Guest essay by Alan Caruba
I am giving thanks this week, despite the heat wave, that I have not read, nor heard, a single claim that it is proof that global warming has arrived and we are all doomed.
By the time the global warming hoax was in its final days, we were being told that mid-winter blizzards were signs of it. Now the charlatans have switched their message, calling it “climate change” and this is so bogus that it defies description.
Of course the climate changes! It has done that from the billions of years before the first man climbed down out of the tree to stand upright; just in time to learn how to run like hell from whatever creature thought he would make a tasty snack.
I live in the Northeast and residents in the tri-state area face an entire week of temperatures in the upper 90s. The National Weather Service predicts the heat index (what it feels like outside) could hit 105 degrees. In 2006, about forty people died from heat stroke in New York during a heat wave from late July to early August. Most lacked air conditioning.
Curiously, the Earth is actually the farthest away from the Sun during our summer months. The way the National Geographic explained it the “Earth’s elliptical orbit means there will be a point each year when the planet is closest to the sun, called perihelion, and a point when it is farthest away, known as aphelion.” The aphelion was reached on July 5.
By contrast in January of this year Australia was undergoing a historic heat wave complete with wildfires in five of its six states. It set new records hitting 104.6 degrees Fahrenheit; summer in Australia runs from December to February. Far to the north, however, this summer has been the coldest on record in the Arctic and it is forecast to get even colder there towards the end of the month.
What I always find interesting is the way much of the population seems to have absolutely no memory of any previous heat wave or, for that matter, a major blizzard. Either way the news media goes bananas, usually seeing it an apocalyptic scenario. No, it’s just a perfectly normal heat wave or blizzard.
It’s a good idea to keep in mind these and other events are the “weather”, not the “climate.” The climate is measured in terms of centuries or, at the very least, decades. The climate is a trend. The weather is what’s happening outside today.
These weather extremes can be quite dramatic. Wikipedia notes that by 1851, half the population of England was living in towns while London had already grown into a major city. “Modern toilets appear on the scene before modern infrastructure, turning the Thames into an open sewer. In June 1858, a heat wave hit London and baked the river into a fetid mess.” A newspaper reported that “Gentility of speech is at an end—it stinks; and whoso once inhales the stink can never forget it and count himself lucky if he lives to remember it.” The result was that Parliament moved upstream and anyone who could afford it left town.
In June 1976, England sweltered for fifteen straight days of heat in the ninety degrees and parts of the southwest went without rain for forty-five days. Forest fires destroyed trees and crops.
In August 1948 in the northeast, New York, Philadelphia, and other cities saw the temperature hit a hundred degrees and people flocked to air-conditioned movie theatres or to the airy beaches like Coney Island. I am old enough to recall the pre-air conditioned times before they became a common appliance in people’s homes and apartments. Electric fans provided what little relief there was to be found.
You don’t have to live in a city to endure a heat wave. During the Great Depression the 1936 heat wave that hit the Midwest turned farms into dust bowls and farmers lost their summer crops. It is estimated that some 5,000 people died. Chicago was hard hit and as far north as Toronto. The scene was repeated in 1995 in Chicago when an estimated 500 people died from heat-related deaths.
By the end of the week, Al Gore is sure to issue another one of his boring claims that the current heat wave is “proof” of global warming. Ignore him.
First it was Global Warming, then it was Climate Disruption and in 2009/2010 (here in the UK) they started calling Climate change after a series of bad Winters and Summers.
As you have said (I’ve also been saying it since I first heard of Climate Change) it is a cover for the fact that the models were wrong.
The best thing here is to fight fire with fire and say Climate Change is a natural process that has been going on for billions of years (12,000 years ago most of northern Europe and America was under miles of ice and the Sahara was a lush green oasis).
They then have to prove that this is not the case, which is very hard to do 🙂
It’s 62 degrees tonight. Once again, my tomatoes will be late to set. Expecting highs in the low 80s for most of this week.
Anthony, I too remember the summers without air conditioning 🙂 We spent most of our summers in the Sierras to stay cool. Camping spots were free and safe. School started again in mid September and we had several weeks of high 95-110 degree days. Our teachers would turn off the lights to make it cooler. Maybe it helped. I can remember walking to the city pool and seeing the bank thermometer at 112 degrees. That was probably 1961.
“In June 1976, England sweltered for fifteen straight days …” – I remember it well. It was the year I started to suffer from hay fever. This week, the BBC linked the current high temperatures with climate change and suggested that it would create more hay fever sufferers. Funny, that.
