Why Nobody Ever Calls The Weather Normal
By Dr. Matt Ridley
WHEN the history of the global warming scare comes to be written, a chapter should be devoted to the way the message had to be altered to keep the show on the road. Global warming became climate change so as to be able to take the blame for cold spells and wet seasons as well as hot days. Then, to keep its options open, the movement began to talk about “extreme weather”.
Part of the problem was that some time towards the end of the first decade of the 21st century it became clear that the Earth’s average temperature just was not consistently rising any more, however many “adjustments” were made to the thermometer records, let alone rising anything like as rapidly as all the models demanded.
So those who made their living from alarm, and by then there were lots, switched tactics and began to jump on any unusual weather event, whether it was a storm, a drought, a blizzard or a flood, and blame it on man-made carbon dioxide emissions. This proved a rewarding tactic, because people – egged on by journalists – have an inexhaustible appetite for believing in the vindictiveness of the weather gods. The fossil fuel industry was inserted in the place of Zeus as the scapegoat of choice. (Scientists are the priests.)
The fact that people have short memories about weather events is what enables this game to be played. The long Australian drought of 2001-7, the Brisbane floods of 2009-10 and the angry summer of 2012-13 stand out in people’s minds. People are reluctant to put them down to chance. Even here in mild England, people are always saying “I have never known it so cold/hot/mild/windy/wet/dry/changeable as it is this year”. One Christmas I noticed the seasons had been pretty average all year, neither too dry nor too wet nor too cold nor too warm. “I have never known it so average,” I said to somebody. I got a baffled look. Nobody ever calls the weather normal.
So it is deeply refreshing to read the new book called Taxing Air: Facts and Fallacies About Climate Change by the internationally respected geologist Bob Carter and illustrated by the cartoonist John Spooner, which puts climate change exactly where it should be – in perspective. After demolishing many other arguments for carbon taxes and climate alarm, Carter runs through recent weather events, showing that there is nothing exceptional, let alone unprecedented, about recent droughts, floods, heat waves, cyclones or changes to the Great Barrier Reef.
How come then that last week the World Meteorological Organisation produced a breathless report claiming that “the decadal rate of increase (of world temperature) between 1991-2000 and 2001-2010 was unprecedented”? It took professor Ed Hawkins of Reading University a short time to point out that this was no longer true if you compared 1993-2002 and 2003-2012 – ie, if you took the most up-to-date records. In that case, the latest decade showed a smaller increase over the preceding decade than either of the preceding decades did. In other words, the temperature standstill of the past 16 years has begun to show up in the decade-by-decade data.
And this is even before you take into account the exaggeration that seemed to contaminate the surface temperature records in the latter part of the 20th century – because of urbanisation, selective closure of weather stations and unexplained “adjustments”. Two Greek scientists recently calculated that for 67 per cent of 181 globally distributed weather stations they examined, adjustments had raised the temperature trend, so they almost halved their estimate of the actual warming that happened in the later 20th century.
Anyway, by “unprecedented”, the WMO meant since 1850, which is a micro-second of history to a paleo-climatologist like Carter. He takes a long-term perspective, pointing out that the world has been warming since 17,000 years ago, cooling since 8000 years ago, cooling since 2000 years ago, warming since 1850 and is little changed since 1997. Consequently, “the answer to the question ‘is global warming occurring’ depends fundamentally on the length of the piece of climate string that you wish to consider”. He goes on: “Is today’s temperature unusually warm? No – and no ifs or buts.”
Carter is a courageous man, because within academia those who do not accept that climate change is dangerous are often bullied.
