(This post is being superceded, as John Christy has pointed out I used the unadjusted USHCN data for this.)

As many of you are aware, Heartland’s 9th International Conference on Climate Change (aka the “skeptics conference”) will be held in Las Vegas, Nevada during July 7-9, 2014.

Anthony Watts has already posted some July temperature statistics for Las Vegas…basically, it’s really hot there in July.

What is notable about the “official” surface temperature record there is the strong urban heat island (UHI) effect which still remains in the USHCN data. Daytime warming has been modest, but nighttime warming has been spectacular….10 deg. F or more since the 1940s.

How does something like this spurious warming still remain in the USHCN data? The “homogenization” adjustment procedure that NOAA uses in USHCN apparently does not effectively remove the spurious warming. Anthony has posted extensive evidence regarding this issue in the past.

I examined the raw 3-hourly temperatures (from NOAA Integrated Surface Hourly [ISH] data) collected at McCarran Airport in Las Vegas, as well as at Nellis Air Force Base, since 1973. It clearly shows how nighttime temperatures have increased in the last 40 years compared to the daytime temperatures:

Las Vegas temperature trends 1973-2013 as a function of time of day (dark shading is approx. nighttime hours).

What is rather remarkable, though, is that the USHCN temperature trends for the same period (1973-2013, the red stars), while agreeing with the ISH 3-hourly data for Tmax, are twice as warm as the ISH data for Tmin.

How can this be?? How can the USHCN adjustment procedures actually magnify the nighttime warming, rather than reduce it? I have no explanation for this. (Nellis AFB data are not available in the USHCN data after 1970 for some reason).

If we just focus on the month of July, the results are roughly similar to the full-year results:

Fig. 2. As in Fig. 1, but for the month of July.

Las Vegas has seen dramatic growth over the time period represented above. The number of visitors has skyrocketed from 8 million in 1973 to about 40 million today, a factor of 5 increase. The population has increased by a factor of about 6 or 7.

All of this translates into more waste heat from air conditioning, plus more artificial surfaces which warm faster than natural surfaces. If you doubt this for even the natural desert surrounding Las Vegas, look at the Landsat IR thermal imager data in this report.

During the day, the extra heat can mix convectively through a pretty deep layer of the atmosphere, which limits the daytime warming. But at night, the nocturnal inversion traps heat, magnifying the UHI effect.

The bottom line is that the USHCN data still seems to contain significant UHI effects, which are inflating warming trends, possibly even in the daytime. So, at this point, I don’t think we know if there has been any “global warming” experienced in Las Vegas.

And when it comes to the UHI effect, I doubt that the old adage “what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas” applies.

We visited Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore by boat on June 16, 2014, and there was still unmelted ice and snow piles in the shadows of the rock cliffs, just above the Lake Superior waterline.

This particular pile was about 30-40 feet long and looked to be about 6 feet thick:

Large pile of snow and ice, Pictured Rocks, Michigan, June 16, 2014.

For those wondering about “Icezilla“, it appears from MODIS satellite imagery to have been beached by strong winds on the southeast shore of Michigan Island, in Michigan’s Apostle Islands in western Lake Superior.

Yesterday, NASA released high-resolution satellite imagery from Landsat, showing the iceberg I’ve dubbed “Icezilla”.

I’ve back tracked through the daily MODIS imagery to find where it originated from, as shown in this Landsat image from May 23 (click for large version):

The latest Landsat image provided by NASA is from June 8, at which point the iceberg was about 1 mile long and about 800 ft. wide:

As I mentioned yesterday, this berg is so big that it was spotted from land, 20 miles to the south, on June 10. If it is sufficiently thick, Icezilla could last until July before it fully melts, since water temperatures in the vicinity appear to still be below 40 deg. F.

On the heels of today’s announcement that North Korea leader Kim Jong-un has warned his country’s meteorologists about their bad weather forecasts, Mr. Kim has been named the new head of the IPCC, where he will crack down on the bad climate forecasts being made by that organization.

“I will direct all climate modeling groups to either start paying attention to the observations, or else“, said Kim Jong-un, a presumed reference to satellite, weather balloon, and surface temperature observations which all show the climate models relied upon by the IPCC are producing too much warming:

Mr. Kim also suggested that the rest of the world should follow his country’s lead on energy conservation, starting with a ban on all outdoor lighting.

