Guest Essay by Larry Hamlin
The L A Times article and headline shown below exaggerate the March 2024 U.S. and global temperature outcomes by cherry picking and misrepresenting data that mischaracterizes what the data actually shows.
The Times article makes the following claims regarding the U.S. for the period January through March 2024:
“In the United States, March was the 17th warmest in the 130-year data record, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The average temperature in the contiguous U.S. was 45.1 degrees — 3.6 degrees above average.”
The Times article does not present readily available NOAA measured Maximum Contiguous U.S Temperature for the month of March from 1895 through 2024 as shown below.
The NOAA March data clearly shows that maximum temperatures across the contiguous U.S. have been consistently declining since March 2012 – a highly significant point which is unmentioned in the Times article.
This NOAA measured historical U.S. March temperature data behavior, as shown above, does not support “the heat just keeps coming” hype in the Times article.
The NOAA data shows, as indicated below from NOAA’s website, that the March 2024 temperature is only the 22nd highest temperature measured during this period with the highest measurement in March 1910 and many other prior years.
The Times article claim that March was the “17th warmest in the 130-year data record” is incorrect because that claim it is based on the Average versus Maximum NOAA Temperature data for the Contiguous U.S.
The Times continues to mischaracterize “average temperatures” instead of “maximum temperatures” in claiming “warmest“ and “hottest” temperature outcomes as they did regarding their flawed claim that the summer of 2023 was “The Hottest Summer Ever” as addressed here.
The “hottest” or “warmest” temperature in March 2024 was 56.61 degrees F (shown in NOAA’s March temperature data above) versus the “average temperature” of 45.1 degrees F in March 2024.
The Times article claim that “January through March marked the fifth-hottest start to the year in the U.S., NOAA said.” is discussed below.
NOAA’s maximum contiguous U.S. temperatures for the period between January through March 2024 are shown below.
This NOAA data again shows the declining trend in the January through March 2024 Contiguous U.S. temperature period beginning in 2012 – a highly significant point again unaddressed by the Times.
Additionally, this NOAA data, as shown below, indicates that the January through March 2024 year are only the 11th highest (49.97 degrees F) in the period 1895 through 2024 and not the 5th highest as noted in the Times article which is again based on average instead of maximum temperature anomaly data.
The NOAA January through March 2024 Contiguous U.S. maximum temperature data does not support the Times theme that “the heat just keeps coming”.
Furthermore, NOAA’s USCRN March 2024 maximum temperature anomaly data for the Contiguous U.S., shown below, clearly establishes there is no increasing maximum temperature anomaly trend during the period 2005 through 2024 with the March 2024 value at 1.28 degrees F far below the year 2012 maximum March peak value of 7.72 degrees F.
The Times conceals the clear failure of NOAA’s data to support alarmists claims of increasing maximum temperature anomaly trend outcomes across the contiguous U.S. as readily apparent in the NOAA graph above and unaddressed by the Times.
These measured NOAA values of maximum temperature anomaly outcomes in March 2024 do not support the Times theme that “the heat just keeps coming”.
Also, hyping monthly and annual NOAA measurement temperature differences as representing “climate change” (which is properly evaluated over periods from 30 to 100 years) is politics not science.
The Times article provides NOAA global average temperature anomaly data updated through March 2024 but conceals that the global average temperature anomaly value significantly varies throughout the world.
Even though global CO2 levels are ubiquitous in the atmosphere the average temperature anomaly values associated with the world are not homogeneous but a highly heterogeneous patchwork across the globe contrary to the flawed claim by climate alarmists that the global average temperature anomaly value can be used alone to characterize global climate.
This patchwork discrepancy clearly demonstrates that multiple nonuniform natural weather and climate causalities dominate the global climate behavior versus the data unsupported hype that man made climate change is dominant – a highly significant outcome unaddressed by the Times.
The Times articles concealed highly significant global average temperature anomaly data regional differences that are presented and summarized below.
NOAA’s Global Land area average temperature anomaly measured outcome is shown below for March 2024 revealing a decline from March 2023 (2.09 degrees C versus 2.19 degrees C respectively) with year 2016 (an El Niño event year value of 2.46 degrees C) remaining the highest measured anomaly outcome.
