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Tom Velardi
Joined: Mon Oct 29, 2007 10:20 pm Posts: 4337 Location: Kyushu, Southern Japan (33.607N latitude)
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Re: 2016 in southern Japan and all its ups and downs
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Sat Jan 28, 2017 11:05 am |
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Jimhardy
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Re: 2016 in southern Japan and all its ups and downs
Only God knows for sure, and he ain't talkin'... It MAY be more accurate to say that we are not listening. Just a thought
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Sat Jan 28, 2017 3:20 pm |
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Bennz
Joined: Tue Nov 06, 2007 4:06 am Posts: 675 Location: Waimarama NZ
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Re: 2016 in southern Japan and all its ups and downs
_________________ Waimarama NZ Oceanic temperate climate
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Sat Jan 28, 2017 7:48 pm |
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Fukuoka Scott
Joined: Wed Aug 28, 2013 2:32 pm Posts: 958 Location: Fukuoka, Japan
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Re: 2016 in southern Japan and all its ups and downs
I definitely won't stay here if it gets any hotter. In the 21 years I've been here the summers have varied from just unpleasant to just godawful, and I don't dispute the stats but it's felt more like waves than a long upward trend. It's the increasing mildness of the winters that's remarkable. When I got here the temperature almost never seemed to get above 10C between late December and the end of February. Now it happens often, and the nights aren't as cold. You won't hear any complaints though given how poorly heated and insulated homes are here!
I posted a couple of years back about the long term change in Fukuoka's climate, and it is pretty remarkable. When the temperature record began in the late 1800s Fukuoka was a much cooler place. Unfortunately before that we have only anecdotal evidence and rather unreliable proxies like tree rings and ice cores to tell us what things were like before then.
The UN IPCC have the largest datasets and best minds working on it, so I tend to take their word for what is happening and tune out the more extreme alarmists and skeptics from the mainstream press and political activism.
It is worrisome that the new US administration has indicated a hostility to this ongoing research. If they merely insist on more transparency (e.g. getting NOAA and NASA to better explain to the people what the adjustments to historical temperatures are and why they were needed), that would be a good thing, but for the research to be cut back or restricted is scary.
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Sun Jan 29, 2017 4:38 am |
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Tom Velardi
Joined: Mon Oct 29, 2007 10:20 pm Posts: 4337 Location: Kyushu, Southern Japan (33.607N latitude)
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Re: 2016 in southern Japan and all its ups and downs
Just for fun, here's the graph I've posted before (vertical axis is degrees C). The averages speak for themselves.
As for summers getting hotter, here is a comparison of two 10 year periods for August average temperatures. Arbitrarily I picked the first 10 years of the dataset and the last. Except for the oddball August of 2014, which was well below normal, the trend here as well is pretty obvious.
Definitely fall and winter have been much more mild, especially in the last decade. I sit here now at almost 8 pm during the coldest month of the year in Japan and it is still 14 C outside right now... I'm just sayin'...
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Sun Jan 29, 2017 10:56 am |
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Fukuoka Scott
Joined: Wed Aug 28, 2013 2:32 pm Posts: 958 Location: Fukuoka, Japan
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Re: 2016 in southern Japan and all its ups and downs
Yeah the trend in Fukuoka is pronounced and undeniable over the long term. I guess the reason the difference in the summers between now and 20 years ago is less noticeable because the daytime highs haven't gone up as much as the nighttime lows. It just doesn't cool off much at night anymore. As for it being 14C the other day, the whole "it's like this right now" is a trap both sides fall into that warm January day and last year's 38-year freeze at both just momentary blips in the long-term trend. The weather service had predicted a cooler than normal January and February but it's looking unlikely to pan out. Today the high is 11C. People are commenting that "it's cold out." Do they know it's still 2C above average for this date? They're getting accustomed to the warmer regime.
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Tue Jan 31, 2017 4:17 am |
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Fukuoka Scott
Joined: Wed Aug 28, 2013 2:32 pm Posts: 958 Location: Fukuoka, Japan
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Re: 2016 in southern Japan and all its ups and downs
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Tue Jan 31, 2017 4:19 am |
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Steven
Joined: Sun Aug 10, 2008 4:02 pm Posts: 2486
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Re: 2016 in southern Japan and all its ups and downs
Last edited by Steven on Wed Feb 01, 2017 8:30 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Tue Jan 31, 2017 1:46 pm |
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Paul Spracklin
Joined: Tue May 05, 2009 3:55 pm Posts: 2564 Location: North Thames delta UK
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Re: 2016 in southern Japan and all its ups and downs
I am not sure there are many people denying that global warming, or climate change if you prefer, actually exists. As that graph clearly shows it is easily demonstrable - plot the temperatures and the line slopes upwards. It would take a special kind of idiot to deny it is actually taking place. But the term 'global warming' seems to have become synonymous with 'man-made global warming' in certain quarters - which, of course, it isn't - hence the denial. So people will say 'global warming is a load of nonsense' when they actually mean that 'man-made global warming is a load of nonsense'.
