Pursuant to our previous story showing issues with diverging data and claims over time, NCDC has updated the Climate Reference Network Data for December 2012. I’m still waiting on the NCDC State of the Climate report to come in with their number, and I’ll update the graphic (in yellow) when it is available.
Being a state of the art system, it is well sited, and requires no adjustments and the data is well spatially distributed by design so that it is representative of the CONUS. Here’s the current plot
(click to enlarge):
Each number in blue represents one of the 117 NCDC operated U.S. Climate Reference Network stations. Here’s the data reports for December and the entire year:
From the NCDC provided FTP data files we can calculate a yearly CONUS Tavg, which has never been done before by NCDC to my knowledge. Odd that is falls to somebody outside of the organization don’t you think?
Therefore, from this data, the Average Annual Temperature for the Contiguous United States for 2012 is 55.25F
Note also the value from the CRN from July 2012, 75.6F far lower than what NCDC reported in the SOTC of 77.6F and later in the database of 76.93F as discussed here.
Makes you wonder why NCDC never mentions their new state of the art, well sited climate monitoring network in those press releases, doesn’t it? The CRN has been fully operational since late 2008, and we never here a peep about it in SOTC. Maybe they don’t wish to report adverse results.
I look forward to seeing what NCDC comes up with for the Cooperative Observer Network (COOP) in their “preliminary” State of the Climate Report for Dec 2012 and the year, and what the final number will be in 1-2 months when all the data from the COOP network comes in.
On Weatherbell.com, Dr Ryan Maue has calculated used NCEP global reanalysis the annual temperature anomalies. As he describes it the departure of 0.039C is a ‘yawner”.
UPDATE: As Art and I have both written, snowcover has been increasing not decreasing. In fact Rutger’s snow lab shows this December set a record for Northern Hemispheric snowcover.
When I was a television meteorologist sometimes a hurricane would destroy an area, tornadoes would strike with little or no warming, winter storms would bury cities in snow, floods would inundate communities and temperature records would be broken. People accepted these events as the normal variability that has always confronted and confounded humanity.
Not so anymore. Now when a minimal category one hurricane strikes it’s called “a super storm.” When Washington D.C. is digging out from under two feet of snow it’s given a name like “snowmageddon.” When drought hits the farm belt it’s said to be consistent with predictions that say in a warmer world dry conditions will become more severe. In today’s world virtually any weather event that causes any interruption in the flow of daily life is proof that weather is becoming more extreme due to global warming. Is there really more extreme weather in a warmer world?
When I start a semester teaching meteorology, one of the first things my students learn (hopefully) is that it’s temperature contrast across the earth that drives weather. They learn that the greater the temperature contrast between the poles and the equator, the harder the atmosphere works to equalize that contrast. The way this work is done is with stronger storms. Stronger storms do a better job of transporting heat from the tropics to the polar regions, therefore reducing the contrast in temperature across the earth. In a sense the storms are the earth’s safety valves helping to reduce the pressure so the pipes don’t blow!
In a warmer world with less temperature contrast between the poles and the equator the weather would be less extreme, not more so. In the Northern Hemisphere winter the storms are much more powerful than in the summer. In winter jetstream winds miles above our heads roar at 150 to 200 miles per hour where as in summer they drift along at 20 to 40 miles per hour. Weaker temperature contrast decreases the available energy to make bigger storms and that’s what you would have in a warmer world.
What proof do I have of this claim that weather is less extreme in a warmer world? The answer is in the ice. The ice in glaciers holds a record of earth’s past temperature. Greenland is a great repository of very old ice. Scientists have drilled deep into the ice and have retrieved long cores that can be dated year by year and then analysed to reveal past temperature.
The method of recreating past temperature from ice cores is quite ingenious. Water in the oceans is made up of two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom. But not all water is the same. About 99.8% of all water in the oceans has oxygen with an atomic weight of 16. About 0.2% of the water in the worlds oceans has oxygen with an atomic weight of 18. Oxygen 18 is about 11% heavier than oxygen 16 so it is a little harder to evaporate and once in the clouds it falls out in precipitation a little more readily, depending on temperature. It is this difference between lighter oxygen and heavier oxygen that tells us so much about the temperature of the past.
