Ten Stations

The Hottest January?

There are two schools of thought. The Earth’s land and oceans have been warming for the last twenty years. Er, no, they have been cooling.

Our world can’t do both at the same time surely, so who is right? (Obviously, both sides agree that the climate is changing.)

A few days ago, NOAA declared that January 2020 was the hottest on record, globally. It beat 2016 by 0.02°C, a ridiculously tiny amount compared to the margin of error of the calculation. But wait…

The four warmest Januaries documented in the climate record have occurred since 2016; the 10 warmest have all occurred since 2002.

NOAA

I have been a “warmist” for as long as I can remember, a position reinforced by the Ten Weather Stations I’ve been monitoring. I spent a few hours on Sunday extending the series back to 2001and calculated the difference between the January Mean and the Ten Year Average for each station. The resulting hemisphere/globe charts look like this.

January_NORTH_0120

January_SOUTH_0120

January_GLOBE_0120

It is clear that 2020 wasn’t the warmest January at one northern station. Koltsovo was the anomaly and I had to check the data at Weather Underground. Seventeen days were over 20 degrees Fahrenheit and three above freezing. Phew! Unprecedented?

The trendlines show warming in the 21st century but this does not mean that the “Coolists” are wrong in their assertions. Ten stations is a pitifully small sample. I may, by chance, have picked on those returning unusually high mean temperatures.

As a control (of sorts), I looked at Durham Tees, going back as far as the data were available in an uninterrupted sequence.

DurhamTeesJANUARY9720

I was surprised to see northern England experienced Koltsovo-like relative warmth in 2007, with 2020 coming a dismal 4th and 2016 5th (of 24 years). But the trendline is almost flat, so it is not difficult to imagine that hundreds of stations could easily dip the other way.

(Januarys/Januaries.)

I wonder what the Hemisphere and Globe charts would look like if the data from every station available on Weather Underground were to be interrogated and averaged.

The elephant (or polar bear) in the room is the accusation from the Cool folk that NOAA doctors the raw temperature data to suit a global warming narrative. Mallen Baker answers the charge.

Two Weeks…

…into the current Meteorological Year, how much is the temperature rising at the Ten Stations?

The Northern Hemisphere has experienced warming that the IPCC isn’t expecting until 2095 – at 2.96°C above Pre-Industrial. Fortunately, the South is bang on the 1.06 degrees the IPCC projected at the end of the year. So in two weeks, the mini Globe has only warmed 38 times as quickly as the IPCC imagined.

The main driver of warmth in The Ten is Koltsovo. In Week 2 it was 4.51°C warmer than at the same time last year, 6.23 degrees above P-I and with a Warming Rate of x238. Eighteen hundred kilometres to the west, Moscow is having a similar experience.

Obviously, all the stations will have weeks of relatively low temperatures in the coming months (north and south) and who knows, by the end of the Met Year they will as a group be close to the IPCC Projection. They may even go below the projected 1.06 degrees. In some graphs I have seen online, the Grand Solar Minimum, the Maunder feel-alike, is expected to take up residence in 2020.

The mythical Sam Carana, at Arctic News, is nonetheless doubling down on his gloomy prognostications of human extinction by 2026. He makes a case for us all departing this life in the coming calendar year.

Extinction and “Global Warming is a hoax” are clearly poles apart. Speaking of which, the GFS 10 Day forecast on Climate Reanalyzer has the Arctic at 2.3°C warmer than expected today but falling to -0.6 a week from now. The Antarctic hovers around 1.6 to 2.0 degrees warmer for the coming 10 days and the World stays mostly within a range of +0.3 to +0.6 (14 to 28 times warmer than the IPCC bargains for.

Here are Week Two graphics for the Ten Stations in Two Hemispheres, plus Durham Tees.

Week2_NorthPlus

Week2_SouthPlus.jpg

Gathering the data and constructing the graphs takes me away from the main task of putting headstone photos on the FamilySearch Shared Tree, so I won’t be doing weather posts every week. I’ll perhaps do an update after each completed month, with an occasional Week Graph if it illustrates something extreme or unexpected. In the media in Week 2 much was made of the heatwave expected in New South Wales that would intensify the bushfires. Notice above that Sydney is roughly in the middle of the green Goldilocks zone. The daily high peaked at 108°F yesterday but fell to 79 degrees (26.11°C) today. Records in Oz may be broken again as summer progresses. Across the Tasman, Wellington was the only one of the southern five in the red. The New Zealand capital may not cool down any time soon.