Exploring Climate Warming using charts
Why all the Arguments and Doubt?
The arguments and doubt exist for 3 reasons:
- climate change spans hundreds of years that can’t be described/explained/understood simply (it’s complicated!)
- math-magic and models provide the terms and methods to analyze climate but at the cost of being opaque to non-math types like me while obscuring the details (show me the details!)
- we just don’t want to believe it.
This website addresses the first point by using charts to compactly consolidate the last 100+ years of daily temperature records without resorting to math-magic of the second point. The third point is up to you.
Select the Pick Cities menu option and then click on a city on the US map. Below the map the details of that city will be displayed. The details will give a few details about the size, population and when established info. Following that is the charts section. Each chart has a discussion of characteristic daily temperatures of that city and any apparent trends.
SPOILER ALERT: not all cities show a definite warming trend! Some cities have more constant temperatures over the time period studied but the overall trend for all cities is warmer.
SPOILER ALERT 2: warming trends are NOT linear! Climate warming does NOT require that next year be hotter than this year. Some cities studied show a hot decade or two followed by one or more cooler decades. The presence of cooler decades for a city doesn’t disprove the climate is warming.
SPOILER ALERT 3: a warming climate doesn’t automatically mean that every summer will be filled with new record breaking highs. What is more likely is that a city will have more summer days with near-record highs and fewer cold and near-record cold winter days. Longer summers and shorter winters.
SPOILER ALERT 4: look at the night time temperatures to see evidence of warming more clearly. The day time heat isn’t dissipating like it used to, making it more likely that the next day will be a little warmer than it would have been 100+ years ago.
Be sure to visit the FAQ page for answers to date and methodology used to prepare the charts. The blog page will have articles about items that were of interest to me while preparing this web site, possibly including programming and website preparation details.