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.]
Excellent presentation of statistics to demonstrate at a glance that the data record indicates there’s effectively nothing out of the ordinary – and therefore the “Greatest Threat The World Has Ever Faced” is most likely nothing whatever of the sort.
Next up; how about repeating this exercise with global data (if you can get hold of any that’s genuine…) to illustrate the record over the last 160 years? My bet is that it would appear virtually identical to the one here, thus making the hysterical warmist claims look even sillier.
slow to follow (04:50:18)
I prefer Paul’s way, and I’ve done that in the past, only to endure questioning about why my year had 13 months, and was I using 30 day months, and the like. So I decided to do it this way … can’t please everybody, I guess.
@ur momisugly R. Gates (11:15:11) :
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.”
——-
Of course, if they did “move along”, they’d have to go get real jobs and try to be productive as opposed to attempting to thwart productivity. BTW, do you really think there are “thousands of scientists” studying climate change today? Really? I can name a few, more than most, but I can’t get anywhere near 100 that has published, or participated in a significant manner to the CAGW theory. I’m wondering where they are?
John Pattinson (05:48:23)
We see much more than a half-degree change from year to year. The average US temperature has changed three degrees in a few years more than once, as can be seen in Fig. 1. The biggest single year change was two and three quarters degrees.
But those pesky dang plants kept growing on the farms, and somehow your “narrow areas different crops grow in” didn’t destroy agriculture as we know it. Perhaps no one mentioned it to the plants.
Since the beginning of satellite records in 1979, do you know how much warming there has been in the tropics?
None. No statistically significant warming at all.
So where are these millions of “significantly impacted” people going to come from? People fleeing the warmer winter nights in Winnipeg? Folks running from the balmier February days in Budapest?
Every forecast climate calamity which is supposed to result from global warming is with us today. Floods, famines, rising sea levels, storms, droughts, wet and dry years, hot and cold years, sickness, we don’t have to wait fifty years for a single one of them. They are here now, and yet somehow, we don’t have millions of “climate refugees” beating down the doors …
Go figure.
@ur momisugly Willis Eschenbach (11:50:14) :
We see much more than a half-degree change from year to year. The average US temperature has changed three degrees in a few years more than once, as can be seen in Fig. 1. The biggest single year change was two and three quarters degrees.”
And how many degrees separates us from an ice age? Five? Six? It’s not a lot. We should be thanking our lucky stars we live in such balmy conditions.
I think Lindzen et. al are right–the Earth is never in equilibrium and doesn’t have a “preferred” temperature.
Great post, Willis. And I loved the Homer Simpson reference!
stevengoddard (06:21:20)
Ummm … you can’t overlay them like that, the scales are different …
Digsby (07:20:42)
Not my idea, sadly, but it is Homer in Munch’s painting …
From my earlier post:
“…a global regime to combat climate change. ”
This is somewhat open to interpretation, but what I understand “regime” to mean in this case is the creation of a financial/bureaucratic strait jacket to force all of us to pay carbon dioxide taxes to less developed countries as some sort of “compensation” for being industrially more advanced, and to pay for infrastructure such as sea walls to keep out the “rising sea levels”, etc. which we have supposedly caused. What it amounts to is using carbon dioxide taxes in order to pay poor countries to stay undeveloped.
Matt (08:09:43)
Sure. According to the IPCC, the change in forcing for a change in methane in ppb is
where alpha is 0.036, MM is the methane concentration (~1800 ppb), M0 is the original methane concentration (~ 1600 ppb) and N0 is the N20 concentration (about 310 ppb).
The formula “forcingf”, in turn, is
where “Log” is the natural log to the base e.
Putting all of that together, a change in methane from 1600 ppb to 1800 ppb gives a forcing change of 0.09 W/m2 … please check my figures, but that’s what I get.
People get misled by the true statement that, per molecule, methane is a much more potent GHG than CO2. The fly in the ointment is that CO2 concentration is ~ 385 parts per million, where the methane concentration is ~ 2 parts per million. A 12% change in methane is meaningless.
If you had not been told that the global temperature had increased by half a degree C over the last century, what would you point to as the results of this “non-trivial” increase? What have been the changes in the climate that would stand out in a “non-trivial” way? What have been the “non-trivial” consequences of what you see as a huge change?
In other words, what clues would you have that there had been any temperature change at all, much less a “non-trivial” change? I see little change in anything, but YMMV.