And THAT is the contentious issue. Is the cause of this change simply a part of the natural cycle of cooling and warming that has been a part of the earth's history since it became a spinning lump of ores 4.5 billion years ago. Or has this cycle been thrown out of balance and speeded up by Man's activities? I have to say I am not convinced either way. It takes a cleverer man than me to sort through the mis-information put about by all the various lobbies as to the cause as there are credible arguments put forward for both sides. I would confidently say no-one on the forum is qualified to say definitively, so it comes down to an act of faith one way or the other - whichever fits in with your world view and your place in it.
_________________ visit my website - www.oasisdesigns.co.uk
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Tue Jan 31, 2017 5:08 pm |
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Chad
Joined: Tue Oct 30, 2007 10:03 pm Posts: 2343 Location: Inland Cornwall UK
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Re: 2016 in southern Japan and all its ups and downs
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Tue Jan 31, 2017 8:42 pm |
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David Matzdorf
Site Admin
Joined: Mon Oct 29, 2007 4:06 pm Posts: 5321 Location: Islington, London UK
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Re: 2016 in southern Japan and all its ups and downs
We've learned that debating climate change science is not a good idea on GOTE. So can we arrest or refocus this thread now, please?
_________________ 51º33'07"N x 0º07'21"W
43m (142 feet) ASL
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Wed Feb 01, 2017 1:09 am |
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Tom Velardi
Joined: Mon Oct 29, 2007 10:20 pm Posts: 4337 Location: Kyushu, Southern Japan (33.607N latitude)
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Re: 2016 in southern Japan and all its ups and downs
I'll refocus by presenting some more statistics from a prominent active volcano in central Kyushu, Mt. Aso. The station on the mountain is at 1142 meters elevation, far from any significant urban areas with development confined to a few roads. The climate here is cool temperate and wet with annual precipitation exceeding 3 meters most years. For reference it is located at 32°52.8’N latitude and 131°4.4’E longitude (about 100 kilometers southeast of Fukuoka City).
The dataset goes back to 1933. Here is the graph of annual average temperature for the last 83 years (I messed up the labeling on the x axis, but the data is correct):
And to see if summer temperatures have been changing, I also plotting August averages for two 30 year periods, from 1933-1962 (also my birth year!) and from 1986-2015:
Again, the trend lines are clear, average temperatures are going up steadily no matter how you slice the data. I’m confident you’ll see the same trends no matter where you are in Kyushu, or for the rest of Japan.
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Wed Feb 01, 2017 8:12 am |
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Steven
Joined: Sun Aug 10, 2008 4:02 pm Posts: 2486
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Re: 2016 in southern Japan and all its ups and downs
Tom, this post makes perfect sense. I can relate to this.
As for the presumed distorting data due to the proximity of weather stations to heat islands, I can only say that any weather station within urban heat areas also has suburban and rural counterparts, which prove the point that the rise in averages is clearly NOT because of expanding heat islands, rather than an overall rise in temperatures. Met stations on mountains are usually the longest and best documented ones among this category.
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Wed Feb 01, 2017 8:31 am |
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Fukuoka Scott
Joined: Wed Aug 28, 2013 2:32 pm Posts: 958 Location: Fukuoka, Japan
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Re: 2016 in southern Japan and all its ups and downs
Climate "debates" aside, it's certainly cold now! High temperature of 6C predicted for today and I've had to remove snow from the cyatheas two mornings in a row. Thus far there hasn't been a hard freeze thankfully so I might make it through this winter without any cold damage...
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Sat Feb 11, 2017 1:45 am |
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philinsydney
Joined: Wed Oct 31, 2007 10:58 am Posts: 1099
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Re: 2016 in southern Japan and all its ups and downs
No-one can ever remember a summer like the one we are having, but today was probably the climax when it reached 47.0c at Richmond and 46.9c at Penrith, which are within the Sydney Basin. Observatory Hill only reached 36c due to a weak seabreeze. Even out on the Western Plains of NSW it struggled to exceed these temps; Ivanhoe reached 47.6c
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Sat Feb 11, 2017 9:58 am |
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