Indeed, Carter, who retired from James Cook University before he got interested in the global warming debate but remains an emeritus fellow, recently found himself deprived of even an email address by colleagues resentful of his failure to toe the line. As the old joke goes: what’s the opposite of diversity? University.
http://www.thegwpf.org/matt-ridley-calls-weather-normal/
[sorry, but we aren’t interested in your slanted opinion – mod]
blackadderthe4th says:
July 15, 2013 at 4:20 am
CHERRY PICKER try black adder the third
you also get your policy
blackadderthe4th says:
July 15, 2013 at 4:20 am
‘ it became clear that the Earth’s average temperature just was not consistently rising any more’
“Has global warming stopped or stalled? R Alley has the answer!”
In summary, the alarmist can pick whatever starting point they like, say 1957(his birth year) to prove that the planet is getting warming, but the skeptics, which acknowledge warming since the end of the LIA , are fudging the data to support their position. Riddle me this Batman. Which side is revising history to support their argument?Which side has tried to close the discussion on CAGW? Which side has received $$$Billions to create models that don’t work, but support the political view? Which side is willing to enslave mankind with higher energy costs based on unproven theories? Which side is making the big bucks with this scam?
What should have been clear to R. Alley is that “Earth’s average temperature” is meaningless.
I nominate this for quote of the week. It says in one short phrase what this con is all about. Government paid for results, nothing else. If I put up a $5billion fund to find albino frogs – there will be many finds of albino frogs, a rising trend – even if they have to be bleached white (data torture, interpretation). This is what is going on in climate alarmism. The only thing they can realisticall say is that it has warmed since 1850 (end of the Little Ice Age, no surprises there) and the Arctic extent (not caused by warm air for sure http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/meant80n.uk.php). That’s it, the rest is a load of bollocks.
@- Jeff Alberts
“What should have been clear to R. Alley is that “Earth’s average temperature” is meaningless.”
Just as meaningless as the the body’s average temperature. It varies over the body between core, the limbs and surface, as well as altering over a daily cycle.
And yet medics do find the arbitrary measurement of a body temperature a useful metric!
“And yet medics do find the arbitrary measurement of a body temperature a useful metric!”
izen, medics find that useful for two reasons:
1. The nervous tissue, and in particular brain, can die of hyperthermia.
2. There is an outward temperature gradient in the body.
So when you note that a temperature taken at any arbitrary point on the surface of the body exceeds the well-known heat tolerance of the brain, you can infer that there is brain damage developing.
No analogy with global average being useful for any purpose.
omnologos says:
July 15, 2013 at 2:10 am
A 31-year-old satirical piece by an Italian climate scientist
http://omnologos.com/how-to-be-right-about-the-climate-always/
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wow! obviously a whole generation of climate scientists adopted this as their bible.
If you are a climatologist and you want to survive as a climatologist, perhaps even increasing your reputation, all you have to do is provide the exact diagnosis and prognosis that people expect.
To the question “Is the climate changing?“, by all means, never, ever reply “No, everything’s normal“, or “It’s just fakery pumped up by newspapers and on television“: because people would unanimously conclude that you understand nothing about meteorology, and nothing about climate.
It would be the end of your career.
The only sensible answer is: “Of course it is changing! It’s a well-known fact, scientifically confirmed and one that none cannot argue against“. You can then launch yourself in forecasting for the next hundred years a climate identical to the current one, amplifying the latest phenomena to extreme consequences.
If it is cold you’ll therefore predict “ice ages“, if it’s warm a “torrid period“, and if there are signs of strong variability “short-term climatic extremes” and more-or-less the same climate in the long term.
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I have a list of the record highs and lows for each date for Columbus Ohio that I copy/pasted into Excel in 2007 and again in 2012.
Of the record highs that are on both lists, 21 of the 2007 records have been “adjusted” in the 2012 list.
18 of the records set before 1950 have been lowered a total of about 22*F. The three set after 1950 have been raised a total of about 10*F.
Of the record lows that are on both lists, 31 of the 2007 records have been “adjusted” in the 2012 list.
They have been raised a total of about 63*F.
Now, this is just for one little spot on the globe and it only shows “adjustments” that changed record temperatures. I wonder what “adjustments” were made to past daily temperatures that did not “set” a record?
