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 Today, public interest in the ozone layer has been replaced by concern about global warming.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.
Its not warming in texas. its not warming anywhere. Glaciers are not melting. Sea level is the same as it always was, and frost fairs are scheduled for next year in London.
Your sarcasm seems pointless, since none of this is remotely a problem for sceptics.
There is precious little evidence that modern glacier melting is different from that from 1850-1950.
Sea level measurement fail to reveal any difference in rates either.
There were ice fairs in 1900? No. So it warmed before 1900. That says nothing of now. And invites the reverse historical retorts as always (that Greenland was warmer when settled, Romans grew grapes in Britain etc).
Same with California. No drought we have seen since Westerners have settled here matches the droughts we see in both tree-ring and other geological data such as lake levels. Lake Tahoe, for example, has been below its outlet for CENTURIES at a time during the Holocene and many Serra Nevada lakes were far below their current levels as evidenced by stumps now submerged under tens of meters of water.
The past 500 years have been an unusually wet period during the Holocene for California.
_Jim says:
April 27, 2012 at 1:08 pm
“death was pronounced and deconstruction (by chainsaw) has commenced …”
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Only to clear room for the next generation.
Richard M says:
April 27, 2012 at 1:18 pm
I looked at their graphs and it didn’t make any sense to me. Everything I’ve seen (particularly from Tisdale) show we’ve had more El Niños. Their graph showed the opposite. How did they come up with that? Typical warmist adjusting? Make it up? Who knows.
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Yeh….. rationalizations, make stuff up, and then go with it!
Climatology is like someone on a roller coaster freaking out because they’re going to be shot into space on the upsweep, and then screaming they’re going to be thrown to the ground on the downswing.
And then you find out they’re being paid to do that, with your money, and when you point out it’s natural for a roller coaster to go up and down they have a fit and call you a liar and say you should be punished for disagreeing with them.
O.o
Presumably by taking even more of your money.
Nick Stokes: “Are they totally wrong as well?”
Which well known climate scientists in the USA exclaimed that Texas and Arkansas and Tennessee and all those states that cooled in the “Warming Hole” had not warmed at all?
Which of them said “Hey, no need to panic. A big chunk of the USA is not warming at all.
Did you? Mosher?
“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”
You obviously haven’t “adjusted” the data correctly.
I think I’m going for the zero-scape solution this next time …. rocks, cactus; nothing requiring water or mowing …
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“Nick Stokes says:
April 27, 2012 at 1:28 pm
When there is a post saying “Climate scientists who have been claiming Texas is warming are totally wrong”, why can’t we be told who those scientists are, and what they said? After all, they can read the NCDC site too. In fact, the site was compiled by climate scientists and meteorologists. Are they totally wrong as well?”
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Nick look 7 posts above yours and you’ll see the answer to that. The list starts with some person I’m sure you never heard of called James Hansen. And I didn’t make an exhaustive search that was just what I could see real fast.
Nick Stokes says:
April 27, 2012 at 1:28 pm
“When there is a post saying “Climate scientists who have been claiming Texas is warming are totally wrong”, why can’t we be told who those scientists are, and what they said? ”
http://www.google.de/#hl=de&gs_nf=1&cp=24&gs_id=o2&xhr=t&q=Climate+scientists+claim+Texas+is+warming
HTH
I might also mention that the strange ‘pipping-sound’ bird called “Couch’s Kingbird” have returned to my immediate area (noted first about 5 years ago in an area 4 miles to my south). Last year they raised a family in one of my neighbor’s backyard trees.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Couch's_Kingbird
http://www.audubonbirds.org/species/Birds/Couch's-Kingbird.html
Note: They have been observed for like the 5th year in the north central Texas (north of Dallas) area.
Note 2: This a species that has not been here before about 6 years ago.
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Could the migration northward of the species Couch’s Kingbird from far south Texas be considered a proxy for a warming Texas?
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This Texan is praying we don’t have one of those “megadroughts”. I can’t imagine.
LamontT says: April 27, 2012 at 2:30 pm
“Nick look 7 posts above yours and you’ll see the answer to that.”
No. Those posts refer to an argument about whether the Texas heat of 2011 might be partly due to global warming. Well, it was hot in 2011 and there has been global warming. That’s not a proof of causation, but it bears thinking about. But this post talks about a century trend in Texas, and I don’t see what statement by a climate scientist is disproved by that..
Nick Stokes: “global warming”
There you go. Claiming something is global when it is only regional. You can’t help yourself.
For Howard Ambler – Austin’s official weather station moved from Mueller to Bergstrom in 1999. Mueller was in the heat island for sure. A lot of new record lows have been set because of this.
I live in Dallas and our official weather station moved in the 40’s. Apples and oranges! Just because of the UHI, I am 10 degrees warmer than the suburbs at night especially in winter.