I was made to do Climate Freezing maths just before the Summer of 1976. How many painful nights I had trying to put all this cooling to rest.
Since then I’ve read of “Glacier Girl” lost under the ice and of other things. To think we have any understanding of the weather outside of local effects is assine.
If, Polution and it’s reduction was the aim then I’d applaude that, but it isn’t. It’s some bogus BS that continues to stink.
Al Gore may you have many restless nights.
“….By contrast in January of this year Australia was undergoing a historic heat wave complete with wildfires in five of its six states….”
Sorry, nothing but hype.
Australia has had plenty of hot summers. This one was very normal: The satellite data shows that.
The dramatic headlines were based on doubtful surface measurements and some unspecified averaging:
“…The AWAP records from ground based thermometers are based on a method that still has not been made public. What we do know is that there were 700-800 sites (strange how the actual number so hard to state).
…….. less than half of those were operating in the 1930s and 1940s when we had our last major heat waves…”
http://joannenova.com.au/2013/06/australias-angry-hot-summer-was-hot-angry-hype-satellites-show-it-was-average/
Records supposedly bested (Hot, cold, fires, rain, floods) had occurred in years (where shown) listed in the ‘Angry Summer’ story:
1972, 1972, 1939, 2006, 1890, 1896, 1981, 2011, 1979, 1958, 2011, 2007, 1976, 1920, 1968, 2006, 1992.
The very fact that records of years, decades or even more than a century ago are only now being matched surely tells us more about the variability of the planet than it does of “sudden and dramatic change”.
Australia was undergoing a historic heat wave complete with wildfires in five of its six states. It set new records hitting 104.6 degrees Fahrenheit;
That makes as much sense as saying that the USA hit 104.6 degrees Fahrenheit. In many places in Australia a temperature of 104 degrees would be considered a mild day during the heights of summer.
Sort of like that idiot warmist who commented on a previous thread that said current weather patterns (obviously all caused by “climate change”) were going to cause big waves in Hawaii.
I nearly collapsed laughing, jaw still aches. 🙂
I struggle trying to recall the most-recent blizzard here in Perth, Western Australia. 😉
Too much is made of floods and bushfires. They are a well-known feature of land.
Much of the devastation wrought by bushfires on people has been brought about by “environmental” policies, limiting or banning the fuel-reduction burns that would deny fuel to fires and hence diminish the intensity of inevitable fires.
Similarly, policies have prevented the building of dams and the maintenance of catchments to maintain streamflows to provide potable water for a growing population. One that has tripled since e.g. the last major reservoirs for dringing water were constructed in the populated SW of Western Australia.
And in other areas, dams which would also serve as flood mitigation were never constructed due to environmental concerns. Floods have mainly impacted on people who’ve been settled onto floodplains. That’s been exascerbated by Climate Commissars insisting that the rivers will never flow again, etc. due to global warming.
And throughout, white elephants in the form of energy-guzzling desalination plants are constructed; benefitting nobody but the construction company.
And in Tasmania, they recently recorded the COLDEST day on record in Tasmania.
Interestingly, on that ONE hot summer day in Sydney, they said the record was 45.8C, but I looked the next day, and the automatic weather station summary for the hot day only recorded a maximum of 45.3C. This is the same record maximum temperature from 1939.
After all the warming we are meant to have had, finally we reach the same temp as 74 years ago.
US Death Valley didn’t even come close to the 1913 record did they ?
@Bernd,
I was at a meeting of some of the top “water” guys recently, they were discussing the climate models.
Their conclusion was that the models have ZERO skill in predicting changes in precipitation.
Different models come up with a range of something like +/- 20% change in what is already basically guesswork. ZERO SKILL !!
Which is probably more skill in the climate models wrt temperature.
last sentence should have read…
Which is probably more skill than the climate models show wrt temperature
interestingly the UK alarmists have stopped linking heatwaves to global warming sometimes in the summer of 2011
http://omnologos.com/monbiots-silence-wrong-kind-of-heat-as-orange-groves-refuse-to-attack/
This is because everybody likes NICE weather in the uk for a change after months of cold and damp darkness. If warmth could be linked to CO2 emissions people would leave their cars running on empty, I’m sure.
AndyG55, the recent Met Office annoucement on future precipitation for the UK gave a range of -30% to +20%, meaning that drought is a bit more likely from the model runs, but who knows?
