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NOAA Confirm Heatwaves Are Declining In California

October 8, 2020

By Paul Homewood

  

 

https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cag/statewide/time-series/4/tmax/3/8/1895-2020?base_prd=true&begbaseyear=1901&endbaseyear=2000

 

I have often published official graphs of individual stations, which show that heatwaves in California were more intense in the past. These run contra to NOAA’s official temperature record shown above.

 

NOAA themselves, however, a summary of climate trends in California a few years ago, which backs up my station data:

image

 https://statesummaries.ncics.org/chapter/ca/

 

 

Below is the relevant table:

 

image

 image

 

Not only do the 1930s stand out for heatwaves, but the last decade appears to be little different some of the other periods in between.

The exercise only takes us up to 2014, but my analysis does not suggest anything untoward happening in the last five years. If heatwaves really are getting worse because of global warming, we would surely have seen a steady trend upwards in the number of extremely hot days during the last several decades.

 

We can compare this state graph with a similar one for Lemon Cove showing number of days over 100F:

chart-1

 http://climod2.nrcc.cornell.edu/

The pattern is similar, with heatwaves peaking in the 1930s, followed by a much colder interlude between the 1960s and 80s.

The two years of 2017 and 2018 stand out, but other than that heatwaves at Lemon Cove since 2000 appear to have been around 1940s and 50s levels.

 

NOAA’s maximum temperature graph is obviously averaged over the whole of the summer, so won’t necessarily reflect the heatwave patterns, It may be that there a fewer unusually cold summer days now, unlikely though that may seem.

NOAA’s graph of extremely hot days does however pose more questions about the reliability and accuracy of their monthly temperature records, both for California and the US as a whole.

15 Comments
  1. October 8, 2020 8:29 am

    Nice find Paul
    Hope you had a good hol.

  2. October 8, 2020 8:50 am

    Hope you had a good vacation and welcome back.

  3. 2hmp permalink
    October 8, 2020 9:24 am

    But if you take 1970 to today then there is a steep upward slope. We can all do a NASA or Michael Mann. I’m surprised they haven’t snatched at the opportunity

    • October 9, 2020 11:14 am

      You raise a very important issue.

      The most important part of any experimentation is not the result but the method. The greatest challenge to any scientific endeavour (this applies also to everyday life) is to avoid introducing bias into experimentation and consequently affecting decision making. This bias can be in respect of input and also the way the input is sampled. A very important part of any research and where PhD tutors will spend a large part of their effort is to challenge proposed work for validation of the scientific method. This is what data and what methodolog(ies) and why? When I read any papers in my field I scan quickly to see what data has been used, how it was sampled and the methodology to which it has been applied. If I am not happy with the input then It is the old adage sh1t in, sh1t out and I begin to question how the paper past muster.

      I remember when I was young listening to my late father a doctor grumbling away while reading the BMJ or Lancet when he saw flawed methodology and consequently questionable or dangerous results of medical research. He picked up long before the event on a couple of quite well known cases where medical procedures or medicines had been developed and put into practice based on flawed assumptions and methodologies

      It is clear for much output to do with claimed causes of global warming and even more outlandish claims of climate change (out of respect I avoid including the term science to describe much of the output associated with these topics) that avoidance of bias is not only not considered but that bias is often deliberately introduced making the conclusions worthless. I see this having several causes. The first is simply increase the quantity of research output and the result will be a reduction in quality. This is a direct consequence of more money being made available. There is an incredible amount of easy public money being thrown at universities who embrace the Anthropogenic cause is evidence in the explosion of new departments, professors( we used to call them lecturers) and courses selling something which is being developed (I call it being made up) as they go along. This is having a serious knock on and detrimental effect on traditional pure science faculties in universities which are being lured by easy money into compromising themselves scientifically. This will have profound consequences for the future if this corruption of the stem fields is not addressed.

      It can be seen that in respect of pronouncements by the climate industry that for example data presented inevitably is subsampled deliberately to show an increase over a chosen time sequence. Increase is the hook used to grab the attention of the weak minded. Increase is BAD. This applies to the main claimed causes and effects…CO2, temperature, seal level storm droughts etc. That this finds its way into once august journals speaks volumes about the lack of scientific integrity of journal editorial boards. A great case in point is Scientific American who have just taken the outrageous step of backing one candidate in the current US presidential race. I already understood that SciAm has been compromised scientifically for a number of years but to brazenly broadcast their support for one candidate while professing a one sided view of the claimed science shocked me and many others. They are not alone in doing the unacceptable and tainting science with politics and publishing fatuous and dangerous politically motivated statements. Prof. Ivar Giaever famously spoke about resigning from the American Physical Society when they put out a statement on climate change fundamentally at odds with the scientific method. He also in one presentation I saw categorized science in the following way: 1 Real Science, 2 Pathological Science, 3 Fraudulent Science ( the MANNipulation of data), 4 Junk Science and finally 5 Pseudo Science. I think it does not take much training to understand how much of the output of the climate industry figures in categories 2-5!

