Story submitted by Forrest Mims III, originally published for the San Antonio Express-News
In the early days of this column, concerned readers sent many questions about the earth’s ozone layer, which I began measuring in 1990. Today, public interest in the ozone layer has been replaced by concern about global warming.
Answering questions about global warming requires considerably more space than this 437-word column. So let’s focus in on the temperature history of Texas for now.
The 2011 Texas drought was exacerbated by the highest temperatures since 1895 during June, July and August. Several prominent climate scientists have blamed these record highs on global warming. These claims are puzzling because, in spite of the 2011 record highs, Texas records going back more than a century show slightly more cooling than warming. So I visited the National Climatic Data Center website to review Texas temperature records. The NCDC provides monthly temperature records for 10 Texas regions going back to 1895.
It also provides the average temperature for the entire state.
I retrieved all 12 months of data for each year since 1895 and plotted the average annual temperatures on a chart along with their trend. As shown in the chart, the average temperature of Texas barely changed between 1895 and 2011.
The total warming during those 116 years was a statistically insignificant 0.046 degree Fahrenheit. If the record highs of 2011 are omitted, Texas cooled 0.055 degree from 1895 to 2010.
The NCDC temperature data do not fully account for the enhanced warming of weather stations that have become surrounded by buildings and pavement. This is the heat island effect. Dr. Daniel Boice of the Southwest Research Foundation studied the temperature at New Braunfels and San Antonio from 1946 to 1990. www.swri.org/3pubs/ttoday/fall97/heat.htm
He found that San Antonio has warmed when compared with its smaller neighbor. San Antonio might be several degrees cooler today than in 1885 if no new buildings and roads had been constructed. Why do some scientists insist that Texas is warming when the data show a negligible increase? I don’t know. But I do know that a National Science Foundation program officer told me that applications for atmospheric science grants that do not include a global warming theme stand little chance of acceptance.
Climate scientists are right to be concerned about droughts, especially since no Texas drought since precipitation records were begun around 1870 matches the megadroughts revealed in the rings of bald cypress trees. Those droughts occurred hundreds of years before SUVs and power plants began pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, a process blamed for global warming that has not yet arrived in Texas.
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Forrest Mims III, an expert reviewer for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, was named one of the 50 Best Brains in Science by Discover Magazine. His science is featured at www.forrestmims.org. Email him at forrest.mims@ieee.org.
I worked outdoors in Texas last summer. How much Gatorade did I make disappear?
A lot.
Funnily enough, during the 18 months I worked outdoors in Austin, the airport had more than two dozen record low temperatures, and I also froze my behind off a fair amount of the time. I would tell people during the course of my day that there had been a record low that morning (or three mornings in a row or what have you) and they looked at me like I was crazy. The AGW brain-washing of Austinites is a sight to behold!
Perhaps this exercise should be carried out for all 50 States. The result will probably be similar. Better rush before the State records are ‘corrected’ though.
When did facts ever matter to a warmist?
C’mon…it’s only climate when it’s hot. If it’s anything else it’s just weather.
🙂
“Texas drought was exacerbated by the highest temperatures since 1895.”
Taken a long while to break the record. The same thing happened in Scotland, a long standing record was broken this year, but not at the same weather station as in the 1800s. Records seem to be broken in a different weather station from the last record.
Go figure. This has always bothered me how so much fuss is made over a FRACTION OF A DEGREE, something that cannot be detected by the bizarre creature doing the detecting. It’s back to the ‘scientific rigor’ implied by decimal places….except that instrumental error, UHI, Hansen-diddling, and outright fantasy erase any meaningful ‘change’ in temperatures, resulting in ‘rigor mortis’. And how does one “average” the temperature? it’s back to the idea of the Olympic-sized swimming pool discussed recently at WUWT. Sure, you can measure a temperature at some point, but does that represent every point? To see ‘prominent climate scientists’ (read ‘look at me’ climate scientists) clamouring to be the first to blame a gnat fart on ‘climate change’ is just plain disgusting. No point in going AdHom over it, although it is sorely tempting.
I suppose in some way it is comforting to know that the Lone Star State is climatically more or less the same as it has been for hundreds of years, but in the absence of a benchmark for ‘normal’ (another of my pet peeves about climate science), this be basically meaningless, Wyatt. It’s been both hotter and colder, wetter and drier, oilier and gassier in Texas, and so it will be.
/rant
“But I do know that a National Science Foundation program officer told me that applications for atmospheric science grants that do not include a global warming theme stand little chance of acceptance.”
That is all I needed to know.
Take a look at Arkansas …
http://sunshinehours.wordpress.com/2012/04/27/the-warming-hole-arkansas-noaa/
1) The warmest year from this century was 2006, 99 out of 117th. 18 years were warmer.
2) 1896 was tied with 1934 for 110th out of 117.
3) 1897 was tied with 2011.
4) CO2 is one wimpy GHG in Arkansas
Run forrest Run! (For office)
The alarm is all in gathered data that has been “carefully” adjusted to take account of various errors. All other sciences see in the small what they see in the big, natural local variation considered. Yet a global situation that doesn’t show up in regional changes distributed globally, is not a global, but a regional situation.
The difference between GISTemp and HadCruT is significant and rooted in how GISTemp handles the poorly measured Arctic region. How many (and which) other regions would need to be removed from the record to show that the world is not warming to any significance at all?