Matt (02:52:32) :
“In areas of permafrost, this amount of warming is crucial – the very definition of permafrost means ‘permanently frozen.’”
I would suggest you go look up that definition again. Almost all areas of permafrost melt at the surface annually. The depth of the melt varies from a couple of feet to over 20 feet. What makes it permafrost is that at some depth the earth remains frozen year round. The majority of permafrost areas in the world are intermittent permafrost, which means that over extended timescales they are sometimes permanently frozen at depth and sometimes not. The notion that areas that have been melting 7-8 feet or 18-20 feet are going to turn into volcanoes of methane because those ranges change to 8-10 feet or 20-22 feet is fairly dubious in my estimation.
stevengoddard (05:23:00) : edit
Good catch, Steven, I was wrong. I thought GISS used the USHCN figures and added a UHI adjustment, but USHCN makes their own as well. I’ll update the head post to reflect that.
Thanks,
w.
Matt (02:52:32)
“Just an example, Alaska and western Canada have warmed 3-4 deg C over the last 50 years,…”
Where are you getting this data from?. I have run every GHCN Station in BC through Jeff ids R script for individual stations and I am pretty sure none of them show an increase of 3-4 Degrees C over 50 years.
I wonder what the average ice age conditions would look like on graph two? They would be on the plot I’m sure, but surely no one would deny the vast difference in conditions?
MikeD (08:20:07)
I have not conflated those two. I have shown them separately, that is to say, I have contrasted them. You are conflating “contrasting” and “conflating” …
I love these kinds of claims, they make me look things up. Per the HadCRUT absolute global temperature data, in the area covered by the US, the temperature change North/South is about 0.012°C per mile. A temperature change of 0.5°C is therefore about 42 miles. If we get a temperature change of +2°C in the next century (possible but very doubtful in my estimation, YMMV), that would be a change of about 170 miles. From Chicago (which is in Illinois), that doesn’t even get you out of Illinois … and it’s less than a third of the way across France, for that matter.
You have ignored the fact shown in my graphs that the warming is in the winter. I don’t think that many people, or many snails for that matter, would complain if their winter temperatures were that of an area a bit further south. If it’s a problem for you, move north.
Finally, if you get on a plane in the winter and go somewhere that is 2° warmer than where you left, I doubt that you would even notice … when’s the last time it warmed 2° in the winter and you said “my goodness, that’s nice, it’s much more pleasant now” …
Pascvaks (10:48:10)
Huh? The months go from 1 to 12, January to December.
@Dale Rainwater A Burns (02:23:52) :
A variation of 1 deg F is equal to the recording accuracy of measuring stations:
http://www.srh.noaa.gov/ohx/dad/coop/EQUIPMENT.pdf
“MMTS OBSERVER INSTRUCTIONS
To determine the maximum temperature – push “MAX” button.
To determine the minimum temperature – push “MIN” button.
The At Observation temperature is the current temperature displayed.
Record temperatures in whole degrees only.”
– – – – – – –
DATA ANALYSIS INSTRUCTIONS
To calculate the “Daily average temperature” reported to the public:
1) Add the MAX and the MIN together.
2) Divide by two.
Never mind that this is really the median temperature, but nevertheless, report it as the average temperature. Hardly anyone will notice this bit of sloppiness.
R. Gates (11:15:11)
R. Gates, here’s how it works. I have shown graphs and presented facts that show there is nothing to see here. If you hold the opposite view, merely waving your hands and saying “You’re wrong!” won’t get you any traction on this site. It is a scientific site, voted Best Science Blog on the web in 2008. As such, we are interested in facts, measurements, data, math, you know … science. If you have facts to back up your claims, you should bring them out. If not …
R. Gates (11:15:11) :
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.”
You forgot to mention the billions of dollars wasted, careers wasted on the equivalent of digging holes and filling them back in, and the tragic, propagandizing and frightening of children bordering on child abuse.
Other than that though, no problem.
@ur momisugly Clive
concerning the states that have cooled… You tell me. Wasnt there recently much discussion on this site about the southward movement of snow extent?
