USA Divisions

We’ve occasionally looked at temperature time series from NCDC (National Climate Data Center) for USA48 (the 48 states of the continental USA excluding Alaska). But in addition to data for individual states, NCDC also offers data for each individual climate division within each state. The temperature data, for example, can be found here.

Segmenting USA48 by division rather than state will give us a much more detailed geographical picture of climate change in the mainland U.S. Let’s take a look at some of the things the data have to say.

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Where’s the Skepticism?

It’s getting tiresome.

There’s a new post on WUWT about how

“Authors Steirou and Koutsoyiannis, after taking homogenization errors into account find global warming over the past century was only about one-half [0.42°C] of that claimed by the IPCC [0.7-0.8°C].”

Anthony Watts was so excited he felt the need to alert Richard Muller to this result. The blog post leads to the usual frenzy of accusations that the global temperature estimates are a fraud. There’s much talk of how the entire global warming during the last 100 years is only 0.4C, and half of that must be natural, leaving a mere 0.2C (at most) attributable to humankind, so they’ve been right all along that we’re not changing the climate in any dangerous way. There are even some bizarre statements like one reader concluding “that is fully consistent with what we’ve said all along, that incresed water vapor is a negative, not positive feedback…” How water vapor got into the discussion, I don’t know.

What’s lacking is the faintest glimmer of actual skepticism about this claim.