Post by Ryan Maue
It’s a wonder why the media continue to trot out the likes of Bill Nye and Michio Kaku to speak about climate change and the weather when they already have folks like Al Roker and Sam Champion on the payroll.
For some unknown reason, Bill Nye showed up on Fox News Saturday afternoon to chat with Uma Pemmaraju about tornadoes Video Link. The meandering answers by Nye led to many quizzical looks by Uma, who got out of the way, and let Nye demonstrate his meteorological expertise. One should ask, as Amy Ridenour does in her off-base, satirical videos, is Bill Nye smarter than a 5th grader when it comes to understanding the weather?
And a NPR blogger wonders what motivates Climate Change Deniers?
Jeff Poor, over at the Daily Caller (where Anthony is a contributor), has the transcript:
“Well, it is very difficult to connect tornado to climate change,” Nye said. “They are small even relative to the other big picture. But i will tell you this – last 11 years are the warmest 11 years on record, since the 1800s. And there is 4 percent more water vapor in the atmosphere than has been in the past. Four percent doesn’t sound like a lot but it is a huge amount. And if you think of the Earth as a disk in space just receiving sunlight, and there are on the other of one and half billion BTU [British thermal unit]-worth of heat than there used to be. When you get that much extra heat and water vapor in the air, you are going to have more storms.”
“Notice that the floods that are probably connected to the tornadoes,” he said. “These floods – there is no Katrina or Rita, it just rain rained. When water vapor changed from a liquid to a vapor it gives up heat high in the atmosphere, or medium height in the atmosphere. And that heat up there makes it churn up more and that leads to more storms. Now, people have talked about this for years and everybody, this is serious business. The tornado is very difficult to mathematically connect to climate change. But the rains and extra warmth in the atmosphere, the extra water in the atmosphere, those are the facts. That’s the real deal.”
“You know, we are patriots, we are from the U.S. – I am,” he said. “And you would like the U.S. to be the leader in addressing this problem. We would like to be out in front in trying to deal with whatever it is that is holding in the heat and creating all of the extra water vapor in the atmosphere. Tornadoes are almost certainly a consequence.”
“Well, there is not that many other countries that have the configuration of North America to make the tornadoes,” Nye said. “And the word hurricane is a word coined in the Caribbean. This is a unique area in that regard. We have the Gulf of Mexico and we have this access of cold air from Canada or from the Arctic. And these two things conspire to move the jet stream, and then that helps to carry the extra water vapor over the heart of North America. So, it is unique place. You don’t have tornado in Norway. The weather is set up differently. But here in the U.S., it is a serious problem.”
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Bill Nye should just admit he knows nothing about the weather or climate change and let the professionals like Al Roker, Sam Champion, and Michio Kaku explain it to the rest of us.
Climate expert Michio Kaku: “El Niña” or global warming causing snowstorms, or something
Al Roker believes climate change is moving tornadoes into urban areas
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I took a momment to check Bill Nye’s CV. Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering from Cornell. No advanced degrees, if you don’t count the honorary ones, which I don’t. So he has less of a science background that I: BA in Biology and MD. You won’t see me on talk shows pretending to know everything about atmospheric science and meterology. But I know enough about science to be skeptical, especially about my own field. It seems every 5 years a widely held medical shibbolith gets smashed into bits. Climate change science is long overdue for a rigorous re-examination of the same unchallenged notions.
Nye is an official of CSICOP (now CSI) and as such he is committed to the idea that peer-reviewed scientists can’t be wrong and a ragamuffin group of populistic spitballers can’t be right. His organization has made permanent role-assignments of white hats to the former and black hats to the latter.
PS: I should have said, “CSICPO … is committed to the idea that a big consensus of peer-reviewed scientists can’t be wrong in a conflict with a ragamuffin group of populistic spitballers”
tallbloke says:
May 29, 2011 at 3:35 am
The NCEP re-analysis of the radiosonde data (which isn’t as bad as the warmista make out) shows what controls specific humidity at high altitude up near the tropopause, where most of the radiation of energy to space takes place. It’s the Sun.
http://tallbloke.files.wordpress.com/2010/08/shumidity-ssn96.png
See also Miskolzci’s optical thickness graph over the same period:
http://miskolczi.webs.com/Fig10.jpg
You should have also clued Espen on just how close Miskolczi’s figures and NOAA’s figures really are. (but you have to convert both)
A = 1 – e^–τa = absorption
τ a = – log( 1 – A ) = tau
NOAA’s absorption as tau = – log( 1 – 0.84568 ) = 1.8687
Miskolczi’s tau as absorption = 1 – e^–1.868754 = 0.84568
Basically a close match from two different sources.