@- Jimbo
“If I put up a $5billion fund to find albino frogs – there will be many finds of albino frogs, a rising trend – even if they have to be bleached white (data torture, interpretation). This is what is going on in climate alarmism.”
Would you make the same claim for medicine?
Perhaps if the government had not put so much money into cancer research there would not have found the link with smoking, clearly a power grab by governments to dictate what people can and cannot smoke, and the alarmism about the health effects of smoking would never have happened.
The idea that problems go away if scientists are prevented from researching them is one of the silliest I have encountered in a while…. Can you think of any other example where scientific research has resulted in fraudulent alarmism based on century old physics and confirmed by military research in the 1950?
I learned this weekend that Sharknado’s are caused by global warming!
We need to do something NOW!!!!
PS. That is a wonderfully bad movie! Makes it perfectly OK to carry around a chainsaw if you’re concerned about climate!!!!
Off topic but in my last comment I messed up the formatting. The answer is probably “no”, but is there any way for me to look at my comment to see where I messed up?
(I probably put the “/blockquote” in the wrong place.)
http://www.columbian.com/news/2013/jun/25/94-in-alaska-weather-extremes-tied-to-jet-stream/
The jet stream is about 14 percent slower in the fall now than in the 1990s
Early California wildfires fueled by heat contrasted with more than a foot of snow in Minnesota. Seattle was the hottest spot in the nation one day, and Maine and Edmonton, Canada, were warmer than Miami and Phoenix.
“I’ve been doing meteorology for 30 years and the jet stream the last three years has done stuff I’ve never seen,” — Jeff Masters, Lead Meteorologist for WeatherUnderground
Last fall, a dip in the jet stream over the United States and northward bulge of high pressure combined to pull Superstorm Sandy almost due west into New Jersey, Francis said. That track is so rare and nearly unprecedented that computer models indicate it would happen only once every 714 years, according to a new study by NASA and Columbia University scientists.
When was the last time you saw massive cut-off low force its way from Virginia into Texas?
do yourself a favor, watch this animation:
https://www.eldoradocountyweather.com/current/satellite/goeseast-wv.php
and tell me, what part of any of this is “normal abnormality”?
They are the brave few who for years have put themselves into a very real danger zone, while everyone else kept their mouths shut and their heads down. Over the years more than a few of them, like Prof. Bob Carter this week, have paid the price for such integrity. For what it’s worth, they have my lasting admiration and if you’re a true skeptic, they should have yours as well.
http://thepointman.wordpress.com/2013/06/28/know-your-enemy-the-alarmist-scientist/
Pointman
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I think you missed his point. This is usually used in a different context but, “You get what you pay for.”
The question is, are all the “climate change” related grants granted to obtain an unbiased understanding of “climate” or are they granted bolster an environmentalist/political agenda?
I don’t know how old you are. I’m 59 and I remember back in the ’60’s the environmentalist were going after “Big Oil”. That was long before “global warming” became the lever to power.
jai mitchell says:
The jet stream is about 14 percent slower in the fall now than in the 1990s
So what? Abnormal extreme weather? No, just another scare tactic.
Early California wildfires fueled by heat contrasted with more than a foot of snow in Minnesota. Seattle was the hottest spot in the nation one day, and Maine and Edmonton, Canada, were warmer than Miami and Phoenix.
So what? Abnormal extreme weather? No, just another scare tactic.
“I’ve been doing meteorology for 30 years and the jet stream the last three years has done stuff I’ve never seen,” — Jeff Masters, Lead Meteorologist for WeatherUnderground
So what? Abnormal extreme weather? No, just another scare tactic.
Last fall, a dip in the jet stream over the United States and northward bulge of high pressure combined to pull Superstorm Sandy almost due west into New Jersey, Francis said. That track is so rare and nearly unprecedented that computer models indicate it would happen only once every 714 years, according to a new study by NASA and Columbia University scientists.