This was taken up by Krebs and others (you’d think a real scientist like Krebs wouldn’t be so easily fooled) as proof of dire things to come – somehow the -30% figure draws attention, and the fact that the range covers mainly “nothing to see here” is ignored.
Reminds me of the forecast for the 2009 winter. Met Office said it would be colder (30% chance), average (30% chance) or warmer (40% chance) than normal. All the media read this as predicting a mild winter. After the event of the coldest in donkey’s years, the met Office pointed at that they has predicted average or colder at 60% likelyhood!
We should remember that “IPCC” stands for Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. It was established in 1988. To my knowledge there has never been an Intergovernmental Panel on Global Warming.
If you make your models predict a large enough range, one of then is bound to be right.
Didn’t works so well for climate temperature models though, did it. 😉
The twisting of the language is a serious weapon that is used by a certain type of personality, and honest people do not know how to deal with it. It is a political tactic. We saw it used very effectively in the EU debate by the people who set up the Euro currency who used exactly the same strategy, they used the same methods as has again been re-used by the perpetrators of the AGW scare: they took control of the media, refused proper debate, when debate was unavoidable they labeled opponents xenophobes and little Englanders, they invented bogus statistics about job dependency, when facts proved them wrong they changed their arguments and adopted the facts as reason for more, not less monetary union.
Truth and facts are not enough to win against these people. To win you really have to reverse their language. An example of reversing is countering the word “denier” into “cult” and “believer”. Another is to reverse reporting of statistics, as has been achieved with simple memorable phrases such as “no temperature increase for 17 years” and “their models have failed”.
To speed up the process new concepts have to be created to carry the message through. For instance UHI is not understood, really it needs to be “Urban Heat Pollution” or “Temperature Pollution”. And phrases about homogenizing and adjusting of data has to be rephrased to become “tampering with the temperature record”. Honest people are always uncomfortable with this sort of use of language because they believe in long winded debate and well defined language. In debate they have strength, but in the media their instinctive honesty is a weakness.
omnologos says:
I worry about the UK if the temperature does start to take a dive.
Their energy infrastructure is trashed. Is not going to be nice for them at all.
So, I posted on a Calgary newspaper comment section that according to the flood report commissioned after 2005, the level of flooding (catastrophic, unprecedented) we experienced last month is considered a 22 year event.
The response I got before they locked comments was “that can’t be right, where was the flood in 1991?”.
I’m pretty sure most people who frequent WUWT know that a 22 year, or 100 year event don’t happen at those times like clockwork. This is why we need better education about climate. NOT “climate voodoo”, but actual climate as we’ve experienced it for millenia,
‘Of course the climate changes! It has done that from the billions of years before the first man climbed down out of the tree to stand upright’ of course there was and there was always a reason! Such as
‘Nearer our own time, the coming and going of the ice ages that have gripped the planet in the past two million years were probably triggered by fractional changes in solar heating (caused by wobbles in the planet’s orbit, known as Milankovitch cycles’
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn11650-climate-myths-global-warming-is-down-to-the-sun-not-humans.html
But they have no influence presently. So what is the forcing agent at present?
AGU, global warming and co2, with Richard Alley.
I spent the last 3 years commuting between southern Germany and Zurich, Switzerland. Each winter I was astounded, at the first major snowfall on the motorway, to see Swiss people failing to slow down, sliding off the end of corners, crashing into each others cars, and generally behaving as if they had no experience of snow whatsoever.
I figure that if Swiss people, some of the most careful and considerate of drivers anywhere in the world, cannot remember that in Switzerland it snows every year, then I cant expect anyone else to remember what happened 6 months ago …
“June 1976, England sweltered for fifteen straight days of heat in the ninety degrees”
And what a bloody damn fine summer that was! At boarding school in the north of England we considered ourselves extraordinarily blessed to be relieved of the interminable gray skies and rain, slated to occur some 230 days of the year.
The summer lives on in my memory today, as vivid now as it was then. So it was always very, very easy to be a “skeptic.” The emotion preceded the science.
Here in Virginia we are now in a sort of brief mild heat wave, with temps in the middle to upper 90s for highs and 70s for lows for five or six days; unpleasant, but far from unique. We are now at the highest CO2 levels since humans started keeping track. Our tomatoes have not ripened because the spring and early summer never got hot. Perhaps they will do something now. I know–this is weather, not climate. Suspicious nonetheless: if CO2 is such a driver of higher temps, why this cool summer? Surely cause-and-effect still operates as a principle. Of course it does–CO2 is merely not the only cause (and has probably already maxed out), and other causes have not yet been considered adequately in the warmists’ litany of dire effects.
