Althouse: "Here is a fact rarely, if ever, mentioned: 26 of the 50 states set their all-time high temperature records during the 1930s that still stand (some have since been tied)."

August 7, 2019

"Here is a fact rarely, if ever, mentioned: 26 of the 50 states set their all-time high temperature records during the 1930s that still stand (some have since been tied)."

"And an additional 11 state all-time high temperature records were set before 1930 and only two states have all-time record high temperatures that were set in the 21st century (South Dakota and South Carolina). So 37 of the 50 states have an all-time high temperature record not exceeded for more than 75 years. Given these numbers and the decreased frequency of days of 100 degrees or higher, it cannot be said that either the frequency or magnitude of heat waves are more common today."

From "Throwing cold water on extreme heat hype" by Dr. Joel N. Myers, AccuWeather Founder and CEO (at AccuWeather).

200 comments:

James K said...: He will be doxxed and unpersoned in 10, 9, 8, 7,...; 8/7/19, 12:53 PM
Seeing Red said...: Skilling was trying to sell the BS too, lots of warm days in July, but the record for the warmest day that day was TA. DA! 1914.; 8/7/19, 12:53 PM
Nonapod said...: That's dangerous talk. Facts running counter to The Narrative must be supressed, downplayed, and dismissed. And failing that, they must be denied at the top of one's lungs. The perpetrator of such wrongspeak must be doxxed and shamed and threatened.; 8/7/19, 12:58 PM
mccullough said...: I wonder how well-calibrated/maintained the equipment has been. I’m assuming the equipment used now is better.

Makes it tough to precisely measure across time; 8/7/19, 1:00 PM
exhelodrvr1 said...: Someone is about to release a statement explaining that he misspoke.; 8/7/19, 1:06 PM
Ignorance is Bliss said...: ...it cannot be said that either the frequency or magnitude of heat waves are more common today

Frequency and magnitude each have a single value at any given time. Neither frequency nor magnitude will ever be more or less common.

Either, or both could become greater, or lesser. And heat waves could become more or less common.; 8/7/19, 1:10 PM
Seeing Red said...: While France was Frying, Russia was very, very cool.; 8/7/19, 1:12 PM
Lyle Smith said...: Climate change is cash money! Bad CEO.; 8/7/19, 1:13 PM
henry said...: Has that math been vetted by the science diversity police? It might make someone feel bad.; 8/7/19, 1:14 PM
Bricap said...: Which is a better measure, the year of an all time high reading, or a general warming trend over time (assuming said warming trend does indeed exist)?; 8/7/19, 1:17 PM
PM said...: "Yes, we've done a little, but we have so so far to go."
- James E. Hansen; 8/7/19, 1:17 PM
tim maguire said...: That's why we call it climate change instead of global warming. Used to be, we needed to show it was getting really hot. Now, it's enough that it rained yesterday and is sunny today while, but for human influence, it would have been sunny yesterday and rainy today.

That's climate change and we need to destroy the economy and cause mass suffering to avoid it.; 8/7/19, 1:19 PM
LYNNDH said...: I just read that CO city set record for states highest temp. But then the town is close to Kansas and OK.; 8/7/19, 1:21 PM
AustinRoth said...: The heretic must be burned!!; 8/7/19, 1:22 PM
MadisonMan said...: I've always been curious to know if the response to any global warming would be uniform across the Globe. In the past decade, Alaska has certainly been a lot warmer than it was (check out the dates of the Nenana ice-out for example, or shipping dates into/out of Nome). Here in Madison, although morning lows seem a lot warmer to me, outrageous daytime highs aren't more common. And the morning lows might signal land-use change at the airport, where the temperatures are recorded. (I've not examined overnight lows elsewhere to see if the trend in Madison is similar to elsewhere.); 8/7/19, 1:22 PM
Matt said...: According to wikipedia, there was a severe heat wave in 1936. There were bad heat waves in 1911, 1901 and 1896 as well. If those are the years of the high temperatures, these heat waves must have been really bad. The 2011 heat wave felt like it would never end. The A/C couldn't keep up with the heat. I can't imagine what it must have been like to suffer through a heat wave before A/C.; 8/7/19, 1:23 PM
tim maguire said...: Bricap said...
Which is a better measure, the year of an all time high reading, or a general warming trend over time (assuming said warming trend does indeed exist)?

The alarmist position is that the average temp will only go up by a few degrees, so even if true, we will still have some cool summer days and it won't feel that different to people living in warming times.

However, if your average temperature goes up, then you should be seeing a new all time high from time to time. 15-20 years without a new high? Not a big deal. 75 years without a new high? Kind of a big deal. Most places going many decades without a new high? You need a new theory.; 8/7/19, 1:23 PM
Caligula said...: Is it really worth pointing out that heat waves were far more deadly in the 1930s, when practically no one had air conditioning?; 8/7/19, 1:24 PM
Bricap said...: I don't think it would necessarily be uniform across the globe. My understanding is that it's a rise in the average of the distribution of temperatures.; 8/7/19, 1:26 PM
tim maguire said...: MadisonMan said...although morning lows seem a lot warmer to me, outrageous daytime highs aren't more common.

Same in Toronto--I like to check out the temp graphs in the newspaper and the daily highs haven't changed much, but the nighttime lows are much warmer. It's not cooling off at night like it used to.; 8/7/19, 1:26 PM
Sebastian said...: "a fact rarely, if ever, mentioned"

I invite you to think deeply about why it is rarely mentioned.; 8/7/19, 1:28 PM
Dear corrupt left, go F yourselves said...: Summer is hot. To the pampered left, that it's not perfect Camelot outside brings tears and anger.

Gas up the private jet.; 8/7/19, 1:29 PM
Rob said...: Dr. Joel N. Myers, you'd better get to the bunker. Incoming!; 8/7/19, 1:29 PM
Todd said...: He may have "facts" on his side but can his "facts" hold up against "moral facts" and "our truths"? I think not.; 8/7/19, 1:30 PM
tim maguire said...: Bricap said...
I don't think it would necessarily be uniform across the globe

Supposedly we're seeing more warming at the poles, but that doesn't hold up either. I've seen pictures of the North Pole in the 1950's in summer with not a cube of ice in sight. And frankly, 100 years ago we have no idea what was going on in the arctic summer.

The retreating Greenland glaciers that are supposed to be a sign of dangerous warming are still spitting Viking settlements buried in the Little Ice Age. So the glaciers were smaller than they are now less than 1,000 years ago.; 8/7/19, 1:32 PM
Paul Zrimsek said...: All the more remarkable when you consider that local temperature records are based on the raw temperature, without the correction for urban heat island effects that gets applied to global temperature averages.; 8/7/19, 1:36 PM
Achilles said...: AccuWeather has an app. It is carried on both major platforms.

Watch news about this over the next few months. The leftists that run Apple and Google will retaliate.

There is no free market anymore.; 8/7/19, 1:42 PM
Dave Begley said...: This comment has been removed by the author.; 8/7/19, 1:43 PM
Dave Begley said...: CAGW is the biggest scam in history.

If China Joe gets elected and enacts his plagiarized Green New Deal, American workers lose and China wins. No oil and gas power will drive this country bankrupt.

Since Teslas don't pay gas tax but use the roads, the state should start taxing the heck out of those tax subsidized vehicles.; 8/7/19, 1:45 PM
Lyle Sanford, RMT said...: I'll never forget my dad (born in 1911 and a farmer here in central Virginia) saying the heat and drought were so bad during the 30's that, "the crows went blind".; 8/7/19, 1:45 PM
Bricap said...: Urban heat islands are compared against rural areas in studies. When I googled about this, it was suggested that there was little difference in trend for rural vs. urban. YMMV.

Scientists can figure out what was going on in polar regions from taking readings of ice from the era in question, wither it's 20th Century or 20 million years ago, so they do have more than zero idea, anyway. That his part of how they can determine that there have been warmer periods than today.; 8/7/19, 1:47 PM
Owen said...: (1) You people need to catch up with the nomenclature. NPR announced the other day that "climate change" has been replaced with "climate emergency" and "climate change skeptic" is now "climate change denier." Please consult the updated IngSoc NewSpeak version, which you can download. In fact if you fail to download it, your social credit score will be adjusted.
(2) What does "global average temperature" even mean? Temperature is a local value in a scalar field. The temperature in Phoenix and the temperature in Anchorage can be arithmetically mixed to produce an "average" and what exactly does that signify in the physical world? The closest thing to what these excited idiots and con artists want to say is, the total heat content (energy) of the earth climate system. And then the flux: the rate at which energy is added to and departs from the system. Somehow these people never get to that question: we just get hand-waving and talk of storms.
(3) Insofar as there may be any change in temperatures (and after accounting for urban heat islands, and cockamamie re-siting of temperature stations, I don't pretend to know), it seems to be an increase in the minimum temperatures, not an increase in the maximums. The talk of heat waves will buy you votes, but who the hell could care if the July minimum temperature in Antarctica has gone from -55 to =53?; 8/7/19, 1:51 PM
American Liberal Elite said...: Weather is not climate.; 8/7/19, 1:52 PM
PB said...: Also, no air conditioning then.; 8/7/19, 1:53 PM
tim maguire said...: Bricap said...Scientists can figure out what was going on in polar regions from taking readings of ice from the era in question

That is the case over land areas that don't melt, and scientists can go back thousands of years in the Antarctic, but that doesn't work over the Arctic ocean, where ice moves with the wind and completely melts from time to time.

The other issue I would bring up is that ice core samples don't give you the precision temperatures warming enthusiasts are claiming (do you really believe they know to within a tenth of a degree what the average temperature of the earth was in 1850?); 8/7/19, 1:53 PM
Ingachuck'stoothlessARM said...: he's probably full of hate,
and wants temperatures to rise to eradicate people of color,
since they fare worse in warmer, sunnier climes.; 8/7/19, 1:56 PM
bagoh20 said...: But everybody keeps telling me I'm incredibly hot!; 8/7/19, 1:59 PM
Jaq said...: The US has always had the best thermometer coverage and the vast majority of the rest of the world is “estimated” for that period.

In the former Soviet Union, if you wrote down the termperature by hand and submitted it, the lower the temp, the more heating oil you got. All very scientific. I am sure that the current Siberian hotspot though is all natural.

