Union of Concerned Scientists – Unwarranted Concern about the Northeast US

Similar concerns, unwarranted or not, have been adopted as official policy by the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation. That organization released its “Sea Level Rise Task Force Final Report” earlier this week. You can get a .pdf copy of this 102 report here: http://www.dec.ny.gov/energy/67778.html
From page nine of the report: “The warming produced by global climate change causes the sea level to rise because warmer water takes up more space, and higher temperatures are melting ice sheets around the globe. New York Harbor has experienced an increase in sea level of more than 15 inches in the past 150 years, with harbor tide gauges showing a rise of between 4 and 6 inches since 1960. … Sea level rise affecting the Lower Hudson Valley and Long Island is projected to be 2 to 5 inches by the 2020s and 12 to 23 inches by the end of this century. However, rapid melt of land‐based ice could double these projections in the next few decades, with a potential rise of up to 55 inches by the end of the century.”
I hope Anthony will share his comments on this report.

Real concern:
Snow in Los Angeles Causes 30-Mile Backup
http://www.thirdage.com/news/snow-los-angeles-causes-30-mile-backup_1-3-2011
In times of deepest darkness
I’ve seen him dressed in black
Now my tapestry’s unraveling…
he’s come to take me back…
As George Carlin said: “Pack your sh**s folks…we are leaving” 🙂

Steve Keohane says:
January 6, 2011 at 5:52 am
SteveE says:January 6, 2011 at 5:23 am
What a rubbish article.
Go on to the website and select any northern region and plot winter trend and it’ll be positive.
The trend shows up to 3 degrees increase over the 1895 to 2010 period for West North Central.
That’s certainly warming which ever way to look at it!
Assuming the measurement is correct, when we know they are all biased high.
———————-
I see, so if you cherry pick the data to show no positive trend then the data is accurate, if you don’t cherry pick the same data and it shows a positive trend then the data is bias.
Makes perfect sense to me.

Some remarked they (the UCS) are watermelons. No, I doubt they really care. They are just government leeches however – go where the money is. Because the alternative is to work – and parasites hate work!

The UCS is nothing more then a a bunch of opinionated eco-religious nuts. Like many other propaganda oriented groups that have co-opted a name that has some status like democracy. The only credibility these people have or ever did have comes for the name Science. They should simply be ignored.

Eric Baker is correct – small is not the same as non-significant. All the seasonal graphs show small but significant warming trends, probably because averages are being pulled up by sharp rises in the last 40 years or so. (Graph eg 1970 – 2010 against a baseline of 1900 – 1970 and see what happens – it looks a bit different).
Rising minimum (night time) temperatures are because less heat is being radiated out, exactly as expected if this were being caused by the greenhouse effect. If warming was due to increased insolation, day time maximum temperatures would show the biggest increase. (As it happens, solar irradiance and Milankovitch cycles are both close to minima, i.e. we should be in a cooling cycle.)
Here is a paper with similar figures for the last few decades for South Africa, where I live:
http://www.met.sjsu.edu/~wittaya/journals/TempTrendInSouthAfrica.pdf
Note that the authors have corrected for both El Nino and urban heat island contamination. (Most of these stations are away from the big cities anyway, because we don’t have a lot of big cities 🙂 ).
However, living where I live, I don’t actually need to read a scientific paper to know that it’s getting hotter. In SA we’re not arguing about more or less snow. We used to have one of the most fantastic climates in the world in the Western Cape, and right now we’re busy making the transition from hot to uninhabitable. Since anecdotal evidence and unsupported extrapolation from particular cases seem to be acceptable arguments on this site, I have some anecdotes of my own:
We’re experiencing flash floods and the first summer heatwave. Two weeks ago half the highways in Johannesburg had to be closed because of freak floods. I know – I was in the stack waiting to land and we missed being diverted by a hair’s breadth.
All my friends and I can talk about is how to cope with the heat. Where I live, it hasn’t cooled down below 25 C at night this week yet – and I’m in a country village with dirt roads and large plots – no tar. The Western Cape is supposed to have a Mediterranean climate (i.e. cold wet winters and warm dry summers) but the humidity just keeps going up.
They used to close the schools at 38 C but they don’t anymore because they’d never get any teaching done in summer. 40 C used to be regarded as really exceptional. Last summer we had stretches of 4 to 5 days where it didn’t go below 45 during the day or about 27/28 at night. I used to live in a village called McGregor in a region called the Klein Karoo – I moved back to Cape Town about 6 years ago. It got to 42 or 43 quite often while I lived there and I remember one day when it hit 48 and we all oohed and aahed about global warming. Well, that was positively chilly. Last year in January it hit 55 – that’s 131 Fahrenheit. Who knows what it’ll do this year – we’ve got another 3 months to go before it starts to cool down, and that is an extremely depressing prospect.
We’re having more and more mountain fires in summer – last year we thought the whole village of McGregor was going to go up because it was surrounded by mountains on fire. The Fynbos (indigenous vegetation) is battling to recover. It needs fire to germinate but it’s burning too often, too hot, and over areas that are too big. It’s one of the world’s 5 Floral Kingdoms, with over 8000 unique species, and it’s going to die.
After more than 40 years in SA I’ve just succumbed and bought my first aircon – and it’s not making much headway. At least I can afford one. Most people here can’t, and have to live in uninsulated low-cost housing – or shacks. I’ve got the option of moving back to the Northern hemisphere if it gets unbearable. I don’t want to leave my home, but right now I can see myself being forced to.
When I was a student, we used to go on holiday and travel through the Karoo (the central semi-arid region) to visit family who lived up-country . The hottest temperature I remember seeing (on the first car we had which had an onboard thermometer) was 35 C. Those were the days (about 25 years ago).
Currently Beaufort West, a Karoo town about a third of the way to Johannesburg, is having its worst drought in recorded memory and is having to ration domestic water. A couple of banks and radio stations started a charity appeal whereby you could donate a 5 litre bottle of water, and the long-haul lorries would drop them off as they went through – that’s how desperate the situation is. This isn’t just dams – the ground water table which feeds their boreholes has dropped alarmingly, and there’s no guarantee it’ll recover, so they’re racing to get a sewage recycling plant operational. And this started in spring.
http://www.news24.com/SouthAfrica/News/Beaufort-West-rations-its-water-20101124.
I’m sure Australians could tell you a story or two as well – currently they’re experiencing the worst floods on record.
So I think global warming is for real, partly because I’m reasonably able to follow the science, and partly because I’m on the sharp end of it – there is nothing theoretical about what we’re experiencing.
Nevertheless, although it’s probably caused by global temperature trends, weather in SA doesn’t prove or disprove those trends. Neither do your snowstorms.
Caroline

