Did Salem miss a few witches? According to Salem State University and UMass-Amherst, New England has already experienced greater than 1.5C warming.
Study: New England warming faster than the rest of the world
Every season is affected, authors say
BOSTON —
A troubling new report on climate change warns that New England is warming faster than the rest of the planet and that the rapid changes will threaten elements of the regional economy.
In a paper published earlier this month by the journal Climate, authors affiliated with Salem State University and UMass-Amherst analyzed the temperature averages for each state individually and the region as a whole.
They found that temperatures in the area have increased more than 1.5-degrees-celsius from 1900 to 2020.
“This warming is diminishing the distinctive four-season climate of New England, resulting in changes to the region’s ecology and threatening the rural economies throughout the region,” the authors wrote.
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Read more: https://www.wcvb.com/article/new-england-warming-faster-than-the-rest-of-the-world-climate-study-finds/38644757
The abstract of the paper;
Overall Warming with Reduced Seasonality: Temperature Change in New England, USA, 1900–2020
by Stephen S. Young 1,* and Joshua S. Young 21Geography and Sustainability Department, School of Arts & Sciences, Salem State University, Salem, MA 01970, USA2Department of Linguistics, College of Humanities and Fine Arts, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA 01003, USA*Author to whom correspondence should be addressed. Academic Editor: Chiara Bertolin
Climate2021, 9(12), 176; https://doi.org/10.3390/cli9120176
Received: 4 November 2021 / Revised: 2 December 2021 / Accepted: 2 December 2021 / Published: 6 December 2021
Abstract
The ecology, economy, and cultural heritage of New England is grounded in its seasonal climate, and this seasonality is now changing as the world warms due to human activity. This research uses temperature data from the U.S. Historical Climatology Network (USHCN) to analyze annual and seasonal temperature changes in the New England region of the United States from 1900 to 2020 at the regional and state levels. Results show four broad trends: (1) New England and each of the states (annually and seasonally) have warmed considerably between 1900 and 2020; (2) all of the states and the region as a whole show three general periods of change (warming, cooling, and then warming again); (3) the winter season is experiencing the greatest warming; and (4) the minimum temperatures are generally warming more than the average and maximum temperatures, especially since the 1980s. The average annual temperature (analyzed at the 10-year and the five-year average levels) for every state, and New England as a whole, has increased greater than 1.5 °C from 1900 to 2020. This warming is diminishing the distinctive four-season climate of New England, resulting in changes to the region’s ecology and threatening the rural economies throughout the region.
Read more: https://www.mdpi.com/2225-1154/9/12/176/htm
New Englanders are historically kindof sensitive about bad weather. Some people believe unusually cold years and poor harvests kicked off the infamous Salem witch trials.
Did Cold Weather Cause the Salem Witch Trials?
By Natalie Wolchover published April 21, 2012
Historical records indicate that, worldwide, witch hunts occur more often during cold periods, possibly because people look for scapegoats to blame for crop failures and general economic hardship. Fitting the pattern, scholars argue that cold weather may have spurred the infamous Salem witch trials in 1692.
The theory, first laid out by the economist Emily Oster in her senior thesis at Harvard University eight years ago, holds that the most active era of witchcraft trials in Europe coincided with a 400- year period of lower-than-average temperature known to climatologists as the “little ice age.” Oster, now an associate professor of economics at the University of Chicago, showed that as the climate varied from year to year during this cold period, lower temperatures correlated with higher numbers of witchcraft accusations.
The correlation may not be surprising, Oster argued, in light of textual evidence from the period: popes and scholars alike clearly believed witches were capable of controlling the weather, and therefore, crippling food production.
The Salem witch trials fell within an extreme cold spell that lasted from 1680 and 1730 — one of the chilliest segments of the little ice age. The notion that weather may have instigated those trials is being revived by Salem State University historian Tad Baker in his forthcoming book, “A Storm of Witchcraft” (Oxford University Press, 2013). Building on Oster’s thesis, Baker has found clues in diaries and sermons that suggest a harsh New England winter really may have set the stage for accusations of witchcraft.
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Read more: https://www.livescience.com/19820-salem-witch-trials.html
The study authors mainly seem concerned about pests surviving winter and disruptions to the ecology of the region. In my opinion these fears are overblown.
Agricultural sprays can handle economically damaging pests – New England could import some bug spray from places which already experience mild winters.
As for temperature changes, cold weather is a much bigger threat than warm.
