Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
I got to thinking about how the information about temperatures is presented. Usually, we are shown a graph something like Fig. 1, which shows the change in the US temperatures over the last century.
Figure 1. Change in the US annual temperatures, 1895-2009. Data from the US Historical Climate Network (USHCN DATA) [Yes, it’s in Fahrenheit, not Celsius, but hey, it’s US temperature, and besides I’m doing it in solidarity with our valiant allies, all the other noble countries that are bravely fighting a desperate rear-guard action against the global metric conspiracy … Liberia and Myanmar …]
Whoa, this is obviously a huge and scary change, look at the slope of that trend line, this must be something that calls for immediate action. So, what’s not to like about this graph?
What’s wrong with it is that there is nothing in the graph that we can compare to our normal existence. Usually, we don’t even go so far as to think “Well, it’s changed about one degree Fahrenheit, call it half a degree C, that’s not even enough to feel the difference.”
So I decided to look for a way to present exactly the same information so that it would make more sense, a way that we can compare to our actual experience. Fig. 2 is one way to do that. It shows the US temperature, month by month, for each year since 1895.
Figure 2. US yearly temperatures by month, 1895-2009. Each line represents the record for a different year. Red line is the temperature in 2009. Data source as in Fig. 1. Photo is Vernal Falls, Yosemite
Presented in this fashion, we are reminded that the annual variation in temperature is much, much larger than the ~ 1°F change in US temperatures over the last century. The most recent year, 2009, is … well … about average. Have we seen any terrible results from the temperature differences between even the coolest and warmest years, differences which (of course) are much larger than the average change over the last century? If so, I don’t recall those calamities, and I remember nearly half of those years …
To investigate further, Fig. 3 looks at the decadal average changes in the same way.
Figure 3. US decadal average temperatures by month, 1900-2009. Red line is the average for the decade 2000-2009. Photo is Half Dome, Yosemite.
Most months of the year there is so little change in the decadal averages that the lines cannot be distinguished. The warming, what there is, occurred mostly in the months of November, December, January, and February. Slightly warmer temperatures in the winter … somehow, that doesn’t strike me as anything worth breathing hard about.
My point in all of this is that the temperature changes that we are discussing (a global rise of a bit more than half a degree C in the last century) are trivially small. A half degree change cannot be sensed by the human body. In addition, the changes are generally occurring in the winter, outside of the tropics in the cooler parts of the planet, and at night. Perhaps you see this small warming, as has often been claimed, as a huge problem that “vastly eclipses that of terrorism” (the Guardian). Maybe you think this is a pressing concern which is the “defining issue of our era” (UN Secretary Ban Ki-Moon).
I don’t. I’m sorry, but for me, poverty and injustice and racial prejudice and totalitarian regimes and recurring warfare and a lack of clean drinking water and torture and rampant disease and lack of education and child prostitution and a host of other problems “vastly eclipse” the possibility of a degree or two of warming happening at night in the winter in the extra-tropics fifty years from now.
Finally, the USHCN records are not adjusted for the urban heat island (UHI) effect. UHI is the warming of the recording thermometers that occurs as the area around the temperature recording station is developed. Increasing buildings, roads, pavement, and the cutting down of trees all tend to increase recorded temperatures. Various authors (e.g. McKitrick, Spencer, Jones) have shown that UHI likely explains something on the order of half of the recorded temperature rise. So even the small temperature rise shown above is probably shown somewhere about twice as large as it actually is …
My conclusion? Move along, folks, nothing to see here …
[UPDATE – Steven Goddard points out below that the USHCN does in fact include a UHI adjustment in their data. The adjustment is detailed here. I don’t agree with the adjustment, because inter alia they claim that the UHI reduces the maximum temperatures in cities. This is contrary to my personal experience and to many studies that find it is hotter in the cities during the daytime as well as at night. But they do make an adjustment.]
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” Matt (02:52:32) :
[…]
There are untold other numbers of indicators showing the effects of this ‘minimal’ temperature increase, which given the community here, will be outright rejected as alarmist propaganda, so I won’t attempt a list at present.”
Oh come on. Just the top 10! Pretty please!
Thanks again, Willis. (I feel as if I know you well enough to be informal)
It is also interesting to see geological timescale temp. graphs presented as actual, best guess, temps. rather than anomalies from an arbitary base line.
The current temp. changes can barely be seen.
The very first thing I learned in Numerical Methods for computation was ‘Never subtract two nearly equal numbers’ – since the errors nearly always overwhelm the result. Numerical techniques are chosen to avoid this.