This was the common theme just a few short years ago.
“…winters are becoming warmer and less snowy. These changes are consistent with global warming…”
Remember this from Jan. of 2007?

So if this January turns out looking exactly the opposite of the map here they use to promote global warming…
Well, what would it mean?
That global warming is making the weather extreme. That cold is hot and blizzards should be handled as a summer shower? At least that’s the attitude New York City has decided to take. Just ask any of those sanitation workers as they were sipping back on a six pack of Budweiser instead of plowing, like they have on video here on the news.
Maybe the MetOffice took that policy decision as well. Always forecast hot, due to global warming, and when it doesn’t happen, just stop forecasting. Or, better yet, give the forecast out but to the people that REALLY want to see this global warming stuff through. That would be the government, of course, because they (at least the liberals in government) see global warming as the ultimate cash cow. The never-ending fund. What better way to fleece the masses than to tax them on the air they breathe and the weather which occurs over their heads. No matter what you could never go wrong. As witnessed in these last few very short years. Whether it rains or it snows; if it’s a blizzard or a hurricane; a drought or a flood; hot when it’s supposed to be cold or cold when it’s supposed to be hot – no matter what, it’s global warming (or one of it’s various aliases) and the latest reason to enact such taxes. Always under the guise of equality or coerced through guilt and shame.
You eat too much red meat.
Your house is too big.
Your car uses too much gas.
Your light bulb uses more power in one night than a family from (insert any country it’s politically correct to bleed your heart for) uses in a week.
Then, as this post points out, once useful and credible organizations, such as the UCS or the NAS, etc. denigrate themselves to become pawns for these fictitious schemes (global warming, deforestation, ‘marine habitat destruction’ and so on) which all have as their endgame, dare I say it, global governance.
And wheres the media in all this? Well, if you read the AP, AFP or Reuters, they’re behind it 100%.
Sites such as this one, which are continually attempted to be discredited by myriad bloggers and organizations, yet they have failed to do so are now being branded as propagandist sites by the government, subject to new net neutrality laws.
Wait and see.
Watch what happens if Democrats lose both houses of Congress in the next election. All those laws and regulations passed by the 110th and 11th Congress, giving nearly unlimited power to federal bureaucracies, like the FCC and the liberals which dominate those organizations…
Promoting anti-global warming theory might just be a seditious act.

Tom C;
The UCS was once credible? When was that, pray tell? How could the Union of Conspiring Socialists ever have been credible?
Robin E;
That “95% by default” needs to be kicked downstairs. It is the “default” of the soft and squishy pseudo-sciences. One chance in twenty that some kind of data-snooping or publication bias or fraud or whatever might have produced the results is WAY too much slack to give Climate Science, which is rife with sloppy procedures and thinking and has conflicts of interest up the kazoo.

Tony;
Advise her to work for 5 yrs first, then go. “Mature students” do far better, and know much more about what they want and are better grounded, hence more independent.

The Union of Concerned Scientists is another Soros funded propaganda group posing as a legitimate organization.

Robin, Excel will do least squares, and I believe you can compute confidence intervals if you install an analysis add-on (these days it’s increasingly being used as a front end to MS’s analytics and predictive modelling tools, which I find a bit scary). Being a database person, I never use it either. I stopped reading stats textbooks when I hit the moment-generating function of the multivariate normal distribution, which gave me nightmares (but perhaps I should start again if I can unclog some of the rusty gears in my head!)
I must say I’m curious about all the urban heat island fuss here. Except in cases where there is a great deal of development going on in an urban area (i.e. changes in local heat sources), why would you think that this would affect a trend? Very simplistically, absolute temperatures will be higher (because cities are hotter), but by a constant amount, which is irrelevant when computing the trend. It’s not the sort of data I usually work with, but I gather that US station temperature trend anomalies are detected and cleansed by using a geographical grid and comparing the data to data from nearby rural stations, and that in most cases urban and rural trends are pretty similar anyway, which is what one would expect.