Downtown Los Angeles as seen from American Airlines flight from Japan. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Posted on 06/25/2012 1:54:29 PM PDT by Ernest_at_the_Beach
Downtown Los Angeles as seen from American Airlines flight from Japan. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
SkepticalScience recently published a post titled Mercury rising: Greater L.A. to heat up an average 4 to 5 degrees by mid-century. It’s a cross post of a UCLA press release with the same title. It struck me odd, because we recently showed that Western North American land surface temperatures have declined in recent years. Refer to Figure 6 in the post IPCC Models vs Observations – Land Surface Temperature Anomalies for the Last 30 Years on a Regional Basis.
The press release is based on the Hall et al (2012) climate model study Mid-Century Warming in the Los Angeles Region published at the website C-Change.La.
So, does a 4 to 5 deg F rise in Greater Los Angeles land surface temperature anomalies by 2050 sound realistic? That equates to a rise of 2.5 to 2.8 deg C. Considering that, based on a preliminary look at the data, greater Los Angeles land surface temperature anomalies have been cooling for the 3-plus decades, it seems to be a real stretch of the imagination.
The GHCN-CAMS land surface temperature dataset comes in a number of resolutions, including 0.5 degree latitude and longitude. Lucky for us, it’s available through the KNMI Climate Explorer. And that means we can capture data for some reasonably small geographical areas. The GHCN-CAMS land surface temperature dataset was presented in the Fan and Dool (2007) paper A global monthly land surface air temperature analysis for 1948-present. It will allow us to get an idea of what Greater Los Angeles surface temperatures have been doing since 1948.
The UCLA press release states (my bold face):
Some of the smallest changes predicted, yet still nearing a 4-degree increase, are in Oxnard (3.68 degrees), Venice (3.70), Santa Barbara (3.73), Santa Monica (3.74), San Pedro (3.78), Torrance (3.80), Long Beach (3.82) and Santa Ana (3.85). Among the highest predicted increases are Wrightwood (5.37), Big Bear Lake (5.23), Palm Springs (5.15), Palmdale (4.92), Lancaster (4.87), Bakersfield (4.48) and Santa Clarita (4.44). Table 2 in the study calls out 27 distinct locations, such as downtown Los Angeles (3.92), San Fernando (4.19), Woodland Hills (4.26), Eagle Rock (3.98), Pasadena (4.05), Pomona (4.09), Glendale (3.99) and Riverside (4.23).
So they’ve made predictions for an area larger than the City or County of Los Angeles. For the sake of discussion, let’s say it represents the area bordered by the coordinates of 33N-35.5N, 121W-117W. See Figure 1. Those coordinates fit with the 0.5 degree grids. And we’ll call that dataset Santa Barbara-Ventura-Los Angeles-Orange Counties.
Figure 1
Figure 2 presents a time-series graph of the Santa Barbara-Ventura-Los Angeles-Orange Counties land surface temperature anomalies since January 1948. The data has a linear trend of 0.177 deg C/decade. In order for the land surface temperatures for that dataset to rise 2.5 deg C by 2050, the linear trend of the data has to change drastically to about 0.667 deg C/decade from June 2012 through December 2050.
Figure 2
I thought Los Angeles was supposed to be underwater by now what with sea levels rising by 25 feet and all.
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They are promising a warm up next week.
But none of that is more true in L.A. than elsewhere.
Another Stephan Rahmstorf sea level scare
The Global Warmistas Crowd is meeting in Rio,...so it is time to let loose the Alarmists Stories.
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In Figure 3, I’ve smoothed the Santa Barbara-Ventura-Los Angeles-Orange Counties land surface temperature anomalies with a 13-month running-average filter to reduce some of the variability. What caught my eye was the shift in 1976 that coincides with the Pacific Climate Shift. Curiously, it appears the dataset has been cooling since that shift.
Figure 3
Figure 2 looks like things have really cooled off in the last 12 years or so.
Here’s the comment I left at the wuwt article:
L.A. summers -used- to be hot; looking at Pasadena in particular, we’re talking a majority of the summer days over 90°F, and many over 100. But those who live there have noticed a dramatic change, as the last 4 summers — in a row — have been cool. 90° has been a virtual ceiling, with just a handful of days going over 90, and literally just a couple of days reaching 100. This is seemingly and obviously inconsistent with the notion that we are in a period of acute global warming. Instead, if we were actually living in the hottest period of history, nearly all the days should be over 90, and a near majority over 100. But it’s the opposite… And now, to predict that temps are going to skyrocket in L.A., it’s just ludicrous, laughable. Makes you shake your head in disbelief. The warmists are full of it.
I wonder if any of these “Climatologist” have ever heard of precession? Evidently they all seem to think that the earth is supposed to be static and not ruled by nature and the natural events of planets.
Up to a foot of snow for Mt Shasta California In summer ! (forecast for this past weekend)
There is no evidence that the ultra-trace gas CO2 affects climate scale temps. Instead, there is only an arguable ambiguous theoretical model. Indeed, ipcc founded their climate propaganda on a correlation which wasn’t evidence; they claimed that there was a causal correlation between temps and CO2. This has since been debunked, but algor continued to parrot the falsehood, see him called out for doing just that in this 3 minute video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WK_WyvfcJyg
Maybe 98% of the public doesn’t know this key info about CO2 as presented in the video above. That’s why it’s important that we share and promote that video. Watch it.
My thinking: CO2 may have at most a minuscule warming effect, but in any event the ultra-trace gas is simply dwarfed by other huger factors, like the sun, and the ocean and atmospheric dynamics. An analogy: take a large open winter auditorium, put a small 800w bathroom heater (CO2) at the center. Sure, it heats, but it’s not going to make a whits worth of difference on the temps in the open auditorium. The larger environment overwhelms any effect of the tiny heater (CO2).
Nothin’ to do with LA, but,,,, here in Cleveland, it’s dropping to 50 tonight, but supposed to be in the 90s by Wednesday or Thursday.
Hey these guys are near a great big ocean. Maybe, they can go in and cool themselves off.
Hot pie in the sky when you die.
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