They also made adjustments to sea temps basically by guesstimation.

It’s like the Yogi Bera thing: "If I hadn’t of believed it, I wouldn’t have seen it.” They estimate based on their judgement, which is colored by their expectations, which is why I only pay attention to satellite data. Of course it stems from the coldest part of the last century.; 8/7/19, 2:01 PM
stevew said...: As if the weather and climate are uniform across the entirety of each of the States. Even our relatively tiny New England states have great variety across them. When Mrs. stevew and I visited the big island of Hawaii we learned that it had 11 different micro-climates across just that one island in the chain.

The people barking about the climate whatever crisis are the true science deniers.; 8/7/19, 2:01 PM
Gospace said...: Plis record colds all over Russia in the last day. With a lot more cold news at the site.

Humans and other living things do a lot better when the Earth is warm. Not a lot of things will grow in Canada under 100+ feet of ice.; 8/7/19, 2:02 PM
Owen said...: Bricap at 1:47: "...Scientists can figure out what was going on in polar regions from taking readings of ice from the era in question, wither it's 20th Century or 20 million years ago,..." Yes, they can compare those figures, but that process rests on an assumption that the old readings, taken with very different methods, are in fact comparable to the recent readings. If all my readings are done with the very same mercury-in-glass thermometer (all tested beforehand for uniform response, all maintained in the same way, all observed in the same manner by similarly-trained observers) then I may have pretty high confidence that a -10 degrees reading on one is indeed different from a -5 reading on another. But if my readings are done on all kinds of different systems, I had better have good protocols for translating an X value on one system into a Fahrenheit degree reading on another.

In this case, we have ancient temperature readings that are derived from what, exactly? Ratios of isotopes in gas samples captured from drill cores? Yeah, that's obviously and exactly comparable to a mercury-in-glass reading, or a satellite microwave reading, or whatever else is being used today. Same issue, and flagrantly so, with tree rings. Michael Mann created the "hockey stick" chart so badly abused by Al Gore and many others, by merging paleo temperature data (derived from highly cherrypicked tree ring data dating back to the Middle Ages) with modern temperature data: as if they were all the same data set. Even worse, he was careful to truncate his paleo series in the modern age, because it began to go in the "wrong" direction, suggesting a modern cooling period. Which would in turn suggest that the earlier period data was not exactly useful.

This is not news but it doesn't fit the Narrative so it gets very little attention. Insofar as it relates to your point, I think I am reinforcing it: what little we know suggests that the past may well have had warmer periods (and certainly we should not too quickly accept the argument that it was colder then).; 8/7/19, 2:03 PM
Jim at said...: How will we know if/when we've 'defeated' climate change?; 8/7/19, 2:05 PM
Jaq said...: The problem with ice core data is that the farther back you go, the lower the resolution, since the heat does migrate, if slowly. What this means is that the hottest years and the coldest years are brought back to the average. For this reason, we don’t have year by year information for 1000 years ago to compare to our data today. It’s lost to history. We don’t know.

We have records from the Vikings that they changed sea routes due to ice from time to time. And Greenland exported cattle 1000 years ago, since there was such lush grassland there. Get it? GREEENland?

But of course all of the places where we don’t have historical records or good data is where it all averages out, due to estimation by humans, of course. Humans who think they are saving the planet by exaggerating the problem to prompt action.; 8/7/19, 2:07 PM
Gospace said...: AAT said...
The US has always had the best thermometer coverage and the vast majority of the rest of the world is “estimated” for that period.

Great Britain has records going back further that are just as accurate. Plus the British Navy has air and seawater temperatures recorded all over the world in varying spots for centuries. The only way to get to global warming from the older recorded temperature readings is doing what NASA has done- adjust all the old ones upward, because ALL the old thermometers measured too low, or some silly excuse like that. Raw unadjusted readings show no change to cooling, but no warming trend.; 8/7/19, 2:11 PM
Jupiter said...: Bricap said...

"Scientists can figure out what was going on in polar regions from taking readings of ice from the era in question, wither it's 20th Century or 20 million years ago, so they do have more than zero idea, anyway."

Two million years ago, India was an island off the coast of Asia, and the Himalayas were a low plateau. If you want an idea of the current possibilities for global climate, you want to look at the last few hundred thousand years. And if you do, you will see that during the majority of that time, even though there was more surface area, the Earth was much too dry and cold for modern agricultural methods to feed billions of human beings.

It looks to me as if the Earth's climate is a bistable system. There are two modes that are quasi-stable, likely due to positive feedbacks, but it can quickly shift from one to the other. And the Cold one is a bit more stable than the Hot one. Tends to last longer. And no one has any good idea what causes the shift. Could be a chaotic system, more or less random.; 8/7/19, 2:12 PM
Jaq said...: “Even worse, he was careful to truncate his paleo series in the modern age, because it began to go in the "wrong" direction, suggesting a modern cooling period. Which would in turn suggest that the earlier period data was not exactly useful.”

Basically the Hockey Stick was an exercise in assuming what he was trying to prove.; 8/7/19, 2:13 PM
Bill Harshaw said...: When I see ships taking the Northwest Passage and the Northeast Passage, and China building icebreakers so they can exploit the Northeast Passage I tend to believe the alarmists.

When I see farmers changing the crops and varieties they grow I tend to believe the alarmists.

When I see gardeners being able to plant earlier in the spring I tend to believe the alarmists.

When I see flooding more common on the East Coast I tend to believe the alarmists.

(IIRC the Powerline blog in 2008 or so was touting a new study of temperatures led by a scientist at UCLA or Berkeley who was a skeptic. It was supposed to disprove the conventional wisdom of rising temperatures using new methods. When the study came out, the scientists had come to the same conclusion as the majority view. Oops. Heard crickets from Powerline.

Yes, I believe the alarmists.; 8/7/19, 2:13 PM
effinayright said...: Bricap said...
Which is a better measure, the year of an all time high reading, or a general warming trend over time (assuming said warming trend does indeed exist)?
*************

Neither.

A claimed "year of an all time high reading" is utterly bogus, because we never had true global measurements of air and ocean temperatures until 1980 or thereabouts, when we started putting up satellites to measure radiainces, and put hundreds of buoys in the water to measure temps and then upload them to other satellites.

Geologists know that the Earth has been both a lot hotter and a lot colder in the past, that there is no "stable climate" in the long run.

A "general warming trend" itself proves nothing, as it is insufficient to attribute such trends to human agency. Ever since the end of the Little Ice Age in the early 1800's we've been on a general warming trend, with a bit of see-sawing up and down. The past twenty years there's been no statistically significant warming, despite an ever-increasing level of CO2.; 8/7/19, 2:14 PM
Jupiter said...: Anyway, keep on flying them jets down to Rio. Can't hurt, might help.; 8/7/19, 2:14 PM
Owen said...: AAT: you got game.; 8/7/19, 2:15 PM
Original Mike said...: I'd be happy if we all could simply agreed that the science is NOT settled.; 8/7/19, 2:15 PM
tcrosse said...: Temperatures were higher in the 1930s, even though they predated the inventon of the plastc drinking straw.; 8/7/19, 2:17 PM
Jaq said...: It’s also well known that the plants have been trying to freeze us to death. They have been sequestering carbon out of the atmosphere to the point where it was almost getting too low to support plant life. This is not a joke. Earth has been a “snowball” a couple of times, and had we not vented the CO2 the plants had sequestered, it was just a matter of time before the planet became uninhabitable to us.

Not to mention that interglacials, like the one we have been enjoying for the past 15K years or so only seem to last 10 to 20 thousand years before the ice age returns, at least for the past 4 million years or so. Thank God we staved off the next ice age.

The Earth doesn’t love us, it wasn’t “designed” for us to live here. We are vulnerable to its geologic whims. If we managed to put Earth back in charge, it would kill us off in great numbers or make our lives better based on random chance.; 8/7/19, 2:18 PM
Jupiter said...: Bill Harshaw said...

"(IIRC the Powerline blog in 2008 or so was touting a new study of temperatures led by a scientist at UCLA or Berkeley who was a skeptic. It was supposed to disprove the conventional wisdom of rising temperatures using new methods. When the study came out, the scientists had come to the same conclusion as the majority view. Oops. Heard crickets from Powerline."

That would be Richard Muller. Wrote an excellent book about possible astronomical explanations for the Earth's climate history. You grossly misrepresent his findings. Alarming!; 8/7/19, 2:21 PM
Owen said...: Bill Harshaw: Believe what you will, but one of my rules of thumb is, "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." And when I look at the alarmists' claims, translated into real-world predictions of how bad things are getting and will get, I look first at sea level rise (because they press this claim very hard and often). And what is their claim?

Are you sitting down?

3 mm/year. That's two dimes, a year. Less than an inch a decade. About 10" a century. So in practical terms it means my great-great-great-grandchildren will have to move the beer cooler another foot up the beach.

And for this we need to destroy industrial civilization?

It's a power grab. Bad enough that we have to get through this tsunami of hysterical BS, but what really hurts is the damage this does to the whole Science brand. These people have been trying to win the argument for decades using the argumentum ad baculum, "Because I said so." That's an immediate tell that they have nothing. And so it is proving to be. And as a direct consequence, Science is suffering an enormous hit to its general credibility.; 8/7/19, 2:22 PM
Char Char Binks, Esq. said...: Hoover heat.; 8/7/19, 2:23 PM
MadisonMan said...: I've seen pictures of the North Pole in the 1950's in summer with not a cube of ice in sight.

I've never seen such an image. I'd be extremely skeptical of it.; 8/7/19, 2:24 PM
Bricap said...: Thanks to all for the responses. I don't know which "side" is correct, so I guess I'm a skeptic in that regard.

I've certainly heard about Greenland. As for ice caps, I remember reading something about how the polar regions of Mars were experiencing similar rises in temperature, which would lend some credence to the idea of it being sun related.

