Guest post by Indur Goklany
Now that the cold weather is here, we should remember that more Americans die during the cold months than at any other time of year, notwithstanding any global warming.
The figure below, which is based on data from the US National Center for Health Statistics for 2001-2007, shows that on average 7,200 Americans die each day during the months of December, January, February and March, compared to the average 6,400 who die daily during the rest of the year. On this basis, there were 95,000 “excess” deaths during the 121 days in the cold months (December to March, assuming a non-leap year).
So bundle up if you go outside, and keep warm indoors as well.
Merry Christmas & Happy Holidays.
Figure 1: Average daily deaths for each month, United States, 2001-2007. Sources: 2001-2004 data from National Center for Health Statistics, DataWarehouse at http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/datawh/statab/unpubd/mortabs/gmwkIV_10.htm, and National Vital Statistics Reports available at http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/pubs/pubd/nvsr/nvsr.htm; 2005 data from Births, Marriages, Divorces, and Deaths: Provisional Data for 2006, Volume 55, Number 20. 6 pp. (PHS) 2007-1120; 2006-2007 data from Births, Marriages, Divorces, and Deaths: Provisional Data for 2007. NVSR Volume 56, Number 21. 6 pp. (PHS) 2008-1120.
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Lamont,
You keep coming back here with your weird belief that CO2 is a pollutant, but you refuse to examine the fallacy of that belief. As such, the fact that for the 80 million years of the Cretaceous period, the mean atmospheric CO2 content of 1700 parts per million, was six times greater than now and the average global temperature was just 4 °Centigrade than it is today. That is NOT runaway warming by any stretch of the imagination.
Of course, I do not expect you to accept the research that has revealed that information, nor can we expect you to go away, because it appears not in your nature to heed the advice of wiser heads than yours.
The AGW supporters should listen to the following.
Perhaps they might start to catch on.
No, no, no! People! This isn’t about how many die now from warming-related deaths, but how many WILL die. It’s about our, and more importantly our childrens’ future, particularly once the ice caps melt, beginning with the Arctic which could be gone in five years. This will not only cause catastrophic rises in sea levels, particularly for islands such as Tuvalu, and many low-lying coastal cities but positive feedbacks due to albedo loss will lead to a chain reaction-type catastrophic loss of ice in the Antarctic, beginning with the West Antarctic ice sheet. This alone would yield a rise in sea level of more than 5 meters by 2095, according to the highly esteemed climatologist, James Hansen. Once runaway warming starts, and it may already have begun, climate catastrophe will be almost inevitable, leading to many, many millions, and eventually billions of deaths not only from extreme heat, but from drowning, disease, starvation due to crop loss, political unrest and climate-related wars, and numerous other causes. Do we REALLY want that on our heads? We need to stop using coal, and cut oil and gas usage drastically, and immediately begin building solar, wind, and geothermal- powered plants. Recycling should be required by law, and energy-wasters taxed severely. We can DO this! After all, we managed to go to the moon in ten years’ time. Now is not the time for naysayers. (Sarc OFF).
Sorry for the pseudo-AGW rant. The AGW believers have circled the wagons, bolstered by the upcoming Obama presidency (not that a McCain presidency would have made much difference wrt climate policy). I remain hopeful that science, and truth will eventually prevail, but it appears it may be a long, tough battle.
On the sea ice stasis, I will copy a post from the polar albedo thread:
Go to cryosphere http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/
and look at the individual maps . A lot of the stasis is coming from heating in the Greenland sea and environs.
Go to
http://weather.unisys.com/archive/sst/sst_anom_loop.gif
We see there, between greenland and iceland , not a transport of heat, but a hot spot in the anomaly in December . Is one to think the sun has shone so hard there, during the longest night? Knowing that there is geothermal activity in the area (Iceland), seeing how local the spot is, it looks suspiciously as if there is geothermal heating coming up there.
It is a hypothesis, but unfortunately the volcanic people are on a different wavelength than people worrying about AGW and other delusions , so it cannot be tested . When the new satellite ( UCU? ) which will be able to see gases down to sea surface is launched we will have online data that could prove or disprove such hypotheses ( AIRS it seems can only talk from 5000 meters up).
At times there are mentions of heated waters on ocean bottoms, usually by marine scientists studying unusual life forms, and also now and then in the news one sees about new vents :
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2008-07/uow-sbr072408.php
Well inside the Arctic Circle, scientists have found black smoker vents farther north than anyone has ever seen before. The cluster of five vents – one towering nearly four stories in height – are venting water as hot as 570 F.
