The Truth About Mid West Heatwaves That The UCS Did Not Tell You

By Paul Homewood

 

http://www.ucsusa.org/global_warming/science_and_impacts/impacts/global-warming-and-heat-waves.html#.VIriunvLL5y

 

As extreme summer heat has been a bit of a topic recently, let’s have a look at this report from the UCS that Steve Goddard highlighted a few days ago. Although the report was published in 2012, conveniently in the middle of the hot summer that year, it still has much relevance to some of the other things we have been discussing.

 

This is what the UCS said:

 

Rising temperatures are not just a concern for the future. Dangerously hot weather is already occurring more frequently in the Midwest than it did 60 years ago.

The report, Heat in the Heartland: 60 Years of Warming in the Midwest, presents an original analysis of weather data for five major urban areas — Chicago, Cincinnati, Detroit, Minneapolis, and St. Louis — as well as five smaller nearby cities.

The results from the analysis are clear: Hot summer weather and heat waves have been increasing in cities in the nation’s heartland over the last six decades on average. The report documents this trend, explores its health implications, and looks at what the largest cities are doing to adapt to these changes and protect their residents….

The report looked at changes in summertime weather patterns using information dating back to the 1940s and 1950s.

Heat waves lasting three days or more have become more common over the last six decades. St. Louis has approximately four more three-day heat waves each year than it did in the 1940s.

 

Whenever I see history starting 60 years ago, the BS button lights up. So let’s look at what the data really tells us in Missouri.

According to USHCN, Steffenville is one of the longer running and higher quality stations there, and crucially it is a genuinely rural site. They offer a useful tool, which plots the number of daily record temperatures (incl ties), for each day of the year, which shows for Steffenville:

 

  http://cdiac.ornl.gov/cgi-bin/broker?_PROGRAM=prog.select_d9k.sas&_SERVICE=default&id=238051

 

Clearly, the vast majority of summer daily record temperatures took place in the 1910’s and 1930’s (98 out of 114). Although the data only runs to 2010, there have been no records at all since the 1980’s. Remember that these figures include ties.

There is a similar pattern with all-year round temperatures, with most records set before 1940, and relatively few recently.

 

 

 

We can also do the same exercise with night time temperatures, and again we find that many more warm minimums were recorded in the three decades leading up to 1940.

 

 

USHCN also offer this whisker plot of daily maximum temperatures, which takes us up to 2013, thus including the hot summer of 2012. Again we see that temperatures were higher prior to 1940.

The all-time record was 115F, set on 15th July 1936. In contrast, the highest reached in 2012 was 105F, a figure which has been equalled or beaten on 149 occasions.

 

 

http://cdiac.ornl.gov/cgi-bin/broker?_PROGRAM=prog.climsite_daily.sas&_SERVICE=default&id=238051&_DEBUG=0

 

 

Finally we can use the USHCN data to graph the number of days over 100F. It will come as no surprise by now to learn that 100F days were much more commonplace, right up to 1950, and again in the 1980’s. Since the report was written, there has only been one day over 100F in Steffenberg.

 

http://cdiac.ornl.gov/cgi-bin/broker?_PROGRAM=prog.climsite_daily.sas&_SERVICE=default&id=238051&_DEBUG=0

 

 

Not only does the UCS report rely on UHI affected data from St Louis and other large cities, it also dishonestly uses 1961-90 as the baseline, for comparisons of what the future might look like.

 

http://www.ucsusa.org/sites/default/files/legacy/assets/documents/global_warming/Heat-in-the-Heartland-Executive-Summary.pdf

 

They may be a union, and they may be concerned, but they sure aren’t scientists. Sadly, this sort of fraudulent presentation is only too common in climate science nowadays.