pre-industrial

Warmth

The UK is experiencing near-record December temperatures and the 10-Day Hourly Forecast Map on Climate Reanalyzer shows the warmth is shared by most of Europe. At noon on New Year’s Day…

Four weeks into the 2021/22 Meteorological Year, the Weather Station at Ciampino (Rome) indicates Daily Mean Temperatures are running 12 times higher than the IPCC’s projection to a Global 1.5°C above Pre-Industrial by 2040. Rome is 1.35 degrees above P-I and North East England (Durham Tees) 0.2 degrees warmer still. Top of the charts of Ten Stations I monitor is Koltsovo (Yekaterinburg), 5°C above Pre-Industrial and currently warming 182 times faster than the IPCC suggests is unhealthy.

Below are two tables for Week 4 showing the Average Warming Rate for the years 2017/18 to 2020/21 and this year’s figures.

Signs, perhaps, that the Solar Minimum has its eye on the Southern Hemisphere.

(Data gathered from Weather Underground.)

Measure of Man 69 · Rocket Pole

Geograph

My Climate

Durham Tees Airport is about 70 miles from Filey but closer Stations providing data to Weather Underground became unreliable after a while.

In the beginning I arrived at a Pre-Industrial baseline by averaging ten meteorological years of daily mean temperatures (2008/9 to 2017/8) and adding 0.85°C – on the assumption that a global rise of this amount could be reasonably applied. In 2018 the IPCC declared that Earth had warmed by 1°C between the start of the Industrial Revolution and 2017, so I altered my spreadsheets “to fit”. Yesterday, I menioned my wheeze of an “IPCC Unit” – the amount the temperature must rise annually to the end of November 2040 to reach the “Paris Target” of 1.5 degrees above Pre-Industrial. Ignoring pesky 366th days gives a daily rise of 0.0000596°C. By the end of Week 46 of this meteorological year my version of the globe has therefore notionally warmed to 1.08442 degrees above Pre-Industrial.

Three days ago Durham Tees was running at 1.77°C above P-I. At the beginning of summer  (Week 26) this figure was just 1.06°C. Last year, summer began at 2.34°C above P-I and cooled to 1.8 degrees.

In 2014 it was warmer still at Week 46, reaching the dreaded 2°C. To be more exact,1.997 degrees, and rising further to 2.05°C by the year’s end. Fortunately, there have been enough cool years since 2008 to bring the above Pre-Industrial average down to a comfortable level.

Accepting a one degree above P-I figure for all  years from 2008 to 2017, and then going with my interpretation of the steady rise to the IPCC’s 2040 projection gives the following graph.

Two calculations –

1.7711-1.08442÷0.02174=31.6

1.132-1.08442÷0.02174=2.2

So, this meteorological year is currently running31.6 times warmer than the IPCC projection.

But if 14 years of Warming are averaged the Rate falls to just 2.2. Nothing to see in North East England then. Hot air blowing down from Glasgow in a couple of weeks can be ignored. There are too many other things to worry about.

Townscape 73 · Queen Street

Northern Spring, Southern Autumn

April seemed unusually cold on the Yorkshire Coast, and May cold and wet. But the mean temperature data from the Durham Tees weather station indicates the season was actually a tiny bit  warmer than the average for the last thirteen years.

It was maybe the seemingly relentless wind that chilled us.

Note the trend line in the above chart. Perhaps north-east England is anomalous because a Government Report out this month tells us we should not just be afraid of catching ‘flu. (Gee, I hope I don’t get a Delta Variant runny nose.) UK Column extracted a quote from the Report for their bulletin yesterday.

You may recall that the IPCC claimed in 2017 that the global average temperature had increased by one degree centigrade since the beginning of the industrial revolution, and projected it would reach 1.5°C above Pre-Industrial by 2040.

Taking the running average mean temperatures from the start of the current meteorological year, two of the five northern  hemisphere weather stations I monitor (other than Durham Tees) were well above the dreaded 2°C by the end of Spring. Mumbai at 2.66 and Shanghai 2.42. Koltsovo, which has been very warm over the last few years, has cooled to a smidgen over the “Paris Target” of 1.5°C. Four of the five southern hemisphere stations have been quite cool throughout their autumn, with Cape Town being only 0.47 degrees above P-I. The 10 stations representing the Globe average 1.23°C above Pre-Industrial. If one gives each day since the end of November 2017 an equal bite of the 0.5°C rise to 2040, the projected global temperature at the end of Q 2 this year is 1.08 degrees. My Ten Stations collectively are therefore warming seven times faster than projected. Durham Tees is cooling by a little less than one “IPCC Unit” (0.02174°C per year).

