Tom Nelson runs a great aggregator blog. he’s got his pulse on climate news all over the globe. He’s also got a keen eye for news detail and offers some interesting insights. I had to chuckle then when he pointed out this hilarious media paradox:
Settled science: Can everyplace really be warming much faster than everyplace else?
[Africa: Allegedly warming faster than the global average]
Prof Gordon Conway, the outgoing chief scientist at the British government’s Department for International Development, and former head of the philanthropic Rockefeller Foundation, said in a scientific paper that the continent is already warming faster than the global average
North Pole Heating Faster than anywhere else
Many scientists seem mystified as to why the North Polar region is warming up several times faster than the rest of the planet.
Australia warming faster than rest of globe, climate report says
Kuwait: Alarm as Gulf waters warm three times faster than average
The seawater temperature in Kuwait Bay has been increasing at three times the global average rate since 1985
Antarctic air is warming faster than rest of world – Times Online
AIR temperatures above the entire frozen continent of Antarctica have risen three times faster than the rest of the world during the past 30 years.
Tibet warming up faster than anywhere in the world | Reuters
(Reuters) – Tibet is warming up faster than anywhere else in the world, Xinhua news agency said on Sunday.
European temperatures rising faster than world average, report says – The New York Times
Sundarbans water warming faster than global average
In the Sundarbans, surface water temperature has been rising at the rate of 0.5 degree Celsius per decade over the past three decades, eight times the rate of global warming, says a new study.
Climate change heating up China faster than rest of the world – report
In a new report, the China Meteorological Administration now says climate change is heating up the People’s Republic faster than the rest of the world
Spain warming faster than rest of northern hemisphere: study
The country has experienced average temperature increases of 0.5 degrees Celsius per decade since 1975, a rate that is “50 percent superior to the average of nations in the northern hemisphere”, the study by the Spanish branch of the Clivar research network found.
U.S. West warming faster than rest of world: study
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – The U.S. West is heating up at nearly twice the rate of the rest of the world and is likely to face more drought conditions in many of its fast-growing cities, an environmental group said on Thursday.
A New Leaderboard at the U.S. Open « Climate Audit
Four of the top 10 are now from the 1930s: 1934, 1931, 1938 and 1939, while only 3 of the top 10 are from the last 10 years (1998, 2006, 1999). Several years (2000, 2002, 2003, 2004) fell well down the leaderboard, behind even 1900.
Global warming is occurring twice as fast in the Arctic as in the rest of the world
Lake Superior is Warming [much stronger than the global average]
The really striking thing here is that the long-term trend in Superior is so much stronger than the global average. Well, we know that the upper midwest is warming more rapidly than the global average, but not this much more rapidly.
Himalayas warming faster than global average
New Delhi, June 4 (IANS) Northwestern Himalayas has become 1.4 degrees Celsius warmer in the last 100 years, a far higher level of warming than the 0.5-1.1 degrees for the rest of the globe, Indian scientists have found.
[Korean Peninsula]: Allegedly warming twice the global average]
According to the Korea Meteorological Administration, the climate has been warming on the Korean Peninsula twice more rapidly than in the rest of the world over the past century.
A couple of random replies……
I dunno if there is an evolution blog–I’d be surprised to learn that there are not several.
The currently available evidence for weather behaviour (a/k/a “climate”) is strong and readily available–or should be (and is is you can get back stage and look for your self).
For the evolution vs intelligent design question the evidence is more opaque. For me, I don’t see how one necessarily precludes the other, and I don’t see how it makes any current difference.
And lastly, for the awakening agnostic: I have said, with no credentials what ever, that there is in fact a global warming–or was. (I have made this mini-rant a number of times (where “number” is much larger than one. And nobody here or elsewhere has ever argued with me about it. Which tells you how man people read what I write–there is usually somebody who will argue with an assertion that sugar is sweet.)
IT seems clear to me that by definition, (by definition!) the Earth has been (was) warming since the bottom of the last ice age, and will (did) continue until we turn(ed) the corner, so to speak, on the way back down.
The ambivalence has to to do with recent evidence that we have in fact turned that corner, but I for one think it is way too early to say for sure. The statisticians have a word for describing the uncertainty (and more words for deciding when it ends.) But I will say that I am less uncertain, in my ignorance. today than I was the first time I made this rant.
I wonder if the scientists (or is it “scientists”? [I just noticed! The i-before-e-except-after-c think is broken!])….I wonder if the scientists are busy getting the papers from the 1950’s that proved then that were were doomed to an ice age for which we were unprepared because we were worrying about the wrong things…..whew, got lost in that sentence. I wonder if they are busy re-typing those old papers to get them “on-line”.
