Never cool, always cool
The Spokane paper, always conforming to rigidly orthodox Satanism, carries only genocidal pseudoscience. All the cool people agree that Gaia is the only god and Michael Mann is Gaia's Prophet. The newspaper's local Mannite High Priest, locally the coolest of the cool, has written a piece using the so-called "global averages" to make a dramatic point. He says that young people have never known a cool month. Specifically, if you were born after 1985, you never experienced one month that is cooler than some "global average."

This might be true if you are a slime mold covering exactly the points that NOAA uses to form its invalid "global average temperature", and if you are capable of sensing your overall temperature by the same algorithm that NOAA uses to form its invalid "global temperature".

Unfortunately, theoretical globe-covering algorithm-following slime molds don't exist, and if they did exist they wouldn't read newspapers. (They would already be able to sense everything that's happening on earth.)

Actual newspaper-reading humans occupy a much smaller piece of real estate per individual. So let's assume the reader resides somewhere in the state of Wash. Admittedly I'm doing a larger-than-human average here, but I know from examining the records that Wash pretty much moves together on temp. In other words, I'm reasonably close to the trends experienced by an actual human around these parts. (This wouldn't work with precip averages.)

Here's my usual montage of NCDC century records, one for each month. I've highlighted the years since 1985 when the nominal young reader has been alive. (PSP file here for better resolution.)



To my eyes, our hypothetical young Wash reader would have experienced months below the century average as follows:

Jan 6
Feb 9
Mar 6
Apr 11
May 10
Jun 12
Jul 9
Aug 6
Sep 5
Oct 16
Nov 10
Dec 12

Total cool months: 103
Total months (26 years * 12) = 312

These years are unquestionably on the warm side, but the Mannite assertion is nonsense.

Looking at it crudely by seasons: Winter is warmer than the previous 50, returning to the 1890s. Spring is nothing special. Summer is warmer because the nighttime lows are rising, typical of UHI. Fall is definitely cooling.

So we have some trends in some months, but they don't show a rising baseline as you'd expect from a GLOBAL warming trend. Mainly we have the effects of PDO and UHI.

Labels: Blinded by Stats, Carbon Cult

  ¶ 4:39 AM