The Ups and Down of Climate Alarmism

With a teething child waking the household up throughout the night (every night) and an early rising for the RI Center for Freedom & Prosperity’s debate, today, it was with a tired, playful frame of mind that read this, in Ted Nesi’s weekend column:

The average temperature in Rhode Island has risen by 0.6 degrees Fahrenheit every 10 years since the first Earth Day in 1970, according to Climate Central; only 10 states are warming up faster.

Oh, no!  How can we save Little Rhody from climate devastation that’s among the most dire in the nation?  Well, one way would be simply to rewind to last year’s ranking from Climate Central, in which Rhode Island’s 0.51°-per-decade rate put the Ocean State at 27th.  On the other hand, that result was an improvement from the previous year, in which a 0.52° rate ranked 16th.

Of course, Rhode Island was somewhat unique in this latest iteration in that it was one of only five states that actually saw an increase in its rate from last year.  Put differently, the rate of warming slowed or held steady in 43 states from one year to the next.  In order for that to happen, the average temperatures would have had to have held steady that year or decreased.

“Ah,” the alarmists might say, “everybody knows that you can’t look at annual temperatures in isolation. It’s the long-term trend that’s important.”  To which I say, “Precisely.”

If a given state happened to have a relatively warm year in 1970 and a relatively cool one in 2013, its increase would be relatively small.  Rhode Island, as a small area in a volatile region for weather, is probably especially susceptible to this effect.

What’s more, the volatility carries on a larger scale.  Climate Central notes that “since the 1970s, warming across the U.S. has accelerated.”  In its larger 2012 report, Climate Central shows Rhode Island actually topping the charts in per-decade increase over the century since 1912, at 0.34° per decade. The image those results produce in one’s mind is of 0.1-0.2° increases for six decades, followed by those four decades of 0.6°, but that isn’t the case.

Unfortunately, Climate Central’s original source is offline at the moment, but this chart of the “Global Land-Ocean Temperature Index” might give some indication of what the century actually looked like.  It started in the midst of a substantial downswing in temperatures and then jumped up more than 0.5°C in about 30 years (0.17°C per decade).  Then came another downswing and stasis for three-and-a-half decades, followed by a 0.6°C increase in about 40 years (0.15°C per decade).

Now, I don’t offer this as a refutation of the entire global warming thesis.  I’m absolutely confident that believers could come up with reasons why each of these changes could have occurred.  After all, the 2012 report states that the increase beginning in the ’70s “coincid[es] with the time when the effect of greenhouse gases began to overwhelm the other natural and human influences on climate at the global and continental scales.”  And the pause in the last decade is, you see, temporary storage of the heat in the deep ocean.

Surely, there’s some equally obvious reason for the dip during the turn of last century, the subsequent surge, and the subsequent long pause.  The heat went here.  This overwhelmed that.  Something else happened that we can’t quite account for, just now.

Surely, there are such explanations.  I’m just not so sure that it’s all quite obvious enough that “deniers” should feel pressured to join in the panic every time somebody cuts the data in such a way as to produce a map with a lot of red on it.

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