thermometers”:
Zombie Thermometers – Return of The Un-Dead
In looking for what thermometers died in 2010, I discovered that there are Zombie Thermometers. They appear to be alive in some years, but sometimes are unresponsive and give no data. They can be dropped from the GHCN v2.mean data file (silently) as though they have died. Gone and buried. Not even giving a ‘missing data flag’ to show they are alive.
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/
This is another confirmation of the misconduct, to say the least, of all those “scientists”, all over the world, connected to the CRU Climate Gate Web, as shown in the Climate Gate emails’ addresses and names, who made disappear all thermometers readings from cold places, as the ones located at the Sierras, in north and south america and other places, with the fraudulent purpose of deceiving, liying, cheating, by telling the known tale of the “hottest season ever”.
Russ in Texas,
Was that maybe the summer of ’81 instead? Damn hot summer (no A/C in the ’69 Mustang with black vinyl seats).
Russ in Texas (07:33:56) :
“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.”
It is annual mean temperature. Look at 1979 and 1981. The average mean is much lower than 1980. Those 45 days out of 365 did result in an increase for 1980.
Steve Goddard (08:01:31) :
Steven, I think the link to the global map you provide supports my point very nicely. The areas of red/yellow (warm) significantly out weigh the areas of blue (cooler). It shows precisely why we had the global record in January despite the cool spots in SE U.S, Europe and Russia. P.S you might want to look up a defintion of Central Asia- the region is covered in red/yellow (i.e warmer than normal).
http://www.remss.com/data/msu/graphics/tlt/medium/global/ch_tlt_2010_01_anom_v03_2.png
Rebivore – the weather you remember was Dec ’83 – Jan ’84. North and East Texas stayed below freezing constantly for 2 weeks, which had *never* happened before or since. Gardeners will not that it wiped out almost all of the Zone 8 plants in Texas and it took about 15 years for people to start planting them again. (palms, semi-tropical stuff, etc)
I remember it well since I had just bought an old Victorian house to redo with inadequate heating and no insulation. I had to retreat to the core 3 rooms which were I could keep warm; the back, distant bathroom developed a long icicle from the shower head and I couldn’t get enough heat back there to thaw it out for 2 weeks. And I spent a lot of time in those weeks crawling under the house with heating cords trying to keep what liitle plumbing that was still working thawed out.
Ah yes, good times. Okay, not really.
Using the logic that the MWP was not a “global phenomenon”, because only the northern hemisphere provides enough evidence but not enough from the southern, so why then doesn’t a cold northern hemisphere suggest likewise that the present warming is indeed not global. There seems at least many holes in the CO2 blanket that “insulates the earth”. It also seems the alarmist like to subjectively homogenize data.
“So where do those last 6 years (with the huge temperature spike) come from?”
Didn’t intend this as a rhetorical question. Presumeably the last (make it 5) years were filled in from another station. Is there any way of knowing which one?
MJK,
We are having an El Nino, so most of the Pacific is above normal.
I was arguing your assertion “The vast majority of the world’s land mass is significantly above normal.” That isn’t true. The land temperature average was heavily skewed by Greenland and Canada, but that does not provide any information about the distribution.
anna v (07:47:49) :
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 ?
Speaking personally from Houston, where the summers don’t seem quite as hot as they were 25 years ago, I just don’t think Terry Pratchett is a reliable source. In fact, it is my belief that Terry Pratchett makes up some of the stuff in his books.
Jim Steele (08:45:00) :
“Using the logic that the MWP was not a “global phenomenon”, because only the northern hemisphere provides enough evidence but not enough from the southern, so why then doesn’t a cold northern hemisphere suggest likewise that the present warming is indeed not global.”
January relative warmth is considered global simply because it shows up in the global mean. Likewise, the MWP would be considered global if it shows up in the global mean. In neither case is it required that the temperature anomaly be actually uniform throughout the Earth.
But fixating on a single January is missing the point. A single January is weather, not climate. The real story is in the trends. The trend is for warming everywhere on Earth except for a part of Antarctica and a couple patches of ocean. If you take a snapshot of the Earth at any given moment, you will definitely find some cold spots, but even in those spots, if you look over time, you’ll see a general (but noisy) warming trend.
Jim Steele (08:45:00) :
Using the logic that the MWP was not a “global phenomenon”, because only the northern hemisphere provides enough evidence but not enough from the southern, so why then doesn’t a cold northern hemisphere suggest likewise that the present warming is indeed not global
It was global:
The known argentinian geologist Miguel Gonzales, in his studies in the “Salinas del bebedero”, a salt lake in Argentina, found that this salt lake filled with water during solar minimums, which is confirmed by historical records.
This phenomenon will repeat in any moment, during the current minimum, so we can go down there and watch it.
http://www.springerlink.com/content/m11m129238u61484/
By the way, Brenham is the home of Blue Bell Ice Cream, one of the most popular brands in Texas. I don’t know how big their facility is, but clearly they would require a great deal of refrigeration equipment that could contribute to a mini-UHI. Would be interesting to see where the weather station is sited relative to their plant.
Jim Steele (08:45:00) :
We can use Google earth to go there, right now.
http://maps.google.com/maps?q=salinas+del+bebedero&hl=es&ei=b9N6S6WNHYTmiAO48b3_BA&ie=UTF8&view=map&cid=10411604023318932519&iwloc=A&ved=0CBQQpQY&sa=X
This salt lake will be filled with water as a sign of the current minimum.
MJK (08:37:54) :
Don’t you see anything wrong with that Colourful view of the so called temperatures, like China, which had record snow and very low temps in January?
How about North East America, also with lot’s of snow and near record temps?
Don’t you find any problem with Satellite views and reality?
Perhaps the Base for the Anomaly is using a shifting scale to show those colours.
Where is the Raw data, ask DR Spencer?
juanslayton (08:46:14) :
“So where do those last 6 years (with the huge temperature spike) come from?”
Didn’t intend this as a rhetorical question. Presumeably the last (make it 5) years were filled in from another station. Is there any way of knowing which one?
Maybe they used readings from the Temple airport? Not large but they have added hangers, new terminal and extended the runways. And getting ready to lengthen the runway again. I know the local paper used to get weather readings from the airport until a couple of years ago. There were questions about the accuracy of the rain measurements. I wonder how much hotter the airport is when the airshow is going on in May? Hundreds of cars parked on the grass fields, explosions from the Tora, Tora, Tora reenactment, vendors selling roast turkey drumsticks, kettle corn, funnel cakes, etc.
Steven Goddard, thanks for precise, individual examples of climate change/no change (and if these familiar oscillations continue we on Earth will be most fortunate). Your explanation of temps in Texas help all readers to see and understand the experimental proof (if our instruments are well sited and well regulated) necessary to assess global warming/cooling.
Anna v and Kim, I like “This is Turtle Island”.
Steve Goddard (08:54:29) :
Steve,
If you re-examined your map, it is very clear that my claim about the majority of the world’s land mass being significantly above normal is accurate as well. In addition to Canada/Greenland,–Northern Africa, the Middle East, Central Asia, and Western Australia were also well above normal.