If you have 1,ooo stations and a 100 year record – you would expect 10 stations per year to have their hottest month ever. (There are other considerations for the time of year when record heat can occur, but they cancel out of the equation and are not shown below.)
1,000 / 100 = 10
The largest component of the USHCN upwards adjustments is called the time of observation bias. The concept itself is simple enough, but it assumes that the station observer is stupid and lazy.
Suppose that you have a min/max thermometer and you take the reading once per day at 3 pm. On day one it reads 50F for the high – which for arguments sake occurred right at 3 pm. That night a cold front comes through and drops temperatures by 40 degrees. The next afternoon, the maximum temperature is also going to be recorded as 50F – because the max marker hasn’t moved since yesterday. This is a serious and blatantly obvious problem, if the observer is too stupid to reset the min/max markers before he goes to bed. The opposite problem occurs if you take your readings early in the morning.
I had a min/max thermometer when I was six years old. It took me about three days to realize that you had to reset the markers every night before you went to bed. Otherwise half of the temperature readings are garbage.
USHCN makes it worse by claiming that people used to take the readings in the afternoon, but now take them in the morning. That is how they justify adjusting the past cooler and the present warmer.
They should use the raw data. These adjustments are largely BS.
http://www.ijis.iarc.uaf.edu/seaice/extent/AMSRE_Sea_Ice_Extent.png
Red below shows 2006 ice present but not in 2011. Green shows 2011 ice present but not in 2006.
In 1942, a squadron was forced down over Greenland and forced to abandon their planes. Forty-six years later, the planes were recovered under 265 feet of ice.
Every once in a while some victim of John Cook comes along and claims that sublimation is causing the thickness of the ice to decrease in the coldest regions of Antarctica. Rather than arguing against their silly claims, one picture is worth a thousand words.
This is the South Pole Research Station, buried in ice. The red building at left was five stories above the snow when it was built in the 1970s.
http://www.coolantarctica.com/Bases/South_Pole/south_pole0002.html
“until we’ve talked to you”
That is not how it works.. How about “There is no agreement until a majority of us agree”
Lincoln. Virgina is a small town 45 miles west of Washington D.C. and is the closest USHCN station to DC. Since the 1930s, annual maximum temperatures there have dropped by several degrees.
http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/meant80n.uk.php
Every summer since 2003 has seen temperatures north of 80N fall below the long term mean.
We would be better off with the Keystone Cops running Washington. The current crew are all completely worthless. Boehner had an historic opportunity and choked – in world class form.
WASHINGTON (AP) — House Speaker John Boehner says the pact he’s reached with President Barack Obama and other leaders of Congress on lifting the debt limit and taming the budget “isn’t the greatest deal” but lives up to the GOP’s principles on taxes and spending.
1934 was a year of heat and drought across the planet, from pole to pole. It wasn’t the CO2. It wasn’t USHCN’s overblown Time Of Observation Bias. So what was it?
And the bigger question is – why aren’t climate scientists investigating the real drivers of climate, rather than hiding in their Oxygen deprived CO2 chambers?