Lately I've read about wine producers lamenting climate change and how it is affecting their vineyards. It is a common lament for increased ripeness. There is talk in Bordeaux about new allowable grapes. England is now producing quality bubbly. It wasn't that long ago that it was deemed too inhospitable to grow quality anything there. And there was a time in Germany a number of centuries ago where it got too cold to produce it.; 8/7/19, 2:25 PM
Ingachuck'stoothlessARM said...: during the early 80's, one of our clients was the weatherman for NBC.
He left for a climate conference in DC, and returned somewhat shaken.
We asked what the outlook was, and he said, gravely:
"In 10 years, we're doomed"

AOC promises we will be dead in 12, but if you give the Dems your vote and your money, they can forestall your demise...til the next election cycle.

It's a protection racket.; 8/7/19, 2:28 PM
gilbar said...: this is Why they Now always talk about the 'feels like' temperature
If they were to say: "It's going to be Super Hot this afternoon! high around 92!!"
Some (old) people would say: "This is IOWA This is AUGUST! 92 degrees is NORMAL; 8/7/19, 2:28 PM
Jaq said...: I blame the Hockey Stick for a lot of the problems with climate science. The nature of his calculations tended to flatten out the temperature history, which fit perfectly with his assumptions. Basically he applied his test to the most recent part of the time series in question, kept the ones that matched, and the remaining part of the series to which no test was applied, of course converged around an average.

Mann made another assumption. That the temperature from year to year was disjointed, that there was no correlation from the year before in the old temp data, that it was like “white noise” and that the only correlation between the years, the “red noise” was introduced by rising CO2. How convenient! Let’s assume that it has to be CO2 in order to prove that it is CO2!

Then the modelers were lulled into believing that absent rising CO2, the climate was flat. Then when natural variability showed up in the satellite records, they were caught flat footed. Imagine that!; 8/7/19, 2:29 PM
walter said...: Achilles said...Watch news about this over the next few months. The leftists that run Apple and Google will retaliate.
--
CAGW mobs to his home...; 8/7/19, 2:30 PM
rhhardin said...: Think of temperature as the derivative of internal energy with respect to entropy rather than a molecular dynamic thing. It makes it less alarming. Also more accurate. You can get negative absolute temperatures.

The definition comes from temperature being what two systems in contact come to the same of, with energy conserved. No other assumption needed.; 8/7/19, 2:31 PM
effinayright said...: Bill Harshaw said...
When I see ships taking the Northwest Passage and the Northeast Passage, and China building icebreakers so they can exploit the Northeast Passage I tend to believe the alarmists.

>>>Other than some yachts and small boats, very few ships have successfully navigated the Northwest passage.

>>>Two icebreakers headed for the North Pole in January had to turn back---because the ice was too thick.

https://wattsupwiththat.com/2017/01/19/russian-icebreakers-stuck-in-the-arctic-global-warming/

When I see farmers changing the crops and varieties they grow I tend to believe the alarmists.

>>>Farmers have done this since they began engaging in agriculture.

When I see gardeners being able to plant earlier in the spring I tend to believe the alarmists.

>>>> Earlier in the spring...everywhere? And every year? Snort. Check out the farmers in the midwest who had to delay planting this year because of floods caused by the late-spring snow.

When I see flooding more common on the East Coast I tend to believe the alarmists.

>>>Another assertion w/o evidence. Where are these "more common" floods, and where is your evidence that they are more frequent. Please don't offer Miami as evidence, since the entire FLA peninsula has been undergoing subsidence for the past 100-odd years. If your claim were true, the entire East Coast would also be flooding.

ALL data supports the evidence that the oceans are rising by 2 to 3 mm/year, as they have since the end of the Ice Age 180 years ago.; 8/7/19, 2:31 PM
n.n said...: I’m assuming the equipment used now is better.

The equipment, handling, siting, sampling, then and now, are of significantly variable quality and distribution to reach firm conclusions about the past or predict the future. The models (i.e. hypotheses) are guides, not evidence, and have demonstrated a lack of skill in either capacity. The point is that science is a near-domain philosophy and practice, with cause.; 8/7/19, 2:31 PM
Nonapod said...: Jupiter said...It looks to me as if the Earth's climate is a bistable system. There are two modes that are quasi-stable, likely due to positive feedbacks, but it can quickly shift from one to the other. And the Cold one is a bit more stable than the Hot one. Tends to last longer. And no one has any good idea what causes the shift. Could be a chaotic system, more or less random.

It certainly seems so. The question is, what is causing it.

Many climate researchers put a lot of faith in Milankovitch cycles as an explanation, which are sort of like a collective effects of the gradual changes in orbital eccentricity, axial tilt, axial precession, apsidal precession, and oribital inclination. Of course, that's far from perfect. There's a lot of unexplained discrepancies if those were the only cause.

My personal suspicion is the Sun itself plays a far greater role than many climate researches acknowledge. They've traditionally downplayed the role of the Sun, despite the fact that accurate measurements of solar forcing have only became available during the satellite era and there's really no easy way to accurately determine ancient solar activity.

For some reason, people seem to think of the Sun as this relatively stable, unchanging thing which only experiences the well known short term 11 year long solar cycles. But I believe that it's likely that the sun has much longer overarching cycles, perhaps on the order of hundreds of thousands of years in duration. Over the course of these cycles, the Sun's activity will wax and wane a great deal.; 8/7/19, 2:32 PM
JackWayne said...: The Question Bill is: If we are warming (unproved as yet), Are we warming due to man-made carbon dioxide or is it natural warming?; 8/7/19, 2:33 PM
Jaq said...: "It wasn't that long ago that it was deemed too inhospitable to grow quality anything there.”

Yes, we are coming out of the Little Ice Age, a period accepted by geologists and historians alike, until Mann claimed he had shown it was hardly a blip.

The original Frankenstein was written during the Little Ice Age. If you read the novel, you will see that ice and snow were constant themes. There is even a scene, IIRC, with the monster on a dog sled. Hers was not the only piece of art that reflected an increased attention to colder weather.; 8/7/19, 2:34 PM
mandrewa said...: As I recall back in 1936, the average daily high temperature in the lower 48 states of the United States was something like 105 degrees Farenheit.

That wasn't just one day. It was day after day after day.

It wasn't just some anomalous one hot day we are talking about. It was the whole summer. To get a feel for the numbers we are talking about, take whatever the temperature data is for the area you live in now, and add 15 degrees across the board on to that. That's probably approximately in the range of what 1936 was like.

And as far as I know, we still don't know what happened. We don't know what caused this. There are a few other years in the 1930s that were quite hot compared to today, but 1936 was the extreme.

Tony Heller has talked about this, which is why I know about it.

See Erasing America's Hot Past; 8/7/19, 2:35 PM
Owen said...: Bricap: regarding wine production in the UK, it seems the Romans were doing it. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/veni-vidi-viticulture-remains-of-roman-vineyards-found-in-uk-738723.html

Then it turned colder. And if it has warmed since, it has not warmed enough yet to support much new wine production.

But...but...C02 explains everything about temperature, right?

That's the alarmists' assumption. Declare the hypothesis you like, eliminate all the others by fiat, and then --surprise-- your hypothesis succeeds.; 8/7/19, 2:35 PM
Owen said...: AAT: "...There is even a scene [in the Mary Shelley "Frankenstein"], IIRC, with the monster on a dog sled."

You do recall correctly. A most memorable scene. And she was writing in the early 1800's.; 8/7/19, 2:37 PM
effinayright said...: MadisonMan said...
I've seen pictures of the North Pole in the 1950's in summer with not a cube of ice in sight.

I've never seen such an image. I'd be extremely skeptical of it.
***********

In 1958 the nuclear powered sub Nautilus surfaced at the North Pole.

https://tinyurl.com/y3ya44ob

There was ice, but it wasn't very thick.

Here's more on the topic:

https://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/04/26/ice-at-the-north-pole-in-1958-not-so-thick/; 8/7/19, 2:38 PM
gilbar said...: Zeus points out...
There are two modes that are quasi-stable, likely due to positive feedbacks, but it can quickly shift from one to the other. And the Cold one is a bit more stable than the Hot one. Tends to last longer. And no one has any good idea what causes the shift.

And THIS Means:
IF there is Man Made Global Warming; Thank GOD!
If there isn't Man Made Global Warming; we need to start making it SOON!

If you had to chose, between two climates for Madison, Wisc:
A) that of the dinosaurs, with HOT HUMID HEAT
B) that of the Other mode: ONE MILE OF ICE ON TOP OF MADISON
which would You chose?
I don't really like hot humid days; I Really don't like living under a mile of ice; 8/7/19, 2:42 PM
Nonapod said...: This comment has been removed by the author.; 8/7/19, 2:47 PM
Bricap said...: Owen, reading that article about Roman wine production in England, I have to wonder how good it was compared to other regions under Roman control at the time. Early harvest and tons of honey for sweetness and if I understand correctly, to get higher alcohol content. An ancient form of chaptalization, perhaps?; 8/7/19, 2:48 PM
Nonapod said...: ATT said...The original Frankenstein was written during the Little Ice Age. If you read the novel, you will see that ice and snow were constant themes. There is even a scene, IIRC, with the monster on a dog sled. Hers was not the only piece of art that reflected an increased attention to colder weather.

The year she wrote it, 1816, was also the infamous "year without summer" that was a direct result of the 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora. That erruption was (most likely) the single largest volcanic erruption in recorded history and had a significant effect on the weather.; 8/7/19, 2:48 PM
Jaq said...: The funny thing to me is that the polar bears survived the Eemian, a period much warmer than today for at least two thousand years. A period so hot that the Seychelles, and probably other islands, were under water. We are forbidden to notice this though. Just twenty thousand years ago, due to gradual changes in the Earth’s orbit that occasionally produce extremes in solar insolation at various lattitudes, the Arctic was far warmer than today, and likely the Arctic Ocean was ice free during the summer, and the polar bears did fine.; 8/7/19, 2:50 PM
PM said...: I recall when it snowed unseasonably during some Global Warming conference in D.C. back when - and people laughed, the terse response was "Don't confuse climate with weather" which is logical. Never heard that once during this summer's heat wave.; 8/7/19, 2:53 PM
gilbar said...: here's a pic of the north pole in mid May, 1987
Subs at the north pole 1987

lotta ice, but a LOTTA Water
Meadowlark lake in the Bighorn Mountains doesn't ice out until late June
Meadowlark lake is only 8,200 feet; 8/7/19, 2:53 PM
Jaq said...: When I read the book in college, it was said that she and her husband the poet, who was the more famous Shelley at the time, were visiting Lord Byron at his summer place and the weather was miserable the whole summer with constant rain and so they had. contest to see who could write the best story. She won.; 8/7/19, 2:53 PM
Temujin said...: All I can say is it's hotter than hell here in Florida these days.

