Would even a 1 or 2 degree change be noticed given the great range of extremes in every state.

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Note: see also this post Will The Democratic Candidates Ever Notice That The Climate Change Thing Is Over?

The general interest newsmagazines of the world have been in serious decline for years.  Time, Newsweek, U.S. New and World Report - what ever happened to them?  Although all of them still exist in some form, they are all shadows of their former selves. 

But then there is The Economist of London.  These people put out what at least looks on the surface to be a serious print edition every week.  They devote real resources to gathering news from around the world.  If you want to find out what’s going on in, say, Argentina or the Congo or Uganda, this is one of the few places that you can find it.  But can you trust anything they say?

I’ve been a long-time subscriber to The Economist, and had long regarded them as relatively sensible, generally less infected by leftist groupthink than most mainstream sources.  But then, a few years ago - I can’t pinpoint the exact date - they made what appears to be a corporate-level decision to go all in for global warming alarm.  Henceforth, every issue would contain one or several global warming stories, always with the slant of trying to scare the readership about the allegedly terrible crisis at hand. 

Since then, it’s been a steady downhill slide.  But how low can this go?  In the issue of May 25-31, 2019, we seem to have hit bottom, with an editorial headlined “How to think about global warming and war.” Yes, they have now descended to attempting to blame all world warfare and strife on the universal bogeyman of “global warming.”

How would that even work?  Supposedly, through this obvious chain of logic:

[F]uture-gazers are right to warn that global warming has made some wars more likely than they would otherwise have been, and will make others more so in the future. It is never possible to pinpoint a specific war and say that it would not have happened in the absence of climate change, just as it is impossible to say that a particular flood or typhoon was caused by it. Rather, climate change is causing environmental upheaval that destabilizes regions and raises the risk of bloodshed.

Can you fill us in on what is the supposed “environmental upheaval”?  The answer is, we will just repeat the usual mantras about “extreme weather” and droughts and floods, without bothering to check the underlying facts in any way:

Some things are clear.  Accumulating greenhouse gases in the atmosphere are increasing the frequency and intensity of extreme droughts and floods in some regions.  Seasonal rains and monsoons are becoming more variable and less predictable.  As one area grows parched, its inhabitants encroach on land traditionally farmed or used for grazing by others.  Disputes erupt, some of which are already turning violent…

What is the supposed evidence of “increasing frequency and intensity of extreme droughts and floods”?  The closest thing in this article to evidence is a single picture, presumably from the Sahel region of Africa, showing what looks like severe drought conditions:

Sahel photo.

But is there actually a measurable trend somewhere in the world showing that so-called “extreme” weather conditions are increasing?  Of course, it’s the opposite.  The people at AC (Alarmist Claim) Research have just updated their work on fact checking many of the usual alarmist claims about global warming, from droughts and floods to sea level rise to hurricanes and tornadoes and many others.  The summary report, with a revision date of May 20, 2019, can be found here.  The more detailed report as to the sub-topic of droughts and floods can be found here. (See this story on the flooding this spring and May tornadoes). From the introduction on the droughts and floods topic:

In testimony before Congress Professor Roger Pielke, Jr. said: “It is misleading, and just plain incorrect, to claim that disasters associated with hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, or droughts have increased on climate timescales either in the United States or globally.  Droughts have, for the most part, become shorter, less frequent, and cover a smaller portion of the U.S. over the last century.”

Go to the link for an abundance of charts and graphs showing U.S. and worldwide trends in droughts and floods, which universally are either flat or downward, not upward.  The article in The Economist mentions specifically the Sahel region of Africa as one place where strife is supposedly increasing due to long-term drought.  They seem completely unaware that the Sahel specifically has been experiencing increasing rainfall over the past several decades.  Here is a 2011 Briefing Paper from the Global Warming Policy Foundation specifically on the subject of that trend in the Sahel, titled ”The Sahel is Greening.” Excerpt:

The Sahara is actually shrinking, with vegetation arising on land where there was nothing but sand and rocks before. The southern border of the Sahara has been retreating since the early 1980s, making farming viable again in what were some of the most arid parts of Africa. There has been a spectacular regeneration of vegetation in northern Burkina Faso, which was devastated by drought and advancing deserts 20 years ago… Vegetation has also increased significantly in the past 15 years in southern Mauritania, north-western Niger, central Chad, much of Sudan and parts of Eritrea.

For more recent data on Sahel rainfall and greening, see this April 2019 article from Nature.  But then, who needs facts when there’s a narrative to advance?  The problem for The Economist is that the total abandonment of facts in favor of advancing a political narrative ultimately destroys their credibility on all issues. 

