An examination of CET versus global temperature anomalies: Part III – Conclusions

In our previous two posts relating CET anomalies to global temperature anomalies – for July to December here and for January to June here.

To finish the survey this post will give an overall examination of the observed correlations for each month and for all months. The first step will be to graph the observed CET anomaly versus global temperature anomaly correlation coefficients between 1880 and 1974 for each of the twelve calendar months. They are arranged in fiscal year order in the graph to fit in with my previous research on CET – a choice made because temperature anomalies are larger in winter than in summer.

Monthly Central England Temperature anomaly versus global temperature anomaly correlation coefficients, 1880 to 1974

Before I analysed each month separately, I hypothesised that there would be three plausible patterns of variation in monthly CET anomaly versus global temperature anomaly correlation:

1. There would be no difference in correlation for all months
2. There would be a maximum in summer (when natural variance of CET and global temperature anomalies are smallest) and minimum in winter (when they are largest because air advection influences are greatest and most independent of greenhouse gas concentrations)
3. There would be maximum in autumn (when CET has increased most consistently and the effect of retention of heat by greenhouse gases appears greatest) and minimum in late winter and early spring

If we look at the graph closely, hypothesis (2) appears the most nearly supported of the three, because the maxima in April and June on the extreme right of the graph (which covers one fiscal year) would even if smoothed out with the very low coefficient for May still show a maximum three month mean of around 0.22 – well above any monthly value between November and February when CET and EWP correlate positively. During these months, the correlation coefficient is relatively consistently around +0.09.

A likely conclusions is that, for the summer months when natural variability is lowest, a sample size of ninety-five years is too small to give accurate correlations at the monthly level. When variability is lower at the local level, smaller changes in temperature can have more effect on the anomaly, especially upon its sign.

If this be so, then we can conclude that over an adequately long period, the correlations between CET and global mean temperature would trough in the winter months at around +0.09. What value they would take in months with negative EWP versus CET correlations (April to September) is less certain. The graph above shows +0.11 and +0.21 as the plausible limits, but what to expect is not certain. We cannot test any years before 1880 since I cannot gain access to compatible values of global temperature anomaly. Testing the post-1974 period is a possibility to expand the sample size, but I am too wary that global warming via greenhouse pollution out of Australia, the Gulf States and South Africa will have  distorted the results vis-à-vis the relatively consistent climate of the 1880 to 1974 period.

An examination of CET versus global temperature anomalies: Part II – January to June

Originally when I decided to plot anomaly of Central England Temperature against anomaly of global temperature for the 1880 to 1974 period, I aimed to do the whole project as one; however a single project really is too much memory for the images needed.

Thus, more than halfway through, I decided I would publish the first part from July to December (which is online here) and finish off the second half from January to June as a separate post. I decided upon reflection later that I would do the conclusions as another separate post.

January:

January CET anomaly versus global temperature anomaly in ˚C, 1880 to 1974

January does not present any really outstanding features. Both our hypotheses at the beginning of this post argued the the relationship between CET and global temperature anomaly should weaken from December to January, and this is observed if only slightly. No outliers so striking as Decembers 1910 and 1939 occur, although the four “War Januaries” noted in the section on December show a striking contrast between cold weather over and warmth globally. As this contrast has been substantially described by Stefan Brönimann in ‘The global climate anomaly 1940–1942’ from 2005, I will not discuss it further here, though I might do a post on these four Januaries later.

February:

February CET anomaly versus global temperature anomaly in ˚C, 1880 to 1974

February’s correlation coefficient is slightly higher than that of January, a result which would not be expected under either theory of CET/global temperature r – both of which expected February to be near a minimum correlation.

What’s also notable is that there are some very strong outliers in what is otherwise a reasonably – given the smallness of the CET area – good correlation over the short period of time during which we can compile reasonable data. February 1963, which ended the coldest winter over the CET area since 1740 and possibly – since anecdotal evidence suggests a very strong “latitudinal inversion” during 1740 – the coldest over the UK as a whole since 1684, has been described in an earlier post. Februaries 1970 and 1941, although less extreme, are similar, whilst February 1944 was a highly anticyclonic winter during a global temperature maximum:

Global temperature anomaly for February 1944. This was during the hottest year globally between 1880 and 1974, and featured a high level of warmth in the northern continental interiors, but strongly anticyclonic circulation over Europe.

The character of the winter of 1943/1944 can be seen below: the strong anticyclone centred over the UK produced a circulation cold enough to counter a level of global warmth not exceeded until after the Lonie Report. The northerly circulation over the UK contrasts with strong zonal anomalies virtually everywhere else in the higher latitudes and troughs in the Mediterranean and Baja. The warmth of this winter over high latitudes of North America was similar to the “War Januaries”.

Winter 1943/1944 500 millibar height anomaly in metres. Note the anticyclonic circulation over the UK contrasting with strong westerlies and mild weather over both continental interiors

An opposite situation to February 1944, with warmth in Central England but cold weather globally, comes ironically from another highly anticyclonic UK winter – that of 1904/1905:

Global temperature anomaly for February 1905. Note the unusually cool weather in the northern hemisphere subtropics.

The cool weather over almost all of the northern hemisphere subtropics, except California and Baja California, is quite remarkable, as shown by the zonal means reproduced below. Anomalies of -1˚C extend south of the Tropic of Cancer, where owing to the intense sunlight and consistent anticyclonicity natural variability of mean temperature is much lower than in higher latitudes where air mass variability has much greater influence. Shimla, at only 31 degrees from the equator and sheltered by the Himalayan crest from cold Siberian air, had its only ever subzero monthly mean at minus 0.8˚C, 1.6˚C colder than February 1893. On the plains, Lahore also had its coolest month on record with a mean of 10.1˚C against an 1880 to 1974 February mean of 15.0579˚C.