What's that you say? It's August? Hmm...so it's hot in the summer. Hmmm...
Seems to me I recall some freakin hot days in August in Michigan when I was younger.
And in Chicago.
And in Cleveland.
Buffalo.
New Hampshire.

I think I'm seeing a trend. It gets hot in the summer. Ah ha! So that's what they must mean by global warming.

But...what do they call it in February?; 8/7/19, 2:54 PM
Jupiter said...: "For some reason, people seem to think of the Sun as this relatively stable, unchanging thing which only experiences the well known short term 11 year long solar cycles. But I believe that it's likely that the sun has much longer overarching cycles, perhaps on the order of hundreds of thousands of years in duration."

Maybe. There are a lot of people looking into it. But there is good reason to think that many natural systems are chaotic. They are effectively acausal. A tiny change in initial conditions leads to radically different outcomes. Most paths lead around in the regular circle of the seasons. But a few paths take you to a different place, that has a much hotter or colder regular circle of seasons. Once in a while, the Earth heads down one of those paths, just because it happened to be pointed that way.; 8/7/19, 3:00 PM
Owen said...: Bricap: I have no idea how good the Romans' wine was. I imagine they were happy to get anything drinkable, living there at the very edge of the civilized world. To me, the power of the story is, they MADE WINE. They left behind enough physical evidence of their MAKING WINE that we can infer with reasonable confidence that the climate allowed them to MAKE WINE. Which implies a certain kind of climate, and not one that much helps the alarmists' narrative.

AAT: Why are we surprised that bears (and seals, birds, fish) would have trouble adapting to climatic changes? Obviously an overnight radical change would kill off some, compromise others, and (surprise) empower yet others. But Darwinian selection would pretty quickly help the various species move toward phenotypes that could cope or even thrive. Polar bears can swim like champs. But they can also manage on land. Look at Churchill Manitoba, which is on dry land and absolutely seething with polar bears.

I don't pretend to know enough here, but I am confident in my ignorance.; 8/7/19, 3:00 PM
gilbar said...: compared to other regions under Roman control at the time.

The WHOLE WORLD was warm back then. It was SO WARM, that Olives grew in the Alps at places that are STILL too cold for Olives. It was so warm, that they used to call it the Roman Climatic Optimum. Then it started to bother folks like Al Gore, that the hot weather was called an Optimum. So they changed the name to the Roman Warm Period.

When did the Roman Climatic Optimum end? Right when the Roman empire did. Guess WHY the Roman empire ended? Read ALL about it The Fate of Rome Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire By: Kyle Harper; 8/7/19, 3:03 PM
joshbraid said...: See "Reason #2: Some Historical Perspective" at https://wattsupwiththat.com/2019/07/21/heat-wave-hysteria-the-truth-shall-set-you-free/

The warmest decade in the the 20th century was the 1930s.; 8/7/19, 3:15 PM
Bill Harshaw said...: Re: Jupiter

Thanksfor the name--Richard Muller. From Wikipedia:
"In October 2011, Muller wrote in an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal, concerning his work with the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project:

When we began our study, we felt that skeptics had raised legitimate issues, and we didn't know what we'd find. Our results turned out to be close to those published by prior groups. We think that means that those groups had truly been very careful in their work, despite their inability to convince some skeptics of that. They managed to avoid bias in their data selection, homogenization and other corrections.

Global warming is real. Perhaps our results will help cool this portion of the climate debate. How much of the warming is due to humans and what will be the likely effects? We made no independent assessment of that.[18]"; 8/7/19, 3:18 PM
Caligula said...: Summer temp. data from 1871-2018 in Milwaukee, from Wisconsin State Climatology office:

http://www.aos.wisc.edu/~sco/clim-history/stations/mke/MKE-TS-JJA-T.gif; 8/7/19, 3:19 PM
Nonapod said...: Once in a while, the Earth heads down one of those paths, just because it happened to be pointed that way.

Heck, in some cases that could be literally. As the solar system moves around the galactic core, there's probably all sorts of intersteller phenomena that could have an effect on solar activity and/or the climate of the Earth. If the Earth is bathed in radiation from a relatively nearby supernova, what kind of effect would that have on the atmosphere? Or if a large celestial body passes through the Oort cloud, knocking a bunch of comets into the inner solar system. Or stuff we can't yet imagine having some kind of effect on solar output. We believe we know so much.; 8/7/19, 3:20 PM
Caligula said...: More data: record temps in Milwaukee, 1871-2018:

http://www.aos.wisc.edu/~sco/clim-history/stations/mke/MKE-ap-90degdays-ann.gif

http://www.aos.wisc.edu/~sco/clim-history/stations/mke/MKE-co-90degdays-ann.gif; 8/7/19, 3:23 PM
Wilbur said...: My folks (in Central Illinois) used to specifically mention the summer of 1936, how uncomfortably hot it was for weeks at a time.; 8/7/19, 3:25 PM
rehajm said...: Tell that last part about neither more severe or more frequent to David Attenborough, who never mentioned such a thing on tue BBC shows but is now all over it with Netflix paying the tab.

BTW that last part has been in the IPCC report until recently when the alarmist ‘scientists’ won the shouting match and had the language changed.; 8/7/19, 3:28 PM
Bricap said...: Making wine and making good wine are two different things. Wine was an important part of Roman culture, so it doesn't surprise me that they at least tried, and were able to come up with something passable. Whether the seeming lack of quality is all climate related or about mismatch of grapes to the area, some combination thereof, or other unknown, who knows?

Nowadays, bubbly comes from the region that commands over $50 per bottle at retail. https://www.wine-searcher.com/find/nyetimber/1/usa

This while Champagne is starting to feel the effects. https://daily.sevenfifty.com/how-champagne-producers-are-preserving-acidity-as-the-climate-changes/

What that portends 50 years out, your guess is as good as mine.; 8/7/19, 3:28 PM
Bill Harshaw said...: Re: wholelot... and Northwest Passage:

Wikipedia says a 75,000 ton freighter and 1,700 passenger cruise ship have navigated the Northwest passage. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northwest_Passage

This site says: "Complete transits have been made by 222 different vessels" as of Dec. 2018.
https://www.spri.cam.ac.uk/resources/infosheets/northwestpassage.pdf (Different sites seem to have different figures, and "vessels" includes icebreakers.

The wikipedia site for the Northeast Passage hasn't been updated recently but has this:
"In 2011, four ships sailed the length of the Northern Sea Route and Northeast Passage, from the Atlantic to Pacific Oceans. In 2012, 46 ships sailed the NSR.[19]

In August 2012, Russian media reported that 85% of vessels transiting the Northern Sea Route in 2011 were carrying gas or oil, and 80% were high-capacity tankers.[20]"

This website haa post from 2018:"In 2011, four ships sailed the length of the Northern Sea Route and Northeast Passage, from the Atlantic to Pacific Oceans. In 2012, 46 ships sailed the NSR.[19]

In August 2012, Russian media reported that 85% of vessels transiting the Northern Sea Route in 2011 were carrying gas or oil, and 80% were high-capacity tankers.[20]"
https://logisticsviewpoints.com/2018/08/29/northeast-passage-shipping-lane/

The important point is these are corporations who care only for their bottom line, not some fancy dancy scientists who've never paid a payroll. If the corporations are risking these passages, you can take the existence of these passages seriously.; 8/7/19, 3:32 PM
MadisonMan said...: in 1958 the nuclear powered sub Nautilus surfaced at the North Pole.

Thanks. (polynya is a great scrabble word btw) My beef was with the absolutism 'nary a cube in sight' indeed.

As noted in that article, Sea Ice is very dynamic. It moves, expands, contracts. What is important is trends from one year to the next -- and also, in winter, how much 'old' ice there is compared to new. Microwave information tells you this. You want ice to persist if you want a large albedo at the Poles. That's easy at the South Pole. Maybe not so easy at the North.; 8/7/19, 3:35 PM
AllenS said...: This idea that global whatever means whatever they come up with for the last, what, 5,000 years bullshit. What about the dinasour era, then, what about the glacial shit? If anything people will die off from global cooling. I can hardly wait.; 8/7/19, 3:44 PM
gilbar said...: Bricap said...

No True Scots Wine!; 8/7/19, 3:50 PM
rehajm said...: AMA pushing to include climate change in medical school curriculum. I don’t like to say we’re doomed but...; 8/7/19, 3:54 PM
Owen said...: Bill Harshaw @ 3:18: You quote Richard Muller and his work with BEST. IIRC, he prevailed upon Anthony Watts (of "Watts Up With That," the climate skeptic site) to provide him with data about (or from) US weather stations. IIRC, Anthony Watts was not happy about the way Muller used the data and characterized the results. I consider Watts to be very experienced and almost painfully fair-minded, so I came away with, shall we say, a bad impression of Muller.

I will try to supply more facts, but offer this as a caution.; 8/7/19, 4:00 PM
Seeing Red said...: I think they’ve a,so started mapping volcanos and outgassing. We can’t control the sun or volcanoes.; 8/7/19, 4:03 PM
Owen said...: Bill Harshaw: Yes, if you Google "Wattsupwiththat and BEST" you will get a series of posts by Anthony Watts and others (Fred Singer, Willis Eschenbach) who are pretty smart about this stuff. And, no, Anthony Watts is not entirely happy about Muller's work.

https://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/10/21/best-what-i-agree-with-and-what-i-disagree-with-plus-a-call-for-additional-transparency-to-preven-pal-review/; 8/7/19, 4:05 PM
madAsHell said...: Joe Biden watched FDR proclaim Global Warming on TV back in the 1930's.; 8/7/19, 4:09 PM
Bill Harshaw said...: re: coastal flooding:

From a 2018 NOAA report for US:
"In 2018, 12 communities broke or tied their previous records for the number of days with high-tide flooding, some with more than 20 days of storm-free flooding, according to the report. All were on the Eastern seaboard, from Massachusetts down to Florida."
"In Annapolis, Md., where high-tide flooding is quickly becoming a chronic problem, the city plans to upgrade storm drains, raise roads and install pumps to keep low-lying areas dry. A study published earlier this year estimated high-tide flooding in one part of the city in 2017 cost businesses about $100,000 in lost revenue."

