NOAA’s ‘New Normals’ Climate Data Raises Questions About What’s Normal
Does using 30-year weather averages mask rapid global warming?
By Bob Berwyn and Matt deGrood
May 15, 2021
A bicyclist rides along a flooded street as a powerful storm moves across Southern California on Feb. 17, 2017 in Sun Valley, California. Credit: David McNew/Getty Images
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When climatologists started standardizing global weather data about 100 years ago, they didn’t know that heat-trapping greenhouse gases were already pushing the planet’s climate inexorably in one direction, off the charts of human experience.
But people like to measure things in understandable segments, so, based on the data it had at the time, the World Meteorological Organization created three-decade climate reference periods they called “climate normals” against which they could measure daily temperatures, unusual heat waves, cold snaps or big rainstorms.
Covid cases rise 12% in a week – as experts fear Indian variant ‘spreads 60% faster than Kent’
12 May 2021, 9:40
Updated: 12 May 2021, 10:41
UK COVID cases are on the rise and a “third wave” may have already started ahead of the next stage of unlocking.
Scientists fear the new variant from India is to blame and it s predicted to be up to 60 per cent more transmissible than the dominant Kent strain.
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UK Covid cases are on the rise, data suggests, ahead of the next stage of unlocking. Pictured, two friends in Finsbury Park, north London, 10 MayCredit: LNP
Professor Paul Hunter, from the Norwich School of Medicine at the University of East Anglia, said: “Today [May 11] 2,427 new cases of Covid have been reported in the UK.