Who are you going to believe, me or your lyin’ frostbitten eyes???
A tale of two countries. The west has been very warm >10 F above normal while NE is > 8 below normal. Check out this site http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/tanal/temp_analyses.php
This shows the futility of talking about climate change based on monthly conditions. It is weather. The jet stream and entrenched fronts etc control the temp. When Feb is done it may show above average temps for the US, but tell that to the folks fighting collapsing roofs and frozen pipes!
I just got in....ten degrees out (Eastern MA)
Toasty !!!! :-)
.
Apples and Oranges temperature measurement.
In order to have accurate temperature measurement, especially when small variances are so important, temps must be taken under precisely the same conditions time after time. This has not been done. It is nearly impossible. What was the formula that the NOAA used to “adjust” when Chicago moved its official temperature measurement from Midway Airport to O’Hare in the last part of the 1900’s? The two have different measurements. Midway, closer to Lake Michigan, has milder temps, O’Hare has more extreme temps. How do they adjust?
Urbanization has a huge effect on temperature measurement. A weather station in a field yields one temp. Put that suburban parking lot near it, or a McDonalds 100 feet away and you have a distorted result. taken as a global measurement, it will grossly exaggerate the actual result to the warm side. Again, what is NOAA’s formula for this?
There are literally thousands of variables to be taken into account, especially over long stretches of time. There is way to much guesswork in the “modeling” that is going on with global temp statistics and measurement. Today there are many places in Africa, Asia and South America where temps are recorded, but in the past, there were few. If you take the same places,and exclude the rest, you have the many effects of urbanization “heat islands” dramatically shifting the measurements upward. How to adequately account for this? Guesswork. They are guessing what the relative temps are. It is not “science.”