Other Parts of the World Also getting Less Cold

As I suspected, Canada is not unique in having the increase of the average of the mean tempueratures from winter temperatures being less cold, and no change in the summers.

This was from 4 years ago which appeared in JunkScience for a station in Ireland:



http://www.junkscience.com/MSU_Temps/Armagh_an.html

Also from Australia http://kenskingdom.wordpress.com/2010/07/27/the-australian-temperature-record-part-8-the-big-picture/

When I posted about Canada's temps and it would be nice to see his graphs showing the full range of yearly temps, that author, Ken Stewart said:

"Yes that seems to be the general pattern here. The rise in means is largely due to increasing minimum temps. In large areas of south / eastern Australia maximum temps have been decreasing, and in an area of inland Victoria and NSW the means are decreasing- cooling! I’ve seen your graph and it would not be too hard to do as I have all the data now. I stuck to means as that is how the HQ data is available."

It cannot be a co-incidence that three distantly placed locations would show this pattern of a narrowing of the yearly range of temps, and it not be so for the rest of the temperate world.

This completely falsifies AGW because their entire mantra is the planet is going to heat up. Well, our plots of actual data does not support that premise. Now they have to explain how rising CO2 makes winters less cold and summers with no change.

SUMMER RECORD TEMPERATURES

You are going to hear a lot about this summer breaking records for the hottest year. They will likely point to certain specific days that broke a record, from some 50 years previous or so. What you will see is cherry picked data to give the message they want you to receive -- that is we are heating the planet with our CO2.

DON'T BELIEVE IT!

Look at the actual evidence before falling into their trap. I will do a separate post comparing 2010 to other years, but this post will very likely show you what I expect to see. Nothing unusual about 2010.

It's all about record breaking days. They manipulate that to mean what they want you to believe. Record breaking days is not about the planet heating up. It's an accounting issue only. Since we do not have accurate records before 1900, there is no way of knowing if some specific day indeed is the "hottest on record". The fact that they include the word "record" is the key that this is accounting only.

Take this thought experiment as an example. You travel back in time to 1900, and set up a station to record accurate temperature data. Guess what? EVERY DAY IS A RECORD BREAKER! That's because you have nothing to compare it too. As the years move on, that year maintains its "record" temps until some day where it happens to land above one of those record days from 1900, and low and behold a new record temperature! Doesn't matter that the new day, say July 5 1911 is 30C, it's a record breaking day!

Eventually as time goes on, some year will break some day and be heralded as a record breaking temp. The problem is eventually, the number of record breaking days will start to drop for each year as the accounting accumulates more and more data. Eventually you get to the point where no more years will have any record breaking days. That time has yet to come, and actually can be simulated with a software program that randomly assigns a temp within a range to future days and plotting the number of record days in each year. I don't have to create such a program to know that eventually some time in the future, there will be no more record breaking days. It may be 100 years from now for there to be enough data accumulated for that to occur, but it will happen. Then what will the warmists do! AGW will very likely be a scam of the past by then.

What we can do now is see what the record breaking days in summer have been so far since 1900 using Ottawa's station (4333).

The verticle axis is the number of days since May 1 in the summer months until end of September. The X axis is the year that each record occurred. The dots represent the highest, or record breaking, temp on that day. You will see that those record breaking days cluster before 1930.

Those record breaking days have a narrow range of actual temperatures when viewed this way:

The Y axis is the record temp, the X axis is the number of days since May 1, and each dot is the year the record was set. There is a clear band of temps. It would appear that there is an upper limit to how "hot" any given day can actually get for this location. For example, it would be physically impossible for the first day of May to get to 38C. likely not possible to get above 32C. This would be true for any location which would have their own upper limit to how hot any day can get. Record breaking days are attempts to get to that ceiling.


Let's see a closer view, July only, with the years marked on the graphs.
The early 1900's clearly dominates the record days. The three in the more recent times are not even close to being records at the top at 35C, 3C cooler than the record highs for the month at nearly 38C.



1911 is a prominent year of highs, comparing all the day's highs for 1911 throughout the summer with all the record years shows how each year can achieve the notoriety of being a record breaker.

The yellowed dots are 1911 placed on the previous graph of all record breaking day's temps. You can clearly see when each of the days gets into the range of the band of records are days of heat waves. As Homer would say, "DUH!" Three of these heat wave spikes are very well defined in the middle of May, beginning of July and part way through August.

One of the top summer record breaking year 1995, near today, looks like this:

One lucky quick warm front on the 14th of July 1995 managed to just poke into the lower range of the record days, and just happened to be the hottest day so far, and only because no other day has managed to get above that due to the shortness of the accounting.

