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?
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Tom in Texas,
I wrote up a piece this morning showing visual comparisons of San Antonio vs. Boerne and Luling. Might be up tomorrow.
Related to Texas as it relates to weather/climate/Cap & Tax/GHGs and the EPA CO2 Endangerment Finding enforcement from Reuters::
UPDATE 1-Texas to challenge US greenhouse gas rules
Texas suit one of several to challenge EPA
* EPA pursuing CO2 rules if Congress does not act (Adds byline, American Petroleum Institute petition, others)
By Ed Stoddard, Reuters
DALLAS, Feb 16 (Reuters) – Texas and several national industry groups on Tuesday filed separate petitions in federal court challenging the government’s authority to regulate U.S. greenhouse gas emissions.
Texas, which leads U.S. states in carbon dioxide emissions due to its heavy concentration of oil refining and other industries, will see a major impact if U.S. mandatory emissions reductions take effect.
In December, the Environmental Protection Agency ruled that greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide endanger human health, opening the door for the agency to issue mandatory regulations to reduce them.
Texas said it had filed a petition for review challenging the EPA’s “endangerment finding” with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. Texas has also asked the EPA to reconsider its ruling.
“The EPA’s misguided plan paints a big target on the backs of Texas agriculture and energy producers and the hundreds of thousands of Texans they employ,” Texas Gov. Rick Perry said.
The rest of the pieces at:
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSN1661844120100216
I should have noted that I found the Reuters piece on Drudge.
There is an explanation for the snow on Wunderground, due to El Nino and the AO. However it is warm in Canada, which goes unmentioned here of course 😀
Andy
AndyW,
Canada is 99.9% covered with snow from one end to the other. The snow line is far south of the Canadian border. Not much to talk about there in a discussion of snow extent, is there?
http://climate.rutgers.edu/snowcover/chart_daily.php?ui_year=2010&ui_day=47&ui_set=0
I have found the same paradox in australia. I have compared raw data for Sydney, Newcastle, Dubbo and Cessnock. The latter are rural locations with data going back to 1900. The only warming occurs in Sydney with some in Newcastle. The rural towns are showing no warming and even a cooling if an Excel trend line is any indication. The warming in Sydney is interesting as it kicks up in the late 50’s to early 60’s. This is when there was a lot of building going on after WW2 (the baby boom period).
re carrot eater (12:54:29) : “Absolute temperatures are not important here; trends are. If UHI causes a steady offset of 2 C over the period of interest, then UHI is not important to the analysis over that period.”
Carrot, I used GISS data because that is what “Peter and his Dad” used, and I was able to replicate their results.
You chose to ignore the trend in the paired data. Taking the difference each year, then looking at the trend in those differences, I said that the AVERAGE difference was 1.4 DegC over the years 1904 through 2006, and that the SLOPE for that time period was 1.55 DegC per century. In other words, there was a gap and the gap was growing.
My comment about a gap of 2 degrees was intended to show the size of the gap in the later years ( 1.4 over all, but over 2 after 1984)
So let’s look at the trend in the differences after 1984:
In 1984, the difference was 1.97, and by 2006 the difference was 2.34. The SLOPE of the differences using all values 1984 through 2006 shows 0.5 DegC per century increase in the temperature difference.
Since the difference was not constant over that period, it would suggest that UHI was important to the analysis over that period. Or maybe it tells us something about the GISS algorithm to ‘adjust’ for UHI.
Dave in Delaware (05:07:59) :
I was simply letting you know that those stations continue past 2006 in the USHCN, so going forward that’s the place to look for more current numbers.
I’m not ignoring anything. Since 1980, Boerne shows a warming trend, in both the raw and the adjusted data. The magnitude is above 0.2 C/decade. If you’re going to put forth Boerne as a non-UHI station, you may as well acknowledge that it has a warming trend over the period of interest.
Tom in Texas (20:22:41) :
If you think Boerne is an outlier, then fine (for now). I haven’t looked at every single surrounding station. All I know is, Boerne was offered here as a good station, and just a glance at its data shows warming since the 1970s. I thought I would point that out.
What happened in ~1955 in Texas? A good number of stations have some discontinuity then.
Observing live coverage incl RADAR (both NWS S-band and local TV C-band wx RADARx) for about a decade now there doesn’t seem to be a magical ‘zone’ where tornadic storms simply ‘fall apart’.
A number of the Toranadic cells have been ‘lone wolf’ formations chewing their way through a capping inversion (at altitude; not a boundary layer phenomonon) and by the time have the reached east of I-35W to nearer I-35E (Dallas) they have weakened considerably owing to the strong capping effect … others forming on the leading edgs of a squall line don’t pack the punch a tornado forming the SW quadrant of a storm does.
So, I would say from an observation point of view this theory is not supported by the observational evidence.
.
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Steven Goddard,
“One problem with using sea level as a thermometer is that it is affected by other factors like glacial melt. Another problem is that it reflects local water temperatures rather than air temperatures. Sea level trends vary a lot from place to place. In some locations sea level is falling and in other places it is rising”
Thanks for the link to the awesome sea level map.
What is wrong with including glacial melt? Isn’t glacial melt partially a result of climate energy?
This is my uneducated wag but isn’t the the total energy in the oceans and seas a key climate factor? Does most of the climate energy at any instant come from the oceans and seas?
The sea levels on the map seemed mostly up. Aren’t the sea levels useful at least in a relative sense?
Given that the surface sensor temperature DBs are crap, how do the temp trends look if you just use satellite measurements that do not include any UHI spots?
Is the climate science community outraged by the behavior of the climategate perpetrators? Have any polls been taken to see the reaction of climate scientists as a group?
It has been suggested that climate science should take an open source approach in the future to restore the confidence of the public in climate science ethics. Do you think this will happen?
_Jim (16:01:44) quotes Oliver K. Manuel (04:35:50) :
“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”
_Jim asks: “Surely the good doctor does not deny the H-bomb (and the mechanism by which it works)?”
– – – – – – – –
OM replies: H-fusion is well established as a source of energy that releases typically up to 0.7 % of the rest mass as energy.
– – – – – – – –
Follow-on Q: Does not the H-bomb provide experimental basis for understanding how fusion processes obstensibly take place in old sol?
– – – – – – – –
OM replies: In old sol, fusion of Hydrogen (a neutron-decay product) generates ~35% of solar energy and ~100% of solar neutrinos. Solar neutrinos do not magically oscillate away to fit the fairy tale model of a Hydrogen-filled Sun.
With kind regards,
Oliver K. Manuel
Steve Koch,
Glacial melt is pretty minimal at this point in the glacial cycle. It has very little impact on the overall energy balance of the earth.
The global warming phenomena is mainly caused by the excess CO2 liberated by the industries and this forms a layer which traps sun rays, which in turn lead to the rise in the atmospheric temperature.