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.]
How does Global Warming stack up against Annual Global Temperature?
http://www.trevoole.co.uk/Questioning_Climate/_sgg/m1m1_1.htm
Global annual anomalies data:
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/research/anomalies/index.html
Summary of annual global temperature ranges:
Sea Surface = 0.6°C
Combined = 3.8°C
Land = 11.5°C
“Anyway, my original point still stands – your claim that a 0.5 deg C global average temperature increase ‘is trivially small’ willfully ignores the implications of such an increase. Namely that in terms of a ‘global temperature average’ this is a very non-trivial increase. To claim otherwise is to demonstrate a misunderstanding of a global temperature average.”
Please demonstrate in what way it is non-trivial.
Can it cause a tipping point to be reached? Only if you believe that the normal seasonal variations in temperature are just a little eensy weensy bit short of reaching that tipping point anyway. You think that a tiny little increase will suddenly melt all that permafrost and allow enormous amounts of methane into the atmosphere? Why? Retreating winter snows don’t cause runaway releases of methane. Methane doesn’t last long in the atmosphere anyway – it oxidises to CO2 and then the CO2 gets washed out by the rain.
Can it cause melting of ice on a wide scale? No, because most of the worlds ice is in Antartica and is at -50Celsius so a 0.5Celsius increase in global temps is not going to melt that (even if you assume that measurements made with instruments only accurate to 1 Celsius can be used to detect such a trend.)
Oh and by the way, most animals don’t need to worry about a 500 hundred mile shift in climate because the vast majority are already spread over areas far larger than 500 miles. Even snails.
Oh the satire !!!
The top graph titled “UNITED NATIONS IPCC’s VIEW”.
The second to be titled “NATURE’S VIEW”.
What a great work Willis. You mind if I plaster the top two in every shopping center possible? How about on some billboards? Your work never ceases to amaze me !!
The Alarmists must have read Tufte; they are very good at creating scary graphs. Remember the Hockey Stick!
/Mr Lynn
The first graph is a classic case of misrepresentation by distortion.
The vertical scale, which represents tiny increments, displays them as large, and the horizontal scale is compressed. So the vertical changes look really big and the slope of the line is really steep, about 66%. To see what I mean, copy the graph and paste it into a Word document. Click on the block on the center of the right of the frame and drag it out to full page width. Then drag the horizontal frame and compress it to half it’s original height. On my computer the slope of the line flattens down to 14%.
Doesn’t look so scary, does it?
Re the effect of small changes in temperature, some time before 1970 I read in National Geographic (IIRC) that travellers on the Oregon Trail (1841 to 1869) found the US midwest to be semi-desert and useless for agriculture. I remember reading that a “climate change” brought a sufficient change in rainfall / temperature that the region is now a breadbasket.
A small change in temperature / rainfall can make a big difference.
IanM
Thanks again Willis.
Very intuitive, graphs of real temperatures instead of anomalies, and no crazy Y-axis.
Or better, “Oh the irony !!!”
Perhaps I should actually wake up before hitting the submit button.
What a great way to portray the matter at hand Willis!
And I have yet to read the article, just seen the graphs.
“Kate (02:12:25) ”
Thanks, Kate, and nice takedown. Yes, that’s Post Normal Science in practice = simply a massive Propaganda Operation designed to loot/steal from the producers and anyone who has any “wealth” in order to “redistribute” it to criminals and other parasites. I’m not sure what’s so difficult to understand here, especially since we in the U.S. can see it in Obama, enc.’s, blatant actions even quite apart from any statements.
Willis Eschenbach (04:13:46) :
Your post is truly excellent for a proper perspective on the minuscule temperature increases — I share the thought that these graphs need to be widely disseminated to the general public — graphs get people’s attention.
Willis, your response to Matt’s (02:52:32) comment is also excellent — a “smack-down” — if I can be so colloquial.
And that’s what the AGW advocates need: Real time responses that refute their arguments — a quick response either informs readers and AGW advocates what the real state of the evidence is, or for those advocates who know the reality, but spread their misinformation, lies, anyhow, that they can’t get away with it.
Thank you for the quick response — I was wondering how Matt’s comment would be handled — it turns out, like a champion dispatching a pretender.
Steve Keohane (09:23:51)
USHCN made a major adjustment in 2000 which made recent temperatures higher and older temperatures lower.
I never understood why they did that until I saw your graph. They apparently wanted to make the US data set match the global data set, so they corrupted the good US data rather than fixing the poor global data. Interesting stuff and thanks for making it clear!
Alaskan comments:
Permafrost is a variable thing based on where in Alaska you are. It averages between 2,000 – 2,500 feet deep on the Prudhoe Bay oil fields. The surface melts down to a foot or so during the height of the summer. The depth of permafrost makes it difficult to produce shallow oil wells with cool oil, as the oil needs to be heated or otherwise treated to lift.
The farther south in the state you go, the shallower the permafrost level goes. That line sits somewhere between Fairbanks and Anchorage and tends to move around based on warmer or colder weather at each location. It is not a well defined line, either, as there are regions that tend to remain cold and those that tend to remain warm over the course of a year.
When you get freeze thaw cycles in wet ground, and most of this state is pretty wet, things on the surface, or stuck into the dirt (think fences, foundations, trees, etc.) tend to move around over time.
Even here in Anchorage, the ground tends to freeze down to 9 feet or so. The depth is somewhat controlled by the thickness of snow pack on it. In a really hard winter of 1995, our initial snow pack fell as rain and it got cold and stayed cold. Ground froze down to about 12 feet. Long around February, the expanding frozen ground started decapitating fire hydrants. It was a real mess.
