Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
A while back in the US there was an ad for a hamburger chain. It featured an old lady who bought a competitor’s hamburger with a great big hamburger bun. But when she opened it up she asked …
I got to thinking about this in the context of whether there is any real danger in a degree or two of average temperature rise, or whether it’s a big bun with no beef. In my previous post, “Lies, Damned Lies, Statistics … and Graphs”, I closed by saying:
My conclusion? Move along, folks, nothing to see here …
A commenter took exception to this, saying
When talking about global average temperatures, tenths of a degree really do matter.
Now, if tenths of a degree changes over a century “matter” for the globe, they certainly must matter for parts of the globe.
So here’s your pop quiz for the day: Which US State warmed the most, which cooled the most, and by how much?
To answer this, I used the USHCN State Temperature Database. Here are my findings:
Figure 1. Temperature trends by state, USHCN data. Seven states cooled, and forty-one warmed.
The state that warmed the most was North Dakota (top center), which warmed 1.4°C per century. The state that cooled the most was Alabama (middle of three dark blue states, lower right). It cooled by 0.3°C/century.
To compare with my previous post, here’s a similar graph, of the decadal changes in North Dakota by month.
Figure 2. North Dakota decadal average temperatures by month, 1900-2009. Red line is the average for the decade 2000-2009. Photo is an old North Dakota farmhouse.
As with the US, for much of the year there is little change, and the warming is in November to February. Note that unlike the US, during that four months, the temperature of North Dakota is below freezing (32°F) …
Now, if tenths of a degree “matter”, if they are as important as the commenter claimed, we should have seen some problems in North Dakota. After all, it has warmed by 1.6°C since 1895. That’s almost three times the global average warming.
But somehow, I must have missed all of the headlines about the temperature calamities that have befallen the poor residents of the benighted state of North Dakota. I haven’t seen stories about them being “climate refugees”. I didn’t catch the newspaper articles about how it has been so hard on the farmers and the frogs. I am unaware of folks moving in droves to Alabama, which has cooled by -0.4° since 1895, and thus should be the natural refuge of those fleeing the thermal holocaust striking North Dakota.
In fact, I don’t remember seeing anything that would support the commenter’s claims that tenths of a degree are so important. North Dakota has warmed near the low end of the range forecast by the IPCC for the coming century, and there have been no problems at all that I can find. So I have to say, as I said before,
My conclusion? Move along, folks, nothing to see here … where’s the beef?
APPENDIX: R Code for the US Map
(I think this is turnkey. Sometimes WordPress puts in extra line breaks. If so, it is also available as a Word document here.)
The code requires that you download the USHCN Temperature Data cited above and save it as a “Comma Separated Values” (CSV) file. I downloaded it, opened it in Excel. I split it using “Text to Columns …” into the following columns, as detailed in the USHCN ReadMe file:
FILE FORMAT:
STATE-CODE 1-3 STATE-CODE as indicated in State Code Table above. Range of values is 001-110.
DIVISION-NUMBER 4 DIVISION NUMBER. Value is 0 which indicates an area-averaged element.
ELEMENT-CODE 5-6
02 = Temperature (adjusted for time of observation bias)
YEAR 7-10 This is the year of record. Range is 1895 to current
year processed.
JAN-VALUE 11-17 Monthly Temperature format: Range of values -50.00 to 140.00 degrees Fahrenheit. Decimals retain a position in the 7-character field. Missing values in the latest year are indicated by -99.90.
FEB-VALUE 18-24
MAR-VALUE 25-31
APR-VALUE 32-38
MAY-VALUE 39-45
JUNE-VALUE 46-52
JULY-VALUE 53-59
AUG-VALUE 60-66
SEPT-VALUE 67-73
OCT-VALUE 74-80
NOV-VALUE 81-87
DEC-VALUE 88-94
If that is too complex, the CSV file is here.
