Posted on 11/08/2011 10:44:54 AM PST by QT3.14
At Watts Up With That, data from the National Climatic Data Center are reviewed. The results are quite startling. Every region of the continental United States has shown a cooling trend during the winter from 2001 to the present, and five of the nine regions have also had a cooling trend during the summer. With respect to annual mean temperature, only one of nine regionsthe Northeasthas gotten warmer; the other eight have gotten cooler.
(Excerpt) Read more at powerlineblog.com ...
I grew up in Dallas, and one year in the early 80’s, the temperature did not get above freezing for 3 weeks. White Rock Lake was frozen and people were ice skating on it.
My mom still lives in Dallas, and I don’t think she’s been In a winter as bad as that one.
A couple of years ago they had a bad ice storm and my parents were without electricity for almost a week. We never personally lost electricity when I was growing up. I think that was the worst winter for my parents.
The latest effort by people seeking "real, undistorted facts" (the Berkeley Earth Project):
- http://berkeleyearth.org/
And even with your “real, undistorted facts” I find problems.
#1 - Berkeley? Red flag. Data from communists is often less than reliable. If they don’t flat out lie to fit their message, they more often then not will massage the data.
#2 - The rise seems to be significant, but warming doesn’t mean AGW. Climate changes. Weather is variable. Stuff happens.
#3 - And finally, 1800-2000, 200 years. So, for 200 years of data, they sound the alarm? How old is the planet? 4 billion years? How many warming/cooling cycles have been documented?
Here in NE Ohio, the weather people can’t get tomorrow’s weather correct. I’m being very literal, half the time they can’t get tomorrow’s weather correct. It’s amazing how the technology has made forecasters less accurate. I know climate isn’t weather, but they are related. If we are incapable of understanding one, how can we understand the other?
Mueller's statement was incorrect because of precisely the issue presented in that first "skeptics versus realists" graph I posted: 10 or 15 years is not long enough to achieve a statistically significant discrimination between short-term and long-term temperature trends (that requires around 30 years).
That's why by cherry picking the data (as in the skeptic example in that graph) you can demonstrate that for a decade or so there have been numerous periods when the temperature trend for that period was downwards - even though the longer term trend has clearly been upwards.
So Curry is correct: the recent downward trend absolutely cannot be used to indicate that "global warming has not stopped", just as the same data cannot be used to demonstrate that "global warming has stopped".
Thus Curry's comment that Murry's comment "detracts from the credibility of the data, which is very unfortunate.
So where does that leave us?
What the latest "skeptical" analysis does do is increase our confidence that previous global temperature reconstructions were reasonably accurate - that even when she bring more powerful statistical tools and careful reanalysis to questions such as siting induced errors there has been a substantial increase in global temperatures, prior to 1990.
WHY this happened is a separate question.
"....and Leon is getting laaaaarger."
You can even - if you wish to - consider human climate drivers just another "natural phenomena" - we are part of nature, after all.
We just happen to be a natural phenomena which is raising CO2 concentrations pretty quickly on the time frame in which we have been operating.
And there is nothing about this observation which implies that on a longer time frame there might be other natural phenomena which would act as more significant drivers of climate, or that over shorter time frames there may not be other natural phenomena (such as volcanic activity) that might be even more influential.
So what often strikes me as odd about this debate is the conviction that human activities are somehow so "different" that we are reluctant to apply quite well understood aspects of physics and chemistry to evaluating their likely results.
I disagree that the modeling of the complex systems that comprise earth are well known enough to be accurately simulated.
How about going back 160 years and using data which has not been " adjusted". A couple of rather interesting graphs from New Zealand which of all places one would suppose would need very little adjustment as it's surrounded by the Pacific Ocean and has little atmospheric pollution to speak of yet still has the same CO2 density as the rest of the planet.http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/10/09/new-zealands-niwa-temperature-train-wreck/,/a>
I prefer Warming and I am in South Texas
TT
You’re doing a good job presenting some of the data. There are problems with the data though. Now that the data is out in public, people are going to plow through it and as it is filtered by common scientific sense (and not just by people looking for global warming), the average will become valuable.
Well, that's petty much what the Berkeley Earth Project did: started from scratch on the the data, took a fresh look at the statistical methods (and even managed to extend their data set back a bit further than had been done previously - which was a useful contribution)... and came up with almost exactly the same result as previous methods.
So you have to ask "How many bits of the apple is it reasonable to take", and expect to get a different result?
Global Warming on Free Republic
The Northeast has gotten slightly warmer during the summer, but significantly colder during the winter. That is what the data stated. It is probably easy to see that by just observing how short spring and fall have become in your area the past few years. During an Ice Age, you have two seasons.
The cooling has occurred during the last 10 years, so your graph is not even related to this story. Everyone agrees that the 1998 El Nino caused an upward spike in atmospheric temps. That is what strong El Ninos do. So everyone assumes a temperature increase from 1980’s leading up to 1998. Not stepped like you insinuate.
Whenever you have record snow pack in the western US mountains, you might want to assume that summer time in Texas will be a barn burner. Watched the weather all summer long and the dominant air flow in your area was up from Mexico into Texas and out toward the east. The western mountains were cold due to record snow pack and may have formed a blocking pattern. The warm weather coming up from Mexico helped to develop the high pressure over Texas.
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