February 1905 zonal temperature anomaly, showing the extreme cool in the northern subtropics.

In southern North America, February 1905 was also exceedingly cold. Record cold temperatures for Missouri, Arkansas, Oklahoma and Kansas occurred on the thirteenth and fourteenth. Extraordinary rainfall and cloudiness occurred in the normally cloudless desert southwest: Yuma had rain on twelve days and Phoenix on fourteen – a trend that was to continue into March and normally rainless April throughout Arizona and New Mexico.

Owing to the low latitude of the main anomaly centres, it is on the 250-millibar rather than the 500-millibar chart where the anomalous cold flow into the subtropics, anticycloncity over the UK and tropical maritime flow into Arizona is seen most clearly:

250-millibar height anomaly for February 1905, showing the cold air advection over the subtropics (northeasterly from Hudson Bay over the southern US, northwesterly from Central Asia over South Asia)

March:

March CET anomaly versus global temperature anomaly in ˚C, 1880 to 1974

March fits the thesis of summer maximum better than autumn maximum, as the correlation coefficient between CET anomaly and global temperature anomaly is substantially higher than for February. The diamonds one sees on this chart are much more “confined” than was the case for February, where outlying diamonds occurred quite close to the upper left and lower right corners.

The outlying March 1944 with global temperature 0.50˚C above the 1880 to 1974 mean and CET below the normal for that period, is an intensification of the trend of the winter of 1943/1944: with only 11.8 millimetres March 1944 was the driest month between 1939 and 1956 in the EWP series. March 1962 was a classic month of Atlantic blocking with cool throughout Europe and the United States plus warmth in Greenland, Nunavut, Québéc and Central Asia, warmed by enhanced subtropical westerly flow from the Mediterranean:

Global temperature anomaly for March 1962. The pattern of warmth over Greenland and Central Asia and cold over the United States and Europe should be familiar now

There is a notable lack of Marches that were strikingly warm in the CET series but cool at a global level. No doubt this is because the warmest CET Marches between 1880 and 1974 – those of 1938, 1945, 1948, 1957 and 1961 – all occurred when the global temperature had already heated by around 0.4˚C due to industrial development. March 1948 does present a classic map of cold in western Greenland, Nunavut and western North America and warmth in Europe and the eastern United States:

March 1948 global temperature anomaly. This pattern of warmth and cold should be as familiar now as that of March 1962

April:

April CET anomaly versus global temperature anomaly in ˚C, 1880 to 1974

The virgin Pearson product moment correlation coefficient between April CET anomaly and global temperature anomaly fits the thesis of a summer maximum strongly, rather than that of an autumn maximum (and spring minimum). It is indeed stronger than for any other month we have reviewed so far, with the most conspicuous exception being the extremely hot and sunny April of 1893, which was part of a season that decisively ended Central England’s coolest eight-year spell since 1700:

April 1893 global temperature anomaly. Like October 1896, longitudinal bands of heat and cool can be seen over the Northern Hemisphere.

The only Aprils near the other extreme (Central England cool, globe overall hot) are those of 1953 and 1973. April 1953 was part of an El Niño year that did not produce major drought in Australia – unusually it was east of the dividing range where the driest conditions occurred – and this month saw blocking around Hudson Bay produce a combination of very cool weather in the US and warmth in Canada. Indeed, despite the impact of greenhouse pollution from Australia, the Gulf States and South Africa since the 1970s it remains the warmest April on record in the Arctic Archipelago and Nunavik. Eureka, Nunavut averaged -18.7˚C (anomaly +9.06296˚C); Isachsen averaged -17.8˚C (anomaly +8.08˚C); Kuujjuaq averaged 0.3˚C (anomaly +9.8163˚C); Nottingham Island averaged -4.4˚C (anomaly +8.39286˚C); Iqaluit -4.2˚C (+9.90˚C) and Coral Harbour -6.7˚C (+9.74286˚C).

It was cool in the UK, Iceland, and eastern Greenland due to offshore flow in a strong high-latitude westerly pattern:

April 1953 global temperature anomaly. Note the warmth in Canada and northwestern Russia and the cool over the contiguous US

April 1973 had a somewhat similar global pattern to April 1953, though the cool over the United States was more exceptional, as can be seen below:

April 1973 CONUS division temperature ranks. Note the record cool over the Southern Plains grading to hotter than average in the Northeast

Compared to April 1953, the heat over the majority of the globe was never so extreme as over the High Arctic in the former month; however, the interiors of Australia and South America were especially consistent in being hotter than the virgin mean over a wide area, as was European Russia, China and Japan. Only Western Europe, the US, the Arctic Archipelago and Central Siberia were actually cooler than average:

April 1973 global temperature anomaly

May:

May CET anomaly versus global temperature anomaly in ˚C, 1880 to 1974

The May table, contradicting the April one, suggests a spring minimum and autumn maximum in correlation coefficient. In fact, the observed correlation coefficient between CET and global temperature anomaly is less than for any other month, with the distribution of dots 99.91 percent random.

