Meteorologist: Even with warm 2016/17 winter — US 20+ year winter temperature trends are still down
Even with warm 2016/17 winter, US 20+ year trends are still down
Joseph D’Aleo, CCM, AMS Fellow
This winter has started in December with some frigid cold, especially the central. Here is the last 7 days and the forecast the next 5 days (maps courtesy of Weatherbell.com).
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Though many have argued the so called ‘pause’ was clearly over, it appears not. The pop in 2015/16 was related to El Nino.
NCDC (now NCEI) has the Climate at a Glance tool I frequently use for temperature and precipitation trend. I have used it in recent years to examine trends in winters the last 18 to 20 years. It was argued a few years back the cooling it showed was biased by the significant El Nino of 1997/98. Even after the (1) new NOAA methodology (removal of UHI adjustment, TOBS. homogenization) that made 1997/98 less warm and (2) the 2011/12 and 2015/16 warm spikes (perhaps slightly enhanced by the changes), what was called the pause (really a cooling trend) is still there in the last 20 year period for December to March.
For the nation, we have seen a cooling rate of -1.63F/century.
The NCEI CAAG site allows you to look at regional changes. I looked first at U.S. Climate Regions (Upper Midwest/Great Lakes, Ohio Valley and Northeast.
The cooling was greatest in the Upper Midwest (an amazing rate of -11.9F/century).
The Ohio Valley has cooled at a rate of – 9.1F/century.
The northeast has cooled at a rate of – 7.4F/century for December to March periods
Then I looked at larger NWS regions (administrative):
The large 14 state central region shows a cooling rate of -5.9F/century.
The large 16 state Eastern Region a cooling of -7.1F/century even with the 2011/12 and 2015/16 spikes.
Despite some ups and downs, we expect this year will be colder than last winter and keep the trend going.
To see how far back I could go and get a negative trend, I went to 1995 for the CONUS and found no warming trend (a not statistically significant cooling of 0.25F/century) the last 22 years.
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Though the jump in major snows in the east was attributed in the media to global warming and resulting more moisture. I would argue the land cooling is responsible. Sellers back in the middle 1900’s speculated snow …
Michael Sununu: Manipulating climate data right before our eyes
THE RECENT ELECTIONS have caused the climate alarmists’ heads to spin. Without a liberal President to force green policies on America, there is little chance their agenda will move forward. Regardless of policy preferences, what elected officials need to focus on is what is actually going on in our climate and what steps need to be taken to address them. It’s the data that count. The real data.
On this point, let’s all agree that the world is warming. It has been since the 1800s when the world started to emerge from the Little Ice Age. We have had periods of warming, periods of cooling and periods when global temperatures didn’t do much of anything.
The bigger question is “Are we seeing recent temperature trends that are out of the ordinary of what we have seen in the past?” Alarmists tend to scream that temperatures are rising out of control, in an unprecedented manner, and that we are reaching a tipping point beyond which we are doomed.
That is all a lie, but I am sure they believe it.
Let’s look at the data, and just as importantly what alarmists have been doing to the data.
If you look at raw global surface temperatures, you see the rate of increase in the early part of the 20th century is the same as what occurred from the late 1970s to the late 1990s. No one has argued the first rate of change was anything but natural. So why must the more recent warming be manmade? In addition, we saw a flat/downward trend in global temperatures from the 1940s to the 1970s and we saw, at least up until recently, another almost 20 year flat temperature period to start this century. – See more at: http://www.unionleader.com/article/20161121/OPINION02/161129918/1004#sthash.MdhgSLLz.dpuf
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When you look at how temperatures have been manipulated you start to wonder if we have any idea what the global temperature is. Over the past decade or so, the keepers of the data have cooled temperatures in the pre-1910 period the equivalent of -0.52 degrees per century. They warmed temperatures from 1980 to the early part of this century by the equivalent of +0.11 degrees per century.
Those two changes represent half the warming since 1900! And this was before the “pause buster” sea surface temperature manipulation took place.
– See more at: http://www.unionleader.com/article/20161121/OPINION02/161129918/1004#sthash.MdhgSLLz.dpuf…