2007 had three record breaking days, two in May and one in September. This is why:

A nice heat wave at the end of September pushed the temp near the ceiling. The summer, however, was obviously uneventfull.

Once this summer is over, I will plot 2010 on this same graph. Anyone want to bet with me that 2010 will be a "hotter" than ever year?

Is the Glass Half Full or Half Empty?

Your answer to that question is supposed to have some deep meaning on how you view the world. Half empty is supposed to be a pessimistic view of the world, where as half full is supposed to show you are optimistic.

Bunch of garbage.

If the glass was filled half way the glass is half full. If half of a full glass was emptied then the glass is half empty. If you come across a glass and don't know either of the previous all you can say is the class contains half of what it is capable of containing, nothing more.

What does that have to do with temperature changes? Lots.

I often post in the Globe and Mail when they run some story about AGW. In the latest round I pointed someone who was a supporter of AGW to this site to show them that summer temps have been cooling while winter temps have not gotten as cold. He accused me of misrepresenting what is happening.

"More heat is being added in the winter" was his claim, as if adding more heat is bad, which is the mantra of AGW. My reply to him was that it depended on how you looked at it. I asked him if the glass is half full or half emptied.

The analogy goes like this. The world is supposed to be summer all year long. That's what it was for almost all of geological time in the past 500 million years at least, punctuated by a few rare ice ages. Thus in the temperate zones there was no winters, no seasons. And a new paper just published showed those times were great for the biota. If anything, having winter seasons was bad for the biota in those areas. See paper here. So one can argue that going into winters means the planet is losing vital heat.

So the premise is this, since going into winter LOSES heat that should have been retained (emptying the glass) then for it to not get as cold in the winter means not as much of that vital heat is lost (not emptying the glass as much).

Of course he not only refused to see temperature in that way, but he also refused to answer how a milder winter can be bad. Only in the world of dogma does one not see alternative possible ways of viewing the same phenomenon. In this person's mind the glass is supposed to be empty, and adding to it, adding ANY heat to the atmosphere, including heat that was lost, is a priori bad.

CHECKING McGUINTY'S CLAIM

So here we are in 2005, emerging from the hottest and driest summer on record. Just for example, Toronto over the last 30 years has hit 30 degrees Celsius about thirteen days each year on average. This year, temperatures have hit 30 degrees Celsius on 40 days. So we face record demand and we had to ask Ontarians to reduce their consumption. The people of Ontario did what they always do --; they came through. But to continue to build a growing modern economy, the people of Ontario need to be able to rely on a sustainable supply of energy available at a cost that is
reasonable and realistic.

Dalton McGuinty in a speech to the
Ontario Energy
Association
General Meeting in 2005

He is correct, but the implications of this observation is no so clear cut. The impression McGuinty is obviously trying to make is that both the hot summer of 2005 and lack of precipitation in that same summer is a trend caused by global warming, caused by our CO2.

Easy enough to check.

This is the number of days above 30C for Toronto Int'l Airport:

He's correct, but you can see what he has done. He picked a period short enough to give the impression he wanted. Go back to 1938 and you can see a similar period of the number of days over 30C between 1947 and 1960. Of course that comment was in 2005, and since then the number of days above 30C has dramatically dropped.

With the current hot spell we are experiencing it will be interesting to see if that number swings back up. Definitely wide osculations, but what is also interesting is the period 1960 to 1970 where the osculation was much narrower, less swings in the number of days over 30C. The climate pulsates at different frequencies.

So, 2005 was indeed up there with heat waves, definitely an anomalous year, along with 5 others in the past 70 years.

(on a side note, the Weather Channel said that the hottest day on record in Canada is still held in the prairies in 1938)

As for summer temps in general, the trend of the maximum temperatures in the summer months only (July-Aug) looks like this:


The narrowing of the range is clear again, as in every other station looked at so far. The highest of the maximum summer temps has been dropping, while the lowest of the maximum temps has been rising. The picture is clearly much more complex, and definitely not the trend our Premier was trying to imply.

This is what the average of the yearly mean temps for Toronto looked like since 1938:

To get a better picture of where 2005 stood on the range of temps, we have this:

Same pattern seen across the country. Narrowing of the full range of temperatures since 1938. Thus this makes 2005 nothing but one year in that trend, which is not the trend he wanted to portray.

What about his claim of precipitation?

Well, 2005 doesn't stand out as being too dry does it. Oh, but he said Summer precipitation

Yes, most definitely. Summer of 2005 was only matched 2 other times in 70 years as being the driest. Interesting that 2008 was so much wetter that it clearly made up for that dry year! But McGuinty didn't know what the future was going to be, did he...

