So, President Trump dumped the Paris Climate Accords yesterday. One of the biggest excuses I hear from American conservative circles is that “It’s all a hoax just to further the liberal agenda.” So is the temperature and specifically record data that I and others have been presenting all made up? For those of us who are “weather weenies”, or people very much attuned to day to day, week to week, and month to month weather at our residences and around the country, the answer is a resounding NO. On that basis alone all of the present administration’s arguments to ignore the climate problem fall flat. Science is science, and facts are facts, right?😊 You can peruse through the NCEI site I use here to see the evidence of increased warmth:
https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cdo-web/datatools/records
The “streak” of more daily record highs than daily record lows per month across the United States has now reached an unprecedented 30 months as of May 2017.
Yes, in my “colorized record genome” May 2017 gets logged as a “black month”, or one of near a one to one ratio of DHMX to DLMN, but the streak continues.
Of note Miami International, FL tied its all-time record high of 98, and for the first time in recorded history Florida saw maxes above 100 in May.
As suspected here a month ago, I thought that May 2017 would not be an exceptionally warm month: https://guyonclimate.com/2017/05/03/april-2017-was-warm-no-fooling-streak-at-29/ Each passing month, though, continues to add to that eye opening streak.
During May, one of my contemporaries, Chris Burt, blogging for Weather Underground on Category 6, painstakingly went through National Weather Service records finding that the ratio of DHMX to DLMN was near 5 to 1 for this decade using geographically spread-even stations across the U.S. with a period of record at or longer than from 1895:
https://www.wunderground.com/cat6/us-daily-record-highs-outnumber-lows-5-1-2010
The evidence contained within Chris’ blog is more information showing that the climate problem is not a hoax. In a world that is either not cooling or warming the ratio of record highs to lows, scientifically, would be 1 to 1.
Well, back to the acrimony surrounding Paris. There have been understandable tweet storms, headlines in major papers, and large, worldwide protests in the last 48 hours. I am optimistically impressed with the blowback from Trump’s decision. Perhaps the current administration has unintentionally put the climate issue on the front burner of the 2018 and 2020 elections (pun intended)😊. A logical reason why the Paris Climate Accords are a good thing is posted by Jeff Masters and Bob Henson here:
Many meteorologists denounce the decision here: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/capital-weather-gang/wp/2017/06/02/meteorologists-slam-decision-to-withdraw-from-paris-climate-agreement/?utm_term=.41a6ad732962
My own personal take is that the lower the level of greenhouse gases are comparable with pre-industrial conditions, the better off, in the long run, humanity will be. Any global agreements both now and in the future are a great thing and must not be undone due to short-sighted reasons.
So what about June 2017? Will the streak reach 31? Model ensembles are trending warmer for mid-June forecasting a fairly strong, hot ridge of high pressure over the nation’s mid section:
ATTM I am not that impressed with the forecast warm anomaly, and what I presented here is from one of the warmer model runs in the last couple of days. A relatively cool pattern will persist on both coasts, so the atmosphere, much like it did in May, might struggle to continue the streak.
We will begin that more meteorological, technical heat diary for the summer of 2017 for the U.S. on my next post.
The Climate Guy