_Jim says:
April 27, 2012 at 2:44 pm
Possibly. It could also be a proxy for backyard ornamentals not normally native to areas now Big D or Little D suburbs. ‘Might be interesting to know what species of tree that was in your neighbor’s backyard where the Kingbirds nested.
‘Might also be a proxy for the number of birders paying attention, number of Cooper’s Hawks hanging around backyard feeders & possibly reducing competition. I could go on, but I think the general rule would be that there is an unknown number of factors affecting the range of the various species, but in this case, only the Couch’s Kingbirds know for sure.
Forrest writes a weekly column for the San Antonio Express-News. From his columns I gather he lives outside of San Antonio in the Texas hill country. His interests are broad, and his columns cover biology, chemistry, electronics, astronomy, and occasionally global warming. I don’t recall ever seeing a letter to the editor about his columns, but today there was a letter in the Express-News defending AGW, and claiming that Mims was just cherry picking. With the following:
“No reputable climate scientist says that global warming will present itself in a steady climb of temperatures everywhere on the globe for the entire time period.”
And the assertion that if you look at the NCDC data you find:
“…over the 117 year period , two states have remained constant as to temperature, while six have cooled slightly. All the rest- 40 states……-have warmed”
Well, I haven’t looked at the NCDC data so I don’t know if the letter writer’s claim is true as to how many states have warmed, but I have seen graphs from “the team” showing “ a steady climb of temperatures.” with the implication that it is everywhere.
_Jim says:
April 27, 2012 at 2:44 pm
Could the migration northward of the species Couch’s Kingbird from far south Texas be considered a proxy for a warming Texas?
No, it means that they have found a geographic location where it is easier to raise young. Why??? Dunno, maybe food, temp, water, lack of predators, they may just like the social scene in Dallas. To say that it can be used for a stand alone proxy is foolishness.
The summer of 2011 was brutal. It was almost as bad as the summer of 1980. The drought part of it was almost as bad as the drought of 1986. But not nearly as bad as the drought during the 1950’s, Find a book called “A Time It Didn’t Rain”. Texas has extreme weather. I lived in North Texas for 40 years and saw the 2 coldest winters, 3 hottest summers, two 500 year rain fall events and 2 of the worst droughts recorded.
jaschrumpf says:
April 27, 2012 at 11:06 am
All these significant digits… what kind of thermometers were being used back in 1985-mid-20th C. that went out to three significant digits? If your thermometer is calibrated in degrees, then your observational error is going to be +/- 0.5 deg
Actually, an NIST-traceable immersion thermometer scaled in 0.1 deg C will have an better than 0.1 C accuracy for air temp, as long as it is shielded from IR & light, and aspirated, however mildly.
Once you get to the 0.1 C level of accuracy, the precision is set by how well you can eliminate stray heat.
Even if a digital instrument can meaningfully deliver two or three decimal places measuring temperature, it’s pointless to talk about two decimal places when measuring ambient air temp, since variations from one cubic foot to the next can exceed that.
As WUWT readers all know, averaging air temperatures over more than a few acres is thermodynamically meaningless, especially since it’s surface temperatures that determine the Earth’s IR heat budget, along with cloud-tops. Air temp is an indirect variable for IR, so all-important to the Warmistas.
NetDr says:
April 27, 2012 at 11:03 am
I lived in Dallas around the late 70′s and it was a lot hotter then.
Days of 110 F wre common , as many as 21 of them in a row.
That hasn’t happened since then.
Yea, I was there too. I carried a small kitchen towel in my car because the metal shifter knob was too hot to touch after an afternoon parked.
And Forrest Mims III? Wow, great to see you are still active. I bought one of your Radio Shack electronics notebooks, probably close to 30 years ago. Still have it.
I can’t wait for someone to assign a “Fact Check” rating! We can probably expect something nonsensical like “True, but false. But actually true, with an explanation.”
It’s important to start your graph from about 1970, as the global warming high priests have deemed that to be when manmade warming began, and they’re the experts, right?
Thanks, James and others for the responses. Here’s another question: it’s been noted recently and probably many times that Milankovitch cycles alter insolation in June at 65N by as much as 20% = 100W/m^2. This refers to daily mean insolation TOA. As for the figure of about 1.5W/m^2 due to GHG’s, does this not refer to peak radiation, corresponding to the c.1300W/m^2 TOA, triple the daily average? In which case a 20% variation would correspond to c.250W/m^2 peak TOA insolation, or nearly 200 times that due to CO2, etc.
So correct me if I’m wrong, but it appears that the energy required to end an ice age is a full two orders of magnitude above GHG radiation, which is then rendered negligible for climatological purposes. Thanks, –AGF
I saw my mistake as soon as I posted: “In which case a 20% variation would correspond to c.250W/m^2 peak TOA insolation…” –the variation is already measured as daily insolation rather than peak. But the GHG radiation has not: is this not equivalent to a .5W/m^2 daily average, so that the roughly 200:1 ratio still holds? –AGF