Demonstrating the Explosion of Daily Record Highs, Easy as Pie

By on January 21, 2013 in News 10

Whether or not global warming is being caused wholly or in part by human activity, and regardless of the mechanisms involved, here’s a graph demonstrating that the United States is getting hotter.  Andrew Freedman writes at Climate Central:

As the climate has warmed during the past several decades, there has been a growing imbalance between record daily high temperatures in the contiguous U.S. and record daily lows. A study published in 2009 found that rather than a 1-to-1 ratio, as would be expected if the climate were not warming, the ratio has been closer to 2-to-1 in favor of warm temperature records during the past decade (2000-2009). This finding cannot be explained by natural climate variability alone, the study found, and is instead consistent with global warming.

When you look at individual years, the imbalance can be more stark. For example, through late June 2012, daily record highs were outnumbering record daily lows by a ratio of 9-to-1.The study used computer models to project how the records ratios might shift in future decades as the amount of greenhouse gases in the air continues to increase. The results showed that the ratio of daily record highs to daily record lows in the lower 48 states could soar to 20-to-1 by mid-century, and 50-to-1 by 2100.

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  • BuzzCoastin

    instead of a debate about who caused what
    it would be more prudent
    to consider the flow of the changes and adapt

    those that adapt & survive will be the gene pool for the next ice age

  • Kevin Leonard

    “This finding cannot be explained by natural climate variability alone, the study found…”

    The study found no such thing.
    http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2009GL040736/full

    • http://twitter.com/Kaminishiki Gregory Wheeler

      From the citation, “Under any future scenario that involves increases of anthropogenic greenhouse gases and corresponding increases in temperature, the ratio of record high maximum to record low minimum temperatures will continue to increase above the current value.” Please specify the conclusions of the cited article which found “no such thing” when the least optimistic models (based on the paper’s conclusion) project NO minimum records being set sometime after 2100, only new “highs.” I think we can easily see where this is going, unless we make the leap out of the carbon age damned fast.

      • Kevin Leonard

        If I have to spell it out for you…

        The study uses an extremely small sample set of data (just a few decades, as opposed to the centuries found elsewhere (link below)), using an a priori assumption (CO2 emissions are the primary cause of climate change) to make projections of future temperatures. The only reference to natural climate variability was found in the conclusion: “The model cannot represent all aspects of unforced variability that may have influenced the observed changes of record temperatures to date…”

        So how did the article’s author arrive at “This finding cannot be explained by natural climate variability alone, the study found…”?

        My turn at providing a logical fallacy:
        Either the author of the article fails at reading comprehension, or the article is pure propaganda. I suspect the latter, as it doesn’t even link the study which it so heavily references, and even uses data from 2010-2012 for its charts which were not part of said study.

        A larger data set of climate change:
        http://www.appinsys.com/globalwarming/GW_Part1_PreHistoricalRecord.htm

  • Bluebird_of_Fastidiousness

    It looks an awful lot like a timer that’s about to go off. Time to stick a fork in humanity.

  • LucidDreamR

    One thing that stands out to me with much of the information presented about our changing climate: As with this article, it far too often seems to focus on a small part of the data set- e.g. the U.S. A perfect example of this is the Arctic circle, which obviously is shrinking and is mentioned often; but the converse is the antarctic circle- which NASA scientists have actually concluded to be growing very quickly. I’m not saying the climate is warming or changing, but I think it’s important we look at the whole picture. Since the Earths conception she has been in an ever-changing state, and will continue to be. It seems incredibly simple minded to me to just say “it’s getting hotter, it’s bad, we need to stop it.” I think Buzzcoastin hit the nail on the head: it’s about adaptation. The sooner we can fully understand these changes, and learn to adapt with them, the better. But to think of it as a bad type of change that needs to be reverses is an exercise in futility.

  • http://www.facebook.com/doug.blair1 Doug Blair