Over the past several years I've written a few pages about climate. they don't really go together, but they're not completely independent, either. There's a good chance I'll write more or split the climate change page into sections, so I decided to write this home page now instead of later.

This list is for things I've written, sorted by interest and importance level as of the last edit.

There is a big gap over the last 9-12 years (it's 2024 today). I've been busy and distracted. We also haven't learned very much about climate, though people have managed to make it a Big Deal. Interest wanes when people talk about how much "fixing" the climate will cost.

Weather History

I was never very interested in the (political) history taught in school, but that may reflect on its presentation. In the 1960s I remember looking forward to a daily radio program that was in the style of a news report on the events in the Civil War. My grandmother's best friend, Marion Oser, was Thomas Edison's eldest daughter, and "Aunt Marion" gave me an Edison biography that was written for children and focused on Edison's childhood which was during the Civil War. The Civil War just wasn't all that long ago way back then!

I welcomed the history of Tolkien's Middle Earth in The Lord of the Rings, but later was less enthralled with The Silmarillion, I guess because it was further removed from LOTR.

Later I realized science history was fascinating, especially the struggles to understand stuff that is now "settled science." A book titled "The Microbe Hunters" looked at the efforts that led to discovering bacteria and other microscopic life. It made me realize history was interesting. I would've loved to have had one of the first microscopes back in those days.

I've written several posts on the Watts Up With That blog on historical weather events. One big impetus is that people, myself included, have a surprisingly short memory for most weather events beyond the truly exceptional events or days with a big impact on us. A few events are indelible, e.g the Northeast's Blizzard of 1978, and some events we didn't experience have made it into our collective consciousness, e.g. the Hurricane of 1938 here in New England, the Dust Bowl Days, and the 1888 blizzard that impacted New York City.

The following is a list of my essays on important past weather events. Most are WUWT posts, the impetus for many was to provide a counter-argument for people remarking on the current "unprecedented weather" that isn't really all that unprecedented." And some are just "interesting history." I include the data published, as many titles refer to "XX years ago."

• 2017 March 19: The 300th Anniversary of the Great Colonial Snow cover of 1717
  This has managed to make it mostly out of our collective consciousness and I suspect the stories may have grown in the telling. On the other hand, no other winter has stories approaching this one. Be glad you missed it!
• 2016 June 5: Summer of 1816 in New Hampshire: A Tale of Two Freezes is a much larger essay looking at the entire summer. I concluded that the destructive weather was largely due to two freezes that managed to occur at very bad times. This is also published at the Watts Up With That blog.

