Unsurprising Summer Heat Baffles Cooling Alarmists

Global Temperatures In June

I know I haven't been keeping up with my monthly temperature summaries. I may go back to selected updates as we get further into the year, but the June statistics are in for the satellite data, and are worth bearing in mind whilst reading this article. Both UAH and RSS show June was hot globally. UAH has 2019 as the second hottest June in its 40 year record, only beaten by the super El Niño year of 1998. Whilst RSS has June as the hottest in its 40 year record, beating the previous record June by over 0.2°C.

Remote Sensing Systems Lower Troposphere Anomalies - June 2019

The RSS anomaly map shows most of the globe was above average with the warmest anomalies in Western Europe and Northern Russia, but with the occasional colder spot, noticeably a cold blob just west of the UK and Ireland, and the USA is a mixture of above and below average spots.

June According to WUWT

So naturally a certain type of skeptic will ignore all this and point to places that are cooler than expected as disproving any warming. In particular we have an article from What's Up With That published just before the end of June - with the title Surprising Summer Chill Baffles Global Warming Alarmists. In this, not only does Vijay Jayaraj claim cold spots as baffling those who claim the world is warming, but even suggests they could indicate the start of a new ice-age caused by an inactive sun. It starts:

A surprising late-June chill broke records for lowest temperatures and made life miserable for many across the world.

Across the world is limited to a couple of place in America and Australia:

From Denver, Colorado, in the United States, to Melbourne in Australia, the mercury dropped precipitously.

The article never cites specific records and most seem to be the coldest since the 80s or 90s, not all time records. Regardless, the author ties himself in linguistic knots to argue that this is not compatible with global warming:

Either way it contradicts alarmists’ claims of a warming world. If it were a mere weather phenomenon, then it would mean global warming would result in cold phases (like those in June, May, and earlier months this year), not warmer phases, as claimed by the alarmists. That means climate change will result in cold phases like the ones we’ve been observing in the past two years.

But he thinks it entirely possible there is global cooling, ignoring all those pesky warm weather phenomena.

In contrast, if these cold phases are an indicator of a longer climatic shift, then there is no drastic warming but a global cooling.

We might be headed to what NASA describes as a period of “solar minimum,” with temperatures akin to the Little Ice Age that froze Northern Europe in the 16th century.

Watt's Up With Central England?

But it's his description of Central England that I'm focusing on in this article.

And back in the Northern Hemisphere, central England experienced similar historic lows in June, although the temperature was forecasted to pick up the following week due to a heatwave.

Now I live near Central England and have an interest in the Central England Temperature data set (CET). It's certainly true that this hasn't been the best start to summer by a long way. It's been cool and very wet - but this is England, summers are often cool and wet. But it's difficult to see any justification for "historic lows".

Here's a chart of daily mean temperatures from CET.

Data Source: Met Office Hadley Centre

The faint gray area shows the range of temperatures for each day between the warmest and coldest mean temperature. The darker area shows the 90% range. All data is since 1772, the start of daily CET data. Here's the same just showing June.

Data Source: Met Office Hadley Centre

It's difficult to see any evidence of historically low temperatures. Only one day in June fell into the bottom 5% of temperatures. There have been more excursions over the year into the top 5% region.

More Alarmism

The WUWT article links to an article on a website called Electroverse, whose description is Documenting Earth Changes during the next GSM and Pole Shift. The article in question is called Central England on Course for it’s 17th Coldest June in 360 Years of Records — Crop Concerns — Grand Solar Minimum, and is quite alarming. It starts

It’s been a truly miserable run-up to summer for folks in the UK so far, with official data revealing England is currently on for it’s 17th coldest June in records dating back to 1659.

and finishes

The cold times are returning, as the sun enters it’s next Grand Solar Minimum cycle.

Historical documentation forewarns that periods of prolonged solar decline lead to shorter growing seasons, crop losses, and eventually famines.

Prepare.

Grow your own.

Grand Solar Minimum + Pole Shift

Its claim that we were on track to be the 17th coldest since 1659 is just plain wrong. After pointing out that the provisional average for the first 2 weeks of June was 12.6°C, they compare this with previous Junes:

In recent years, only the June’s of 1991, 1977 and 1971 ran colder. Before that, you have to back to 1923, 1916, 1908, 1906, 1860, 1823, 1821, 1749, 1745, 1725, 1705, 1698 and 1689 to find cooler months of June.

Firstly, this is just wrong, there are 20 Junes with a temperature of 12.6°C or less. They have forgotten 1972, 1927, 1909, 1907 and 1675. June would have to drop to 12.4°C to be equal 17th coldest.

But the main problem with this analysis is they are simply not comparing like to like. You cannot compare the first two weeks of a month with the entire month. You would generally expect a 30 day period to be closer to the average than a 14 day period. Moreover, with a month like June the temperature is expected to increase as the month moves on. Historically the first two weeks of June are more than a degree cooler than the last two weeks.

If you want a fair comparison then you need to compare the start of June to previous starts of June. We can do that looking at daily data from 1772, and find that a provisional 12.6°C would be the equal 45th coldest start to June since 1772. Not remotely an historically cool start. Warmer than the start of June 2012 and 2015.

For an actual like-for-like comparison, we now have the final figures for June 2019, which was 14.2°C. Making June 2019 the equal 162nd coolest in 360 years, slightly below the long term average. It was the 6th coldest June of the 21st century

Even if this June had been the 17th coldest it could hardly been claimed as evidence of an impending mini ice-age. It would only be the coldest June since 1991, less than 30 years ago and CET is very unpredictable when looking at monthly or even annual figures. 1675 was the coldest ever June, but the following year had one of the hottest ever (assuming you can put much trust in the early part of CET), 300 years late we had the 5th hottest June at 17.0°C in 1976 followed the next year by one at just 12.2°C. The hottest ever June was 18.2°C back in 1846 - a time usually called the mini ice-age.

You simply cannot read that much into any one month of Central England temperatures, and certainly not as an indicator of what the weather will do over the next few decades.