Tropical Queensland grows vast quantities of temperate climate produce like strawberries, Maine potatoes, along with tropical produce like sugar cane and pineapples, in a much warmer climate than the Northern states of the USA. Aussie farmers compensate for the much warmer Queensland climate by adjusting their planting times to maximise yield.
Weather which is too cold is more difficult to manage. If it is too cold for crops to grow, expensive interventions like covering fields with plastic or smudge pots to drive back the frost can help, but ultimately cold is the real crop killer.
The reported effects look very much like misattributed Urban Heat Island effects, with higher low temperatures.
The temperature change is real, even if urban. Furthermore, since New England has flourished in the past 120 years, including massive reforestation, we can concluded that 1.5 °C of warming is good. This real work experiment proves it, there is no need to do anything about human CO2 emissions. Except we should increase them if we can.
UHI effect and more recent raw data manipulation.
First comment right out of the gate nails it. I hope the use of USHCN was everybody’s first clue. New England has always had a sharp urban/rural divide, with USHCN in populated areas.
Then the whole region had explosive growth in the post-WWII era to create the extensive suburbs the region has today. Of course, this growth overran rural areas and their USHCN stations. The whole region is a beacon advertising for the misattribution of USHCN data.
Northern New England is rich in Ski Areas, in many cases with weather data of very high quality going back to the 1930s or more.
I have always wondered what that data would show. Particularly interesting would be the huge variation in annual snowfall, both year to year and decadal.
I there is (globally) N degrees of warming, then virtually every place warmed or cooled some different amount. An average is composed of some number (in this case many thousands) of different measurements.
Perhaps, but I did not see a list of the locations of the 44 Stations used for this paper.
Coming to a parking lot temperature station near you.
Better qualified data says 0.83 deg. 1935 to 2020
The rest of the World is warming faster than All the Rest of the World, again.
And all the children are above average!
And the men are good looking!
And it will all happen 2 days before the day after tomorrow!
Oh, dear, the weather is not what The They say it’s supposed to be so it’s scaring them.
It is a cryin’ shame that Monty Python went the way of all good things, and we’re left with dullards for amusement.
But we do have “the Weather Forecast” by Marty Feldman
and “The End Of The Earth” by Peter Cooke And Dudley Moore
This is how I view the climate alarmism of the catastrophists.
You do give me hope!
Thanks Ken I had the Beyond the Fringe record and that bit was one of my favorites. I replay it in my mind every time I hear one of these doomsters.
And I like the way that they point out how, according to Die Kalte, eastern Antarctica has suffered an obviously catastrophic – 2.6ºC average drop in temperature. Oh…hang on…just a minute…still looking for that reference.
Yes, and the climate refugees are already in exodus to Florida and Texas. /sarc
I see you beat me to the “climate refugee” point, but in reverse. 🙂
Funny, here in upstate New York we are cooling faster than expected. However, when I pointed this out to my neighbor (The one with the BLM sign in his front yard), he agreed. He did allow though that it was warming everywhere else.
Back when Trump was president he constantly complained about how bad the economy was. I observed that he and his wife were doing very well financially and he agreed but claimed that everyone else was doing terribly.
Pattern?
Who you gonna believe, the media or your own lying eyes?
I actually have microfiche copies of the reports of the NY Weather Bureau from the 1880s. In 1886 it was 44 F on 3 Jan. whereas today it was 19 F. It is 25 degrees colder today than it was 146 year ago that’s a drop of .16 F/yr. In ten to twenty years it will never exceed freezing at any time of the year.
If NE keeps getting warmer as we get colder. The gradient on the NY/Mass border will be awesome.
Isn’t that calculation from one extreme point in the past exactly how the eco-doom hysterics behave?
At least you’ll be able to ski jump off that gradient providing you take shorts and sunglasses for when you land in tropiCal New England.
I borrowed that calculation from leading climate scientists. My other favorite technique is to take the first derivative at a point on a curve and extrapolate the tangent to infinity.
BLM use to evoke Bureau of Land Management
Another totalitarian organization
Is anyone keeping a list of all these places which are said to be “warming faster than average”? Either we redefine “average” or somewhere, somebody is getting very cold, very quickly.
On average, I mean mode, in the median.
Tony Heller has a YouTube video or 2 on this theme, done in his usual entertaining way. So does Dr. John Robson on his CDN YouTube site.
Tony Heller nails it here. https://realclimatescience.com/2019/12/warming-twice-as-fast/
There’s this
https://archive.is/OJkHL
If New England has already reached 1.5C of warming, doesn’t that prove that everyone in New England is already dead?
There’s some walking dead in Portland, does that count?
They arent dead. They just smell that way.
