From Tom Neslon who writes:
Barking madness in the New York Times: Global warming blamed for coldest winter in China in 30 years and many other extreme cold events; story illustrated with a photo of snow on the palm trees of Jerusalem
Extreme Weather Grows in Frequency and Intensity Around World – NYTimes.com
All this recent shift to pushing “extreme weather” in the clueless MSM made me wonder how the public is responding to it. Obviously, the use of the term has been dramatically on the rise, in fact it is a veritable hockey stick:
Source: Google ngram viewer (note: data only available to 2008)
But, I was really surprised at the public response. It seems that the public just might be smarter than the MSM and the AGW doomers think, or maybe they are just fed up with hype. Search trends on Google are flat:
Source: Google Trends
It seems that “extreme weather” is not catching on. I’m sure the doomers would say it is a “communications problem“. Compare “extreme weather” to the peak from Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth in 2007. All terms seem to be in an interest slump now.
Further, it seems to be mainly an English speaking aberration, the rest of the world apparently has even less interest.
Not to worry though, there’s still room on the leader-board for a new meme once the MSM and the doomers realize that “extreme weather” has fizzled out as a propaganda communications tool:
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After the PM trotted out the climate change line about our sudden summer heat wave (fancy that in summer?) and associated bushfires the Opposition pointed out the obvious to the carbon taxers-
http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/national/climate-change-link-to-heat-fires-utterly-simplistic-says-warren-truss/story-fndo28a5-1226550415035
Naturally government grant scientists had to get in on the act with their climate chaos thingy backing up the PM’s climate change scolding opportunity.
Ho hum. Another weather event, another proof of climate change.
not sure if any one has seen this, it has to be one of the most barking mad things on climate change I have ever read-
By Miranda Leitsinger, NBC News
The plight of a pod of killer whales that got trapped by ice in a mostly frozen Canadian bay this week was a “good example of what climate change can do” in the Arctic, a researcher said Friday.
Gail Combs says:
January 11, 2013 at 2:23 pm
Most people who come to WUWT have their brains ‘in gear’ and that is all that matters.
1) I’m glad you stated “most”.
2) I’m glad you get to determine what matters.
With Oz you need to bear in mind the First Fleet rolled up in sailing ships in 1788 to plant the Union Jack on ‘Terra Nullius’ as they described it at the time. Not a lot of Stevenson Screens onboard at the time and lately we’ve been scolded incessantly at how the thermometerless original inhabitants were here for thousands of years but no matter, climate chaos it is and naturally it’s all the fault of a current pale skinned generation or two. Never mind aboriginals used to burn off vast tracts of bush for hunting purposes and Oz flora has adapted specially to that over the centuries.
No it’s all about the here and now and in that regard with the increasing mediocrity of our cloistered Sandstones, I have no doubt we’re no different from the narcissism of the present and future movers and shakers who think only they move and shake Gaia-
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-20756247
richard says:
January 11, 2013 at 2:55 pm
not sure if any one has seen this, it has to be one of the most barking mad things on climate change I have ever read-
By Miranda Leitsinger, NBC News
The plight of a pod of killer whales that got trapped by ice in a mostly frozen Canadian bay this week was a “good example of what climate change can do” in the Arctic, a researcher said Friday.
===========================================================================
Global Warming dooms the polar bears. Climate Change dooms the orcas.
Don’t they remember what they said yesterday?
The movement gets stranger and stranger…
What happened to good old ocean acidification or the even older meme of rising sea levels?
Sometimes I just can’t keep up with the speed warmists are changing their narrative according to their needs.
I read this statement in a report of the UK Met Office
The Met Office says despite the change, “we will continue to see near-record levels of global temperatures in the next few years”. …..
I fear this is absolutely right – which ever side of the fence you sit – the temperature isn’t going to plunge over night. That being the case we should be prepared for some pretty “extreme weather” over the next five or six years. The “noise” (of up to 0.8 degrees C) may cause it to drop here and there but the moving average has a lot of inertia to over come. I predict the “extreme weather” meme has years of currency left in it before we move to the “global cooling” meme.
geran says:
January 11, 2013 at 3:12 pm
Gail Combs says:
January 11, 2013 at 2:23 pm
Most people who come to WUWT have their brains ‘in gear’ and that is all that matters.
1) I’m glad you stated “most”.
2) I’m glad you get to determine what matters.
======================================================================
“Brains in gear”? Then why are you here?
(Just thought I’d reply to you with the same depth you replied to Gail.)
observa
…the Opposition pointed out the obvious to the carbon taxers-…
Mr Truss, who is the leader of the National Party, leads the political equivalent of WUWT-thinking in Australia. To give foreigners a sense of what is going on here – I am not aware of a single National Party representative in either the House or the Senate who supports AGW science.
