For those too young to remember (such as Jim Hansen’s coal protesters in Washington this past week), Clara Peller, pictured above, started a national catchphrase with “Where’s the beef?” that even made it into the 1984 presidential campaign. Today, the Boston Globe asks: where’s the global warming?
Watch the original commercial that started the catchphrase. It seems applicable today. – Anthony
JEFF JACOBY
By Jeff Jacoby, Globe Columnist | March 8, 2009
SUPPOSE the climate landscape in recent weeks looked something like this:
Half the country was experiencing its mildest winter in years, with no sign of snow in many Northern states. Most of the Great Lakes were ice-free. Not a single Canadian province had had a white Christmas. There was a new study discussing a mysterious surge in global temperatures – a warming trend more intense than computer models had predicted. Other scientists admitted that, because of a bug in satellite sensors, they had been vastly overestimating the extent of Arctic sea ice.
If all that were happening on the climate-change front, do you think you’d be hearing about it on the news? Seeing it on Page 1 of your daily paper? Would politicians be exclaiming that global warming was even more of a crisis than they’d thought? Would environmentalists be skewering global-warming “deniers” for clinging to their skepticism despite the growing case against it?
No doubt.
But it isn’t such hints of a planetary warming trend that have been piling up in profusion lately. Just the opposite.
The United States has shivered through an unusually severe winter, with snow falling in such unlikely destinations as New Orleans, Las Vegas, Alabama, and Georgia. On Dec. 25, every Canadian province woke up to a white Christmas, something that hadn’t happened in 37 years. Earlier this year, Europe was gripped by such a killing cold wave that trains were shut down in the French Riviera and chimpanzees in the Rome Zoo had to be plied with hot tea. Last week, satellite data showed three of the Great Lakes – Erie, Superior, and Huron – almost completely frozen over. In Washington, D.C., what was supposed to be a massive rally against global warming was upstaged by the heaviest snowfall of the season, which paralyzed the capital.
Meanwhile, the National Snow and Ice Data Center has acknowledged that due to a satellite sensor malfunction, it had been underestimating the extent of Arctic sea ice by 193,000 square miles – an area the size of Spain. In a new study, University of Wisconsin researchers Kyle Swanson and Anastasios Tsonis conclude that global warming could be going into a decades-long remission. The current global cooling “is nothing like anything we’ve seen since 1950,” Swanson told Discovery News. Yes, global cooling: 2008 was the coolest year of the past decade – global temperatures have not exceeded the record high measured in 1998, notwithstanding the carbon-dioxide that human beings continue to pump into the atmosphere.
None of this proves conclusively that a period of planetary cooling is irrevocably underway, or that anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions are not the main driver of global temperatures, or that concerns about a hotter world are overblown. Individual weather episodes, it always bears repeating, are not the same as broad climate trends.
But considering how much attention would have been lavished on a comparable run of hot weather or on a warming trend that was plainly accelerating, shouldn’t the recent cold phenomena and the absence of any global warming during the past 10 years be getting a little more notice? Isn’t it possible that the most apocalyptic voices of global-warming alarmism might not be the only ones worth listening to?
There is no shame in conceding that science still has a long way to go before it fully understands the immense complexity of the Earth’s ever-changing climate(s). It would be shameful not to concede it. The climate models on which so much global-warming alarmism rests “do not begin to describe the real world that we live in,” says Freeman Dyson, the eminent physicist and futurist. “The real world is muddy and messy and full of things that we do not yet understand.”
But for many people, the science of climate change is not nearly as important as the religion of climate change. When Al Gore insisted yet again at a conference last Thursday that there can be no debate about global warming, he was speaking not with the authority of a man of science, but with the closed-minded dogmatism of a religious zealot. Dogma and zealotry have their virtues, no doubt. But if we want to understand where global warming has gone, those aren’t the tools we need.
Jeff Jacoby can be reached at jacoby@globe.com.
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
rationalpsychic (18:42:07) penned:
“Since when do regular folks feel compelled to argue climate science? Of course, they’re really not–they’re discussing whose rhetoric is better crafted to reflect a current snapshot of reality.”
Please, speak for yourself and ONLY for yourself; some of us have the background and experience to evaluate the data and methologies (the ‘horse’) upon which (the ‘knight’) AGW rode in on … ranging from flawed/contaminated surface temperature data (owing to temp shelter/MMTS siting issues) to highly questionable if not outright suspect analysis (e.g. the Hockey Stick).
