Source: Wash Times
Last summer’s headlines blared, “Hottest July in the history of the United States.” The National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) of theU.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) said so, so it must be true.
This week, the NCDC is reporting the same, with the added alarm that 2012 was the warmest year on record and one of the top two years for extreme weather in America.
Climate activists are linking this to man-made global warming, ignoring the fact that the area covered in theNCDC reports, the contiguous United States (excluding Alaska), comprises only 2 percent of the Earth’s surface. Trends that may manifest in the United States in no way indicate global phenomena. In fact, the United Kingdom’s Meteorological Office has said that there has been no global warming for 16 years and this week announced that temperatures are expected to stay relatively stable for another five years.
Regardless, all NCDC temperature proclamations must be taken with a large grain of salt. Here’s why.
Until the use of thermocouple temperature indicators became common in the U.S. climate network, temperatures were determined with mercury thermometers that are, at best, only accurate within 0.9 degree Fahrenheit. Even today, many U.S. stations only record temperatures to the closest whole degree. Thus, breaking the 1936 high temperature record by 0.2 degrees F, as NCDC claimed occurred last July, is not meaningful. This change falls within the uncertainty of the measurement. It is akin to being alarmed that the moon has moved a millimeter closer when we can only measure the Earth-moon distance to within a few centimeters.
All that was recorded for most of the United States was minimum and maximum temperature for each day. TheNCDC’s so-called average daily temperatures were derived by simply computing the average of the minimum and maximum temperatures. This is not a true average, however, since it does not take into account how temperatures varied throughout the day.
Trusting the NCDC averaging method to reach “hottest ever” conclusions is a mistake, because higher minimums at night will yield a higher daily average, even if daytime highs do not rise.
This is what happened in July 2012. Then, NCDC records indicated that the United States was less cool at night than in July 1936, therefore, the average they computed for July 2012 was higher than in 1936. Yet, Roy Spencer of the University of Alabama at Huntsville demonstrated that NCDC records show daytime high temperatures in July 1936 far surpassed those of 2012. July 2012 was not the warmest month in the American 118-year instrumental record.
This week, NCDC’s credibility was further damaged when meteorologist Anthony Watts of Chico, Calif., announced that he had discovered huge differences between their “State of the Climate” (SOTC) reports released each month and the actual database of NCDC temperatures. For example, the July 2012 SOTC report, issued in early August, announced that a new record had been set with the average July temperature for the contiguous United States at 77.6 degrees, one-fifth of a degree higher than in July 1936. However, the NCDC now says the July 2012 average was actually about 76.9 degrees, nearly 0.7 degrees less. This is almost 0.5 degrees cooler than the 77.4 degrees claimed as the previous monthly record in 1936. What is going on?
It turns out that the NCDC does not wait for all the data to be received before computing and very publicly announcing the U.S. average temperature and its rank compared to other months and years. While some stations, such as those at airports, send the data quickly via radio links and the Internet, other stations use old paper forms that arrive by mail considerably later.
When the printed data finally arrive, the NCDC updates its temperature database, typically “cooling” the country when all the data are used.
Neither the NCDC nor NOAA tells the public and the press that the temperature announcements in previous SOTCs are no longer correct when the complete data set is analyzed.
Strangely, NCDC changes temperature data even from the distant past without notification. For example, NCDCnow asserts that the average temperature in July 1936 was 76.4 degrees, a full degree cooler than the 77.4 degrees that they claimed for the month in the July 2012 SOTC report. This allows them to continue to say that July 2012 set a record.
Mr. Watts found that in the 23 monthly SOTC reports between October 2010 and November 2012 (three SOTC reports did not list average temperatures), 22 of them do not match the NCDC database, presumably due to later updating when all the data are received and analyzed. In all cases except one, the country cooled when all the data were incorporated.
Mr. Watts concludes: “It is mind-boggling that this national average temperature and ranking is presented to the public and to the press as factual information and claims each month in the SOTC, when in fact the numbers change later.”
We don’t really know how much, if any, warming has occurred in the United States over the past century. Since the American record is considered to be the most accurate part of the Global Historical Climatology Network, we really don’t even know that global warming has occurred at all in the past century.
NOAA has not responded to questions from the International Climate Science Coalition about this issue.