The Global Land area is where Earth’s 8 billion+ people live. Based on NOAA’s measured average global land area temperature anomaly data there is no “the heat just keeps coming” theme in NOAA’s Global Land regions in March 2024.
NOAA’s Northern Hemisphere Land area average temperature anomaly measured outcome is shown below for March 2024 revealing the decline from March 2023 (2.39 degrees C versus 2.62 degrees C respectively) with year 2016 (an El Niño event year value of 3.12 degrees C) remaining the highest measured outcome. There is no “the heat just keeps coming” theme in the March 2024 in the Northern Hemisphere.
NOAA’s Asia Land area average temperature anomaly measured outcome is shown below for March 2024 revealing the decline from March 2023 (2.52 degrees C versus 4.01 degrees C respectively) with year 2008 (4.20 degrees C) remaining the highest measured outcome. There is no “the heat just keeps coming” theme in Asia in March 2024.
NOAA’s Oceania Land area average temperature anomaly measured outcome is shown below for March 2024 revealing the decline from March 2023 (0.93 degrees C versus 1.10 degrees C respectively) with year 2016 (an El Niño event year value of 1.85 degrees C) remaining the highest measured outcome. There is no “the heat just keeps coming” theme in Oceania in March 2024.
NOAA’s Gulf of Mexico Land and Ocean area average temperature anomaly measured outcome is shown below for March 2024 revealing the decline from March 2023 (0.95 degrees C versus 1.51 degrees C respectively) with year 2020 (1.63 degrees C) remaining the highest measured outcome. There is no “the heat just keeps coming” theme in the Gulf of Mexico in March 2024.
NOAA’s Hawaiian Region Land and Ocean area average temperature anomaly measured outcome is shown below for March 2024 revealing the decline from March 2023 (0.31 degrees C versus 0.61 degrees C respectively) with years 1947 and 2017 (1.11 degrees C) remaining the highest measured outcomes. There is no “the heat just keeps coming” theme in the Hawaiian Region in March 2024.
NOAA’s Arctic Land and Ocean area average temperature anomaly measured outcome is shown below for March 2024 revealing the decline from March 2023 (2.42 degrees C versus 2.85 degrees C respectively) with year 2019 (4.33 degrees C) remaining the highest measured outcomes. There is no “the heat just keeps coming” theme in the Arctic in March 2024.
NOAA’s Antarctic Land and Ocean Antarctic area average temperature anomaly measured outcome is shown below for March 2024 revealing the decline from March 2023 (0.24 degrees C versus 0.50 degrees C respectively) with the year 1966 (1.18 degrees C) remaining the highest measured outcome which occurred 58 years ago with a clearly declining trend over this more than five-decade period.
There is no “the heat just keeps coming” theme in the Antarctic in March 2024.
These March 2024 U.S. and global average temperature anomaly regional outcomes presented above reflect climate reality based on climate science data versus climate alarmism hype and politics.
Unfortuanately, California and the U.S. (thanks to Governor Newsom and President Biden’s climate alarmist polices) electricity prices have exploded upward through the roof, as shown in the graphs below, driven by climate alarmist politically mandated use of highly unreliable and hugely costly renewable energy.
The reality of climate alarmism is that the “hype (not heat) just keeps coming” resulting in huge and unnecessary increases to California and U.S. electricity costs creating economic hardships for all citizens, businesses, educational, medical, and other necessary organizations that support the creation of economic benefits for our society.
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The usual verbose sloppiness. The NOAA clearly indicated that they were saying March average tempeature (not maximum) was 17th highest in the US record.
And we all live in “Average Temperatures”? Only 17th Highest? That should tell you something. 😉
I should have posted my previous comment here.
You are correct Nicholas.
The thing that is really SLOPPY is NOAA’s global land surface data.
So sloppy as to be absolutely meaningless.
“The thing that is really SLOPPY is NOAA’s global land surface data.”
