I have been tinkering with climate data for about the past 15 years. Thanks to the folks at the Swift Current, Sask. federal ag research station, I now have complete monthly temperature and precipitation data from 1886 to 2023. That adds five years to my last summary, so we will now do the update.
Weather and climate
What we call “weather” refers to day-to-day, week-to-week, month-to-month, year to year data. Most ‘global warmers’ produce graphs that start about 1950 and proceed to the current date, and call the difference “climate change.” The problem is, they are talking about weather, not climate.
Climate is the 30-year average of the annual data. In what I show you here, I’ll be dealing with 30-year moving averages to illustrate how the climate is changing. Figure 1 shows the weather, in the form of mean annual temperatures, for Swift Current. About all this tells you is that 1950 and 1951 were long-underwear winters for sure.
A summary of previous Swift Current climate data
Since about 1975, the mean annual temperature on a climate (30-year moving average) basis has risen about 1 C. Closer inspection of monthly data show the mean annual temperature is driven by January, February and March, where the increase has been 5-6 C. September has warmed about 1 C since 2000, but July is actually cooler.
Now, we do not grow too many crops in January, February or March, so what is the big deal? The longer frost-free period is due entirely to September, so we have not lost a crop to fall frost in a while.
The final conclusion has been that global warming is not a big deal in our neck of the woods. We have assembled data for three stations in Alberta, six in Saskatchewan and two in Manitoba and all lead to the same conclusion.
Updating to 2023
For the update, we will show a few graphs that emphasize the changes of the past five years. For January (not shown), the sharp rise in temperature levelled off about the turn of the century, but it did not start to go down.
February, March and April temperatures — as shown here in Figures 2, 3 and 4 respectively — have declined about 1 C since about 2005. That means the sharp recent warming period for January, February and March has ended and we are now in a cooling period. Keep your long underwear handy for the next several winters.
I still think we have much more to fear from cold than hot in our neck of the woods.
Data and observations shown here are based on actual, factual long-term weather records, over periods long enough to deal with climate — again, the 30-year average — as well as weather, in the form of annual data. It is not based on complicated mathematical models that few can understand. Those same models choose to ignore the main greenhouse gas, water vapour — that is, clouds.
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So, there you have it: the facts as I have assembled them. Please do draw your own conclusions based on the data and observations.
