Results from the surface temperature outlier races, just in time for AR5

A couple of TV points:
richard verney says (April 17, 2012 at 6:09 pm)
I watched te same BBC documentary on climate change and the Old Kingdom, and heartily recommend it. What was most interesting was the scientists talking about a natural 1500-year cycle for Little Ice Ages, and the brilliant way they found evidence by looking at how far south in the Atlantic melting icebergs had dropped Icelandic volcanic ash to the seabed. This was joined-up climate reconstruction at it’s best.
Mike says (April 17, 2012 at 10:07 pm)
“Amazing. I wonder how many of the tradespeople commenting here would appreciate someone unqualified in the trade coming behind them and telling them they are doing it wrong?”
In the UK we have programs (such as ‘Rogue Traders’) where honest experts expose the shenanigans of their less competent or ethical fellows with the aid of hidden cameras. Enough said.

Santer and Schmidt (and IPCC) were only kidding when they stated:

Tropospheric warming is a robust feature of climate model simulations driven by historical increases in greenhouse gases (1–3). Maximum warming is predicted to occur in the middle and upper tropical troposphere.

http://climateaudit.org/2008/12/28/gavin-and-the-big-red-dog/
Where’s the hot spot?
The “basic physics” also states the stratosphere should be cooling.
How about it Mosher, what’s wrong with the “theory”?

beesaman says:
April 18, 2012 at 4:27 am
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In addition, do noy forget that data based upon land temperature measurments does not tell us anything of importance since (i) without taking into account, it is not a metric for energy, and (ii) ot does not tell us what the average temperature was over a sustained period of 24 hours was.
Just because there might have been a change to Tmax and/or Tmin, it does not necessarily mean that the averafe temperature throughout the day has changed.
The data sets are not fit for purpose. This is not surprising since the temperature stations and the measurements that they record were never intended for climate research
If back in the 1970s there concerns as to global warming, step 1 should have been to completely redesign and redeploy a new spatially designed monitoring system which was properly sited and with proper instrumentation which was calibrated to a known standard and which measured temperature and humidity every 5 minutes and which reported its output additionally in Joules.
Of course, the satelitte system comes nearest to this, nut the warmists generally do not like the satellite data..
Finally, if one is concerned as to the possibilty of global warming, one would only bother with the oceans. THis is where the energy is. There can be no global warming if the oceans are not warming.

Glad you wrote a book – but why the extra long title? Hate to say it but an extremely long title like that is really going to cut into your book downloads. In a nutshell, your book will be largely ignored except by the readers of this blog. The title you used should have been a subtitle, with a short phrase that catches people’s attention quickly used as the title. I know it sounds shallow but that’s the reality of the publishing business.

