Climate Change According to the Global Historic Climate Network: Part 2 - the Results

In my previous post I presented some background information on the GHCN and the data available from it. I won't go over that information in detail again here. What is important to know is I am looking at the GHCN data covering the years 1900 through 2011 using only stations with complete records for all those years. That is 493 stations. For this post I am using the highest recorded daily temperatures.

So without further ado and editorial comments, here are the fairly self explanatory charts. Note: I have added trend lines consisting of 5 year running averages to each chart shown in red.

 

 

 

 

 

What you see here is nothing more than what we really should know from our history. The hottest weather seen since 1900 occurred in the 1930's. This corresponds with a significant drop in the number of days where the daily high failed to get above freezing. This also corresponds to a period of severe weather related incidents all over the world. In fact, 1936 was the worst year for heat, floods, and storms in the modern record.

 

Don't just take my word for that. Steve Goddard (aka Tony Heller)  has done an excellent job of documenting the extremes of the past on his blog. There you will see newspaper articles, magazine articles, government reports, and supporting data showing extreme events all over the world. A good starting point would be to simply search for 1936 on his blog. You will get plenty of reading material from that year alone.

 

https://realclimatescience.com/

 

If you look carefully you will notice a couple of other things. For temperatures over 90° F there are actually five individual spikes of varying magnitudes. These appear to occur at fairly regular intervals. The latest of these appears to have started in the late 1990's. You will also notice the number of days where the temperature did not exceed freezing began to go down about 1980 and reached its lowest point in the early 2000's.

 

As I explained in my previous post, the data I am presenting is heavily weighted towards North America and Europe. It does include data from all over the world, but that data is sparse in comparison. There is however nothing I can do about that. Lacking similar data from Africa means I am unable to create an extensive long term temperature record from Africa. Lacking similar data from South America means I am unable to do so for South America either. The records exist where they exist, they just do not exist elsewhere.

 

However, the data does cover significant portions of the inhabitable land mass of the world. If global warming were truly happening as rapidly and as incontrovertibly over all the world as claimed would it not be apparent in North America, Europe, and significant portions of Asia? Of course it would.

 

The simple fact is the UN, NASA, the NOAA, and others are trying to reconstruct a history of the global average temperature from woefully incomplete data. Yet, those reconstructions in no way match the actual temperature records from anywhere in the world with long term temperature records. Why then should we believe them, much less commit billions upon billions of dollars and place the very bases of our economies into their hands? Can we really justify condemning billions of people to poverty, disease, and no hope to ever better their lives based upon flimsy reconstructions?

 

Coming soon: Climate Change According to the Global Historic Climate Network: Part 3.