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.]
I think the decadal average temperatures by month shows the long term trend best.
Can we have a 3-D version to see how that looks? If it’s OK, I’ll plot every graph this way.
R. Gates (17:11:21),
You are the King of the Cherry-pickers, no doubt about that. How many times do you intend to show that graph of the Arctic, while pretending the Antarctic is following suit?
The Arctic, like the Antarctic, is a region. Neither one is global, unless they are considered together.
Here are both graphs, side by side: click
I am glad you’re checking out the Climate4You site, you will probably learn something worthwhile there. C4Y shows that CO2 isn’t the culprit in global warming [hint: the planet is emerging from the Little Ice Age, and there are many other forcings – all more important than CO2].
Next, your NODC chart shows a recent declining trend. Didn’t you notice? Cohenite noticed in another thread that it had to be re-adjusted because of its original faulty “adjustment”: click [blink gif – takes a few seconds to load]
Here’s what had to be changed: click
Did you ever wonder why the “adjustments” are always made in the scariest direction? For the same reason your pals “dedicated their lives to their professions”: Job $ecurity.
With that chart retraction we’re well into natural climate variability territory. No need to invoke the e-e-evil “carbon” in order to explain the natural rebound from the LIA, aided by clouds, ocean cycles and other factors. In fact, Occam’s Razor says it’s foolish to add extraneous entities, such as CO2, when they’re not necessary to explain something.
The Null Hypothesis rules, and CAGW still lacks any verifiable, reproducible, testable evidence.
R. Gates (17:11:21) : edit
R Gates, you came in, declared that:
I did say, “move along”, so that quote is accurate. But “nothing to study here” is nothing but your twisted interpretation. Don’t put words in my mouth, it is a sneaky trick that angrifies my blood. “Nothing to study” is also a straw man, something you have made up out of the whole cloth and just spent a whole post arguing against, when I NEVER SAID IT.
I asked you for facts instead of handwaving and political commentary about “Faux News”, and you get your knickers in a twist … ah, well, I suppose I shouldn’t care. Are there political comments on this site? Sure. Did it get the “Best Political Blog” award? No, it got the “Best Science Blog” award.
You mistake my meaning entirely. There are lots and lots of fascinating things to study in the field of climate. Am I “oh so much wiser than” all climate scientists? That’s your fantasy, not mine. I’m just another scientist who thinks he is right … quite unlike all the rest of the scientists in your experience, I guess …
I thought my meaning was clear, but I guess it wasn’t, so I’ll restate it. A 0.5°C change in the temperature is nothing out of the ordinary. It is not anomalous. It is not unusual. It is not the defining problem of our century. And it is nothing to worry about.
What on earth does that have to do with honest climate scientists doing honest work?
I see the problem. You think “nothing to see here” means “there is nothing of interest worth studying in the field of climate science”. Don’t know where you got that, it sure wasn’t from me, I’m fascinated by the myriad challenges of climate science …
My meaning was quite different. It was that there is nothing worth reorganizing the economy of the planet, nothing worth restructuring the way we live our lives, nothing to stay up nights worrying about, in the US temperature record of the last century.
Oh, please, that’s not what I meant, and if you don’t know that, you’re not paying attention.
“… many climate experts who say quite the opposite” … gosh, I’m convinced now. Science by democratic vote, that’s the ideal … not. Different scientists have different views, and every one of them thinks he or she is right … shocking, huh?
If you had actually looked at what the climate models say, and the ocean heat content graphs, you’d know that they match very poorly. But unlike the “men and women studying this sort of thing”, including myself, you haven’t done that, you just claim that they show the same thing, and claim that we are “chagrined” by that. Come back with a graph showing how well a climate model matches the ocean heat content since 1960, and we’ll discuss chagrin. To pass the time until you find one, here’s a study I did three years before your cited graph was published, of the match between Hansen’s climate model, the GISS model E, and the ocean heat content data available at that time …
As you can see, the GISS climate model does a very, very poor job of matching the oceanic heat content. James Hansen cherry-picked the last ten years of the ocean data to write a paper claiming great, stupendous, “smoking gun” results … but he either didn’t analyze the earlier data, or didn’t reveal it. Should we all genuflect to him as one of the “climate experts” you fantasize I’m dissing?
(In passing, it is a measure of the poor state of climate science in general that your lovely graph has no error bars … bad scientists, no cookies.)
Oh, not this crap again about how the only real, true, honest, valiant scientists are those that brave the Antarctic wilds searching for the elusive datapoint. There’s lots of parts of science. There’s people that collect the data. There’s people that analyze it and think about it. You seem to think that the collectors are the only scientists … unsurprising, I guess.