Alexandria and Norfolk are seeing similar patterns.

For Boston, see this: https://www.sciencenews.org/article/boston-adapting-rising-sea-level-coastal-flooding

https://www.npr.org/2019/07/10/739466268/high-tide-flooding-on-the-rise-especially-along-the-east-coast-forecasters-warn

Measuring sea levels is, I understand, difficult because the earth can be rising or subsiding in different areas (i.e. the Delta is subsiding).; 8/7/19, 4:09 PM
madAsHell said...: This has been going on since the 30's?? The end is closer than we guessed. AOC call your office!!; 8/7/19, 4:09 PM
Michael K said...: You people don't seem to appreciate that there is a lot of money riding on global warming/climate change.

Millions in grants and subsidies. This is an industry. Think of the windmill builders. Hundreds of millions involved.

The fact that we emerged from the Little Ice Age about 1850 and had warming for 75 years should be ignored. This is about the Benjamins!; 8/7/19, 4:16 PM
Bill Harshaw said...: re: Owen's followup posts on Muller and WattsUp.

Appreciate the added info but generally I try to avoid getting into the weeds of the disputes between Hanson and Christie, WWattsup.. etc. I I was impressed by Muller because Powerline, a conservative blog I follow, was very optimistic he would debunk climate warming before the study was released. I figured if they thought he was a credible scientist, all the more reason to trust his opinion when he came out with a different conclusion.

Forgetting Muller, I'm most convinced by the evidence when people whose incomes and careers are on the line change their behavior in line with climate change (shipowners, farmers, gardeners, etc.); 8/7/19, 4:17 PM
madAsHell said...: What's the leading cause of global warming??

Millions in grants and subsidies.; 8/7/19, 4:17 PM
Eleanor said...: Somewhere on this planet some enterprising scientists and engineers are creating new technologies that will both mitigate and take advantage of the coming changes in climate. They know the Earth's climate is constantly changing, and rather than believing they can alter that and wasting their time, they know the real fortunes will be made by the people who exploit it. They'll emerge from their labs and workrooms with new products and services we'll flock to buy. Human beings adapt. We've survived through ice ages and warming periods before with a lot less adaptive technology. Power hungry politicians are in a race to convince us all we need to turn ourselves over to them before we all realize they have nothing to offer us but our own subservience.; 8/7/19, 4:19 PM
El Supremo said...: If Global Warming is a threat, then any solution other than waiting for technology to mitigate it or adapting is pure bullshit fantasy. A political solution is totally impossible, so just stop all the pretending. It ain't gonna happen. If our salvation is in a global political solution then just be happy you were born before it burned up. All this talk and hysteria is a big waste of time, becuase humans just don't work that way.; 8/7/19, 4:22 PM
eddie willers said...: About ten years ago I read a book about the Magna Carta. (1215 AD) They celebrated with locally grown and locally made wine.

No agenda, but just the facts ma'am.; 8/7/19, 4:22 PM
Bill Harshaw said...: re: Owen--continuation, posted by accident before I said this:

no scientist, just a retired bureaucrat, so I don't feel capable of judging among the scientists. But when behavior of people with money at risk confirms what is claimed to be the consensus of most scientists, I go with that.; 8/7/19, 4:23 PM
Bricap said...: Michael, if we're talking money, how much do fossil fuel industries and petrostates have at stake in this debate?; 8/7/19, 4:31 PM
phantommut said...: While I'm sure what he says is true, that statement is going to bring holy hell from the Eco-Crusaders down on AccuWeather.; 8/7/19, 4:34 PM
Gahrie said...: East Anglia or Mann will simply go back and "adjust" those records to make them cooler.; 8/7/19, 4:38 PM
madAsHell said...: I should have organized that as a Jeopardy question.....
Contestant: Alex, I'll take leading causes for a $1000.
Trubeck: The answer is...Millions in grants, and subsidies
Contestant: What is the leading cause of global warming??; 8/7/19, 4:42 PM
tampapaw said...: DUST BOWL; 8/7/19, 4:45 PM
mandrewa said...: Bill Harshaw, it's likely that things are complicated. For instance it may be the case that global warming is occurring and that it is a real potential danger but, in addition to that, we have scientists and institutions that are lying, and lying to an amazing degree.

You mentioned Robert Muller, he's a man that is a part of a team has come up with some evidence that substantial global warming is occurring, and yet at the same time he has also said this,

Climategate 'hide the decline' explained by Berkeley professor Robert Muller

I would feel much better about the climate science community if there were more people like Muller.

And I'd be quite interested to know what Muller thinks about that video from Tony Heller above, about misuse of the US temperature data by NOAA.; 8/7/19, 4:46 PM
phantommut said...: mccullough said...
I wonder how well-calibrated/maintained the equipment has been. I’m assuming the equipment used now is better.

You know how you calibrate a mercury thermometer? You take a bucket of water and ice, stir it, put the thermometer in, voila. 32°; mark the glass. Now take a pot of water, boil it, put the thermometer in, voila, 212°; mark the glass.

To put it in a different way, engineers in 1969 put two men on the moon. We've got a lot better tech now and we currently can't do it. I'm willing to go out on a limb and say the folks back in the 1930's could work the tech they had.; 8/7/19, 4:48 PM
Howard said...: No one mentioned Roger Pielke Jr. It proves the depth of you people ignorances. FYI he got kicked off 538 because he said that there is no proof of climate change induced extreme weather; 8/7/19, 4:49 PM
Owen said...: Michael K @ 4:16: CC is an industry? Yes indeed.

As the joke goes, if you want a grant to research the mating habits of the flying squirrel, sorry, not a nickel can be found. If you want a grant to research the effects of climate change on the mating habits of the flying squirrel, well, how much would you like?; 8/7/19, 4:49 PM
narciso said...: largely there is the still the question, of heat island measures, throwing off the observations of the overall climate track,; 8/7/19, 4:55 PM
phantommut said...: Same in Toronto--I like to check out the temp graphs in the newspaper and the daily highs haven't changed much, but the nighttime lows are much warmer. It's not cooling off at night like it used to.

The more pavement you have, the less evaporative cooling you get from soil, vegetation, etc. Toronto is a growing city. The bigger it gets, the less the aggregate area is going to cool off.; 8/7/19, 4:56 PM
Fritz said...: Bill Harshaw said...
re: coastal flooding:

From a 2018 NOAA report for US:
"In 2018, 12 communities broke or tied their previous records for the number of days with high-tide flooding, some with more than 20 days of storm-free flooding, according to the report. All were on the Eastern seaboard, from Massachusetts down to Florida."
"In Annapolis, Md., where high-tide flooding is quickly becoming a chronic problem, the city plans to upgrade storm drains, raise roads and install pumps to keep low-lying areas dry. A study published earlier this year estimated high-tide flooding in one part of the city in 2017 cost businesses about $100,000 in lost revenue."

Alexandria and Norfolk are seeing similar patterns.

For Boston, see this: https://www.sciencenews.org/article/boston-adapting-rising-sea-level-coastal-flooding

https://www.npr.org/2019/07/10/739466268/high-tide-flooding-on-the-rise-especially-along-the-east-coast-forecasters-warn

Measuring sea levels is, I understand, difficult because the earth can be rising or subsiding in different areas (i.e. the Delta is subsiding).

I get a Chesapeake Bay newsfeed that routinely has sea level rise scare stories. What they never, ever show, is the actual data tide gauges in the area, which have excellent long term records:

Annapolis:

Baltimore

Sea level has been rising at a low, and constant rate since they started measuring it. There's simply no evidence that global warming has caused any increase in the rate of sea level rise.; 8/7/19, 5:01 PM
Ken B said...: Achilles 1:24
Sadly plausible.; 8/7/19, 5:12 PM
daskol said...: 26 of 50, huh. Suspiciously specific.; 8/7/19, 5:15 PM
Jaq said...: “ FYI he got kicked off 538 because he said that there is no proof of climate change induced extreme weather”

Dollars to donuts no proof that he was incorrect was offered.; 8/7/19, 5:29 PM
Anonymous said...: There are a whole lot of people who have spent a lot of time putting data into a box. Not much time (zero) doing real science. Hint: its the sun.; 8/7/19, 5:30 PM
Yancey Ward said...: "While France was Frying, Russia was very, very cool."

Dig Mueller up and get him back on that Russia Conspiracy!; 8/7/19, 5:32 PM
traditionalguy said...: Global Cooling has changed the Jet Stream dipping further south and blocking the old west to east air flows creating hot pockets that last a week or so. And all the experts know that,; 8/7/19, 5:32 PM
Gospace said...: Crops going in early? I'm not even certain Saskatchewan got planted this year. It's August, and in central NY you can still look over the top of the corn fields. There's been a handful of night time temps above 70.

The citrus line, the northernmost area you can grow citrus on the East Coast is still going South.; 8/7/19, 5:36 PM
narciso said...: where this starts to matter is in the insurance premiums based on these stupid projections,; 8/7/19, 5:38 PM
traditionalguy said...: Clouds over the Pacific Ocean are a third more or less . That is the only temp knob. It responds to solar flares blocking cosmic rays or not. That’s all folks; 8/7/19, 5:43 PM
chuck said...: > Millions in grants and subsidies. This is an industry.

I recall the collapse of the ozone industry, reminded me of the collapse of the aerospace industry in southern California. Whole academic careers nourished by the steady flow of research money wasted away after the Montreal Protocol. It's not like ozone science had reached an understanding of the matter, the basic chemistry had gone on life support about a year after it was proposed when a key reaction rate was measured and found to be 70-100 times less than that used to obtain the initial apocalyptic results. Folks were proposing reactions catalyzed on the surface of ice crystals and such in an attempt revive the world ending scenario. AFAIK, things got even worse about 2005 when another reaction rate was measured to be 10 times less than previously thought. Ozone holes still appear over the Antarctic, but the last one I read about was explained by an influx of cold air. Ozone holes are no longer world shaking news.

