Telling The Whole Truth About ‘Average’ Global Temperature Rises
image source: bbc.co.uk
If you read the recent headlines about how Canada’s temperature is rising more than twice as fast as the average, you probably believed it, as I did at first, and concluded that Canada is facing a unique emergency.
But the same headline recently appeared for many other countries, all warming at twice the average: Australia, Finland, China, Sweden, Russia, Britain, all of Europe, Singapore and Japan.
How can all these countries be warming twice as fast as the average?
It brings to mind Garrison Keillor’s fictional Lake Wobegon, where “all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average.”
Surprisingly, these media stories are neither a joke nor a mistake. As I first learned from Prof. Ross McKitrick of the University of Guelph, they are a basically trivial fact, turned into a frightening story by deceptively vague language.
The CBC’s version of the story read: “Canada is, on average, experiencing warming at twice the rate of the rest of the world, with Northern Canada heating up at almost three times the global average, according to a new government report.”
The report in question, Canada’s Changing Climate Report (CCCR), was commissioned by Environment and Climate Change Canada.
Remarkably similar news appeared regarding Finland: “Finland is warming fast — faster than scientists ever predicted and at nearly twice the rate of any other country on Earth — according to new research from the University of Eastern Finland and the Finnish Meteorological Society.”
And there have been similar stories for several other countries. If you’re interested, just google these headlines:
- Australia temperatures rising faster than the rest of the world: official report
- China warming faster than the global average
- Temperature in Sweden rising faster than the world’s average
- Russia Is warming disproportionately fast, environment ministry says
- Britain warming faster than average
- IPCC: Europe has been warming faster than the global average
- Why Singapore is heating up twice as fast as the rest of the world
- Japan: hot and getting hotter
Everybody, it seems, is warming faster than average.
Is all this just fake news? No, it’s all true. How is that possible? It’s possible because of the word “average.” The average referred to is the average temperature of the entire planet.
The assertion is not that any country is warming twice as fast as the average of every other country. Rather, it is that the country in question is warming faster than the average temperature of the entire planet.
But the entire planet is not just the land countries sit on, it is the land and the oceans. And, as we all learned in elementary school, the Earth is 70 per cent ocean.
According to NASA, from 1881 to today the oceans’ surface has warmed about 0.6 degrees C while the land has warmed about 1.8 degrees C.
Using the 70/30 ratio, combined warming has been 1.0 degrees C. If every country warmed at exactly the same rate they would all be warming at 1.8 times the global average.
But higher latitude regions warm faster than the tropics. With that adjustment for latitude, we can see that any country outside the tropics will warm approximately twice as fast as the (land and ocean) average of the entire planet.
All of these media stories convey the same political message: because the country in question is warming at twice the (unspecified) average, that makes it doubly urgent for it to cut its greenhouse emissions quickly, compared with all the other countries.
This politically manufactured emergency pressures frightened voters (and their even more frightened children) to accept whatever measures the government may propose to reduce CO2 emissions.
It also enhances the budgets and influence of the country’s environmental politicians and bureaucrats.
If we are really to have “evidence-based policies,” as the Trudeau government has so often proclaimed, we need an honest discussion of the evidence.
If governments want to use changes in average temperatures to justify higher carbon taxes and the like, they should tell us exactly what they mean by apparently simple terms like “average.”
Read more at Financial Post
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Pierre D. Bernier
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Go tell that to TURD’o and Climate Barbie McKenna ! Good luck !!!
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Ken
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I just read a story about David Attenborough with a film crew in Antarctica, they were yhere in summer and saw stuff melting, and had a ‘hot’ day (not specified) AND it appears it is warming 5 times faster there than anywhere else!
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Andy Rowlands
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Just about every country is warming twice as fast as anywhere else according to most mainstream media. The truth is what Andrew Roman says and the media taking the fraudulent temperature data from alarmists as scientific facts.
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David W Thomson
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The Earth is not warming, it is thawing. The ice in the Northern Hemisphere is the anomaly. The fact that the ice has been thawing for 11,000 years is what is normal. Near the end of anything thawing cycle, temperatures quickly rise in the very last stage to the stable zone, that range of temperatures that existed in the environment before the anomalous ice appeared.