When the world is warmer, more of the heavier oxygen 18 makes it farther north as snow. When this snow falls onto the Greenland ice cap it is eventually crushed by more overlying snowfall and becomes ice. This ice has a higher concentration of oxygen 18 to oxygen 16. Years, decades and centuries of ice with this higher ratio of oxygen 18 to 16 tell us the earth was warmer. When the earth is colder the heavier oxygen 18 falls out sooner before reaching the colder polar regions like Greenland. The result is that the snow that falls on the Greenland ice cap has a lower concentration of oxygen 18 to 16. In the ice cores this lower ratio tells us the earth was colder when that snow fell thousands of years ago.
So what does this remarkable record of temperature frozen in the ice tell us about past climate and weather? The ice says that when the earth has been colder the climate, and therefore the weather, which is what ultimately makes up climate over the long run, was much more extreme than today, wildly so. The ice age temperature variability is enormous. The Greenland ice core reveals that the temperature range during the ice age was around 40 degrees Fahrenheit! There were periods of time when the temperature would plunge 20 to 30 degrees for thousands of years then suddenly stop falling. After that the temperature would rocket upward in just a few hundred years or just a few decades to where the temperature had been before or even warmer! These were amazingly wild temperature swings. Only the most robust and adaptable of creatures could have survived these massive gyrations of extreme climate change. These gigantic roller coaster temperature swings, in very short periods of time, reduce the changes of the last 100 years to irrelevant insignificance.
In the winter, during the ice age, the temperature over the ice sheet, being a mile above sea level, would drop to perhaps 100 degrees below zero or lower. The temperature in the tropic was still warm so the temperature contrast between the air over the ice and the tropics would have been much larger than today resulting in wild weather extremes. When the ice age ended the contrast in temperature across the earth eased. The result of this decrease in temperature contrast has been far less temperature instability over the last 10,000 years. Temperature has varied by only 5.5 degrees Fahrenheit since the ice age ended as opposed to 40 degrees during the ice age! The ice core data is telling us that when the earth is warmer there is much less volatility of temperature and therefore the weather that results from that decrease in volatility is much less extreme.
Other than the long term trends in temperature we can derive from the ice cores, our “official” weather records only extend back to 1895 in the United States. There are no weather records of the extremes of weather for 99% of the last 10,000 years. The evidence from the Greenland ice strongly indicates that when the earth is cold the weather is crazy beyond anything we see today with inconceivably large temperature swings back and forth in very short periods of time. This indicates enormous extremes of weather.
So is the weather more extreme today than the past? The answer from the ice is no, not by a long shot.
Dr. Richard Feynman, the great physicist told his students about the scientific method in this class. By his definition the theory of AGW is falsified and should be discarded.
I presented some of the evidence that taken together with that compiled by Marc Morano is more than enough to discredit/falsify global warming.
Here is an interview I did for Nashua CTV Speakupnh. I will add the Hudson video I did with Art Horn when it is released.
Done deal:enlarged. Washington, D.C. to complete warmest year on record in 2012 – Capital Weather Gang - The Washington Post
The GHCN station at nearby Beltsville, Maryland says that 2012 is the second warmest year.
But let’s move away from the urban sprawl, to the closest GHCN HCN station in Virginia. November was the coldest on record, temperatures have been declining for 80 years, and 2012 as a whole was below normal. The Washington DC temperature record is thoroughly contaminated by UHI, and is completely useless as a climate indicator.
Alaska is going rogue on climate change....the nation’s icebox is getting even icier.
That may not be news to Alaskans coping with another round of 50-below during the coldest winter in two decades, or to the mariners locked out of the Bering Sea this spring by record ice growth.
Then again, it might. The 49th state has long been labeled one of the fastest-warming spots on the planet. But that’s so 20th Century.
In the first decade since 2000, the 49th state cooled 2.4 degrees Fahrenheit.
Widespread warming
That’s a “large value for a decade,” the Alaska Climate Research Center at the University of Alaska Fairbanks said in “The First Decade of the New Century: A Cooling Trend for Most of Alaska.”
The cooling is widespread—holding true for 19 of the 20 National Weather Service stations sprinkled from one corner of Alaska to the other, the paper notes. It’s most significant in Western Alaska, where King Salmon on the Alaska Peninsula saw temperatures drop most sharply, a significant 4.5 degrees for the decade, the report says.