I'd love to see a updated history of the ozone episode, but it is probably too early, the politics still matter.; 8/7/19, 5:46 PM
Seeing Red said...: The Thames froze over I think in the 1600s they held carnivals on the ice. FF to 2000 and snowfalls are a thing of the past. Except, they’re not.

The earth heats up and cools. And it did that long before the Industrial Age. Our lives are blips.; 8/7/19, 5:49 PM
Jaq said...: “Michael, if we're talking money, how much do fossil fuel industries and petrostates have at stake in this debate?”

What do they have to do with it. They don’t’ get into the debate. The holes in the warmies' arguments are clear to see. Nobody had to pay for those holes, the problem for warmies' is that open discussion is allowed in a free society and they spend most of their time trying to refine propaganda rather than strengthen arguments and answering objections.; 8/7/19, 5:51 PM
Michael K said...: Blogger Bricap said...
Michael, if we're talking money, how much do fossil fuel industries and petrostates have at stake in this debate?

Oh, quite a bit, as does civilization. If you want to freeze in the dark, be my guest but not in my civilization.

If greenies don't like "fossil fuels and petrostates" why not support nuclear power?; 8/7/19, 6:16 PM
Bruce Hayden said...: “There are a whole lot of people who have spent a lot of time putting data into a box. Not much time (zero) doing real science. Hint: its the sun.”

Exactly. Or, maybe more accurately there are several primary forcing factors for global temperature, and one of the biggest is the amount of solar radiation received. Others include the amount of planetary wobble, vagaries of our orbit around the sun, planetary albedo, and I the case of ocean temps, in particular, El Niño/La Niña. When doing multivariate correlation, the one factor that is down in the noise is CO2 level. Which makes sense - for the last several decades, atmospheric CO2 has been steadily rising, but the global temps (satellite numbers, not NOAA’s continuously fudged figures) have gone up a bit, down a bit, etc.

Interestingly, when the 97% of “atmospheric scientists” supposedly agreed about Global Warming, studiously ignored in the study were physicists, and, in particular, astrophysicists - the scientists who know most about these primary forcing effects. Instead, it was filled with for example, paleoclimitologists (tree ring counters). Not only did they not apparently know a lot about astrophysics, but their statistics are not much better - Mann’s “hockey stick”, at some point, was very much the result of incompetent statistics (even before they started “hiding the decline” by carefully merging tree ring and quasi (because their global temperature calculations were, again, statistically nonsense) quantitative measurements).; 8/7/19, 6:19 PM
Michael K said...: Toronto is a growing city. The bigger it gets, the less the aggregate area is going to cool off.

Same reason Phoenix is hotter than Tucson. Urban heat island effect,; 8/7/19, 6:19 PM
Michael K said...: It proves the depth of you people ignorances.

Thank you for one more contribution in kind to Trump 2020.

Arrogant assholes are plentiful so donations continue to pour in.; 8/7/19, 6:21 PM
Yancey Ward said...: The temperature record is being constantly revised downward in the past. I can prove this in a number of instances where the someone overlooks a particular temperature record in specific place on the web.

In July of 1995, an intense heatwave hit the upper Midwest. This heatwave was particularly noted at the time because of what happened in Chicago on July 13th of that year when the temperature hit 106 degrees. The four day heatwave (it was 97 on the 12th, 106 on the 13th, 101 on the 14th, and 99 on the 15th before breaking) killed over 700 people. This event is well remembered by anyone living in the area during the the heatwave- it has its own Wikipedia entry. Because this event is so well documented for the number of deaths involved, and thus remembered by so many people, you can still find the recorded temperature readings in the the normal places unaltered- indeed, you can see the month of July 1995 for Chicago right here- those temperature readings are the same as described in the Wiki entry, and no one dares alter those records because the event was so well documented.

However, I lived in Danbury, CT in July of 1995- that same heat wave moved east, and Danbury tied its all-time record high of 106 degrees F on July the 15th after being 101 degrees the day before. In the Wiki entry I linked above for the Chicago heatwave, you will Danbury actually mentioned in the article, and in Danbury, CT's Wiki entry in the climate discussion, you will again see that 106 degree day described as tied for the city's all-time record high.

At Weather.com, about 10-15 years ago, I could still find that record high and the previous day's very high temperature faithfully reproduced- I also could find it again about 5 years later at Weather Underground after Weather.com stopped giving record data. However, last year when I went back to Weather Underground to find this data again, I found this- the two days where it had been recorded as 101 and 106, it was suddenly 95 and 97 degrees for the highs on July 14th and July 15th- a total change for the two days combined of 15 degrees F. And it isn't the case that it is a different station in the area- the main station is at the airport then and now- as it is in most city's with an airport of any kind.

These aren't the only records I know have been altered. The Summer of 1988 in Eastern Kentucky was the hottest since the 1930s. When I checked the data for the nearest NOAA site in the early oughts (through Weather.com) I could count two days in June, 7 days in July, and 4 more days in August where the temperature was recorded in excess of 100 degrees with the all-time high of 105 set on consecutive days in July of that year. When I checked the same data last year, all of the 100 degree days were missing- downgraded to numbers between 95 and 99. And when I checked just now at Weather Underground, all those local stations are now missing completely defaulting to Huntington, West Virginia, and July of 1988 is completely missing in that data set.; 8/7/19, 6:27 PM
Jaq said...: Yancey Ward, that was a great post.; 8/7/19, 6:32 PM
Yancey Ward said...: I have actually started to keep text files of notable high and low temperature events- copying the actual data from Weather Underground. I plan to keep check them from time to time to see if they are altered. One of person interest to me is the heatwave here in Oak Ridge, TN in late June and early July of 2012- the hottest it has been since I have lived here- the temps were 101, 102, 105, and 105 from June 28th-July 1st of that year. And when I checked just now, those temperatures remain unaltered. Will they be unaltered 5 years from now? 10 years? 15 years? I doubt it- I expect that, eventually, they also will be lowered.; 8/7/19, 6:38 PM
I'm Full of Soup said...: Heh are you sure his middle initial is M? I'd swear it should be D for Denier.; 8/7/19, 6:41 PM
Jaq said...: I was in Montreal in July of 1995 and it was 104. I remember it well. We jet boated on the St Lawrence River to cool off. They had the coolest “champaign rapids,” huge standing waves and no rocks.; 8/7/19, 6:46 PM
Jaq said...: I remember when I got home to New Hampshire, I had a solar blanket on my pool and I took it off and when I dove in, I felt two thermoclines as I penetrated the water.; 8/7/19, 6:49 PM
David Begley said...: Jim wrote, “How will we know if/when we've 'defeated' climate change?”

That’s a big part of the scam. We have to totally change or economy within 12 years but we won’t know if these massive changes will have worked until the end of the century. We’ll all be dead by 2100.; 8/7/19, 6:51 PM
Mike (MJB Wolf) said...: Gee Howard there are HUNDREDS of distinguished scientists we haven't mentioned yet who vary from the consensus, ones who study sunspot cycles, cloud formation, and a lot of other disciplines who measure hard data and agree we don’t know enough about the ocean or the atmosphere or the sun to declare any specific thing or things as THE CAUSE of global warming. Our ignorance exceeds even what you imagine. Get with it already.; 8/7/19, 6:53 PM
steve uhr said...: Turn up the temp slowly enough, the frogs and Althouse commentators won’t notice until it’s too late.; 8/7/19, 6:55 PM
Yancey Ward said...: AAT,

I just checked, that 104 doesn't exist at Weather Underground. Just to make my overarching point, however, Montreal's Wiki entry describes the all-time record high as 99.7 degrees F on August 1st 1975 at the airport. When I checked at Weather Underground for Montreal's airport, though, I found the high for that date as listed as 95 degrees. Another example, probably, of an altered record, and again altered downwards. This is like flipping heads 1000 times in a row.; 8/7/19, 6:57 PM
Michael K said...: Blogger steve uhr said...
Turn up the temp slowly enough, the frogs and Althouse commentators won’t notice until it’s too late.

Steve, I moved to Tucson AZ several years ago. When the ice age arrives, we have a spare bedroom.; 8/7/19, 7:01 PM
Marcus Bressler said...: Send him to the Gulag!

THEOLDMAN

Mankind is just a tiny speck on this planet when it comes to significantly affecting temperatures. Such a huge ego to think we make a difference. It IS all about the Benjamins and control; 8/7/19, 7:06 PM
Michael K said...: In July of 1995, an intense heatwave hit the upper Midwest. This heatwave was particularly noted at the time because of what happened in Chicago on July 13th of that year when the temperature hit 106 degrees.

I had driven to Chicago that week following my graduation from Dartmouth. My 14 year old daughter was with me. When we arrived in Chicago, I found my 97 year old mother in her apartment that had not yet turned on the air conditioning for the summer. I went right to a big appliance store and bought her a window air conditioning unit. I got a kid from the building to help me mount the thing in the window. I had visions of dropping the thing from 18 stories on top of some pedestrian. It worked great and she was the most popular resident of the building for two weeks.

She lived six more years. I remember all the deaths. Not her.; 8/7/19, 7:09 PM
Seeing Red said...: Turn up the temp slowly enough, the frogs and Althouse commentators won’t notice until it’s too late.

First I was going to freeze to death (50 years ago) which is what I was taught in school, now I’m going to fry to death.

Still waiting.; 8/7/19, 7:09 PM
Seeing Red said...: A couple of years ago, some German scientists predicted global cooling until 2050, global warming until 2130 and global cooling until 2200.; 8/7/19, 7:13 PM
Seeing Red said...: The Summer of 1988 Drought!

It was HOT!; 8/7/19, 7:16 PM
Yancey Ward said...: My oldest sister lived in an apartment in Chicago at the time and was being visited by my other two siblings the days of the heatwave- she didn't have a window unit, and after the heatwave started, she tried to buy one, but they were sold out everywhere she looked. My mother and father here in Tennessee tried to ship her one on a Greyhound bus, but it was stolen before she could pick it up. I think she even tried to book a room in a hotel in the downtown area and couldn't find any vacancies. That must have been miserable- I am very tolerant of high heat, but 106 without AC is not something I could handle easily.; 8/7/19, 7:18 PM
Yancey Ward said...: It is interesting- I tried finding data for the 1930s on weather underground for various cities in the midwest Louisville, Lexington, Cincinnati, St. Louis, Wichita- nothing. You can find data for the 1930s for other locations, but not for the area where the heatwave was the worst for that Summer. Odd- it is possible the data is just sparse on the site that far back, but still odd.; 8/7/19, 7:23 PM
Bricap said...: Michael, I hear good things about new wave nuclear power. My past worries were about what to do with the waste, and geological stability wherever the facility is built. The first concern seems to have been answered with the new wave tech, anyway.