In my continuing coverage of the last ice on Lake Superior (erroneously reported to have melted several days ago by the NWS in Duluth), iceberg “Icezilla” has been spotted from land 20 miles to the south.

As reported to me early this morning by Mark Vinson aboard the U.S. Geological Survey ship R/V Kiyi,

“On Tuesday (June 10), one of our employees was driving back to Ashland (WI) after getting off the ship in SSM (Sault Ste. Marie, MI). She told me she could see a large berg between Ironwood, MI and Ashland. There is a nice high spot near Saxon, WI that you can overlook the lake. She said it was a whopper and it would have had to have been for her to be able to see it from there as this spot is several miles from the lake.“

This spot on highway US-2 would be 20 miles directly south of Icezilla.

Since no one seems to have a camera to capture direct evidence this mythical beast, I decided to commission an artist rendering based upon what little information we have:

Artist rendering of iceberg “Icezilla”, still on Lake Superior as of June 11, 2014

Compared to MODIS satellite imagery the day it was spotted from land (June 10), it looks like Icezilla yesterday (June 11) gave birth to Son of Icezilla and Daughter of Icezilla:

MODIS satellite imagery of iceberg Icezilla and its offspring.

I’ll keep you posted on any further developments regarding the ice monster, which appears to still be several hundred feet across.

As I reported on June 4, and again on June 6, there remains a large iceberg northeast of Ashland, WI, which is slowly approaching Madeline Island.

Boatside pics of some of the smaller icebergs reached the popular press on June 7, as reported by Wisconsin DNR employee Amie Egstad:

I’m still curious about what might be a much larger iceberg, though, which looks to be at least 1,000 ft. in diameter in the NASA Aqua satellite MODIS instrument imagery (it might be made made up of smaller pieces…you can’t tell from the satellite imagery, which has at best 750 ft resolution…click for the large version):

I sent an e-mail to DNR employee Amie Egstad about this larger mass of ice…it sure would be nice if we got updates on this in the coming days. The iceberg she took pics of (above photo) is really thick, suggesting there might be “bigger” ice out there that will take some time to melt.

I’ve been getting periodic reports from Mark Vinson on R/V Kiyi, still on Superior, of nearshore water temperatures running around 37 deg. F. While it seems unthinkable, I suppose it is possible that thick icebergs in water that cold could last until July.

Public opinion surveys are notoriously easy to manipulate. Depending on how you ask the survey question, you can get just about any results you want.

A recently publicized Washington Post – ABC News poll, timed to coincide with the recent announcement of the Obama EPA proposed power plant CO2 emissions regulations, found a majority of Americans supported CO2 restrictions on coal-fired power plants. But the way the question was asked minimized the supposed cost, and maximized the supposed benefit, of such restrictions on the American economy.

Quoting from the HuffPo article about the survey results:

“Asked whether Washington should still go forward with limits if they “significantly lowered greenhouse gases but raised your monthly energy expenses by 20 dollars a month,” 63 percent of respondents say yes, including 51 percent of Republicans, 64 percent of independents and 71 percent of Democrats.”

Hell, even *I* would probably support $20 more a month if it “significantly lowered greenhouse gases”, just to be on the safe side. But it’s NOT going to significantly lower greenhouse gases (on a global basis, which is what matters), nor is it going to cost only $20 a month.

The poll question was so poorly worded and misleading, I think the pollsters should be ashamed of themselves.

A more recent survey of American attitudes on immigration and other matters (including how the various news outlets rank for trustworthiness) was just announced yesterday by the Brookings Institution, and buried in it was the following chart that showed how Americans with different political leanings ranked various concerns. As is usually the case, “climate” comes in dead last with all groups except self-described “liberals”:

Clearly, jobs and the deficit — basically, “the economy” — is the main concern that most Americans have. And the proposed EPA regulations will hurt far more people than they would help…especially the poor.

Generally speaking, the public has lost faith in scientists whose profession requires them to sound the alarm over global warming climate change climate disruption. Most Americans understand that forecasts of gloom and doom as predicted by “scientific experts” are not as reliable as predictions of, say, this afternoon’s weather.

In fact they have a history of almost zero reliability.

