Don’t believe the hype by the alarmists who want to tax the the very air you exhale.
There have been 372,989 correctly recorded daily high temperature records in the US since 1895. 84% of them were set when CO2 was below 350ppm.
To read the article and see some outstanding charts and graphs, go here.
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Any climate scientist would tell you that it is silly to draw any conclusions about long-term temperature trends from any single brief period of extreme weather.
What “alarmists” have to say may be of political relevance, but has no bearing on the science.
That aside, the link you posted is provides a good example of why the science community dismisses Anthony Watts as an unserious critic of climate science.
One of the two items he reposts in your link draws a false conclusion from the annual number of daily high US temperature records since 1895: “Compare the number of record highs in the 1930s to the past decade. You can see that the 1930s were consistently much hotter.”
In fact, the relative number of record high temperatures does not provide sufficient data to make any conclusion about the relative temperatures of the two decades.
Even the commenters at wattsupwiththat (Cain Thaler makes an appearance there) agree that the claim is not valid, for the obvious reason that records come easier in the earlier years of temperature recording than after many years of recording. I’d add that, while global warming generally will push daily high temperatures higher over time, record daily high temperatures are not a good proxy for record high mean temperatures.
That same item reposted by Watts highlighted the phrase “84% of them [daily high temperature records] were set when CO2 was below 350ppm”. That statement is a meaningless math result both for the reason above and because one can manipulate the % number by simply choosing a different CO2 threshold.
For the purpose of generating record high temperatures, there is nothing significant about the 350 ppm level. One could use the same data as the poster did to say something like: “97% of the record high temperatures were set when CO2 was above 300 ppm”.
There is some value in pointing out and correcting errors spread by the media in news or commentary, but Watts then destroys any such value by posting material that includes false conclusions and meaningless calculations.
Very true, ottnott. And well said.
However, I would clarify that my statement was that the data looked like a log logistic distribution skewed to the right, which doesn’t actually disprove the authors point, because in stable temperatures that sort of distribution does trend to zero.
We need more data, and, as you said, a lull from the mob inciters.