Last but not least, the PDO turned to a cold phase a few years ago, which Willis captured nicely in his graph of Alaskan temps. Will be interesting to see quickly those averages return to what we saw in the 1970s.
…and nobody/thing/creature experiences an average global temperature.
…and, just for fun, plot human prosperity versus CO2.
@ur momisuglyRyan Spear:
By non-trivial I mean that by historic standards, a 0.5 deg C change is not a small amount. Looking at temperature reconstructions, http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:2000_Year_Temperature_Comparison.png we can see that with the exception of the Little Ice Age, the temperature anomaly varies between +/- 0.5 degrees C.
If you look farther back http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ice_Age_Temperature.png, you see that for several hundred thousand years, the earth’s temperature anomaly has varied over a range of 9 degrees C. So on that kind of scale (between ice ball and super-warm earth) then yes, 0.5 deg C is non-trivial.
@ur momisugly templar knight
Zoomed in charts here http://www.csiro.au/news/Has-Methane-Stabilised–ci_pageNo-2.html
rbateman (04:20:06) :
Red Bluff: 1875?
Giss dumps that data prior to processing:
425725910004 RED BLUFF/MUN lat,lon 40.2 -122.2 omit: 0-1889
Step 1 of GISSTEMP.
Willis?
You don’t like December? What happened to December? I like December. Could you put December back in the picture? Purddy please?
PS: Just looks kinda kaddiwampus without December;-)
Louis Hissink (03:31:53) :
What year did climate science start using the 30 year climate benchmark to produce the temperature anomalies?
Not sure but Jones cites an article in the climategate letters that indicates a period of 35 years would have a better physical basis, but he didnt want to redo the math. The notion is based on the existence of longish cycles in the data. The choice of 30 years is somewhat insensitive to the final answer. for example in CRU they use a CAM and require 20 ( as I recall) of the 30 years to be present to calculate a normal.
Kate (02:12:25) :
“1) Reinforce the perception that the US is constructively engaged in UN negotiations in an effort to produce a global regime to combat climate change. This includes support for a symmetrical and legally binding treaty.”
“global regime” = global power structure = one-world government. Control the energy of the world and you control the world.
Er, who is going to have all of this power? The Copenhagen Plan had absolutely no structure for the determination of who would wield the power it would create. You might as well hand out nuclear weapons as door prizes for the economic and societal damage such power would cause.
No amount of showing how the science does not indicate a crisis can dissuade the politicians from their goals. Their heedlessness of the facts is because they already have the confusion/faith which allows them to proceed with the plan.
They are seeking to change the power structure of the world – it has nothing to do with climate. Obama is on board with the whole wealth redistribution plan. He is doing it in the US and wants to make it global. He wants energy costs to skyrocket and to bathe in the flood of money (and power) that he can spend and hand out to his favored people and other countries. After all, the US is evil and should not be allowed to prosper – it is so selfish of them – no one needs our productivity, apparently, as Obama is all about ruining it.
Instead of raising undeveloped countries up to our level where they have the wealth to clean up, protect, and husband the environment, these people want to bring the world’s economy down to an agrarian level, no high tech, reasonably short life span (after all, old people cost to much, you know, and they should unselfishly die to make room for others – it’s only fair), no weapons (even fishing might be banned in the US), no rights, and no freedoms – all of these things threaten the environment (in their all-knowing opinion), so you cannot have them.
They do not want the truth – it conflicts with their agenda. They simply will not admit or recognize the truth or they would be revealed as pursuing a clearly fraudulent plan.
THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS AN OPEN-DISCUSSION WITH A CLOSED-MINDED PERSON.
Remember: “The science is settled,”dontcha know. They are moving on to the logical Draconian response to this world-level “crisis!” Draconian, because anything less than world-domination would just be a token effort. Why not go for the whole thing?
kdk_33 (10:20:48) :
“…and nobody/thing/creature experiences an average global temperature.
…and, just for fun, plot human prosperity versus CO2.”
I believe you hit the proverbial nail on the head. It’s the whole point of the alarmism and tying warming to CO2. It’s difficult to bend prosperous societies to the will of a few elitists oligarchs that wish to become plutarchists.
Fig1: Why cherrypick Homer ?
wow 😉
Steve Keohane (09:23:51)
Another problem with my graph was that I didn’t notice the different scales that GISS had used for US and global.
Willis said:
“My conclusion? Move along, folks, nothing to see here …”
———
Wow, and to think of the time and effort being wasted by those thousands of scientists world wide from dozens of countries who are studying climate change. If they would just “move along” and know there is “nothing to study here.” I should think between listening to Willis and maybe watching Faux News, they’d really get all the truth they need!
Great work! What lurks inside the averages is pretty tame compared our real experience of climate.
John Pattinson (05:48:23) :
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.
True. But surely the U.S. should not destroy itself in order to “help” the rest of the World, which is what the PNS CO2CAGW Climate Scientists advocate.
Rather, the U.S. should hold itself up as an example of what works ! And the U.S. should protect and preserve its example by the necessary – but not sufficient – means of a strong National Defense and reasonable Immigration Policy. Succumbing to a rather feckless brand of Marxist Socialism/Communism is not a plan.
In general, the rest of the World needs to recognize what works and what doesn’t work. Only then can “the rest” be helped. And we can’t do that particular thing for them.
More excellent work Willis! And Homer Simpson was a most appropriate touch. I’m sure any members of the IPCC gang who see these inconvenient graphs will be gasping ‘Doh!’ while their flocks go watch TV so they don’t have to think about it.
Seems the only logical solution for the gang to maintain their useful crisis is to ‘discover’ that average is bad, and that CO2 suppresses variations. We’re all doomed to die of catastrophic boredom unless we act immediately.