Quote:Oof...this one stings.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energ...nge-means/


“In a stationary climate, a climate where we don’t have any trend or long-term change, we expect hot and cold records to be broken at almost the same rate,” explains Sophie Lewis, the lead study author and a researcher at the Australian National University in Canberra. “But in the last 15 years, we see a dramatic increase in the frequency of hot records and the decrease of cold records.”


...


Sure enough, the study found that from 1910 to 1960, the ratio of hot to cold records was close to 1 to 1. From 1960 to 2014, however, that changed, as hot records started to happen much more frequently than cold records — and from 2000 to 2014, outnumbered them by more than 12 to 1.



This is becoming all too real.

 

The so-called study is looking at local records. As the population increases and more and more people add more and more asphalt and more and more AC, only an idiot would expect the number of cold records to keep up. This proves nothing as far as the global temperature is concerned, this is local urban heating and microclimate. If you install an air conditioner near a thermometer, the heat from the outside exchanger will make the thermometer readings higher in the summer. If you pave over a nearby grassy area the thermometer will read higher at night. There is no comparable cause for locally cooling the thermometer readings other than a few rare cases where pavement has been dug up and replaced by grass.


 

The number of US state cold records broken since 1990 is greater than the number of hot records broken, and the total number is less than expected for a 25 year period so there's no indication of an increase in extremes either. State records are not as easily affected by local changes since population centers are rarely in the warmest or coldest parts of the state.

 

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