3rd Coldest October on Record

3rd Coldest October on Record

NOAA is reporting that October was nationally the 3rd coldest October since national records start in 1895:

Temperature Highlights - October

The average October temperature of 50.8°F was 4.0°F below the 20^th Century average and ranked as the 3^rd coolest based on preliminary data.

For the nation as a whole, it was the third coolest October on record.

Now, Alaska was warmer than average, with the 10th highest temperature since records there start in 1918. But it turns out that you can plot national temperature averages for year to date here. There's definitely a warming trend from 1895 to the 1930s, then cooling until 1970, then warming until 1998--and now cooling again. If greenhouse gases were the major determinant of global temperatures, it is a bit odd that they fell for forty years--at a time when industrialization was dramatic, and have started to fall again--in spite of no successful effort to control greenhouse gases.

It could well be that manmade greenhouse gases are contributing to warming, but that other phenomena are playing a larger role. Those other phenomena would seem to be considerably more powerful than manmade greenhouse gases, if they successfully overwhelmed manmade greenhouse gases 1930-70, and 2000-09. That doesn't mean that manmade greenhouse gases aren't a factor, and perhaps even a serious concern. But the popular attempts to overstate the criticality of manmade greenhouse gases smell more like an attempt at justifying control and enriching the already obscenely rich (like Al Gore) than something that requires immediate action.