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 Today, public interest in the ozone layer has been replaced by concern about global warming.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 wonder how long it will be until the temperatures are “adjusted” by NOAA, turning a level temperature trend into an increasing one.
to sunshinehours1:
The highest temperature recorded in Arkansas is 120°, Fahrenheit. This record high was recorded on August 10, 1936 at Ozark. just saying…
agfosterjr says:
April 27, 2012 at 5:08 pm
AGF, let me check your math
um lets see 1360 W/m^2 time 20% = blah blah blah carry a zero blah blah blah come up with… yep, your right. CO2 does not have the power to end an ice age. If you truly want me to check your math it will have to wait until Monday. But it seems improbable that 100 ppm of CO2 (or even 300 or 400) would have the power to end an ice age. If you like math problems with lots of zeros, calculate the amount of energy to melt 10,000 feet of ice covering the norther half of North America and Europe. Start with a temperature of -40 degrees (please give your answer in calories).
“The 2011 Texas drought was exacerbated by the highest temperatures since 1895 during June, July and August.”
As a meteorologist, I would tend to reverse the above statement, and instead say: “The 2011 Texas heat wave was exacerbated by a severe drought.”
In regions that normally contain significant vegetation and soil moisture, the vast majority of the solar energy absorbed at the surface during the growing season is converted to latent heat through evaporation of soil moisture and transpiration by plants. Obviously when a severe drought occurs in such a region, the majority of this energy can then be converted to sensible heat. Thus, it temporarily becomes more desert-like.
This was demonstrated well by the late 1987, 1988, and early 1989 drought that hit an area from the Carolinas through the Midwest and up to Alberta. In June 1988 I recall that Minneapolis set daily record highs on 16 of 30 days in June. Yet in that month there was also frost that killed some crops in central Minnesota. These events were the result of negligible soil moisture. Of course, the summer of 1988 is also when an infamous government bureaucrat began tooting his horn about this being a sign of AGW. Never mind that there have been more severe droughts affecting much larger parts of the country and for longer periods of time well before coal-fired power plants and SUVs.
So what drove the cooling that started in the late sixties and lasted through the seventies…I think it may have been bad music…it really bottoms out when disco ruled…
Lewiston, Idaho is one of the hottest cities in the West at the latitude it sits at. But not in recent years. You can actually buy a coat now in that city.
Brewster said (April 27, 2012 at 10:02 am)
“…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…”
That’s why I’ve taken to using their own data against them.
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/modelforce/ghgases/Fig1A.ext.txt
This shows CO2 levels back to about 1850 – makes a great source to compare today’s CO@ur momisugly to a level that is at least 100ppm or so LESS than today.
As an example, here’s another comment:
J. Philip Peterson said (April 27, 2012 at 6:48 pm)
“…to sunshinehours1:
The highest temperature recorded in Arkansas is 120°, Fahrenheit. This record high was recorded on August 10, 1936 at Ozark. just saying…”
And that chart shows that the CO2 level in 1936 was pegged at 310.1. Amazing that such a high temperature could have been achieved with the CO2 level about 84ppm lower than today.
Also amazing is another long-time record (still standing): Most consecutive days above 100 °F (37.8 °C): 160 days; Marble Bar, Western Australia from 31 October 1923 to 7 April 1924. CO2 level, 304.5/304.9ppm. How could that extreme heat ever have happened with levels that low?
Harold Ambler, I’m fortunate to work outside, up on the higher elevations of the South Plains near Lubbock. You guys have humidities that are just awful, I commisserate. A tip for the gatorade, buy one bottle from the store, and the powder at walmart or wherever. Less than half the price, helpful if you go through a lot. Oh, I was young in the summer of ’80, in the DFW area, it was far worse than last summer IMO.
We (in north central Texas) had winds predominantly from the SW last summer, as opposed to from the south (and off the Gulf Of Mexico for those areas east of I-35 which includes me) pretty much establishing what we saw (hot and dry vs warm and somewhat muggy as winds off the Gulf carry moisture; this off-the-Gulf moisture pattern is also reflected in in the rainfall records – higher rainfall east of I-35 in Texas and this also applies to the states more northern like Oklahoma and Kansas.)
Whether a ‘blocking high’ repeatedly developing as a product of El Nino or La Nina setting our predominant wind last year during the summer, I don’t know … but THESE are the things ‘climatologists’ should be considering, of course, before considering any leaps to attribute the ‘heat wave’ to GW …
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It’s really too bad for the author that a “Texas average temperature” is as useless as a “Global average temperature.”
And yet, there will those that will consider it a valid ‘proxy’; consider yourself immunized. I wrote that thinking it was going to be a slow-rolling ‘hand grenade’ into the room so to speak (but, this is to be taken seriously; I captured stills and videos -for their calls- to document their presence … you may not understand the difficulty I had in identifying these birds; none of the usual ‘Birds of North Texas’ books and resources were any help!)
There is more to this story too, such as, where do these birds migrate after completing the cycle of raising the young up here? They don’t spend all summer in this area, they are gone by … was it July or August? … I will have to observe again this year since I don’t have my mental notes handy at the moment …
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Has this been submitted to peer review? It belongs in a journal reply….
I’m glad you said that; I mentioned the effect briefly up-thread but I don’t think many ppl really understood nor latched onto it …
Between many of the deciduous trees going into stress accompanied by water restrictions to only once or twice a week (many commercial establishments used to water automatically a 7 days a week) greenery and lush lawns both diminished.
Anyone who has seen a camera shot from one of our TV station’s tower-cams can testify to the amount of ‘greenery’/trees in the Dallas et al area.