From Alberta to Australia, from Finland to France, and beyond, voters are increasingly showing their displeasure with expensive energy policies imposed by politicians in an inane effort to purportedly fight human-caused climate change.

Skepticism over whether humans are causing dangerous climate change has always been higher in America than in most industrialized countries. As a result, governments in Europe, Canada, and other developed areas are much farther along the energy rationing path, cutting carbon dioxide emissions as required. However, residents in these countries have begun to revolt against the higher energy costs they suffer under due to high taxes on fossil fuels and mandates to use expensive renewable energy.

This is what originally prompted protesters in France to don yellow vests and take to the streets in 2018. They were protesting scheduled increases in fuel taxes, electricity prices, and stricter vehicle emissions controls, which French President Emmanuel Macron had claimed were necessary to meet the country’s greenhouse gas reduction commitments under the Paris climate agreement. After the first four weeks of protest, Macron’s government canceled the climate action plan.

Also in 2018, in part as a reaction against Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s climate policies, global warming skeptic Doug Ford was elected as premier of Ontario, Canada’s most populous province. Ford announced he would end energy taxes imposed by Ontario’s previous premier and would join Saskatchewan’s premier in a legal fight against Trudeau’s federal carbon dioxide tax.

And in August 2018, Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull was forced to resign over carbon dioxide restrictions he had planned to meet the country’s Paris climate commitments. His successor announced that new goals of reducing energy prices and improving reliability, not fighting climate change, would be the government’s priority going forward. Subsequently, Australia’s deputy prime minister and environment minister announced the country would continue using coal for electricity and expand coal mining and exports.

But 2018 was just a prelude for the political climate revolt to come.

In mid-March, the Forum for Democracy (FvD), a fledgling political party just three years old, tied for the largest number of seats, 12, in the divided Dutch Senate in the 2019 elections. FvD takes a decidedly skeptical stance on climate change. On the campaign trail, Thierry Baudet, FvD’s leader, said the government should stop funding programs to meet the country’s commitments to international climate change agreements, saying such efforts are driven by “climate change hysteria.”

In Finland, climate change policies became the dominant issue in the April 14 election, as support for climate skepticism suddenly surged. While all the other parties proposed plans to raise energy prices and limit energy use, when all the votes had been counted, the Finns Party, which made the fight against expensive climate policies the central part of its platform, came out the big winner with the second-highest number of seats in Parliament. Just two months prior to the election, polls showed the Finns Party’s support hovering below 10%. But after the the party made battling alarmist climate policies its main goal, its popularity soared, delivering it the second-most seats in Finland’s legislature - 39, just one seat behind the Social Democratic Party, with 40 seats. Even the New York Times noted the Finns Party’s electoral surge was based on its expressed climate skepticism.

In Alberta, where the economy declined after Prime Minister Trudeau’s climate policies were enacted, voters on April 16 threw out the reigning Premier Rachel Notley and her New Democratic Party, which supported federal climate policies. The United Conservative Party, headed by newly elected Premier Jason Kenney, took over after vowing to scrap the province’s carbon tax and every other policy in NDP’s climate action plan. As part of that effort, Kenney said he would reverse plans to accelerate the closure of the province’s coal power plants and its cap on emissions from the oil sands. In addition, Kenney says he will challenge the federal government’s climate impositions in court and streamline regulations hampering the province’s critical oil and gas industry and pipeline construction.

As daily headlines become ever more shrill, hyping climate fears based on projections made by unverified climate models, the international public is becoming increasingly wary of the Chicken Little claims of impending climate doom. Voters in developed countries are saying “enough is enough” to high energy prices that punish the most vulnerable but do nothing to control the weather.

Note:
See this from Powerline on Bad Data.

Anthony is a good friend from way back in the early days of TWC. He worked with me and many others on a comprehensive overview of Temperature issues here. He also undertook a volunteer effort with many in the field to evaluate station siting, finding most did not meet the NOAA standards - which he then worked with a team of climatologists to examine (shown below). After that was released, NOAA’s GAO did their analysis and in a report showed by their methodology that 42% of the network in 2010 failed to meet siting standards and they have recommendations to NOAA for solving this problem. He then worked with a team of climatologists to examine and publish the impact analysis (here, discussed below). Now a new NOAA analysis shows poor station siting does matter.

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Anthony Watts WUWT

I’ve been saying for years that surface temperature measurements (and long term trends) have been affected by encroachment of urbanization on the placement of weather stations used to measure surface air temperature, and track long term climate. In doing so we found some hilariously bad examples of climate science in action, such as the official USHCN climate monitoring station at the University of Arizona, Tucson:

USHCN weather station in a parking lot. University of Arizona, Tucson

I have published on the topic in the scientific literature, and found this to be true based on the science we’ve done of examining the USHCN and applying the siting methodology of Leroy 2010.