Dissolved sulfide minerals that solidify when vent water hits the icy cold of the deep sea have, over the years, accumulated around the vent field in what is one of the most massive hydrothermal sulfide deposits ever found on the seafloor, according to Marvin Lilley, a University of Washington oceanographer. He’s a member of an expedition led by Rolf Pedersen, a geologist with the University of Bergen’s Centre for Geobiology, aboard the research vessel G.O. Sars.
The vents are located at 73 degrees north on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge between Greenland and Norway. That’s more than 120 miles from the previous northernmost vents found during a 2005 expedition, also led by Pedersen. Other scientists have detected plumes of water from hydrothermal vents even farther north but have been unable to find the vent fields on the seafloor to image and sample them.
also in:
http://www.livescience.com/environment/080724-black-smokers.html
It is a wonderful world we are living in, and the scientists in it are real christians: their right hand does not know what their left hand does, as far as sharing knowledge.
Are those of us who are not of the Global Warming faith really surprised that true believers seek the holy grail of a colder climate that is more deadly to human life? In their sick and twisted minds humans are the ultimate evil that needs to be destroy, and what better way to do that than to create a colder global climate that is unsuitable for man. To us carbon is the building block of life, to the GW faithful it is a pollutant that must be eliminated.
Lamont,
One issue with your hypothesis is that the PDO is a 30 year cycle. The previous warm cycle started in 1978 ended in 2007, so we are at the very beginning of the PDO cold cycle. It is very unlikely that the PDO will shift back to a warm cycle prior to 2012 so you won’t get the ‘perfect storm’ that we had in 1998 (which produced one of the strongest el Niinos on record followed by a 2-3 year la Nina). Solar Cycle 24 is looking like it will be far weaker than Cycle 23, which was pretty active.
I’m also not sure that ENSO cycle length is predictable and I believe it is influenced by the PDO (and other events).
In any case neither the PDO nor the ENSO seems to be influenced by atmospheric CO2 levels and the resultant changes in temperatures are entirely natural.
Lamont:
By what means are you so clairvoyant? Livingston and Penn would certainly dispute your claim that by 2012 the sun will be in anything like its normal warm cycle as they predict that by 2014 or 2015 there will be no sunspots at all.
If solar magnetism turns out to be a potent driver of climate, will your clairvoyance may be faulty.
Lamont (00:11:14) :
All of these cycles, including solar cycle 24, are going to eventually turn warm again in the next few years, and before 2012 the 1998 records will be solidly broken.
Yes, eventually things will warm up again…that is why they call them cycles…but warming by 2022 seems iffy…certainly suggesting that it will warm by 2012 sounds like you are whistling past the graveyard….however, what makes this interesting is we will all know for sure in just three years….I’m curious to see what becomes of the AGW religion if we are all snow bound at that point….cdl
Thought this Cox and Forkum cartoon might capture the AGW’s conundrum – Iove it!
Can’t figure out how to publish it here, so here’s the link:
http://www.coxandforkum.com/archives/05.12.06.WinterBlunder-X.gif
Hope it works. Merry Christmas, all, and here’s to a wonderful New Year!
Special thanks, Anthony for all your work, balance, science acumen and hosting this wonderful forum.
Lamont:
“The cognitive dissonance here is assuming that this time its going to be different in all these cyclical factors. The skeptical crowd needs to generate a major failure in solar cycles in order to avoid dealing with AGW. That is textbook cognitive dissonance.”
This is classic. Why do we need to “generate” something to avoid dealing with something that by your own words, doesn’t exist to begin with?
If you believe it’s going to get warmer due to the cycles you mention, then there’s no “A” in AGW.
JimB
I was also baffled by the drop in sea ice. and suspected “adjustments”, but then took a closer look at SST anomolies in the arctic. Several very marm pools. Very large one off Labrador. Also between Iceland and Greenland. Given that Grteenland/Iceland are very active geothermal regions, the “culprit”, for low sea ice area/extent may well be unrelated to the air temperature. Several other “hot spots”, globally, but in general SSTs are cool. Ironic that volcanos cool the atmosphere, but heat the oceans. Thge climate is very complex, and searching for simple answers is a fruitless endeavor.