SPPI Blog Source: Pravda, By Stanislav Mishin
For years, the Elites of the West have cranked up the myth of Man Made Global Warming as a means first and foremost to control the lives and behaviors of their populations. Knowing full well that their produce in China and sell in the West model and its consequent spiral downward in wages and thus standards of living, was unsustainable, the elites moved to use this new “science” to guilt trip and scare monger their populations into smaller and more conservative forms of living. In other words, they coasted them into the poverty that the greed and treason of those said same elites was already creating in their native lands.
What better way to staunch protests at worsening economic and life conditions than to make it feel like an honourable job/duty of the people to save “Gaia”. At the same time, they used this “science” as new pagan religion to further push out the Christianity they hate and despise and most of all, fear? Gaia worship, the earth “mother”, has been pushed in popular culture oozing out of the West for a better part of the past 1.5 decades. This is a religion replete with an army of priests, called Government Grant Scientists.
Various groups have fought back. This is including Russian hackers, who published a huge database of UK government, scientific and university emails depicting the fixing of data to sell Global Warming, er Climate Change (as if it never changed on its own). And while taking hit after hit, the beast, like Al Qaida, will not die. As a matter of fact, the beast is on a steady come back, as it is quite useful during the down times recession. The US alone spends $7 billion each year on warming “studies”, which is, in truth, nothing but a huge money laundering operation, as no real science is conducted and vapid alarmist reports the only product generated.
Amongst the newest claims of pending disasters, is a cry that icepacks are now melting at three times the rate of the 1990s, even though there has not been any significant warming in the past 20 years. Greenland’s icepack melt off, has been linked to volcanic activity under the ice, heating it. Must be the magmamen and their SUVs. These facts, however, do not faze the Gia crowd and their Elite/Governmental backers. The fact that a super storm hit the NE US is also being played as evidence of GW. Thank God that before GW no such things ever happened. How are they to explain that Russia and Eastern Europe are projected to have the coldest winter in 20 years? Oh, but I doubt my Western readers are even aware of that.
Now, with their economies in a spiral of debt laden, non-manufacturing recession (if not out and out depression), the Elites, who sense they are loosing their grip or toe hold on key economic regions outside their home regions, are once again calling out their inquisitors of Global Warming and sending them towards the developing world.
The first salvo has been fired by a British Warming dandy named Lord Nicholas Stern of Brantford, who as an academic at Whitehall, has made a career and quite a bit of money off of this scam. Lord Stern, a former World Bank chief economist and author of the landmark Stern review of the economics of climate change, was a close associate of Gordon Brown and the Leftists, who with the Tory counterparts and in parallel to the American Democrats/Republicans set up the grand and self destructive economic schemes that have plunged their own nations and many many others into the abyss of poverty.
The good Lord Stern, in commentary on why countries such as Russia, China, India and Brazil, in other words, the BRICs, have to pony up cash and depress their own growth, made this statement for the Guardian paper: “It’s a brutal arithmetic - the changing structure of the world’s economy has been dramatic. That is something developing countries will have to face up to.”
His premise is that even if you take out the deindustrialized West, run away Global Warming will not stop due to the industrialized world. Its now all the fault of those raising themselves up for the destruction of the world, from the phantom joke of GW. Lord Stern tried to assure that the opening salvo was not a salvo, by stating: “I am not pointing the finger at the developing world, just looking at what is necessary. I am not accusing or proposing, just calculating what is needed [to meet scientific estimates of the emissions cuts needed to avoid dangerous levels of climate change]”. More like a calculated accusation. After all, this is not some light weight of the GIA cult, but the movement’s chief economist who enjoyed the ear of the UK government: a perfect tool of the Western Elites.
Expect the cries to get louder and more shrill in the months to follow.
Temperatures in China have plunged to their lowest in almost three decades, cold enough to freeze coastal waters and trap 1,000 ships in ice, official media said at the weekend.
Since late November the country has shivered at an average of minus 3.8 degrees Celsius, 1.3 degrees colder than the previous average, and the chilliest in 28 years, state news agency Xinhua said on Saturday, citing the China Meteorological Administration. The cold in Eurasia and elsewhere offset warmth in the US and created global temperatures below the NCEP model normal for December.
Bitter cold has even frozen the sea in Laizhou Bay on the coast of Shandong province in the east, stranding nearly 1,000 ships, the China Daily newspaper reported.
