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Hottest May in History for Texas

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Re: Hottest May in History for Texas

#71
post #50
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And, once again, screaming "climate change" when there is a high begets "counter arguments" when it's cooler. Not every article with a hot point of data is proof and shouldn't be treated as such. To be very clear before the knee jerk downvoting occurs, climate change is very real and needs to be addressed, scientifically. Don't bail on the mountains of science to make points in a small article about a regional high o…

Temperatures, particularly high temperatures, have a distribution. If enough contributing factors were independent, the high temp would follow a normal distribution, and new records would decrease in frequency over time. This isn't what we are seeing. Records are being broken faster than ever; outliers are increasing . So is the average. Turns out, yeah, it is climate change. The whole distribution is shifting over.

Yes, temperatures, particularly high temperatures have a distribution. Here's a list of record high temperatures for U.S. states and territories:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._state_and_territory_tempe...

Notice the dates:

     
Going by this list the really worrisome period would be the 1920-1940 interval, going by newspaper archives this is corroborated - this is after all the time of the Dust Bowl.

Now let's look at record low temperatures:

  1885-1900: 6
  1900-1920: 8
  1920-1940: 9
  1940-1960: 7
  1960-1980: 9
  1980-2000: 13
  2000-2022: 4
Less spread but noticeably the very hot 1920-1940 interval also gave rise to a relatively high number of record cold temperatures. The 1980-2000 interval sticks out a bit in both record high as well as record low temperatures.

What, if any, conclusion can be drawn from these data? Just going by the numbers the 1920-1940 interval was the hottest on record thus far but in the same period a relatively high number of record cold temperatures were recorded. The same is true for the 1980-2000 interval. The conditions which give rise to record high temperatures also seem to be capable of producing record low temperatures. Elsewhere in this thread I posted an observation on the close relation between insolation and average temperature [1]. The difference in insolation is most likely related to the amount of aerosol pollution (of natural and human origin) in the atmosphere given that an increase in aerosol pollution leads to an increase in cloud cover due to those aerosols functioning as cloud condensation nuclei. It would be interesting to see the data on insolation/SSR (solar surface radiation) for these regions and compare it to those record periods. I would expect to find a correspondence there which would explain both the high as well as the low temperature records - clear skies make for hot summer days and cold winter nights.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31556790

Re: Hottest May in History for Texas

#72
post #11

Wait this article is from May 12th. It’s not “the hottest May on record”, because May isn’t even over? What the article says is the average high/low of the first 11 days is hotter than the hottest month. Uhhh… statistics don’t work like that? You cant compare a part month to a full month and make that claim because your selectively comparing some days to an average of a whole month.

It's meaningless to compare calendar months at all. They're entirely artificial. It would be more meaningful to compare something like rolling n-day average maximum temperates.

Well we have that already. Like since 2000's 19 years had been in the hottest years ever recorded. Thats 86% chance bet that next year will be in the hottest 20 list.

Since 70's average mean global temp went steadily by 1C in almost straight line.

Anything else is just click-bait articles that don't change underlying data.

Re: Hottest May in History for Texas

#73
post #66
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So...when some place has a low, you're going to take that has proof against global warming? Of course not. This article isn't about temperatures distributed over time or the globe. It's about one state over one month. That is cherry picking data and doesn't support global warming any more than one place is cold disproves it. I'm saying to take global warming out of the popularity/anecdote contest, even when popularit…

> Nothing I've written has been against climate change. It's merely against the, "See it's hot! Climate Change!" style argument which I believe does more harm than good. > They would also prefer to cherry pick data. Stop crying "cherry picking". The 10 hottest years on record for the entire planet have all been in the 21st century. The avalanche of record-breaking heat incidents is overwhelming. If anything, the publ…

> The 10 hottest years on record for the entire planet have all been in the 21st century.

The 10 hottest years in the last ~century that is. Also, see my post on temperature extremes just below this one for some anecdata on which period in time was good for the most records (1920-1940). Going by the data that period was far warmer - and in some places also quite a bit colder - than it is now.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31557076

Also have a look at the Atlantic period (6500 BC-4000 BC, also referred to as "the Holocene climatic optimum") when talking about "the hottest years on record". Notice that the sea rose up to to 3 m above the present level after which it started to go down due to water being locked into glaciers again. The end of the climatic optimum lies somewhere around 2800 BC going by temperature decline or 2300 BC to 1100 BC (depending on where you look) as evidenced by elm-decline, the latter of which being disputed as to whether it was (and is, we are again in a period of elm-decline) the result of temperature decline or human activity or a combination of these two factors.

Re: Hottest May in History for Texas

#74
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to mention the idea that anyone could live in Florida before air conditioning.

Pretty soon, ie now in Pakistan and India, the wet bulb temperature, a measure of realtime humidity and temperature, will regularly exceed 120 degrees, at which point it becomes too hot for the human body to physically cool itself with sweat. Our climate is changed and changing now. It was cooler in Florida 10-20 years ago, let alone centuries ago. It's hotter now. When hundreds of millions are starving, flooded, ove…

Parts in the Midwest USA are reaching max wet bulb also.

Re: Hottest May in History for Texas

#75
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I picked the worse time to be homeless in Washington. Cold and wet, non stop. Leaving this week cause I can’t take it anymore.

You chose to be homeless? Or am I misreading that? If you feel so inclined I am quite curious why you chose to be homeless.

Yeah, you misread. I am disabled, living with Lupus. Lost my housing during COVID because the owners found they could rent my place more on AirBnB to some desperate person who really needed the quiet to work from home. Bought a van in desperation since I had no money for first, last and deposit.

Re: Hottest May in History for Texas

#76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I picked the worse time to be homeless in Washington. Cold and wet, non stop. Leaving this week cause I can’t take it anymore.

Assuming you didn’t really have much choice?

No, unfortunately not.

Re: Hottest May in History for Texas

#77
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In this area we have indigenous families that have histories that go back for many hundreds and even thousands of years. Where is that? Thousands of years is well beyond the histories of any North American tribes.

Dude, the West Coast has been settled for some 30000 years. People have lived in this particular interior valley for at least 3000 years. You find it hard to believe that the Interior Salish peoples don’t have a history?

With no evidence, why do you assume their civilization was stable enough to carry a cohesive history? No writing system + inter-tribal conflicts makes it difficult for all but a few outlandish stories to make it more than a couple hundred years.
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