But once again, you have totally misunderstood what I said. I have spent lots of time contemplating that very study and hundreds of others like it. There’s lots to be seen in climate science, and lots of good folks studying it. So let me re-state my conclusion, since it seems to have eluded you:
That’s what I mean by “nothing to see here”, and it seems that just about everyone but you got the message.
We now return you to your regularly scheduled programming …
jaymam (17:21:35)
I’m not a big fan of 3D charts in general, it is often hard to see the details. But a lot of people have asked, and we’re nothing if not a full-service science blog, so …
Great stuff!
Now please do the graphs for the world as a whole, and a series for various regions. Especially one for Australia so that I can send it to the CSIRO.
(And of course, keep them all in Celsius. Farenheit is only used by the terminally backward.)
Even the dumbest weatherman knows that it will stay warmer through the night if there is cloud cover, especially in the winter. So who is looking at the change in cloud cover and trying to determine if it is the real cause, and why the clouds have increased. (Could be increased irrigation – look at the number of center pivot irrigation systems in Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, California, etc. I would guess the number has drastically increased since the 60’s. They are easy to spot with Google Maps Satellite view.)
RoHa (18:57:33) :
(And of course, keep them all in Celsius. Farenheit is only used by the terminally backward.)
There are 1.8 degrees F for every degree C. In other words we have accepted an almost 2 to 1 loss of precision for the convenience of only having to deal with numbers that are all factors of ten. The inability or unwillingness to deal arithmetically with numbers that don’t conveniently end in zero is hardly a hallmark of superior mental attainment.
13
04
2010
George E. Smith (16:16:53) :
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
=====
Don’t be so hard on Willis. Of course he is biased, and may have an agenda, but I don’t think he claims to be a true skeptic. Can’t a person make up silly graphs to poke fun at silly graphs?
Willis Eschenbach (18:48:19)
The 3-D graph is great. I was hoping to have one color per decade and then it would be perfect. I’d like to use it for plotting single weather station data.
UzUrBrn (19:07:55), thanks for the comment.
Clouds actually cool the planet overall. You’re not alone, the climate models also think cloud feedback warms the planet. The ERBE data shows that they are wrong … go figure.
Regarding irrigation, you might be interested in this paper from John Christy of UAH.
UHI is like water vapor, we better figure out whether they are positive or negative forcing’s.
I think most sensible people would agree that UHI increases city temperatures, just how does Hansen figure it to adjust olden days lower and recent days warmer? That seems totally backwards to me!
Wren (19:47:57)
I rather suspect that George E. Smith’s post was satire … but then I’ve been wrong before.
Heck, I’ve been wrong in this thread, I thought the USHCN didn’t do UHI adjustments. That’s science at work, I make claims, people try to poke holes in them, we all learn something.
Am I a “true skeptic”? Gosh, I don’t know. I’ve laid out my beliefs at “Trust and Mistrust”, you tell me if I’m a true skeptic or just masquerading as one …
Willis,
I got the message quite well. You think the presentation of the data skews perceptions about climate change and that you don’t think the warming of the past century is important relative to what you see as the other pressing issues of our time. So you presented your own graphs to show that the warming is really nothing to worry about. You called it “trivially small”.
Interesting, it was only a slightly larger (by a few tenths of a degree) temperature change (in the opposite direction) the brought about the Little Ice Age, and I wouldn’t consider that event as trivially small. When talking about global average temperatures, tenths of a degree really do matter, and the can’t be compared to the temperature on any single day varying by a few degrees– this is comparing two vastly different metrics. But you’re smart enough to know this…so I wonder why you do it. And worse, in doing so, you do, whether you admit it or not, trivialize the research of those who think a few tenths of a degree over a period of a few decades, if it continues in the same direction over a longer period, really is important and that we’d better not “move along” because if AGWT is correct and we don’t do something about it, then the poverty and hunger we see today will be magnified by thousand-fold. This is not alarmism, but simple prudence, for the stakes are high enough to merit both not “moving along”, and the equal dose of healthy skepticism to make sure the science is honest, but either way, “moving along” is not a viable option until the issue is settled.
Steve Goddard (10:16:01) : Thanks for your reply. These guys like their data smoothed and homogenized don’t they? Sounds like you folks on the front range had a windy day per my son in Longmont.
R. Gates (21:19:29)
No, you didn’t. You falsely claimed that I said that there was “nothing to study here.” Then you wasted a bunch of paragraphs trying to convince me that there was something to study here, when (obviously) I study climate science all the time, so I clearly think there is something here to study.