The context here is a plethora of local, regional, state and national heatwave and temperature records being smashed, that is to say, not just being lifted by .1 of a degree or so. Although 350,000 ha of mostly farmland has burned in one state alone, and well over a hundred houses have burned in several states, it is fairly clear that Australia has so far dodged the real bushfire bullet this season. This is, IMHO, mostly the result of some very, very good fire response set-ups, and the dedication and willingness to take risks of thousands of fire fighters. Governments plus volunteers have mostly got it right. Individual homeowners have also smartened up a bit since multiple fire-related deaths in recent years.
Amidst the stinking heat, Mr Truss, a canny politician, has tried to pour cold water on what he reckons are the over-heated imaginations of the faint-hearts.
But – his Coalition has a policy to spend $10 billion to reduce CO2 emissions in Australia by 5% by 2020.
You want the ‘obvious’? This is the ultimate in cynical political behaviour. He can’t have it both ways. Either climate science is crap or he wants to waste $10 billion.
BTW, the National Party’s stronghold is rural Australia. By far the strongest demographic of those who deny climate science, propotionally, live in rural areas so there is a natural symmetery between the National Party positions and those of its supporters.
The other day on the radio Mr Truss’s natural constituents were complaining, literally, about failed grain crops, burnt pastureland, burnt houses, burnt shedding, burnt fences and stock killed by fire, stone fruit ‘boiling’ on the trees (head of the stone fruit association or wtte, so he must have known what he was talking about), runs of forty+ temperatures making it very hard to work cattle, fruit not setting on tomato plants, petrol in engines vaporising, and the horrible consequences of sundry other weather extremities destroying their livelihoods. I was driving through some of the best sheep country in Australia as I was listening to some of this stuff on the radio and the fields were burnt black to the horizon and farmers were reported to be out shooting burnt, but not yet dead, animals.
There is resilience. Farmers in unburnt areas are donating hay and grain. People are donating trucking transport and the Governments at Fed and State level have kicked in with various disaster relief measures including, I understand, interest-free loans.
The other bit of good news is that two years of la Ninas had pretty-well filled all the irrigation dams.
But your adoring reference to Mr Truss is misplaced. Clearly, he talks out of both sides of his mouth.
Historically the greatest swings in extreme happened when it was colder, not warmer. Even CO2 advocate Michael Mann wrote that the Little Ice Age was “more significant in terms of increased variability of the climate, rather than changes in the average climate itself”
There is also a ton of literature on the Dansgaard-Oeschger Cycles where global temperatures varied by 18 to 27°F within 20 to 50 years when it was much colder 20 thousand years ago.
Now they these religious CO2 zealots believe global warming causes all extreme cold events. Omnipotent CO2 works in strange and mysterious ways and controls everything. Once that stance is accepted, there is no scientific way to disprove CO2. Every contradiction that would make a wise man pause and question, is still evidence of CO2. Un-friggin-believable!
observa
Never mind aboriginals used to burn off vast tracts of bush for hunting purposes and Oz flora has adapted specially to that over the centuries.
Indigenous burning was carried out for various reasons. The burning was mostly done in small patches and not by way of ‘vast tracts’. Routine ‘vast tract’ burning is a recent phenomenum – partly caused by the removal of Indigenous people from vast tracts of the continent. Oz flora has not adapted to it and the change in fire regime is a significant contributor to Australia’s extinction epidemic.
Fuel reduction burning in Australia is being hampered by a mixture of the following: concerns about extinction, the increasing close juxtaposition of property and fire prone areas, lack of suitable weather windows, the monstrous amount of paperwork involved in ‘risk’ management for fire management organisations, and the ever-increasing likelihood that if you get it wrong you will be sued, the legal profession having horned into the fire space with a vengeance. Many of the current fires started on private property and farmers who start a fire by negligence, or even allow a lightning strike fire get away by negligence, now risk litigation that would ruin most of them.
Ok so what is to be gained by news orgs continuing the scare go green tactics? Lets have a little look at GE, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Electric IF this wiki entry is even half correct this company, is “ranked among the Fortune 500 as the 6th-largest firm in the U.S. by gross revenue,[7] as well as the 14th most profitable” They also ” acquired the windpower assets of Enron during its bankruptcy proceedings” and managed to sell more…. Considering they are the PARENT COMPANY of MSNBC, NBC, Comcast and numerous mags and rags.. Do you honestly think it doesn’t benefit their company to keep the AGW theory going? And that is only one way It profits off of this hoax.