In Fall et al, 2011 we discovered that there was a change to the diurnal temperature range (DTR). It decreased where stations had been encroached upon, because of the heat sink effect of man-made materials (asphalt, concrete, bricks, etc.) that were near stations.

For layman readers that don’t know what diurnal variation is, it is the daily variation of temperature due to the variation of incoming solar radiation from rotation of the earth on its axis.

It looks like this:

Source

Here is what we found; in the best-sited stations, the diurnal temperature range in the lower 48 states has no century-scale trend, but the poorly sited stations had a reduction in DTR:

These results suggest that the DTR in the United States has not decreased due to global warming, and that analyses to the contrary were at least partly contaminated by station siting problems.  Indeed, DTR tended to increase when temperatures were fairly stable and tended to decrease when temperatures rose.

Fall, S., A. Watts, J. Nielsen-Gammon, E. Jones, D. Niyogi, J. Christy, and R.A. Pielke Sr., 2011: Analysis of the impacts of station exposure on the U.S. Historical Climatology Network temperatures and temperature trends. J. Geophys. Res., in press. Copyright (2011) American Geophysical Union.

A few years back in 2012, I noted that NOAA was doing an experiment to prove or disprove what we learned.

Initial funding was provided this year by the USRCRN Program for a multi-year experiment to better understand the thermal impacts of buildings with parking lots on air temperature measurements. A site near the offices of ATDD will be instrumented to measure accurately the air temperature and other variables at multiple distances from the potential thermal heat source, corresponding to the distances from thermal sources used in classifying USCRN stations (Figure 7).

This study will have several applied and practical outcomes. Determining the downwind range of influence of a typical building will be important for understanding built environment impacts on surface air temperature measurements. Other measurements of radiation and heat fluxes will help illuminate the physical processes responsible for any detected heat transfers. Finally, this information will help influence future USCRN/USRCRN siting decisions. Additional insight is being sought by collaborating with National Weather Service (NWS) and National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) on extensions of the basic project. This effort promises to be greatly useful to understanding climate quality temperature measurements and how they can be influenced by the station site environment.

They have finally published. (h/t to Steve Mosher) Guess what? Like I’ve said all along (and been excoriated for saying so) they found exactly what we did.

Impacts of Small-Scale Urban Encroachment on Air Temperature Observations

Ronald D. Leeper, John Kochendorfer, Timothy Henderson, and Michael A. Palecki

https://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/10.1175/JAMC-D-19-0002.1

Abstract (bold mine)

A field experiment was performed in Oak Ridge, TN, with four instrumented towers placed over grass at increasing distances (4, 30, 50, 124, and 300 m) from a built-up area. Stations were aligned in such a way to simulate the impact of small-scale encroachment on temperature observations. As expected, temperature observations were warmest for the site closest to the built environment with an average temperature difference of 0.31 and 0.24C for aspirated and unaspirated sensors respectively. Mean aspirated temperature differences were greater during the evening (0.47C) than day (0.16C). This was particularly true for evenings following greater daytime solar insolation (20+ MJDay−1) with surface winds from the direction of the built environment where mean differences exceeded 0.80C. The impact of the built environment on air temperature diminished with distance with a warm bias only detectable out to tower-B’ located 50 meters away.

The experimental findings were comparable to a known case of urban encroachment at a U. S. Climate Reference Network station in Kingston, RI. The experimental and operational results both lead to reductions in the diurnal temperature range of ~0.39C for fan aspirated sensors. Interestingly, the unaspirated sensor had a larger reduction in DTR of 0.48C. These results suggest that small-scale urban encroachment within 50 meters of a station can have important impacts on daily temperature extrema (maximum and minimum) with the magnitude of these differences dependent upon prevailing environmental conditions and sensing technology.

And, we’ve published at AGU on the effects of siting on 30 year temperature trends:

The quality of temperature station siting matters for temperature trends

Anthony Watts / December 17, 2015

30 year trends of temperature are shown to be lower, using well-sited high quality NOAA weather stations that do not require adjustments to the data.

NEW STUDY OF NOAA’S U.S. CLIMATE NETWORK SHOWS A LOWER 30-YEAR TEMPERATURE TREND WHEN HIGH QUALITY TEMPERATURE STATIONS UNPERTURBED BY URBANIZATION ARE CONSIDERED

EMBARGOED UNTIL 13:30 PST (16:30 EST) December 17th, 2015

SAN FRANCISCO, CA - A new study about the surface temperature record presented at the 2015 Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union suggests that the 30-year trend of temperatures for the Continental United States (CONUS) since 1979 are about two thirds as strong as officially NOAA temperature trends.

