It’s not that this is some huge issue. But leaving it up there is dishonest and stubborn.

On topic, there is a VERY GOOD point that people are not noting or thinking about, about how STeve has confounded regional differences with the rural/urban comparison. Take a minute and think about it. Read the CA post. Stop. Think. ks is the guy to read. Think. Read. Consider. Slow down…

The temperature data for the US may be poor, but for most of the rest of the world it appears to be absolutely abysmal!!!

No, TCO you professional troll, Steve did not cherry pick his numbers. But you never miss a chance to insinuate dishonesty on Steve’s part. What a weanie.

So what the plots show is that urban 1900 temperatures were 2 C cooler than urban 1980 temperatures while rural 1900 temperatures were virtually unchanged over that period. This implies that (at least in the US) warming has been almost entirely an urban phenomenon which argues for urban heat island effects (asphalt, waste heat) being the dominant cause of warming. If CO2 (or the sun or any other global phenomenon) had been the primary driver, then both rural and urban areas should’ve seen similar increases over similar time scales.

Isaac

Thing is, someone dug out pictures from the early 1900’s of the same glacial areas, showing the glaciers had already retreated significantly by about 1910-1915.

Of course, the “usual suspects” (media included) did not recant a single scream of alarm.

The biggest problem I have with AGW is that the hysterics by the alamrists are, well, hysterical.

A few years back (roughly 12 or 14 so I don’t have the data at my fingertips) my daughter, then in early middle-school, needed to do a project that tied some sort of “science” with some other aspect of life. What she somehow arrived at (probably from a family dinner-table discussion) was checking Dear Old Dad’s claims that, “when I was a kid we were always ice-skating on the frozen pond and sledding in the snow all winter long”. There just wasn’t all that much snow in NJ when mine were young. What she decided on was to check my recollections against data.

She put a great deal of effort into her research. Among other things she contacted the US weather service or whatever they are called and had them send her data for the 50’s through 90’s. As it turned out, the ’60s were an unusually cold decade and yes, Dad did a ton of ice-skating and sledding and snowball fighting when he was a kid. Much of the data was for the Northeast. It was the same throughout the region.

Weather changes. Some decades/centuries/millenia are warmer/colder that others. During the revolution the Delaware River was clogged with ice. Nobody’s seen that in quite some time. If you could live long enough you could be the farm that at some point in the future people will be moaning and groaning about how darned cold it is and how the Delaware, or the Charles NEVER used to freeze.