Guest essay by Eric Worrall
The Guardian is distressed that the agreeable, pleasantly mild weather caused by global warming is undermining efforts to motivate ordinary people to address Climate Change.
A large majority of Americans have enjoyed more pleasant weather due to global warming over the past 40 years, research has found, but there is set to be an unpleasant sting in the tail as temperatures escalate further this century.
Vast areas of the contiguous US have warmed considerably during winters without becoming unbearably hot during the summers, making the climate generally more agreeable to the public. A new study has found that 80% of the American population lives in areas where the weather has become more “preferable” since 1974.
According to the analysis by Duke University and New York University, 99% of Americans live in places where the average January temperature has increased, with just 60% in locations where the July temperature has risen. Rainfall and humidity changes have also, largely, changed by a favorable degree for many Americans.
This shift to more temperate conditions means that “virtually all Americans are now experiencing the much milder winters that they typically prefer, and these mild winters have not been offset by markedly more uncomfortable summers or other negative changes,” the paper found.
Read more: http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/apr/20/climate-change-weather-changes-us-study
The abstract of the study;
As climate change unfolds, weather systems in the United States have been shifting in patterns that vary across regions and seasons. Climate science research typically assesses these changes by examining individual weather indicators, such as temperature or precipitation, in isolation, and averaging their values across the spatial surface. As a result, little is known about population exposure to changes in weather and how people experience and evaluate these changes considered together. Here we show that in the United States from 1974 to 2013, the weather conditions experienced by the vast majority of the population improved. Using previous research on how weather affects local population growth to develop an index of people’s weather preferences, we find that 80% of Americans live in counties that are experiencing more pleasant weather than they did four decades ago. Virtually all Americans are now experiencing the much milder winters that they typically prefer, and these mild winters have not been offset by markedly more uncomfortable summers or other negative changes. Climate change models predict that this trend is temporary, however, because US summers will eventually warm more than winters. Under a scenario in which greenhouse gas emissions proceed at an unabated rate (Representative Concentration Pathway 8.5), we estimate that 88% of the US public will experience weather at the end of the century that is less preferable than weather in the recent past. Our results have implications for the public’s understanding of the climate change problem, which is shaped in part by experiences with local weather. Whereas weather patterns in recent decades have served as a poor source of motivation for Americans to demand a policy response to climate change, public concern may rise once people’s everyday experiences of climate change effects start to become less pleasant.
Read more: http://www.nature.com/articles/doi:10.1038/nature17441
Think about it – if this awful trend continues, one day parts of the Southern USA might enjoy the kind of climate you currently have to retire to the Caribbean to experience.
Let us all work together, to ensure that our children’s children are never forced to endure long idyllic Summers and mild winters.
…D’oh !
(…buys more property in Canada to will to his children…)
*…gladly sells it to witless suckers and laughs all the way to my new beach home in Florida, where the weather is pretty much the same as it ever was…*
As Global Warming unfolds, the weather is just wonderful and not apocalyptic. Even the earth is greening. Maybe Global Warming is folding up like an accordion.
If minima are increasing by (say) 2° and maxima are increasing by (say) 0.5° then overall the average temperature is increasing by ~1.2° but the overall effect is likely to be considerably different from an increase of 1.2° at both top and bottom, I would have thought.
Am I right and does it affect the likely outcome for climate in the long term?
This assumes that global warming is actually occurring, which would seem to defy the satellite record. Although, as you inferred, the planet is measurably greening from increased CO2.
So its not Exxon that’s influencing the public? Its Mother Nature?