But an anomaly is indeed the subtraction of two nearly equal numbers, and is, therefore, close to meaningless.
@ur momisugly Matt (02:52:32)
Don’t be so defensive – I (and probably others here too) agree with you. Additionally, I didn’t find the following comment very helpful:
“A half degree change cannot be sensed by the human body.”
So what? Do we decide what is relevant by our bodies’ abilities to sense it? And as Matt said, the 0.5 figure is an average, which could be a combination of greater extremes in different areas.
Nevertheless, a major difference between pro-AGW-ists and sceptics (like me) tends to be one of how we regard this average rise of 0.5-1 C over a century. We sceptics would tend to say: nothing unusual about that, nothing to link it to CO2, and no evidence of increases of extreme weather, and no increase in the rate of sea level rise. AGW-ists, conversely, would say (scream) that this is a sign of impending doom for mother Earth and that our children (oh, won’t somebody think of the children) are all going to die under hundreds of feet of melted ice caps if we don’t immediately (like yesterday) curb our emissions and “put democracy on hold during this time of international emergency” and welcome in some unelected, benignly dictatorial world governing body to oversee the whole thing.
Hmm… I wonder why governments nearly all seem to be PRO-AGW? Particularly those with a Socialist bent? Gee, that’s a tough one.
Willis’ response to Matt – great put down!
Eventually, the sceptics’ real facts will defeat the alarmists manipulated data and unfounded scare stories, but it is probably going to be a long time.
There are so many fanatical alarmists: i) those who want to keep their comfy jobs in the climate industry, ii) those who will believe in anything green, especially if it is goofy, and iii) those looking for new ways of raising taxes.
Most people do not fall into any of the above categories and this silent majority is steadily swelling. Eventually the politicians will have to listen to this silent majority and maybe, just maybe, that’s when the tens of billions of dollars currently being wasted on the promotion of bad science will finally come to an end.
Great “context” ! Now how about Al gore in context….”pig in a blanket”!
My compliments on your choice of Half Dome as the background of one of your graphs. I’ve always been bemused by the web trend of curious backgrounds where any self-respecting scientific journal would reject them out of hand as being irrelevant and distracting.
My attention was drawn to the nice correlation between curve and dome, except in the area of the flaw in the dome, of course, and it made me think about the VW (New) Beetle commercial talking about arches (in this case a bridge) and their strength while a someone drives a Beetle to match the bridge’s arch. In this you you have cemented my faith in your data. As surely as the Sun will rise and set, so will US temperatures during the course of they year. I look forward to your next concrete examples, and humbly suggest a series based on things like the Hoover Dam, as I’m sure that will add power to you presentation.
(Please don’t use the Glen Canyon Dam. I’ve never been in the area, but I know what’s lost under the water. You can take the bridge.)
Oh, what was the point of the graph? Maybe I should go back and read the text instead of looking at the pretty pictures.
If the real temperature increase is only 1/2 that shown, then there probably is no need to add CO2 to make the models fit the observations and the entire IPCC case for man’s causing warming disappears. See IPCC 4AR WG1 Ch 9 FAQ 9.2 Fig 1, p. 703 (bottom three graphs), http://tinyurl.com/27ocvp
As far as I can tell that is the best argument that they have for man’s causing warming: The models don’t fit reality unless we include CO2 in the models.
OR UNLESS the real warming is ½ that claimed.
Here is how Phil Jones explained it to the BBC:
BBC: If you agree that there were similar periods of warming since 1850 to the current period, and that the MWP is under debate, what factors convince you that recent warming has been largely man-made?
CRU Head, Dr. Jones: The fact that we can’t explain the warming from the 1950s by solar and volcanic forcing – see my answer to your question D.
See http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/science/nature/8511670.stm
Thanks
JK
In order to be honest and do so in detail, a vertical bar graph in color breaking down all the parts of the atmospnere. 3.8 parts per 10,000 would be very tiny compared to 73 parts per hundred Nitrogen.
Willis,
Interesting article, but USHCN does make a UHI adjustment.
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/research/ushcn/ushcn.html#QUAL
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/img/climate/research/ushcn/mean2.5X3.5_pg.gif
It is also true that GISS and others claim to only use the annomilies, and yet as this post points out, this is not true. This brings great potential error in the dropping, and adding in of various locations and extroplating this to the dropped stations, as well as the UHI problem. E.M. Smith is examing the problems inherent in these methods.