If you think ANY of our news organizations do not have a corporate agenda, think again. I can show you a parent company for most of the MSM stations, papers and magazines. It was our mistake to let these huge conglomerates form. The people we sent to DC to watch our backs have been putting cash in their pockets and looking the other way for some time. Now our media is not even remotely what the “fourth estate” was meant to be. The final blame comes down to all of us. Our lazy put the r or the d back in voting… is our ultimate undoing.
mogamboguru says:
January 11, 2013 at 3:30 pm
What happened to good old ocean acidification or the even older meme of rising sea levels?
Are they trick questions? Global sea levels are rising. Ocean chemistry is changing. And the ocean is gaining heat.
Haven’t heard from David Karoly for a while but he sure is stoking up the fire now:
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-01-12/climate-commission-predicts-more-heatwaves-bushfires/4461960
As I recall he didn’t seem quite as sure how to explain the Queensland floods:
“What we are seeing over the last 50 years and over the last 100 years is a change in this pattern of extremes with more hot and more wet extremes in northern Australia and more hot and more dry extremes in southern Australia and that pattern is exactly what we would expect from climate change due to increasing greenhouse gases in the atmosphere”
From what I understand of the current Australian heat wave is that it is being caused by a later and DRYER than normal wet season in Northern Australia with little cloud and rain to mask the heat moving over the centre. But no doubt Prof Karoly can pinpoint CO2 as the cause of this in some way or other.
What I find a little strange is that I can recall regular heat waves for the last 50 years but certainly nothing unusual over the last decade or two. Why suddenly this year I wonder?
But I am sure that we will find out who is right in the next 5 years – WUWT posters who say that temperatures are flattening and CO2 has little affect or Prof Karoly who asserts unless we drastically change our emissions Australia will become a summer Thermaggedon. Fascinating stuff!
Rich Lambert says:
January 11, 2013 at 2:37 pm
“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary. ” H.L. Mencken
Mencken is an over-generalising fool.
He might have changed his mind were he writing that ‘wisdom’ in a house in front of a fire front of a so-called ‘imaginary’ Australian bushfire. Australian governments of all stripes have been trying to frighten the populace about bushfires for some time. Fortunately it is getting through. Houses and property are still being burnt but people are getting smarter.
But, but, but http://www.foxnews.com/science/2013/01/11/shock-and-anger-as-new-york-times-eliminates-environment-desk/
Gunga Din says:
January 11, 2013 at 3:46 pm
“Brains in gear”? Then why are you here?
(Just thought I’d reply to you with the same depth)
Exactly….
I think it’s pretty simple. Even a layman should be able to understand it.
If it’s hot it’s global warming.
If it’s cold it’s climate change.
If the weather is atypical on any given day, that’s extreme weather.
You’re going to see a lot of extreme weather from now on due to the global warming/climate change. It’ll be like that town where all the children are above average.
ABC was all over this and the HONEST YEAR EVER…. The dam fools ignore the site data that says it isn’t happening and being the good little commies they are, they promote the agenda for control… even in the face of massive cooling and record lows globally..
Do they know how foolish they look or are there so many low information voters out there that can be deceived so easily?
*** CAUTION **** ******** WARNING ******
Do not get your hopes up the new term is much more subtle. “Sustainable development.” This harmless, actually wholesome and worthwhile sounding phrase has been corrupted beyond belief. Look it up on Wikipedia. This new propaganda has infiltrated the schools, universities (they have deans in charge of insuring all branches of the university incorporate Sustainable development. An now it is infiltrating the government contracts. Look up the mission statements of EPA, and may other government departments. Worse yet it is hidden in everything. Check your local building codes as one example. There is even Sustainable politics!
geran says:
The promotion of AGW is HIGHLY political. (Earth can be saved by taxation, for example.)
All issues involving the distribution of resources and/or their potential redistribution and/or the maintenance of their current distribution are highly political.
Thus BAU boosters who are gaining a quid from fossil fuel are engaged in the politics of maintaining BAU. That means trying to cast doubt on the science of AGW.
Not rocket science. Not even climate science.
OY! “honest” should have read HOTTEST… I hate auto spell check..
Bill H
Could you please provide a link to where did the ABC say that this was the hottest year ever for Australia? If the ABC has not said that it was the hottest year ever, please would you mind admitting that you are making stuff up?
King of Cool
What I find a little strange is that I can recall regular heat waves for the last 50 years but certainly nothing unusual over the last decade or two. Why suddenly this year I wonder?
Good question. The short suggestions appear to be the status of the Indian Ocean Dipole and the late arrival of the monsoon. The direct impact of both appears to be some months of very dry weather and some months of very low cloud cover, both of which have contributed to the development of a massive pool of very hot air in inland Australia. That begs the questions of why the IOD is doing what it is doing, and why the monsoon is late.
If anyone can shed technical light on it, I would like to hear their thinking.