Possibly warmer over the past century, definitely cooler compared to any past non-ice-age period – cooler than the time of the dinosaurs, or the Pharoahs or Roman Republic or the height of the Middle Ages. Only a soft-handed academic can be worried about it getting slightly warmer in New England, especially since CO2 increases would slow down heat lost from the biosphere, and hence would affect the lows more than the highs.
New York was warmer in the 1880s.
Prolly all that steaming horse poo in the streets.
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Having trouble deciding whether or not to add a winky, Sal. That could have been a factor. The only mystery is why no-one has applied for a grant to study the topic.
PhD
studying Poo and horse Droppings
New York was actually experiencing exactly the same kind of climate change in the 1880s that we are seeing today. From the NY Times, August 3, 1878:
Now, we know all too well that the heat during the present Summer has been unprecedented, and that the last Winter was one of exceptional mildness. Moreover, there has been a very obvious increase in the heat of the climate during the last thirty years, or within the memory of the present generation. The change has brought about the total disuse of the enormous sleighs which formerly took the place of the City stages during the Winter. The snow no longer lies for months in our streets, and the rivers, which used to be frozen from December to March, are now closed to navigation only during a very few weeks in mid-winter. Thirty years ago, icebergs were rarely met by vessels trading between New York and Liverpool before the month of July, and even in July and August very few were seen. Now we have ice in the Atlantic early in Spring, and in enormous quantities, thus showing that the warm season in the Arctic region, which sets free the icebergs, begins much earlier than it formerly began.
Of course, the NY Times of the 19th century, in its ignorance, blamed these climatic changes on the sun, rather than on time traveling mid-20th century carbon dioxide.
https://www.nytimes.com/1878/08/03/archives/the-truth-about-the-sun.html?searchResultPosition=1
This is what happens when the impossible is attempted. A planetary average temperature can never be more than an estimate . With 70% of the planet covered by water and the land only 40 percent of the land having reliable temperature reporting,what we have is a “model” temperature average . With the error bars average temperature could be several degrees off in either direction . Any report on average temperature must be taken as a best guess.
If the error bars are derived from the annual variance, then the 1 sigma range should be several tens of degrees F.
Author from the “…Department of Sustainability.” Like you can sustain your funding if you figure out what sells, no matter whether it looks like the King has no clothes, and publish it, after your pals review it. If Witches cause ice ages what form of occult nonsense causes warming?
what form of occult nonsense causes warming?
The Fires of Hell?
Perhaps 1900 is a cherry-picked start date? Doesn’t the IPCC use 1880 as the start date for global warming. Since a small area of the globe, New England can vary significantly from the global average year to year, the study may be meaningless.
“Since a small area of the globe, New England can vary significantly from the global average year to year, the study is meaningless.”
There, fixed that for you….
I did notice that both the authors were young.
This morning as I drove across North Central Kansas (Highway 36) I noticed my car thermometer displaying a varying temperature between 4 degrees F and 19 degrees. The temperature went up and down from the teens to single digits at least a half dozen times and would change 1-3 degrees in a minute. How can they measure average temperature?
Do you drive a Ford Anomaly per chance?
Good one! A Dodge van actually, I’m back in the mountains of Colorado it’s currently a temperate 31F give or take.
Must be global warming. If it wasn’t for mankind’s wickedness, the mountain tops would be the same temperature as the valleys /sarc.
That’s why they homogenize and adjust to climate models output.
Have you got one of those new Tesla cars? It might be a problem with your battery.
I encourage everyone who resides north of the 35th parallel north, to quit petroleum cold turkey, and to do it now. It’s for the planet. (snicker)
Philip – currently -26C here is Calgary Alberta Canada and my wife was just commenting on all the neighbours chimneys showing the steam from almost none stop natural gas burning … the furnaces work pretty hard at these temps to keep the houses warm.
“Reduced seasonality” could also be described as “fewer weather extremes”, depending on your point of view.
They used to sacrifice babies… virgins for fair weather causes.
“This warming is diminishing the distinctive four-season climate of New England, resulting in changes to the region’s ecology and threatening the rural economies throughout the region”
Absurd- farming in MA is actually doing quite well- not grain crops or cattle, but niche farming. But forestry isn’t doing well for several reasons:
The historical evidence shows that witch burning tends to be correlated with colder periods … which is clear proof that burning witches causes the climate to warm. This is easy to explain due to the ultra high thermonuclear energy contained in witches, which if we could only harness it will end the need for birdmincers.
All lies as we know it’s canada warming faster than all the rest of the world, because our intellectual prime minister said so, and because we are special.