And yet this article is the one cherry picking it to claim that March 2024 was not a record,
A “record”? Record what? It’s statistical prestidigitation; recording about 72,000 daily “high” and “low” temperature readings (which often are not the lowest or highest temperatures that day) from 1,200 stations over a month and averaging them. The temperature variations over any 3 million square miles of Earth’s land surface—the size of the contiguous “lower 48” United States—differ significantly. There are multiple weather systems over such a large area.
An actual temperature record is when the temperature at Peter Sinks in Utah (elevation 8100 ft) is measured at -69.3 F (-56.3 C), or the temperature at Furnace Creek in California is measured at 130 F (or 134 F in 1913). It’s a recording of an actual, measured temperature, not a conglomeration of thousands of temperatures that vary by up to 50 F (or more), thrown in a pot, and stirred together with whatever statistical seasoning the (biased) statistician decides he (or she) likes to flavor it to taste.
There is no such thing as an “average” temperature or “global average” temperature. It’s a statistical invention designed specifically to alarm the public in order to advance an oppressive, totalitarian regime of policies to make life miserable for the rest of us in order to please the elitists who think they know better than the proletariat how to run our lives. Cutting through all the sciencey-sounding nonsense, that’s the real reason, and the only reason, for these “average temperature” manipulations from a hodgepodge of unrelated data. Unrelated because temperatures from a cold front over Montana and North Dakota are entirely unrelated to those from a warm front over Louisiana and Florida.
For the “climate crisis” lemmings who can’t spare a brain cell from checking their social media daily to make sure they’re still in the herd, it’s called weather and it varies dramatically over the planet every single hour of every single day. Averaging those temperatures and declaring with absolute certainty that it’s a paltry 1.2 or 1.5 °C warmer now than 150 years ago and freaking out about it instead of celebrating it is a game for fools.
Plus the Earth is still in a 2.56 million-year ice age with millions more people dying from cold-related causes than heat-related causes, mainly due to increased strokes and heart attacks in the cooler months.
It’s too bad that your intelligent knowledge about temperatures isn’t shared by those scientists that should actually know that averaging temperatures is physical nonsense.
Apparently my explanation bounced off your head. Falling back on the “appeal to authority” logical fallacy is silly. “Scientists” aren’t infallible gods, as you seem to think. They are human beings. Some are fairly smart and some aren’t. They all have biases, and many, if not most, believe some pretty weird things that simply are not true, like catastrophic, human-caused global warming. Before these wild-eyed “scientists” started propounding this absurd theory, no one thought to generate charts of statistically averaged global temperature, or U.S. temperature. It’s a meaningless number because temperatures fluctuate so dramatically throughout a day and vary so much over large areas. It was simply for the sake of trying to “prove” by “science” that humans are boiling the planet to death that they zeroed in on average temperature analysis as a way to convince the gullible, because a depressingly large number of people believe in the infallibility of science and scientists and accept their pronouncements with wide-eyed faith, just like the Inquisitors and their acolytes who believed in the infallibility of their geocentric model of the universe, even though all the evidence showed it was wrong. As the article painstakingly explained, those relying on average temperature analyses draw erroneous conclusions because they cherry pick. They ignore a mountain of data that shows essentially nothing happening in the grand scheme of things, and home in on a little mole hill and say, “See how bad it is?”
Not sure what school you went to (or how bad your academics were) that a B (87%) is a record for you . I bet you got a lot of participation trophies.
Not sure what relevance this has, but when I was studying for my Bachelors, a mark of 85% was a distinction. It was a real pain when I messed up one maths exam and got a 2-nd level pass. My record was the final one where by some fluke I managed to get 100%.
You missed the point.
LA Times headline: And the heat keeps coming: Global temperature record broken for 10th month in a row in March
The NOAA statement was also presented. You might want to spell check your post.
The point made was, using average temperatures does not align with “the heat keeps coming.” Using average temperatures does not show how hot it got.
On top of that, there is nothing in the average global temperature calculations that indicates all of the measurements are made at the same time. Nor is there anything in the simple ave = (max-min)/2 that accounts for time intervals. The temperature changes at different rates hour by hour. To get an accurate assessment of the average you have to apply the Nyquist theorem, specifically sampling rates versus fidelity.