Here’s the R code:
# The code requires that you download
# the USHCN Temperature Data
# and save it as a "Comma Separated Values" (CSV) file.
# I downloaded it, opened it in Excel, and used
# "Save As ..." to save
# it as "USHCN temp.csv"
#Libraries needed
library("mapdata")
library("mapproj")
library("maps")
# Functions
regm =function(x) {lm(x~c(1:length(x)))[[1]][[2]]}
#Read in data
tempmat=read.csv('USHCN temp.csv')
# Replace no data code -99.9 with NA
tempmat[tempmat==-99.9]=NA
# split off actual temps
temps=tempmat[,5:16]
# calculate row averages
tempavg=apply(temps,1,FUN=mean)
# calculate trends in °C by state
temptrends=round(tapply(tempavg,as.factor(tempmat[,1]),regm)*100*5/9,2)
# split off states from regional and national
statetrends=temptrends[1:48]
#calculate ranges for colors
statemax=max(statetrends)
statemin=min(statetrends)
statefract=(statetrends-statemin)/staterange
#set color ramp
myramp=colorRamp(c("blue","white","yellow","orange","darkorange","red"))
# assign state colors
mycol=myramp(statefract)
# names of the states (north michigan is missing for ease of programming)
myregions=c("alabama", "arizona", "arkansas", "california", "colorado", "connecticut", "delaware",
"florida", "georgia", "idaho", "illinois", "indiana", "iowa", "kansas", "kentucky", "louisiana", "maine",
"maryland", "massachusetts:main", "michigan:south", "minnesota", "mississippi", "missouri", "montana", "nebraska",
"nevada", "new hampshire", "new jersey", "new mexico", "new york:main", "north carolina:main", "north dakota",
"ohio", "oklahoma", "oregon", "pennsylvania", "rhode island", "south carolina", "south dakota", "tennessee", "texas",
"utah", "vermont", "virginia:main", "washington:main", "west virginia", "wisconsin", "wyoming")
# draw map
par(mar=c(6.01,2.01,4.01,2.01))
return=map('state',regions=myregions, exact=T,projection='mercator',fill=T,
mar=c(5.01,8.01,4.01,2.01),col=rgb(mycol,maxColorValue=255),ylim=c(10,60))
# set up legend boxes
xlref=-.48
yb=.37
ht=.05
wd=.08
textoff=.025
# assign legend labels
mylabels=round(seq(from=statemin,by=staterange/12,length.out=13),2)
#draw legend
myindex=0
for (i in seq(from=xlref,by=wd,length.out=12)){
xl=i
xr=xl+wd
yt=yb+ht
rectcolor=myramp(myindex/11)
rect(xl,yb,xr,yt,col=rgb(rectcolor,maxColorValue=255))
text(xl,yb-textoff,mylabels[myindex+1],cex=.65)
myindex=myindex+1
}
text(xl+wd,yb-textoff,mylabels[myindex+1],cex=.65)
# add annotations
text(0,1.08,"US Temperature Trends (°C/century)")
text(0,1.03,"USHCN Dataset, 1895-2009",cex=.8)
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Don Shaw (05:49:53) :
Bill Tuttle (03:00:07) :
… but I suspect that other factors may also be in play.
For example I was investigating following up on a station in Monmouth County very near the ocean, but then Anthony advised me that this station was dropped as an official station. I even wrote an e-mail to the university where the station is located without reply. On the east coast we all know how much cooler it is close to the ocean and selectively dropping such stations may meet an objective.
You’ve raised a very good point, Don. I know that school (I flew helicopters for the Jersey Guard for thirty years) and it’s only about a half-mile from the water. The Atlantic breezes reach almost ten miles inland in New Jersey, and in the southern half, the westerlies cross Delaware Bay and add further cooling. I’ve seen temperatures of +10°C at Trenton turn to 0°C after a twenty-minute eastbound flight — but that’s aviation weather, not aviation climate…
Thanks Willis. N. Dakota needs all the degrees it can get. I spent a Christmas outside Dickenson at -40°F with 50 mph winds, absolutely miserable. Furnace ran 24/7, with frost on the inside of the outside walls. Serious cold.
Clicked on the Google link to help out Anthony, it was for Al Gore’s website, Repower America, got this message:
“Firefox doesn’t know how to open this address, because the protocol (s-p) isn’t associated with any program.”
Hope you get paid anyway, Anthony.
Mercury freezes at about -38 (C or F – take your pick). To measure temperatures in that region, you have to use an alcohol thermometer.
Lived in Fargo for over 25 years. Mom’s side of the family all lives there still. And I can tell you, over that period of time at least (the most accelerated warming period according to the data), it hasn’t felt like it has changed 1/1000th of a degree. And I don’t believe it has.
Oh, my friends, we should give the warmists a break. After all, they worked long and hard, long into the night, year-after-year to find alternate causes for the alarming warning observed in the last few decades. They thought of everything and tried every combination of factors, but the polynomial was always the same. Only CO2, emitted by human activity with wild abandon, could explain the temperature variations. Can’t we just relax and let the hard-working experts guide us to utopia?