The new nippiness began with a vengeance in 2005, after more than a century that saw temperatures generally veer warmer in Alaska, the report says. With lots of ice to lose, the state had heated up about twice as fast as the rest of the planet, in line with rising global greenhouse gas emissions, note the Alaska Climate Center researchers, Gerd Wendler, L. Chen and Blake Moore. After a “sudden temperature increase” in Alaska starting in 1977, the warmest decade on record occurred in the 1980s, followed by another jump in the 1990s, they note. The third warmest decade was the 1920s, by the way.
Too chilly for king salmon?
But now comes cooling. Researchers blame the Decadal Oscillation, an ocean phenomenon that brought chillier surface water temperatures toward Alaska. Some contend the Pacific Decadal Oscillation is harming the state’s king salmon runs, too.
One effect of the oscillation is to weaken the Aleutian Low—a storm-breeding center known for spitting out winter tempests that help regulate weather in the Lower 48. With that low-pressure center above the Aleutians weakened, polar storms raking Alaska from the north linger longer.
People have noticed the new chill in King Salmon, but slightly colder temperatures don’t bother you much when you’re already bundled up for 20-below, said Don Hatten, the National Weather Service forecaster there. Most noticeable was that for the first time last year, the Bering Sea ice shelf extended south nearly to the edge of the Alaska Peninsula, he said.
The single exception to Alaska’s cooling trend came in Barrow along North Slope, where the mercury rose as it has across most of the Arctic. That’s because that northernmost slice of Alaska is secluded from the rest of the state by the Brooks Range, researchers say. Temperatures for the decade were 3.1 degrees higher in Barrow. That trend continued earlier this year, with weeks of above average temperatures in Barrow, apparently driven in part by Arctic Ocean ice melting.
Some like it cold
Will Alaska’s frigid spell last long? The researchers don’t know. The report notes, however, that Alaska endured three decades of relative cold starting in the mid-1940s. Many Alaskans pray the current cold stretch abates sooner.
But Bethel’s Myron Angstman, a pilot, musher and longtime organizer of the Kuskokwim 300 sled dog race, isn’t one of those Alaskans. He’s glad it’s chillier in Southwest Alaska, because increased freezing creates safer trips for mushers, snowmachiners, skiers and others.
Too much warm weather leads to freeze-thaw cycles that create unpredictable layers of ice and hidden water. Even a plunge into a few feet of overflow can prove life-threatening when the subzero temperatures have returned and your snowmachine is stuck—or you’re drenched.
“There’s nothing worse than a winter in rural Alaska with temperatures of 35 degrees,” he said.
Very cold December
Alaska’s cold trend may even be strengthening this winter. National Weather Service meteorologist Shaun Baines reported Saturday that as of Dec. 21, Anchorage had already spent 10 days below zero this month. The city’s average temperature this December is just 5.3 degrees, nearly 8 degrees shy of the December average of 13.2 degrees. Even though warmer air is due by Christmas Day, Anchorage was already enroute to the coldest winter since 1982.
Could it warm up a bit during the second half of Alaska’s winter? Anything is possible, but the National Weather Service in Anchorage recently completed its 90-day forecast and calls for colder-than-normal temperatures at least through the end of March, said meteorologist Dave Stricklan.
---------
Icecap Notes:
You can see why the cold PDO with cold water off Alaska would result in a cold Alaska.
Richard Keen in an analysis a few years back showed how the Alaska temperatures tracked with the modes of the PDO. The PDO dipped dramatically after 2006 resulting in the cooling decade (the step down) as the article notes.
Hi Joe et al.,
When I did my update study of central Alaska for the Natl. Park Service last year, I found a correlation of r=0.81 between PDO and temperature on 5-year time scales, and an apparent PDO shift to cold
Alaska in 2006-2007. The original 2005 study is posted by NPS, The update should be posted soon. In the meantime, I’ve attached some slides (PDF) on the subject, extracted from a talk I gave a few months ago about “global climate dysfunction”. The bottom line is that for Alaska climate, there’s the PDO and not much else. I’m also sending a different PDO data slide, namely, AK temps compared to the NP index on five-year time scales. The NP is the atmospheric component of the PDO, i.e., mean North Pacific SLP. Enjoy.