We can predict the time of sunrise in Podunk, Michigan on July 17, fifty years in advance. But not all scientific disciplines are created equally, climate prediction is still in its infancy, and fortunately the public understands that.

I was awakened at 10 p.m. last night by a roaring sound. I looked out the window and the trees were swaying in all different directions.

This morning I found that one of the oak trees out front of the house was down. This same tree was cracked a couple years ago by what appeared to me to be a localized downburst or funnel cloud circulation…no damage anywhere else in the neighborhood:
.

Last night’s storm also took out this tree, dropping in on my vinyl fence (that post has a poured concrete pillar in it):

Another large limb from a third tree narrowly missed the cars.

I figured after at least 5 minutes of roaring and swaying trees there would be trees down all over the neighborhood this morning.

Nope. Not a one. Just carnage in the Spencer’s yard.

John Christy says Gaia is out to get me. I said, “But nothing hit the house or the cars!”

John very reasonably replied, “This was just a warning shot…”

Or, after watching “24” last night, I thought maybe a weather modification drone was sent to target me?

Hmmm.

The Version 5.6 global average lower tropospheric temperature (LT) anomaly for May, 2014 is +0.33 deg. C, up from April (click for full size version):

The global, hemispheric, and tropical LT anomalies from the 30-year (1981-2010) average for the last 17 months are:

YR MON GLOBAL NH SH TROPICS
2013 1 +0.497 +0.517 +0.478 +0.386
2013 2 +0.203 +0.372 +0.033 +0.195
2013 3 +0.200 +0.333 +0.067 +0.243
2013 4 +0.114 +0.128 +0.101 +0.165
2013 5 +0.082 +0.180 -0.015 +0.112
2013 6 +0.295 +0.335 +0.255 +0.220
2013 7 +0.173 +0.134 +0.211 +0.074
2013 8 +0.158 +0.111 +0.206 +0.009
2013 9 +0.365 +0.339 +0.390 +0.190
2013 10 +0.290 +0.331 +0.249 +0.031
2013 11 +0.193 +0.160 +0.226 +0.020
2013 12 +0.266 +0.272 +0.260 +0.057
2014 1 +0.291 +0.387 +0.194 -0.029
2014 2 +0.170 +0.320 +0.020 -0.103
2014 3 +0.170 +0.338 +0.002 -0.001
2014 4 +0.190 +0.358 +0.022 +0.093
2014 5 +0.329 +0.326 +0.333 +0.173

This is the 3rd warmest May in the satellite record:
1998 +0.56 (warm ENSO)
2010 +0.45 (warm ENSO)
2014 +0.33 (neutral)

John Christy thinks the coming El Nino will give us a new temperature record, since it is superimposed on a warmer baseline than the super El Nino of 1997-98. I’m not convinced, since we are in the cool phase of the PDO, which favors weak El Ninos (like 2009-10).

As we finish up our new Version 6 of the UAH dataset, it looks like our anomalies in the 2nd half of the satellite record will be slightly cooler, somewhat more like the RSS dataset….but we are talking small adjustments here…hundredths of a deg. C.

The global image for May should be available in the next day or so here.

Popular monthly data files (these might take a few days to update):

uahncdc_lt_5.6.txt (Lower Troposphere)
uahncdc_mt_5.6.txt (Mid-Troposphere)
uahncdc_ls_5.6.txt (Lower Stratosphere)

As of June 5, 2014, the only ice on Lake Superior that remains clearly visible in the 250 meter resolution MODIS satellite data are several bergs northeast of Ashland, Wisconsin:

I contacted Mark Vinson at the USGS Great Lakes Biological Station, in Ashland, Wisconsin, to see if anyone has gone out to take photos of the remaining ice rafts on “the big lake they call Gitche Gumee“.

It turns out Mark is out on the lake for their month-long nearshore fish community survey, done every year on R/V Kiyi, now heading east towards Marquette. They are also taking some photos of the remaining ice, much of which is hugging the shore and apparently is not visible in the MODIS satellite imagery.

For example, here’s a photo of icebergs in Sand Bay, in the Michigan’s Keweenaw Peninsula, taken from the Kiyi yesterday:

You can monitor the location of R/V Kiyi in real time with this great Google Maps tool Great Lakes & Seaway Shipping Online Vessel Passage Maps. Here’s its current location: