There has been a lot of talk about weather records lately. If you've been doing any fact-checking and finding yourself lost in a system of inscrutable pull-down menus and "animation" that doesn't load, here are some shortcuts.
This is the map you've probably seen on blogs and Tumblr recently. It shows the number of daily highest temperature records set in the U.S. in June 2012.
The map was generated by this page on NOAA's National Climatic Data Center site. (Climate Central has their own version that draws its data from the same place, but offers check-boxes for some other variables.)
What I find more personally useful, if somewhat less dramatic, is searching that same tool by state and picking an individual day. What you get is a few of the state's major cities plotted on a map, and a list of the record temperatures for those cities. Assuming you live relatively close to a city, this is where you go when you find yourself saying, "Damn, this has gotta be some kind of record!" Here's Missouri on Monday.
One more that's fun are the U.S. ASOS Temp Departure & Degree Day Maps. Pick your date range and map and it plays a little time lapse of how those days differed from the 1981-2010 normal. Here's a frame from the average temperature departure for the beginning of July.
Pick a nice long range and just watch the fronts pass through.
Every time I hear about temperature records I think about Guy Walton. Guy Walton co-authored a paper in 2009 describing how the U.S. is experiencing a significantly greater number of record highs than record lows. Now, every three months, Walton hosts a game he calls Climate Dice. We're in the first third of the fifth rolling of the dice. The idea is that the National Climactic Data Center ranks temperature and precipitation on a scale from 1-118. (I haven't gotten around to reading about how they got to 118, so if you know the story, please share.) You can generate those rankings for different time periods on their site here. So, for example, here's a state level look at the rankings over the first three months of the year:
In Climate Dice, you're invited to guess what the national rank will be for each month in the season. If you think January will be warmer than usual, guess closer to 118. Submit your guesses in advance for each of the three months and it plays out kind of like the lottery. We're already a third of the way into the summer quarter, so you'll have to wait until fall to officially join in, but you can still play along at home.
What's clever about this game is that if you don't believe in climate change, then you'll want to keep your guesses around 59 because you expect normal weather. But if you do believe in climate change and you know the trends in record temperatures, you know you want to keep your guesses up in the 118 range. The spring numbers were "118/116/117 for MAR/APR/MAY 2012 with an overall Power Ball ranking for the season of 118."
Don't think it's a gimme though. Here's Walton's summer forecast (made in June):
My forecast for this summer is for averages across the U.S. to continue to be warm but not as horrifically hot as they were the last couple of years. Also we are "due" to see at least one below average month during the summer. I won't be shocked, at all though again, if just like last summer, fall, winter, and this spring not one single month of summer is below average. The last few posts I have been way under forecasting the observed warmth across the U.S. each season...I guess I'm just an eternal optimist.
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This is a recipe for disaster ! We have seen heat ,storms,fires and will we have a devastating hurricanes and tornadoes ? The earth is heating up and the rain is evaporating before it can become rain. If we have little or no snow this winter i think this time next year we will be as a nation in very big trouble. But those that should be preparing for the out come seem to careless.
look at weather data from 1920-30....much hotter.
Here you go timmy3--
http://www.easternuswx.com/bb/index.php?/topic/124812-greenland-warming-of-1920-1930-and-1995-2005/
Timmy3 - Are you speaking ONLY of Greenland, or are you trying to say that US temperatures of the 1920s were much warmer than today's?
Doing a quick (not scientific) survey of July 11 records on the NOAA site (first link in the article above) showed 19 broken records in 1925 and 22 in 1926; the real spike was 1930, with 192 records broken. Looking to more recent years 2010 saw only 4 broken, while 2011 and 2012 saw 91 and 11, respectively. Significant note: those numbers are actually more skewed as we have data for over 5,000 stations in 2010+ and only 937 stations in 1930. So, I don't think there's any denying that 1930 was a record-setting year.
Note however that these are all-time records; the 91 records broken on July 11, 2011 bested temperatures of the 1920's as well as all other recorded years. In fact, the Dardanelle, AR, record in 2011 was exactly one degree higher than the same record which it broke in 1930.
By and large, though, if you look at the records which are being broken today, they are not from the heat wave of 1930, but from the 1970s and 1950s. That is, by and large, we are getting much more extreme readings out there today than we had in 1930. Which is, after all, what is important, not the number of records broken. Looking through the all-time record highs reported, you don't end up with those 1930 records sticking around very long, which tells a story: temperatures went up a lot that year, but they've just kept going up ever since.
When you flip over to the "Climate Extremes Index" data, you can see lots of "specialness" in the most recent years. A huge eye-opener is comparing the "abnormal highs" (we aren't in the range of 1935 there at all, but we have a greater disparity between abnormally high highs and abnormally low highs) and "abnormal lows" (we have a DRAMATIC increase in the abnormally high lows in the past decade). See http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/extremes/cei/graph/2/04-09 for the graphs I am talking about. It's entirely feasible to attribute most if not all of the record-highs to the fact that we just aren't cooling off as much at night as we used to; I'll leave that argument to someone more versed in the specifics though.
In all this, however, we should not confuse "weather" with "climate". Climate is a long-term view. Weather is the short-term "isn't it hot today!" phenomenon. Weather, aggregated, tells us about climate; weather, non-aggregated, just tells us if we should wear a sweater or shorts today.
Here, Timmy, I'll save you the work. look at weather data from 1920-30....much hotter.
We didn't have as many people or the ability to pump out carbon emissions in 1930 as we do now.
I guess the scientists need to prove that climate change is caused by carbon. Funny thing, we were open to this in the past, and we all worked together to fix the issue (ozone, acid rain....)
Oh brother. Hot weather=climate change. Cold weather=climate change.
And you folks wonder why you aren't taken seriously?
