Friday, March 09, 2012
1901 again
Looked for some indication that Urban Heat Island was understood a long time ago. Couldn't find that, but bumped into an interesting bit of climate alarmism from 1901. This is a little unusual in that it's written by an expert. Generally speaking, before the digital era the experts were more in touch with reality and the common people were more likely to succumb to alarmist and apocalyptic feelings.
This is a short pamphlet from the St Louis Botanical Garden, here in ebook form.
I've reassembled the somewhat jumbled pages to put the diagrams where they belong:
Probably unfair to call the author an alarmist. Actually he sounds like a careful observer who grasped the distinction between fact and theory. He expressed a fear that agriculture would be permanently damaged, but carefully avoided attributing any cause to the current problems.
If I'm reading his Diagram B properly, the July mean for 1901 was about 88. According to NWS 'climatology' data for St Louis itself, the July mean for 2011 was 85.7 degrees.
So the author was right! 1901 was indeed unusually warm. But despite his hand-wringing at the end, the unusual weather didn't continue. It went down after that, then went up again in the 20s and stayed up, according to this NCDC record for the part of Missouri that includes St Louis.
This diagram shows no carbon effects. When St Louis started to bustle in the Route 66 era, it got warm. The supposed "Carboniferous Era" after 1970 is actually a bit cooler than the preceding peak, perhaps because St Louis stopped bustling after 1970.
If nothing else, it emphasizes yet again, as Polistra has been pointing out for a long time, that "global average temperature" and "global average change in temperature" are utterly meaningless and illogical concepts. If you want to use those concepts, you have to prove first that it's valid to assemble such a conglomerate. But the modern theory-bound idiots fly right past that basic point and ASSUME AS AN AXIOM that "global average" has meaning. Circular reasoning at its best.
= = = = =
Nostalgic sidenote: The pamphlet gives a good feel for meteorological technology a century ago. Though they lacked radar and satellites, ground-level observation was better then than now. Every small town had a railroad station with a telegrapher, and those telegraphers sent regular reports of temperature and conditions to the Weather Bureau.
Presumably the author drew the curves by hand, probably with a drafting table; but he was helped by printed graph forms. Takes me back to my first real job in an Oklahoma print shop. I remember setting up similar forms for oil logging companies. Required precise casting of rule slugs on the Ludlow, followed by even more precise cutting and beveling to fit the graph together. Photoshop can be fun, but it lacks the smell and feel of hot lead!
This is a short pamphlet from the St Louis Botanical Garden, here in ebook form.
I've reassembled the somewhat jumbled pages to put the diagrams where they belong:
Probably unfair to call the author an alarmist. Actually he sounds like a careful observer who grasped the distinction between fact and theory. He expressed a fear that agriculture would be permanently damaged, but carefully avoided attributing any cause to the current problems.
If I'm reading his Diagram B properly, the July mean for 1901 was about 88. According to NWS 'climatology' data for St Louis itself, the July mean for 2011 was 85.7 degrees.
So the author was right! 1901 was indeed unusually warm. But despite his hand-wringing at the end, the unusual weather didn't continue. It went down after that, then went up again in the 20s and stayed up, according to this NCDC record for the part of Missouri that includes St Louis.
This diagram shows no carbon effects. When St Louis started to bustle in the Route 66 era, it got warm. The supposed "Carboniferous Era" after 1970 is actually a bit cooler than the preceding peak, perhaps because St Louis stopped bustling after 1970.
If nothing else, it emphasizes yet again, as Polistra has been pointing out for a long time, that "global average temperature" and "global average change in temperature" are utterly meaningless and illogical concepts. If you want to use those concepts, you have to prove first that it's valid to assemble such a conglomerate. But the modern theory-bound idiots fly right past that basic point and ASSUME AS AN AXIOM that "global average" has meaning. Circular reasoning at its best.
= = = = =
Nostalgic sidenote: The pamphlet gives a good feel for meteorological technology a century ago. Though they lacked radar and satellites, ground-level observation was better then than now. Every small town had a railroad station with a telegrapher, and those telegraphers sent regular reports of temperature and conditions to the Weather Bureau.
Presumably the author drew the curves by hand, probably with a drafting table; but he was helped by printed graph forms. Takes me back to my first real job in an Oklahoma print shop. I remember setting up similar forms for oil logging companies. Required precise casting of rule slugs on the Ludlow, followed by even more precise cutting and beveling to fit the graph together. Photoshop can be fun, but it lacks the smell and feel of hot lead!
Labels: 20th century Dark Age, Carbon Cult
¶ 10:35 AM