When an area like the Arctic (or other) warms anomalously, there are two possible solutions. The first you would make (Occam’s Razor) is that it is a regional situation, perhaps a change in wind or water currents. The second is that the situation is global, with the effects showing up the specific region. This is the IPCC/Hansen position, with computer modelling to provide the (directed) backup. (The third option, that there is a mix of reasons, fatally weakens the CO2 narrative, and so falls into the region-as-responsible category for the purposes of this debate.) Any region can therefore be dismissed if contrary to the global view, even many such groups.
When you already have the perpetrator in mind, all investigations into him tend to find what they are looking for. Prison records and evening CSI programs demonstrate this. So it is with global warming/CAGW: you get studied that which you expect to prove the Bad Guy, CO2 here, guilty.
You don’t do the defense’s job when you are the prosecutor.
“The 2011 Texas drought was exacerbated by the highest temperatures since 1895 during June, July and August. Several prominent climate scientists have blamed these record highs on global warming.”
It would have been better if Mims had actually identified these “prominent climate scientists” and provided links to their pronouncements. Without these, this article is something of a strawman.
I’m not smart enough to deconstruct the Texas state climatologist’s latest:
http://climatecrocks.com/2012/04/24/the-lack-of-recent-warming-canard-no-cigar-but-thanks-for-playing/#more-10677
Why don’t some of you sharpies tackle it? –AGF
The Texas state climatologist thinks he’s got the goods on us:
http://climatecrocks.com/2012/04/24/the-lack-of-recent-warming-canard-no-cigar-but-thanks-for-playing/#more-10677
Anyone care to deconstruct him? –AGF
[Moderator’s Note: Don’t you think three links to the same site are about enough? -REP]
This brings up a point that really bugs me. Over at the Weather Underground, Dr. Jeff Masters can’t resist a blog about any record high temp showing up somewhere. His latest report mentions all these record highs at various airports with record data going back 100 years.
I do wonder how many of those airports with their concrete and asphalt influenced weather stations existed 100 years ago. I could agree with a statement to the effect of “record temperature at this station with records going back 10 years”, but certainly not the alarmist statements that he is making now.
Here Come the Green Police! DHS Launches ‘Environmental Justice’ Units
HOMELAND SECURITY DEPARTMENT VOWS TO FIGHT ‘CLIMATE CHANGE’ AND ‘MELTING ARCTIC ICE’
http://constitutionclub.org/2012/04/18/here-come-the-green-police-dhs-launches-environmental-justice-units/
Hey neighbor! Oklahoma here. I just ran the 1895-December 2011 yearly data on Oklahoma from your link to NOAA climatology page and the annual linear is y = 0.002x + 32.755 °F. That’s +two thousandths of a degree Fahrenheit per year for the last 116 years. You can’t call that perfectly level, but, visually the linear trend line looks perfectly flat.
These “climatologists” are just full of ..it as we all now know, factually, and their hypothesis has been proved false over and over again. As Dr. Feynman expounded… if the data doesn’t agree with the theory, it’s wrong… period. It is ‘they’ who are cherry-picking. Global surface energy cannot just ignore the thousands of sites across this globe showing zero or negative temperature trends. Physics just doesn’t work that way. Check on spontaneous energy transfers across differentials or the principle of least action.
I guess our states are just showing no ‘action’ at all!
I went to Mims’ website to check his stuff out. The controversy behind Mims’ firing from Scientific American was interesting.
By the time August arrived much of the vegetation had already succumbed (e.g. trees de-leafing due to stress); this was ‘helped’ by tight watering restrictions across the area(s) too providing for reduced evaporative cooling.
Much of our low-level winds were from the SW as well rather than the south as it normally is during the summer months; winds from the SW arrive much drier (and warmer!) to start with. I lost a couple Maple trees (I know; they are/were bad choice for this area, but I also lost a native Persimmon tree too) owing to the long, hot, dry summer last year.
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@Forrest Mims III
Obviously, you’re not a real climate scientist. If you were a real climate scientist then you’d know that temperature data must be adjusted to reveal the truth of AGW. If you’ll simply subtract tree ring aquired “adjustment” values from 1955 back you’d have a proper chart showing temperatures in the early 1900’s of about 63 degrees as we all know they were and steady warming until about 1970 and then a sharp increase in warming as we all know is what actually happened. /sarc
Good work! Texas “fire storm” (Oh my!) due to AGW assertion debunked.
Here is one that found the same;
Texas temps were relatively high during the mid 1950s whereas for the northwestern states the temps were relatively low. Stationary high pressure domes can park themselves over a region for a summer, contributing to long periods of high temps. How would one account for this? I mean if the warmistas can diddle at will with temps, why can’t we?
Brewster,
And how many stories are ever written about cold temperature records being broken? The most insidious form of news bias is in the selection of which events and stories are reported, and which are ignored.
_Jim says:
April 27, 2012 at 10:15 am
I lost a couple Maple trees (I know; they are/were bad choice for this area, but I also lost a native Persimmon tree too) owing to the long, hot, dry summer last year.
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Which maple? Up here in Ft. Worth at Metro Maples, they had Shantung maples surviving last summer without any water in sandy soil. Maybe that’s why they were designated as Texas Superstar plants…. http://metromaples.com/perfect_anti_storm.htm
“These “climatologists” are just full of ..it as we all now know, factually, and their hypothesis has been proved false over and over again.”
I sometimes go to PJTV to watch what’s new. Their daily update today has the following:
“Love of theory is the root of all evil.” According to Bill Whittle, this is the greatest sentence ever. From communism to global warming, the love of theory trumps real-world evidence.”
Explains a lot!