In spite of this, there are no really outstanding cases of a hot May in Central England being a cool May globally. The May of 1911, which proved the beginning of a famous hot summer in Europe (not only in Britain) is the nearest to this, being the second coolest on record globally but quite hot over the UK if not remarkably so. The only other notable hot area was the eastern United States, which saw a contrast with the Western States commonly seen in very hot CET months (e.g. August 1899, July 1911, July 1921, August 1947, July/August 1955 and July 1983):

Divisional temperature rankings for the contiguous United States for May 1911. Note the cool in the West and South and record heat in the Northeast

Unusually for months with heat in the East and cool in the West, May 1911 was very dry over the contiguous United States, being second driest only behind May 1934 and recording record dryness in the hot Northeast:

CONUS precipitation for May 1911. Note how there is no very wet area over (part of) the Mississippi Basin as in most months with a cool West/hot East temperature anomaly pattern

The pattern suggested by this is of an extreme anticyclone over the East and a cyclone over the West, with the eastern high level anticyclone extending so far that Gulf air cannot be advected into the East as is usual under this scenario. Actually, there is very strong easterly flow into Florida – which was consequently very wet and cool – and this is another important difference when compared to most hot East/cool West months. The anomalous easterly flow is quite consistent over the subtropics and meant that dry continental air was advected throughout the eastern United States:

May 1911 northern hemisphere 50kPa height anomaly.Note the strong blocks over the Baltic and Great Lakes

June:

June CET anomaly versus global temperature anomaly in ˚C, 1880 to 1974

June is an extreme contrast to May: whereas the Pearson r for May was the lowest for any month, that for June is the strongest for any month at 0.33318483.

This extreme contrast is only deviated from significantly in two cases – the very hot year of 1944, and June 1972 at the beginning of a strong El Niño. June 1944 was very much akin to July 1993 – flooding rains over the northern Plains (wettest month over Montana since before 1895), very hot in the East, very cool in the West, and dry in the Southeast. On a global scale, the only cooler-than-average regions in June 1944 were the western US, Europe except the southeast, and southern Australia (which was controlled by frosts resulting from extreme drought):

June 1944 global temperature anomaly map. Note general heat – though nowhere excessive – outside Europe, the western US and southeastern Australia

The final, hopefully shorter, post will consider the correlation coefficients observed between CET and global temperature anomaly and discuss conclusions.

A list that claims to be universal, but overlooks almost everything

As I, perhaps looking to control obsessions that have dominated my thoughts and prevented me doing any real work on this blog or elsewhere over recent months, browsed YouTube looking for greatest albums articles of the type I lavished up a decade or so ago, I found one from 2013 that I had failed entirely to discover when it was originally written.

The list is, interestingly from my perspective and history as a music listener, written by Australians, namely Toby Creswell, Craig Mathieson, and John O‘Donnell. The critics claim that they are dealing with what they perceive to be a kind of “nationalist” bias in rock criticism, claiming in their YouTube interview that:

“A US list will contain 99 US artists and the Beatles; a British list will contain 99 British artists and one US artist” 

I do have my doubts that “nationalist” bias of this type is so extreme as Cresswell and Mathieson claimed in their interview; nonetheless I do not doubt that the nation one is from can greatly influence which albums are considered important.

Creswell and Mathieson claim to have compiled their list from as many authoritative sources as possible rather than their own listening; however from my knowledge garnered during the 2000s of the most serious kind of rock criticism it is not possible for me to believe honestly that they have simply failed to see that a large number of  “best albums” lists are totally ephemeral and simply reflect the public popularity of records rather than enduring influence or being even remotely groundbreaking or even distinctive. To take at least some care, even if not the most extreme sort, to ensure that such lists are avoided is essential.

Joe S. Harrington’s decision in his Top 100 Albums to not allow anything released after 1992 to be included was a sign of wisdom since it is exceedingly clear he was listening to very little groundbreaking during the decade between 1993 and 2003, whilst David Keenan, who did include a couple of albums released after 1993 in his The Best Albums Ever...Honest, nonetheless came out utterly free from trendiness and attention to the present. Piero Scaruffi’s list of the 25 best albums is even more than Harrington’s or Keenan’s, the product of extremely intensive study of music and sound (not I would say by any means perfect), and focuses on music whose influence over the long term can be clearly demonstrated. I will say that I think Scaruffi can be a little over-the-top in praising avant-garde music that is not as good as he thinks, but his ability to find music of considerable value but which I would never learn about from other more mainstream critics is most definitely sufficient for me to recommend him.

I have tabulated Creswell, Mathieson and O‘Donnell’s top 100 albums, published in their book 100 Best Albums Of All Time, along with whether the album is included in the three lists by Harrington, Keenan and Scaruffi noted in the preceding paragraph and which I also note in my critique of NME’s Top 500 Albums from around the same time. Symbols:

1. a blank indicates that the artist has no albums on the relevant list
2. one asterisk is added for each album other than the one listed here the artist has on the relevant list
3. in Harrington’s and Scaruffi’s lists, each album included is given its number on that list
4. for Keenan’s list, which was not strictly ordered, each album from here included therein is simply labelled with a “Y”
5. albums released after the lists were published, or after 1992 with Harrington, are labelled with an “ineligible”
6. albums I own are shaded in pink