Perhaps this is your first visit to the site, in which case your should check out the more ‘technical’ threads as opposed to the more ‘political’ where delving onto the specifics ‘errors’ in the AGW arg are discussed.
.
Rationalpsychic wrote this: “Sure, Al Gore is easy to make fun of. But one winter does not disprove a growing trend in temperatures across the globe. Ornithologists are noticing the ranges of many birds extending northward over the last twenty years. Wildlife who make changes in their habitat and range are not influenced by the popular media, news reports, etc.”
So WHAT IF IT IS??? If I was a dark-eyed junco (one of the cutest) songbirds….I would be stoked as to the expanded territory.
“Ornithologists are noticing the ranges of many birds extending northward…”
20 years is a micro snowflake in the bucket of snow.
Be happy that there is any BIRDAGE at all at this point.
If I were an ornithologist….I would be relieved to see the expanded territory….not alarmed that the earth had warmed to support such.
LMAO!!
Chris
Norfolk, VA
Tenney Naumer (05:23:44) :
Thanks for coming along to Mr Watt’s website. You are contributing directly to the number of hits on his website. As you can see to the right had side he has had almost 10 million hits. Not bad for a supposed “flat earther” who won the Best Science Blog in 2009.
Come back again soon, we enjoy the entertainment you provide.
rationalpsychic wrote:
You mean reports like:
Mature Arctic ivory gull seen in Massachusetts for the first time in over a century
Rare snow bunting appears in Cornwall
Waxwings from Scandinavia move south to Britain
Crossbills from Scandinavia visit British garden bird feeders
Snowy owls spotted thousands of miles south of normal feeding grounds
manbearpig is REAL, you guys.
savethesharks wrote:
And you know what they say a good cold winter kills all the bugs.
Not the flu bug.
Please investigate the difference between “climate” and “weather”. It looks like you are confusing them.
Re: the difference between a news article and an op ed. In this current infotainment world we live in, it would be easier to part the hair on a gnat’s head than it is to tease apart the reliability of a news report from an opinion.
It is not a good thing when I, a liberal, see more accuracy in an opinion from Mr. Will, or any other designated Republican conservative op ed piece than a news report on what Al Gore has said about global warming. I have no conservative or liberal ax to grind but I also have no desire to change my views on several of my liberal leanings. One of the reasons why I have liberal views is because I rely on basic science, not political environmentalist dogma or religious faith based party planks, to help me understand how things work.
But this CO2 global warming thing does not make logical scientific sense at all. And it seems to have affected (infected?) some of the brainiest people around, which just floors me. Degreed people, researchers, titled scientists, all of the presidential candidates, and, it is hard for me to say this, nearly all the democrats in Washington and a good share of republicans, have been taken in by this odd global movement. Are there no honest politicians or major respected scientists that, while surely risking their careers, can calm the masses and stop the madness of this ill-conceived movement?
Obama, I voted for you. I hate to say this, but I am regretting the choice I made. You are beginning to look like one of the pack, just like all the rest. There is such a thing as being blinded by your own kind.
As last I looked, the atmosphere was a chaotic system. Increasing the energy level of a chaotic system will tend to result in greater instability. In climate, this would mean greater extremes and wilder variations as well as an increase in the overall global temperature. If these things are observed, it is evidence that the energy available in the system – the temperature – is indeed increasing.
Now, if any one of those is not happening, that would be a strong argument against global warming. Possible evidence for global cooling would include a narrower range of temperatures measured over time, fewer major storms over time, a reduction in the average global temperature over time, and a reduction in the rate of change in atmospheric conditions (essentially, conditions tending more towards an average climate and less towards rapid changes, such as warm days followed by cold ones). “Over time” would require a minimum of about a year to mean anything much, preferably evidence should be collected over several years.
Evidence for stability would involve those items remaining constant over time.
After that, of course, there is the question of how much impact human activities are having on the observed trends.
Now, if you want a quick thought-experiment to evaluate whether or not adding more energy to a system causes greater variation, consider reducing the average temperature of the earth to a close approximation of absolute zero. There will be virtually no changes, no variation between years, and no weather.
Then add energy to the system until you reach current conditions: you will find notable variations in surface temperatures in various locations over the course of a year, a great deal of activity, and a lot of weather.
It’s about time the Boston Globe said something about the global cooling which is I believe has been going on since 2006. NASA reported the oceans since 2006 have been cooling, following winters 2007 and 2008 have been harsher almost like the winter of 1979.
