Saturday, February 12, 2011

Global Warming, Climate Change, Whatever You Call It: It Isn't Making the Weather Weirder

In the climate models, the extremes get more extreme as we move into a doubled CO2 world in 100 years," atmospheric scientist Gilbert Compo, one of the researchers on the project [The Twentieth Century Reanalysis Project], tells me from his office at the University of Colorado, Boulder. "So we were surprised that none of the three major indices of climate variability that we used show a trend of increased circulation going back to 1871."

In other words, researchers have yet to find evidence of more-extreme weather patterns over the period, contrary to what the models predict. "There's no data-driven answer yet to the question of how human activity has affected extreme weather," adds Roger Pielke Jr., another University of Colorado climate researcher.
Read the whole story at The Wall Street Journal.

Though, as Mike Flynn points out, that doesn't stop people from making up theories of weather change affecting just about anything.
NYT columnist Paul Krugman has determined that the Egyptian uprising was due to Global Warming™ [I mean, Climate Change; I mean, Climate Disruption]. The rationale is that Global Warming results in droughts (when it isn't causing increased rainfall or snow) which leads to reduced crops, which leads to higher prices, which leads to mobs crying out for governments to sprinkle magic pixie dust to make food cheaper. It's a wonderful theory. Except for one thing.
Another interesting instance of "what everybody knows" versus the facts.

8 comments:

  1. What's your point here?

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  2. They can't find evidence of global warming because all the variability has within the historic variations. The proofs of global warming rests on computer modeling and as someone familiar with modeling (I'm an engineer by profession) modeling such complexity as to what effect weather (temperature, pressures, fluid flow, cosmological factors, etc.) is virtually impossible to be accurate. And their whole argument rests on varaitions to a fraction of a degree. Well, measurement and modeling are not that accurate. In fact the earth supposedly has been cooling slightly in these last ten years, something the models did not predict. In my opinion, there is no proof for global warming. And even if it existed, there is very little short of going back to pre-industrialization that we can meaningfully do something about it.

    Didn't Al Gore's movie predict that in ten years we would be having environmental catastrophies? Well, it's been almost ten years and nothing has changed.

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  3. Please excuse some of my grammatical lapses above. I always forget to proof read before I click the "publish" button. But I think you can make sense of what I said.

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  4. Krugman is right Global warming caused the riots in Egypt. Only not for the reasons he states actually it is the climate change scam that is the cause.

    The climate change scam is causing food shortages and higher prices across the board. We are using corn for fuel reducing the food supply. We are also looking to alternative fuels which do nothing but raise costs. In a poor country such as Egypt this is a prescription for riot so Krugman is right sort of.

    Beware the solution.

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  5. Anonymous ... my last sentence is my point.

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  6. Manny makes a good point. To add to his point...another, more likely reason for variations on global temp, could be sun fusion activity.

    Do some searching guys (I am not the expert on these things), but it seems that there is evidence that high global temps correlates with high solar activity, while cooler temps match times of reduced solar activity.

    Some of the measurements go back as far as the 1500s.

    If these statistics can be counted on then it would indicate that human activity has even less bearing on the global temp than is PC to believe.

    I am not saying that we do not need to make changes, but at least let us make those changes based on facts.

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  7. To hershchoc:
    Yes, I've heard of solar activity can cause temperature changes on the earth. That's kind of what i was referring to when i said cosmological.

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