BTW, for those still worried by the potential for a looming methane climate catastrophe, I would recommend reviewing this paper
http://ams.confex.com/ams/Annual2006/techprogram/paper_100737.htm
The paper is pretty much a piece of warmist dreck, but the experimental technique appears to be sound and the actual measurements quite revealing. They used spectral analysis of downwelling longwave radiation to attempt to quantify the contribution of the various components of the atmosphere to the total DLR signal, which is basically the heart and soul of the “greenhouse effect”. I would draw your attention to tables 3a and 3b which list the measured seasonal fluxes for winter and summer that they measured. The winter values do offer some support to the notion of CO2 as a potential driver of the climate, as the relative absence of H2O makes the CO2 appear to be quite significant, although even in winter the interannual variance of H2O’s contribution is almost as great as the total CO2.
Where it gets really interesting is in table 3b, the summer measurements. In a phenomenon that even the authors feel compelled to comment on, when the contribution of H2O rises above 200W/m2, the contribution of all the other GHGs is dramatically surpressed. CO2 goes from being almost a quarter of the 147W/m2 total in winter, to less than 4% of the 270W/m2 total for the summer.
Take special note of that 270W/m2 number. This experiment was done in Canada. The central notion of CAGW hypothesis seems to be that the addition of CO2 to the atmosphere will drive warming which will lead to increased water in the atmosphere which will exacerbate the warming dramatically. Since, as I understand it the majority of water in the atmosphere is generated by evaporation from the oceans at tropical and subtropical latitudes and estimates and measurements of DLR at those latitudes indicate total DLR there to range from 350W/m2 to well over 400 W/m2, the results from this Canadian experiment would seem to suggest that where the excess evaporation must take place CO2 and all the other nonH2O GHGs contribute at most 2-3% of the greenhouse effect and probably less.
When I first came across this paper quite some time ago, I naively expected the potential of this spectral analysis technique to at last provide solidly quantified values for the contributions of the various GHGs to planetary warming would lead to a rush to repeat these measurements at other locations across the globe. Instead, unless Google has really dropped the ball on this one, I’ve only found one other instance of it. Rather predictably it was done at the South Pole, where CO2 was shown to account for a full third of DLR. Of course that paper’s authors conveniently failed to mention that, at the location where they did their work, the temps have been laying there like a dead dog for 50 years.
The Canadians did this work more than a decade ago. In the interim total DLR has been measured at quite a number of locations. Adding the spectral analysis capability to all those locations would likely have been a difficult though hardly daunting task. Given the large potential to significantly advance our knowledge of the climate that such analysis would have provided, I find the lack of willingness to pursue it rather puzzling. A less charitable mind than mine might suspect that some of those who control the flow of grant money really don’t want to know what this might reveal. But I’ll leave that for each of you to form your own judgement.
I just realized I have drifted completely clear of why I started this comment in the first place, which was in reference to methane. To cut to the chase, the measurements for methane range from 0.6 W/m2 to 1.3 W/m2 with seasonal and annual variability being much greater than any estimated increase.
I was pleased to see that Maggie’s Farm, one of the sites I visit on occasion, has linked to this article using the Homer Simpson graph.
Dave Wendt (14:59:00) : edit
Fascinating paper, Dave, many thanks. Matt asked above what a 12% change in methane would mean. I calculated it at 0.09W/m2. 12% of your two figures are 0.06 and 0.14 W/m2 respectively, so I’d say my calculation was in the ballpark …
Well I’m sorry Willis but I find it hard to buy into your thesis; because of the totally phony temperature scales that you employ in order to inflate the feeling of catastrophe; or “robustness” if you will.
So why don’t you quit trying to fool us, and plot the data on the real world temeprature scale; which really runs from about -130 F to +140 F; which translates to -90C (Vostok) to +60 C (Tropical desert surface); that being the real extremes of temperature which might all exist simultaneously on the planet; particularly round about July.
Otherwise I would say you are a fraud; with an agenda to mislead us.
George
here’s an interesting site which compares 3 stations with the CSIRO and BOM’s assertion that all of Australia has experienced warming over the past 50 years
http://rcs-audit.blogspot.com/
her conclusions are If an accountant were to use these same methods in preparing financial reports, he would surely go to jail for his efforts. And yet this obvious data manipulation seems to be the mainstay of modern “Climate Scientology”. It bears similarities to the financial manipulation that underlies the derivatives market in that the end product is almost unrecognisable from the data on which it is based. One wonders whether this “homogenised data” might better be labelled “Climate Data Derivatives”.