Figure 3 - Comparisons of well sited (compliant Class 1&2) USHCN stations to poorly sited USHCN stations (non-compliant, Classes 3,4,&5) by CONUS and region to official NOAA adjusted USHCN data (V2.5) for the entire (compliant and non-compliant) USHCN dataset.

Using NOAA’s U.S. Historical Climatology Network, which comprises 1218 weather stations in the CONUS, the researchers were able to identify a 410 station subset of “unperturbed” stations that have not been moved, had equipment changes, or changes in time of observations, and thus require no “adjustments” to their temperature record to account for these problems. The study focuses on finding trend differences between well sited and poorly sited weather stations, based on a WMO approved metric Leroy (2010)1for classification and assessment of the quality of the measurements based on proximity to artificial heat sources and heat sinks which affect temperature measurement. An example is shown in Figure 2 below, showing the NOAA USHCN temperature sensor for Ardmore, OK.

Figure 1 - USHCN Temperature sensor located on street corner in Ardmore, OK in full viewshed of multiple heatsinks.

Dare I call this new NOAA paper vindication?

Or, by doing so will the rabble of global warming zealots led by schmucks like Dr. Michael Mann find yet another reason to label me a “Koch funded science denier”?

I could use a beer right about now. You can support the work here.

ICECAP NOTE:

Alarmists and eco fanatics and their comrades in the fake news media love to play ambulance chasers and play up every extreme as examples of man-induced climate gone wild. It is an unfalsifiable hypothesis.They cover both side of every weather extreme - hot/cold, too wet/too dry, more hurricanes/record long lull, more tornadoes/record long lull, less snow/record snows, more ice/less ice. For example, recently we saw dueling papers on Greenland ice disappearing faster than we thought and Greenland ice increasing and glaciers growing.

Also see here how sea level inconveniently slowing in gauge and satellite measurements has been altered to give impression of rising oceans.

In this story, GWPF wrote:

The propaganda barrage by climate activists has few precedents in modern US history, increasing in intensity and the magnitude of its exaggerations. Any extreme weather, no matter how typical in history, becomes evidence of human influences: heat waves, cold, floods, snow, and - as described in this post - droughts. Activists hope that their flow of alarmist “news” will shape public opinion, just as a riven can carve through mountains.

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Permadrought was forecast just 6 years ago. It was localized in Texas and California (both states have an upward, though not statistically significant long term trend).

The Atlantic has cooled, and regional drought is giving way to widespread rains.

In fact, the rain the 12 months from May 2018 to April 2019 shows the wettest such period since records began in 1895 for the nation.

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Note: CLICK ON ACRESEARCH ICON TOP OF PAGE TO ACCESS FACT CHECKS ON 11 ALARMIST CLAIMS BY OUR TEAM OF EXPERTS working pro bono on combatting the scare tactics of eco warriors and their compliant scientist friends and breathlessly reported in the fake news media. Support Icecap efforts to combat scientific fraud and environmental fanaticism with a donation via a secure access to Paypal.

Roger Pielke Jr, though a proclaimed believer in man made influences shows how drought has reached a record low level of areal coverage this century.

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Roger Pielke Jr.

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The graph above shows data for the entire period covered by the US Drought Monitor. This week marks the first time in the record that >90% of the US has experienced conditions of NO drought. Some further info:

Since 2000, the linear trend in the data indicates that the overall proportion of the US experiencing no drought conditions increased from about 50% to about 60%.

According to the Drought Monitor, more than 283 million people currently live in regions experiencing no drought. This is the most people in the history of the US to experience no drought conditions at once.

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ICECAP NOTE: Long Term Drought blend shows no issues.

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In fact soil moisture is 99% percentile in many central areas.

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The soil moisture based model suggest the wet pattern continues this summer.

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Climate bedwetters wipe out (again) while trying to surf another tragedy.

This morning Reuters blames 70 torrential rain-related deaths on “climate change.”

It took only a few seconds to “recall that in history.”

From the October 3, 1987 edition of the New York Times (60 ppm CO2 ago):

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Torrential rains are not new to this part of the world. The deaths are due to the various unfortunate conditions associated with poverty. None can be blamed on “climate change.”

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See this report citing NASA findings that show removal of CO2 would wipe out civilization as we know it.

Read the details in this Natural News post.

See NASA’s video that supports this.