WolfStock1

IMO trying to use/apply a single decade's worth of data is a fool's errand. There's too much background noise there in the ENSO and solar cycles. IMO anything meaningful with regards to changes in the rate of increase would need to be over at least a 20-year period, or even 30. That said "meaningful" here I equate with "strong evidence". 10-year data isn't totally meaningless - it's worth at least eyebrow-furrowing when it indicates something unusual. I just wouldn't use it to make a statement to the effect of "this shows that the rate of warming is increasing".

I believe UHI effect, while a thing, is overblown as well. My point though is - deniers like to point to UHI as tainting the data and general claims of trends, so in order to remove all doubt it would be good to have a data set (more than a single station, but rather hundreds of stations) that are truly remote. It appears the USCRN is a mix of some remote and some not-so-remote sites. Doing a filter of the USCRN data and weeding out the not-so-remote sites and presenting an average would seem like the thing to do. The Lake Erie thing actually brings something else to mind. Has anyone done studies on how much water warming (mainly rivers and lakes) is due to general industrialization vs greenhouse effect? It seems like it could be quite significant actually. I mention this because I was looking into water usage recently (context was discussion on data centers) and found that actually one of the biggest water consumers in the US is power plants - used for cooling. There's more water used for cooling power plants than there is for irrigation, believe it or not. Much of this is evaporative but much ends up back in rivers and lakes, raising their temperature. Much is used for other industrial things as well, which certainly raises the temperature some.

Yes unlike many of the others Georgia appears to have done a good job picking truly remote sites. Ideally you'd like to see all the sites be like that, since it's usually an average of all sites that's shown (e.g. in the X post). I haven't looked for it, but was just noticing that a lot of the references in this thread to records / high trends are in areas that may be subject to UHI effect. Would be nice to see some for remote sites instead, since IMO that's much more meaningful.

Here are the Georgia sites:

Hmmm - well - looking at their locations https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/access/crn/ - that's not really what I'm talking about. It looks like just about all of those sites are actually suburban sites, or at least "close to city" rural sites. For example the one in central NC is in Duke Forest - but that's practically surrounded by Durham, which is a fast-growing urban area. The one in southern LA is at Cade Farm which is rural-ish, but is only 3 miles from the edge of Lafayette. The one in western VA is only 1 mile from I-64 and Charlottesville, Etc. What I'm talking about would be truly rural sites - ones where there isn't a significant city within about 50-100 miles or so. I see very few if any sites of those that fit that bill.

Not an expert in UHI effects, but Lander isn't exactly the middle of nowhere - it is a town of 7k+ people. What's needed is data like this from actual remote sites, that aren't at cities / towns at all - e.g. sensors at national parks / forests, etc. Remove all question w/regards to UHI.

About damn time.

SW of Leesburg VA we got right at 5", so it appears more than most in the area. Was a really sticky and beautiful snow Sunday night. (we got a bit more after the pic was taken)

Bunk. The world has solved lots of problems, without having solved all of them. The notion that if you can't solve one problem then you can't solve any problem is ludicrous.

Your level of understanding of worldwide systems, and your worldview, is made pretty clear from that last sentence. The rest just naturally follows, and isn't even worth addressing. We'll just leave it at that.

Boy you hit about all the MMGW scapegoat talking points there, didn't you? You forgot about rape though. (Yes, it's a thing) I'll just hit one of the scaries for now - crop failures - the rest can be inferred. The sky-is-falling narrative tends to fall apart when you look at the actual data, and not individual anecdotes. (ironically - much like looking at a weather event and claiming that it's an indicator of climate trends)

Well there's also the fact that it's lot harder to survive in extreme cold than it is in extreme heat, which is why so many more people die each year from cold weather. Human comfort / survivability is not one of the negative effects of MMGW. Sea level rise and increase in storms, yes. But not the temperature itself. IMO areas becoming "difficult to survive in" is a non-issue for MMGW. Any slight increase in storm activity is just noise in the overall background of improved infrastructure and weather prediction. A *lot* fewer people die these days from hurricanes and floods than they did in years past. (Sea level rise of course is a non-issue w/regards to survivability; the creep is way slower than natural human birth/death cycles. I always have to laugh when I hear of literal human "danger" proposed as being due to sea level rise.)

Are you sure? Why is it that the Wikipedia page on the subject: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outgoing_longwave_radiation doesn't discuss ENSO? The chart that's there doesn't seem to follow ENSO cycles: Keep in mind we're not talking about radiation *into* the atmosphere here (what I think is most affected by ENSO), we're talking about radiation from all earth elements (including the atmosphere) out into space (outgoing longwave radiation). Though I haven't attempted any kind of mathematical correlation - I thought ENSO cycles were generally much longer duration than what's in that chart.