Johnnyb (02:22:54) :
As for Cognitive Dissonance and the like, I honestly wish I could say tell you all not to worry, but it seems to me that religious convictions are the dominent human trait and this is one of our national religions du jure, and we have officially entered an age of madness in our political casts. How long can we survive with lunatics, crooks and morons running the country? I do not know, but I do believe that we are about to find out.
I have been carefully watching who is being appointed to run our upcoming government….they seem to be opposed to any form of energy that involves oil, coal or nuc…I conclude that we are embarking on a great experiment…to see what happens when you try and run an industrial economy without any visable or viable form of energy…it remains to be seen how far faith will take us when the lights go out………cdl
Christmas dinner with Pachauri.
————————————————
A UN-Approved Christmas Dinner
http://www.spectator.org/archives/2008/12/23/a-un-approved-christmas-dinner
“The dictatorship-dominated United Nations has its eye on our Christmas hams as a key source of allegedly man-made global warming and planetary suicide.”
“We haven’t come to grips with agricultural emissions,” warned Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, head of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change…”
“Farm flatulence and belching… “the trillions of farm animals around the world generate 18 percent of the emissions that are raising global temperatures, according to United Nations estimates, more than from cars, buses and airplanes.”
————————————————————-
All the “flakes” of the winter season are not snow.
Northwest Ohio
To all Anthony’s fans:
You are a clever funny lot!
Could you manage to identify your state or country?
When comments are made about your local weather –
I’m so curious as to where you are on globe.
Perhaps at the beginning of your comments.
Thank you :0)
BTW – It was minus 2 F a couple nights ago.
Henry Galt: You are taking advantage of poor Lamont. You can’t loose your bet. 1998 is not the hottest year. it is 1934, as even Hansen has admitted.
Sorry that I blew your cover, but poor Lamont needs all of the help he can garner. He has to be saved from his personal delusions by fair minded folks like us.
Lamont
The original Sin, as put forth by the high priests of the new religion, was that man-made carbon dioxide emissions are causing global warming. Man-made global warming has morphed into the mnemonic, AGW, and more recently, MMGW. The now head of the IPCC, Dr. Pachauri, has expanded the cause of global warming/climate change to include, first, bovine flatulence, and now swine and other farm animal flatulence. This is all a diversion from the original CO2 theory into the environmentalism argument that man is destroying the Earth’s environment and is responsible for all green house gas (GHG) emissions. The use of mnemonics confutes the general public as is its intent.
Your argument admits that the natural solar cycle, the natural POD cycle and the ENSO cycle are the controlling factors in the environment over any imagined man-made cause.
You are correct, this is a classic text book cognitive dissonance: when belief in a grand narrative persists blindly even when the facts in the real world begin to contradict what the narrative is saying.
History shows the Little Ice Age was a much worse time to live than during the Medieval Warm Period. That’s why the Ministry of Information is so busy rewriting the history books. The MWP must be removed from our books, journals and memories or we’ll never accept the Greater Truth about AGW.
A merry Christmas to all,
Kathy,
I live in southern Greece. We have had a very mild December (10 low 18 high), probably a degree or two higher in both the highs and the lows than average. We just got our first snow in the mountains around Athens and drizzle in town and temperatures dropped to 10 C in daytime and 4C at night. A white Christmas would be completely unusual. Usually Januaries are cold( highs 6 to 10C), Februaries are mild ( sometimes 18C degrees again) and March cold. I usually start swimming in the sea by the end of April beginning of May ( air temperatures 23C or so, water still cold).
Lamont,
1) PDO is a 60 year cycle, it will take 30 years or so to switch back to the warm side.
2) If you think solar cycle 24 will be anywhere near as strong as solar cycle 23, then you haven’t been watching the sun lately.
Break 1998’s record by 2012? Yeah right.
BTW – It was minus 2 F a couple nights ago.
—
You wimp ;*) -2 was the high here on Monday. Central Iowa.
Sorry this is OT but I wanted to inject a suggestion into the overall discussion. Perhaps Anthony or another moderator can place it in an appropriate place if merited.
I wonder if we could institute a sort of “Windturbine (WT) Watch” where people that have occasion to observe WT installations could make note of how many of them are actually turning. For instance, as a pilot I would often fly over the large WT farm in the vicinity of Bedford, PA and notice that of the 30 or so turbines in the area I never saw all of them turning at once. If we could collect some figures like “6 of 8” are turning at a particular location at a specified time and date we could get some feel over time for how many are down for maintenance, lack of wind, not needed, iced up, or other sorts of reasons and then begin to form some understanding of just how efficiently they are working.
