Global Whining vs. the Truth

Brian Sussman
American Thinker
Saturday, June 7, 2008

"105° tomorrow? We'll be sending you out live," the television producer informed me.

Like most TV Meteorologists, I loathed the heat wave live-remotes. I would much rather work in a controlled environment, complete with air conditioning and a green Chroma-key screen. And during extreme weather events, the studio lent itself to professionalism rather than playing on emotion.

"Let me guess, the bank in Walnut Creek?" I said sarcastically. I had been through this drill many times.

"Perfect location. Plus, a lot of viewers with ratings meters out there."

Walnut Creek is an upscale town 30 miles east of San Francisco. It is sheltered from the cooling influences of the coast and the Bay by a modest mountain range. As a result, in the summer that region can bake. The bank not only referenced the name of the town, but had a thermometer that was several degrees off, thanks to the heat absorbing black asphalt on the adjacent multi-lane street and the pavement of the nearby parking lot. The producer knew 105° would easily read 110°. On air, I always quickly explained the reason for the soaring temperature reading for our audience, but it was not enough. The misleading visual message was absolutely clear: 110° in Walnut Creek-another sign of climate doom! No doubt about it, the climate was under assault. It had to be global warming.

No, it's global whining.

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Even without the bogus bank thermometer, a heat wave-or even a hot year-does not indicate global warming. More important, such weather does not point to any warming created by mankind's utilization of fossil fuels. But telling that to the stooges on Capital Hill who are debating energy policies like Cap and Trade is like trying to tell the TV producer not to mislead the audience by sending the weatherguy to the bank thermometer in Walnut Creek.

The world's most thorough historical temperature record is found amongst the 1,221 official, government-sanctioned weather monitoring stations that have been recognized as a part of the U.S. Historical Climatology Network (USHCN). Most of the stations within this network have records that date back to the 1800s. The beauty of this system is that in so many cases the environs where the thermometer is housed has changed little over the decades, providing critical data to determine major long-term trends.

In some instances thermometers within the Network have been encroached upon by urban sprawl and their readings notably have trended upward. However, for the locations that have remained relatively stable, the temperature record hardly reeks of global warming.

A perfect illustration is found when comparing the USHCN temperature records from Central Park in New York City to those taken a mere 55 miles away at West Point.

Readings in Central Park have been regularly measured since 1835 when the city's population had just surpassed 200,000. Today, surrounded by a metropolis of eight million people filled with some of the world's tallest buildings, a massive underground subway system, an extensive sewer system, power generation facilities, and millions of cars, buses, and taxis, the Central Park temperatures have been greatly altered by urbanization. And, as one might expect, the Central Park historical temperature plot illustrates an incredible warming increase of nearly 4°F.

The West Point readings have also been meticulously maintained since 1835, but the environment surrounding the thermometer shelter has experienced significantly less manmade interference then the one in Central Park. The West Point readings illustrate a significantly lower warming increase of only about 0.6°F over the same 170-year period. This is remarkable given that the year 1835 is considered to be the last gasp of the Little Ice Age -- a significant period of global cooling that stretched back several hundred years.

Cries of out of control global warming become more dubious when one looks at the hottest decade in modern history, the 1930s.

The summer of 1930 marked the beginning of the longest drought of the 20th Century. From June 1 to August 3, Washington, D.C. experienced twenty-one days of high temperatures of at least 100°. During that record-shattering heat wave, there were maximum temperatures set on nine different days that remain unbroken more than three-quarters-of-a-century later. In 1934, bone dry regions stretched from New York, across the Great Plains, and into the Southwest. A "dust bowl" covered about 50 million acres in the south-central plains during the winter of 1935-1936. In some areas, the drought never broke until 1938.

Full article here.

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