Rich
When the Atlantic ocean cools in 5 years or so, the other side of the arctic will cool and the ice will increase dramatically as it did in the 1960s when the AMO dove.
The Obama Gang is stealing our taxes, energy resources, revenues, jobs and economy
An oil and natural gas boom is underway in the United States, born of horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking.” It has created tens of thousands of well-paying jobs directly, and hundreds of thousands more in hundreds of businesses that supply and support the industry and its workers.
In North Dakota, the unemployment rate is 2.4 percent, in large part because of a huge increase in natural gas and crude oil production from deep shale rocks that yielded nothing prior to fracking. The new technology is also driving job growth, higher incomes, and increased tax revenues for hard-pressed state and local governments in Louisiana, Pennsylvania, Texas and other states.
Meanwhile, 350 miles north of Edmonton, Alberta, other innovators are producing billions of barrels from oil sands that stretch across an area the size of Utah. Shallow deposits are accessible via surface mining, while deeper lodes are tapped using in situ drilling and steam injection. As work is completed in an area, the land is restored to woodlands, grasslands, lakes and marshes, and the process moves on.
As with fracking, the oil sands create tens of thousands of high-paying jobs and generate billions in revenue, benefitting people from Fort McMurray, Calgary and Vancouver to Ottawa and Halifax, and throughout the United States. Construction of the Keystone XL Pipeline would multiply these benefits.
And yet, despite ample evidence that responsible development of these enormous energy resources could power a national economic, manufacturing and employment renaissance, the Obama Administration’s environmental ideologies and political debts to radical green groups could delay or stymie progress.
The new robber barons in the Executive Branch and Congress are not content only with taxing job creators and saddling our children and great grandchildren with trillion-dollar IOUs. They are using hard-earned tax money to finance wind, solar, biofuel and other schemes that primarily reward crony capitalist campaign contributors. They’re also locking up centuries’ of oil, gas, coal and uranium that could generate an economic revival, millions of jobs, and many billions in federal, state and local royalty and tax revenues.
Some say the way these robber barons use, abuse and ignore laws to advance this agenda reminds them of the infamous James Gang, which plundered banks and trains until Northfield, Minnesota citizens ended their lawless ways. Others say a better example is the Chicago based Al Capone mob.
Still others point to the Capitol Hill “fiscal cliff” negotiations, as providing clues as to what lies ahead. President Obama says he favors a “balanced” approach to avoid fiscal calamity, but insists on raising taxes on high income citizens and will not discuss reining in entitlement expenditures that are lead life preservers on taxpayers and our economy. His Treasury Secretary tells us, “There are no options.”
The President’s unique concept of “balance” also defines his “all of the above energy program. Like Humpty Dumpty, his words mean just what he chooses them to mean as in all of the above-ground projects, but none of the below-ground resources. Perhaps the real question is, who is to be master...of our lives, natural resources, nation and pursuit of happiness?
Thus the Administration banned oil development on 1.6 million more acres of federal lands in the West and millions more on the Outer Continental Shelf, while delaying leasing and drilling in still more areas on top of vast acreage and resources that Congress placed off limits through legislation. The ruling czars and robber barons also imposed ethanol in gasoline requirements that turn 40% of the nation’s corn crop into fuel, converting an area the size of Missouri from growing food crops to producing fuel that we could get by drilling, and driving up the cost of countless food products.
Their wind and solar programs waste billions of tax dollars on expensive, unreliable electricity projects that blanket habitats and steal our wildlife heritage, in violation of clear environmental laws.
Meanwhile, EPA issued still more hugely expensive rules that effectively ban the use of coal in electricity generation sending coal’s contribution from 45% a few years ago to 35% today, and killing thousands of mining and utility jobs. Its latest rules demand that the transportation sector slash its soot emissions another 20% ostensibly to reduce asthma, other illnesses and “thousands” of premature deaths.
In reality, the only health or environmental benefits exist in EPA computer models, press releases and cover-ups of illegal experiments on humans, whose response to being subjected to “dangerous” levels of soot actually disproved EPA’s claim that tougher standards are needed. EPA has also ignored the significant health risks caused by its regulations, especially for now unemployed older workers.