David, i think it’s the “greenies” who are influencing the public. Climate change happens way to slowly for any one to notice, feel it. (Half the population wasn’t even born in 1974!) So, i think it may just be the greenies and their power of suggestion…
RCP 8.5 is the fantasy in this.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/graph/plot/esrl-co2/from:1958/mean:24/derivative/plot/hadcrut4sh/from:1958/scale:0.27/offset:0.095/plot/esrl-co2/from:1958/derivative/trend/plot/hadcrut4sh/from:1958/scale:0.27/offset:0.095/trend
Steve, as you can see in the above graph, the carbon growth rate has been tracking with temperature since the inception of the mauna loa observatory data set (with the exception being the pinatubo years here). If the past is any indication of the future, “business as usual” won’t have ANY impact on changes in the growth rate heading into the future…
To analyze a correlation, Powerpoint overlaying two graphs is not statistics. In statistics, you graph one in x and the other in y to directly compare them. This shows the correlation. Mauna Loa CO2 to Hadcrut4 has a correlation coefficient of 0.6569, a fairly strong correlation if you use a second order polynomial fit that gives multiple CO2 values for a temperature value and shows the correlation stops at 380 ppm (climate stopping point). Beyond that, the correlation reverses such that temperatures start to decline. Arctic sea ice declines in a strong correlation to CO2 up to 380 ppm, but for Antarctica, sea ice slightly INCREASES with more CO2 (plotting september values for annual maxima).
Donald, i think your making the same mistake that i’ve seen over and over again. The carbon GROWTH RATE also stalls at about 380 ppm at about 2 ppm per year. Let me know if (and how) i’m not understanding you correctly (if that’s the case) because i really want to pin this thing down…
How is it that you readily accept the hypothesis that CO2 controls temperature but the alternative, temperature controls CO2, is an anathema to you?
If you can prove your CO2 control knob hypothesis, many at this site would join you in convincing others. Your proof will need to be more than just two lines being coincident.
John, i must be doing a really bad job at articulating my point here. This graph indicates that temps ARE controlling carbon growth. (don’t know the reason why but they are…) No mention here as to what carbon growth does to temperature (and this graph is NOT indicative of that anyway)…
“John, i must be doing a really bad job at articulating my point here. This graph indicates that temps ARE controlling carbon growth.”
******************************************************************************************
Carbon doesn’t grow, it’s formed inside stars. Another example of sloppy (deliberate?) use of scientific language. Referring to carbon when you mean CO2 means nothing except an intention to mislead.
The increase in human release of carbon dioxide has not been a straight line increase with over a third of all CO2 emissions having taken place in the past 20 years or so when there has been very little increase in temperature.
CO2 content in the atmosphere may well be driven by temperature (directly or indirectly) but doesn’t appear to have much in common with human emissions. There appears to be so much natural variance that we cannot explain.
SteveT
No, it’s not.
CAGW is the fantasy in this.
We din not really have winter this year, and I didn’t miss it at all.
In southern Ontario our last two winters were cold and snowy. The last two summers were on the lukewarm side as well. One mild winter is just variety. I am hoping for a warm summer for a change. We will see what La Nina brings.
And we enjoyed the respite from cold and snowy, right, David? 🙂
I live in Northern Arkansas and I’d say we had a mild winter, but we had a lot of chilly days without any of our normal magical warm days mixed in. We didn’t get many hard freezes. Last winter was cold with a lot of hard freezes. And our summers are not getting any hotter, in fact quite a few of the past summers have been mild. I guess as the climate gets warmer, the weather becomes more pleasant. Cool!
same (maine) for last 2 winters (including this last one) however the non winter seasons were cooler and rainier so (locally) overall was cooler.
I was in Ecuador last year and didn’t hear anyone complaining of intolerable heat. Back in Canada now and had a very mild winter. What are we trying to fix exactly? Where are the problems?
+ a million
That’s the key question. As warming is concentrated at the poles and mildest at the equator, it is overall a positive thing. This is why there is so much wild speculation about the effects, as the simplest interpretation is that mild global warming would be a good thing.
A not quite as fatally frigid Arctic wasteland is a disaster!
How many times must you be told?
was 5 F when I tried to go skiing at Lutsen. with 15 mph winds. More coal please!
Summer here on the West Coast. Office moved to the deck. Idiot son is suggesting this proves GW…I suggested it might just be weather. Lovely, warm, El Nino influenced weather. But he’s in college so what can you do?
Stop paying for it and tell him to get a job?
Why do engineers only offer practical advice? This is all about emotion and fantasy. About that, we have to be more practical.
Thank you, Crispin. What is it like living in a railway station?
Actually I seem to live in airports, presently of the Toronto ilk. Now that Waterloo has international flights we might be able to re-cast the reputation of Waterloo in the garb on a new century. That will save me a hundred Canuk Bucks (50 Toonies) each way. I will settle for Waterloo-Beijing.
