What with the California governor blaming the fires on man-made global warming in the most definite terms available in the English language, it is time once again to undertake the painful task of actually looking at the data and deciding for ourselves whether the dire picture he paints is actually true or whether he has issued a wholly fictional account. It would be nice in the maintenance of our civilization to acknowledge that there still exists as much of a difference between non-fiction and fiction as there is, say, between David Hume and George Floyd.
The task is painful because as is typical of government sources, they are as if handed down by clerks intent on fogging up the reality. In the case of the U.S. average annual temperatures, it is not at all common for the NOAA to provide continuous easy-to-read tables or reports. They commonly hide the relevant actual time series of data, if it can be found at all. They manipulate it in any number of creative ways, like deviations from averages of past arbitrary periods. In 2003, 2004, and 2005, the same source of annual data suddenly provides no annual data, only monthly data. The NOAA discussions invariably contain a series of anecdotes selected by no known criteria except to tell interesting stories that supposedly support the idea of a warming planet. The NOAA functions more like a newspaper than as a scientific source of data.
After patiently extracting one by one the data from NOAA on mean annual temperatures in the contiguous U.S., by their account, it is a pleasure to report that since 1998 there is no evidence at all of warming. The mean temperatures from 1998 to 2019 are trendless, neither up nor down in any obvious way. You the reader can verify this conclusion by inspection.
1998 54.6 degrees
1999 54.5 degrees
2000 54.0 degrees
2001 54.3 degrees
2002 53.9 degrees
2003, 2004, 2005 not easily available
2006 54.9 degrees
2007 54.2 degrees
2008 53.0 degrees
2009 53.1 degrees
2010 53.8 degrees
2011 53.8 degrees
2012 55.3 degrees
2013 52.4 degrees
2014 52.6 degrees
2015 54.4 degrees
2016 54.9 degrees
2017 54.6 degrees
2018 53.5 degrees
2019 52.7 degrees
22 years is a fairly long time, at least in comparison to the doom-sayers and carbon critics who think the world is coming to a fiery end. It’s a long period relative to indoctrinating 6-year olds and famous Swedes into apocalyptic beliefs as well as into the sex practices of the LGBTQ “community”.
If there is global warming, the last 22 years show no temperature evidence of it here in the U.S. This is presumably why the climate lobby has shifted to claims that the oceans are holding the warmth back, while generating bigger hurricanes. Gov. Newsome is stuck with selling the case that excessive and worsening heat, pure and simple, has dried out the forests of his state and/or somehow prevented enough rain from preventing the result.
All these data are from NOAA. An example of their obfuscation follows, which is their language used to report the 2019 temperature mean: “Based on preliminary analysis, the average annual temperature for the contiguous U.S. was 52.7°F, 0.7°F above the 20th century average. This ranked in the warmest third of the 125-year record and was the coldest year since 2014. Below-average temperatures, particularly daytime temperatures, were observed across the northern Plains, while above-average to record-warm overnight temperatures dominated across the Southeast and Mid-Atlantic.” NOAA will always find some comparison, no matter how obscure, to make a case for warming; and they’ll always go to regional comparisons to muddy the waters. There’re always some weather events going on and there’re always some extremes going on. That’s the nature of weather. Benoit Mandelbrot alerted us to this science a long time ago.
3:05 pm on September 13, 2020