• 2015 March 8: 1934, 2015 - A Tale of Two Februaries
  Well before 2015 I was looking into whether Concord NH's snow storms were bigger than what coastal New England sites get and verified that those areas have better access to Atlantic moisture so generally get bigger snow storms. We keep our snow longer, but not always! However, I noticed that February 1934 was significantly colder than any other February in Concord's weather records and wondered it what it must have been like. I also figured that the warming climate since then would mean I'd never know. In 2015 I was proven wrong. If you were in Boston you might remember the heavy snows that month - and that they didn't melt! If you were in the Pacific Coast you might remember the drought and record warmth.
• 2013 September 21: Weather Before and After the Hurricane of 1938
  I wrote this for the 75th anniversary of this storm, traces of which can still be found throughout New Hampshire. I expected, correctly, that there would be a lot of coverage about the anniversary and decided I'd write about the extreme weather around then. After all, this was a 1930's storm. I started a few years before that decade with Vermont's 1927 flood. Since then it has be equaled by the remnants of Hurricane Irene in 2011 and somewhat less, I think, by heavy summer rains in July 2023.
• 2017 April 1: Remembering the Incredible New England Snowstorms of March 1956
  The 1950s in New England are better remembered for hurricanes. The folks at the Blue Hill Weather Observatory remember all their weather since 1885, this is their account of that month. I was a preschooler near Philadelphia that month. I don't remember it. :-)
• 2012 March 6: 50 years ago: The Great Atlantic Storm of 1962
  While tropical storms get the most attention, nor'easters may be responsible for more damage along the northeast coast. In 1962, a nor'easter over achieved by stalling off the New Jersey coast for three days during what we call a supertide now, maybe worse, the highest tides in the 18 year Saros cycle. While I was growing up in Ohio, my grandparents had a neat old summer home on Long Beach Island, a barrier island in New Jersey. The storm destroyed the house, cut the island in three places, and forever changed the area.
• 2010 November 10: 35 years ago: The Witch of November Come Stealin'
  By 1975 I had left Ohio for Pittsburgh PA and left that for New England, where I still am. I wasn't aware of the loss of the ore carrier one night in November, and even when Gordon Lightfoot immortalized that night in song I thought he referred to a European sailing vessel. No - It was a Great Lakes ore freighter that sank with all hands, including three who lived in northeast Ohio. I expected I would mention the similar storms since then, but discovered that the earlier storms were far more interesting, especially because we couldn't forecast them well. So I included some of them and other important event around 1975. This was my first history post and it remains my favorite, in large part because the comments greatly enhance what I had to say. Watch this video now. You'll understand.
• 2017 May 8: 40 Years Ago: Massachusetts Snags a Memorable Snowfall in May Storm
  I posted several weather history essays in 2017, each referring a major event for the month I posted in. The late 1970s were a period of extreme weather. Massachusetts' "Winter" in 1977 didn't end until May. A major snow storm on the 9th was inconvenient for pretty much everyone and everything. A lot of eastern Massachusetts had some 8" of snow, central Mass had up to 20". Maple trees had leafed out and quickly captured more wet snow than the tree limbs could support.
• [Written in 1993?] The Blizzard of '78 in Marlboro, Massachusetts
  That May snow storm was followed the next winter by a January snow storm that set a new 24 hour snow fall record at Boston's Logan airport, a blizzard in the midwest that set a record low air pressure at Cleveland Ohio, and in February my all-time favorite snow storm, the New England Blizzard of '78. That also set a new 24 hour snow fall record at Logan airport. and remains the storm that all other major snow storms are compared to. Our recent extreme weather is so boring!
• 2017 April 20: The 20th Anniversary of Massachusetts' April Fool's Day Nor'easter
  For multiple reasons, the severe weather of the late 1970s relaxed. David Keeling's report of years of rising CO2 levels in the Pacific changed the discussion from Chilling Possibilities to "Anthropogenic Global Warming." In July 1988 James Hansen warned the US Congress that global warming had begun, in 1997 Mann et al's [infamous] "Hockey Stick" paper was two years from publication. New England weather has never been compliant with expectations and played a rather unwelcome April Fool's Day trick on Eastern Massachusetts. Once again Blue Hill Weather Observatory made it easy for me.
• My 2021 September 21 Thoughts on the problems with comparing 30-year "climate normals" or WUWT's On Comparing 30-Year "Climate Normals"
  I wrote this in response to a Mt Washington Observatory webinar that compared the old 1981-2010 "climate normals" to the new 1991-2020 normals. What that really does is compare just 1981-1990 to 2011-2020. The presenters don't seem to have realized that. There are comparisons that can make sense, for example, if the average temperature went up 0.5°F each decade, but that's not the reason we have these thirty year averages. I asked about that during the webinar (the link above is queued to my questions), but neither the state climatologist nor WMO staff answered it particularly well and didn't answer this at all when I wrote this expanded version and sent it a few days later.

More general climate and weather pages

• Glacial Retreat of 5,000-7,000 Years Ago
  Much hand wringing has been expended over the current glacial retreat. While it may indeed be unrelated to past retreats, there is ample evidence that we have had much less glacial ice in the not too distant past.
• More about 1816: The Year without a Summer
  This set of pages related 1816 information, including an earlier page on 1816 in New Hampshire. All this was inspired by finally hunting down a granite monument to this year that is close to one place I lived. I created a geocache for that I named Summerless.
• Science, Method, Climatology, and Forgetting the Basics
  What passes as debate about climate change seems to involve people who do not understand science and scientists who have forgotten what science is all about. Recent events are giving us the chance to get things back on course and inspired me to write this essay. If it works, it will explain to lay people the basics about the scientific method, describe the leading theories behind climate change, and get scientists from both sides of the debate to invite the other to their next picnic. I will then move onto bringing peace and prosperity to the Middle East. Actually, I'll be happy if it gets a few people thinking and watching what may be a very important period in climate study.

• State of the Climate - 2009
  I hope this is the first of a series of reports of what's happening in climate research today, what's interesting, and where we're heading. Even if I don't have time for an update next year, this will be a useful snapshot. This report features the impact due to the PDO shift, notes about the Society of Environmental Journalists, and the release last year of a paper that reports evidence that sunspots will fade from view around 2015. (Please make it be 2016! See below.)