Now you want to claim you got the message? Nice try …
John Pattinson (05:48:23)
John, there’s a very interesting study on this exact subject, the Global Agro-Ecological Zone (GAEZ) study done by the UN FAO. Among their findings:
• There is more unused cultivable land in South America than there is cultivated land in North America.
• There is more unused cultivable land in Africa than there is cultivated land in Europe and Russia combined.
Of particular interest for this discussion is this finding (emphasis mine):
The summary of the GAEZ study is here. For someone like you who is obviously interested in the subject of food for the planet, it is an invaluable resource, check out the whole site.
Best guess for the eventual levelling off of the population, by the way, is about 9 billion. That’s the median number the major agencies (WHO, FAO, World Bank and the like) are using for their population projections. See e.g. here.
Re: R. Gates (Apr 13 21:19),
those who think a few tenths of a degree over a period of a few decades, if it continues in the same direction over a longer period, really is important and that we’d better not “move along” because if AGWT is correct and we don’t do something about it, then the poverty and hunger we see today will be magnified by thousand-fold.
The problem arises that the doubtful something “we” can do, going back to the energy levels of the 19th century, will surely make ” the poverty and hunger we see today to be magnified by a million-fold“.
Were there 1 billion alive on the globe in the 19th century? That is how many your energy projects for reducing CO2 will support. This means elimination of billions of people, whether you realize it or not, because a minimum of energy is necessary for a person to be born and live a life, and that energy gives off CO2 ( as in addition does the person while breathing, 1/2 ton a year).
The whole AGW field, from the “science” to the sociological consequences is a bizarre, Alice in Wonderland, off with their heads surrealistic project, in my physicist opinion.
This is not alarmism, but simple prudence, for the stakes are high enough to merit both not “moving along”, and the equal dose of healthy skepticism to make sure the science is honest, but either way, “moving along” is not a viable option until the issue is settled.
If rising seas and temperatures were really a problem, solutions can be found since they are rising so slowly, that will be much less costly in money than cutting off our energy nose to spite our face, and much more humane of the human population than demanding it be reduced by 80%, which is what is really behind the CO2 scams.
For example, take all those teaming masses where the sea level will flood, to now empty Siberia which will become temperate, if all the hype comes about. It will cost much less than the trillions contemplated with CO2 taxation and cap and trade projects. Of course speculators will not become billionaires on this plan.
Not get rid of the teaming masses by stampeding them over a cliff with the specter of CO2, which is the effect of all this carbon limits planning.
And as a scientist, I think the scientific issue is settled, and I have been reading up for over two years. Ready to write a masters I am. The slow increase in heat , slow once UHI effects are taken into account, is not a cause for alarm, but for continuous observation. If it reaches over the medieval warm period start looking for population shifting projects and/or dams a la the Netherlands.
If it goes down the hump towards cooling, as chaotic models are predicting, well and good.
In any case, CO2 is a minor player in this game.
R. Gates:
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.”
They got paid didn’t they? But why did they think they could overturn the null hypothesis – ~fossil fuel CO2 not a new factor significantly entering into climate processes, as compared to previous and given the nature of ongoing contemporaneous climate events – without using the Scientific Method? It would seem that they must have known or at least strongly suspected that they couldn’t.
Otherwise, why not use it?
Gates, please ask your Climate Science buddies about it.
R. Gates,
When you’ve lost anna v (23:35:27), you’ve lost the argument.
Go back to realclimate. They’ll tell you, “There, there, it’s OK. Those nasty skeptics are just picking on you.”
R Gates,
“we’d better not “move along” because if AGWT is correct and we don’t do something about it, then the poverty and hunger we see today will be magnified by thousand-fold. This is not alarmism.”
You’ve gotta be kidding, right? You state that poverty and hunger of today will be magnified a thousand-fold, and in the next breath that say that “this is not alarmism.” What is it then? Truth? Reality?
Alarmists have been feeding this nonsense to the public for decades and decades – humans will run out of food and there will be mass starvation by the 1970’s; civilization will run out of chromium, zinc, copper etc by the 1990’s; forests will be destroyed by acid rain; life will be destroyed by the failing ozone layer; the developed world will be overrun by billions of climate refuges. Every single one, except the last, has turned out to be complete nonsense. Why should we believe the latest?
Even now, the armageddon prophecies of the IPCC are being picked apart and found to be a mix of gross exagerations, made up, and a repression of positive outcomes.
You want to know how to alleviate poverty and hunger? Wealth creation brought about by cheap and abundant energy. If we really do see the policies advocated by the crazies enacted, then, and only then, will we see “poverty and hunger of today magnified a thousand-fold.”
Now, that is something to be alarmed about.
Excellent presentation of the truth!
In the mean time we have become the liars!