	Artist	Title	Year	Harrington	Keenan	Scaruffi
1	Bob Dylan	Highway 61 Revisited	1966		**
2	The Beatles	Revolver	1966		*
3	The Clash	London Calling	1979	*
4	Nirvana	Nevermind	1991	*
5	Van Morrison	Astral Weeks	1968		Y	#21
6	Joni Mitchell	Blue	1971
7	The Rolling Stones	Sticky Fingers	1971	*	*
8	Fleetwood Mac	Rumours	1977
9	The Velvet Underground and Nico	The Velvet Underground and Nico	1967	#25	Y	#4
10	Public Enemy	It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back	1988	#27	*
11	The Beach Boys	Pet Sounds	1966	#84	*
12	Bruce Springsteen	Darkness on the Edge of Town	1978		*	*
13	Television	Marquee Moon	1977	#83	*
14	Little Richard	Here’s Little Richard	1954
15	Led Zeppelin	Untitled (Led Zeppelin IV)	1971		Y
16	Radiohead	OK Computer	1997
17	The Band	The Band	1969		*
18	The Beatles	The Beatles (The White Album)	1969		Y
19	Pixies	Doolittle	1989
20	John Lennon	John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band	1970
21	U2	Achtung Baby	1991
22	Simon and Garfunkel	Bridge over Troubled Water	1970
23	Bob Dylan	Blonde on Blonde	1966		**	#17
24	Sex Pistols	Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols	1977	#2
25	Prince	Sign of the Times	1987
26	Arcade Fire	Funeral	2004	ineligible	ineligible
27	Michael Jackson	Thriller	1982
28	Neil Young	On the Beach	1973	*	*
29	Jay-Z	The Blueprint	2001	ineligible	ineligible
30	Massive Attack	Blue Lines	1991
31	The Smiths	The Queen Is Dead	1986		Y
32	Carole King	Tapestry	1971
33	David Bowie	Hunky Dory	1971	*
34	Ray Charles	Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music	1962
35	Paul Simon	Graceland	1986
36	Iggy and the Stooges	Raw Power	1973	*	*
37	The Jimi Hendrix Experience	Are You Experienced?	1967	#20	*
38	Aretha Franklin	Lady Soul	1968
39	Ramones	Ramones	1976	#63	*
40	The Rolling Stones	Exile on Main Street	1972	*	*
41	Patti Smith	Horses	1975	#17	*
42	Miles Davis	Kind of Blue	1958	**	Y	*
43	Sonic Youth	Daydream Nation	1988	#94	*
44	Bruce Springsteen	Born to Run	1975		*	*
45	The Beatles	Abbey Road	1970		*
46	Guns’n’Roses	Appetite for Destruction	1987
47	Black Sabbath	Paranoid	1971	*	*
48	George Harrison	All Things Must Pass	1971
49	Green Day	American Idiot	2004
50	The Doors	The Doors	1967			#5
51	Pink Floyd	Dark Side of the Moon	1973
52	James Brown	Live at the Apollo	1963		Y
53	Creedence Clearwater Revival	Cosmo’s Factory	1970
54	Pearl Jam	Vs	1993	ineligible
55	The Wailers	Burning	1976
56	The Monkees	Headquarters	1967
57	Talking Heads	Remain in Light	1980
58	Rod Stewart	Every Picture Tells a Story	1971
59	Devo	Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo!	1978
60	Chuck Berry	After School Session	1957
61	Eminem	The Marshall Mathers LP	2001	ineligible	ineligible
62	Blondie	Parallel Lines	1978
63	Dusty Springfield	Dusty in Memphis	1968		Y
64	R.E.M.	Automatic for the People	1992		*
65	The Supremes	Where Did Our Love Go?	1964
66	Oasis	(What’s the Story) Morning Glory	1995	ineligible
67	Kanye West	My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy	2004	ineligible	ineligible
68	Jeff Buckley	Grace	1994	ineligible
69	The White Stripes	Elephant	2003	ineligible	ineligible
70	Eagles	Hotel California	1976
71	Wilco	Yankee Hotel Foxtrot	1994	ineligible
72	Beastie Boys	Paul’s Botique	1989
73	Tom Waits	Rain Dogs	1985
74	Kate Bush	Hounds of Love	1985		Y
75	The Who	Live at Leeds	1971	*	*
76	Joy Division	Closer	1980	#47
77	Kraftwerk	Trans-Europe Express	1977
78	Randy Newman	Sail Away	1972
79	Pavement	Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain	1994	ineligible
80	Curtis Mayfield	Curtis	1970
81	Roxy Music	For Your Pleasure	1973	*
82	The Strokes	Is This It?	2001	ineligible	ineligible
83	Midnight Oil	Diesel and Dust	1987
84	Coldplay	Viva la Vida, or Death and All His Friends	2008	ineligible	ineligible
85	The Kinks	The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society	1968		Y
86	Pretenders	Pretenders	1980
87	The Modern Lovers	The Modern Lovers	1975	#70
88	Primal Scream	Screamadelica	1991
89	Fairport Convention	Unhalfbricking	1968		*
90	Elvis Costello and the Attractions	This Year’s Model	1978	#72
91	Portishead	Dummy	1994	ineligible
92	AC/DC	Back in Black	1980	*	Y
93	Beck	Odelay	1998	ineligible
94	Gang of Four	Entertainment	1979
95	Marvin Gaye	What’s Going On?	1971
96	Arctic Monkeys	Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not	2006	ineligible	ineligible
97	Queen	A Night at the Opera	1975
98	Derek and the Dominos	Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs	1970
99	P.J. Harvey	Let England Shake	2011	ineligible	ineligible
100	The Byrds	Sweetheart of the Rodeo	1968	*	*

As one can see at the merest glance, most recordings on Harrington’s Keenan’s and especially Scaruffi’s lists are completely absent:

• only eleven of Harrington’s Top 100 albums are present
• only ten of Keenan’s best 103 are present
• only four of Scaruffi’s top 25 are present
• ten artists on the list have a different album in Harrington’s Top 100
• eighteen artists on the list have a different album in Keenan’s list
• only Springsteen has a different album in Scaruffi’s top 25