“intellectual prime minister”
I was about to blast you until I realized you had not written “intelligent”.
If my comment needed a sarc tag then there is no hope for the world.
The “special” comment should also have been a dead giveaway
“New Englanders are historically kind of sensitive about bad weather.”
Yuh, we hate it since we’ve mostly always had pretty bad weather. It’s the norm. We get maybe a few “nice days” per month. No wonder Yankees are ornery. But it also made them in the early days work hard and struggle to find ways to tame the land- putting the rivers to work driving industry- and establishing some of the best universities in the world. I think Harvard was America’s first university.
That’s cute…
Oxford University
There’s an Oxford University in the U.S.?
It’s called humour. Look, it up…
Harvard may have been the USA’s first established University but not necessarily the first University in America!
American Indians had universities? Who knew?
On the bright side for the New England economy, they could reinvent themselves as a haven for all those climate refugees from Florida and Texas expected to arrive any time now. /sarc
ROFL 🙂
Yes, warming for the first three decades when the CO2 levels were insignificant, cooling for the next 4 or 5 decades as CO2 ramped up significantly, and then warming for the next 5 decades as the CO2 continued its exponential increase. Not a compelling image for CO2 being the ‘control knob.’
There is, however, a clue that something is imprinting its effects with about a 4 or 5 decade periodicity. Anybody got any ideas what fits the description?
Geography and Sustainability Department, School of Arts (crafts) & Sciences,
Nothing useful can come out of such a hodge-podge of academic confusion. That combined with a discussion of witchcraft my head was close to exploding … so I stopped reading.
Home of the legendary Basket-weaving 101 course?
I thought it was wet summers => high incidence of ergot on cereals => hallucinations and abortions that characterised Salem..
Eurpean witchcraft and werewolves strongly associated with datura genus plant abuse, availablle in USA as ‘Jimson Weed’…
“They found that temperatures in the area have increased more than 1.5-degrees-celsius from 1900 to 2020. “
And what climate disasters have occurred in New England?
“as the climate varied from year to year”
Thus abolishing the difference between weather and climate.
Well it was nice while it lasted. Woke up this morning to 12F (-11C)
I hear the money burning in the basement.
Nothing has changed since the 1600s in that regard.
Why is this paper published by someone in the department of linguistics?
Science is sexis’ …
You really have to admire the industriousness and tenacity of these researchers. After all, they started with nothing more than the conclusions they wanted, and managed to produce the foundations for those conclusions. Congratulations. Hats off. Well done. We should be giving them a standing ovation, and huzzahs.
I am a alum of that department
They are as woke as you can get
I am a Uscg credential sailing captain
Living in New England for 70 years
Sailing the coast
I personal observation is that the spring is cooler the winter the same
The reforestation of New England is impressive
They need to get out of the office more often and enjoy the weather
Total bullshit. I live in Massachusetts. We aren’t warming here. We have our warmer years and our colder years. Recently it was so cold that the freeze went below the frost line!
How the heck does the freeze go below the frost line??
Does that happen in years when the water is extra wet?
The “frost line” is the distance below the surface where the soil does not freeze often enough to cause heaving. It is the depth that foundations, etc. are supposed to be buried. There are times that the ground can freeze below the frost line.
The paper lays out the authors’ methods in a fair amount of detail. It would be interesting to see if their results can be replicated. I have not tried to download the USHCN data. It looks to be massive.
I am also puzzled why they did not simply list the stations they used. Given the number and density of USHCN stations in New England their map is not particularly helpful.
I have sent a request to Prof. Young for a list of the 44 stations.
Holding your breath?
We’ve put 15 minutes into this research. Why should we give you that when all you want to do is find something wrong with it?
Actually Prof. Young courteously sent me the list. I had already managed to download it. I was surprised to find that the 44 Stations used in the research are the only stations in the USHCN database for the New England States. I am in the process of spot checking the average temperature records using GISS data. I have to do it by using Excel which makes it a slow and clumsy process.
They used all the USHCN stations in Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island and Vermont.
Being a resident of this area, I like to remind people that we used to have some rather severe penalties for fortune tellers. Maybe we need to go back to that.
wait a minute, Canada’s north laid claim to this fame last year…I smell a copy-cat
What a ridiculous article… Google up the “Exodus to Ohio”. It was literally so cold in the early 1800’s that the North Eastern mountains from Maine to Pennsylvania remain basically devoid of population to this day. Crop failure much? How obtuse.
Greta Thunberg turned me into a newt.
I got better…