Human memory is selective and partial.
That is why we keep records.
There is nothing normal, average or unexceptional about the massive preponderence of hot records over cold records for the last few decades. Whatever you call it that indicates a trend in the climate. Undeniable, inelectable and exceptional.
If the climate was just exhibiting ‘natura’ variation then the incidence of records would be decreasing and equal for cold and hot records. Human memory may be unreliable, but the objective data are unarguable. The climate has been and is warming.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/capital-weather-gang/wp/2013/06/26/warm-temperature-records-dramatically-outpacing-cold-records-in-washington-d-c/
I have posted this before elsewhere but it is relevant to this post
UK Climate and Control Charts
“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.
For those not familiar with a control chart an example is deciding if variations in a machine’s output is just normal or if the machine needs adjustment.
To decide if everything is OK the Mean and Standard Deviations of the data are computed and the upper and lower control limits are calculated and plotted on the chart of the data. The control limits are the mean plus and minus three times the standard deviation. These limits represent the edges of the normal distribution curve, so anything outside these limits is considered abnormal.
You can see the results at
http://oldgifford.wordpress.com/
Dr. John M. Ware
In the UK we are having a nice spell of very hot weather and curiously our tomatoes in the greenhouse haven’t ripened yet and I wondered why, perhaps they need an early spring to get them going.
With some of the hot weather hype I’ve heard lately I’m surprised we survived 40-60 years ago without air conditioning and the like growing up in Eastern North Carolina. I really think most of the weather reporting is over done to gain viewership and advertising dollars: tune in and we’ll tell you how bad it’s going to be. It’s mid-July and the Richmond (VA) weather is typically hot. I’m not sure I can really tell the difference between 92°F and 95°F.
The GWPF has a story today about how Reuters is now backing away from Climate Change coverage. Expect more of the same from other major outlets in coming years….
http://www.thegwpf.org/global-cooling-reuters-downgrades-climate-coverage/
H.
I remember the 1976 UK heatwave – I was 13 years old and lived in Plymouth, Devon. The southwest of England was hit very hard by the ‘drought’ of ’76, water reserves got so low that stand-pipes were introduced (for the first and only time in my life so far) and every household in every street had to collect their water rations by the bucket load from one stand-pipe at the end of the street.
But mostly I recall it was a long, gloriously hot summer holiday off school. ‘Jaws’ had just come out and there were already rumblings of a ‘fantastic-looking’ new science fiction film called ‘Star Wars’ or something coming in ’77… Halcyon days. I’d go back tomorrow.
1976! Oh What a Year! Endless summer, ladybird invasion, a Minister of Drought being appointed just days before the rain returned in earnest, Elton John and Kiki Dee top of the charts from July to September, and Southampton FC winning the FA Cup. Happy days…..
Henry –
not just Reuters, hopefully. David Shukman on BBC World has just done pieces in California & Texas, which were relatively CAGW-free on TV, tho i note he manages to slip the subject in in the text below:
(includes video) 14 July: BBC: The receding threat from ‘peak oil’
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-23280894
blackadderthe4th says:
July 16, 2013 at 2:19 am
It must be CO2, because he doesn’t know what else it could be. Forget 4,000,000,000 years of history and lets look at the last 150 years with the continuously “adjusted” data. If he was correct the computer models based on his beliefs would be correct and they’re not. What’s more arrogant? Man caused global warming, or man can stop global warming.
forgot to add the fracking link, tho i can’t see the actual video from the broadcast posted as yet:
16 July: BBC: David Shukman: US to begin exporting ‘fracked’ gas
But for the moment, a shale gas boom, made possible by fracking, is under way in the US with every prospect of it growing for decades to come.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-23317370
For Alan Caruba and others, here is bad weather from the past in the media. It’s horrible and is a sure sign of a steady state climate, when co2 was below the safe level of 350ppm. 😉
(Scroll down to go back in time)
http://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/bad-weather/
Peer reviewed Holocene climate extreme events by Jimbo (very horrible)
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/07/01/claim-recent-el-nino-behavior-is-largely-beyond-natural-variability/#comment-1351897
@Alan Caruba – I guess we are about the same age. I too remember the days when houses had fans, not central air. On hot summer night (just a few hundred miles south of you), we laid still in the bed hoping for a whiff of a breeze to evaporate the sweat from our bodies. Daytime was spent at a pool, under a hose, or at a beach. We were lucky. We had beaches.