But you create a perception you are not really interested in science, so I will waste no further time trying to enlighten you.
Actually, Mr. Stokes knows he’s talking nonsense, but wants to continue with the scam. A global temperature “statistic” is not a temperature. That’s a quote from Professor Thermos–a character from “Taken By Storm” written by Essex and McKitrick.
I have not run a histogram distribution around daily/hourly temperature, but if it is like rainfall in my region I bet that it isn’t normal, and therefore “mean” is not exactly average.
The NOAA temperature chart for the Antarctic dated back to 1850 sets the standard of reliability for all their global temperature charts.
Would love to see where all the measurements for the 1850-1890 period came from.
NOAA did not exist in 1850.
Has anyone ever interviewed the average person to hear how they coped with the average temperature over the month?
(you know, that average person with one teat and one testicle?)
Whoever thought it was a good idea to average out a month’s worth of weather must have been really ripping their bong.
You can have a week of bone-chilling, once-in-a-century cold, followed by mild temperatures for the rest of the month, and it’s all just smoothed over by the average.
“. . . ripping their bong”
Okay, I agree if I knew what a ripped bong was.
very heavily used? 🙂
Tell that to UAH, RSS, HADCrut,, GISTemp et al. all of which average a multitude of readings over the month. Whether you accept that they are accurate representations of monthly temperature or not,. you can’t argue that they don’t tell you a lot more about the conditions of the month in question than a single data point (which may well have been a reading from a weather station beside the runway of an airport when an aircraft was taking off or one sitting beside an airconditioner exhaust or …).
The average alone doesn’t really tell one a lot without including the variance or range with it.
Or the sampling intervals.
Try sunrise versus sunset and you get a different average than noon and midnight.
For a global average all the measurements have to be made at the same, coordinated time. Example: DC at 7:00 am and LA at 4:00 am.
Not to mention median or mode of the measurements. mean is a pretty useless statistic unless you can show the distribution is normal.
a lot more about conditions… Add…. at specific locations or regions…
And one brain cell.
I have lived in two very different places at the seaside. In both I experienced a warming up in the middle of the night after a cold winter day. In the one place it was because of a katabatic wind from the interior and the other wind from the much warmer sea. To speak of the mean temperature on these days is at the very least misleading. So too are the designations “normal” and “extreme” for climate and weather. Climate alarmist misuse and abuse of language only compares with that of politicians and MSM journalists.
As this article points out, not just MSM.
Outside of the Tropics, they live and work in heated buildings, use heated transportation, and have warm clothes
I rarely agree with NS, but in this case I do. Using “maximum monthly temperature” (a single instantaneous reference point at a single location in a whole month) to refute a discussion about the general temperature throughout the month is disingenuous to say the least. Every major monthly data set including UAH which is reported here monthly uses a composite of many temperatures readings throughout the month, not a relaltively meaningless single instantaneous reading at a single locattion at some point in time over a full month.
.
All true however the LA Times article is babbling nonsense as no one here agrees that a single datapoint for an entire nation is useful.
They clearly imply that Death Valley was at the same average temperature for the month of March as International Falls Minnesota was.
LOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOL!!!
“The average temperature in the contiguous U.S. was 45.1 degrees ”
OMG.. that is COLD !!!!! (Assuming they mean ºF)
Here in central Wokeachusetts, we’ve had a single day over 70F since October- so anyone saying the planet is burning up is insane. And that one day was exactly 70.
Yes, the US tried to switch to the metric system many years ago, but the general public refused. Why use a simple decimal based system when you can use a complicated system that requires a calculator to change units? As an engineer, we have at least two English systems and at least two metric systems–switching between them is often quite a chore..
Then they should be averaged locally. They cannot provide a realistic profile from the Canada border to Texas.
Just think of this. The one profession where you can regularly get it wrong and keep your job is that of a meteorologist. Mind you they are up there with economists and climate scientists. 😉
Climatologists, puleeze.
There are no real degrees in climate science as climate requires expertise in virtually all of the physical sciences and no one goes to college for 40 years. Well maybe 1 or 2.