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Steve P says:
April 27, 2012 at 3:36 pm
“‘Might be interesting to know what species of tree that was in your neighbor’s backyard where the Kingbirds nested.”
Russ in Houston says:
April 27, 2012 at 4:15 pm
_Jim says:
April 27, 2012 at 8:34 pm
_Jim says:
April 27, 2012 at 8:45 pm
Perhaps you missed my post at 3:36 pm, and my question. Do you know the species of tree in your neighbor’s backyard where the Kingbirds nested?
Russ in Houston says:
April 27, 2012 at 7:25 pm
OK, but can you vouch for the fact that the average daily GHG radiation is .5W, 1/3 of peak 1.5, or is 1.5 the average? That makes a difference of almost half an order of magnitude. –AGF
That temperature graph looks like an oscillatory function with a beat of about 120 – 130 years.
Pamela Gray wrote: “Lewiston, Idaho is one of the hottest cities in the West at the latitude it sits at. But not in recent years. You can actually buy a coat now in that city.”
I grew up in the Lewiston/Clarkston Valley in the 1950s. Before going to school, I always listened to the meteorologist, Bob White, on KRLC who gave the weather forecast every morning around 7:45. The summers were hotter, and the winters were colder during that decade, but we enjoyed the seasons without fret over any catastrophic implications. The summer weekends found us water skiing on the Snake River, and winter weekends found us snow skiing at Field Springs State Park south of Anatone.
Old News…
I reported the 117 year flat temperature trend in Texas on January 11, 2012:
http://sbvor.blogspot.com/2012/01/117-year-flat-temperature-trend-in.html
Harold Ambler?! Cool! I just bought your book “Don’t Sell Your Coat” after I recently saw Greg Gutfeld give it a plug. It’s a great read. Keep up the good work!
For much of the UK, March this year was one of the warmest and driest months ever, while April is proving to be one of the coolest and wettest months on record.
For the global warming crowd, March is statistically important, while April is an irrelevant aberration.
Such is ‘climate science’. Texas is no different, just an irrelevant aberration unless the statistics have been properly adjusted to reflect current global warming beliefs. Expect that soon, but do not expect any announcement.
agfosterjr says:
April 27, 2012 at 5:08 pm
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
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AGF, you’re covering territory that’s been covered before, but to little avail. Here’s the problem…. we know, approximately, on average, what is coming at us, in terms of energy. …… that’s all we know. Please allow me this bit of a diatribe………
We can talk thermodynamics until we’re blue in the face, but that’s simply theory. It doesn’t all piece together in real world.application. We can view energy leaving the TOA, but we don’t know where that’s coming from…. surface or TOA. We mostly consider IR, but UV is a big player largely ignored. Gravity, clouds, water, ice….. biosphere….. convection, conduction, aerosols…… trying to calculate an energy budget from incoming energy is an exercise in futility. But, don’t believe for a second that people have any great knowledge about the nuances and erratic behavior of the sun. They don’t. The more certitude they speak with, the more you can be certain they don’t know. We don’t know what we don’t know.
We can talk about the first law, second law, 3rd and 4th. We can discuss Einstein, Newton, Hubble, and Leibniz. We can do the ideal gas law, Boyle’s law and Charles’s law, Avogadro’s law, Graham’s law, Dalton’s law, Gay-Lussac’s law………there’s likely a couple hundred more “laws” ….. none of them work properly when considering the climate. Sure, generally…. they work generally, but when we’re talking about 1/2 degree Celsius or something…. they don’t work!
We, collectively, shat upon ourselves, mired in pedantic stupidity, worrying about a stray spectrometric frequency or two. The I-something is our banner of progress and achievement. As many laws of thermodynamics and physics this earth breaks, it is inconsequential to the laws of nature we’re breaking! My God! We’re devolving!
Who were these climate scientists who claimed that Texas was warming? Really?
I see that Hansen blamed some of the EXTREMES on AGW, but extremes swing both ways and get wet as well… and may not affect the average temperature at all. The old “feet in the oven and head in the freezer, on average comfortable” discussion… but I know of none who say Texas specifically is getting warmer.
Well it’s interesting that it shows the 1970s dip in temperatures. I understand this is commonly explained as post WW2 production increases leading to more aerosols.
But that same dip also contradicts the urban heat island effect explanation of increasing temps popular around here. Presumably since was a large expansion of cities and energy consumption starting prior to the 1970s. So the temperature rise should have started way back then.
Anyhow I reckon Forrest might have to change his mind if the post 1970s trend continues for another 10 years. After all warm cities don’t cause record droughts.
Four material points arise out of studies like this, namely:
(i) warming is regional, not global,
(ii) CO2 alone cannot account for the regional differences in some regions warming, and other not so warming. It would appear that other factors are at play, or at any rate natural variation is stroneger than the CO2 signal such that natural variation can completely overcome it.
(iii) there can be no confidence in model projections until such time as they are able to properly backcast each and every regional variation throughout each continent. Once they can achieve that, if they cannot forecast the next 10 years correctly, it would appear that the model is still flawed.
(iv) until such time that those supporting the AGW theory can put forward an adequate explanation that is consistent with their theory explainining each and every example where there is either no warming or cooling, there can be no confidence in the correctness of the theory in its current form
@ur momisugly Forrest Mims,
Excellent post! Could you comment on the inconsistency shown by the NCDC data, specifically, the average warming of the Lower 48 does not match the area-weighted average of the individual states?
I did a post on this here:
http://sowellslawblog.blogspot.com/2011/09/us-long-term-temperature-trend-from.html?m=1