Sometimes this very big fact stays hidden to a reader if he or she does not just stop and actually perform the conversions so they can compare, besides just the trend lines of the two graphs.
You might be surprised to learn that the United Kingdom has more tornadoes, relative to its land area, than any other country.
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/severeweather/tornadoes.html
My daughter came home from school and told me that her 8th grade science teacher showed a video on man-made global warming by Bill Nye, The Science Guy. As you all know, kids consider him a science guru.
At the parent/teacher conferences, I discussed the issue of man-made global warming with the science teacher. I asked the science teacher if she was going to show Al Gore’s movie “An Inconvenient Truth.” If so, I wanted to know ahead of time because I was going to pull my daughter out of science class on that day. The teacher shook her head “no” and said, “We wouldn’t do that.” She said that she was not supposed to interject any bias in the science class. I then said that that was exactly what she did when you showed the video of Bill Nye, The Science Guy.
In a follow-up letter, I gave the teacher some background on Bill Nye and explained how Bill is part of Repower America (Alliance for Climate Protection). Here is a short video.
The founder and chairman of the Alliance for Climate Protection is Al Gore.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alliance_for_Climate_Protection
I told the science teacher that Bill Nye is acting as a surrogate for Al Gore in the public schools and that we must not confuse our kids with science fiction in a science class that is supposed to teach science fact. I asked her, “How would our kids be able to distinguish between the differences?” And, I told her, “Their future relies on their trust, and their trust is fragile.”
I then told her that I would really appreciate having some time with the kids to present an opposing point of view based entirely on scientific fact. I received no response to the letter.
Every parent is a warrior and must confront this scientific ignorance in our public schools.
Keep Smiling 🙂
Jeff Wiita
Who can possible deny global warming when we now have a full proof proxy, in the form of how many times tornado sirens sound in and around St. Louis!
At least, that’s apparently what they’ll teach you at Washington University, courtesy of Ursula Goodenough.
Jeff Wiita
Is Bill Nye paid by Alliance for Climate Protection to be a global warming advocate, or what they call someone that “raises awareness”?
Bill Nye was always one to mix a little political agenda with his science teaching when I was a kid, but it looks like he has run completely off the science rails these days. And given his incoherent babbling here, I think he’s is now a pile of wreckage on a canyon floor.
And Ryan Maue still does not understand the point of Steve’s latest silly video.
Mac the Knife
May 28, 2011 at 10:15 pm
I’m an engineer also. Some of the things that have been said to me would have made many here curl up and blow away. I guess we play rough, or use to. I don’t know about the current crop of engineers though, they seem to be a bunch of wusses.
Amino Acids in Meteorites
I don’t know.
http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/britain-turns-into-a-tornado-hotspot-with-100-twisters-a-year-731802.html
The reason being the UK’s position to the ocean, closeness to Arctic air and very warm waters to the SW. USA compared has colder Artic air and warmer Gulf air meeting in tornado alley most of the time, so the tornado’s are severe/very severe at times. That’s why the ideal conditions in the USA are Spring, when the biggest difference in temperatures occur and therefore nothing to do with global warming.
The negative PDO and lower jet stream are ideal conditions and are not sign of a warming world. The last severe occurance of tornado’s observed also occurred at a similar period with a cooling planet in the early 1970’s. (negative PDO, La Nina and low jet stream)
If the globe was warming then this temperature difference would reduce and therefore less severe tornado’s would result. (the NOAA graph actually shows this) Anybody linking tornados with global warming have absolutely little idea what they are talking about. This is because the only scientific evidence link actually shows a decrease of severe tornado’s with a warming world, but government representives with an agenda can’t actually mention this fact.
I wonder if anyone has ever tried to repeat Bill Nye’s optical experiment. Does a flask of water with 390 ppm “fountain pen” ink really look that much darker than one with only 280 ppm? Of course this does not take into account that CO2 absorption is a narrow band effect and the typical ink has a broadband optical absorption effect.
I believe Venus is a red herring because the surface pressure there is so much higher than that of the Earth. I would not be surprised if a planet with a pure CO2 atmosphere and Earth normal surface pressure would be cooler without water vapor in the atmosphere.
Yeah, it’s kind of funny reading this post on Bill Nye tonight. I just saw some program that National Geographic Network was rerunning tonight about extreme weather in 2010 that talks about how it’s getting warmer (the term “climate change” is increasingly being used in the Nat Geo propaganda these days), there’s too much water vapor in the atmosphere, that we’ve caused the warming, and how “unprecedented” this weather was. And I didn’t even hear CO2 mentioned there, either.