What were we worrying about then? Nuclear Winter? SMOG? The Ozone Hole? What happens when we have completely paved the earth?
I think this has to do with the psychology of the average person that no longer has to live in the natural element. When I was a kid we had no air conditioning at all. Not in the car, not at home, not at school. The only place you got AC was the grocery store, the mall, or the movie theater. I hated summer. It was hot. It was hot in the morning, it was hot late at night when you were trying to sleep, it was hot driving around in the car. Now 30 years later my home has central air, the office has AC, my car has AC. The only time I feel the heat is about 5 minutes walking from my office to my car. But imagine the younger generation that grew up that way with constant temperature control set to 72F. You’d think “wow, it’s so much hotter than it used to be”. I don’t think that way. I still remember that all my childhood summers were unbearably hot. The summer of 1987 was over-the-top hot. It was over 100F for 14 days in a row which was a record back then. But now I turn on the TV and all the crybabies are talking about the heat, like they are amazed that it’s hot in the summer. Get over it folks…the summer is hot. That’s what the summer does. When you get out of the AC it’s hot. Not because of CO2 but because the sun is shining and it’s high in the sky. But don’t worry, winter is right around the corner!
This entry was posted in Alarmism, Humor, earth, media, ridiculae.
My comment was humorous, ridiculous, and contained no language that the FCC would not allow on public broadcast programs.
Please excuse me for making a humorous reply to a humorous article.
Regarding Mike D. says:
July 25, 2010 at 12:03 am
Mike, if it is art then it must be post normal art.
Steven Mosher says:
no place warms at the average. every place warms at a faster rate or a slower rate. but NO PLACE warms exactly at the average rate.
As Robert notes there are many places that warm at slower rates than average.
many places show ZERO trend or negative trend. more places show positive trends.
The temperature series used to show “warming” are adjusted to the point of uselessness. I note that you constantly used “warming” and didn’t mention “cooling” other than as a “negative trend”. A bit of bias in your word choice?
Some places, large places, are cooling. And cooling a lot. The Antarctic is growing lots of added ice. The cold from it has just caused a minor disaster as far north as the Equator in South America. The Western USA is having quite a cold snap (it was a wonderful 75 F or so in my garden today. Didn’t even break a sweat. Usually it’s in the miserable 90’s F this late in July. It’s been this way all summer. Not even one really hot day to speak of.) Australia and New Zealand are cold. Killer snow in Mongolia. Trains buried in snows (yes, plural) the last couple of years in China.
The basic disconnect here is between the reality of places COOLING and getting loads of cold and snow; vs the ‘temperature series’ that have so much built in bias in the collection, “quality control”, adjustments, and analysis that they are functionally useless (and becoming a bad joke in the face of the PDO shift to the cold side.)
And it’s not just me saying this. There is a peer reviewed analysis of the temperatures in Turkey by Turkish Mets that found cooling in Turkey. This implies that GHCN used a biased set of stations to find “warming” in Turkey. Use the whole set instead of a subset, and you will find Turkey is cooling. They used several methods that all showed a cooling Turkey when all the data were used. Yet Turkey shows up as a bright red blob on the GIStemp maps.
It’s that kind of data cookage that lets everywhere be warming faster than average…
From a comment on this page:
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2010/03/10/lets-talk-turkey/
this article:
http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/114078036/abstract
If similar work were done for each country on the planet, I’m pretty sure we’d find similar results. We’re in a long term cooling trend from the peak of the Interglacial, but there are very large ripples in it (some 60 to 120 years long) and individual places move in contra-point to each other (as in Turkey being coolest when the USA is warmest). So by picking starting points and places you can make the globe whatever “global average temperature” you want and make any place “warming” or “cooling”.
If you would know what actually is happening, you must use a much larger set of the data, and treat it consistently with Nyquist, and stop changing where you take the temperatures and when; AND stop changing the processes in the middle of the series.
Any chemist would cringe at this “calorimetry” experiment where we shuffle the thermometers around all the time and constantly fiddle with the instrumentation.
Craigo said:
But from here:
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2010/05/19/cure-for-global-warming-invade-canada/
we find out that Canada is warming faster than anyplace else, per the GIStemp map:
http://chiefio.files.wordpress.com/2010/01/ghcn_giss_1200km_anom11_2009_2009_1951_1980.gif
But if it IS Canada, there’s an easy fix…. Invade Canada! (Yes, that’s humor…)
The real problem is that we’ve got essentially a fractal temperature pattern and we’re picking various starting points and finding various trends (just as you would expect from the math of it).