What one can say about the general composition of Creswell, Mathieson and O‘Donnell’s list is that it has many major omissions by genre. Heavy metal is utterly absent apart from Black Sabbath and AC/DC, but hardcore punk and progressive rock are also unrepresented, and experimental rock also absent except for Sonic Youth, whose pop hooks allowed them to reach the Billboard Top 40 in 1994 with Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star. Folk and folk rock are also weakly represented apart from Dylan and Joni Mitchell, for whom I will say the magnificent and utterly unique Hejira may be the finest recording I have ever heard and stands much superior to the more famous Blue. The absence of metal and progressive rock is of course almost certainly due to well-documented biases in Creswell, Mathieson and O‘Donnell’s sources, and how with progressive rock the key albums were never remotely popular commercially in the English-speaking world. These biases are however no excuse for not even trying to correct them.

Another severe fault is how the most recent albums on the list are all popular and what one must call “fashionable”. There is not even something by Joanna Newsom, arguably the most brilliant musical artist of modern times, yet alone by more obscure underground acts since the 1990s, such as the post-rock scene.

For all its grandiose claims, Creswell, Mathieson and O‘Donnell’s list is a very bad one. It simply reproduces badly flawed lists of music that tends towards the ephemeral, and ignores important parts of rock history.

An examination of CET versus global temperature anomalies: Part I – overall and July to December

The Central England Temperature (CET) series goes back to 1659 and is the longest temperature record in the world. Like the global temperature record, CET shows a major increase since the 1970s, which I have documented in the first chart from an earlier post here but will reproduce for your interest:

Mean Central England Temperature for each fiscal year from 1659/1660 to 2014/2015, plus mean and percentiles for period from 1765/1766 to 1973/1974, reproduced from ‘Two “little ice ages” revealed by CET summer data’

Despite the similarity between CET and global temperatures over the long term – both are now about 1˚C or 1.8˚F above the mean from 1880 to 1974 – at shorter time scales there does not superficially appear to be any natural relationship between the two. The largest CET anomalies during the very cold months of February 1947 and January 1963 do not show a corresponding global decline, and what I previously observed as the coolest period globally around 1910 was not abnormally cool in the CET series, especially vis-à-vis an exceptionally cool period (taking the CET series as a whole) from March 1885 to January 1893.

However, as the map below shows, the period from 1903 to 1912 during which all but one of the “record cool” months at a global level occurred was actually hotter than 1885 to 1892 over the northern hemisphere’s land, but cooler over the tropics and oceans.

Moreover, the areas without data seem to have been hotter during the later period, which covered only a minor proportion of the great pluvial over Central Chile from 1898 to 1905. Wetness over Central Chile is known to be correlated with blocking, stronger anticyclones and colder conditions over West Antarctica, as shown below:

Mean 500 millibar (50 kilopascal) May to August geopotential height for 1898 to 1905 vis-à-vis the period since the second “magic gate” identified by Tim Flannery in ‘The Weather Makers’

Whilst we can see the anomalous wetness over Central Chile due to stronger onshore flow very easily from this chart, one cannot see the cold over West Antarctica that would be expected on the eastern side of the block. However, this is not very clearly seen from the temperature graph below:

The diversion of the Central Chilean pluvial put aside, in order to really look at the correlations between CET and global temperature anomaly over the period from 1880 to 1974, I have taken the following steps:

1. Compiled an unrounded monthly mean CET for every month from 1880 to 1974 via the daily CET data, which can be downloaded online here
2. Averaged the CET for each calendar month using only years from 1880 to 1974 inclusive
3. Using an Excel file and my dowloaded GISS global temperature maps (which have an anomaly vis-à-vis 1880 to 1974 means to two decimal places), I compiled all the global means as independent variable and plotted CET against it as a dependent variable
4. As a final step, I plotted scatter plots of CET anomaly against global temperature anomaly (versus 1880 to 1974 mean in both cases) and calculated the Pearson product-moment correlation.

There were too many data for a Spearman correlation and I lack any means of separating large number of equal ranks in the global temperature database, whose anomalies are naturally within a much narrower range than CET anomalies covering only about 0.1 percent of the planet’s ice-free land. 1880 to 1974 is chosen as the review period for two reasons: first, 1880 is when the earliest maps of global temperature begin, and secondly, 1974 is when, as shown by the sudden fall in runoff into Perth’s dams, the first “magic gate” caused by greenhouse emissions from the oil- and mineral-producing nations of Australia, South Africa and the Gulf States began controlling the climate. Because GISS cannot in its latest form provide fiscal year temperature means (which have the advantage in the northern hemisphere of not dividing abnormally cold or warm winters which provide most of the annual temperature variability) I have done only monthly data for the moment at least.

All Months:

Looking at our scatter plot of CET versus global temperature anomaly between 1880 and 1974, we do see some positive correlation both at a glance and with the correlation coefficient of +0.13730109. However, this coefficient is sufficiently small that variation in global temperature can explain a mere two percent of the variation in CET, since percentage explained equals the square of the variation.

It is of course possible that different seasons behave differently. Because the sun is weak or nonexistent, high-latitude winter temperatures (including those of the UK) are controlled almost entirely by air mass. Variations in wind vector could thus overwhelm global temperature trends due to variations in greenhouse gas concentrations or dimming from volcanic aerosols. In the hotter months, however, air masses possess less influence and sunlight of cloudiness has a more critical role: thus, one might expect a better correlation between CET and global temperature anomaly here.