In the mid 70s I had a job working outside. fortunately it was not hard manual labor (just a huckster at a theme park). I remember wringing my shirt out as it was so saturated with sweat that it was not damp, it was soaked. We have not duplicated that string of temperatures since then.
Weather changes. Climate changes. Those who grow old and realize this basic truth of life are the wiser for it. Those who sulk and stomp their feet like petulant children because the summers and/or winters of their maturity are not the same as their youth never grew up. A span of 70 years is nothing in the scheme of climate. Yet it is the span of a man’s life and so what was, he thinks should always be.
Anthony Watts see this:
“Polar ice melt may be natural event”
http://www.scotsman.com/news/environment/polar-ice-melt-may-be-natural-event-1-3001226
“Limits in detecting acceleration of ice sheet mass loss due to climate variability”
B.Wouters, J. L. Bamber, M. R. van den Broeke, J. T. M. Lenaerts and I. Sasgen in Nature Geoscience
http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/ngeo1874.html
“New study indicates need for continuous satellite monitoring of ice sheets to better predict sea-level rise”
http://www.bris.ac.uk/news/2013/9589.html
Here in the east, we are in the middle of the coolest, wettest summer in my 40 year memory. Due no doubt to CO2 induced warming…
Can we just get this right once and for all? There was no media or leftist conspiracy to call AGW ‘climate change’ rather than ‘global warming.’ It has long been called climate change in scientific circles (hence the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (1992) and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (1988) … you can go back to the early 1900s for more references). Within the public lexicon, it was Bush word man Frank Lutz who sent out the memo that the term ‘climate change’ be used, because “global warming” sounded too scary.
I lost credibility for the corporate-hired non-scientist (Caruba, a PR guy) as soon as I read his inaccurate echo-chamber-inteded second paragraph.
Henry says:
July 16, 2013 at 4:19 am
‘The GWPF has a story today …………’, but:-
‘The use of factually inaccurate material without a legitimate basis in science is an abuse of the foundation’s charitable status, which is all the more reprehensible because the public is more trusting of pronouncements made by charities’
http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change/lord-lawsons-climatechange-think-tank-risks-being-dismantled-after-complaint-it-persistently-misled-public-8659314.html
Global Warming and Climate Change mean different things and always have done. Getting your facts straight is a pretty important skill if you want to be taken seriously.
Mikeyj says:
July 16, 2013 at 4:48 am
‘blackadderthe4th says:
July 16, 2013 at 2:19 am
It must be CO2, because he doesn’t know what else it could be’, because
Only 500 million years of evidence that CO2 is a GHG and heating up the planet!
izen says:
“If the climate was just exhibiting ‘natura’ variation then the incidence of records would be decreasing and equal for cold and hot records.”
Now that’s climate change denial; the climate stasis hypothesis. Hmmm. Glacial maximums and minimums are pretty well established events. Hypothesis fail, try again.
How exactly does man-made warming look different than natural warming?
:Izen says:
July 16, 2013 at 3:44 am
“There is nothing normal, average or unexceptional about the massive preponderence of hot records over cold records for the last few decades. ”
Your statement confirms yet ignores the well known warming trend since the Llittle Ice Age.
Natural Climate Change in action. There’s no CO2 signal there. There’s no CO2 acceleration per the Doomsday Cult.
Is this a reason to cripple Western prosperity and cede hard-won freedoms to the government?
I think not.
Ask yourself where your liberty comes from. Then ask youself who convinced you to cede liberty for the sake of “The Planet”
First answer. Brave soldiers, Many of whom died doing it.
Second answer Government fed bureaucrats, many of whom will get rich doing it..
How big does a lie have to get for your ilk to recognize it.?
Notable weather extreme. DFW not equivalent to Death Valley. DFW, July 15th, 2013, maximum temperature = 74. Previous Lowest Max = 79 in 1900.
“”Julian in Wales says:
July 16, 2013 at 2:01 am
The twisting of the language is a serious weapon that is used by a certain type of personality, and honest people do not know how to deal with it. It is a political tactic. “”
Indeed Julian, It was the language of CO2 alarmism that made a skeptic of me.
