Wednesday, June 13, 2012

Fastest warming states are warming faster

Climate Central, a research and public outreach organization, examined historical climate data and identified the the U.S. states that are experiencing the greatest and the least amount of warming over the last 100 years. The state that has warmed the most over the last 100 years is Rhode Island. They also found three states have actually cooled over the last 100 years - Arkansas, Georgia and Alabama. It is interesting to examine their result as applied to regions. The northeast region has warmed the most, while the southeast has warmed the least.

But, there is an even more interesting result from their data. What they found is that they had to break it down to subsets of before 1970 and after 1970. Comparisons between these two data sets show the warming trend since 1970 has been three times as much as before 1970. In other words, the states were, mostly, warming before 1970. But, the warming rate is now three times as much as it was before 1970.

Keep that in mind next time someone tells you global warming has stopped.


2 comments:

  1. "Keep that in mind next time someone tells you global warming has stopped."

    Keep what in mind? You're a physicist, you know full well that climate change occurs unevenly and over long periods of time.

    I realize you're trying to imply that variations in regional temperature are caused by human activity, but that is little more than guilt by association. All of the evidence you have provided above is simply evidence that the earths climate changes only, they are not evidence that CO2 is the cause.

    Perhaps that's something you might want to keep in mind someone claims that images of melting glaciers and swimming polar bears are evidence of the evils of human activity.

    klem

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  2. Actually, the data clearly shows that the warming is due to manmade emissions. This is actually discussed in the article I was referring to. A link to the original article was provided in my post. But, proving the climate is changing is important because climate change deniers claim there is no such change. As we go along, we can show that each and every claim made by the deniers is false. At some point, any reasonable person will realize that if everything the deniers are claiming is false, then their premise must also be false. The only way you can come to any other conclusion is to reject science and logic.

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