We know the ice is the anomaly, and not the thawing, because under the ice are large peat swamps and old forests from 11,500 years ago. Large animals roamed the polar regions and ate well before the anomalous ice appeared in a sudden and horrific storm.
Nothing humans can do can stop the thawing, and we don’t want it to stop. We want the planet at its natural temperature, which eventually will cause the deserts to become watered and fertile, again. Our biggest concern should be our powerful weapons that release tremendous amounts of heat into the atmosphere at one time. If an all out war occurs, and thousands of high temperature massive weapons are detonated, all that heat will eventually end up in the ocean, and it is the excessive heat in the Atlantic ocean that will generate the massive hurricanes in the polar regions, which will suddenly cool the Earth again, and release sudden piles of ice up to ten miles thick in the Labrador, Canada area, and also in the Norwegian area. It is the sudden appearance of the massive quantities of ice that cause the ice ages, and this sudden appearance is accompanied by massive storms lasting only several weeks, but which cause unimaginable damage across the entire planet.
Let the ice thaw in peace, and keep peace in the world. Do not ever support a full scale war involving weapons of mass destruction. We have a chance to survive, and it requires that we all get along with everyone.
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tom0mason
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A classic case of comparing an overall ‘global average’ to short term weather in a specific region. Not quite the truth or lies but a gross distortion of reality.
Take two scenarios for instance —
1. The equatorial areas of the world cool slightly and the polar areas warm.
2. The equatorial areas of the world warm slightly and the polar areas cool.
— and the result is that the average global temperature from both cases are the same.
The climatic effect of each of these scenarios is quite different!!
Generally the temperature differential between the equator and the poles is what governs how ‘excitable’ our weather and climate is, from the example, scenario 2 would favor more volatile weather/climate.
The bottom line is that the global average temperature tells you very little about the possible changes in the weather or climate anywhere. It is the equator to poles differential that tells you a little more with regional climate changes as cases unto themselves for they depend highly on the region in question (altitude, topography, land use change, closeness to large bodies of water, etc.).
Trying to averaging global climate results in it becoming meaningless! Climate is specific to a location or region.
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Dan Pangburn
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Bad climate science started when they guessed the wrong molecule
Hitran, using Quantum Mechanics, calculates the relative absorb/emit intensity of water vapor molecules vs CO2 molecules. Comparison at zero altitude is shown at https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ECWhyyDUYAA1P89?format=jpg&name=medium . Comparison by the ratio of the summation of intensities (line lengths) for each wavenumber for each molecule species is 8.7/0.07 = 124. On average at ground level, WV molecules outnumber CO2 molecules by about 10,000/410 ≈ 24 to one. After accounting for molecule count, each WV molecule is still more than 124/24 ≈ 5 times more effective at absorb/emit of thermal radiation than a CO2 molecule.
The relative effectiveness of the increases of WV and CO2 over 30 years is calculated as follows:
CO2 increase in 3 decades, 1988 to 2018 = 407 – 348 = 59 parts per million by volume (ppmv)
Water vapor increase trend from NASA/RSS TPW data, is 0.04272/28.9 * 100 * 10 = 1.47 % per decade.
Average global WV = 10,000 ppmv. WV increase in 3 decades = .0147 * 10,000 * 3 = 441 ppmv
Therefore, WV has been 441/59 * 5 = 37+ times more effective at increasing ground level temperature than CO2. (Most of the world has been falsely indoctrinated.)
Above the tropopause (about 33,000 feet) WV molecules are reduced to about 32 ppmv because of the low temperature while CO2 molecules remain at 410 ppmv. Therefore, CO2 molecules outnumber WV molecules 410/32 ≈12 to one. At higher altitudes the molecule spacing increases and more and more of outward directed radiation makes it all the way to space. The increased cooling by more CO2 well above the tropopause counters and apparently fully compensates for the tiny added warming from CO2 increase at ground level. The result is that burning fossil fuels does not significantly affect climate. http://globalclimatedrivers2.blogspot.com
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Herb Rose
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Hi Dan,
When you take into account the solubility of CO2 in water the amount of CO2 gas in the troposphere drops below insignificant.
Herb
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