Why Nobody Ever Calls The Weather Normal
By Dr. Matt Ridley
WHEN the history of the global warming scare comes to be written, a chapter should be devoted to the way the message had to be altered to keep the show on the road. Global warming became climate change so as to be able to take the blame for cold spells and wet seasons as well as hot days. Then, to keep its options open, the movement began to talk about “extreme weather”.
Part of the problem was that some time towards the end of the first decade of the 21st century it became clear that the Earth’s average temperature just was not consistently rising any more, however many “adjustments” were made to the thermometer records, let alone rising anything like as rapidly as all the models demanded.
So those who made their living from alarm, and by then there were lots, switched tactics and began to jump on any unusual weather event, whether it was a storm, a drought, a blizzard or a flood, and blame it on man-made carbon dioxide emissions. This proved a rewarding tactic, because people – egged on by journalists – have an inexhaustible appetite for believing in the vindictiveness of the weather gods. The fossil fuel industry was inserted in the place of Zeus as the scapegoat of choice. (Scientists are the priests.)
The fact that people have short memories about weather events is what enables this game to be played. The long Australian drought of 2001-7, the Brisbane floods of 2009-10 and the angry summer of 2012-13 stand out in people’s minds. People are reluctant to put them down to chance. Even here in mild England, people are always saying “I have never known it so cold/hot/mild/windy/wet/dry/changeable as it is this year”. One Christmas I noticed the seasons had been pretty average all year, neither too dry nor too wet nor too cold nor too warm. “I have never known it so average,” I said to somebody. I got a baffled look. Nobody ever calls the weather normal.
So it is deeply refreshing to read the new book called Taxing Air: Facts and Fallacies About Climate Change by the internationally respected geologist Bob Carter and illustrated by the cartoonist John Spooner, which puts climate change exactly where it should be – in perspective. After demolishing many other arguments for carbon taxes and climate alarm, Carter runs through recent weather events, showing that there is nothing exceptional, let alone unprecedented, about recent droughts, floods, heat waves, cyclones or changes to the Great Barrier Reef.
How come then that last week the World Meteorological Organisation produced a breathless report claiming that “the decadal rate of increase (of world temperature) between 1991-2000 and 2001-2010 was unprecedented”? It took professor Ed Hawkins of Reading University a short time to point out that this was no longer true if you compared 1993-2002 and 2003-2012 – ie, if you took the most up-to-date records. In that case, the latest decade showed a smaller increase over the preceding decade than either of the preceding decades did. In other words, the temperature standstill of the past 16 years has begun to show up in the decade-by-decade data.
And this is even before you take into account the exaggeration that seemed to contaminate the surface temperature records in the latter part of the 20th century – because of urbanisation, selective closure of weather stations and unexplained “adjustments”. Two Greek scientists recently calculated that for 67 per cent of 181 globally distributed weather stations they examined, adjustments had raised the temperature trend, so they almost halved their estimate of the actual warming that happened in the later 20th century.
Anyway, by “unprecedented”, the WMO meant since 1850, which is a micro-second of history to a paleo-climatologist like Carter. He takes a long-term perspective, pointing out that the world has been warming since 17,000 years ago, cooling since 8000 years ago, cooling since 2000 years ago, warming since 1850 and is little changed since 1997. Consequently, “the answer to the question ‘is global warming occurring’ depends fundamentally on the length of the piece of climate string that you wish to consider”. He goes on: “Is today’s temperature unusually warm? No – and no ifs or buts.”
Carter is a courageous man, because within academia those who do not accept that climate change is dangerous are often bullied.
Indeed, Carter, who retired from James Cook University before he got interested in the global warming debate but remains an emeritus fellow, recently found himself deprived of even an email address by colleagues resentful of his failure to toe the line. As the old joke goes: what’s the opposite of diversity? University.
http://www.thegwpf.org/matt-ridley-calls-weather-normal/
Wasn’t that known as the ‘English disease’, where they can’t stop talking about the weather?
Must be catching. :^)
One reason for the perception isn’t short memory, it’s that the complete 30-year cold, 30-year warm cycle covers the human adult life span. We just don’t have the longevity to recognize the cycle when it comes around again.
“The one thing you can accurately predict about the weather is that it is going to be unpredictable.” (Derek and Clive)
I remember my parents saying many years ago now, that talking about the weather was always a safe bet. Religion and politics were risky, but weather? Always safe. Even then they’d go on about extremes. “Isn’t it hot!” or “Isn’t it cold!” Everyone enjoyed a good whinge, whatever the weather.
We live in strange times that now many can’t mention it for fear of triggering an extremist reaction.
