Reply: Welcome to WUWT. Be respectful of other posters or post elsewhere. First warning. ~ charles the moderator

Of course the debate is about whether or not current fluctuations are significant or not and if so, whether they are anthropogenic or just part of natural cycles. Probably a bit of both which is why we could debate the whys & wherefores forever.

The biggest problem we have is human population numbers increasing to a level where competition for resources among humans & between humans and other species is getting more and more intense. Wiping out fish stocks, large areas of the Amazon and polluting the little fresh water supplies we have really isn’t intelligent.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/8026865.stm

What caught my eye was the quote at the end :
“The state health department blamed the infestation on the cooler autumn climate which was forcing mice across the region to look for warm places to infiltrate.”

But I guess two years in a row does not count, of course. Increased snow in California is just what was predicted by the Climate Change Crowd. Maybe after 10 or 20 years in a row?

What’s that? California is to have a hotter and drier climate, with less precipitation? We know this is true because the climate models tell us it is true.

Just ignore the white stuff on the ground, then. It will soon disappear, and you can tell yourself you imagined it.

Can I turn of my heater, too, and pretend it really is getting warmer?

You mean like what’s normal in Texas?

Once had a 50 F or so plunge of temps from about 75 F to about 25 F and from sunny to snow in roughly 18 hours. I think I was in Dallas at the time (some convention 3 decades ago). Startling to a guy from California where San Diego is 70 F +/- 5 F more or less year round…

So Texas has Climate Change and California has weather (because nothing changes)? Strange definition…

GW is, as most of you will know, the incorrect term to use and is misleading.

Of course if you want to mislead in your discussions you’ll continue to use the term global warming.

Well, unfortunately, since the AGW crowd has made it the agenda, we kind of don’t really have any choice but to talk about their agenda with their term for it… It would be rather lumpy and very unclear to say:

“Hansen and Gore in advocating that the world is getting warm…er changing it’s changeable weath…er having variations of things that vary… Oh forget it…”

So, as long as the weather models are predicting that it is going to get warmer, and as long as the scare mongers are scaring with warmer fears of melting ice caps and sea level rise and tropical mosquito fears and as long as CO2 is accused of causing warming…. As long as that’s the agenda, the best and most clear way to refer to that agenda is to call it “Global Warming” and in particular “AGW” as a political movement based on the Global Warming Climate Change thesis.

Unless of course you want to say that the Climate Change we can expect is that we will all end up with a nice paradise climate, in which case I’m all for dropping the global warming term and calling it Paradise Change… ;-)

Weather is what’s happening now with temperature, wind, precipitation, etc.
Climate is what’s happened over a very long history of a place in terms of the same properties.

The problem is: What is “a very long history”. The ’30 year average’ metric is clearly broken. There is at least one demonstrated weather cycle that runs about that long or longer (PDO, AMO, etc.) and there are solar cycles of much longer duration that seem to have a weather changing impact (there is a correlation of some degree.) On the longer end, there are 1470 year cycles of extreme cold:

http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2009/04/06/bond-event-zero/

Now if a change comes around on a regular basis, rather like the seasons, but is longer cycle that we normally notice in our short little lives, was there really a change of ‘climate’? Is not the Mediterranean Climate still present in the Mediterranean even though we had the LIA, MWP, Roman Optimum, etc.?

So some of us, like me for instance, tend to endorse Pamela’s point of view:

Your climate changes when you change your altitude, distance from the ocean, latitude, etc. i.e. Climate only changes over geologic time scales. Now I doubt that someone from 1800 And Froze To Death would really think that the climate was the same then as it is now (basically a practical climate based on what you can plant, grow, etc.) but I would assert that it is the same. Why? Because right now a volcano could pop off in Indonesia and we could have 2010 And Froze To Death. NOTHING has really changed, so how can I say the climate has changed? We would just be having a spectacular weather even for a few years.

So, IMHO, your question comes down to: “What is your time scale?”

short: weather —– middle: unclear —– very long: climate

we can clearly say that short starts at “now”. It’s the long end that is cloudy… But in my opinion, the notion of climate change in less than thousands of years is broken. In particular, is not the Sahara a desert climate and staying that way for many centuries and is not Antactica an arctic climate and staying that way for many centuries and Chile, California, Australia and the Mediterranean area all Mediterranean climate; and Northern Siberia a tundra climate; and Western Canada a temperate forrest climate; and the Amazon a Tropical Climate?

