Well, that's what we keep hearing, every year. Or the equivalent but couched in weasel words: "7 of the last 10 were the hottest ever". So riddle me this: when was the hottest temperature ever recorded?
It was this day, 100 years ago. July 10, 1913 saw a temperature of 134° in Death Valley, California.
And so after a century of "unprecedented" and "accelerating" warming, with repeated "record hot" years in the last two decades, the hottest day ever was an entire century ago. What a strange warming, that raises average temperature without raising record high temperature. It's almost like the computer models fiddle with the data when they calculate the averages or something. Or even change the actual data in the databases. But it seems that nobody - so far, at least - has had the guts to change the all time high.
Likely because someone would ask why, and make them show their work.
6 comments:
We can go a little bit later. June 29th 1994, Lake Havasu City AZ, 128 Farenheit. http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_was_the_highest_recorded_temperature_in_Arizona
And I may dispute that, My thermometer ofter reads 5 to 10 higher than the "Official" temp from the authorities.
Found a comment on an ASU site that indicates the Death Valley temp may have been due to a sandstorm. http://wmo.asu.edu/north-america-highest-temperature
Any time some idiot starts yammering to me about Glo-Bull Warming©, I suggest to them that they do a little research on the Medieval Warm Period. Just a bit (about 39° F) warmer from 1000-1300 AD than it was from 1931-1960. Damned Republican Vikings and their coal fired power plants!
I'm no fan of CAGW shills, but I don't trust isolated outlier measurements very much either. I assign a pretty significant probability to somebody in Death Valley being unusually careless or possibly unusually unlucky somehow (e.g., strange manufacturing defect in that one instrument causing sporadic flakiness). And even if every single experimental thing was done correctly on that day with a weird measurement, the statistical distribution of rarest outermost individual outliers can naturally have some annoyingly flaky mathematical properties that can make it tricky to draw conclusions.
Observations like being able to find remains of old trees above treelines could be convincing reasons to doubt that we've moved conclusively into new global temperature ranges. But any individual ordinary temperature measurement or even any collection of measurements which could have a single point of failure (bad instrument, demented operator...) is not all that convincing, and a single reading which is the weirdest in a collection of many thousands of routine readings is less convincing still.
Here is one of the biggest things that I've yet to see pointed out on either side of the debate or clubbing of its all dire and we are going to boil alive!
While even all of the bits about mid evil warming periods, or the bits about Ice ages are relevant here is something I have not seen discussed:
Humans have been keeping more or less accurate records for the past 100 or 150 years, relatively accurate records for a few hundred and there is anecdotal evidence that is often interpreted from pictures or best guesses from tree rings, peat bogs, and other archeological finds. This is a few hundred years on the young age but a few thousand years on the outside for total age.
Wait for it...
Speaking on a terrestrial geographical time frame this is a -blink- of an eye in the grand scheme of things. We know that the climate for millions of years was vastly different than it was today. How do we know that the climate that we as humans have experienced is not of itself the abnormality? So what if temperatures rocket up several degrees? How do we know that no matter -what- the cause may be that the weather we as a species have known is of itself not an abnormality in the geological scale?
(Snide inserted now, since so many of the its global warming say that humans have ruined the world anyway why would they not encourage the death of our species and a possible return to the global/gaia! normal?)
Or perhaps someone can fill me in if my particular question has been addressed or if it is not really something to ask anyway.
The only accurate temperature monitoring system that humans have ever come up with is the network of satellites that measure temperatures. We had none of these before the late 70’s. Any temperature data at all from before that period is suspect and should not be accepted at face value. Any temperature data that comes from any other source is likewise suspect.
We are chasing our tail. I’ll bet we’re so far off the actual mark on what’s really happening that we aren’t even wrong – you can’t be wrong when you aren’t even addressing the same issue. It’s like asking what the sum of two plus two is and getting “sandcastle” as your answer. So far off the mark it isn’t even wrong.
Things that don’t even get considered – what if we’re saving our own asses with all this fossil fuel burning? Why did the little Ice Age end? Was it really an actual, real ice age that we turned around with our evil fossil fuels?
Or how about this? Carbon was being sequestered over the millennia in the form of fossil fuels. Since carbon, and particularly carbon dioxide, is essential to life on Earth, and all of this carbon was being sequestered in the earth, leading to the total amount of available carbon in the biosphere being lower than it ever has been before in the history of the world that we know, what if we are saving the planet from an eventual slow death from lack of carbon availability by re-releasing it into the environment? Biodiversity is lower now than it has almost ever been before (and by now, I mean since the last ice age). What if we’re saving the planet?
Again, I think that there is so much more to this than we even understand that we’re being silly by trying to guess what is going to be the output Y given input X, or even trying to control that at all.
Goober,
You bring up some great points and I feel they are as valid to ask as what I did or really any of the other theory's on the table.(I understand about the temp measurements but at least with the past few decades the base understanding is somewhat accurate if we have a control example)
What my take away from all of this and including Goober's excellent points is that we have one group that is trying to control the narrative.
The more realistic question that could be asked or observation is this to me:
We say we should look down on studies that are funded by energy companies or anyone else that end with the statement there is not global warming/it is not because of energy use and its ZOMG snap it has to be because they are bought and paid for to find this answer! Anything they say is suspect!
But yet .gov funded or Sierra Club or WWF funded studies that the continued funding hinges on ...Finding and establishing that any sort of change is based of what humans do and nothing else? That funding is not cause to suspect the findings of their funded studies?
Hmmmm
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