BrianGarst.com

The Warmmongers like to pretend that all the data supports their non-stop hysteria, and that anyone who disagrees is either ignorant, hates science, or is a dirty liar paid off by the oil industry. Lately, they’ve taken to pointing to current “extreme weather” anecdotes as further proof of AGW. But what does the data say? Dr. John Christy offered testimony to the Senate Environment & Public Works Committee exploring that question. From GlobalWarming.org:

Increasingly, we hear experts blame global warming for bad weather. Most acknowledge that no single weather event can be attributed to global climate change. However, they contend, the pattern of recent events – the sheer number and severity of heat waves, wild fires, droughts, freak storms — is exactly what climate scientists have predicted and must be due to mankind’s fuelish ways. Such assertions, Christy shows, are not based on real data.

One way to measure trends in extreme weather is to compare the number of state record high and low temperatures by decade. Many more state high temperature records were set in the 1930s than in recent decades. Even more surprising, “since 1960, there have been more all-time cold records set than hot records in each decade.”

…One might object that state temperature records are not informative, because the number of data points — 50 — is so small. So Christy also investigated “the year-by-year numbers of daily all-time record high temperatures from a set of 970 weather stations with at least 80 years of record.” He explains: “There are 365 opportunities in each year (366 in leap years) for each of the 970 stations to set a record high (TMax).” Adding the TMax days by year, Christy found that there were several years with more than 6,000 record-setting highs before 1940 but none with record highs above 5,000 after 1954. “The clear evidence is that extreme high temperatures are not increasing in frequency, but actually appear to be decreasing.”

So keep that in mind the next time some media commentator breathlessly attributes “unusual and extreme weather” to global warming.

Global Warming