And again, you miss the point. Extreme weather = climate change. Read the research, including the one commissioned by the Kochs, that confirms it all.
I don't think the "scientists can't see common sense through their mumbo jumbo" argument works on this one, Shooter.
Record breaking temperatures are common sense. Everyone knows that breaking records is supposed to be rare. Everyone knows that suddenly breaking a lot of records is a sign that something is wrong.
This time the onus is on denialists to explain away the common sense that everyone can see and feel.
look at weather data from 1920-30....much hotter.
With due respect Will, breaking a lot of records means something is different, not wrong. Second, a single record breaking event (even a wide spread one) does not indicate long term global temperature change. Third, climate cycles (20,40 and 100 year cycles) are in synch right now, generating many of the climate extremes. Fourth, the global mean temperature for June was <1 degree higher than the 1979-2010 average. Which may be meaningful, but I've yet to read an objective article trying to differentiate between an increase in global mean temperatures and cyclic climate patterns.
Finally, reasonable skeptics don't claim the climate isn't changing, what they are skeptical about is the idea that it's man-made change. Whether you are dealing with a reasonable skeptic or not, makes all the difference in conversation.
John - "Finally, reasonable skeptics don't claim the climate isn't changing, what they are skeptical about is the idea that it's man-made change. Whether you are dealing with a reasonable skeptic or not, makes all the difference in conversation."
Depends on the definition of "reasonable skeptics". I would say a reasonable skeptic might hold that view. But, that means that 99% of the anti-climate change chatter out there is from unreasonable "skeptics". I completely agree with that, that denying the plain observable facts of temperature increase over the past 100 years, as well as the forecasted increase of just as much over the next 50 years, is unreasonable. It is just not often admitted to.
But yes, "reasonable skeptics" can rightfully join the ~20-25% of the scientific community who are not convinced that man-made effects are a significant contributor to the observed climate change. It is NOT reasonable to deny this effect (<1% of the scientific community does so; that should be a good indicator of the quality of data). It is also NOT reasonable to deny that the mid-term result of this effect will be mass extinction (<5% question this). Finally, it is also NOT reasonable to deny that mankind can affect a change and significantly reduce the impact of this change (around the same <5% of the scientific community disagree with this).
We can argue over who broke the environment all day long, but the fact that we are on course for a life-altering disaster, and the fact that we have in our power the ability to make that disaster less devastating, are not positions a "reasonable skeptic" can hold.
That said, I welcome the influx of "reasonable skeptics" into the fold of folks seeking to reduce the impact of the coming global climate change by positive action. If comments on boards such as these are any indication, there aren't many of you out there, but still you are definitely welcome to the big tent of people looking for solutions rather than assessing blame.
John, I essentially agree with most of your points. I generally think of these weather extremes as symptomatic but not evidentiary. I was speaking specifically to the "dumb-down and distort" tactic Shooter is employing and what kind of argument makes people take an issue seriously. My comment was about the opposite of reasonable skeptics (and frankly, the opposite of conversation).
I don't think the reason climate change is having trouble gaining public acceptance is due to reasonable skeptics or reasonable conversation. I think it's due to over simplification and obfuscation. But now, the argument that, for example, the climate can't be warming because it snowed today is less effective on a populace that has suffered through several successive seasons of extreme weather conditions and events.
Will, :), I think you're being rather too kind concerning the reason for (or not) of acceptance.
Though, if I can infer from your general tone, you have a more positive outlook on humanity than I.
The weather has changed drastically ! When i was a kid you had seasons in Ohio and now you do not know one from the other except leaf color change unless its so dry they just fall off the trees. there was not enough snow for the kids to go sledding. The seas are warming and rising. I am sure if many people today had lived during the ice age they would have ignored it to. It happen and only a fool does not prepare for disaster ! The animals on this earth will head the warning of disaster long before we will !
how did the ice age melt?
http://www.easternuswx.com/bb/index.php?/topic/124812-greenland-warming-of-1920-1930-and-1995-2005/
Paul - Interesting article, but rather deeply flawed in methodology. More exhaustive approaches come to a similar conclusion - that the Greenland warming of the past decade is not outside historical norms. For example, see http://www.deas.harvard.edu/climate/seminars/pdfs/Kobashietal2011.pdf for an online-accessible paper on Greenland observed temperatures. However, the trend is the worrisome part: given current trends and our best models, we expect Greenland's actual temperature to be more than two standard deviations from the 4000-year "normal" by 2100 (ref: above-linked article). Those models aren't perfect, of course, but they are close. Why this worries us is that, over the past thousand-ish years Greenland has had lower-than-normal temperatures, the result of the current ocean currents etc, and has acted as a significant anti-greenhouse foil (ice sheets reflect a significant amount of heat away from the Earth). That foil is expected to go away, which will serve to increase the impact of CO2 in the atmosphere (which CO2 was NOT present in the previous Greenland warmings).
Greenland's warming isn't important as an example of what is happening, but as a significant source of future climate change. It's like measuring your family's financial health by looking at your available credit; the available credit might reflect your finances, but only in a remote and secondary way. Most importantly not having available credit means you won't be able to weather an emergency that is coming up. And, by the way, your bank account balance is shooting towards negative territory as well.
Those are not heat records, those are rose pedals, maybe. . .
the question now is "so what do we do about it?". Seems to me the number one thing is to decentralize farming/encourage the small farmer.. Conserveing ground waters would be on the short list too...
look at weather data from 1920-30....much hotter and how did the ice age melt?
I live in Oregon so neener neener :P
PS it rains a lot so don't move here.
liberal scare tactics for al gore to make money on "climate change'.....how did the ice age melt, no suv's then...
You asked why 1-118. It's the number of years of data in the database.
You asked why 1-118. It's the number of years of data in the database.