An Aggie Joke

By Steven Goddard

[Update: See message from Professor North Below]

Some well known Aggie Jokes:

Did you hear about the Aggie who won a gold medal at the Olympics? He liked it so much that he decided to get it bronzed.

Did you hear about the Houston Cougar that transferred to A&M? He raised the IQ of both schools!

How many Aggies does it take to screw in a light bulb? One, but he gets 3 hours credit.

How do you get a Texas A&M graduate off your front porch? You pay for the pizza.

And here is the most recent Aggie joke. Check out this piece of work from the Texas A&M school newspaper.

Published: Tuesday, June 15, 2010

It is not just Texas; it is global. The rising temperatures that have afflicted the state are only part of a larger problem. Earth’s temperatures are rising at an alarming rate, rates unseen for thousands of years. “The warming that has occurred in the last 100 years seems to be very unusual,” said Gerald North, professor of atmospheric sciences and oceanography. “We do not see warming changes like that for 10,000 years. The rate at which it is going up has not stopped.”Even though the global rise in temperature is small, 3 degrees Celsius over a period of 100 years, the implications of such warming are large. “3 degrees Celsius is about 5.5 degrees Fahrenheit, and if you ask most people, they would say that it does not sound like very much,” said Andrew Dessler, professor of atmospheric sciences and oceanography. “If you look at the global average temperature, it really varies a small amount.”

Every fact and statistic quoted are suspect. According to NCDC, Texas has not warmed over the last 90 years, or the last 110 years.

Next up is their claim that global temperatures have risen by 3C in the last 100 years. Even Hansen’s bloated numbers only show 0.8C in the last 130 years.

NCDC shows the same thing, only less.

HadCrut shows less than one degree rise over the last 150 years.

The authors seem to be confusing IPCC estimates for the next hundred years, with measurements from the last hundred years – which is clearly the context of that paragraph.

Then they go on to claim that summer temperatures have increased in Texas.

Global climate changes are having equal effect on Texas‘ climate, which is part of the reason for the increased temperatures over the summers.

According to NCDC, Texas summer temperatures are dropping:

And finally :

“Texas temperatures are going up pretty much like the earth’s temperatures are,” North said. “Generally speaking, the global average temperature changes about the same as in Texas, so it is probably going to be warmer in Texas in the next 50 to 100 years. Last summer was a really hot summer, and while I say that is a fluctuation, it does probably indicate things that we might expect in the next 20 or 30 years. And what you can expect in the next 50 years is that the heat we experienced last summer is going to be the average summer temperature.”

Not one shred of evidence to support that statement. If NCDC trends continue, summers will be cooler in 50 years in Texas. Now, let’s give them the benefit of the doubt and assume that they are only thinking about their little part of Texas. The closest USHCN station to College Station is in Brenham.

According to USHCN, Brenham was warmer 100 years ago.

One might expect that professors of atmospheric science would have access to the Internet, and would be able to look these things up for themselves – before presenting information to their students. Looks like another bad Aggie joke.

[Update: Professor North responded to an email from one of our commenters, James Allison,  and stated this:

“Please correct the false impression left on your website. The item in the Texas A&M student newspaper was based on short interviews by phone. While there was no error in fact, the impression left is false. In the interview with me, I was referring to the temperature changes of our planet over the last century (about 0.7 deg C). The author switched abruptly to an interview with Professor Andrew Dessler who was not talking about the temperature over the LAST century but instead the IPCC prediction for temperature over the NEXT century (averaging over models about 3 deg C). I would not have known about this error except that my email box has been unusually loaded with hate mail today.
Gerald North”]