As for engineers, Waterloo deserves its well-earned reputation for being the best. I think China would willing fill up the whole student roster. Sorta humorous that I am headed the other way!
Yes, jay, the sad thing, as Dr Spencer has oft pointed out, is that much of our climate change here in the good ol’ U.S. of A. has been due to a shift in the pdo which (again he says) is shifting back so that we will be seeing weather patterns similar to those in the sixties and seventies…
I think Dr. Spencer overweights PDO and underweights AMO and multi-year-smoothed ENSO, which I suspect is loosely linked to AMO. However, I expect the pause/slowdown of global warming to continue to around 2030, maybe into the 2030s.
Even so, I expect increased CO2 and high regional positive surface albedo feedback in arctic/subarctic areas to decrease the temperature gradient between the warming Arctic and the more-temperature-regulated tropics, which means American weather and weather elsewhere in the “north temperate zone” mostly getting milder as a result of global warming. Summers get longer more than more badly hot, and extreme high summer temperatures in these areas mostly seem to not be getting worse at all. (Even though I expect the improvement to have a slowdown continuing to around 2030.) Consider what the alltime record highs of each of USA’s states are, and when they were set.
Also, northern hemisphere extratropical windstorms in general (including hurricane hybrids, Nor’Easters and tornadoes of every class F2/EF2 and higher) have been getting less bad since 1950.
afonzarelli, the PDO Index is far from negative:
The PDO may turn negative in response to the upcoming La Nina…because the PDO is, in part, an aftereffect of ENSO. See Chapter 3.5 – Ocean Mode: Pacific Decadal Oscillation of On Global Warming and the Illusion of Control – Part 1:
https://bobtisdale.files.wordpress.com/2015/11/tisdale-on-global-warming-and-the-illusion-of-control-part-1.pdf
Oops, typo in the title block.
Donald, we’ll see… my take on what dr spencer is getting at is that he thinks 60s/70s weather will return for the u.s. even as the global temps continue to stay high. He does think that the change in our weather (since the 70s) has been largely due to the shift in the pdo.
Bob, thank you for the graph and the link. The spike over the last couple years looks quite unusual. Any thoughts as to why this hasn’t been replicated before?
Cut his allowance?
…what can you do?
If they respect you (even a little), its never too late to hit ’em with a stick or something.
https://www.wunderground.com/history/airport/KGNA/2016/1/20/MonthlyCalendar.html?req_city=Lutsen&req_state=MN&req_statename=&reqdb.zip=55612&reqdb.magic=1&reqdb.wmo=99999
Tough skiing mid-month…’eh?
well, flipside, my indian blood peach just died from a mid spring 23 F.
More BS, IMHO. People are not as stupid in general as believed by politicians, acedemics and (apparently) warmist climate scientists. I suspect other factors at play, which dominate over the weather. For instance…
Many technically inclined folks (especially those regularly frequenting WUWT) understand measurement errors, incorrectly applied statistics, data manipulations/adjustments, model uncertainty, model errors/omissions, natural climate influences, etc., and thus are unmoved by calls by warmists of the impending apocalypse.
Many politically inclined folks can see the completely transparent bias by politicians (reaching for peoples’ wallets) and pseudo-scientists (rent-seeking) spewing things that are clearly wrong or implausible, and thus are unmoved by these warmunist politicians and acolytes of the CAGW-religion (who they know are lying because their mouths are moving).
Many regular Joes and Janes have seen the “boy who cried wolf” played out so many times now (children won’t know what snow is, species are going extinct, islands are being inundated, arctic ice will be gone by 2013, tropical storm Sandy was proof of global warming, etc.) that they are figuring out CAGW feels like a scam. So many predictions and projections that have been proven false already…
Some folks are seeing a host of benefits we’re getting along side the mostly natural, very slow warming (crop yields increasing, greening of the planet, etc).
And, I’m sure there are other factors, which influence other groups of folks to investigate what’s really happening or to be similarly unmotivated to give up their liberty and hard earned cash.
Just think how much success the CAGW crowd would be having without the internet and with information power still in the firm grip of the left-leaning media. It might be more like the DDT scare, the ozone hole scare, the cholesterol scare, the table salt scare, etc., where we all just fall into line without alternative information sources (all these were vastly overblown, I believe). With this internet thingy, we actually might have a shot to kill this craziness about us knowing what the big climate control knob is.
It’s probably time to give thanks to our WUWT host again.
THANKS AW!!!
I second that motion.
They’re still trying to figure out why they can’t get the people to buy what they’re selling …
It went from global warming to
climate change to
climate chaos to
climate disruption to
extreme weather
and still the people wouldn’t buy.
Now, they’re grasping at straws to figure it out and so, come up with … the weather’s been nice.
Hint: The American people have an excellent sense of smell and can smell the odor of the product and they ain’t buying anything that smells like that.
So if it gets a bit warm, the solution’s obvious … take off some clothes and work at a slower pace … problem solved.
And in the winter we won’t have to bundle up as much and will only have to do it for a shorter time. What’s not to like?
Academics … where are their heads?
Lodged firmly in their fundaments working on the next grant application ?
So if it gets a bit warm, the solution’s obvious
==============================
turn down the furnace.
Don’t forget the gullible and uniformed like the Canuk PM who, we are assured on CP24, will sign the Paris agreement tomorrow. Well, he can sign on his own behalf. Just leave out me and more than 90% of people I know in Waterloo who think it is a scam with baseless alarmism founded on fraudulent claims.
With a PM who will say/sign anything, literally, to ingratiate himself with some loud portion of ‘the people’ we seem doomed to duplicate the folly of Spain and the UK.
Is he really trying to make Canada colder? That’s his contribution to the well-being of Canadians?
If you think fraud is not detectable and if it is, remains unpardonable, check out the judgment of the Duffy trial. OMG the secret handshake society is no better than the greens.
We had a couple of “record” breaking temps here in BC in the Interior, the records being broken were in the range of 0.1 to 0.3 degrees. At the station we have it was actually 4C below the “record” temps and as usual the record breaking temps were in the downtown area and along the runway at the local airport
Some reports I have seen said it hasn’t been this hot (on this day) since 1917. In other words, it was just as hot on this day 99 years ago.
Weirdly, my weather app says it is going to be -3C (27F) tonight. So it is supposed to drop from 19 C currently and in 4 hours be -3C ? Something is fouled up with the data for the app obviously.
Has anyone got the actual graph of US temp? Here’s the UK one for my entire lifetime:
?w=645&h=389
I’ve lived in Phoenix, Az since 1995 and I can tell you there is no real trend one way or the other for summer climate. Some years we get monsoons and rain. Some years not. Some years it’s hot early; some years it’s hot later (Sept / Oct). Some years it’s hotter and every summer it’s hot. No trend at all. I measure it myself. No trend. Huge UHI. 5 to 7 degrees. I pack the dogs in the car and we drive out to the Indian reservations from south Tempe and back right around sunset. I love it here. Summer is just fine with me.
Summertime – Southern style:
Please allow me to extend our musical interlude, while illustrating how we got where we are.
My family has lived in Arizona since it was a territory. We are going into another cold cycle. It snows in Tucson during cold cycles. I grew up there during the previous cold cycle. We had school closings due to snow storms.
It did rain a good deal! The desert was gorgeous. But by 1970, I had to find old fur coats second hand to turn into blankets because it was very cold at night and the little houses built before WWI were very cold indeed with no central heating and this is how we survived the cold weather there.
Then I moved to NYC in 1974 and had to deal with several years of severe blizzards and extreme cold and this was horrible to experience when one grows up in a desert!
And then there are people like me who move to New England partly for our “interesting” weather.
My all-time favorite weather event was the Blizzard of 1978, back when extreme weather was more common. 🙂
When the weather all over the globe turns decidedly colder, as I suspect it soon will…I am going to laugh so long and hard that by the time I am finished I will have to start right in on the crying for the real disaster that will be unfolding.
“A study shows 60%” why not just say 50%?
This reminds me of the “500 year storm” that just hit Texas, apparently it were recorded on a leather pelt somewhere.
It will become a 749.37 year storm, after “adjustment”.
The awful truth is now hitting the Grauniad that the Climate Change that it feared so much might turn out to be a Climate change for the Better. Less dangerous cold weather, less heating bills, more rain and improved crop production all down to the dreaded CO2.
Perhaps it is time for the Alarmists to come up with yet another new name for the ‘threat’. They have gone through ‘global warming’, ‘climate change’, ‘climate chaos’, ‘climate disruption’ and ‘extreme weather’, but I am sure that the Media Department will be able to come up with something suitably scary.
“Climate morphing”. It could be scary, and it can mean lots of different things; it can also be used as a verb and be applied to what hanson etal have done to the data. One term … lots of differing uses … makes the politicians (and other dishonest people) happy.
Climate head-fake is here . .
Damn! Climate is changing for the better. That’s not good for the narrative “Climate change is worse than ISIS”. Mild winters and cool summers are a tad less horrific than getting your neck sawn with a blunt knife.
But you’re supposed to signal your concern by being worried about Earth’s environmental state in a hundred years time, not the near-term (despite energy poverty, fewer violent storms and overall nicer weather happening now). How do you expect to be seen as a caring, concerned, longsighted individual, comrade?
virtually all Americans are now experiencing the much milder winters that they typically prefer
===================
but Gavin assures us that any change in temperature is BAD because our infrastructure is so finely tuned to local conditions. Warmer winters would be a disaster because people wouldn’t be able to turn down their furnaces in time and there would be run away winter meltdown.
I’ve noticed they don’t like to mention cold. America – or Europe – could be under a mile of ice and they’d insist it’s a mild Winter. They will say anything rather than admit they are wrong. Smells like desperation to me. Oh, and blame the people for not jumping to as they are supposed to do. Of course.
(I still like Boaty McBoatface. This whole CAGW has a Boaty McBoatface feel to it. I can’t help it, I now think of the current incarnation of climate science as “Boaty McBoatface science”. It just IS. Okay, so do I apologize for this now or later?)
🙂
And it (boaty) really seems to mesh well with “the science guy” feel/approach to the climate science studies.
I love Valentia ( remote SW Ireland) for its flat temp record for over 100 years. Until homogenised with Paris UHI
I love Valentia too. When we were there, we climbed the hill to the watchtower and watched the transatlantic flights to the continent pass over the island. The most notable thing, to me, about that part of Ireland–heck, all of Ireland–was how fast the weather changed from sunny and warm to cool and drizzly and back again. Multiple times in a few hours.
Temperature isn’t what’s being used to scare people. Sea level is. I do a daily news search on “sea level,” here’s a recent example of what’s out there in a steady drone:
Study on sea level rise assesses potential impacts on Queen Anne’s
“…sea level rise of 2 feet by 2050; a sea level rise of 4 feet by 2100…”
That comes to 18 mm/yr and 14.5 mm/yr respectively. The current reported rate is 3 mm/yr and there’s no evidence of any acceleration in the rate that will reach those numbers. It’s as if the predictions are being made out of whole cloth.
“as if”?
No as ifs about it…they have now moved on to pure lies.
One mild El Nino winter and the US is back in the Cretaceous?? How soon everyone forgets the record cold and snowmageddons of but a couple of years ago. Wonder how long it will be before a rogue western nation actually elects a leader who isn’t congenitally mentally ill, breaks ranks and just says shut up, we’re going fracking.
100 percent correct. Two out of the last three winters were severe over USA!
Just one year past, we were just getting over one of the coldest, snowiest winters we have had in many years. We were constantly bombarded with the notion that “Global Warming causes cooling”. We were treated to the notion that Global Warming was causing the “Arctic Vortex”, and “Polar Amplification” was causing lower latitudes to be much colder. And on and on.
Remember how much fun all of us here at WUWT had mocking and ridiculing all of this?
Now Global Warming is back to causing warming. *sigh*
Yeah!
Where’s the fun in that?
This has been going on for years and years now.
“The theory that explains everything explains nothing” was already a phrase well worn as of ten years ago.
The reason global warming fanatics are doomed to fail…. earthlings prosper in a warmer climate…..