The warmists have become much more subtle in their arguments, probably because they lack the evidence to claim what they previously claimed. I didn’t know you could have “too much” water vapor in the atmosphere, anyway.
I wish someone would go on FOX or any other network and bring out the big numbers. How much solar energy hits Earth. What matters there is the cross sectional area of Earth. Explain that the reason the poles are cooler and why mornings and evenings are cooler is due to the solar energy having to pass through more air before striking the surface and because the energy spreads over more surface (but not cross section!) area as the location moves away from the center facing the sun.
Also use the hard numbers of how much total energy hitting Earth varies with even a small percentage change in solar output. Explain how the warmistas use those small percentages of staggeringly huge amounts of energy, and slice up the area of Earth into tiny packets and go on about the relatively small amount of change per packet – neglecting to mention just how many billion square meters the cross sectional area of Earth is and how all those little amounts add up to a giant number.
These people slice it up into small chunks and focus on the small changes in one small chunk to hide the reality of the real numbers. It’s long past time someone pounded them into the dirt with the numbers.
“Bill Illis says:
May 29, 2011 at 6:00 am
It seems ridiculous to blame global warming when Temperatures fell over the past year and water vapour levels also fell by 4.0%.”
Bill do you know if there is a graph like
http://imageshack.us/m/221/9702/ensotempsvstcwvapr11.png
that you provided that shows how cloud cover (or insolation) varies with water vapour in the atmosphere?
son of mulder says:
May 30, 2011 at 3:09 am
Bill do you know if there is a graph that shows how cloud cover (or insolation) varies with water vapour in the atmosphere?
————————-
There isn’t a good enough dataset. The numbers that are available have changed overtime in ways that make little sense and, therefore, nobody believes they are reliable enough to use.
This is probably the best discussion of the data.
http://www.climate4you.com/ClimateAndClouds.htm
The climate models build in an assumption that cloud cover will increase by 2.0% to 7.0% per 1.0C increase in temperatures because they also assume water vapour levels will increase by 7.0% per 1.0C increase in temperatures.
I sometimes use out-going longwave radiation (which should decline as there is more cloud cover and increase when there is less cloud cover) and this seems to match the ENSO quite closely. OLR actually decreases (more cloud) when there is an El Nino and it is increases (less cloud) when there is a La Nina.
http://img703.imageshack.us/img703/65/ensocloudolrnino34nov10.png
The important thing is the spatial pattern, however. During a La Nina, cloud cover will increase over Australia and Indonesia and north-west North America, but it will decrease to near Zero over the central Pacific and the southern US. Overall, it goes down in a La Nina and up in an El Nino.
I still like Bill Nye. I think he’s wrong about AGW but I still like the guy.
This is the same Chris who said: “THE FIRST THING THAT NEEDS TO GO: “Junk” computer-generated or doppler-indicated tornado”, taking a step back in time (and a generation back in capability) when something similar was done with the WSR-57, WSR-74 network (i.e., manual identification of storm features with a non-volumetric scanning RADAR using unaided human eye on a PPI alone)?
I rest my case …
.
You can rest your case all you want. I could care less.
You are completely sabotaging and misrepresenting what I said.
Doppler radar is a quantum advancement in technology…and many thanks for those who have contributed in this advancement of science, as well as those dedicated specialists at NOAA and the NWS in giving us the tools to detect severe weather.
I was making a point on the nanny state politics which have created a cry wolf phenonmenon in weather forecasting.
And I stand behind that observation, 110%.
_Jim if you want to live in a nanny state, then I guess that is your prerogative.
I’ll live with a little more risk….and with that risk…be better knowledgable about the hazards that might beset us….and will not count on a computer-generated warning to help when most of the time, it is wrong.
The cry wolf effect….its downside…is worse than not warning at all.
BETTER WARNINGS ARE NEEDED.
Texas has taken the lead….and are beginning to reintroduce such warnings based upon direct observation, rather than something that only shows up on radar.
Direct observation. Hmmmm. Does that sound like something familiar?
Here is the context of what I actually said (and I stand behind it 110%) :
“THE FIRST THING THAT NEEDS TO GO: “Junk” computer-generated or doppler-indicated tornado (or even severe thunderstorm) “warnings”. This is the government, nanny-state BS Big Brother/Sister “protection” at its worst. When I was a kid a severe thunderstorm….meant hurricane force winds, hail, and power outages. Now every blip on the radar that “might” be a severe t-storm…IS declared one. Enough of this milk-toast, nanny-state BS!”
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA