The dots on this map represent weather stations that reported at least one temperature every season from the Winter of 1955 to the Fall of 2010 in the Northern Hemisphere. The right side of the horizontal axis is the Prime Meridian, the left side is 180 degrees East and 180 degrees West. It's a little hard to make out shapes except for that clump in the low middle, which is obviously the United States of America.
The start of the era is very significant in terms of how many weather stations around the world will be reporting. In 1955, the list of true First World countries is USA. Europe is still digging out from the rubble of the war that ended ten years before and likewise Japan and much of Asia.
Let's take a closer look at the data from the United States.
There are four different kinds of marks on this map.
1. Dark with red outline. Strong warming stations. Here the average temperature increase from the 1955-1975 era to the 1999-2010 era is more than 1 degree Celsius. That's about 30% of all the stations.
2. Empty with red outline. Warming, but less than a degree Celsius. 60% of all stations.
3. Empty with blue outline. Cooling by less a degree Celsius. 10% of all stations
4. Dark blue with black outline. There are only a few on this map and they are hard to see at this magnification. A total of 5 out of 2,860, they don't even round to a percent.
Simply put, the large majority of the stations measured are showing warming, but by no means all. The average increase is 0.7 degrees Celsius with a standard deviation of 0.57 degrees. That's a lot of deviation, which means a lot of uncertainty. Climate denialists would play up that uncertainly and try to ignore the warming. As an observer outside the bar fight that is climate science right now, I wish someone would look at the cooling stations and figure out why. Maybe is just randomness, but maybe many of these stations have something in common that we might exploit to start a man-made global cooling effect that offsets what we do with out burning of fossil fuels.
I despair of the Culture of Constant Conflict that so much of human discourse has become. Climate science is one of those areas of discourse and the split it between the center left and the far right. (Conservatives including Margaret Thatcher and Arnold Schwarzenegger are with the current scientific consensus, as was Newt Gingrich before someone offered him more cash.)I'm just a beginner in the field, but I do have some ideas for research I'd like to see explored and this is one of them.
A new idea: What happens if we make the early era 1975-1988? All consistent stations in this set will still be consistent, but several others should join the ranks and the differences in the two averages cannot be the same.
More on this later this week.
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