It is also plausible that because the influence of greenhouse gas levels upon CET was shown in ‘Two “little ice ages” revealed by CET summer data’ to peak in the autumn and trough out from late winter to early summer, that we would see a peak in correlation in the autumn. We will look month by month through the fiscal year to see if either thesis can be supported, and I will divide the fiscal year into two halves to avoid having too much memory in one post.

July:

July CET anomaly versus global temperature anomaly in ˚C, 1880 to 1974

The results here do not really support our prediction that a much better correlation between CET and global temperature anomaly: the virgin mean correlation is actually less than that for all months, when we would expect high values in mid-summer. The smallness of our sample size (95 months vis-à-vis 1,140) means that strong outliers are very easy to see, notably the famously hot and dry July 1911:

As we can see, there are, apart form the generally cool Southern Hemisphere three very substantial cool regions during the UK’s hottest month since July 1852, and Europe’s hottest since July 1859 – a belt from Finland to the Black Sea, China and eastern Russia, and most of the US and Canada outside of Québéc. Newfoundland and New England, where Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine experienced records for heat that still stand today. On the fifth of July, Nashua recorded 106˚F or 41.1˚C.

August:

August CET anomaly versus global temperature anomaly in ˚C, 1880 to 1974

In contrast to July, August’s results do suggest that the summer months with more and less indirect sunlight should provide a better correlation between CET and global temperature anomalies: the Pearson correlation coefficient is almost twice that for all months. The result does however support the thesis of increased correlation in the autumn months which are being approached in August.

However, global temperature anomalies for August still can explain only about one-seventeenth of the variance of CET between 1880 and 1974. 1911 is again a huge outlier:

Global temperature anomalies for August 1911. Note the alternating patterns of heat and cool across the Northern Hemisphere, and the consistent cool in South America and over the oceans

September:

September CET anomaly versus global temperature anomaly in ˚C, 1880 to 1974

As the sun moves southwards we would expect the correlation between CET anomaly and global temperature anomaly to weaken. This is observed vis-à-vis August, suggesting that the July sample may be too small at ninety-five years to eliminate the effect of outliers. Septembers of 1944 (the hottest year globally between 1880 and 1974) and the chilly autumn of 1952 are the most substantial outliers:

September 1944 global temperature anomaly – note the cool area centred around the UK amongst an otherwise circumlatitudinal hot anomaly

September’s poor correlation coefficient also opposes the thesis of highest correlation in the autumn months: the fall from August would not be expected if greenhouse gas concentrations have c=most consistent effect in the autumn as observed in recent CET records.

October:

October CET anomaly versus global temperature anomaly in ˚C, 1880 to 1974

October seems to contradict our first thesis: the correlation between CET and global temperatures is greater than for July or September, although between 1880 and 1974 global temperature variation can explain only 4 percent of variation in CET. It does support the thesis of an autumn maximum in correlation, although the Pearson is less than for August. The major outlier of October 1896 – Central England’s coolest since 1817 but 0.13˚C hotter than average globally – shows the classic alternating “sinusoidal” pattern of hot and cool anomalies, with a very cool band centred upon Iceland and Western Europe and a hot band on Eastern Europe and Russia away from the Pacific:

October 1896 global temperature anomalies. Note the cool over Western Europe and the Great Lakes region and heat over Eastern Europe, northern Russia and Australia

November:

November CET anomaly versus global temperature anomaly in ˚C, 1880 to 1974

As we move towards winter, both theses outlined at the beginning of this post would predict a decline in the correlation coefficient between global mean temperature and CET. Vis-à-vis what we saw for October, November does seem to suggest this: the correlation coefficient is down to 9 percent and global temperature anomalies can predict less than one percent of those for CET. Striking outliers are completely absent despite the low correlation coefficient.

December:

December CET anomaly versus global temperature anomaly in ˚C, 1880 to 1974

The two theories noted at the start of this post give different predictions of how the correlation coefficient between CET and global temperature anomalies would change from November to December: an autumn maximum (October) would predict a rise, whereas a winter maximum would predict a continuing fall in the correlation coefficient.

What is actually observed is almost exactly the same correlation coefficient between CET anomaly and global temperature anomaly as for November. There are two major outliers from the general pattern:

December 1910 global temperature anomalies. Note the hot area of northern Africa and Europe, and the very cold area over Siberia and China

December 1910 is interesting not so much because of the contrast between Europe and the rest of the world, but because unlike in a conventional positive NAO situation, hot conditions extended through the Sahara, which is normally cool during positive NAO winters. As can be seen from the 500 millibar anomaly chart below, there was unlike typical positive NAO winter months much blocking over Greenland, but not a classic low-latitude block that would produce cold northwesterly flow, nor a high-latitude block in the correct place to produce a very cold easterly flow:

Departures from 1880 to 1974 mean of 500 millibar heights (in metres) over the northern hemisphere for December 1910. The block over the Black Sea and Ukraine is decisive in shaping the observed temperature pattern.

December 1939, in contrast, is notable as relative to the 1880 to 1974 mean globally the second-hottest month between 1880 and 1978 (behind January 1944 by 0.02˚C) and the relatively hottest over the Northern Hemisphere. Over the contiguous United States it was the hottest December between 1890 and 2014, although December 1889 was certainly hotter there due to remarkable heat in the East and Plains.

December 1939 global temperature anomalies vis-à-vis 1880 to 1974 averages. Note the unusual warmth over the interiors of Asia and North America – this was the latter continent’s warmest December of the century.