Also worth noticing the dramatic change in USHCN temperatures after their 2000 adjustment.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oNI_devHg7w&hl=en_US&fs=1&]
Willis has good point here and only thing to add is some time perspective. We are living right now at the end of Holocene, which is a short warm blip in the multi-million year iceage. If Hansen is right and delta is in the range of 3/4 then maybe the next glaciation will arrive some time later, say few thousand years. I think he is too worried about his grandchildren to think clearly about the possible good things, like not having to fight with kilometers thick ice too soon.
What if you did the same graph using anomalies, rather than absolute temperatures?
“My point in all of this is that the temperature changes that we are discussing (a global rise of a bit more than half a degree C in the last century) are trivially small. A half degree change cannot be sensed by the human body”
Clearly the average temperature increases seen so far are relatively small in terms of daily or annual changes and we humans are very capable of surviving extremes (living at the poles or in hot deserts), as individuals we can take a lot of change.
However, the world now is home to 6 billion people and very soon to become 9? 10? 11? billion. These people need houses to live in and food to eat. Small temperature changes can have a big impact on the productivity of the agricultural land they impact, just look at the relatively narrow areas different crops grow in.
The USA has a largely benign climate, it will not suffer greatly from temperature changes of a few degrees. But will it open its doors to the millions of people who are likely to be significantly impacted? If it is not prepared to do that, it should at least look seriously at the potential risks for those people and see how it might mitigate those impacts through its own actions; its good risk management and good neighbourliness, something the people of the USA have always rightly taken pride in.
Willis:
The neurologist say you must keep your mind active to combat “Senior Dementia”. I observe that you have done a good job of keeping your mind and that of others busy. I congratulate you on your fight against a problem that is more pressing than the MYTH we are discussing. (Global Warming)
If no other is affected by your efforts, I have enjoyed the exercise you promote!
One of the cheekiest graphs is Roy Spencer’s graph of atmospheric CO2 concentration vs time. The x axis (time) goes for a few decades, the y axis (CO2) goes from 0% to 100%.
That’s all there is to see.
Your charts definitely reveal a different story than the typical MSM charts being used. I ran across this chart recently that also displayed temperature data in a different, non-alarmist context:
http://www.c3headlines.com/2010/01/global-temps-how-fast-will-temps-have-to-grow-to-reach-the-alarmist-hyped-predictions.html
Some interesting observations on the permafrost “problem” here:
http://www.worldclimatereport.com/index.php/2010/03/17/problems-with-the-permafrost/
But the Fahrenheit scale is itself arbitrary! That is why the Celsius and Kelvin scales were developed. Granted, Fahrenheit is the best scale for communicating with Americans, but it does skew the graph.
From physics, I’d say using Kelvin is justified because it compares the earth’s temperature to absolute zero.
Of course, Celsius may be justified as well, but only if you scale it to physically relavent values. It should at least encompass the 0-100C (The freezing and boiling point of water), as outside this range, it becomes very difficult for most life to survive.
Either of these scientific scales would be more accurate in showing just how small these temp swings are.
Mike Jonas (05:54:39),
Spencer’s 0 – 100% CO2 graph, and a few others:
click1
click2
click3
click4
click5
Larus (02:51:21) :
“Hang on, do you actually think the entire problem is about how well the human body can withstand an ambient temperature rise of several degrees?”
No, the entire problem is about how much warming will a doubling of atmospheric CO2 from preindustrial conditions produce. The answer from the lab is around 1 degree C. In the real world, evidence is pointing to a more modest warming due to negative cloud feedbacks.
A secondary consideration would be the ability of the biosphere to adapt (not ‘withstand’…that’s a propaganda word) to climate fluctuations. Since climate has always fluctuated, and the biosphere has always adapted with success, there is no rational cause for alarm.
John Pattinson (05:48:23) :
“However, the world now is home to 6 billion people and very soon to become 9? 10? 11? billion. These people need houses to live in and food to eat. Small temperature changes can have a big impact on the productivity of the agricultural land they impact, just look at the relatively narrow areas different crops grow in.”
But higher CO2 levels INCREASE crop productivity. Also, according to AGW, most temp increases are in the higher latitudes and during the colder months, which would boost farm productivity in those areas as well. Nothing like an early spring to extend the growing season. Even if AGW is true, it does not necessarily follow that it is bad for the food supply.
Of course, the IPCC always supresses any discussion of the ‘positive’ effects of warming.
Leif
Points of origin are not nonsense.
This is basically a flat line graph. Personally I am over your arrogance in physics unproven.
[snip]
The US only makes up 2% of the earth’s land area. If you look at the entire earth, the story is quite different. US and global temperatures started diverging around 1960 and divergence has increased ever since.
http://docs.google.com/View?id=ddw82wws_609dcfg9zrc