So what? Abnormal extreme weather? No, just another scare tactic.
When was the last time you saw massive cut-off low force its way from Virginia into Texas?
So what? Abnormal extreme weather? No, just another scare tactic.
and tell me, what part of any of this is “normal abnormality”?
So what? Abnormal extreme weather? No, just another scare tactic.
Comments in italics above were made by someone who has no understanding of the climate Null Hypothesis. Regular weather events are scaring that frightened little baby.
izen says:
“Can you think of any other example where scientific research has resulted in fraudulent alarmism…”
ALAR in apples, killer bees, Y2K… the list is long.
Also, izen, I got your ‘earth’s average temperature’ right here. Go ahead and panic; you and mitchell make a matched pair of frightened climate alarmists.
Mikeyj says:
July 15, 2013 at 7:20 am
‘received $$$Billions to create models that don’t work’ whoops! Can we trust climate models?
“Extreme weather”.
I don’t know about other countries but here in the USA topo maps and real estate maps often mark floodplains. Does anybody know how many times a local 100 year floodplain has been exceeded in recent years? I don’t recall any of the reports on flooding saying that a 100 year flood plain has been exceeded.
@Jeff Alberts says:
July 15, 2013 at 7:47 am
‘What should have been clear to R. Alley is that “Earth’s average temperature” is meaningless.’ why?
hi – could I get a soursce on this ? “Two Greek scientists recently calculated that for 67 per cent of 181 globally distributed weather stations they examined, adjustments had raised the temperature trend, so they almost halved their estimate of the actual warming that happened in the later 20th century.”
The UK Met Office recently held an emergency meeting:
“Weather and climate experts from across the UK came together at the Met Office’s HQ in Exeter today for a workshop to discuss the recent run of unusual seasons in Europe.”
“Today’s included sessions which looked at the weather patterns and their potential causes in three recent seasons – the cold winter of 2010/11, the wet summer of 2012, and this year’s cold spring.”
From personal experience and a casual glance at the Met Office temperature figures it struck me that the variations seemed pretty much what we expect from our UK weather.
As a manufacturing engineer I was introduced to the wonderful world of control charts so I decided to construct these for the cold winter of 2010/11, the wet summer of 2012, and this year’s cold spring.
You can see the charts at http://oldgifford.wordpress.com
See anything unusual? Let me know if you do because it seems our UK weather is just as normal as it has ever been
You are not allowed to cheat in medicine – you could go to jail, but climate scientists get a get out of jail free card.
Governments didn’t put money into cancer research because they wanted to find a link. Let’s see what happens if a sceptical climate scientist applies for a grant to investigate an imminent ice age. That is not what they want to hear and yet Rasool and Scneider got funding while in Nasa and produced a paper in 1971 predicting just that. Brrrrr.
I never said scientists should be prevented from researching. I want them to stop researching non-existent problems ’caused’ by man.
‘See anything unusual?’, ‘UK Mean Spring Temperature 1910-2012’, ‘ Let me know if you do because it seems our UK weather is just as normal as it has ever been’
‘warmest UK April for more than 100 years…the records, which go back more than 100 years, show much of the UK experienced temperatures 3 to 5C warmer than is normal for April…the UK average temperature was 10.7C, exceeding the previous warmest April on record of 10.2C in 2007…the UK-wide records began in 1910, but the central England temperature series goes back to 1659, making it the warmest April here for over 350 YEARS’
http:\\www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-13269741
jai mitchell says:
July 15, 2013 at 8:48 am
““I’ve been doing meteorology for 30 years and the jet stream the last three years has done stuff I’ve never seen,” — Jeff Masters, Lead Meteorologist for WeatherUnderground”
He has done meteorology for one half cycle of he AMO.
Oh, and he has never done meteorology during a grand minimum of the sun.
And he’s surprised???