‘Whatever claims the BoM may have to operating an efficient weather station network, it is all for nothing when they let their data disappear into this cesspool of “homogenisation”. As we can see from this small sample, none of the “homogenised” records bears any resemblance to the graphs produced from the presumably more realistic station data records. And when a whole century’s worth of “homogenised” data can be produced out of thin air, one has to ask – “what happened to the quality assurance procedures we were told about”.
I don’t know anything about the blogger (unfortunately) but have no reason to doubt what she says and her conclusions
Willis said:
“If you have facts to back up your claims…”
—————
First, don’t be so full of yourself Willis. I have complemented you on some excellent posts, and to make the claim that WUWT is a “scientific” site–as though there is not a fair amount of politics as well, is just a slight exaggeration, don’t you think.
I am not a scientist, though as I’ve stated before, I do have several friends who work in the climate field, and my comment was as much for them as anything. They’ve dedicated their lives to their professions and I do think I know what has motivated them– the search for the truth. The insinuation that you, Mr. Willis Eschenbach, are oh so much wiser than all the thousands of men and women who are out in the field or in their research labs studying this stuff everyday, I find a bit, well, inflated…
So now let’s take a look at three of my favorite graphs. First, the arctic sea ice anomaly graph for the past 30 years (the best and longest bit of reliable data we have):
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/seaice.anomaly.arctic.png
Now if you can look at this and see that there is “someething to see here”, then I would doubt your natural curosity. No matter what side of the AGW debate you’re on…there is certainly something to see here. Something very interesting started happening with arctic sea ice about 10 years ago or so. And yes, it is true, that something else very interesting (a recovery of sorts) started happening in 2008-2009. Now even a neutral eye, with no stance on AGW at all might want to look at this data and say, “wow, it was going down for 8 years or so, and then suddenly seemed to stop falling…hmmm, I wonder why.” Then maybe that would lead you to look at the deep solar minimum we had, or the effect of higher GCR’s on clouds during this time, or something. But let’s move on.
Here’s another graph I personally find very interesting:
http://www.climate4you.com/images/SunspotsMonthlyNOAA%20and%20HadSST2%20GlobalSeaSurfaceMonthlyTempSince1960.gif
Again, I personally find this graph very interesting. Not just because it show global temps going up over the past few decades, but because of the little variations that seem to indicate some kind of effect from the solar cycle, even though the up trend seems to dominate. Now combining this graph with the previous one, a reasonably curious person might ask…”hmmm, could the extreme deep solar minimum of 2008-2009 had some kind of effect on the general downward trend in arctic sea ice during 2008-2009?” Is it possible that the solar minimum allowed more GCR’s to hit earth, inceased the cloud cover, changed wind patterns, sent the the arctic AO index into a tailspin, etc. Who knows? But apparently, the men and women who are studying these very questions are just wasting their time, or as you say Willis, “nothing to see here…move on…” Because apparently, Willis, you know better than they…
And finally, one last graph:
http://www.nodc.noaa.gov/OC5/3M_HEAT_CONTENT/
Oh, I know, there are many people here on WUWT who feel this graph tells us nothing important…when there are many climate experts who say quite the opposite. According to AGW models, the oceans have been absorbing the bulk of the execess heat from AGW. Much to the chagrin of many AGW skeptics, the ocean heat content graph tells us that very thing as well. Sure, it fluctuates with the discharge of heat and cycling of heat in the deeper oceans, but the trend is obvious, just as the trend is obvious in the two previous graphs I present. And low and behold, during the past few years we’ve seen some flattening of the rise in the ocean heat index, just as we saw a halt in the fall of arctic sea ice, and just as we saw a pause in the rise of global temps during the onset of the very deep solar minimum. Could all of these now be related? Are then telling us the same thing? Maybe a deep and prolonged solar minimum can have an big impact on climate, and here’s some graphs to show that? But, no, Mr. Willis Eschenbach…these graphs tell us nothing. The men and women studying this sort of thing all around the world are wasting their times…wasting their lives…wasting government money, etc. because you have looked at your own hand selected set of charts and decided that there is nothing to see here…move along.
You’re a very smart person Willis…but I doubt you’ve ever spent the season in Anarctica collecting ice cores, or months on end floating on a boat in the middle of a pond in Siberia measuring methane gas emissions– all because you believe in the science. At times I find your puffestry a bit off putting, and times I find it necessary to defend the good and intelligent men and women who refuse to “move along” and do indeed find many things to “see here”…