Zheng Dong, chief meteorologist at the Yantai Marine Environment Monitoring Center under the State Oceanic Administration, told the paper that the area under ice in Laizhou Bay was 291 square km this week.
Transport around the country has been severely disrupted.
Over 140 flights from the state capital airport in central Hunan province were delayed, while heavy snowfall forced the closure of some sections of the Beijing-Hong Kong-Macau Expressway, the China Daily said.
Temperatures in the northeast fell even further, reaching a 43-year low of minus 15.3 degrees Celsius, about 3.7 degrees below the previous recorded average.
One truck driver in southeastern Jiangxi province, caught in a 5 km (3.1 miles) queue caused by a pileup that happened after heavy snowfall, told China Daily the snow and extreme cold had caught him unawares.
“I did’’t expect such a situation, so I’ve brought no warm coats or food. All I can do now is wait,” trucker Yao Xuefeng told the paper.
Weatherbell had advised clients there of a brutal winter. here is the 5-day forecast from Weatherbell.com model pages.
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1Vodka saves elephants from death in Siberian brutal cold
Moscow: Vodka saved two circus elephants in Russia from the deadly Siberian cold.
Emergency ministry spokesman Alexander Davydov said on Friday that the elephants were in a trailer that caught fire on Thursday outside the city of Novosibirsk, forcing trainers to take them out into the bitter cold before another truck arrived to deliver them to a warm gym at a local community college.
The Komsomolskaya Pravda daily reported that trainer Leonid Labo had the animals, aged 45 and 48, drink 10 liters (2.6 gallons) of vodka diluted in warm water - and a veterinarian said later that only the tips of their ears were frostbitten.
Novosibisk zoo director Rostislav Shilo told the daily that the vodka saved the animals from frostbite and pneumonia, without harming or even intoxicating them.
A vicious cold snap across Russia and eastern Europe has claimed nearly 200 lives.
In Russia, the cold has killed two people in the past 24 hours, the Ria-Novosti agency reported, citing medical sources, bringing the total number of deaths to 56 by December 21st.
The freeze had also left 371 people in hospital.
Thermometers have been stuck below minus 20 degrees Celsius (minus 4 Fahrenheit) in Moscow—and below minus 50 degrees (minus 58 F) in some parts of Siberia—
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Note from India
A brief update on weather here in India, esp in Northern India, which is in the grip of a severe cold spell for the past two weeks!
This morning news papers ( I am in Solapur, a city ~700,000 pop:, southeast of Pune, about 250km) where the front page coves shows ‘Frozen Dal Lake in Kashmir, a popular tourist place’ and headlines “Frozen India”
Low temp in North , at New Delhi ( popu: ~16M) was at close to zero, high just at 10C most people have NO house-heating!
Over 400 M people of North India are being impacted by long cold spell and it may continue for a week or two more, as I see it! No one is able to explain why North India is witnessing colder winters, since New Millennium!. Since 2008/09, every winter several hundred people are dying due to cold weather! So far over 200 people have died of long exposure to cold weather this winter!
If UK Met Office still wants to talk of Global warming, they are OUT OF TOUCH WITH REALITY OF CLIMATE CHNAGE! If the UK Met Office has worldwide data, it can provide what world-wide temp are since New Year 2013! IIn newspapers here, there were also stories about “loads of ice in and around Shanghai with over 1000 ships stranded!
I think UK Met Office will do a great service by stating “There is NO Global Warming scare anywhere in the world! “
Trying to predict 2013 as ‘possibly warmest year’ is a meaningless exercise!
In my view, UK Met Office is losing its credibility!
Best Regards
Madhav Khandekar, IPCC reviewer from Solapur/Pune India, January 7th 10AM
Zeenews on india.com adds this from the India Meteorological Department:
The cold weather conditions are likely to continue in Punjab, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. Meanwhile, the temperature has also dropped to a record low in Poonch district in Jammu & Kashmir with mercury dipping well below the minus and water freezing at various places in the district. It was the coldest day of Poonch in the last 35 years.
On Sunday, life across the North India region was hit by bone-numbing cold and the toll climbed to well over 100 with at least 16 more people dying in Uttar Pradesh.
The mercury fell to minus 18 degrees in Leh town of Jammu and Kashmir, while several places, both in the hills and plains, experienced zero or lower temperatures as both maximum and minimum temperatures plummeted across the region and icy winds made things worse.