Start 8,000 years ago, it’s cooling. 180 years ago? It’s warming dramatically (at least in the areas that had the Little Ice Age). 10 years ago, it’s cooling. etc. And on the 100,000 year scale, we have a spike of warmth that barely lasts at all, then plunge back into cold wobbly bits. And we’re near the end of that warm spike on the down trend.
@899:
“One could almost do a paper called the ‘hot-spot’ theory.”
I took a look at a ‘degree-days’ map of the USA and found exactly that. Hot spots. In a lot of cool out west. Though “back east” was hot.
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2010/07/14/degree-days-view/
This degree-day map of Washington state pretty much says it all:
http://chiefio.files.wordpress.com/2010/07/nv_41w.png
with little islands of heat right around where GHCN puts the thermometers today and loads of cold out in the boondocks where they don’t measure.
The “stippled” nature of the temperatures pretty much shows that it’s not a CO2 blanket effect, it’s a local environment effect.
But that clarity is what happens when you use all the thermometers in a place instead of a biased hand selected subset.
P Walker
Yesterday , on some newscast , I heard someone state that this past decade has been the hottest since ACCURATE thermometers have been in use . Since the temperature records have shown that the thirties were as warm , I assume that said accurate measurements began circa 1980 . Considering that the graphs presented in Bob Tisdale’s earlier post show a temperature rise of about .6 degrees over the last century , is it not possible that the “accurate” thermometers simply got a slightly higher reading from the get go ?
The early thermometers were in fact quite accurate. What’s kind of nutty is the way temperature codes, like GIStemp, “re-write the past” by making older temperatures colder. This induces a ‘warming trend’ without the problems associated with making the present temperature 2 C warmer than was actually measured. It’s easier to convince folks of the need to “correct” an old temp than a new one. (Though even the new ones can be “corrected” with added warmth some times…)
But to your point: Yes, it is possible for the new thermometers to be ‘warm from the start’ and in fact it has been shown to be the case. The thermometers used at one point ( Anthony has some postings on this… I THINK it was something like HO-83? model?) had a humidity measurement that electrically heated things. This warm air was then sucked back into the device by a built in electric fan… There was a bit of a stir when it was shown that the “modern” devices were biased warm.
IN THEORY, there is a calibration and cross calibration between the old and new thermometers that makes the temperature series comparable. In reality, that leaves much to be desired and is potentially a source of even more errors. In particular, I’ve found that the 1990 time period and more recent has a large “peak clipping” of temperatures with a bias toward clipping low going peaks more than high going. This stands out starkly in comparison to the past (so expect it to be erased in GHCN v3 when ever they release it… which I’ll highlight if/when it happens…) The end result is that in many countries you get a ‘hockey blade” to the temperature profile that pivots up right about 1990. Long after CO2 was increased in the atmosphere… and exactly coincident with a change of the “modification history flag” or “duplicate number” (in GIStemp terms vs in GHCN terms for the same data history flag).
So in addition to the thermometer itself having warming issues in some cases, you can have a warming added via the post reading ‘quality control’ and adjustment processes.
You can find those ‘hockey blades’ in many of the graphs here:
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2010/04/11/the-world-in-dtdt-graphs-of-temperature-anomalies/
Full details here:
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/category/dtdt/
Nearly everyone viewing WUWT lives in a “Representative Democracy”. Ergo – Want to change the volume, tember, pitch, balance of the conversation? Push some buttons! (iow – Vote!)
Actually, we live in a republic, but voting sensibly is the right way to make changes.
Antarctica from Steig et al 2009; That picture of Antarctica was/is very intriguing.
I wonder what is the story behind it? How did they manage to get that defined red area?
E.M.Smith says:
July 27, 2010 at 4:44 am
@899:
“One could almost do a paper called the ‘hot-spot’ theory.”
I took a look at a ‘degree-days’ map of the USA and found exactly that. Hot spots. In a lot of cool out west. Though “back east” was hot.
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2010/07/14/degree-days-view/
This degree-day map of Washington state pretty much says it all:
http://chiefio.files.wordpress.com/2010/07/nv_41w.png
with little islands of heat right around where GHCN puts the thermometers today and loads of cold out in the boondocks where they don’t measure.
The “stippled” nature of the temperatures pretty much shows that it’s not a CO2 blanket effect, it’s a local environment effect.
But that clarity is what happens when you use all the thermometers in a place instead of a biased hand selected subset.
I wonder: Has anyone ever done a temp series map on ONLY those stations which the GISS, et al., don’t use?
In other words, if someone were to take all of the discarded stations and process them in exactly the same way as does GISS, et al., what would the temp map look like, as compared to the what GISS, et al., produce?