A small and minor nit pick. The upper peninsula of Michigan is missing from your map. Adding that back into Michigan could lower the temperature some as my home town in the UP is listed as having the 5th lowest average temp in the US of 39.7 F. If that average could only rise we in the UP would be very greatfull.
😉
I was curious about something for a while
would it be possible to only plot the average of the nighttime LOW temps?
we always get a composite temps averaged per day/per month/per year
would it be possible to just graph the night time low temp averages over time and see if there is anything there, if UHI is a factor then shouldn’t the night time low temps be affected the most?
The observed increase in ocean level is primarily due to the production of groundwater from slow to recharge aquifers i. e. fossil water mining. The worldwide rise in ocean level from this water is 2.6 mm per year. Due to dropping aquifer water levels the pumped rate has slowed somewhat in the past 10 years or so. The US rate slowed a bit before that.
This same production of water results in heat being added to Troposphere to the atmosphere for the first evaporation-condensation cycle, then becomes part of the earth’s hydrological system — but the 93% of the water that does not recharge into an aquifer remains on the surface of the earth — in the hydrosphere, primarily the oceans.
The type of graph that Willis has used here is perhaps the most “let’s put things into perspective” style of presentation that I have yet seen. When the annual variation is about 65°F (36°C), and the “calamity” that we are supposedly facing is smaller than the thickness of the modest lines used to draw the curves, it is clear that there is an enormous amount of exaggeration going on.
This is a wonderful representation. The only thing I would do to change it would be to repeat three months on either end so as to clearly show the harmless oscillations involved.
/dr.bill
Well put Willis. Nice and clear.
Out at work, one person has a New Mexico coffee mug, with the state logo on one side, and some facts on the other. These facts include some average numbers, such as average temperature. I happened to be reading these facts one day, while waiting for the microwave to finish. What I found startling was the average temperature, which they said was 62 degrees F. For anyone who is familiar with New Mexico, this seems a little odd. Then I realized they were averaging our highest temperatures with the lowest ones. We can get high temperatures of 115 degrees F in the southern desert areas during the summer, and low temperatures of -10 degrees F in the northern mountain areas during the winter. The temperature of my small mountain community can be quite different from the temperature, just a few tens of miles away, of some of the valley communities. Average temperatures are really only meaningful for the farmers and ranchers and airports, which is what our weather stations were originally set up for.
len (07:00:17) :
I do that (plot highs and lows) and yes, UHI shows up at night in cities.
http://www.robertb.darkhorizons.org/WhatGlobalWarming.htm
Plotting high & lows is much more work. A lot more work.
But not all cities exhibit UHI. Where there is a natural air circulation cutoff, there is no UHI, city or no city. It is in those place that I see the real direction the climate is going…down.
chris y (06:24:27) :
North Dakota is just south of Winnipeg, Manitoba, known as the land of the triple forties:
+40 C in the summer, -40 C in the winter, and 40 km/hr winds all of the time.
Ten degrees (C) of warming from November thru March would justify a new Provincial holiday to celebrate the milder winters>>>
Yes! There are no skeptics or warmists in Winnipeg. Just pessimists and optimists.
We don’t want folks from North Dakota down here in Alabama-they talk funny. Lol.
Willis Eschenbach
I think you should do a lot more, of this visual work. And publish all, as a book.
Frankly, I don’t believe it is even possible to correctly measure or properly characterize the earth’s temperature to a tenth of a degree Celsius. The inherent uncertainty in such a measurement is likely 10 times the number itself. I really wish someone who understood this conundrum better than I would write some papers on this problem.
If most of the warming was due to increased use of energy in urban areas, a majority of the warming over the last century would be at night and during the winter.
Part of that extra warming in the western states would be due to increased irrigation. I suspect the hottest temperatures have gone down thanks to the latent heat of evaporation, and nighttime temperatures have gone up more than daytime temperatures have gone down- thanks to condensation of water vapor at night.
I think this posting makes me think more about thermal energy and its importance. Most of the heating in North Dakota was in the winter – when it’s very cold. When it’s that cold, the absolute humidity is much lower and much of the surface water is frozen.