There are economic reasons to support viable alternative energies. Being energy independent has obvious geopolitical benefits. The oil/shale technology potentially gets us there, but it can come with a water tradeoff, among other things.

As for Tucson being cooler than Phoenix, it's due in large part to the difference in altitude. All other things being equal, I gather it's about 5 degrees per 1000 feet of altitude change. Tucson is a beautiful place. And I love that back route drive to and from Phoenix via Oracle Junction.; 8/7/19, 7:26 PM
Fen said...: "I don't think it would necessarily be uniform across the globe."

I think Climate Change Crisis would vary according to which areas needed tk install Moar Socialism.; 8/7/19, 7:34 PM
Michael K said...: There are economic reasons to support viable alternative energies.

Until the alarmist left is willing to support nuclear energy, I will not accept them as honest debaters.

Certainly there is some reason to doubt that fossil fuels will last forever. I had always assumed that nuclear energy would be the ultimate energy source. However, Scientific American which I subscribed to all through my engineering education and work. Then, back about 1965, it began to attack nuclear power for heat pollution. That was even before the global warming scare. Global cooling was the current scare. The KGB introduced most of the scare tactics about nuclear energy in an effort to support the "Ban the Bomb" movement here and in UK.

Almost all (99%) of current hysteria is based on the career aims of various "scientists" who are often of unrelated fields, if any. To quote a well known philosopher"

“Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.”

Eric Hoffer, The Temper of Our Time; 8/7/19, 7:43 PM
Michael K said...: As for Tucson being cooler than Phoenix, it's due in large part to the difference in altitude. All other things being equal, I gather it's about 5 degrees per 1000 feet of altitude change.

I think there is a significant Urban Heat Island effect, Phoenix is hotter than other more rural areas at the same altitude,.; 8/7/19, 7:44 PM
mrams said...: We have better baseball records than weather records.; 8/7/19, 7:45 PM
Fen said...: It's so simple, and you don't need a degree to understand it:

1) We agree planet has been warming. We simply disagree as to whether humans have significantly contributed to and warming trend. For that, we are likened to Holocaust Deniers?

2) The Climate Alarmists reject any solution (like safe nuclear energy) that doesn't include Global Socialism.; 8/7/19, 7:54 PM
Michael K said...: Blogger steve uhr said...
Turn up the temp slowly enough, the frogs and Althouse commentators won’t notice until it’s too late.

Steve, Were you in Brisbane this week?; 8/7/19, 7:58 PM
Fen said...: "We have better baseball records than weather records."

Worse. The climate "scientists" have adjusted the raw data, to make the past look cooler in comparison to the present, and then DITCHED the original data. So we don't even have trustworthy temp data for a REAL climate emergency.

Climatology has destroyed the reputation of Science. It will take decades to recover that trust.; 8/7/19, 7:58 PM
Fen said...: Marxist Scum: "and Althouse commentators won’t notice until it’s too late."

You guys said 2010 was our last chance to avert Climate Armageddon.

So why are still here? It's "over", nothing can be done. Party on.; 8/7/19, 8:01 PM
Sprezzatura said...: Joel's little bro needs to get better at his work:

https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/climate-change-global-temperature

Just delete all of NOAA that Joel doesn't link to. And fire all the scientists.

OTOH, why bother w/ that. Meadehouse is already pushing the con POV. Not that everyone is that illiterate re science. So, it's best to super-delete scientists and science that big bro doesn't link to.; 8/7/19, 8:08 PM
chuck said...: > Not that everyone is that illiterate re science.

True, true. We can't all be climate scientists.; 8/7/19, 8:11 PM
Bricap said...: I spent my youth in Phoenix, the 70s and 80s. It has always been warmer there than Tucson. That would be interesting to see studies of the UHI effect in Phoenix versus other similarly situated, yet more rural, locales. Just for the sake of my lifelong fascination with AZ if nothing else. Concrete coverage in the Valley has gone way up over that time, yes. I like to say that Tucson now is generally where Phoenix was 25 years prior.

As I said before, though, the new wave nuclear sounds promising. Scott Adams refers to the negative perception as the Homer Simpson effect. I likened the old wave of nuclear as a gambler's ruin situation. It's got great edge until that one time you get the horrible outlier result that depletes the bankroll and then some. But it sounds like new wave eliminates this risk, so I would expect it will be a real part of the future mix.; 8/7/19, 8:16 PM
chuck said...: > I likened the old wave of nuclear as a gambler's ruin situation.

The problem of waste storage was that the requirements on the Nevada site kept going up, no doubt with the intent to block it. I think at the end it was required to be safe for 10,000 years or more. Who could make such a guarantee in good conscience? Heck, Canada might be under a mile of ice by then.; 8/7/19, 8:25 PM
n.n said...: We agree planet has been warming. We simply disagree as to whether humans have significantly contributed

Also, whether the warming is abnormal, sustainable, and abortive. Or, whether it is normal, chaotic, and pro-life.; 8/7/19, 8:25 PM
phantommut said...: Speaking of baseball records, there was a season in the mid 1980's where there wasn't a rain-out nation-wide through July. For some reason I stopped paying attention, because I was in a top-floor row house apartment in Baltimore and I'm pretty sure my brain stopped working about then.; 8/7/19, 8:31 PM
Seeing Red said...: Ted Danson did ads when he was popular 25ish years ago about oceans rising. We were doomed before the year 2000 I think.; 8/7/19, 8:38 PM
Owen said...: Great comments, special shout-outs to Michael K and Yancey Ward and David Begley. I am encouraged by the quality and diversity of notes (and personal recollections) being offered. The Progs have emotions, we have reason and data.

The problem of doctored history is IMHO huge. The idea that it is OK to alter the original record without explanation and audit trail is to this naive believer in empirical reality and honest truth-seeking, simply gob-smackingly corrupt and vile. You are destroying the world that really was, replacing it with your fucking fiction. I think there is no greater crime in science.

Yet this corruption is happening. I think it is deliberate, programmatic and widespread. I mean, if you're going to conduct a fraud, you gotta go big. So, Yancey (and others), keep good records. Get this stuff archived. Everywhere: because it is happening everywhere. The problem was reported years ago in Australia and NZ as well and I suspect UK. Wherever these bastards get into the universities and the NGOs and the Met Offices, they are like the Mafia, undermining the system of safeguards and controls. And then down the memory hole go those inconvenient numbers.

Sooner or later there will be a reckoning.; 8/7/19, 8:59 PM
chuck said...: > Climatology has destroyed the reputation of Science.

And Journalism has destroyed the reputation of the News. And bureaucrats have destroyed the reputation of the intelligence community. These events are probably all related to cultural changes.

I recall Condon (of Condon and Shortley) was tasked to write a report on UFOs. He found most of the reports to be explainable as natural phenomena or hoaxes, but was careful to add that there were several observations for which there was no current understanding. I would call that balanced. Of course, he came under attack by true believers and there are a lot of folks out there who claim the whole thing was a fraud that allowed the Air Force to wash their hands of the matter. But even so, the report was thorough and meticulous.

Compare with climate science, where there is much that is not understood, from clouds, ocean currents, and particulates to the 11,000 year climate record of the current Holocene interglacial with its bumpy but generally downward trend. Yet, instead of emphasizing what needs understanding, the practitioners fiddle with the data and instantly promote hypothesis (heat hidden in the ocean depths) as established fact. Where disagreement is punished by denying funding, employment, and publishing to the mavericks. Where prominent old climatologists, such as Akasofu, Lindzen, and Curry, are disowned, and intelligent folks with some expertise, such as Dyson and Happer, are disparaged. The whole enterprise is a scientific disgrace, and some day will be seen as such.; 8/7/19, 9:01 PM
Bruce Hayden said...: “The problem of waste storage was that the requirements on the Nevada site kept going up, no doubt with the intent to block it. I think at the end it was required to be safe for 10,000 years or more. Who could make such a guarantee in good conscience? Heck, Canada might be under a mile of ice by then.”

Worse. It was shown safe for 50k years, so they upped it to 500k years. Half a million years. And they probably would have passed that hurdle, except that Harry Reid, then Senate Majority Leader, defunded Yucca Mountain.; 8/7/19, 9:14 PM
effinayright said...: @ Bill Hershaw:

*The Northern Sea route is NOT the Northwest Passage, which is a narrow path between Canadian land.

*Russia has a very long coastline along the Arctic Sea. We used it during WWII to supply the Russkis with war materiel, by sailing to Murmansk.

* Yes, yachts and ships of different drafts have made it through, but it's not a predictable aka commercial route.

https://realclimatescience.com/2019/04/northwest-passage-closed-for-business/

* So...no...it's a case of month-by-month, year-by-year that you might make it through----and that's not the same as saying it's now passable for the first time ever.; 8/7/19, 9:35 PM
Owen said...: In one of my comments above I attacked the alarmism around sea level rise, which IMHO is pretty much a nothing burger. Just to make the rubble bounce, let me offer this item from Watts Up With That, titled "Slowest Start to Atlantic Hurricane Season Since 2004."

https://wattsupwiththat.com/2019/08/07/slowest-start-to-atlantic-hurricane-season-since-2004/

2004 is not ancient history but it's still 15 years. And we have been told that we are in the grip of gigantic and inexorable forces, processes that grind on year by year, even accelerating from year to year, as we approach the planet's ignition point. So while we might accept a certain amount of noise in the hurricane signal, we should have seen a clear trend. But what in fact do we see?; 8/7/19, 9:49 PM
pacwest said...: "All this talk and hysteria is a big waste of time, becuase humans just don't work that way."

That's the bottom line.

