6/05/2015

Temperature anomaly of the 20 most powerful cities

The way things work, most important decisions are taken by powerful people, who tend to gather in large cities with excellent restaurants. These are the people who decide things like the renewable energy subsidies, carbon taxes, and whether they intend to help Pacific Ocean drowning islands.

I decided to see whether they were perceiving global warming in their daily lives. So I downloaded  the temperature anomaly for the 20 “most powerful cities”.  

London (former Londinium), one of the 20
“most powerful”  cities (my apologies to
Paris, but I don’t like President Hollande)

As part of this group I  included  Hawaii because rich folk like to visit, and some  token Australian, African, and South American cities to represent underprivileged elites.

The temperature anomalies were obtained from the Google Earth Hadcrut grid, which runs through 2012. I suspect the plotted average (the black line) probably has a slight upturn in 2013 and 2014, but that´s impossible to tell because I can´t get the detailed Hadcrut data in an easy format.

The twenty cities´temperature anomalies, and their average are shown in the graph below. As you can see, the temperature climbed for many years but it sort of went flat around 1998. 



That year was a strong El Niño year, the world temperature went up and then it stopped climbing. There is a raging debate over this point (whether temperature stopped increasing or not), and I have seen a lot of fur flying in the last few days after NOAA reconstructed the climate record to show it was climbing rather than holding somewhat steady as I show in this graph.


The twenty most powerful cities´temperature anomalies, and their average

Temperature anomaly in this case means the difference between measured temperature and the average for the period 1961 to 1990. A description of the data base is found here: “The CRUTEM4 land-surface air temperature data set: construction, previous versions and dissemination via Google Earth” by T. J. Osborn and P. D. Jones.

Other References: 



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