Category: NOAA

XKCD is a funny geeky comic that I read quite regularly. The blog Inconvenient Skeptic has a good post about being annoyed with a recent XKCD strip that mocks people for using the recent cold days to “disprove” global warming.

Go ahead, read the blog posting (if you are still interested) and comic and then return here.

I was ticked at XKCD for the obvious reason. The mainstream media always loves to blame global warming for any warm spell but never uses cold spells to mock the concept of global warming. I guess when XKCD followed along I was disappointed.

However, beyond that point I was interested in the St Louis data linked by the blog post here. I was immediately interested in the heatwave data in this Excel spreadsheet. I’ll just show the top twenty rows.

Notice 2012 didn’t make the top of any highlighted lists. It came close.  But 1954, 1963 and 1936 had more days greater than 90F. 1936 topped consecutive days above 90F.

And 1936, 1934 and 1954 topped the list of days over 100F. And 1936 was the year with most consecutive days above 100F.

And the red circled years are the Least number of days above 90F and 100F. Notice there are recent years without any 100F days at all.

And while I didn’t highlight it, notice that in 1954 22 days were above 100F. Only 18 were in Jun/Jul/Aug. The other 4 were int the spring or fall. Now thats hot.

So much for recent “warming”. St Louis had more extreme heat in the past. Even 2012 did not set new records.