So how then did 2005 rank for precipitation for each month. If the summer was dryer, and the year on average was normal, then some other months must have made up with higher than normal precipitation.

The X Axis is months of the year, Y Axis the precipitation for each month. The data is grouped by months using all years from 1938 to 2009, except 2005's data. The top line is the largest precipitation in that month for the year it occurred. The blue line is the driest month for the year it occurred. Thus this is the full range of precipitation in each month for all years 1938 to 2009 exclusive of 2005. The grey line is the average precipitation in each month.

The black line is 2005. The summer drought is very clear, but September and November more than made up for that dryness making the year over all within normal range of yearly precipitation.

So McGuinty was right, but for the wrong message. He was clearly trying to give the impression that 2005 was just part of the heating involved in Global Warming. However, this shows the perils of using an anomalous year (whether he did this deliberately or not) as a beacon of some trend.

2005 show no individual reason to be a trend for anything, except as part of the general trend we are seeing across the country -- a narrowing of the range of yearly temperatures.

Which means no global warming, but with the current heatwave happening, you can bet the AGW Priests will be full out blaming this on our CO2 emissions.

ENVIRONMENT CANADA MISREPRESENTS SPRING 2010 TEMPS

Environment Canada has issued their trend for this past spring's temperatures:
http://www.ec.gc.ca/adsc-cmda/default.asp?lang=en&n=4CC724DA-1#a1

Note that their claim is AVERAGE temperature, over all 4.1C above "normal".

Well, first, what is "normal"? They are using anything that is above or below the baseline as being "abnormal", the baseline being normal. This is false. What is "normal" is values within one standard deviation above and below the average.

So is this spring the "warmest", above normal, on record?


Nope.

The problem one has when using the spring or fall to show a long term trend is those two seasons are transitions. That means, for spring the temperature will be rising as we move from winter to summer. There will be a slope to that rise in temperature. That slope is the rate at which we change from the winter temps to the summer temps.


So let's have a look at that for Station 4333, Ottawa Airport. This is the full range of daily temps for spring 2010 (March 1 to May 31).

Notice the early part of April with that spike (down then up), and the middle of May. Some may recall that heat wave we had for a couple days. As a side note, total wind output during that period was less than 5% of name plate capacity. Right when we had that spring heat wave, wind produced virtually nothing.

So how does this compare to previous years? Recall they are claiming this is the warmest spring since 1946. So let's see if it is. Using only max temps for all years, this is the range of temps for those three months: The top red line is the highest daily maximum temperature for all years 1900-2009. The bottom blue line is the lowest of the daily maximum temperature for all years 1900-2009. The orange is the upper and lower standard deviation, and the grey line is the average for those years. The thick black line is 2010.

You will note that 2010 is well within that range, with 3 days of exceptions. You will also note that 2010 went into March warmer than the upper standard deviation, but the end days of spring are around the upper standard deviation. This will tend to shallow the slope of the trend for 2010 compared to other years.

This can be seen when plotting the slopes for all years.

This graph takes all the days for each year and plots the slopes of the max temps for each year. The value of the slope can be from several factors. A steep slope, with a larger number, means that within those 92 days the temperature change increased more so than a shallow slope. A steep slope can also mean a rapid onset of summer. A shallow slope could be one of two things, it took longer for summer to arrive in that period, or the winter was warmer and there was less change in temp needed to get to summer.

You can see from this graph that over time, the slope, the rate at which summer came to be, has been dropping. 2010 is one of the shallowest slopes, only beaten by previous 3 years since 1900. This makes perfect sense since we know that summers have not increased in temps since 1900 but the winters have been less cold. Thus the transition from winter to summer has less to travel. Doesn't mean the spring is "warmer", just less transition needed to get to summer. It was winter that was warmer, not the spring transition.

Notice 1900 was quite steep, one of the steepest (starting from a colder winter). So let's see the max temps for those two years and the linear trends for both:

It is very clear that 2010 went into the spring warmer than 1900, 10C warmer, but by the time April and May came, the two are nearly the same.

So claiming 2010 was the "warmest" since 1946 is a crock, a clear misrepresentation due to omission of detailed data. 2010 was "warmer" only because we went into spring from a warmer winter.

The question to ask is why did EC portray spring in this way? Why leave out crucial details that shows what actually happened?

I will do other stations, and an over all for the country in another posting. One does wonder how their map was derived when there are places in Canada that do not gather any data. Part of the "extrapolation" climate scientists do. In other words, inventing data where none exists.