DO NEW TEMPERATURE RECORDS INDICATE GLOBAL WARMING AND/OR COOLING?

Each year there is an opportunity for 444,935 new High temperature records and 444,935 new Low temperature records in the United States. I determine that from the fact that there are 1,219 weather stations in the United States recording hourly temperatures each day. There are 365 days in the year. You do the math. I decided to write about this subject since the forecast for the Southeastern United States is for some record high temperatures for the date. In Wilmington, for example, the high is forecasted to be 88 degrees F. If the forecaster is right does that serve as evidence for global warming? Of course not. It's a statistical certainty that some records will be broken each year. While the 88 degrees for the date is warm, it's no where near all time record proportions for the season. For example the record for Wilmington for March 29 was 95 degrees and was set in 1907. On the Weather Channel this morning one of the cute lady 'forecasters' stated that with a record cold winter this heat just 'came out of nowhere'. That is simply not true. In the middle of the cold spell I wrote in this blog to expect 'record high temperatures' when the cold snap was over. (Click here for the post of January 7, 2010.) I am no genius for predicting this ninety days ahead of its occurrence. As I said in that post "It's just the way the atmosphere works." If there is an excess of heat in one area there will be a corresponding pool of very cold air elsewhere. If there is true global warming then we would have extended periods of record high temperatures, not just a day here and a day there. And....it would be year after year after year, not periods interspersed with record lows. Also, we would be having new ALL TIME record highs for the state.That has not happened in any concentration except in the 1930s. The only ALL TIME temperature extreme I've been able to find in the past several years was in Illinois in January 2009. The ALL TIME record LOW temperature was tied at minus 36 degrees. According to the Weather Channel there have been over 1,100 record high temperatures since the weather pattern began. Based upon the above I believe that to be statistically insignificant. It's not enough to be even one very hot day across the USA. We have only been keeping high and low temperatures for 120 years, a very short base line. Let's look at it 500 years from now and you just might be amazed at the variations, both hot and cold, to come in the future.