This is an old post of mine:
The Man-Made Global Warming scam/lie/hoax becomes evident when one looks at the narrative that spews from the alarmists: Only evil and suffering can come from a warmer Earth. Fossil fueled, Western style prosperity must stop. This is the real agenda. Saving the Earth has little to do with it. Even if all the CO2 causes warming “theory” were true, It still does not absolutely dictate doom.
I say, why can’t it be? :
“Congratulations children, The Energy sources that fuel our economies and our prosperity, give us long life and comfort, these fossil fuels will also cause our planet to warm gently, about 2C degrees over the next century. What luck!
With the warmth and extra CO2 for plant life, millions of acres of tundra will become forests. Millions of acres of frozen steppe will become arable. Starvation will end. Prosperity will reach even the poorest people. We must keep searching for and burning oil and coal so we can improve our climate and prosper. Humanity will become wealthy. With this wealth we can preserve habitat for animals, protect the rain forest. We will clean the oceans and the land. Our future is bright. We are entering the age of abundance. “
Ah, the good old days. My schools did not have air conditioning until my senior year. (Gee, thanks for waiting that long.) North Carolina can have some hot summers. And the bad part is that the hottest of the hot days has no breeze. I remember many days where we were let out early due to the heat. And these weren’t days in June to August. We had early days due to heat in May and September. And there were many hot days where we weren’t let out early too. The bus ride home provided no relief either because it didn’t have AC either.
blackadderthe4th says: “Only 500 million years of evidence that CO2 is a GHG and heating up the planet!”
Not anymore. Temperatures have flat-lined lately, despite rising CO2. The models have been refuted. Your ignoratio elenchi won’t work here, aspgrasper.
Ah, yes. Summer of ’76 in the UK. At RAF Mildenhall we yanks threw the biggest three-day party of the century to celebrate the 200th anniversary of our independence. It began with an evening of dancing in a hangar to Glenn Miller music and culminated on the 4th of July with a three hour, 21 minute airshow featuring the Red Arrows and more than 40 other aerial demonstrations to a crowd of 185,000. Nobody minded that water conservation measures had allowed us only one-half inch of water in which to bathe, or that the temperatures were in the 90’s and the fens were sere and cracked. What a summer.
Actually, Buzz, we have noticed that in recent years folks are trying to rebrand “manmade global warming” as the uber flexible “climate change”
If you’re trying to run a scam, climate change is a great term.
izen says:
Human memory is selective and partial.
That is why we keep records.
Human records are selective and partial.
That is why we keep our sense of perspective.
Doing so helps us avoid saying supremely stupid things like:
If the climate was just exhibiting ‘natura’ variation then the incidence of records would be decreasing and equal for cold and hot records.
Uh, no. That would only be true if the climate never changed. That would definitely NOT be natural. Anyone with a proper perspective of the span of human weather records vs the range of climate variation understands this.
Climate change is natural. Using the term “climate change’ to refer to something that is by definition unnatural is a political technique used to make gullible idiots forget basic facts.
Much ado about the UK has been stated here. Elsewhere, in the UK, the typical fuss continues….
After the heatwave of 2003, when temperatures topped 38C and there were 2,000 extra deaths over 10 baking days in August, public health authorities brought in a comprehensive heatwave plan. It predicts that by 2040, the extremes of temperature seen in 2003 will become the norm.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/heatwave-britain–are-we-putting-our-heads-in-the-sand-about-the-weather-8708770.html
I grew up in western Pennsylvania. My folks talked often of the floods of 1936. I remember floods from hurricane Agnes (1973?). I was in Madison Wisconsin in 1984. It was stifling hot in late August and unbelievably cold the following winter. I moved there shortly after the nearby town of Barneveld was leveled by a tornado. Then there was the hot drought here in Michigan in the late 80s (’88 or ’89?). Didn’t rain from mid May until late July that year.
You’re absolutely correct that most people seem to have no long term memory whatsoever.
I’ve discovered some miraculous.
All of the worst heat waves occur in the summer. What a wild coincidence.
That can’t be natural.
Humans suck.
The skeptic community should never use the term climate change for a number of reasons but the big one is that the rebranding of Global Warming to Climate Change was a huge mistake by the alarmists and they should be reminded of it at every opportunity.
http://thepointman.wordpress.com/2011/08/18/so-which-is-it-global-warming-climate-disruption-or-climate-change/
Pointman
Just for perspective, I’m in East Texas, and we are in the middle of one of the coolest and most pleasant summers I can remember! Usually we’ve always been over 100 several times by now, but so far we haven’t even gotten close, and don’t look to, at least not in the current two-week forecast. It’s still fun for national commenters to talk about the Texas Drought, but two nights ago we got 2 1/2 inches of rain in a single night. That was nice, and it was a BIG storm that covered most of the state.
yeah, yeah, weather is not climate. Unless it’s convenient for the narrative.
blackadderthe4th says:
July 16, 2013 at 5:42 am
Mikeyj says:
July 16, 2013 at 4:48 am
“Only 500 million years of evidence that CO2 is a GHG and heating up the planet!”
Everything I read says “rise in temperature proceeds raise in CO2, not the other way around”.
The models don’t work, because there is a lot more going than CO2 and “every’, and I repeat every other factor is more important.
Can’t argue the arrogant question?
Thanks, Alan. Good article.
We know there is a scam going on, when past records top recent records and the media ignores it. They try to feed us a global warming scare while preaching that the climate does not change naturally. The corrupt scientists have to get rich and powerful, the government panders to all fringes. Honest scientists get fired and inconvenient scientific papers can not get published.
Politicians get richer by pushing counterproductive alternatives that induce poverty and destroy the environment.
izen says:
July 16, 2013 at 3:44 am
If the climate was just exhibiting ‘natural’ variation then the incidence of records would be decreasing and equal for cold and hot records.
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If weather was a coin toss this would be true. But we know that weather is not a coin toss, it is chaotic. chaotic systems do not converge on an average the way a coin toss does. instead they wander about because chaos is not noise. which is why the climate models are doing so poorly. they treat chaos as noise and assume it will even out over time. statistical nonsense.
July 15, 1954: A light shower and cloudiness toppled Tulsa’s heat from 112 – the hottest July 14 in city history – to 100 degrees, but four more heat-related deaths were reported here and 13 more in other parts of Oklahoma, raising the state’s heat toll to 45. These deaths raised the total of heat deaths for the nation to 186 with 135 of those in Oklahoma, Kansas and Missouri. The heat registered as high as 120 at Fort Scott, Kan., as the temperature seared about half of the nation. . .
ferd berple says:
July 16, 2013 at 8:14 am
“izen says:
July 16, 2013 at 3:44 am
If the climate was just exhibiting ‘natural’ variation then the incidence of records would be decreasing and equal for cold and hot records.
============
If weather was a coin toss this would be true. But we know that weather is not a coin toss, it is chaotic. chaotic systems do not converge on an average the way a coin toss does. instead they wander about because chaos is not noise.”
You’re right with the distinction between chaos and noise; but even if weather were simple noise, ongoing record breakage would be no problem. First, remember that the instrumental record is only maybe 150 years old in most places, and second, this remark goes especially to Izen, you should try to wrap your head around the concept of brown noise.
I know; that would require you to understand power spectra; and that’s probably asked too much. But if you’re interested, that’s where you should look.
blackadderthe4th says:
July 16, 2013 at 5:30 am
“‘The use of factually inaccurate material without a legitimate basis in science is an abuse of the foundation’s charitable status, which is all the more reprehensible because the public is more trusting of pronouncements made by charities’”
The UK is going after Greenpeace?
the “temperature anomaly” is the modern day equivalent of epicycles. It combines the daily and annual temperatures, and tries to derive a single average, ignoring natural variability on scales greater than 1 year.
Here in Australia the Green politicians continue to front press conferences reminding us with straight faces that we are in the midst of a “Climate Emergency” while Melbourne University’s Peter Christoff brings further disrepute to the title of Professor by declaring today that “the world is rushing towards global warming in excess of 4 degrees”.
Of course neither claim bears any resemblance to reality but that doesn’t stop the warmists from churning out more of the same or the MSM from uncritically publishing these opinions. I sometimes think these people must despair at the thought that their pet projects are unravelling and so retreat into some kind of psychological parallel universe where disaster and catastrophe are imminent. I mean, wouldn’t normal, sane people actually experience pleasure on learning that the apocalypse has been cancelled?
“…global warming has arrived and we are all doomed.”
———————————————
We’re DOOOOMED!!!!
You are right about people’s weather memory, maybe I care more about weather than most people, but I am still stunned how quickly they forget. I used to live in Vermont and every summer people would say “I don’t ever remember it being this rainy” and every summer I would say “How about last year, and the year that, and the year before that, and before that and so on.”
