Greenland reached 75 degrees earlier this month, setting a reported record for warmth in June — but one science blogger provided data that casts doubt on the claim.
Using official data from the Danish Meteorological Institute (DMI) Paul Homewood of the blog Not A Lot Of People Know That, found that while April in Greenland was indeed the warmest on record. It was only .2 degrees Celsius above the next warmest April on record, 1953 — long before global warming or CO2 emissions were an issue. Homewood explained that April 2014 and 2015 were “two of the coldest [winters] on record.” A fact seemingly lost on those claiming record warmth.
Further, using the charts Homewood provides in his piece, it shows the 1930s were just as warm for Greenland as today. For reference, the 1930s were a historically warm decade, as pointed out by National Climactic Data Center.
“The top five years for setting record maximums were all during the 1930s.” Steven Goddard writes in 2012 for a piece published by his website stevengoddard.wordpress.com, “No year this century even shows up in the top fifteen. Last year didn’t even make the top sixty.” What Goddard is referring to is the number of record daily high temperatures recorded in a given year.
Homewood also shows that while there are two sets of data for temperature readings at the Nuuk weather station, The Weather Underground — which originally presented the finding — chose to only use one in their assessment; the one that read higher. In the picture Homewood uses, it shows wild temperature fluctuations of up to seven degrees Celsius happening at ten to the hour every hour.
It is worth noting that Homewood uses “non-adjusted data” for his research. There are two sets of data for temperature readings: the adjusted, and the actual temperature record.
Zeke Hausfather of juditchcurry.com explained in a July 2014 piece why scientists adjust data in the first place, “Nearly every single [weather] station in the network has been moved at least once over the last century, with many having 3 or more distinct moves.” Hausfather goes onto explain,”Most of the stations have changed from using liquid in glass thermometers (LiG) in Stevenson screens to electronic Minimum Maximum Temperature Systems (MMTS) or Automated Surface Observing Systems (ASOS). Observation times have shifted from afternoon to morning at most stations since 1960, as part of an effort by the National Weather Service to improve precipitation measurements. All of these changes introduce (non-random) systemic biases into the network.”
Always on the ready to tell climate skeptics that a singular event does not represent climate, the alarmists seem all too happy to do just that here.
“Weather is to climate what one pitch is to an entire baseball season,” Richard Stuebi wrote in an article published by The Huffington Post in 2011.
Homewood wrote in a Friday article, “In any event, the whole idea that a day’s weather proves ;climate change’ is preposterous.”
Joe Romm of Think Progress wrote in an article published Wednesday that Greenland was “shockingly warm” using “land surface” temperature data. There’s just one problem with that according to Homewood: “There are no weather stations in the interior of Greenland.”
“Observed by satellites uniformly around the world, land surface temperatures (LSTs) are not the same as air temperatures.” NASA Earth Observatory (EO) noted in an April piece, “Instead, they reflect the heating of the surface by sunlight, and they can sometimes be significantly hotter or cooler than air temperatures.”
So land temperature data is expected to show different temperatures than what the air actually is, as land soaks up heat from the Sun.
One scientist has a natural explanation for the warmth in Greenland though. Santiago de la Pena, a research scientist at the University of Ohio said in the April piece published by NASA’s EO: “A high-pressure weather system sat over the ice sheet through most of April. The system caused temperatures across Greenland to spike,”
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