The big news, if you’re paying attention the inexorable increase in temperatures, is that the biggest contributor to fossil fuel carbon (the USA) is experiencing the hottest year in 118 years. We have one month remaining this year, but the record will be set unless the USA suddenly experiences the coldest December in 118 years (it won’t – we’re well on our way to a warmer than average December and there’s a weak-moderate El Nino in place right now too which tends to result in more mild winters for at least part of the USA). Certainly many locations in the contiguous USA will be cold, but it’s not the cold that matters though. It’s the comparison of the current temperature to an average of past temperatures that really highlights relative warmth or cold. Mining what has quickly become my favorite climate data source, at least for the USA, i went to the NCDC website and pulled down the data to look at how temperatures of our home state compare to those of our home country. Here’s what I got:
North Carolina NC Climate Division 5* Contiguous USA
January +2.9 (92) +3.1 (94) +5.8 (115)
February +2.7 (88) +2.3 (83) +3.9 (104)
March +8.7 (117) +9.8 (117) +8.8 (118)
April +1.1 (80) +1.7 (88) +3.7 (116)
May +2.9 (108) +2.9 (106) +3.3 (117)
June -1.5 (21) -1.5 (26) +2.1 (107)
July +3.2 (117) +2.4 (111) +3.3 (118)
August -0.4 (50) -1.3 (22) +1.7 (106)
September -0.9 (47) -1.6 (36) +1.4 (96)
October -0.6 (54) -1.5 (38) -0.3 (46)
November -3.6 (11) -3.6 (10) +2.0 (99)
December TBD (TBD) TBD (TBD) TBD (TBD)
*includes Charlotte and Mecklenburg County
The numbers with the + and – are the anomaly (departure) of that month’s temperature from the 20th Century average for that month. The numbers in parentheses are how the particular month for the particular region ranks (118 is hottest, 1 is coldest following NCDC protocol). The regions are NC, a smaller part of NC that includes CharMeck, and the USA minus Hawaii and Alaska. So, if you’re from North Carolina and can’t wait to have the dinnertime conversation with your friend/relative about how global warming is a joke/hoax/conspiracy, here is what you do. Pull up that table and you can heartily agree that, yes, North Carolina has been cooler than average, particularly since August. CharMeck (middle column essentially) has pretty much been the same, maybe even cooler. But then there’s the USA. The USA had below average temperatures in October, but the warmth has otherwise been shockingly constant. March and July 2012 were both the hottest in the 118 year record. On January 1, it’ll be clear that the USA has been warmer than it has been in over a century. North Carolina has finished cooler than average, but as I pointed out before, it was the warmth in the beginning of the calendar year that set the stage. And GLOBAL warming has never been about the warming or cooling of a particular US State – it is the response of an entire planet to the energy imbalance imposed on it by human activities. The data is mounting up though and the temperature trends of regions like the USA are slowly creeping out of the noise of the day-to-day variability.