I enjoyed this article, by the way. It always gives me – if you’ll pardon the expression – a warm and fuzzy feeling whenever the truth comes out. I get tired of hearing nothing but doom and gloom, a bit of “Hey, guess what, it’s average” makes me rejoice. Thank you, Matt. 🙂
If you want to read the analyses by Dr. Ed Hawkins mentioned by Matt, then they are here:
http://www.climate-lab-book.ac.uk/2013/wmo-report/
http://www.climate-lab-book.ac.uk/2013/rates-of-change/
Ed Hawkins
I believe that Bob Carter’s position of adjuct research fellow at JCA has ‘expired’ http://www.townsvillebulletin.com.au/article/2013/06/28/384514_news.html .
On a brighter note, his new book Taxing Air, is in the Canberra library system !. It has been difficult to get a book presenting a different climate viewpoint into the system, and this addition is very welcome.
A 31-year-old satirical piece by an Italian climate scientist has been sadly prescient on the current fashion about “abnormal weather”
http://omnologos.com/how-to-be-right-about-the-climate-always/
No email for you!…
Richard111: says:
> Wasn’t that known as the ‘English disease’, where they can’t stop talking about the weather?
The ‘English disease’ is truly characterised by people’s reluctance to stop talking about the weather and by the emphasis they put on it, but similar conditions, albeit transient, occur in other nations.
When I was about 10 — many years ago, before Global Warming and even before Global Cooling — in other words, before weather became politicised — my geography teacher showed me how to keep weather records using simple instruments. Which I did almost continuously for a number of years. It was a fun thing to do, as it was, but the funniest part was being able to contradict various weather observations by guests and relatives gathered at the dinner table, such as: “We’ve been having such a cold/hot/wet/dry/rainy/stormy season this year — quite unlike last year.”
I would pull out my weather logs and charts and show them how wrong they were. Amazingly, whenever I heard claims like that, they were always wrong. But they never admitted it. All I heard was, “There must be something wrong with your measurements”.
Unlike the English, the Russians near me did not linger on the subject of weather for too long. They just made a wrong statement or two and carried on discussing something else.
Michael Crichton couldn’t have put it any better:
The future of the earth: Is this the end of the world?
Earthquakes, Hurricanes, Floods, What is happening to our planet?
Is this the end of the world? – NO. We live on an active planet – earthquakes are continuous, a million and a half a year, or 3 every minute, a Richter 5 every 6 hours, a major quake every 3 weeks, there’s a quake the size of Pakistan every 8 months, at any moment on our planet there are 11 lightning strikes every second, there are 1500 electrical storms on the planet at any moment, a tornado touches down every 6 hrs, a tidal wave crosses the Pacific every 3 months, there are 90 hurricanes a year, one every 4 days, its constant, is this the end of the world?
No, this IS the world
I know that geophysical phenomena follow the Pareto Distribution, here’s rainfall
I suspect memory does also. My memory of Hurricane Hugo is fading even though the events of that year were reinforced by an exceptional snowfall in Coastal South Carolina and the Loma Prieta Earthquake.
‘ it became clear that the Earth’s average temperature just was not consistently rising any more’
Has global warming stopped or stalled? R Alley has the answer!
Has anybody notice the unusual hot spot over the middle pacific ocean? I notice it has been largely present since somewhere between 2009 and 2010 and hasn’t really gone away.
Perhaps magnetic hot spots are to blame as very little research is done on them which they are fragments of the NP breaking up and when the progress of one slows down it will cause unusual heat signatures in that area.
Sadly though I am likely as usual too late for the conversationists to notice my question so never mind then.
Sorry for wasting time.
When I served as an interpreter at a natural history museum, I was often asked about “normal” weather. It soon became obvious to me that “normal weather” is what individuals remember as the weather during their childhoods.
We really do live so short a time that our individual observations have no meaning in terms of climate trends.
But if by normal you mean the long-term stable temperature, that would be about 25 Celsius, which obtained for most of the time since the Cryogenic, all of the Paleozoic, Mesozoic, and the Cenozoic up to the Oligocene. That’s about 10 degrees Celsius above the global average today, far hotter than most of the catastrophist warmist predict. And there was no ice in Antarctica, nor near the North pole. Looks like a warm Earth is the normal Earth.
Good point. I lived in the UK and remember the wonderful, long heatwave of 1976 and the bitter few winters of the early 1980s. So I laugh when the recent bad winters were blamed on ‘climate change’.
I am appalled at the two faced behaviour of these desperate Warmists. A few years back they rightly insisted that the weather is not the same as climate and that trends are what is important. It was said with an air of superior, deep knowledge and disdain for sceptics. Yet today they have no shame in declaring any flood a sure sign of man-made climate change.
Here is a little something for Warmists who are convinced that the climate is not ‘normal’. Well they are right it really is not ‘normal’. Let’s look back over the past ~11,000 years of our ‘benign’ Holocene. Here are some climate changes which would make Warmists’ heads explode – from mega-droughts around the world lasting hundreds of years to an ice-free Arctic Ocean. Extreme is normal for our Holocene.
Joanne Nova has a lot more about Carter’s separation from JCU at http://joannenova.com.au/2013/06/jcu-caves-in-to-badgering-and-groupthink-blackballs-politically-incorrect-bob-carter/
You can guess the tenor of the piece from the title.