• 2016: The [Next] Year without a Summer
  When the movie "The Day after Tomorrow" came out, I just had to write something about the bad science in it. Besides, the director said he hoped the movie would inspire discussion. Ice cores from Greenland show the climate there can change in a couple of decades, and this page looks at some of the real science behind it. I never really finished the page as the movie didn't inspire much discussion at all.

• Environment New Hampshire - the Power of One.
  I wrote this in 2010, but didn't finish it. A recent event, an unveiling of a wind power paper, evokes memories of the 2010 event, so here it is in 2014. The content is not so much about the (uninteresting!) paper, but how a New Hampshire environmental group has organizational and fund raising ties far beyond what I expected.

The following are documents I've written to various organizations in response to announcements of public hearings or to explain my views to public figures.

• Testimony for the NH Governor's Climate Change Task Force
  The task force was formed from representatives of various organizations and produced a series of documents that are long on reducing CO2 emissions and short on climatology. I also have Joe D'Aleo's testimony and Fred Ward's testimony they presented at the session. The only media present was the Hippo Press, and their reporter, Jeff Mucciarone, summarized the event well in Hot enough for you? Residents have their say at climate change meeting

• Lewis Gordon Pugh and a kayak expedition to the North Pole
  This is Email I sent to the Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming after I heard this fellow was invited to address them. This boondoggle was inspired by predictions that ice at the North Pole might melt this year, 2008. It didn't.

• Re: Gore's Message To Climate Change Skeptics
  This is a letter I wrote to 60 Minute's correspondent Lesley Stahl about a segment that seems to be a kickoff for a $300,000,000 effort to get people excited about global warming. Gore says "I think that those people are in such a tiny, tiny minority now with their point of view, they're almost like the ones who still believe that the moon landing was staged in a movie lot in Arizona and those who believe the world is flat. That demeans them a little bit, but it's not that far off." I couldn't let that pass.

The following are the very best of the best external sites about climate science. I do intend to write a page to host a wider selection of links, but these deserve recommendation here, probably even after I write that other page. All three of the authors once felt that global warming was human-caused but after into the subject found that is likely not the case.

• Watts Up With That?
  This is a blog by Anthony Watts, a meteorologist from Chico CA and founder of Surface Stations, a grassroots effort to document the weather stations used in the US climate record. Anthony has managed to capture a sweet spot with his blog - not too technical, definitely not pablum, opinionated, but peer pressure helps keeps the ad hominem insults down. All sides get aired, participants range from just plain folks to top scientists.

  There are other important blogs and sources, but their important stories wind up here within hours. Making this your daily starting point will keep you up up-to-date.

  One shortcoming of the blog host, Wordpress, is that they offer no good way to browse months of articles. I've made a bit of a start at that with a Table of Contents for WUWT.

• Curious Anomalies in Climate Science
  This is a wonderful adjunct to my Science, Method, Climatology, and Forgetting the Basics. The author is an environmentalist and her essay traces her journey from belief in global warming to realizing that the emperor has no clothes. Her journey is not unique, in fact many people now convinced that CO2 is not the demon Al Gore and the IPCC make it out to be, have followed similar journeys. This one is the best documented and one made after much good material has become available on the Web. Her collection of links provides great support and backup.

• Editorial: The Great Global Warming Hoax?
  I think this started as an editorial but has grown into a comprehensive account shedding light in many more corners than I have time to study. It keeps getting better over time. The author, Jim Peden, started out as an atmospheric scientist, but is happy to be called Dad and would make a very good teacher.

• The Skeptics Handbook
  The Skeptics Handbook by Joanne Nova is a good guide to more of the science than I have and is written for a wide audience.

Preservation

• Climategate's HARRY_READ_ME.txt file
  Climategate, in 2009, released hundreds of Emails from a mail server at UEA's Climate Research Unit. Several web sites sprang up, some with very usable search engines. Most of these have disappeared over time, which is a pity. More than Email was released. While most of the other documents were not very interesting, a simple text file, HARRY_READ_ME.txt, resonated with software engineers. It was a journal, a lab notebook if you will, of someone's attempt to wrestle a huge pile of data and software into the HADCrut weather database. Unfortunately, it was nowhere near ready for prime time. (CRU got the data in part because the person gathering it went into a religious order, essentially after having a nervous breakdown. Or something like that.)