You might add astrologist to your list as climatology as it is presently pursued bears a striking resemblance to astrology.
climatology….a field of study only slightly less respected than scientology.
“The Times article does not present readily available NOAA measured Maximum Contiguous U.S Temperature for the month of March from 1895 through 2024 as shown below.”
That graph is only going up to 2023.
I love how an article which attacks a paper of cherry picking by using global averages, then spends most of it’s time picking selected parts of the data to insist that it was slightly colder than the previous year.
e.g.
“NOAA’s Northern Hemisphere Land area average temperature anomaly measured outcome is shown below for March 2024revealing the decline from March 2023 (2.39 degrees C versus 2.62 degrees C respectively) with year 2016 (an El Niño event year value of 3.12 degrees C) remaining the highest measured outcome. There is no “the heat just keeps coming” theme in the March 2024 in the Northern Hemisphere.”
Do you really want to focus on just the rise in Northern Hemisphere Land? Warming rate since 1975 of 0.5°C / decade.
I think the point is that choosing a single statistic, such as monthly average without associated variance, or highest range value in a month for several years, does not really characterize what the temperatures are doing. A daily graph of highs and lows does a much better job. In defense of Hamlin, the LA times set the tone for the discussion.
A daily graph of highs and lows . . .
Climate Plot (weather.gov)
“I think the point is that choosing a single statistic, such as monthly average without associated variance, or highest range value in a month for several years, does not really characterize what the temperatures are doing.”
Again, the claim was that they were cherry picking by only looking at the global average, rather than focusing on carefully selected smaller regions. I’m really not sure if anyone here understands what cherry picking means.
There are numerous articles on this website that only mention the global mean. We never hear the end of pauses based on just the global mean, with no mention of the fact that some areas will be warming whilst others are cooling. Monckton never mentioned that during the pause period, regions such as land in the Northern Hemisphere was actually warming at a rate of 0.15°C /. decade. Or that parts of China were warming faster than 0.8°C / decade.
Does that mean that Monckton was cherry picking by only talking about the global average? Or is it more of a cherry pick to highlight those areas, whilst ignoring the parts of the globe that were cooling?
Now that the UAH area data has finally been published, we can see that according to the satellite data, this was a record year for land.
And even just for Northern Hemisphere Land.
And as for the Southern Hemisphere, the land area beat the previous March record by 0.75°C.
The average temperature in the contiguous U.S. was 45.1 degrees — 3.6 degrees above average
I’d prefer an average temperature quite a bit higher. It’s no fun being outside in 45 degree weather unless you wear a coat. Most people prefer an average temperature around 70 to 80. Of course humans easily deal with a daily temperature swing of 30 degrees or so because, unlike the rest of the animal kingdom, we are smart, we innovate, we engineer solutions, and we adapt to an incredible range of environments and temperatures. Except for the chronic crybabies who sit around and wail at the unfairness of life instead of appreciating the glorious climate we live in, which wasn’t as glorious 15,000 years ago.
They want a perfect temperature for their trip to the yoga studio after being mugged on public transport.
Average temperature:
The average of +60 C and -20 C is +20 C.
The average of +40 C and 0 C is +20 C.
If +40 C goes to +60 C and 0 C goes to -20 C, you get the same average.
The average conveys no useful information.
I visited the NOAA weather site and collected 24 hours of temperature data from a nearby town.
3 pm 59, 60, 60 F
6 pm 61. 59, 59 F
9 pm 58, 57, 57 F
12 pm 56, 56, 55 F
3 am 54, 54, 53 F
6 am 52, 51, 51 F
9 am 53, 55, 57 F
12 pm 59, 60, 61 F
Min 51 max 61 average 56.0 F
The 1 hour sampled average: 56.54 F
Since it is a math exercise, I did not apply scientific rules for significant digits. Had I, the 1 hour sampled average would be 57 F.
While to many, 0.54 F does not seem significant, it is only for a 24 hour period.
Time for NOAA to be disbanded.
Warmer in a 2.56 million-year ice age with about two-thirds of the world’s freshwater locked away in glaciers and ice caps isn’t very impressive.