In the midst of all this, at the just concluded United Nations climate change negotiations in Doha, Qatar, Obama Administration representatives entertained brazen proposals to require developed countries to compensate less developed countries for “climate change damages” under a wealth redistribution scheme that could potentially cost United States taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars. Also in the works are EPA rules, laws and treaty agreements to force the US to curb fossil fuel use and CO2 emissions.
Inconvenient facts about these decisions were simply ignored or treated much the same way as Steven Spielberg handled his powerful and entertaining Lincoln movie. It was released after the 2012 elections, many believe, so that minority and other voters would learn too late that it was our sixteenth president and other Republicans who championed the end of slavery and northern and southern Democrats who fought to prevent passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, outlawing the heinous practice.
The robber barons say whatever is expedient and then pursue policies that undermine the overall public welfare, while postponing many costly and politically explosive actions until after elections.
They also ignore and undermine the recent International Energy Agency forecast that, by 2020, the USA could be producing more oil than Saudi Arabia, currently the largest oil producer on the globe, thanks to advances in seismic, fracking, deepwater drilling and other technologies. A March 2012 Citi Global Problems and Solutions report painted a clear picture of the benefits that domestic energy development could bring – if government “public servants” and environmental “public interest” groups would permit it.
Cumulatively, the new production, reduced consumption and numerous activities associated with these technologies “could increase real GDP by an additional 2% to 3%, creating from 2.7 million to as many as 3.6 million net new jobs by 2020,” the Citi report stated. They could also shrink America’s “current account deficit” by 2.4% of GDP (a 60% reduction in the current budget deficit) and cause the dollar to appreciate in real terms by +1.6 to +5.4% all by 2020.
In the next few decades, Citi concluded, the energy sector “could drive an extraordinary and timely revitalization and reindustrialization of the U.S. economy, creating jobs and bringing prosperity to millions of Americans, just as the national economy struggles to recover from the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression.” It would also “improve national energy security and reverse perennial current account deficits” for decades to come.
However, as the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research has made clear, these enormous benefits “are at risk if new restrictions are imposed on the industry, from delays in approval of liquid natural gas exports, to opposition to expanding ports for coal and gas export, to opposition to pipelines and refineries, and to the threat of redundant federal regulations on the technology of hydraulic fracturing.” Worse, foregoing these enormous benefits would bring little or no improvement to the environment or human welfare.
Abundant, reliable, affordable energy is the backbone of the US and global economy. Perhaps one day renewable energy will become a viable alternative to the hydrocarbons that sustain jobs and energize virtually everything we make, ship, eat and do. Until then, America and the world need to promote regulatory sanity and increased production of our enormous base of coal, oil and natural gas resources.
Paul Driessen is senior policy advisor for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org) and author of Eco-Imperialism: Green power Black death.
It was dry in the American Midwest and hot across central North America this past summer; both triggered ridiculous claims that it was due to global warming. It’s what we predicted they said; trouble is the Earth has cooled since 2000. Claimants only illustrate they don’t understand climate mechanisms or climate history. There’s illogic in many of their claims such as warming bringing more droughts. Warming increases evaporation putting more moisture in the atmosphere increasing precipitation potential.
Actually, the drought cycles in the middle latitudes have little to do with temperature. Similarly current weather patterns are not unusual and easily understood with a brief explanation of the mechanisms.
Weather Extremes Are Normal
Basically the atmosphere has two parts, the cold polar region and the warm tropical region. The illustration shows the Northern Hemisphere, mirrored in the Southern Hemisphere.
Boundary between the two air masses is the Polar Front marked by a temperature contrast which is the greatest in a short distance for any latitude. As a result strongest winds, labeled the Jet stream, and most severe weather are associated. The technical name for the Jet Stream is the Circumpolar Vortex.
Each season the dome expands in winter to approximately 35N and shrinks in summer to 65N. It passes through southern Canada in Spring on its way north and again in Fall on its way south. Storms that ripple along the front bring severe weather and heavy precipitation accompany its passage.
A major feature in the Circumpolar Vortex are large amplitude Rossby Waves identified in 1939 by Carl Rossby. These Waves dominate and dictate the pattern of weather in the middle latitudes yet are still not included in most official explanations of weather.