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8618024.stm
Anna said:
“And as a scientist, I think the scientific issue is settled, and I have been reading up for over two years. Ready to write a masters I am…” (this last sentence, said in Yoda’s voice?)
———-
I’m sure you’re a great scientist Anna, but forgive me if your 2 years of studying this and getting ready to “write a masters” doesn’t quite equate to thousands of PhD’s studying this for many decades.
The science is far from settled…and to even make this comment makes me wonder what kind of masters you’re working on…
R. Gates (07:12:35),
anna v gave a solid deconstruction to your comment @23:35:27. Your answer was to personally insult to her.
Your response is the result of being outwitted by anna and everyone else here. That will continue as long as you keep up the “catastrophic runaway global warming is caused by a tiny trace gas” religion that has converted you to their evidence-free belief system.
At least the scientists pushing CAGW get to cash in on their propaganda. All you get out of it is to be their martyr. You get no payoff for being wrong here, only self-inflicted ridicule.
Re: R. Gates (Apr 14 07:12),
Just for the record, I already have a doctorate and am a retired particle physicist.
My comment about a masters was to show that I have put in some elbow work on this “science”.
BTW a PhD should not take more than five years, and “climate science” is very new, it does not count decades, and its aficionados come from all disciplines, as a look at the IPCC author list would show. Hansen himself was an astrophysicist as far as I remember.
“”” R. Gates (07:12:35) :
Anna said:
“And as a scientist, I think the scientific issue is settled, and I have been reading up for over two years. Ready to write a masters I am…” (this last sentence, said in Yoda’s voice?)
———-
I’m sure you’re a great scientist Anna, but forgive me if your 2 years of studying this and getting ready to “write a masters” doesn’t quite equate to thousands of PhD’s studying this for many decades.
The science is far from settled…and to even make this comment makes me wonder what kind of masters you’re working on… “””
Well R. you must be some kind of newbie around here; because you clearly haven’t read much of anna V’s many contributions at this club. I have known personally a number of Lady Particle Physicists in my time; and been quite familiar with the amount of crap they have had to put up with to survive in that old boy’s club. And all the ones I have ever known were exceptional in their field as a result; and not the kind of cats you would really want to back into a corner.
Well just so’s you can have a good chuckle; I don’t even have a Master’s degree. I did the work; learned the material; even did my thesis experimental work; just never wrote it up or sat the finals. So I only have a Bachelor’s degree; well with four Majors though; maybe that’s really five. Oh, I also was Senior Scholar in Physics; the year I graduated; dunno if that counts for anything
I thought of getting PhD; Dr Laura has a PhD. I could get one in Ice-Cream Making.
I chose instead to put in 50 years as a practising Physicist in Industry; where they expect you to actually make things work; not just write dissertations about it. The only dissertations I’m even allowed to write, are filed in the US Patent Office. I did recently write a dissertation for presentation and publication; well they called it An Invited Paper; to be the first technical paper of a big International technical conference in Asia.
Then the Company bigwigs heard about it and vetoed it; “We should not be teaching at this level.” was their given reason; we can’t show people how you do those things. So no cigar I guess.
It’s not what’s on your shingle that counts R. it’s what you do with it.
I’d send you my resume, so you could see what I do; but then I don’t have a resume; I’ve never had a resume; but I’ve always had a well paying job. i’m sure there must be something wrong with this picture; well in your view.
I’m sure my two mathematics majors would allow me to learn any statistical analysis I might feel was useful to understanding climate; so far I haven’t found statistical analysis to be of any use in that regard, at all. My Physics Major gives me all the thermodynamis and Energy background, I need. I’ve forgotten more than I’ve remembered about the ionosphere from my Radio-Physics; but still know enough to follow where that fits in with climate.
Well all of that along with the Materials Science, solid state Physics, Solid State circuits technology, Geometrical and Diffraction Optics, and Optical Design; Analog Circuit design; Laser Physics; LED materials Science and Device design and manufacture; well, I guess I’m not really suppoed to talk about this stuff; well not in any great detail; but it really is amazing how LED Device Optical design allows you to understand what might happen to sunlight as it bangs around on this planet and its oddball materials and surfaces.
Yes now that I think of it; with all this talk of ice growing and melting; that PhD in Ice Cream Making sounds like something I could really put to good use.
If you have something to contribute to these discussions R. other than to keep reciting all the party line references that we have all read; like give us some of the wisdom of your own ideas; whatever you use your PhD for ; but applied to the science issues of climate problems; then we are all ready to learn from you; this seems to be a largely communicative, and co-operative endeavor.
So if cheap shots at Anna, and others is what you are best at; there are probably better places to practice your venom than this place. Most of us are here trying to learn, or teach, or both.