Warming trends and cooling trends are normal. The fact that the weather has been cooling despite humans pumping in CO2 into the atmosphere at a very small rate. Al Gore avoids debates about global warming because he wants to focus more on funding those who believe in global warming and restricting companies in the US, while neglecting other countries like China and India.
Thought this article might help you to understand the data.
“The 2008 climate report: partly cloudy. Or partly sunny — it depends on your point of view, which underscores why it can be so easy to misunderstand the mechanism of climate change. The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) on Tuesday released its weather analysis for the year and found that 2008 has been the coolest year since the turn of the century. Using data gathered from Britain’s Hadley Centre, the University of East Anglia and the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA), the WMO reported that the average global temperature in 2008 was 57.74 degrees F (14.3 degrees C), cooler than the past several years. That’s due in part to the chilling action of the climatological effect known as La Niña, which cooled the Pacific.
So does that mean global warming has ceased?
Afraid not. Even though 2008 is cooler than the past several years, it’s still likely to rank as the 10th warmest year since the beginning of climate records in the 1850s. And despite the cooling of the Pacific, several parts of the Earth — especially the Arctic, where sea ice melted to its second lowest level ever this summer — were far above normal temperatures. Globally, 2008 was about 0.56 degrees F (0.31 degrees C) warmer than the annual average between 1961 and 1990. But if the heat seemed to have been turned down during 2008, that could owe to the fact that the gradual warming trend has changed our idea of a normal temperature. As Myles Allen, head of the Climate Dynamics Group at Oxford University, explains, “Globally, this year would have been considered warm, even as recently as the 1970s or 1980s, but [it would have been] a scorcher for our Victorian ancestors.”
During 2008, we kept pouring billions of tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, so it’s easy to assume that the climate would keep warming uniformly — and therefore to use evidence to the contrary as grounds for doubting that human activity really causes climate change. But the climate and the weather are not the same thing: we experience only the weather, which is the day-to-day, sometimes hour-to-hour changes of temperature, precipitation, wind and more. The climate, on the other hand, refers to the cumulative average of the weather around us over decades, centuries and longer.
So we can’t track global warming through changes in the weather, even from one year to the next. Instead we need to look at the long-term trends, and here the evidence is undeniable. “The trend for warming is still there,” says Michel Jarraud, the secretary general of the WMO. There will be oscillations, up and down trends, thanks to other climatological factors like La Niña, its warming opposite El Niño, even large volcanic eruptions, which can throw sulphur into the atmosphere and temporarily cool the planet. But unless we reverse the steady increase in greenhouse-gas emissions, over the long term, the world’s temperature is going in one direction: up.”
Re: “Naughty BBC”
Despite there being no mention of “melting ice” in Pen Hadow’s published diary extracts, the BBC continues to promote it’s AGW agenda with the headline “Arctic diary – The team has a dramatic night on melting Arctic ice”.
In fact what they do say is “Because of the freezing temperatures some of the equipment has been playing up”
and
“I’ve been walking around since the first night with a fuel pump inside my clothing. Like Martin’s kit, our cooking stoves were struggling – the fuel pumps were leaking fuel – it seemed the best way to keep the pump warm!”
Katherine (20:23:54)
Good examples. One could ask, ‘if the world is getting warmer, why are birds that like it colder expanding their range SOUTH, into allegedly warmer areas?’
@Pamela Gray
“Obama, I voted for you. I hate to say this, but I am regretting the choice I made.”
There are a lot of people experiencing buyers remorse at this point,…
…and I think I can fairly confidently assert that the number will increase dramatically.
It’s going to be a very long 4 years. And it’s going to be even longer fixing, if we can, the damage he will certainly have done by then, which is why forums like WUWT are so important, as they supply people with an alternative to the insanity (an antidote to the KookAid) that many didn’t even know they were consuming.
The part I worry about, and I’m beginning to see expressed more and more, is that science will suffer. After all, if AGW was suspect, and if nothing we could do would mitigate the changes, why didn’t they speak out against ruining the economy to “repair” something that couldn’t be? Will the reputation of science be suffer as a result? I think it could, which is very disturbing because without good science no nation can really prosper. But then, prosperity is so ‘yesterday’, after all.
http://masterresource.org/?p=1106
http://masterresource.org/?p=1332
We all know there has been a slow warming since the depths of the Little Ice Age.