So here's a question. Given that "the planet" is generally a self-contained system with very little (essentially no) variance in externalities with regards to energy inputs (mainly solar irradiance - generally near-constant) and output (terrestrial radiation - generally near-constant) - shouldn't the warming of the planet just be essentially a straight (or curved) line with an always-upwards slope, such that a new record should be set *every* year? Or is it the case that it's really just these records are just really just referring to "the places we are measuring" and not "the planet" as a whole? Yes - question is somewhat rhetorical, but is intended to trigger some thought. If one presumes that the planet as a whole is warming continually, then what are the "holes" in the data? Are there significant areas of the ocean for instance that we're just not measuring, and the reason we don't see a new record every year is because of the non-existent data that would offset the data we do have? Or perhaps is it the case that we are in fact measuring the whole "surface" (including the oceans), but the surface temperature as a whole actually does go up and down based on something - e.g. subterranean effects e.g. "bubbles" in mantle convection, or perhaps solar cycles?

Never seen in person but would very much *love* to see - sprites:

What's SUM? (assuming it's an acronym) Looks like it trended down until the 1950's, and has generally been flat since then, aside from the past couple of years. Doesn't seem like it would be an indicator of climate change; if that's what you're thinking.

Wasn't there a big sleet-fest in '86 or '87? I was in Raleigh area, and I seem to recall us getting about 6" of sleet.

See that a lot here. Not an expert but pretty sure it's a radar artifact. I believe the algorithm increases the sensitivity at further distances, at certain wavelengths. Light precip or things fog or drizzle mess with that algorithm, making it look like there's a hole in the middle when there really isn't. Something like that. That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

Anyone know why Apple weather is so different than NWS forecasts? I don't use it but my wife does, and here's what hers shows this morning for Leesburg area for Sunday: Umm.. what? 24" of snow? Only 70% max chance of precip? Totally different than legit forecasts. Only thing I can figure is that the app doesn't have the ability to account for wintry mix / sleet, so it just does some kind of "snow equivalent" or something (?). No clue why chance of precip is only 70%.

You sure you're reading those charts right? That's not what I'm seeing. E.g. in the 1950-1995 period it looks like the average number of record highs was about 2,000 or maybe 2,200, whereas the average number of record lows was around 2,500, before they diverged starting around 1995. Not sure how you're asserting a big ratio like that at any point the 20th century, aside from *only* a few peaks in the 1930's. The key thing seems to be the divergence after 1995, with record highs increasingly outpacing record lows. That trend doesn't go back as much as you describe though.

Cripes man - not sure you really need to delve into the details of semantics with all your posts like that. From a scientific standpoint, there's no such thing as a "tie" when it comes to records. Temperatures are analog, with infinite granularity, and no two daily peaks are ever actually equal Perhaps there could be a tie from a measurement-device standpoint because no measurement device has infinite granularity - e.g. a given device may measure both 98.8 degrees and 99.2 degrees as "99" and consider it a tie. So thus how often one would expect a tie depends on the granularity of the measurement, and the units (F vs C). That's not mentioned in the OP. The main point I want to make though is - IT DOESN'T MATTER, because even in a "tie is considered another instance of a record" scenario - one would *still* expect a downward slope in the number of records over time. As you say - that's the nature of random number generation. Any new time an extreme peak is seen it means there's a lower possibility that peak (the record - be it a tie or not) will be achieved at any given point in the future, for any given sensor. As such - no I don't think the data presented could be considered "rigged". In part this is because the units and granularity of measurement aren't indicated, but also just the fact that the data trend is flat, and not downward-sloping (for daily record highs) indicates a general warming trend over the period. A rigged data set (e.g. if someone wanted to claim that warming wasn't going on) would show a downward-sloping trend.

Well - that's kind of the definition of "record" is not? The 2nd through Nth time you see a given temperature, it's no longer a record. (Presumably the left end of the data is truncated; e.g. any given station would have 365 record highs and 365 record lows in its first year; assuming non-leap-year)

Seems about right, and is consistent with a slow shift upwards in temperatures. In a no-change scenario one would expect both the number of record highs and the number of record lows to be decreasing over time. In a shifting-upwards scenario one would expect the number of record highs to be remaining about constant while the number of record lows decrease over time; those are apparent in those charts.

Looks like the timing of the peak was such that Europe got the best of it last night. Some spectacular pictures. France:

In general the policy shift hasn't been "anti-renewable" though - it's been towards weaning renewables off the government tit to self-sustaining mode. The cancellations have been when people and companies find that many of these projects are not actually financially viable. However that said - of note is that this started happening in late 2023 - long before the current administration came in and started implementing its policy shift. As such much of the failures of these projects had nothing to with policy - but rather a slow popping of the post-covid renewable energy bubble.