2024 CONUS Temperatures

NOAA has released their December 2024 results for both nClimDiv and USCRN US temperatures, and 2024 turned out to be the warmest year for CONUS on record (records beginning in 1895). NOAA's website reports CONUS for 2024 as 55.51°F. Below I show several graphs for nClimDiv, with monthly temperatures, a 12-month running mean, and a 10-year running mean.

ERA5 for CONUS is also out, and to make apples to apples comparisons, I changed nClimDiv to Celsius and set it to a 1951-2000 baseline.
USCRN began recording CONUS temperatures in 2005, so the end of 2024 marks the 20th year for that dataset. Below I show graphs comparing USCRN to both nClimDiv and UAH-TLT for CONUS.

Here's how USCRN compares to ERA5, with the scale switched to Celsius to match ERA5.
Since USCRN only goes back to 2005, I can't give you 30-year trends, but CONUS is warming so rapidly, that the last 20 years is already statistically significant. Since 2005, CONUS trends were:
  • USCRN: 0.451 ± 0.241°C/decade (2σ)
  • nClimDiv: 0.385 ± 0.242°C/decade (2σ)
  • ERA5: 0.418 ± 0.176°C/decade (2σ)
The three are statistically identical, with USCRN showing marginally more warming than nClimDiv and ERA5 splitting the difference between the other two. If I didn't tell you which was which, you wouldn't be able to tell.
CO2 Forcings Do Correlate with CONUS temperatures

And while proper comparisons between temperature and CO2 should use GMST (the US is only 2% of the globe), I see many contrarians plotting CONUS temperatures and CO2 with scales specifically chosen to create the impression that the US is not warming in a manner consistent with the increase in CO2 concentrations. So I thought it might be useful to show the correlation between CONUS temperatures and CO2 forcings. There is more scatter in the data due to the fact that US is a small fraction of the surface area of the globe, but the correlation is still clear. The US is warming at a rate of 0.73°C/W/m^2.




Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Debunking the Latest CO2 "Saturation" Paper

Image
Update (12/29/2024):  The paper I discuss below was retracted a couple days ago, citing failures in the peer-review process. "Subsequent to acceptance of this paper, the rigor and quality of the peer-review process for this paper was investigated and confirmed to fall beneath the high standards expected by Applications in Engineering Science . After review by additional expert referees, the Editor-in-Chief has lost confidence in the validity of the paper and has decided to retract." A paper published earlier this year is the latest in the long history of attempts to show that CO2 is already "saturated" in the atmosphere, and therefore increased CO2 cannot cause any more warming. The latest in a series of these kinds of papers from Kubicki et al 2024[1] attempts to make this point by modeling the atmosphere in a couple different experiments. The result of their experiments suggested to them that we should question whether "additionally emitted CO2 in the atmosp...
Read more

Was There a "Mike's Nature Trick" to "Hide the Decline?" Part 1 - Misreading CRU Emails

Image
In November 2009, someone likely stole[1] and publicly released over 1,000 emails from Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia. Following this, people combed through all these emails  looking for evidence of frauds and coverups on the part of climate scientists. They found very little damaging information, but not everything they found was was good. There were, as best I can tell, four categories of content that were discovered: The normal kinds of communication you'd expect to find in correspondence between scientists Words and phrases that were twisted out of context and redefined to support an imagined conspiracy that had been imposed on the emails. Evidence of mean-spirited attacks on contrarian scientists and heavy-handed tactics intended to punish journals that published contrarian studies.  A single email describing the process of creating a graph for a WMO statement that used the phrase "hide the decline."  Here I plan to tackle the "hid...
Read more

Data Tampering by Shewchuk and Heller

Image
If you follow climate discussions on X, you're bound to see John Shewchuk and/or Tony Heller show graphs that reportedly show that NOAA is tampering with temperature data to fabricate global warming with spurious warming trends. I've gone over many of the reasons why this is nonsense before in posts about bias correction and so-called  ghost stations . I think it's good to show what's actually going on with the graphs they present as "proof" of data manipulation, though. I think it can be easily demonstrated here that it's actually Shewchuk and Heller that are tampering with data. Shewchuk (Top) and Correct (Below) Above are two graphs. The top graph shows what John Shewchuk claims shows that NOAA is manipulating data. It shows USHCN "raw" and "altered" Tmax data for 1900 to 2023. The bottom graph above is the correct plot of NOAA's published data from the current and correct dataset (nClimDiv) with a 5-year running mean to match S...
Read more