Whereas the colder weather of the Chukotka Peninsula relates to the fact that the anomalous high-index westerly airflow was offshore, Europe’s failure to participate in the Northern Hemisphere’s anomalous warmth was because a block over Greenland and Canada, which drove warm air into northern North America throughout this month (and the four cold “War Januaries” of 1940, 1941, 1942 and 1945), drove colder air into Europe. Unlike the “War Januaries” this block was not circumpolar and the easterly flow into the UK much weaker:

December 1939 500 millibar height anomalies in metres. Note the blocks over Canada and Central Asia driving warm Atlantic and Pacific air into Asia and North America.

In Part II of this post, we will look at January to June and make an overall examination of the correlation trends. So far, evidence of seasonality in correlation between CET anomaly and global temperature anomaly is quite indecisive and there remains the possibility that no differences exist between seasons.

If closing one rail line causes unspeakable congestion, what would a complete freeway ban achieve?

Today, as I was going through RailPage archives in my email, I discovered just how close the Upfield rail line was to complete closure to be replaced by CityLink – the most obscene waste of public money in Australia’s history and one which shows just why a constitutional ban on new trunk roads is so desperately overdue.

Although I have not been that opposed to the light rail replacement for the Upfield Line proposed in the 1980s, excessive wastage upon roads (e.g. the South-Eastern Mulgrave link) even then prevented it being carried out. More than that, the freeways attracted so many off-peak rail users that they actually increased traffic congestion, especially with Australia’s very low fuel taxes.

In the RaiPage article, former transport minister Alan Brown says that the Liberal Government had planned to demolish the Upfield Line and put the destructive CityLink through Macaulay and Flemington Bridge stations. However, a delay in this plan meant that CityLink was revised and was placed above Macaulay and Flemington Bridge stations, and the Upfield Line was saved.

Twenty years later, in 2014, the importance if this very minor decision vis-à-vis the radical (and in Australia essential) planning changes advocated by Environment, Capitalism and Socialism four years beforehand had not been carried out was seen when a power failure on the Broadmeadows Line (since extended to Cragieburn) forced chaos on the Upfield Line as can be seen below at North Melbourne station.

Even Alan Brown admitted in his recent interview that:

“it was the poor relation of Melbourne’s rail network”

and

“a line that serviced electorates that the Labor Party held and would clearly continue to hold, but it was the right decision for Melbourne”

The question to be asked sincerely is what would happen if the road lobby could have been completely removed from the political influence it has had for the past six decades, so that road building could be officially and legally ended (apart perhaps from minor back streets) and all funds presently set aside for road building transferred entirely to railway improvements and to demolition of demonstrably unsustainable freeways (which means, certainly in Australia, every single freeway ever built). If Alan Brown is right, a rigid policy of ending and constitutionally banning wastage on unsustainable freeways and transferring all money set aside to rail transit could do much more to deal with traffic congestion than all the freeways ever built to feed the RACV, the Federal Chamber of Automotive Industries, the mining companies, and such lobby groups as the Motor Trades Association. Possibly a complete ban on freeways could actually end traffic congestion if the money were used to fund railways and tramways to new developments or on major long-distance routes like from Geelong or Sydney to Melbourne – at least if the nineteenth-century alignments insufficient investment has left in place were updated to allow for higher speeds. People overlook how Australia’s flat terrain – were investment on roads eliminated rather than dictating policy – is ideally suited to high-speed rail, which has instead been created on much less suitable terrain in Europe and Japan due to the absence of powerful road lobbies.

Such a policy would also significantly cut into Australia’s dreadful record on greenhouse gas emissions – even using diesel fuel rail is four times more fuel-efficient than road transport.

Brown‘s speech – modest as it is – and the lesson that mass protest can prevent such a catastrophe as closing the Upfield Line would have produced, constitutes a clear demonstration of why the most radical change to transport policies in Australia, involving an outright ban on new freeways and highways and a transfer of all allocated funds to rail transit, is over half a century overdue.

Further again from real Messiaen!

As regular readers will know, my mother and brother love to satirise Olivier Messiaen’s amazing piano works like Catalog d‘Oiseaux, Visions de l‘Amen and Vingt Regards sur l‘Enfant Jésus. The amazing skill playing real Messiaen takes is entirely disregarded, and their inability to understand the extremely complex rhythms and melodies of the music means they resort to crude criticism of calling it equivalent to “a cat playing the piano”, although it is true that several others listeners have said exactly the same thing about Messiaen.

Recently, however, my brother has gone even further with his Messiaen satirisation, saying that a dog playing the piano is the best new Messiaen recording!

In fact, although dogs are more intelligent than cats, there is no way they could play something so difficult even for a highly trained pianist as Catalog d‘Oiseaux with any sort of training. Nor could that dog know what “Messiaen” actually means! More than that, if a cat’s playing the piano sounds – when listened to carefully – in no way like a real performance of any Messiaen piano piece, and is much more clearly different from such even than a cat playing the piano. (Of course, I must emphatically emphasise that a cat playing the piano has no sonic resemblance whatsoever to actual Messiaen piano works).

When my brother said it was a new Messiaen work, I laughed loud. The best wish for all who cannot understand Messiaen is not to satirise but to try, even if they (as my mother and brother do) detest the objectives of the cultural milieu of which Messiaen’s work is part (partly because I talk about a much more gory and unsavory part thereof).