      • October 9, 2020 11:53 am

        Outstanding comment PMFB! We face a very long, uphill, battle but, in the great words of Winston Churchill: “We shall never surrender!”

  4. Harry Passfield permalink
    October 8, 2020 9:49 am

    Nearly on topic….Prince William wants to ‘fix the climate’. This is my letter just sent to the DT:

    “Sir,

    I listened to Prince William’s interview with the BBC’s Nick Robinson (see, he does do deference!) and was taken by one of the targets the Prince had set: To fix the climate.

    My immediate thought was, if it needs fixing, could the Prince – or Sir David – let us know what the ideal climate is and how we shall know when it has been achieved. They ought to bear in mind – and going by all the propaganda that the Prince has been bombarded with, he should know – that climate, as defined by the IPCC (no less), is considered to be based on 30 years’ worth of ‘weather’. It could take a long time to determine whether the fix has worked and there’s no guarantee that it might not make things worse.

    If we think Covid has been expensive to ‘fix’, it’ll seem like a walk in the park compared to ‘fixing climate’, an altogether more hubristic exercise.

    Yours, etc”

    • Ben Vorlich permalink
      October 8, 2020 3:49 pm

      The ideal climate has to be the Holocene Optimum. Which means more CO2 not less – if you think CO2 is the control knob.

      • Broadlands permalink
        October 8, 2020 5:16 pm

        The ideal climate has been defined by NASA’s Jim Hansen. He demands we take enough CO2 from the air to go back to 350 ppm. That must mean the climate of 1987 is ideal. The problem, of course, is that means burying about 65 ppm or 500 billion metric tons of CO2. Not likely.

    • Nancy & John Hultquist permalink
      October 8, 2020 4:57 pm

      Please note that the “30” year number is taken from Statistics 101**, and has no relationship to “climate”.
      Meteorologists (in 1935; Warsaw, I think) selected “30” as a reasoned weather average when reporting local weather, and comparing to weather that an average adult would/could relate to. This was selected and defined as (climate normals) before modern computers and communications. Thus, maintaining averages was a time consuming process. 30 years was a labor saving adaptation, standardized across countries.

      **And an assumption is made therein that the “population” is distributed in a “normal” fashion.

      • Harry Passfield permalink
        October 8, 2020 8:23 pm

        Nancy & John. Thanks for that. As you saw, I quoted the IPCC’s definition of climate. Until they made it so I had never heard of such a definition.

        Then again, I think ‘Climate Change’ has been taken from – or adopted by – ‘Stalin 101’.

    • Thjomas Carr permalink
      October 8, 2020 5:35 pm

      I hope that your letter is published, Harry. Today’s Times has a front page headline from Emma Yeomans , “September was the world’s hottest on record” . This is based on the word of “experts from the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service”. Sooner or later some briefing notes with robust sources will have to be issued to these lazy scribblers . It’s a chaotic article but worth catching if you can.

      • Mack permalink
        October 9, 2020 12:14 am

        ‘On record’ is the problem. How long have ‘records’ been going? Er, 100, 150 years. In the case of the CET over 300. But the age of the planet is? And geological records have demonstrated that in millennial time scales, the so called ‘climate’ we are now experiencing is relatively benign and beneficial to human activities. What’s the problem? Is there a grown up out there that can explain this to Prince William and his dad! Environmental damage is easily dealt with, with the right desire and funding, The weather/climate is not. I wish William would take a leaf out of the book of his great old ancestor, King Canute, who realised that he couldn’t control the tides but be could influnce the livelihoods of his citizens through good governance!

    • October 9, 2020 10:47 am

      Nice one, Harry! Excellent wording. The main trouble is that I doubt very much whether anyone else, apart from the DT email/letter-censor, will get to read it.

  5. October 8, 2020 11:12 am

    Prince William, the Duke of Cambridge, and Sir David Attenborough, have launched a £50m “Earthshot Prize”, which, according to @BBCNews, is “the biggest environmental award ever”.
    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-54435638

    Isn’t that saying BIG GREENBLOB pays people to toe the line
    ..just like their conspiracy claims that skeptics are paid by Big Oil. ?

  6. October 8, 2020 2:17 pm

    They must be curbing capitalism and greed over there to save the natural world.

    https://tambonthongchai.com/2020/10/08/the-natural-world/

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