11 thoughts on “All-Time Heat Records”

  1. But none of the twenty and thirty somethings were alive then and they could care less what happened before they were born. When your frame of reference is thirty years then everything feels like it must be the hottest, coldest, wettest, driest, or whateverist weather that has ever been.

  2. Of course, this is only about all-time peak temperatures, not the average temperatures, which have far greater impact on our lives.

  3. That post would serve as a good case study in a course on misleading with statistics. It bases its argument around the recency of state high temperature records. But state boundaries are utterly irrelevant to the question at hand.

    If you care about climate geophysics, a metric that gives equal weight to Rhode Island (1,212 sq mi) and Alaska (663,267 sq mi) is obviously ridiculous.

    If you care about impact on population, a metric that equally weights Wyoming (pop. 568,158) and California (37,691,912) is just as obviously ridiculous.

    Likewise if you care about impact on agriculture.

    Imagine that LA, San Diego, San Francisco and San Jose all hit record temperatures of 130º F one summer. That would strike most people as significant, but it wouldn’t affect this metric one bit because the California record would stand unbroken.

    If it makes sense to toss all per-weather-station temperature records in favor of per-state records, it must make even more sense to toss per-state records and use a single national figure: 1913 (when Greeenland Ranch in Death Valley, CA hit 134ºF). Any heat wave anywhere in the country that doesn’t break that record must not be important, right?

    1. Peaks are fun to watch, but global warming theory predicts that the biggest shift affecting average temperatures would be warmer nights and winters. But that doesn’t scare people enough.

      A couple days ago I was debating a bunch of liberal science-fiction fans and brought up the crucial step that scientists skipped in this whole process, which was asking what the Earth’s ideal temperature [i]is[/i] (ignoring the problem that an average temperature is a rather meaningless metric). We know colder is worse, but if warmer is worse then we have the extremely unlikely case that developed weather satellites right when the planet was at its absolute optimum temperature.

      So I brought up the eocene climate optimum, when palm trees grew in Canada, monitor lizards lived in Greenland, the arctic was about 63 degrees, the antarctic had forests, and yet the tropics weren’t significantly warmer than present. The whole planet was like Hawaii, and life thrived everywhere.

      1. George,

        The world would probably still be that way if the Himalayas hadn’t been stealing CO2 from the atmosphere for so many millions of years. I guess Gaia engineered the evolution of humans to offset those bad old CO2 stealing mountains and restore the balance 🙂

        Really environmentalists should respect the wishes of Gaia instead of fighting her…

        http://www2.cnrs.fr/en/1038.htm

        Paris, November 14, 2007
        The Himalayas : a powerful CO2 pump

        http://popularsciencewriting.blogspot.com/2007/10/himalayas-contributing-to-global.html

        Tuesday, October 02, 2007
        Himalayas Contributing to Global Cooling,Absorbing Carbon Dioxide

        1. From your first link on the erosion rates from the Himalayas.

          In this way they showed that the high erosion rates in the Himalayas led to the transport of huge quantities of organic debris, which is carried down by the great rivers and then rapidly buried in the Indian Ocean.

          What’s scary about global warming alarmists is the cavalier way they refer to the bodies of devout Hindus floating down the sacred Ganges river as “organic debris.”

          Yeah, I just had to go there. 😀

          Another interesting thing about the eocene optimum is that global climate models can’t even come close to replicating it.

          1. George,

            [[[Another interesting thing about the eocene optimum is that global climate models can’t even come close to replicating it.]]]

            I am not surprised since they are still guessing at the various variables involved and their relationships. But then that should be expected from what is still a young science with only a single example, Earth, to use for its analysis.

  4. I heard on the Weather Channel, that overall 2012 is the hottest year on record. BUT the fact that we had 60 degree temps during the winter in Chicago and Denver, with only moderate temps either side helped that be the record.

    Most places had little or no winter.

    June, as hot as it was most places, is only the 14th hottest June on record. So it must have been worse at some 13 odd points in June.
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    Jim,
    if you just once tried to make a point, without snark and your tongue sticking out, I’d fall over in a dead faint. You must have been quite the 4 y/o, if this is the adult speaking.

  5. There is also the point that there is no information about whether some of the weather stations have been either moved or eliminated from the statistics. In the last few years, IIRC there has been an effort to discount records from urban heat islands; this is important because (for example) night-time temperatures in Las Vegas are typically three or four degrees Celsius higher than a couple of miles outside city limits.

    Again IIRC, there has also been an effort to eliminate some of the really stupid errors such as thermometers being placed right by air conditioning exhaust vents.

    But in any case, as others have already said peak temperatures are close to meaningless.

    One more thing; all the models indicate that the effect of global warming (whether AGW or otherwise) is going to be much greater in the polar regions than anywhere else.

    Mr. Turner; you’re probably right in one sense. But on the other hand – how much water was there above the present position of Miami (for example) in the Eocene? Of course, drowning of coasts wouldn’t be a problem – IF the change was gradual, which it might not be. It quite often hasn’t been in the geologically recent past, an example being the end of the Younger Dryas circa 11,000 BC. Seven years, in that case, for a 7 deg C rise in global temperatures.

    1. It would be interesting to compare the difference in usable land area versus sea level. You’d lose coastal area but gain Greenland, Antarctica, and some other vast sections like northern Canada and Siberia.

      1. George,

        Greenland may be a wash since most maps show it mostly underwater and it will probably take isostatic post-glacial rebound a few thousand years to make any difference.

        However the changing rainfall patterns may turn the Sahara, the Australian outback and other low latitude deserts into fertile grasslands making those land areas more productive.

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