Revealing how a resource-surfeited country has stayed democratic

Although it is popularly believed that Australia’s longstanding, stable democracy is simply a reflection of an advanced level of economic development, with age and reading about Australia’s unique ecology and observing its dreadful environmental record, I have come to believe that this generally-held hypothesis is entirely wrong.

As Gallup and Sachs (2000) discuss, countries in low latitudes have low incomes with a few natural-resource-rich exceptions, and almost all the poorest countries are tropical. Although Australia is more than half outside the geographical tropics, as Huston (2012) demonstrates, it is pedologically entirely tropical. In fact, Orians and Milewski (2007) demonstrate conclusively that all of Australia uniformly surpasses all other extant continents in oligotrophy, but there can exist no doubt Australia stands less distant ecologically from the tropics than it is from the Enriched World, simply because:

1. Enriched World soils are distinctly more fertile on average than the soils of non-Australian humid tropical and arid outer tropical and subtropical landmasses
2. Paleopedology (Retallack, 2001, p. 285) gives clear evidence that even the least fertile of the dominant Enriched World soil types were exceedingly rare until the great glaciations began five million year ago

Accepting Australia as a “natural-resource-rich exception” (à la Gallup and Sachs) remains the only logical conclusion.

When we study the other “natural-resource-rich exceptions” – New Caledonia, Brunei and the Arab Gulf States – popular conclusions about Australian democracy are in no way supported. Excluding New Caledonia, which remains a French colony, all these other nations remain absolute monarchies with no evidence of large-scale democratisation. Given that Australia is even poorer in nutrients and animal protein, and has a much wider range of natural resources than the Middle East – which aside from its dominance of world oil and phosphate rock reserves is extremely natural-resource-poor – it would be expected that the political power of its mineral industry would be greater.

However, today, looking for books on democracy and its evolution, I found Dietrich Rüschemeyer’s 1992 Capitalist Development and Democracy today and was impressed (if not to an extreme degree) at his analysis of how democratic and authoritarian regimes evolved in early twentieth-century Europe, the Western Hemisphere and Australia. Rüschemeyer gave a convincing argument that the presence of powerful large landholding classes in Central, Southern and Eastern Europe, Latin America and the American South precluded democracy prior to the “Green Revolution” shifting comparative advantage in agriculture to Australia and Africa. By contrast, northern Europe, Canada and New Zealand were able to maintain stable democracies under these conditions as they were almost entirely smallholding. Rüschemeyer views the only exceptions as Britain and a number of British colonies, including Australia and the British Caribbean islands. Rüschemeyer shows that large landowners in these cases did not control the state and could not enforce authoritarian regimes.

Given that many of the nations discussed by Rüschemeyer – New Zealand, Switzerland, all of Central America – are exceedingly natural-resource-poor, it is understandable that the political influence of mining capitalists would be irrelevant in most of the cases discussed by Rüschemeyer. However, I possess little doubt that a powerful class of mining capitalists would tend to be extremely hostile to democracy, because, by analogy with Mickey (2015, p. 10) we would expect capital-dependent mining elites to be even more hostile to democracy that labour-dependent landed elites. Since mineral resources are completely fixed in location underground, they are harder to move than farming operations, and much harder to move than industrial labour. Thus, a mining capitalist’s wealth should theoretically be more vulnerable to taxation from a politically embittered lower class than even a large landowner’s.

The history of the oil states of the Gulf and Brunei, and the erosion of popular participation in the United States during and after the “System of 1896” do perhaps support this conclusion. However, in the United States the role of mining elites in reforms such as personal registration, literacy tests and residential requirements is doubtful, with the exception of Arizona and New Mexico where mining elites undoubtedly restricted political participation until the 1970s by completely excluding Native Americans whose participation threatened mineowners’ interests. Nevertheless, it does seem highly logical that Australia’s powerful mining capitalist class would be hostile to democracy, and have desire to roll it back as its power increases via advances in lithophile metallurgy – lithophile metals being a natural resource Australia is rich in almost proportionately to its nutrient poverty, owing to the low solubility of most lithophile elements and that their extremely strong bonds with oxygen precluded preindustrial smelting. Nevertheless, such rollbacks have never occurred because of the conservatism of Australia’s working classes – substantially opposed even to a moderate “mining tax” – and the related fact that the mining capitalists do not have their wealth threatened by democracy and can substantially control democratically elected politicians.

However, if Australia had been unable to democratise before major interwar advances in lithophile metallurgy like the Kroll Process, there is no doubt it would remain firmly authoritarian even today. Under such circumstances, the mining elite would undoubtedly prefer an authoritarian regime to even Australia’s actual pliant democracy.

References:

• Retallack, Gregory John (2001); Soils of the Past: An Introduction to Paleopedology, ISBN 978-0-632-05376-6
• Gallup, John Luke and Sachs, Jeffrey D.; ‘Agriculture, Climate, and Technology: Why are the Tropics Falling Behind?’; American Journal of Agricultural Economics, Volume 82, Issue 3, 1 August 2000, pages 731–737
• Orians, Gordon H. and Milewski, Antoni V. (2007). ‘Ecology of Australia: the effects of nutrient-poor soils and intense fires’ Biological Reviews, 82 (3): pp. 393–423
• Huston, Michael A.; ‘Precipitation, soils, NPP, and biodiversity: resurrection of Albrecht’s curve’; Ecological Monographs, 82(3), 2012, pp. 277–296
• Micket, Robert (2015); Paths Out of Dixie: The Democratization of Authoritarian Enclaves in America's Deep South, 1944-1972 (Princeton Studies in American Politics: Historical, International, and Comparative Perspectives); ISBN 978-0691133386