Thanks to Richard Mackey and John McLean this blast from the past. This 1933 paper, ”Is our climate changing? A study of long-term temperature trends” by J B Kincer of the U S Weather Bureau in Washington DC published in the Monthly Weather Review Vol 61 pages 251 to 259, has an eerie resonance with the current debate.

Is Our Climate Changing? A Study of Long-Time Temperature Trends

By By J. B. Kincer, Weather Bureau, Washington, D.C., Sept. 29, 1933

The present wide-spread and persistent tendency toward warmer weather, and especially the recent long series of mild winters, has attracted considerable public interest; so much so that frequently the question is asked “Is our climate changing? ” Historic climate has always been considered by meteorologists and climatologists to be a rather stable thing, in marked contrast to geologic climate and to weather. We know there have been major geologic changes in climate and that weather, which is the meteorological condition at any particular time, or for a short period of time, such as a day or a month, is far from stable. Different kinds of weather come and go in comparatively brief, alternating spurts, as it were, or with short periods of irregular length-cool or cold, then warm, and vice versa-succeeding one another with a continuous recurrence that everyone takes for granted. However, an exhaustive statistical examination of these short period temperature fluctuations fails to disclose any regularity that would afford a basis for forecasting future weather independent of the standard forecasting methods of the Weather Bureau, in which daily synoptic charts play an important role.

The phase of weather, or climate, that is attracting attention at the present time is not these short-period changes from warm to cool, and vice versa, for they are always present, but rather an apparent longer-time change to cool periods that seem to be less frequent and of shorter duration, and duration, and warm periods that are more pronounced and persistent. It has been thought that these fluctuations in temperature eventually neutralize one another, or smooth themselves out, when the long-time record is taken into account. In other words, meteorologists consider that climate, which is the normal run of the weather, for a long period of time, is a fairly stable thing, and that the average temperature for, say, any consecutive 20 years, selected at random from a long record, would not differ materially from that for any other consecutive 20 years so selected from that particular record. It appears, however, from the data presented with this study that the orthodox conception of the stability of climate needs revision, and that our granddad was not so far wrong, as we have been wont to believe, in his statements about the exit of the old-fashioned winter of his boyhood days. We are familiar with statements by elderly people, such as “The winters were colder and the snows deeper when I was a youngster”, and the like.

Read more and see graphs and tables here.
William Kininmonth adds :For some scientists life did not exist before the satellite era!  There is a nice contribution in Monthly Weather Review November 1922 (p 589) talking about the then recent Arctic warming, including that during the previous winter the ocean waters north of Spitzbergen did not freeze over. Currently the waters north of Spitzbergen are only ice free briefly in summer. A 13 September 1937 article in Time magazine refers to the opening of a new route for the North West Passage through Bellot Strait. As a footnote it is mentioned that Russia then had a fleet of 160 freighters that operated the North East passage summer schedule.