I think I just solved global warming!

I recently became interested in understanding how the impending climate disaster would affect people on a local level. As my dear readers are aware, I like to examine the available data to better understand what is going on. In this case, I was interested in looking at how the climate has changed at the US County level. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration published temperature records at the US County level going back to 1895 (specific data set used is climdiv-tmpccy-v1.0.0-20230804).

From there, I decided to analyze how much temperatures have changed in ~ last 100 years. More specifically, I compared the average temperatures in the 1st 20 years of the 20th century (1901-1920) to the 1st 20 years of the 21st century (2001-2020). I’m going to now zoom into a specific county, Hunterdon County, NJ (between Philadelphia & New York). Let’s look at average temperatures by season in those 20 year periods, 1 century apart:

Yikes! Temperatures rose almost 6 degrees on average in the Winter, more than 3 degrees in the Spring, and almost 4 degrees in Summer and Fall. This looks pretty serious! Hopefully my thousands of readers in Hunterdon County are not freaking out right now. If they are, I have some really good news. I think I solved this thing.

For folks in Hunterdon County, here is what you are going to do… get in your car and drive to Westmoreland County, PA:

Yes, 5 hours is kinda annoying in traffic. You can split it into 2 days if necessary. But here’s the wonderful thing… you will have entered a geography that has been spared from much climate change:

As you can see, the seasonal increases in temperature are 2.4, 1.0, 0.3, and 1.0 degrees. Recall that we are comparing this to Hunterdon County, PA which is 300 miles East and had increases of 5.8, 3.3, 3.7, and 3.9.

I’ve managed to cut global warming significantly by driving 5 hours! 😎

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Hopefully my sarcasm is not lost on everyone. If not clear, my actual point here is that I don’t believe for a second that 2 locations only 300 miles from each other had such dramatically different experiences over the last century. While I am sure a climate scientist can tell me all the reasons my analysis is simplistic and misses all number of nuances and need for corrections, etc., the bottom line to me is that I don’t believe in the accuracy of the data. And if the accuracy of the data is this uncertain, how can you possible have an accurate model for the next 50-100 years. Garbage In, Garbage Out.