The question is whether the recent warming i.e. since WW2 has been caused or enhanced by human CO2.
Peter A. Leonard’s article from WMO is disingenuous in not acknowledging that issue.
There is still no proper evidence as to causation or as to scale of AGW in relation to natural forces and the longer the pause in warming or any cooling spell lasts then the less likely it is that human CO2 has anything to do with it.
The WMO of all people should accept that current observations do introduce a level of doubt about AGW so that the science is even less settled now than it was before.
In my opinion a continuation of misplaced confidence about the AGW theory is an abuse of professionalism.
Weather extremes depend on differentials NOT absolute temperatures.
Stormier weather occurs when the global air temperature is falling or rising because changes increase differentials.
The faster the change in EITHER direction the more storminess.
A stable global air temperature has least extremes of weather.
As it gets colder, more folks will see the light, followed by many feeling the heat, just not the kind they expected…
Does anyone know if the Reynolds method data that feed into GIStemp and depend on simulated data (would that be “dimulated” – a typo I started typing, then corrected, then realized the truth from the subconscious …) from the ice levels at the North Pole are using the broken satellite data?
If so, we would know that GIStemp would be fudging their anomaly maps high based on broken polar ice estimates…
Peter Leonard
There it goes again.
“But unless we reverse the steady increase in greenhouse-gas emissions, over the long term, the world’s temperature is going in one direction: up.”
What’s long term? Since the Cretaceous? Holocene maximum? MWP? LIA? The only way you get an uniterrupted warming trend is cherry pick a date after the last cool period (c 1980) and then ignore what’s happened since 1998.
If a small increase (in “long term” terms) in a trace gas is so powerful that it can tip the climate into a catastrophic slide, then what is powerful enough to counteract it? The only way the GCMs can make CO2 do the magic thing is by inventing a water vapour positive feedback, which seems to be in the process of being thoroughly debunked.
Thoth,
Huh???
mjolsen (20:44:22) :
Please investigate the difference between “climate” and “weather”. It looks like you are confusing them.
No, there is no confusion.
Obviously, the difference is: “Climate” means anything that supposedly supports AGW/CC doctrine, including a warming trend for a cherry-picked time period, heat waves, droughts, floods, fires, hurricanes, tornadoes, glaciers retreating and, increasingly, any weather “extremes”, such as unusual cold, blizzards, ice storms, glaciers advancing etc.
“Weather” on the other hand is anything that might tend to cast doubt on the idea of manmade warming/climate change.
1+1=3, 1+1=3, 1+1=3, 1….
In order to fairly discuss the present lay epiphany on climate change one would think that the objective commentator would concede and perhaps offer that there are other theories which have a fairly close coincidence with the present inter glacial scenario such as the Milankovitch Cycle. If I don’t hear some alternative theories offered there is no moving forward then the commentator has only weakened the ground. Unfortunately this article is just a parody of the logical errors of those who have no idea of what they are talking about and subscribe to an ideology. Unfortunately the decisions that follow from the ideology are fantasy world decisions and will have real world consequences. This is a great graph and it deserves contemplation because it is elegant and to the point and predictive to a high degree of certainty.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Vostok_420ky_4curves_insolation.jpg
Toth,
As Stephen Wilde said extreme weather depends on temperature differentials.
http://icecap.us/images/uploads/Gray12-08.pdf
http://www.climate-skeptic.com/2007/09/chapter-7-skept.html
Also increasing heat would not cause cooling, certainly not globally. We all know or should know that this seasons cold temperatures and snow storms are just weather. However no global increase in temperatures since 1998 is a trend and not weather. As stated before, if this was a mild winter the MSM and some AGW acolytes would have used that as proof of global warming. The fact that it has been colder than expected is certainly worth noting because it was unexpected by those who believe in AGW. What we are pointing out is that in spite of the AGW proponent’s predictions of steadily increasing temperatures we have seen instead no warming and also a growing body of evidence of cooling.
Pamela Gray (22:03:30) :
“Obama, I voted for you. I hate to say this, but I am regretting the choice I made. You are beginning to look like one of the pack, just like all the rest. There is such a thing as being blinded by your own kind.”
Pamela,
I am not at all surprised by his position on AGW. Knowing how “smart” he and his team are one would have to conclude that they have motives other than the ones he has stated. If you can look at other instances of Obama saying one thing and doing another you may see, as I have, a pattern.