By no means a scientific study but a bit of a way to get a rough estimate of their contribution.
Cheers,
John
Lamont (00:11:14) :
1998 was a warm phase in the cyclical solar cycle, a warm phase in the cyclical PDO and a warm phase in the cyclical ENSO cycle. 2008 is a cold phase in the cyclical solar cycle, a cold phase in the cyclical PDO and a cold phase in the cyclical ENSO cycle.
And what do you think drives those cycles?
Under the resources tab you will find a posting by me pointing at solar impacts on ozone ( a greenhouse gas that the AGW models ignore), and how the ozone drives some of the weather cycles. The GHG thesis may well be right, you just have the wrong gas and the wrong cause for the variation.
The skeptical crowd needs to generate a major failure in solar cycles in order to avoid dealing with AGW.
See, here’s the difference between us. I don’t need to generate anything and I don’t want too. In fact I specifically abhor generated data. All I need to do is look at the solar output and trace where it changes things. To open my eyes and look at the natural unmodified and ungenerated state of things.
Maybe you didn’t notice it, but the sun has been sleeping for about 2 years and we’ve had cold weather for about 2 years (and getting worse). The sun was very active for about the preceding 30 years and we had warm weather for 30 years (in line with prior cycles, nothing exceptional). Can you say cause and effect? No? I guess not…
DocWat (01:02:42) :
These scientists warned of potential “positive feedback,” in which water vapor traps heat near the surface, the warmer temperatures cause increasing ocean surface water to evaporate, producing even more water vapor, further heightening the trapping effect and beginning the cycle anew.
I think I’ve been there! Gulfport in August!
(Got out of the car in 99 degrees and 99% humid. Water started to condense on ME from the air… since I was cooler and below the dew point.)
Johnnyb (02:22:54) :
The Sea Ice has stopped growing for right now because several bodies of water that usually freeze over are not quite cold enough but they should be soon. The Sea of Okhotsk, The Labrador Sea, The Gulf of Saint Lawrence, and the Barentsz Sea. Don’t worry though, they will freeze up soon enough.
I think you are exactly right on this. In many chaotic oscillating systems (things with stochastic resonance and hysteresis, for example) you get this behaviour, especially at inflection points. In stock trading these are called “battlegrounds”. What you are seeing, IMHO, is the ever colder poles ‘battling’ with the residual heat in the oceans. You get more volatility at these times (ice grows fast, then stops fast, then grows fast again) as the battle unfolds.
In this case, with the sun taking a long nap, the cold will eventually win. But it is likely to take a couple of years to cool down enough ocean water to the point where spectacular polar freezes can run rampant.
As for Cognitive Dissonance and the like, I honestly wish I could tell you all not to worry, but it seems to me that religious convictions are the dominent human trait and this is one of our national religions du jure, and we have officially entered an age of madness in our political casts. How long can we survive with lunatics, crooks and morons running the country? I do not know, but I do believe that we are about to find out.
It has ever been thus. So not to worry. Remember the Mccarthy era? Witch hunting? Inquisitions (Spanish and otherwise)? Mao? The Civil War wasn’t exactly sane. The roman empire lasted a thousand years with lead levels that ought to have caused madness in the ruling classes.
The fascinating thing is that the world survives it all. Hyperinflation in Germany post WWII, food riots in asia, empires enslaving half the world then collapsing, Latin American dictators and communistas swapping places every few decades and both repudiating external debt, and any currency they may have printed. Heck, even nuclear bombs dropped on Japan and Japanese biological weapons dropped on China.
By comparison our crop of looneytoons are positively safe and sane 😉 So be of good cheer, pop open a bottle of beverage of your choice, and watch the show. If it gets too bad you just need to wait a while for the next lunacy to replace the present one. Give it two years and see what happens…
davidgmills (06:01:02)
If solar magnetism turns out to be a potent driver of climate, will your clairvoyance may be faulty.
Davidgmills, you might want to look under the ‘resources’ button up top. At the end of the list is a post about ozone as climate driver. It may not be solar magnetism that is critical, but solar impact on ozone. We’re running about -20% to -40% down on ozone as the sun takes a nap, that opens a 9-10 micrometer radiation window and allows cooling. Bingo, sun driven cold and cold poles and all that we are seeing now.
Some of this is speculation on my part, but there are citations of papers showing some of the xxO climate cycles are driven by ozone fluctuations.
And none of this is in the climate models used by AGW fans.