Claims That Heatwaves Will Increase In LA Ignore The Facts
By Paul Homewood
http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-extreme-heat-20150514-htmlstory.html#navtype=outfit
It really is becoming a full time job debunking the nonsense that masquerades as climate science nowadays.
The LA Times tells us:
By 2050, parts of Los Angeles County are forecast to experience triple or quadruple the number of days of extreme heat if nothing is done to control greenhouse gas emissions, placing further demand on the region’s drinking water and electricity, according to two new reports by UCLA scientists.
That could mean that by mid-century, downtown Los Angeles could see an average of 22 days of extreme heat — days in which the high temperature exceeds 95 degrees — up from an annual average of six days recorded between 1981 and 2000.
The San Gabriel Valley could see the number of extreme heat days rise from 32 a year to 74. Long Beach? From four days a year to 16.
The results point to a hotter, drier future as Los Angeles faces climate change.
They can concoct any nonsense they want about what will happen by 2050, but what has been happening up to now? I expect you’re way ahead of me now!
The nearest, long running USHCN rural station to Los Angeles is Ojai, just 75 miles away. USHCN chart a whisker plot of daily max temperatures. There has been no trend towards higher daily temperatures, quite the reverse in fact. The highest on record was 119F on June 16th, 1917.
You will note that USHCN have not yet updated for 2014, but we have the actual station records which show the highest temperature last summer was only 103F. Indeed this was the only day which broke 100F. This will come as a surprise to many who have heard stories of record heatwaves in California.
We can see this emphasised on the following chart of summer average maximum temperatures at Ojai. (There is some missing data for 2000, 2001, 2003 and 2005).
Summer temperatures were much higher in the 1920’s and 30’s, and to a lesser degree in the 1960’s. The hottest summer was 1931.
There is one more thing I want to show you. USHCN also have a tool which gives data on daily record temperatures, i.e. the record for each particular day of the year.
Below is what they show for Ojai:
http://cdiac.ornl.gov/cgi-bin/broker?_PROGRAM=prog.select_d9k.sas&_SERVICE=default&id=046399
Most daily records were set in those same 1920’s and 30’s, and not just during summer time either. The same applies to all year round temperatures as well.
As the records include ties as well, we should expect an even distribution, every thing else being equal. Yet we find that the last decade has fewest records of all in summer.
In any other branch of science, nonsense such as this, which utterly ignores the evidence of the past, would not get past first base. With climate science, the only surprise is that Katharine Hayhoe was not involved!
Comments are closed.
The 50 US states each have a record maximum temperature. Thirty-six states set their record prior to 1940.
http://ggweather.com/climate/extremes_us.htm
I learned decades ago,in Junior High,that the earth was dynamic and not static. As a botanist (taxonomist, ecologist, ecosystematist), I have paid the price for not going along with the environmentalists. Recently I was called a “science denier” by a fellow wildflower pilgrimage leader in WV. I discovered this blog when following the amazing story of the NOAA/GISS etc. temperature manipulations to answer his charges against me. I used NOAA data for Dolly Sods in WV when doing my MA thesis on a high elevation relict bog there in the late ’60’s. That was prior to messing w/ their data. Science/academia will take a big hit from the general public and nothing said will be believed. I warned some scientists of this when working for the Botany Dept. of the Smithsonian Institution in the 1970’s as I saw them creeping towards “the end justifies the means.”
Joan, I have stated on other forums that the “Quality Adjustments” of data each month means that every study ever done by the Non Climate Scientists using Temperature data may have been invalidated by the new data, because the base data will have changed unless the original Raw data was used and highlighted as such.
You take any study and run it again using today’s data and you could get a completely different conclusion.
It is a travesty of SCIENCE.
Maybe it’s time to start using the term denier for those who refuse to acknowledge data opposite to warming and to historical accounts showing cyclical variations regarding climate.
Couple of points here: (not that I don’t think you have done a good job here)
Why is the data missing from the “Summer max. temps”? Do we know? Instrument failure? Cherry picking? Whatever. Just asking.
“Number of record hot Tmaxs”, – OK, at the start we have no records (because we only started getting the data) so many days are a record, then more data would mean less records (all things being equal ie no GW) as we see. But that still means that in the last 3 decades, we have about 100 Record Days Tmax, is that not a lot?
As time went by the number of record days would be expected to fall off would it not? Perhaps it would fall off quite quickly too?
If I record the record runs of flipping a coin and getting Heads, at first 1 would be the record right off, then 2 then 3, but it would take a while to get a run of 10, then probably longer to get 11 then 12 (doesn’t have top be sequential but you get my meaning) 20 would take a long while. You will over time, of course get a run of 10, 456,234, you just need time.
My point being, what is the last graph telling us? Does it add to the opposition of the article? Surely we should be seeing far fewer record days each year, let alone each decade.
Yes/No?
1) Data is missing at USHCN . This happens a lot at temperature sites all over the world, and hence creates the issue of infilling, which is highly controversial.
2) As the daily records include ties, there should be just as many record highs now as in 1930 (everything else, i.e the climate!, being equal). Put another way, if the record temp of 100F was set in 1930, it is just as likely that we would see 100F this year, as in every other year since the start of the record.
(Your argument would be perfectly correct if ties were not included. As per our example, 100F would not appear as a record this year, and you would need 101F to set a new one)
Re missing data,
Yes, I would expect missing data further back in time, but 2001, etc at the height of warminista hype..
How the heck do they manage that !!!???
Unless the real data was actually “inconvenient).
Yes, ties. If I keep plotting all the runs of 2, 3 , 20, 10,456,234 I would have a lot of records.
Cheers.
Rocky
Are you saying that you flip coins to justify your position on AGW?
Is that the norm?
Rocky:
I think you are missing a crucial point. Let’s take the case of no long-term trends in the real temperature — that is, for a given day of the year, a constant mean and constant variance.
In year 10 of the record, each day would have a 10% chance of setting a record for the date.
In year 50 of the record, each day would have a 2% chance of setting a record for the date.
In year 100 of the record, each day would have a 1% chance of setting a record for the date.
So in this case of trendless real temperatures, should the graph of number of records held in a given year or decade be sloping down to the right, as you seem to think?
No!!!
Because a record set in an earlier year is “undone” by a more extreme temperature in a later year. So if year 50 or year 100 breaks a record that had been set in year 10, year 10 no longer holds that record. And what that graph shows is the number of records STILL HELD by decade at the END of the 100-year period. It would be flat if there were no long-term trends.
80% of Americans live in heat islands not in the countryside. I live deep in the country on my own small mountain. It is getting colder each year since 2005. Much colder the last two years.
People in LA think it is getting super hot and this is due to all the asphalt roads, hot roofs and huge buildings that use air conditioning which spews super hot air as the system vents out the heat, from giant fans on the roof of high rise buildings.
LA is very significantly hotter than the surrounding countryside and comparing its heat with temperatures there in the 1920s when there were far, far fewer people, the city was vanishingly small and virtually no buildings over 5 stories tall and a few paved roads, is ridiculous.
Instead of explaining this to people, the ‘climatologists’ LIE about all this.
@emsnews
Excuse me for asking, but saying: “It is getting colder each year since 2005. Much colder the last two years”
is still a subjective statement
you actually have to back up such a statement with results: by how much is it cooling [in your area? , do keep any kind of record ?
A natural after affect of [global] cooling is => less evaporation => less clouds => more condensation at lower latitudes => more drought conditions at higher latitudes
=> higher day time temps.in the drought stricken areas, feeding the enemies of fossil fuel with more “relevant argument”