I have spent some time researching his background, his past associations, and his past actions and I have concluded that AGW is just another tool he is using to get the people of the US to concede to ever more government control by using scare tactics of a climate apocalypse.
I agree that one month or one year does not a trend make, but now we have 10 years of no increase and recently a decrease in temperatures while all the time CO2 levels have been increasing. Trying to reconcile these data with global warming is like eating a steak to prove you are a vegetarian.
Don J. Easterbrook, Ph.D., emeritus professor of geology at Western Washington University, asked, “What does it take to ignore 10 years of global cooling, sharply declining temperatures the last couple of years, record setting lack of sun spots . . . failure of computer models to predict real climate, predictable warming and cooling climates for the past 500 years. The answer is really quite simple — just follow the money!”
Hm, presuming that the comment addressed to “Toth” was addressed to me on the basis that “Toth” does not appear elsewhere on this page and that the topic seems relevant to my comment, I’ll reply to it.
“As Stephen Wilde said extreme weather depends on temperature differentials.”
Yes. Ultimately those between space and the various regions of a planetary surface. Ergo, increasing that average temperature differential should lead to increasing extremes of weather. Decreasing it should reduce them.
“Also increasing heat would not cause cooling, certainly not globally. We all know or should know that this seasons cold temperatures and snow storms are just weather. However no global increase in temperatures since 1998 is a trend and not weather.”
Half correct: it is a tautology that increasing the average global temperature will not result in decreasing the average global temperature. The notion that adding energy to a system cannot cause cooling in some parts of that system is easily demonstrated to be false: all you have to do to demonstrate that is to go and check your refrigerator. Without pumping energy into the system (in this case, your house), you will not long have a temperature differential between the two locations – inside the refrigerator and the room outside it.
As for whether or not the average temperature of the earth is above, below, or the same as, what it would be without human interference, we have no direct way of finding out: we do not have an earth that is substantially free of human interference but otherwise identical to compare with. Models may be indicative of what we might expect to find in such a situation, but it is always possible for any given model to be wrong.
Model testing is a different subject, but usually involves giving the model a set of parameters from some point in the past and seeing how well it projects known subsequent behavior from there. Models which show a high degree of success in such tests may or may not actually be useful in predicting future events – but models which do not show success in such tests almost certainly are not useful in predicting future events. The larger the number of successful models employed, and the greater their agreement on further projections, the more likely the projection is to be useful as a guide. Similar modeling schemes can be observed in basic behavioral studies, marketing, insurance, and many other fields.
“As stated before, if this was a mild winter the MSM and some AGW acolytes would have used that as proof of global warming. The fact that it has been colder than expected is certainly worth noting because it was unexpected by those who believe in AGW. What we are pointing out is that in spite of the AGW proponent’s predictions of steadily increasing temperatures we have seen instead no warming and also a growing body of evidence of cooling.”
What the MSM and AGW acolytes would use something for is irrelevant to the tests proposed. If the energy level of a chaotic system increases – regardless of the nature of that system – you can expect to see greater extremes and more rapid shifts between such extremes. Remove energy, and you can expect to see lesser extremes and slower shifts between such extremes. Remove enough energy, and the system will become quiescent.
That is a simple set of predictions that can be analyzed, examined, and tested against local records. If the average results of such tests show lesser extremes and slower shifts, we have evidence for global cooling. If the average results show no changes, we have evidence of stability. If the average displays greater extremes and more rapid shifts, we have evidence of global warming. If they show lesser extremes and more rapid shifts, or vice versa, the results will be mixed, and either indicative of stability or of a need for additional tests.
The raw results, however, have nothing to say about what the results would be without human interference or whether the result (whatever it is) is desirable or not. For such evaluations it is necessary to turn to modeling and to personal preferences.
Whether or not the actual data supports trends of global warming or global cooling actually isn’t relevant to the AGW hypothesis, which states that human activity is resulting in a higher average global temperature than would prevail otherwise – not that the average global temperature is necessarily increasing at the moment. Thus, even a solid demonstration that the average global temperature is decreasing would not actually be a challenge to the hypothesis. Such comparisons are based on atmospheric modeling – as are the predictions of various difficulties which might result from an ongoing warming trend. To effectively challenge the AGW hypothesis and the various proposed courses of action based on it, all that is needed is develop atmospheric models that provide better projections of current conditions from past conditions AND either do not indicate that current and likely future human activities will be a major factor in increasing the average global temperature OR which indicate that the results of such an increase will be desirable to whoever is evaluating the results.