Alan: Here is the video clip of Dubyah giving his "one finger victory salute."
What victory do you suppose he was celebrating by flipping the bird on American television?
The hottest American presidency since the 19th century: George W. Bush’s
In 1922, a headline appeared in The Washington Post that would seem very much at home today.
The report focused on a report from an expedition undertaken in Norway, asSnopes.com uncovered. It wasn't widespread warming of the sort we see today.
But, interestingly, that period was also uncommonly warm in the United States. Some of the hottest Junes, Julys and Septembers in recorded American history happened in 1921 and 1922, according to data from theNational Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. And that leads to a weird phenomenon.
Preliminary estimates suggest that the July just completed, July 2015, was the warmest month in recorded history. Not just the warmest July; not just the warmest in the United States -- the warmest month that mankind has ever measured. In light of that, and given President Obama's focus on the warming climate, we were curious which American president actually oversaw the hottest period in United States history.
The answer? Warren Harding.
This is not a sex joke. Harding was president from 1921 until his death in 1923. And averaging the average temperature of every month for which he was president, his administration was the hottest in U.S. history.
(Notice that the vertical axis begins at 40 degrees Fahrenheit, to highlight the change. We assigned months to whichever president held office for the majority of said months. Also, this is only for the lower 48 states.)
That's misleading, though. Unlike most presidents, Harding had an imbalance between the summer months in which he was in office and the winter months. He was president during three Julys (1921, 1922 and 1923) but only two Januarys, for instance. (A similar effect can be seen with John Kennedy, whose presidency was also cut short and wasn't a round number of years.) That, and the fact that some of those months were unusually hot, skews his average.
A better measure is comparing months to the long-term baseline average temperature in each month. In other words: Compare how hot each January was to the norm for Januarys. If you do that calculation since the McKinley administration (data goes back to 1895), you get a rather messy chart that looks like this.
But that measure allows us a better means of comparison. If you average how much each month of each president's tenure deviated from the norm -- which helps avoid things like presidents who were in office during more summer months than winter ones -- things look different.
The president who oversaw the hottest America? George W. Bush -- though Barack Obama is a close second. On average, each month of Bush's administration was 1.4 degrees warmer than the same month was from 1901 to 2000.
The more striking pattern in that last graph, of course, is how the last four administrations -- since George H. W. Bush -- have been much warmer than any administration prior.
The Post's 1922 report wasn't related to climate change. This trend probably is.
No comments:
Post a Comment