  In November 2015 I received a request asking if I had a copy, because someone couldn't find it on the web. While I'm sure there must be many copies around, I simply uploaded my copy here. When I later tried searching for a copy on the web, I couldn't find it myself. A first level search for the name was swamped by pages referring to it. Even searching for a string from within the file came up dry. Perhaps it was gone, perhaps Google doesn't index large text files.

  At any rate, it lives on here. As it should! If you're a software engineer, don't start reading it close to bedtime. It kept me up to 0300 that first night. Keep in mind this data, ready or not, is now in the HADCrut climate database.

• Coal Combustion: Nuclear Resource or Danger
  This article, by Alex Gabbard of Oak Ridge National Labs, is several decades old but everything in it probably still applies. Coal power plants do a good job getting the chemical energy out of coal, but the fly ash waste contains more nuclear energy in terms of its thorium and uranium content than the coal had chemical energy. Nuclear plants cannot release more uranium than they take in. Even if a nuclear plant lost 1% of its fuel, the plant would be shut down and trigger massive protests from the public. Well, from Greenpeace, the Clamshell Alliance (in New England), etc.

  It's one of my favorite pieces to share with detractors of atomic energy.

• Fire and Ice: The climate is warming, cooling, warming, cooling, changing.
  I included a link to this 2006 article in my Science, Method, Climatology, and Forgetting the Basics. It's a good collection past claims of warming and cooling and I was very disappointed when my link to it failed. I went looking for it again in 2023 and was thrilled to find this in a college course site.

• Still Waiting for Greenhouse: http://john-daly.com
  One of the early climate skeptics, Tasmanian John Daly, died in 2004, almost four years before I started my involvement with the skeptic community. While I regret never having had a chance to be involved with him, his web site was kept going, first by his wife, then Jerry Brennan, and now me.

  I intend to mostly preserve it as a historical state-of-the-art site. So far I haven't had time to do anything with it, so I guess I'm succeeding! He dabbled in a lot of things, and there have been many cases where that 2004 snapshot has been useful.

• U.S. Daily Weather Maps
  [This is a rant.] [Update: Thy may have fixed things, I haven't had time to check.]
  Back in High School in Ohio, I subscribed to The Daily Weather Map. It came from the Weather Bureau, a couple days stale, but it was a still a good learning tool.

  It turns out all those maps are archived at NOAA's US Daily Weather Map Collection, or so I thought. They're in three different areas:

  1871 - 1968
  April 15, 1968 - December 31, 2002
  September 1, 2002 - present

  The last is at Weather Prediction Center and they say:

  A six month archive will be kept here. Older PDF files are available via the Daily Weather Map CD. Click here for further Information.

  That link says:

  Subscriptions to the Daily Weather Map in printed and CD format are no longer being accepted. The publications will continue to be produced in both black and white and color versions. The publications are available at no charge at the following web site:

  http://www.wpc.ncep.noaa.gov/dwm/dwm.shtml

  and that loops back to the six month archive site. Hey guys, storage is cheap. Really cheap. I could probably host all of them on my home systems. Aughh!

• USHCN site at Grants Pass OR in 2022: Possibly the worst sited station in the US Historical Climate Network.

  

  IIRC, this is a radio station. The station engineer volunteered to help site this MMTS unit more sensibly, but the offer was refused. The link is an extract of page 25 from the 2022 Surface Stations Report

• The 97% Consensus, Examining the Scientific Consensus on Climate Change
  One thing that has become a bit of a running joke in the climate field is that there is a 97% consensus among scientists that we caused the current climate change. The very first reference was a poll from 2008 by Maggie Kendal Zimmerman and Peter Zoran that was distilled to 79 active research climatologists and found that 75 of 77 thought that "human activity is a significant contributing factor." There is no mention of CO2, so it's an easy poll to critique.

  One reference to an EOS article, http://tigger.uic.edu/~pdoran/012009_Doran_final.pdf, timed out today, so I saved a copy from the Wayback Machine here. I see it is also available at an EOS article abstract. See the text of the questions in the poll why the paper reported 75 of 77 and not 75 of 79, the correct ratio. Notes about the poll implementation by Peter Doran are still at Survey: Scientists Agree Human-Induced Global Warming is Real at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Contact Ric Werme or return to his home page.

Last updated 2024 August 6.