Four weeks of climate data: Northern Temperate Region #1

From Antarctica, so remote and sparsely populated, we move to the Northern Temperate Zone, easily the most populated section of the planet. There is so much more territory that we are going to slice this region into 12 parts, each 30 degrees of longitude wide. I'm using a Mercator Projection of the world to show the regions. It's clumsy and does not represent distances well, most notably in the massive sizes of Greenland and Antarctica, but this map does show the outline of nations, which makes it easier to talk about where we are in the world.

Region #1 is a rectangle from Algeria to Finland. It covers almost all of Europe, missing most of Britain and the Iberian Peninsula, and the main bodies of water are the North Sea and the Mediterranean.

Coverage in this region is not a question. The only gaps are bodies of water and some areas of the Sahara.

If this region shows no warming, then climate change would be very unlikely to have any human cause.

The Winters in this interval are tending to be warmer. The coldest Winters are clearly warming time period by time period, while both the median and the record highs jumped up in a big way in the early nineties but have tapered off a bit in the first decade of this century.

The Spring data shows a warming trend and an increasing one. The big jump in highs, median and lows is the transition from the end of the 20th Century to the beginning of the 21st.

The Summer increases are even more noticeable, relatively static from 1955 to 1988, then a big jump in the 90s and another in the 00s.

The rate of increase is not getting larger as we move forward, but that is about the only argument against warming with this data.

The median Summer temperatures jumped a degree and a half Celsius in the 56 years we are considering. The Fall temperatures are not nearly as dramatic, going up less than a degree, but the trend looks to be accelerating, most notably in the jump of the median and record high steps beginning in the 21st Century.

We are well over 99% confident this data shows warming over time. As for an increasing trend in warming, it does not meet the 95% confidence level, but it only missed by a little.

Later today, Northern Temperate Region #2, most of the European part of Russia and a large section of the Middle East.