Care to name them? Or just 100 of the tens of thousands? How about ten?
An amusing anecdote associated with this observation. Alligators are a very interesting indicator of local average temperature, because nests cooler than 30C produce all females, nests warmer than 34C produce all males, in a window that is 1 to 3 weeks long during incubation. Given their breeding season, this places strict limits on how far north alligators can range as a self-sustaining population. North Carolina happens to be that limit — native sustaining populations of alligators can be found (in otherwise suitable habitat) roughly from Kitty Hawk in northeast NC to the southeast of an invisible line that cuts diagonally southwest across the state, roughly paralleling the coast (there are rarely alligators seen all the way up to the Virginia border and maybe beyond in the Dismal Swamp). It is close to, but not quite identical to, the line demarking the range of plants like oleander and beugonvillia that are sensitive to frost (and hence die if not protected during a winter in which temperatures regularly drop below freezing). A shaded map of their approximate range can be seen here:
http://www.herpsofnc.org/herps_of_NC/crocodilians/Allmis/All_mis.html
I live in Durham about 60-70 miles the west of that line (which is around Goldsboro to the Southeast of here, with a major waterway that extends all the way to the coast (the Neuse River) that runs right beside it and a second one not far away. Raleigh is more like 40-50 miles from it.
Alligators actually behave like teenagers at some point in their lives — they are inclined to wander far from where they are born to seek out new territory. The westernmost part of their range is thus already beyond the range where they can successfully reproduce as a locally sustained population as nests will produce all females, but there are enough males and females that “diffuse” west before settling on a habitat that you can still find a few gators in the lakes, backwaters and swamplands in the Neuse watershed. I fish in several of waterways around Raleigh and Durham that are directly in line to the coast in this way.
In 2010 it was big news when a gator was seen swimming in Hope Mills Lake, in Fayetteville NC (again, 80 or so miles to the southeast) but as the article noted, this is in their natural range where they are rare (probably immigrants that can’t sustain a natural population) but not unknown. The reason it was big news was that the lake is in a heavily inhabited area and is used for recreation with lots of swimmers and fishermen, not because it was “unlikely”. If humans didn’t surround the lake it might harbor a permanent (but small) population over time.
Surveys of their population show that alligators are most common and go farthest inland in the Cape Fear and Neuse waterways, probably because they tend to be surrounded by protected game lands and swampy areas that are natural habitat.
Back in the 1980s — I can’t do better than that because not even Google can retrieve a contemporary account — it was big news when not one but two alligators showed up in ponds at a golf course in Raleigh. This was before “CAGW” had become a world religion, but there were a couple of summers in the 1980s that were scorchers and a couple of very mild winters as well, and the mild conditions plus the aforementioned wanderlust apparently encouraged these two good sized gators (not babies, these were the real thing) to wander further west than usual looking for new territory. Eventually they were removed.
Here we are some 30 years later — the 30 years that have supposedly raised global average temperatures by some 0.5 C over almost exactly that interval. That sort of increase would correspond to a westward push of the natural habitat of at least 40 or 50 miles — all that one needs is for one winter in four or five to be in the range that produces both sexes, there is plenty of swampland and waterway (most of it protected) all the way to the coast up the Neuse and Cape Fear watersheds). I keep hoping to see alligators in the lakes I fish in, in the waterways I hike along — and I keep an eye out for them because they are a species that could just turn up by chance far out of place, like the pair at the Raleigh golf course. So do a lot of people. Basically, if anybody spotted a gator in Jordan Lake or Falls Lake or on the Eno river or in the New Hope Creek that runs within a few miles of my house or… it would be huge news, not because it was “proof” of CAGW but because everybody would think it was so cool. Usually one has to go at least near to the coast to have any chance at all of seeing a wild gator in NC, and one really has to get ON the coast or into the swamps on the major waterways OF the coast to have a “good” chance, or to see one casually hanging out on golf courses. Bald Head Island, for example, has a nice population in its golf ponds and sometimes spotted hanging our right on the roads or grassways. There aren’t a lot of them (that I know of) near Beaufort where I teach in the summer but I tend to hang out and fish in the saltwater side of things and they seem to prefer fresh, or at most brackish.
Anecdotal evidence, to be sure, but still, pretty negatory. We still have frosty, cold, occasionally very snowy winters in my part of NC. Less than a decade ago NC experienced a 100 year record for snowfall with a single fall over 20 inches in Durham. Last winter we started out very cold early, then had a fairly “normal” winter with a few very light snowfalls, then had an arguably unusually warm March (after a normal February). April, if anything, has been normal to cool — we danced along the edge of a late frost last week 2 or 3 nights running, but really it has been unremarkable. There is nothing in this to attract even an unruly alligator teenager — they might be able to build a nest and hibernate through the cold (although it gets quite cold, with temperatures down in the teens F or lower at least a few times most winters) but in most springs — even this “warm” one — the probability of a cool enough stretch to drop average nest temperatures to < 30C (86 F) for a week or more is near certainty. No possibility of a breeding population here, little possibility in Raleigh or even Smithfield or Goldsboro. And we are, sadly, too far upstream for even the most enterprising of alligator pioneers to travel seeking a new home, not even with an exploding beaver population and plentiful fish and reptile and bird population to feed them on the creeks and waterways.
There are similar bellwethers in many other streams and habitats. Clams that live only in selected waterways, for example. These populations are often at risk, but the risk is from agricultural runoff, other pollution, or land use changes, not so much from significant changes in climate. There are definitely decadal trends in the date of the last frost and so on, but anyone who believes that they are "safely" earlier than they were 30 years ago is an idiot who deserves to lose the tomatoes (totally frost intolerant) they put out too early. As I have remarked on other threads, a mere 15 or 16 years ago (right in the middle of the supposed "warming trend" last frost at MY house in NC was at the end of the first week in May! This was so late that it killed off my azaleas, let along wiped out my tomatoes, my fruit crop, and damaged the newly leafed trees. April 15th is the usual “last frost” day for the area, but there are years where it occurs in the last weeks of March (and I’ve gotten away with putting tomatoes in 4/1) and years where it occurs in the last weeks of April or even into May as noted.
Anyone who isn’t an idiot in statistics can guestimate the variance of the date of last frost even from this (still anecdotal) data. The actual date of last frost is distributed around the mean date with a standard deviation of perhaps ten days or even two weeks, making two week excursions either way unremarkable. This also means that resolving the motion of the mean by days or even a week over 30 years of data is basically impossible. Trends are lost in an indistinguishable from noise on all time scales, especially when the secular trends themselves are probably signal from long period secular variation due to e.g. the phase of the PDO and state of the Sun.
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