Just follow the money. Report of Extreme weather[the problem is worse than we thought] = hypothetical problem that needs to be studied = free money from the government to study the problem=new report of more extreme weather[it is even worse than before]=more hypothetical problems =more government money=new report[the problem is much worse than before] etc
Stop the free money, the problem will go away, extreme weather will diminish.
The AGW alarmists are the sci-fi horror film “shape-shifters” brought to life….
News organizations hype the weather because it supposedly attracts an audience and increases revenues. Some of the Richmond (VA) TV stations have given us a couple hours of breathless, prime-time coverage of thunderstorms. So, why shouldn’t the warmist cults hype weather? It sells and we aren’t smart enough to remember that we’ve had weather like that before.
When I moved to Michigan, the first 2-3 years all I heard was this isn’t normal weather for a Michigan spring/summer/fall/winter no matter what weather we were having. I decided that I lived in a very unique place where the weather was never normal.
Bob says
“Michigan… A unique place where the weather is never normal.”
I just moved to Michigan from New Mexico. To read the above is such a relief. Now I understand.
@- herkimer
Just follow the money. …
Stop the free money, the problem will go away, extreme weather will diminish.
Climate research does not CAUSE the large excess of hot records over cold records. That is a objectively observed physical reality. Claiming that less research will affect the rate of heat waves, drought flood and ice melt is very silly.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/capital-weather-gang/wp/2013/06/26/warm-temperature-records-dramatically-outpacing-cold-records-in-washington-d-c/
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Actually, just about an hour ago, I did hear a Weather Channel forecaster call the the weather “normal”. She was talking about rain forecast for, I think it was, the Tampa area. This is not an exact quote but as near as I can recall she said, “These popup thunderstorms are normal for July in Tampa. But we know that these are more intense.”
{snip} Dr. Carter puts his life work, name, and reputation on the line while you take pot shots from the comfort of anonymity. If you want to to make criticisms like that, you are welcome to do so, but have the courage to put your own name on on the or STFU. Feel free to be as upset as you wish – Anthony Watts
[sorry, but we aren’t interested in your slanted opinion – mod]
blackadderthe4th says:
July 15, 2013 at 4:20 am
CHERRY PICKER try black adder the third
you also get your policy
blackadderthe4th says:
July 15, 2013 at 4:20 am
‘ it became clear that the Earth’s average temperature just was not consistently rising any more’
“Has global warming stopped or stalled? R Alley has the answer!”
In summary, the alarmist can pick whatever starting point they like, say 1957(his birth year) to prove that the planet is getting warming, but the skeptics, which acknowledge warming since the end of the LIA , are fudging the data to support their position. Riddle me this Batman. Which side is revising history to support their argument?Which side has tried to close the discussion on CAGW? Which side has received $$$Billions to create models that don’t work, but support the political view? Which side is willing to enslave mankind with higher energy costs based on unproven theories? Which side is making the big bucks with this scam?
What should have been clear to R. Alley is that “Earth’s average temperature” is meaningless.
I nominate this for quote of the week. It says in one short phrase what this con is all about. Government paid for results, nothing else. If I put up a $5billion fund to find albino frogs – there will be many finds of albino frogs, a rising trend – even if they have to be bleached white (data torture, interpretation). This is what is going on in climate alarmism. The only thing they can realisticall say is that it has warmed since 1850 (end of the Little Ice Age, no surprises there) and the Arctic extent (not caused by warm air for sure http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/meant80n.uk.php). That’s it, the rest is a load of bollocks.
@- Jeff Alberts
“What should have been clear to R. Alley is that “Earth’s average temperature” is meaningless.”
Just as meaningless as the the body’s average temperature. It varies over the body between core, the limbs and surface, as well as altering over a daily cycle.
And yet medics do find the arbitrary measurement of a body temperature a useful metric!
“And yet medics do find the arbitrary measurement of a body temperature a useful metric!”
izen, medics find that useful for two reasons:
1. The nervous tissue, and in particular brain, can die of hyperthermia.
2. There is an outward temperature gradient in the body.
So when you note that a temperature taken at any arbitrary point on the surface of the body exceeds the well-known heat tolerance of the brain, you can infer that there is brain damage developing.
No analogy with global average being useful for any purpose.
omnologos says:
July 15, 2013 at 2:10 am
A 31-year-old satirical piece by an Italian climate scientist
http://omnologos.com/how-to-be-right-about-the-climate-always/
================
wow! obviously a whole generation of climate scientists adopted this as their bible.
If you are a climatologist and you want to survive as a climatologist, perhaps even increasing your reputation, all you have to do is provide the exact diagnosis and prognosis that people expect.
To the question “Is the climate changing?“, by all means, never, ever reply “No, everything’s normal“, or “It’s just fakery pumped up by newspapers and on television“: because people would unanimously conclude that you understand nothing about meteorology, and nothing about climate.
It would be the end of your career.