So my practical, grounded, measurable, and accessible to human experience definition of climate would be that it is reflected in the gross ecology that lives or can live in a place and that if the gross ecology has not changed, the climate has not changed (though the other direction is not true if people have eradicated the local ecology; for example via farming or a dam.) Why this definition? Because plants and animals have had millions of years to adapt to the normal ranges of an area. Cactus in the Mojave, for example, can survive both hot and cold, wet and dry. On rare occasions, the Mojave can be cold and wet… that is not an ‘unusual event’ on a geologic, climate, or biological time scale; even if it is on a human time scale.

Sidebar on Sahara: There is an interesting oscillation in the Sahara. On a geologic time scale it swaps from wet and lush to dry and dead. I don’t have a good answer to the question of “Is that climate change”. Clearly it is changing the ecology there. I would tend toward calling it “climate change”; yet it is a quasi periodic event, so isn’t it “normal’? (and thus not “change”?)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sahara_pump_theory

So by my ecological based metric, I would have to call the Sahara a climate oscillator. It is not a stable single state, and the life there has not adapted to the full range of it’s states. Yet I can make the case that since those states last for tens of thousands of years, maybe that is a geologic time scale.

So my practical cutoff for the upper bound would be 10,000 years. At the 20k to 30k year range we have the Sahara oscillator to deal with. At less than 3,000 we have Bond Events. I think this pretty much bounds the range at about 5,000 to 20,000 years and so 10,000 looks to me like a reasonable point to plant the flag.

I think that the term “Climate” has become hopelessly ill-defined, to the point of being worthless.

I would agree, but think that the effort to reach a decent redefinition is worthy…

Graeme Rodaughan (17:06:33) :
Actually – could someone please provide a,

definition of the Distinction between Climate and Weather.

Hopefully I’ve done that…

My grandpa called it “gopher wood” –you put some on the fire and ‘go fer’ some more because it burns so fast. Iron Wood trees were great,–heavy wood, burned slow and hot, the coals looked great. You could sit and watch them a long time. It could be 40 below outside but toasty in the house!

Burning wood, weeding the garden, eating eggs and butter, fresh foods from garden in fall, following the farmers almanac, … the good old days!

SO commentary of surpassing excellence. Much obliged.

Climate change = wild fluctuations in temperatures, rainfall, hours of sunshine and yes snowfall. GW is, as most of you will know, the incorrect term to use and is misleading. Of course if you want to mislead in your discussions you’ll continue to use the term global warming.

OK. If GW is incorrect and misleading, ask the MSM, Al Gore, Hansen, Man, Gavin, et. al. to stop using it.

I was taught, long ago, that “climate” is the prevailing pattern of weather in a geographically distinct area. As discussed above, the pattern is determined over a standardized 30 years. Also as discussed above, that fails to take into account longer term trends. Thus you also need to address data deniers, who claim there was no Little Ice Age, Medieval Warming Period, etc. (As glaciers recede and uncover the remains of villages, deniers of the evidence for NCC, such as Mann, Gavin, Gore, etc., remind me of Creationists denying dinosaur fossils as evidence of Evolution. Is that really the “scientific” company that you, and they, want to keep?)

But have it your way. Now you need to explain the difference between Natural Climate Variation (NCV) and Anthropogenic Climate Change (ACC? – which, I presume, replaces Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW)).

Please explain, quantitatively, the distinction between “wild fluctuations” and normal/natural “fluctuations” (although I believe the more accurate term would be “variation”). And present your theory of ACC in the form of some falsifiable hypotheses. If that’s the “new” theory, let’s address it in terms of mainstream, not “ACC,” science.

Well you lot started it!!!

(Sorry, childish I know, but REALLY…….)

Anthony – first time poster here. I don’t really agree with your put down of Flanagan. … However, even when posters are infuriating, we must be open to what they say as their evidence should be fairly evaluated and then disregarded or accepted. … For me, the key is that climate change does not allow dissent and the sceptics must prove they are above such behaviour.
have to say – love the blog!

Welcome to the blog. Your assessment of Flanagan’s acceptance here is quite reasonable, however, as more evidence accumulates you’ll see he repeatedly makes the same claim despite evidnece to the contrary. His whining about not discussing record heat in Australia is about the most egerious claim. If WUWT were the dual of RealClimate, Flanagan would have been banned a long time ago. However, Anthony is much more tolerant and there’s likely near unaminous agreement that the few people he’s banned were here to disrupt instead of debate.

Personally, I think Flanagan has pretty much worn out his welcome, but his noise level is low enough so I occasionally reply as I did above to let new readers realize his arguments are largely false.

“Climate change = wild fluctuations in temperatures, rainfall, hours of sunshine and yes snowfall.”

Really? Is that all? I never knew!!

Sorry – but people post strange things around here sometimes…