There are two major flow patterns. Zonal flow has low amplitude Waves with stable weather patterns and generally northwest winds in winter and southwest in summer. Meridional flow has high amplitude Waves with unstable weather, extremes of temperature and precipitation, and winds more north and south in summer and winter.
Both Wave types migrate from west to east on a 4 to 6 week basis. Use a 5 week average and from the point when weather in your area changes noticeably you can expect that new pattern to last 5 weeks.
When the Meridional Wave amplitude deepens, cold air pushes well south, warm air pushes well north and the system blocks. Weather people talk about “blocking highs” or
“omega blocks”, the latter describing the pattern on a weather map. Under these conditions the Wave migration becomes 8 to 10 weeks causing persistence of the existing weather pattern. Dry remains dry as in the western US, and wet remains wet as in Britain this summer. People become nervous knowing from experience problems follow.
Drought Pattern in the Middle Latitudes
Government obsession with global warming meant they virtually ignored precipitation, yet in the short and medium term it is much more important for the human condition. In 2000, 200 top climate people listed the 20 worst climate disasters of the 20th century. 11 of the top 20 were droughts and 5 were floods.
Drought has been an issue since we began farming. We made ourselves vulnerable to the vagaries of weather when we switched from hunter/gathering to sedentary agriculture some 9000 years ago.
Drought fall into 3 broad categories.
• Perennial dryness occurs in hot deserts, such as the Sahara, Atacama, and Kalahari/Namib generally located between 15 and 30 degrees of latitude and cold deserts in the Arctic and Antarctic. The North Pole is one of the driest places on Earth.
• Seasonal dryness occurs in many regions of the world and are known as monsoon climates: summer is the dry season in California; winter in India.
• Intermittent dryness occurs wherever precipitation is below normal for an extended period.
Drought is defined in other ways. Hydrological drought occurs when stream flow or lake and reservoir levels are below average. Agricultural drought occurs when plant growth is limited by inadequate soil moisture, but what’s limiting for one plant is not for another. Shallow-rooted plants using soil moisture in the upper 10 cm are more drought- prone than deep-rooted plants using subsoil moisture. Trees are deep-rooted. A tree species adapted to the dry climate of North Africa might have roots going down 100 meters. Garden annuals are mostly shallow-rooted. Annual commercial crops are somewhere in between. If water is abundant, their roots tend to stay near the surface. When water is scarce, they go looking for it. Studies in Manitoba in the late 1980s drought found wheat roots down 3 meters.
In the U.S.. drought explains 55% of weather-related crop losses: excess moisture 16%; frost 11%: and hail 8%. Canadian numbers vary because of lower temperatures, but not by much. Regional variation shows drought more likely on the Prairies. Because of low precipitation it is a moisture deficit region.
Droughts persist throughout North America history. People are familiar with the 1930s, especially in western Canada, but few know similar droughts occur with varying degrees of severity approximately every 22 years.
Dust storm; Regina, Saskatchewan, April 14, 1933
Source; Western Canada Pictorial Index
Canadian Prairie droughts are an extension of the droughts of the American midwest - something John Palliser understood when he travelled across Canada in 1857 at the beginning of a drought, but that’s a story for another column.
The first person to relate the droughts to a physical phenomenon was A.E. Douglass. He was an astronomer whose main interest was dendroclimatology (tree rings), particularly the relationship between midlatitude precipitation patterns. He published an article in 1920 titled, “Evidence of Climatic Effects in the Annual Rings of Trees”. Later a chart was produced that showed the relationship between sunspots and droughts.
I used his work because I found a similar 22 year drought cycle in approximately 200 years of precipitation data for York Factory on Hudson Bay that correlated with sunspot activity. Theodor Landscheidt later showed the same relationship.
We don’t like the severe weather and especially the hardship it brings, but to exploit that for political gain is unacceptable and wrong. What is going on with today’s weather is not only perfectly normal, but not even close to much more severe weather in the past.
Proof of the effects of the Rossby Waves on middle latitude weather and the cherry-picking is evidenced by what happened in the week of August 20, 2012. Here is a map of record cold, yes I said cold, showing how the Wave pattern shifted, but it didn’t appear in the media because it doesn’t fit the alarmist agenda.