The only sensible answer is: “Of course it is changing! It’s a well-known fact, scientifically confirmed and one that none cannot argue against“. You can then launch yourself in forecasting for the next hundred years a climate identical to the current one, amplifying the latest phenomena to extreme consequences.
If it is cold you’ll therefore predict “ice ages“, if it’s warm a “torrid period“, and if there are signs of strong variability “short-term climatic extremes” and more-or-less the same climate in the long term.
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I have a list of the record highs and lows for each date for Columbus Ohio that I copy/pasted into Excel in 2007 and again in 2012.
Of the record highs that are on both lists, 21 of the 2007 records have been “adjusted” in the 2012 list.
18 of the records set before 1950 have been lowered a total of about 22*F. The three set after 1950 have been raised a total of about 10*F.
Of the record lows that are on both lists, 31 of the 2007 records have been “adjusted” in the 2012 list.
They have been raised a total of about 63*F.
Now, this is just for one little spot on the globe and it only shows “adjustments” that changed record temperatures. I wonder what “adjustments” were made to past daily temperatures that did not “set” a record?
@- Jimbo
“If I put up a $5billion fund to find albino frogs – there will be many finds of albino frogs, a rising trend – even if they have to be bleached white (data torture, interpretation). This is what is going on in climate alarmism.”
Would you make the same claim for medicine?
Perhaps if the government had not put so much money into cancer research there would not have found the link with smoking, clearly a power grab by governments to dictate what people can and cannot smoke, and the alarmism about the health effects of smoking would never have happened.
The idea that problems go away if scientists are prevented from researching them is one of the silliest I have encountered in a while…. Can you think of any other example where scientific research has resulted in fraudulent alarmism based on century old physics and confirmed by military research in the 1950?
I learned this weekend that Sharknado’s are caused by global warming!
We need to do something NOW!!!!
PS. That is a wonderfully bad movie! Makes it perfectly OK to carry around a chainsaw if you’re concerned about climate!!!!
Off topic but in my last comment I messed up the formatting. The answer is probably “no”, but is there any way for me to look at my comment to see where I messed up?
(I probably put the “/blockquote” in the wrong place.)
http://www.columbian.com/news/2013/jun/25/94-in-alaska-weather-extremes-tied-to-jet-stream/
The jet stream is about 14 percent slower in the fall now than in the 1990s
Early California wildfires fueled by heat contrasted with more than a foot of snow in Minnesota. Seattle was the hottest spot in the nation one day, and Maine and Edmonton, Canada, were warmer than Miami and Phoenix.
“I’ve been doing meteorology for 30 years and the jet stream the last three years has done stuff I’ve never seen,” — Jeff Masters, Lead Meteorologist for WeatherUnderground
Last fall, a dip in the jet stream over the United States and northward bulge of high pressure combined to pull Superstorm Sandy almost due west into New Jersey, Francis said. That track is so rare and nearly unprecedented that computer models indicate it would happen only once every 714 years, according to a new study by NASA and Columbia University scientists.
When was the last time you saw massive cut-off low force its way from Virginia into Texas?
do yourself a favor, watch this animation:
https://www.eldoradocountyweather.com/current/satellite/goeseast-wv.php
and tell me, what part of any of this is “normal abnormality”?
They are the brave few who for years have put themselves into a very real danger zone, while everyone else kept their mouths shut and their heads down. Over the years more than a few of them, like Prof. Bob Carter this week, have paid the price for such integrity. For what it’s worth, they have my lasting admiration and if you’re a true skeptic, they should have yours as well.
http://thepointman.wordpress.com/2013/06/28/know-your-enemy-the-alarmist-scientist/
Pointman
=======================================================================
I think you missed his point. This is usually used in a different context but, “You get what you pay for.”
The question is, are all the “climate change” related grants granted to obtain an unbiased understanding of “climate” or are they granted bolster an environmentalist/political agenda?
I don’t know how old you are. I’m 59 and I remember back in the ’60’s the environmentalist were going after “Big Oil”. That was long before “global warming” became the lever to power.
jai mitchell says:
The jet stream is about 14 percent slower in the fall now than in the 1990s
So what? Abnormal extreme weather? No, just another scare tactic.
Early California wildfires fueled by heat contrasted with more than a foot of snow in Minnesota. Seattle was the hottest spot in the nation one day, and Maine and Edmonton, Canada, were warmer than Miami and Phoenix.
So what? Abnormal extreme weather? No, just another scare tactic.
“I’ve been doing meteorology for 30 years and the jet stream the last three years has done stuff I’ve never seen,” — Jeff Masters, Lead Meteorologist for WeatherUnderground
So what? Abnormal extreme weather? No, just another scare tactic.
Last fall, a dip in the jet stream over the United States and northward bulge of high pressure combined to pull Superstorm Sandy almost due west into New Jersey, Francis said. That track is so rare and nearly unprecedented that computer models indicate it would happen only once every 714 years, according to a new study by NASA and Columbia University scientists.
