Historical Data on Temperatures in Wisconsin

A reader comments on my remarks regarding 70 degrees in Madison, yesterday:

It’s these type of sensationalist posts that don’t help educate or support/facilitate the discussion regarding climate change. It only muddies the discussion as a single day’s weather means close to nothing as it relates to climate change. A denier can easily reference the historical data which is clear that a 70 degree day doesn’t come close to even cracking the top-20 warmest March days in Madison Wisconsin’s history.

OK, the 70 degrees matches the highest temperature on MARCH 3rd (in 1983). If the reader had noted the upward trend in the highs and lows in Madison, he/she would’ve understood that 70 degrees might not have been as remarkable.  In fact, in the graph in the post he/she was commenting on (reproduced below for completeness), one could see that by MARCH 31st, the 90th percentile temperature was only 5 degrees below 70 degrees recorded. Hence, I can only conclude the reader is blind, or deliberately obtuse, or disingenuous to comment on MARCH (entire month) records. (Why the heck do we provide percentile bands when purportedly statistically informed people ignore them?)

Notes: Green + indicates 3/3/2024 forecasted high for Madison, WI. Source: Weatherspark.com, accessed 3/3/2024. 

How about the significance of a trend in temperatures. Here’s a map:

Source: Wisconsin Initiative on Climate Change Impacts.

Here’s another picture using data on Wisconsin:

Source: NOAA NCICS.

More broadly, across the country, from the first post on Saturday.

 

Source: Gongloff, “3 Seasons in 24 Hours Stump Climate Change Deniers,” Bloomberg

While the second map has no indicators for statistical significance, the first one does.

Since the March 3 observation (in the first figure) lies above the 90th percentile, I might be allowed to think that this was a somewhat unusual (I suppose using the word in a colloquial manner) event. However, I’m sure the commenting reader will find some reason to disagree.

More generally, here is the global (land/ocean) temperature anomaly as tabulated by the NOAA:

Figure 1: Land-Ocean global temperature anomaly, by month (blue), and 12 month trailing moving average (red). Source: NOAA, and author’s calculations.

 

 

 

17 thoughts on “Historical Data on Temperatures in Wisconsin

  1. Macroduck

    Slight edit:

    “Hence, I can only conclude the reader is blind, AND deliberately obtuse, AND disingenuous to comment on MARCH (entire month) records.”

    I think this is the more likely explanation than with “or”.

  2. Moses Herzog

    “a reader” seems overly polite. Unthinking skate over and insult is not reading.

  3. Econned

    Menzie,
    While ego won’t allow you to concede that your initial post was in fact largely meaningless as it relates to climate change, you do include the last graph because deep down you know the content of your initial post isn’t worthy of a glance from freshman-level intro course. Keep it up.

    1. baffling

      and the professional jealousy emerges once again. how does it feel to be a failure in life econned?

  4. Econned

    Menzie Chinn,
    As stated elsewhere… a specific city’s single day temperature is not relevant when discussing global climate change. Your focus, despite any data representation or additional posts and graphs provided here, was the temperature in Madison, Wisconsin on March 3, 2004.

    You can fool your village idiots but not those able to see through your ‘analyses’.

    1. Econned

      Menzie,
      February 4th of 2023 was 3 degrees Fahrenheit in NYC. The weather sparks website suggests such an observation is well below the 90th%. But this tells us nothing of climate change. And you know it.

      1. Econned

        Menzie Chinn,
        Actually, you are precisely as petty as I’ve always said. Your colors never fade.

      2. Moses Herzog

        Maybe you could take the average temperature over the entire month of February 2024 (or March 2024 in a future post) and compare it to February months average temperature of multiple years past?? Maybe that would be the number to get Mr. Hypersensitive Stalker to STFU??

    1. Ivan

      Biden have them by the balls and everybody knows.

      Most of OPEC and Russia are desperate to keep the prices up – and the West need them to succeed to some extend, in order to keep the transition to non-carbon energy on pace. The sweet spot used to be $80-100 now it is more like $70-90. In the next 3-5 years it will sink to $60-80 but that may be as low as it goes because of the cost of US fracking oil. Under Biden the US has become the worlds biggest producer of oil and we probably want to remain that for another decade. There is not a lot of money left in hydrocarbons, but we would rather have US harvest it than Russia, Iran, Venezuela and Saudi Arabia.

    1. Moses Herzog

      China is often times more obsessed with foreign nations’ activities/happenings than they themselves realize. This thing where mainland Chinese keep telling themselves they are number one at everything when they themselves must know on some level that it is utterly preposterous they lead the world in every metric. So they watch the obvious number one nation in power, mesmerized. How much of Xi’s kibosh on Hu Jintao, and Xi’s kibosh on Li Qiang is related to the Orange Abomination’s weird dark cloud, hovering over current American politics?? I would argue, much more than the typical “Chinese expert” or “China watcher” might imagine.

  5. Noneconomist

    Somewhere today, in a galaxy not too far away, the late—but far from lamented—CoRev is chomping at the bit to join this discussion. He knows everything there is to know about weather AND climate. (OK, granted,)to be fair, he honestly believes he knows everything there is to know about everything) oh, if he could show these poor lost souls the errors of their ways.
    Had he not been so intent on chewing lemons and spitting seeds at the moderator, he might still have dazzled us the way only CoRev believed he could do

  6. baffling

    ever notice how econned immediately whines and complains because Prof. Chinn misses an unimportant comma mark in the text, but econned is deathly quiet when ponzi Johnny promotes putin’s genocide against Ukraine? gives you some clarity on econned’s values and priorities. genocide? shouldn’t comment. but professional jealousy? he can write a novel. he lacks integrity.

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