Sunday, May 12, 2019

Warming In and Near Eugene, Oregon

This is to prove a point to the right wing talk show host Lars Larson and his acolytes, who say Eugene, Oregon is cooling. It isn't (first graph), and none of the stations near it are cooling either. 

The data are from NASA via https://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/stdata/#form (scroll down to the bottom).







As I showed last summer, very few of the rural stations I looked at in the Pacific Northwest show flat or cooling temperatures.

(And, to state the obvious, even if a few did show cooling, it hardly disproves manmade global warming or (!) means that locale need not cut its fossil fuel emissions.)

4 comments:

Layzej said...

Although it doesn't appear that Oregon is cooling, it's not impossible that some places may cool as the globe warms. Look at the North Atlantic for example. That cooling in the North Atlantic is possibly related to global warming-induced melting of the Greenland ice sheet.

That can't be seen as a victory for contrarians. Local cooling doesn't disprove global warming, may be a result of global warming, and probably doesn't leave folks any better off than if they had experienced local warming.

A change to either warming or cooling would require adaptation.

David Appell said...

Good points. But I bet in 100 years some denier brain-in-a-jar will point to a single farm in southern Wherever whose thermometer records shows no warming in the modern era and exclaim, "Explain that!"

Yesterday I downloaded the GHCN daily temperature data for Eugene, since 1/1/1940. It's just one site so the month-to-month variations are high, so error bars on the trend are high.

total warming from Jan 1940 to April 1940 = 0.67 pm 0.54 F.
warming in last 30 years = 0.08 pm 0.87 F.

("pm" = plus or minus; error bars are the 95% confidence limits without autocorrelation).

Layzej said...

True enough. Folks in places that have experienced no temperature change at all may think they are immune to the effects of climate change, but temperature is just one aspect of climate. They would also want to determine whether they've been affected by a change in humidity, precipitation, extreme weather, etc.

It doesn't look like Oregon is immune to any of these.

David Appell said...

Good points again, thanks.

Sunday's Oregonian had an op-ed in favor of Oregon's cap-and-trade program, now being spawned in the state legislature (it will, unfortunately, be far complex than a carbon tax).

https://www.oregonlive.com/opinion/2019/05/opinion-strengthen-our-economy-protect-our-future-by-passing-cap-and-trade-bill.html

The op-ed wrote:

"This past fire season, the cost of fighting wildfires reached an all-time high of $514.6 million in Oregon alone, according to the Northwest Interagency Coordination Center. The Oregon Shakespeare Festival lost $2 million last summer due to canceled outdoor performances because of smoky conditions, according to Travel Oregon. Portland was ranked in the top 10 for having the worst air quality in the world due to wildfire smoke.

"But that’s not all.

"Oregon’s ski and snowboarding industry, estimated to have an annual economic impact of more than $480 million, is taking a hit as average temperatures continue to rise. Nearly $51 million in tourism revenue was lost in Oregon in 2017 because of wildfires -- not including an additional $16 plus million in earnings lost to employees and proprietors because of the blazes."