So what? Abnormal extreme weather? No, just another scare tactic.
When was the last time you saw massive cut-off low force its way from Virginia into Texas?
So what? Abnormal extreme weather? No, just another scare tactic.
and tell me, what part of any of this is “normal abnormality”?
So what? Abnormal extreme weather? No, just another scare tactic.
Comments in italics above were made by someone who has no understanding of the climate Null Hypothesis. Regular weather events are scaring that frightened little baby.
izen says:
“Can you think of any other example where scientific research has resulted in fraudulent alarmism…”
ALAR in apples, killer bees, Y2K… the list is long.
Also, izen, I got your ‘earth’s average temperature’ right here. Go ahead and panic; you and mitchell make a matched pair of frightened climate alarmists.
Mikeyj says:
July 15, 2013 at 7:20 am
‘received $$$Billions to create models that don’t work’ whoops! Can we trust climate models?
“Extreme weather”.
I don’t know about other countries but here in the USA topo maps and real estate maps often mark floodplains. Does anybody know how many times a local 100 year floodplain has been exceeded in recent years? I don’t recall any of the reports on flooding saying that a 100 year flood plain has been exceeded.
@Jeff Alberts says:
July 15, 2013 at 7:47 am
‘What should have been clear to R. Alley is that “Earth’s average temperature” is meaningless.’ why?
hi – could I get a soursce on this ? “Two Greek scientists recently calculated that for 67 per cent of 181 globally distributed weather stations they examined, adjustments had raised the temperature trend, so they almost halved their estimate of the actual warming that happened in the later 20th century.”
The UK Met Office recently held an emergency meeting:
“Weather and climate experts from across the UK came together at the Met Office’s HQ in Exeter today for a workshop to discuss the recent run of unusual seasons in Europe.”
“Today’s included sessions which looked at the weather patterns and their potential causes in three recent seasons – the cold winter of 2010/11, the wet summer of 2012, and this year’s cold spring.”
From personal experience and a casual glance at the Met Office temperature figures it struck me that the variations seemed pretty much what we expect from our UK weather.
As a manufacturing engineer I was introduced to the wonderful world of control charts so I decided to construct these for the cold winter of 2010/11, the wet summer of 2012, and this year’s cold spring.
You can see the charts at http://oldgifford.wordpress.com
See anything unusual? Let me know if you do because it seems our UK weather is just as normal as it has ever been
You are not allowed to cheat in medicine – you could go to jail, but climate scientists get a get out of jail free card.
Governments didn’t put money into cancer research because they wanted to find a link. Let’s see what happens if a sceptical climate scientist applies for a grant to investigate an imminent ice age. That is not what they want to hear and yet Rasool and Scneider got funding while in Nasa and produced a paper in 1971 predicting just that. Brrrrr.
I never said scientists should be prevented from researching. I want them to stop researching non-existent problems ’caused’ by man.
‘See anything unusual?’, ‘UK Mean Spring Temperature 1910-2012’, ‘ Let me know if you do because it seems our UK weather is just as normal as it has ever been’
‘warmest UK April for more than 100 years…the records, which go back more than 100 years, show much of the UK experienced temperatures 3 to 5C warmer than is normal for April…the UK average temperature was 10.7C, exceeding the previous warmest April on record of 10.2C in 2007…the UK-wide records began in 1910, but the central England temperature series goes back to 1659, making it the warmest April here for over 350 YEARS’
http:\\www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-13269741
jai mitchell says:
July 15, 2013 at 8:48 am
““I’ve been doing meteorology for 30 years and the jet stream the last three years has done stuff I’ve never seen,” — Jeff Masters, Lead Meteorologist for WeatherUnderground”
He has done meteorology for one half cycle of he AMO.
Oh, and he has never done meteorology during a grand minimum of the sun.
And he’s surprised???
Dr. Bob Carter’s fate is nothing but an expression of cowardice and hypocrisy and mean-spiritedness on the part of his detractors and enemies at James Cook University.
It is also a compelling statement of the need for a thorough [cleansing] process to get leftists out of government and education. Global warming alarmism is only the tip of the iceberg, in terms of the harm these people will do – and intend to do.
Well, CO2 can either warm the atmosphere OR make our weather weird. Surely we can’t expect it to do both at the same time. Sheesh!
@- dbstealey
“izen says:-“Can you think of any other example where scientific research has resulted in fraudulent alarmism…”
ALAR in apples, killer bees, Y2K… the list is long.”
None of which have over a century of scientific discovery and research behind them, were validated by all the major scientific institutions in the developed world and is supported by 97% of a large published research literature.
In fact all the examples you mention were media hype, not real scientific concerns.
Perhaps you are unable to tell the difference.
One clue is that media hype scare stories do not have over a century of scientific discovery and research behind them, are validated by all the major scientific institutions in the developed world and is supported by 97% of a large published research literature.
You would have to invent some sort of conspiracy to think that the science was still a fraudulent scare with that level of consilience with history and scientific development.
izen says:
“In fact all the examples you mention were media hype, not real scientific concerns.”
Really? Y2K was not a concern? A lot of computer scientists would disagree with you. And the government did, in fact, pour money into that scare, believing that it was a real scientific concern.
Also, you keep repeating your “97%” nonsense, like it is your only hope of convincing people you’re right.
Sorry, pal, you’re wrong. That 97% number has been so thoroughly debunked here so many times that only an ignoramus would use it in an argument. Go argue on the Guardian if you want to use that bogus number.
And your “all the major scientific institutions in the developed world ” is just an appeal to authority that takes the place of facts. Assertions by a small clique of Board members is reminiscent of the 100 scientists who wrote to Albert Einstein, telling him he was wrong. Einstein replied that it didn’t require 100 scientists — only one fact.
You are in the same boat. You have not provided one verifiable, testable fact supporting the runaway global warming scare. You only parrot what you read on propaganda blogs like SkS. But that is not good enough here. We need facts — and so far, you have not posted any.
That’s funny, I used the phrase “this average weather we’re having in 2013 is unprecedented.” The only thing this year that I see as unusual is this current retrograde low pressure system. I’m merely an amateur meteorologist so would someone with more knowledge on this subject educate me on just how unusual this westward moving system is.
Moderator –
I am sorry if the term I used to describe “cleansing” of government and the educational system was found offensive. I used it because it describes what was done in Germany after WWII to get Nazis out of the government and educational systems there, and I believe that the left is of a mindset very similar to that of the Nazis: their agenda is founded on lies, is inhumane and could well result in as many deaths as the Nazi Holocaust. We need to be rid of these people just as much as Germany needed to be rid of the Nazis, and unlike Germany we have an opportunity to be rid of them before they wreak their destruction on the world. Therefore, I stand by the term de-Nazification.
Lesson in logic:
Increased CO2 = Increased temperature and Bad things will happen.
Therefore:
Increased CO2 = NO increased temperature and Bad things will happen.
Bad news and bad weather sell newspapers, and helps them cling on to circulation and advertising sales.
So it’s the bad news and bad weather that the press always wishes to write up and emphasize …
None of which have over a century of scientific discovery and research behind them, were validated by all the major scientific institutions in the developed world and is supported by 97% of a large published research literature.
======================================================
So THM’s and disinfection byproducts are fine with you since science didn’t know they existed 100 years ago?
In fact all the examples you mention were media hype, not real scientific concerns
===========================================================
“Media hype”. Hmmm….Ever watched The Weather Channel lately? Do you remember how the Media covered “An Inconvenient Truth” and Al Gore’s Academy Award and Nobel Prize?
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WOW! The old media hyped 97% used twice in one comment!
OOPS!
“In fact all the examples you mention were media hype, not real scientific concerns”
Izen said that. I missed block-quoting it.
Dang! I missed more than one “blockquote”.
“None of which have over a century of scientific discovery and research behind them, were validated by all the major scientific institutions in the developed world and is supported by 97% of a large published research literature.’
Was also Izen.
(Maybe in another 100 years I’ll get right……..)
RT
it is very very unusual, I don’t know but maybe somebody here (hey isn’t watts a meteorologist???) can say whether we have a documented history of a retrogade low in the middle of the midwest actually pulling the bermuda high from the atlantic onto the eastern seaboard and the norther lakes?
that is what this weather vapor indicates is happening. It looks like the entire jet stream has reversed at mid latitudes.
http://www.eldoradocountyweather.com/current/satellite/goeseast-wv.php
Worldwide $308 billion ($400 billion in 2013 US dollars) was spent on the Y2K ‘problem’ for computer scientists and technicians to ‘solve’ the ‘problem’.
You made my point. Vast amounts of money spent by governments on a non-problem. Thanks.
References
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/talking_point/586938.stm
http://www.minneapolisfed.org/community_education/teacher/calc/hist1800.cfm
Does anyone remember the Duke University cancer research scandal? Data falsified and experiments conducted so as to confirm a foregone conclusion, in exactly the same way the AGW crowd has done with climate.
Congratulations Germany you have destroyed the rural ecosystem (not to mention the Baltic bat population) of East Germany with thousands of turbines and a mono crop of rape seed (bio fuel) . The corridor from Peenemunde to Berlin is especially Apocalyptic in its environmental destruction, how anyone can think this is green is a complete dumbkopf…..
To the Fraudulent Alarmism List add radon, lead in paint, and (most) asbestos. Give me a minute and I will think of some others.
And I really wish people on this blog would get a feel for time! One lifetime, or the time since 1850, or the Met Office records, none of these cover enough time to make any kind of meaningful statement about climate trends. Get a grip, folks – human lifetimes are too brief to be significant. Let us deal in multiple millennia, at least. Better millions of years at a time.
Izen
You sound like new blogger on WUWT. Welcome . Suggest that you scan through various past tracks and posts here where countless extreme events and so called records have been exposed to be false and/or inaccurate. Most obvious is the entire global warming imminent threat where the temperatures were supposed to rise in an unprecedented way and never did, or the AGW science that was supposed to be settled and is now shown to be flawed or the unprecedented sea level rise that never happened or the decline in polar bears. The list is large and you seem very unaware and so you must be eager to learn.
The English disease, talking about the weather. Yes in the 1940s – 50s the weather was dreadful, rain, rain, snow, etc., and just across the channel, the French were seething and gloating because of their nice climate with lots of people retiring there. My Mum put down the bad weather as the results of the atom bomb tests and explosions. To have a tan of any sort was a sign you were able to holiday overseas. Such snobbery, eh?
George, you are right, but I bear in mind, that our planet is an ice planet by nature, and the last 10,000 years we have enjoyed a warm period allowing agriculture to be developed. Rain patterns do change and droughts do occur, but in an ice age environment in Africa the desert regions were once teeming with wild life and humans. (Evidence of rock paintings etc) And of course Homo Sapien Sapiens, they eventually moved into Europe and the Middle East, and Asia (China) displacing Neanderthals as they evolved in a cold climate, like the Inuits or Eskimos before Western diets started to kill them off.
Incidentally, during the very strong El Nino of 1998, the summer on Eastern Australia at least was abnormally calm and mild. Warm yes, but the overall weather was benign. I suspect this was caused by a reduction in temperature differentials during warmer periods. The Pacific itself was called the ‘Pacific’ because it was peaceful compared to the Atlantic, perhaps because, being greater the temperatures are more uniform, and the temperature differentials are reduced. So perhaps a warmer world has LESS extremes than a colder one, since the polar areas tend to warm faster and reduce the temperature differential between the equator and the poles. The opposite of what the alarmists say will happen.
The extreme weather scare was actually alive and well in the 1990s. This included a great controversy over impact on hurricanes. The evidence was fully against it and the IPCC said as much in SAR. But not only hurricanes. Other storms also, including cold ones. There was a newspaper article in the mid 1990s (NYT?) that was on messaging, showing a frozen New York street screaming ‘climate change’ (I dont have the reference here). Floods were always included along with droughts and conflagrations. Extreme weather was a way to bring the scare about impacts forward into the present when other impacts either had a positive edge (eg more farm production) or were pushing out beyond 2 or 3 generations. What I suspect has happened is that as the warming pause continues, extreme weather is all they have left in their kit bag.
I thought that “extreme” weather; by definition, is “abnormal”.
Normally, weather is just ‘normal’ ; it’s not extreme.
@blackadderthe4th and others:
The point is not to know if the world average temperature anomaly is positive, and therefore conclude that the Earth has warmed; indeed it did.
But predictive models and scenarii that were repeatedly presented by IPCC and others have proven unreliable. Ths means that:
a) the monocausal CO2 explanation is not good enough. It’s also not wrong in itself (law of physics) but in the magnitude that it is attributed to it. And the stabilizing feedback mechanisms are still not well understood (in particular clouds and rain);
b) weather is not climate. Weather extremes are no climate change.
“Seven years of famine preceded by seven years of abundance”. Who knew this already?
steve says:
July 15, 2013 at 1:40 pm
Congratulations Germany you have destroyed the rural ecosystem (not to mention the Baltic bat population) of East Germany with thousands of turbines and a mono crop of rape seed (bio fuel) . The corridor from Peenemunde to Berlin is especially Apocalyptic in its environmental destruction, how anyone can think this is green is a complete dumbkopf…..
Don’t worry, this will have other ecological consequences which the fanatics will blame on CO2.
The dying bees is another scare (bienensterben).
Of course this is further dramatise to the point: another food crisis will come etc.
Of course “we humans” are always the first being accused, when later the explanation comes, it goes down slowly without much noise, especially in those cases when of course not humans are the cause.
The point is that the alarmist organisations do make a living out of this, this is why they make all the noise and cashing the money and still keeping a clean face: “fighting for a good cause”.
herkimer says:
July 15, 2013 at 5:21 pm
“The list is large and you seem very unaware and so you must be eager to learn.”
nice try herkimer 🙂
Bushbunny, you are still thinking too short-term. The Earth during the Pleistocene was an ice planet for short periods, interspersed with periods warmer than today. Over the long-term, the past billion years, it has normally been a hothouse planet, with only a handful of brief ice ages.
Read the book “1491” about what the Americas were like before the Europeans arrived, and what happened to the indigenous population. It wasn’t a Western diet that did them in, it was (mostly) smallpox.
blackadderthe4th says:
July 15, 2013 at 9:48 am
@Jeff Alberts says:
July 15, 2013 at 7:47 am
‘What should have been clear to R. Alley is that “Earth’s average temperature” is meaningless.’ why?
It has to do with the nature of an “average.” The short of it is, until you really know what you are averaging, that number is pretty well meaningless. No human lifespan is long enough to experience “average” weather on a planetary scale. As Dr. Carter pointed out, trends in temperature are entirely at the mercy of arbitrarily chosen beginning points and ending points. To obtain a “real” average would entail a great deal more than most of the so-called paleoclimatologists involved in the AGW side of the debate are willing offer, such as a sound methodological justification for calling some given number an “average” temperature. Then too, there is the simple problem of measurement locations, which are – or until the satellite era – were strictly biased to locations with human populations of various scales. It is not unreasonable to suspect that the vast majority of all temperature data is contaminated – biased – by human actions altering the local or regional landscape. You hear a good deal about urban heat islands, but not so much about the effects of agriculture and animal husbandry. We have data from urban areas, data from rural (farming) areas and a very trivial amount from wild lands. Comparisons of historical and modern photographs from various locations (e.g. Israel, Yosemite, etc.) reveal tremendous changes in landscapes that are not accounted for by any model or adjustment. The changes can be directly linked to changes in landuse and landuse administration. In Israel, after 1949 strict controls were set in place that limited grazing of sheep and goats, resulting in increasing forest lands and chaparral-communities. In California the suppression of aboriginal burning practices also lead to increased forest density and immense shifts in botantical structures in grasslands.
thingodonta says:
July 15, 2013 at 7:02 pm
Incidentally, during the very strong El Nino of 1998, the summer on Eastern Australia at least was abnormally calm and mild. Warm yes, but the overall weather was benign.
==========================================================================
Are you sure about that?
This may jog your memory.
http://www.australianweathernews.com/news/1998/news9801.html
http://www.australianweathernews.com/news/1998/news9802.html
Seems to me it was as far from benign as you can get.
berniel says: July 15, 2013 at 7:21 pm
And I’m inclined to suspect that your suspicions are not ill-founded, Bernie!
Even the WMO (who really should know better, IMHO) for some strange reason in March of this year felt it necessary to get into the extreme event act (albeit for “public information only; not an official document”). As part of this “unofficial” 8-page pdf which (surprise, surprise) begins::
and continues to recite the all too familiar chapters and verses, “hockey-stickish” graphs included, of course … then introduces:
Never let it be said that a UN affiliated body (particularly a proud parent of the IPCC!) will miss an opportunity to mislead the public, eh?!
Climate is what we expect, weather is what we get. It’s OK, extremes do occur like the great storm of the 80s that flattened 1,000,000 trees in UK. But a typhoon type storm is not unknown in UK one was noticed in the Bronze age. Floods are not unknown either. Droughts too. In Lincolnshire, where I lived in the 1960s, we had water restrictions. Mainly no sprinklers, or washing cars with a hose. Came to Sydney and they had water restrictions here too. Friend of mine sending me a birthday wish yesterday, said, 30 C in London. (86 F) well to me that is not that hot, we get that temp on the Northern Tablelands infrequently, but it cools right down at night.
Yet they had one of the coldest winters again, and I don’t believe this extra hot summer, I don’t know where they took their temps. The thing is in Oz, the hotter it is during the day, with high humidity then rain follows, and we welcome rain.
Climate is always changing! But how much out of the ‘ordinary’ does local weather have to be to suggest it is not natural variability?
Japan heatwave kills 12: reports
http://www.spacedaily.com/reports/Japan_heatwave_kills_12_reports_999.html
I recently took a weekend road trip with some friends in Oregon. We drove out the coast, 2 hours from home, and camped in the backyard of another friend’s cabin. Beyond the yard, as far as the eye could see were luxuriously green fir trees. A short walk across the road was a sandy beach and the massive swell of the Pacific Ocean. It was beautiful, peaceful, enjoyable and inspiring.
In the morning, after sleeping on the ground, we went into the cabin and cut up bananas, strawberries, blueberries and avocados, cooked a big breakfast of bacon and eggs, and poured ourselves mimosas. As we enjoyed our feast at the outdoor picnic table, the talk turned political.
Five women, all in our 30’s pitched in with views and opinions. And then one of the women started talking climate change and that led to her concern about the future and then her concern about the present and eventually her statement “…if it isn’t already too late and the environment isn’t already destroyed.”
Now, I can understand that there will be future repercussions to our current actions, however, when you put someone in a pristine situation and they can see with their own eyes the beauty surrounding them, it seems musing that nature has been destroyed is a theory based conclusion at best. First person experience would lead you to believe that all is well. If you believe in climate change you may believe that nature is in danger. But to say it may already be destroyed while you can see with your eyes that it is not is at the heart of the brainwashing stance of climate propaganda.
And I haven’t even begun to discuss the fact that we drove a gas fueled car, ate meat, drank alcohol and had fruit grown outside of the region. That’s the hypocrisy of the climate alarmists. I always want to ask someone who is so very climate sensitive why they continue to fly about the world on airplanes, but in Portland, Oregon that is just not a PC question. I’ve learned to speak quietly about my beliefs because you will not find a job here if you do not believe in the “truth”.
Storm moving East to West is weird. No?