Returning to Durham Tees, below is a graph showing the progression of mean temperature above Pre-Industrial through the warmest spring of the last 13 years, the coolest, and for the last three years.

This clearly shows that April and May this year were indeed chillier than March but in following 2019’s trend the season ended up distinctly average.

Sea 37 · Filey Bay

An Exceptional April

England hasn’t had such a cold April for almost a hundred years, and I think Scotland was chillier last month than at any time “since records began”. The Met Office serves up sunshine and precipitation figures with UK temperatures here.

Durham Tees weather station posted a month mean a couple of degrees centigrade above the UK April average – mainly because it didn’t share Scotland’s experience. It was 2.7°C colder than the 2009 to 2020 average minimum and so accords with the Met Office’s anomaly map for the four nations. But 2021 wasn’t the coldest April of the thirteen years for which I have data. 2012 was 0.68 degrees cooler. All that sunshine last month had an impact after the frosty early mornings.

April, though, is the fifth month of the meteorological year and the running mean from the first of December, in the guise of Temperature Above Pre-Industrial, reveals Durham Tees is quite a bit warmer in 2021 than the IPCC Paris Accord projection. There has been a 0.2°C fall in the month but at 1.42°C above Pre-Industrial on the 30th, Durham Tees is 0.34 degrees warmer than it should be if the 2040 Paris limit is not to be breached. Those trendlines in the graph above are misleading.

Below is a graph indicating April’s mean temperatures above/below Pre-Industrial from 2009 to 2021. Most years are “grayed out” to avoid confusion. Only the warmest and coolest years at the end of April are highlighted, with 2021 emphasized. The average Temperature above Pre-Industrial for the 13 years (2009 to 2021) is 1.17°C. This is about 0.1 degrees above the IPCC projection indicating a warming rate four times greater than expected. 2021 is currently running about sixteen times warmer than the IPCC’s projection (offered in 2017). Not to worry. The Grand Solar Minimum/Little Ice Age is on the way.

Insect 30 · Sea Slater

Ligia oceanica, Filey Sands

North-South Divide 2

The meteorological year is 21 weeks old. Enough time for a comparison to be made with last year’s temperature data from my Ten Stations.

Five stations in each hemisphere is a tiny sample of the total number reporting, so they are in no way representative of the whole world’s temperature experience. They do, however, combine to tell a story that can question the official climate change narrative.

The northern hemisphere is considerably warmer than it should be relative to the Pre-Industrial baseline. At the end of November 2019, the 5 Stations averaged 1.24°C above P-I. The chart below shows the marked difference this year.

Wk21_NorthIPCCunits

The relative warmth peaked in Week 16 at 127.46 IPCC units. This is massive when you consider the IPCC has projected a single unit rise annually until 2040 sees the Paris Accord’s 1.5°C above P-I reached – if humans fail to tackle the “climate emergency” successfully.

127.46 IPCC units equate to 3.84°C above P-I. The steep decline in five weeks is as welcome as it is surprising, given that reduced industrial activity and transport was expected by some to raise land surface temperatures.

The picture in the southern hemisphere is very different.

Wk21_SouthIPCCunits

Ending last year within a smidgen of 1.5°C above P-I, the south has effectively cooled by almost a degree. It would require a drop of another 23 IPCC units to make the southern hemisphere fall below the Pre-Industrial Baseline, but Rio de Janeiro has done that and Cape Town is currently just 0.04°C above P-I.

Despite the recent relative temperature decline in the north and the seeming stasis in the south the linear trends to the end of the year are up in the north and down in the south, suggesting the North-South divide will be maintained.

Wk21_GlobeIPCCunits

 

From the beginning of Week 6 to the middle of Week 18 the 10 Station “mini Globe” had maintained a temperature over 2°C above P-I. The trend from now to the end of the year is upwards, though it is possible that the cold times are coming.

Flower 15 · Mother-dee

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

My breakfast reading is currently Man and the Natural World (Keith Thomas) and discovering that Red Campion (Silene dioica­) has this disturbing vernacular name sent me along Church Walk this morning. Of little use as a food or medicine, this flower was thought, once upon a time, to kill the parents of any child who picked it. “Popular knowledge” in the Middle Ages bestowed a lot of other names upon it, some of them shared with other quite different flowers. Five are “Robin” names and half an hour after taking this photo I met a fine specimen of Erithacus rubecula in Martin’s Ravine.

