After just coming from a period here in New York State, where the temperature never rose above 40 degrees for almost three fixed months, when I saw this headline on NBC News, I thought they would be something really inspiring announce. ‘Summers can last half a year by the end of this century.. However, the investigation of the article quickly revealed that it was not intended to be a festive discovery. Yes, it turns out to be another article on global warming, straight from the Al Gore playbook. But if you happen to live in the Northeast, it still sounds like it could be pretty good.
Summers in the Northern Hemisphere could last for nearly six months by 2100 if global warming continues unnoticed, according to a recent study that examined how climate change affects the pattern and duration of the earth’s seasons.
The study, published last month in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, found that climate change makes summers warmer and longer, while the other three seasons shrink. According to scientists, the irregularities could have serious consequences that could affect human health and agriculture for the environment.
“This is the biological clock for every living thing,” said the study’s lead author, Yuping Guan, a physical oceanographer from the State Key Laboratory of Tropical Oceanography at the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
Guan and his colleagues searched daily climate data from 1952 to 2011 to determine the beginning and end of each season in the Northern Hemisphere. They found that summers over the nearly 60 years lasted an average of 78 to 95 days longer.
I suppose we should better examine the data they use and determine if there is anything to this theory. Guan’s team claims that they compiled all the daily climate data from 1952 to 2011. Using the data, they worked to ‘determines the beginning and end of each season in the Northern Hemisphere. “Based on these figures, they concluded that a period of 59 years”summers lasted an average of 78 to 95 days. ”
Wow. This is definitely a shocking figure. But there’s a big problem with that. I’m not sure if it was just a typo in the NBC article, or if someone lost his calculator, but the figure suggests that summer ten years ago was up to three months longer than in the early fifties. As if the number has not yet sounded good from the beam, the report becomes more specific and it is said that the other three seasons have contracted on average with the following amounts.
- Winters shortened from 76 to 73 days
- Springs shortens from 124 days to 115 days
- Autumn shortened from 87 days to 82 days
Now I was an English major and our boss promised me that there would be no math in this job, but these figures even seem to me. Stick with me here. The winters were three days shorter. Spings were nine days shorter. The fall was five days shorter. I don’t even have to take off my socks and shoes to determine that those three seasons were on average seventeen days shorter. But the summers were “on average 78 to 95 days longer? Let’s divide the difference and say that the summers were on average 87 days longer. I may have to break out the calculator for this one, but that means the whole year was 80 days longer than it was 59 years before. Did they start selling new calendars with three extra months on it, and I never noticed it?
UPDATE: I went back and watched and it seems NBC News corrected their typo in the last paragraph above excerpt. It reads now, “summers grew from an average of 78 to 95 days. ”
Okay, so now the math is working a little better. So they say summers won 17 days, while the other three seasons lost 17.
Even if we accept the numbers, the next question was how it ‘determined’ the beginning and end of each season. The four seasons we recognize are pretty ambiguous in nature. Right now it’s a relatively soft 60 degrees where I am and my calendar tells me that spring has officially started this weekend. So winter is over, right? But we’ve had years here where we were hit by snowstorms in the second week of May. Does this mean that winter lasts for years in May and spring lasts only six weeks?
My point is that Guan’s team will be able to study the exact temperature at any given weather station on any given day of the year during that period. But he talks about the fact that the average ‘winter’ over a period of fifty years is five days shorter. I assume we should just take his word for when winter starts and ends? What kind of science is this?
There is one last point to touch on, as so many of Guan’s figures depend on temperature measurements from when Eisenhower was president. The accuracy of thermometers and other measuring devices has changed over time. Maybe it did not change everything that much, but it has changed. And speaking of such a small number of degrees, I remain skeptical if the average temperature rose by the exact amounts to a tenth of a degree.
I’m not going to complain about an extra week of summer anyway. If we can only work a month or so on pruning back the winter, we’re ready.