And regarding the green new deal. If we decide to start living in mud huts to save the planet I'm sure China will be willing to create more CO2 to take up the slack.; 8/7/19, 10:08 PM
Bricap said...: As for the waste storage debate, that was preceded by the debate on whether or not to reprocess the spent fuel. The arguments against seem to be that it costs more than disposing (with disagreements as to how much more), and the old fear that it could be further converted into weapon grade. Apparently other countries have already been doing reprocessing spent for some time? I would hope they figure out a way to get past both the real and perceived hurdles at some point.; 8/7/19, 10:30 PM
JamesB.BKK said...: "I wonder how well-calibrated/maintained the equipment has been. I’m assuming the equipment used now is better. Makes it tough to precisely measure across time" But did you just suggest that mercury in a glass tube did not act consistently? What does "precisely measure" mean? Suspect.

https://infogalactic.com/info/Mercury-in-glass_thermometer; 8/7/19, 11:12 PM
Narayanan said...: Miles' Law is the principle in bureaucratic politics that one's position in a bureaucracy determines one's position on an issue

Q: is science different?; 8/7/19, 11:45 PM
Narayanan said...: Hormesis.

How much nuclear waste can be used up with pill-a-day for each human on planet.; 8/7/19, 11:53 PM
Narayanan said...: If we're going to use "global average Temperature" to fight "warming" don't we need "global average ocean depth" to fight "Sea Level rise."; 8/7/19, 11:58 PM
JamesB.BKK said...: "Sooner or later there will be a reckoning." I dunno. Abe Lincoln, Wilson, Churchill, Roosevelt seem to get props wherever approved opinion is expressed.; 8/8/19, 12:02 AM
Yancey Ward said...: Here is another change I can personally confirm- Dallas, Texas at the DFW reporting station:

Here you can find the all-time record high reported on Wiki for Dallas at the Dallas/Fort Worth Airport of 113 degrees F on consecutive days on June 26th and June 27th 1980. I verified this over a decade ago examining temperature records. I just looked at the same weather station on Weather Underground- it is now reported at 111 degrees both days. Another downward adjustment.; 8/8/19, 12:27 AM
Art in LA said...: @Yancey ... thanks for the time machine. I had been in Chicago (actually Evanston) for about a year when that heatwave hit. The insulated brick apartment buildings in Chicagoland are like heat sinks. There was a run on in-window AC units and it took me a few days to get one at the local Home Depot. It was brutally hot for this LA kid. We went to a Cubs game that July in that heat, and then three months later, at the Northwestern homecoming game against Wisconsin, it was right at 33-ish degrees and drizzling. 70+ degree swing in high temps in about 90 days. This is one of the reasons we’re back in SoCal! 😂 BTW, Northwestern earned a Rose Bowl berth that season ... their last time, I think.; 8/8/19, 12:28 AM
Yancey Ward said...: And, again, I will note- these are the ones I can confirm because they are all time record highs getting adjusted down, but where there are other places you can get specific data that is directly linked to the data set itself, such as Wiki pages. I can't tell what is happening to the data of an uneventful day such as, let's say, June 1 1946 in Bumfuck, Texas. I will assume that if all time record highs are getting adjusted downwards, then pretty much the days are getting adjusted downwards. If it keeps happening, let's say, over the periods of 2000-2020, then I will just state it flat out- it is all a fraud- you can't keep using the excuse that it is all due to better equipment. I have already demonstrated that they are adjusting temperatures from the 1990s downwards, and I suspect that a decade from now I will be able to show them doing it on the temperature records of the 2000s, and then the 2010s.; 8/8/19, 12:38 AM
Yancey Ward said...: Art in LA,

I got my PhD at Northwestern!; 8/8/19, 12:40 AM
Milwaukie guy said...: Just started reading this and searched for diurnal. Not there.

So, while daytime temperatures are not really getting higher, the diurnal [nighttime] temperature is rising, giving a higher average overall. The higher diurnal temperature is entirely in the urban areas due to heat absorption by buildings and roads, etc. Think of all the concrete at the airport where the official temperature is taken. Rural areas show no such increase.

Good night all!; 8/8/19, 12:56 AM
Owen said...: Regarding temperature readings, many sites are at airports. Because the original purpose of official readings was not (just) science but safety: letting pilots know the air temperature as they took off and landed. Hotter air gives less lift, so if you are concerned about flight safety you will WANT your temperature readings to err on the high side. You will not worry much if the thermometer is sited close to the baking-hot tarmac or within range of hot engine exhaust.

Over time the airport-centric system of reading and recording temperature was absorbed into the meteorological bureaucracy. Temperature became used for “science,” but those sites were biased high. As with urban heat island effects, the system gives a false picture of what the “real” world is doing. Anthony Watts is great on all this stuff.; 8/8/19, 5:06 AM
Michael McNeil said...: The original Frankenstein was written during the Little Ice Age. If you read the novel, you will see that ice and snow were constant themes. There is even a scene, IIRC, with the monster on a dog sled. Hers was not the only piece of art that reflected an increased attention to colder weather.

Such as the paintings by (e.g.) Pieter Bruegel the Elder showing hordes of ice-skaters out on the ice during winter.

That painting and its ilk tell us several things: 1) The canals and waterways of the Netherlands then froze fairly often. Often enough, thoroughly enough, and over a long enough period (centuries?) for people to have developed a tradition of going out en masse when it occurs to enjoy themselves out on the ice. Often enough that people would have ice skates (or the materials to assemble them), plus have gained enough skill to stand up and skate on the ice.

Nowadays, the canals of Holland seldom freeze, and even more seldom freeze hard enough to reliably support peoples' weight.; 8/8/19, 5:24 AM
Michael McNeil said...: The funny thing to me is that the polar bears survived the Eemian, a period much warmer than today for at least two thousand years. A period so hot that the Seychelles, and probably other islands, were under water. We are forbidden to notice this though. Just twenty thousand years ago, due to gradual changes in the Earth’s orbit that occasionally produce extremes in solar insolation at various lattitudes, the Arctic was far warmer than today, and likely the Arctic Ocean was ice free during the summer, and the polar bears did fine.

Polar bears can always go back to foraging on land — while they wait for sea ice to reappear (which it will, every year during autumn and winter — even if it does at some point begin disappearing in toto during summer). Polar bears originally evolved from brown bears (grizzlies), and can do just fine resuming that role for a time.

Concerning the Eemian, that interglacial (the last before the present one, lasting from around 130k-115k before the present) was a “period so hot” that large portions of the Greenland ice sheet melted — an event which so far has not even come close to (or even started) occurring during the present (Holocene) interglacial (12k-0 BP).; 8/8/19, 5:33 AM
stlcdr said...: I’ve bumped up the temperature inside the house to 78/80.

It feels a lot cooler outside than it used to be. I suspect, and this may be a really wacko idea, but I suspect we acclimatize ourselves as a western civilization to cooler temperatures, making normal summer temps feel a lot hotter.; 8/8/19, 5:47 AM
Michael McNeil said...: Two million years ago, India was an island off the coast of Asia, and the Himalayas were a low plateau.

You're off by an order of magnitude. It was approximately 20 million years ago the collision most intimately occurred — that land met land — though in geological terms, the collision between subcontinent and continent had already been underway for tens of millions of years.

And no one has any good idea what causes the shift. Could be a chaotic system, more or less random.

Even if you personally doubt the prevailing scientific theory in this regard — the Milankovich cycles (principally variations in elements of the earth's orbit that over many tens of thousands of years periodically cause the sun to shine down more directly upon high latitudes) — that's a far cry from assertions that “nobody has any good idea” about the cause.

Way beyond that, the (approximately 100,000 year) periodicity which the theory was created to address is also pretty clearly beyond “random.”; 8/8/19, 5:51 AM
Bruce Hayden said...: @McNeil - Thanks. Esp for the Milankovich cycles link. That article explains it a lot better than the wobble and vagaries of orbit that I mentioned above. The science seems to have evolved significantly over the last half century or so since I was taking most of my science. Back then, they knew that the Earth’s orbit wasn’t exactly consistent, nor was its tilt, etc completely consistent.

Oh, and I can’t wait to tell my kid that their birthday Is when the Earth presently moves through the invariable plane. Their undergrad was in physics, but went in a different direction for their PhD.; 8/8/19, 8:28 AM
Bruce Hayden said...: “Polar bears can always go back to foraging on land — while they wait for sea ice to reappear (which it will, every year during autumn and winter — even if it does at some point begin disappearing in toto during summer). Polar bears originally evolved from brown bears (grizzlies), and can do just fine resuming that role for a time.”

They do, on rare occasion, interbreed successfully. The coloring of the offspring is fairly distinctive- a very light sandy off white. They stand out a bit in a group of polar bears, and probably would among brown bear too. I was surprised a bit though that the brown bears were somewhat dominant in their interactions. But that could just be random matching of individuals, given how infrequently they currently run into each other.

I would expect more overlap in the ranges of the two species, if the climate were truly getting warmer, for awhile, until a new equilibrium was reached. Less ice would presumably disadvantage the species whose coloring matches ice, as compared to the species whose coloring that matches dirt better.; 8/8/19, 8:43 AM
Bruce Hayden said...: “You're off by an order of magnitude. It was approximately 20 million years ago the collision most intimately occurred — that land met land — though in geological terms, the collision between subcontinent and continent had already been underway for tens of millions of years.”

That makes more sense. 2 million years ago, we were well along the road to humanhood, 5 million or so years beyond our split from Chimps and Bonobos. If I remember correctly, we were splitting from gorillas at maybe the 20 million mark. 2 million just seemed too short, and too recent, for the Himalayas.; 8/8/19, 8:50 AM
Bruce Hayden said...: Ok, I have a fetish for being the one to roll into a new page of comments.; 8/8/19, 8:51 AM
Bruce Hayden said...: 201?

My partner has to do everything in 2s, except certain design aspects, because low odd primes (3, 5, and maybe 7) are more noticeable, presumably because of their apparent oddness. But she has to end her counting of almost everything on an even number. Not for me. I do multiples of 5. Hence, maybe my obsession of rolling into a new comment page.; 8/8/19, 8:55 AM
JamesB.BKK said...: Or shine less directly, in each case for extended periods. The mass media government takeover accounts offer no explanation for reversals from cold to warm and vice versa in the past. This is understandable in that their cause, namely, population reduction through hectoring, discomfort, and pessimism, is not served.; 8/9/19, 11:55 PM