Bird 80 · Robin

28_20200428Robin2_6m

Ten minutes later I reached the Glen Gardens cliff top and was thrilled to hear a ‘northern nightingale’, one of several birds once familiarly called Peggy. (The others are whitethroat, garden warbler, willow warbler and chiffchaff.) The lovely song was coming from a distant tree, the sea beyond.

Bird 81 · Blackcap

28_20200428Blackcap1_6m

Linneans chose to call “her” Sylvia atricapilla.

Fifteen more minutes and I was back in prison.

 

The Southern Summer

Last year, my five southern hemisphere stations came within a whisker of going above the Paris Accord target. By week 4 this meteorological year they fell to a running average mean temperature of 0.55°C and bumped along at that level to the end of summer.

SouthSUMMER20cfP-I

The first two relatively warm weeks ensured an overall cooling trend.

SouthSUMMER20cf19DIFF

The northern winter’s somewhat extreme warmth (represented by the five stations) was more than enough keep my “mini-globe” at two degrees centigrade or more above the Pre-Industrial baseline for 9 of the 13 weeks, and above Paris for all but the first week.

GlobeQ1_20cfP-I

Will the 5 southern stations warm enough in the next nine months to reach the IPCC projection of 1.065°C above P-I? This would seem unlikely as Climate Change sceptics have recently been pointing to the extreme winter cold in the northern hemisphere!

“Meanwhile, Europe is et to be hit by a brutal Arctic blast that will cause temperatures to plummet and heavy snow to strike this week…Motorists across large swathes of Britain faced a severe ice risk while driving home the other night after 300 schools were closed. Britain enters Spring this week but you’d be forgiven for thinking that Global Warming has gone on strike, with snow expected to blanket large parts of Britain over the next few weeks. And in places up north, it is expected to be twelve inches deep.”

Vivid stuff, huh? If you want to see pictures, check out Rowan Dean on Sky Australia (start at 4.30). I can’t recall seeing any snow on the Yorkshire coast this winter and have only needed to wear gloves on three of my 180 walks.

Rowan goes on to describe the recent chilling of the United States, going against the grain of my Washington DC temperatures, (ending winter at 1.87 degrees C above Pre-Industrial), and a Weather Underground blog post – February Wraps Up One of Warmest US Winters on Record.

December Hot and Cold

I copied and pasted December average temperatures for ten weather stations from Weather Underground, for the years 2008 to 2018. (The link takes you to the Beijing Capital Station for December 2018. You may be interested in having a look round the website, perhaps for a weather station close to where you live.)

The 10 years 2008 to 2017 provided a baseline and deducting 1.1°F (0.6°C)  from the figure for each station gives serviceable pre-industrial baselines that may be considered distant cousins to the IPCC’s Global Annual pre-industrial baseline.

The Ten Station December pre-industrial baselines were then deducted from the actual December 2018 figures to give an Above or Below Pre-Industrial result. For Earth as a whole (and on an annual basis) we are told that Anthropogenic Global Warming has pushed temperatures to, roughly, 0.6 to 1.0°C. It may be a surprise to see December Temperatures at three stations colder than they may have been before 1750, or warmer than the Paris Accord’s hopeful upper limit of 1.5°C above pre-industrial.

Canary isn’t interested in “actual figures”. She is only concerned about detecting significant warming OR cooling over the next couple of years. My chosen early warning system involves monitoring the number of days each month that the Average Temperature at the Ten Stations falls below Pre-industrial or rises above the Paris 1.5 degrees C. (Given the wide range of average daily temperatures it is not really surprising that only a few days a month fall between the calculated pre-industrial baseline and 1.5 degrees Paris target.)

Here is part of an Excel spreadsheet that shows just the two Pre-industrial figures for each station.

Dec2018PreInd

When January’s figures are in I can begin “joining the dots” and by the end of the meteorological year 2018/19, a pattern may have emerged that will indicate whether we humans will starve whilst baking or freezing.

(Eleven Year histograms show a modest warming trend for nine of my chosen stations. Only Mumbai has gone, immodestly, the other way.)

MUMBAI_11yrDEC

I watched a couple of YouTube videos yesterday. It is important, I think, to consider both sides, even if you don’t believe one of them.

Ice Age Farmer

The Scott Adams Climate Challenge