Lower humidity and frozen water have one notable thing in common – they both LOWER the heat capacity of the system. Thus, it takes a much smaller energy change for ND to warm up 1 C in the winter than it does for AL to cool 1 C in the summer (or anytime during the year I’d imagine).
Although UT and NV may not be super-cold during the winter, they’re both very dry relative to the SE and should have lower heat capacities too.
Now obviously more stuff is present in the system than just water (and its vapor), but I’d guess that rock/asphalt/etc has a fairly constant heat capacity with respect to temperature compared to water.
Any thoughts?
-Scott
Well, warmers like to attribute Red River flooding to AGW, so here’s the history of Red River floods. This study places the flood of 1897 as the worst:
http://pubs.usgs.gov/gip/2007/55/pdf/finalWebGIP55.pdf
HR (06:23:41) :
I take the point you make with the article but I’m a little concerned about the graph you’ve started using (such as fig 2).
Surely the thickness of the lines represent about 1 degree, you’re not going to see much in terms of trends that way. Is that your intention?
——————–
Reply:
So Global Warming…er, I mean, Climate Change is lost in the width of a graph line?
No wonder people are hysterical about the outcome!
Koba,
Those old USA mercury thermometers were calibrated in degrees F. Typical temperature division marks were every two degrees. The normal instrumentation rule is that kind of thermometer can be read reliably to one half of a division or in this case one degree. That is to say, a high quality mercury thermometer from the 1800 could normally be expected to have a calibration accuracy of plus or minus one degree F with a reading precision of plus or minus one degree F for a total accuracy of plus or minus two degrees. This was, and probably still is, considered high enough accuracy for weather reporting. After all, day versus night and summer versus winter temperature differences are so great that a degree or two off in one direction or another is not going to even be noticed when we head out the door.
The problem is with the false logic that you can simply average a bunch of two degree accuracy instruments to produce a more accurate temperature value. Treating reading errors as simple white, pink, or red noise is not defensible. The total accuracy of the final value can be no more accurate than the instrumentation base accuracy.
Now picture that sailor on the deck of a rolling square masted sailing ship pulling a thermometer out of canvas bucket of sea water to take a reading by the light of a swinging oil lantern. That is what we are using as our base for a one degree F temperature rise per century.
Now, if tenths of a degree changes over a century “matter” for the globe, they certainly must matter for parts of the globe.
Why? Why must they “certainly” matter?
If you’d link the comment you’re responding to, perhaps one could understand the context. As a general statement, though, surely you can see the difference between the amount of energy it takes to warm the entire planet a tenth of a degree and the amount of energy it takes to warm North Dakota a tenth of a degree.
So why does it “certainly” matter? If you’re going to base an entire post on a single premise, it would be well to be able to support it logically.
Whilst you’re worrying about all the toasty weather in North Dakota, in the UK we are under a cloud.
Not just the volcanic ash cloud.
But the metaphorical cloud of an election where all the three major political parties are actively vying with each other to be more incompetent and ludicrous than each other.
I thought readers on here might enjoy one manifesto promise from the Liberal Democrats (aka “The Dims”). At present the others two Party Leaders are enthusiastically schmoozing with the Dims because they fear there will be no clear overall winner. So they are likely to have at least some role in the next British Government.
They promise:-
Energy efficiency: The Liberal Democrats are committed to securing a legally binding global agreement on limiting the increase in global temperatures to below 1.7 degrees Celsius.
So, you see, tenths of a degree REALLY DO matter. I’m not certain how they are going to measure this and using which thermometer where, (I’m sure Phil Jones will advise), or even when the “increase” starts from. Also can’t say whether they allow for El Nino effects, let alone UHI.
But, never mind that, 1.7 degrees Celsius it is.
1.6 degrees may be hard to take but, just let it get to 1.7 degrees and you can get ready. Out come the handcuffs and the truncheon (our cops still don’t carry guns). This is no laughing matter! I’m sure they’ll come down on that pesky thermometer like a ton of bricks! They’ll show ’em!
I don’t much agree with commentary that conflates climate change with the thermometer. Most of us wouldn’t even know anything was happening or care that much so long as our plant life and animals were healthy, and our water supplies were strong. The “climate beef” is the tangible manifestation of many factors that test our elasticity to adapt, maintain, and prosper in less than ideal conditions over a period of time. Much like the volcano that has brought air travel to its knees, there’s nothing we can do to effectively address flattening the climate rhythms.
Well North Dakota is lucky they don’t an oceanside or much of it would be underwater.