The Chinook is a mountain wind named after a Native American tribe from the Pacific North-West. They named it snow-eater because of the heat of the wind racing down the eastern slopes of the Rockies. Moist winds sweeping off the Pacific are lifted up over the mountain range, cool and condense into thick clouds and pour with rain. Then the winds become dried out and as they race down the other side of the mountain they warm up and dry even more.
The temperature change is so dramatic that on 14th January 1972 at Loma Montana a 57oC rise was registered from -48oC to 9oC…a world record for a 24-hour temperature increase. Boulder in Colorado often gets particularly hard hit by Chinooks as the winds are funnelled down through nearby canyons. A gust of 143 miles per hour was registered during January 1971 and in January 1982 a Chinook caused more than $10 million of damage.
This year...on my son Nicholas John’s 31st birthday...I wrote a blog that eventually found its way to the Shepherd on Climate website as a piece entitled Cloud Cuckoo Land. This website is a collection of blogs about Research In Progress…now available for download as England’s Climate & Energy Politics. The e-book and the website lack a coherent narrative so I have asked my daughter to edit my Climate Change Scribblings into a book manuscript.
In my Cloud Cuckoo Land blog I mentioned the scientific problem with Temperature Gauge Data in Temperature-Time Series. I wrote that you can either measure the temperature in the same place for as long as possible…hopefully for centuries...or you measure under similar operant conditions. Here is some of what I wrote.
‘The first course of action seems to make sense because the shape of the landscape affects the local climate. A number this side of the hill will not be the same as one from the other side. But there is a problem. A hundred years ago your measuring point was in the middle of a field five miles out of town. Today it’s in the middle of a shopping centre’.
The operant conditions of your data point matter because built-up environments are typically several degrees warmer. I ended by remarking that ‘even something as simple as collecting data is far from simple’. This data quality effect might be enough to explain the fact that global temperature data from the Northern Hemisphere appears to suggest that it has warmed more than the Southern Hemisphere…something that is puzzling scientists as it is inherently unlikely.
In a scientifically-literate world this 200-word caveat about Data Quality would be unnecessary. But Public Science is now a branch of Public Relations...and truth an early casualty.
The reported average 30-year temperature in Britain from 1961 to 1990 was 9.47oC. Since 1990 every second year has been at least one degree higher than this. The top yearly averages since have been 1995-10.52o; 1997-10.53o; 1999-10.63o; 2002-10.60o; 2003-10.50o; 2004-10.48o and 2006-10.84o. This year has been particularly warm. July was billed as Britain’s warmest month ever at 19.66oC and we also had the warmest September since 1729 at 16.55oC. Globally 2006 will be our sixth warmest year since 1850.
There are Carbonistas who point the finger of suspicion at The Carbon Economy to explain all this but little of their science stands up to rigorous scrutiny. Keith Waterhouse found The Carbon Copy Economy more interesting for his journalistic attentions.
He writes of a time 60-years ago when as the most junior clerk he was left in charge of the office while his boss took a client to lunch and his Elders & Betters trooped off to the pub. Nothing usually happened to disturb his lunchtime reading of a library book except the regular visits of the Carbon Paper Salesman.
This gentleman it seems was an Ace Salesman…stationery cupboards throughout the commercial quarter of Leeds were crammed with his boxes of carbon paper…so he chose lunchtime deliberately knowing that at that hour the most senior member of staff in the place would be a gullible office boy or an impressionable typist. His line was either that there was about to be a worldwide shortage of carbon paper…’Hurry while stocks last!’…or that prices were about to rocket due to a South American Consortium having cornered the market. Notice how nothing changes.
Keith Waterhouse writes that his predecessor as Office Muggins had fallen for either or both of these spiels with the result that there was enough carbon paper in the cupboard to last to the end of the century so he was under strict standing orders never to buy any more. Goodness knows what happened to the vast stockpile of expensive carbon paper…melted down perhaps to make spitfires like the park railings and the Council Dumps of aluminium saucepans.
The creep of new technology has turned Carbon Paper into a back number…so I have to fight with my bank every time I order the neat little Paying In Book with counterfoils and carbon paper that I insist on using. But I still remember with embarrassment my discovery that Alan Pryke was spending his first winter in Stockholm trudging around the city’s business district in the snow flogging carbon paper to office clerks and typists.
I first met Alan 40-years ago onboard Tor Anglia en route from Harwich to Gothenburg and Stockholm to spend time with our girl-friends. At the time he boasted a Higher National Certificate in Business & Commerce and was holding down a well-salaried job in the City of London. But I persuaded him that Commuting was not Living and that he should throw it all in and get himself a life in Sweden. But Carbon Paper Salesman was not quite what I had in mind.