They have slightly better memories of big snow storms, but even then they aren’t that good.
Ah! The summer of ’76 in the UK. We missed it as we were living in Cyprus at the time, where we had a rather cooler than usual summer. My parents came over to stay for a while and couldn’t get over the fact that they were cooler there with the sea breeze than in their stifling house with no breeze back in England. For the 5 only really hot days of that Cypriot summer we went up to Troodos where we actually needed blankets at night!
It’s quite hot here now…what a treat after all the freezing winters, the seemingly everlasting cold spring this year and the dreary wet summers we’ve had for the last few years in our green and otherwise rather pleasant land.
Mikeyj says:
July 16, 2013 at 7:19 am
‘Everything I read says “rise in temperature proceeds raise in CO2, not the other way around’.
Well that is too simplistic point of view, because there has to be a trigger event first , during say the ice age, this positive feedback heats the planet and releases the trapped co2, then the co2 level becomes the main forcing agent, after ‘X’ 100s of years, and the planet heats up even further!
The reason for the temperature rise and the co2 800 year lag.
‘The models don’t work’, oh yes they do! ‘Can we trust climate models?’
‘because there is a lot more going than CO2 and “every’, and I repeat every other factor is more important.’ like what? Examples please!
‘Can’t argue the arrogant question?’ Because we know co2 is a GHG and it is the only forcing factor at the present!
DirkH says:
July 16, 2013 at 8:22 am
‘The UK is going after Greenpeace?’ don’t know, what have they said?
Decades ago I worked in North Palm Springs during the summers. In some years daytime highs would average around 110F. I remember once we canceled a concrete pour scheduled the next day because we recorded a temperature of 124F in the shade. I looked on the weather channel and this week they are expecting the temperatures will not exceed 111F this week. This is suppose to be the warmest time of the year so in terms of some past summers, it is a little cool. Because of the heat we would often start work as early as 3AM and try to finish up outside work by 9AM. It is no big deal as long as your are prepared for it. I live by the beach now. It is 69F right now, a real scorcher.
blackadderthe4th says:
July 16, 2013 at 10:18 am
I guess you don’t get the sarcasm?
but I’ll spell it out for you. Greenpeace is a complete bunch of t*ssers, like many so called environmental ‘charities’ (really just another financially motivated self perpetuating NGO) are just promoting and milking any green issue for their own benefit.
This is the real crying shame for such organisations, because many genuine environmental ’causes’ are being ignored or given very low priority in order to milk the ‘big AGW’ scam…….
I too remember 1976 in the UK. I was working in a portakabin at the top of Portsdown Hill.
In early October I could watch, from my desk, the storms over Butser Hill. Then
I could visit my friends in the other half of the kabin – who looked out over Portsmouth
Harbour. No clouds that way!
It went on for ten days – October 2-11, if I remember correctly. Then the floods came.
Climate always corrects itself. Weather, not so much.
Kevin says:
July 16, 2013 at 1:59 am
“We should remember that “IPCC” stands for Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. It was established in 1988. To my knowledge there has never been an Intergovernmental Panel on Global Warming.”
Suggest you go read the mission statement. “Investigate man made climate change”.
blackadderthe4th says:
July 16, 2013 at 10:16 am
Mikeyj says:
July 16, 2013 at 7:19 am
‘Everything I read says “rise in temperature proceeds raise in CO2, not the other way around’.
“Well that is too simplistic point of view, because there has to be a trigger event first , during say the ice age, this positive feedback heats the planet and releases the trapped co2, then the co2 level becomes the main forcing agent, after ‘X’ 100s of years, and the planet heats up even further!
The reason for the temperature rise and the co2 800 year lag.”
“Climate warming unnaturally because of man made CO2”.
Why? because what else could it be? Where’s the proof? Here’s what I do know. CAGW is a scam to redistribute wealth from the common folks to governments and their rich friends. It’s politics or religion, but not science. Alternative energy ain’t. Computer modeling of the climate is a joke and yes we are laughing “at” you not “with” you.
Glacier Girl? She sounds cool!
I’ve asked several people who say the believe in “Climate Change”
to tell me whether they think the term is describing a Cause or an
Effect. So far no illumination has been forthcoming. Anyone out
there know?
Mikeyj says:
July 16, 2013 at 12:57 pm
‘Here’s what I do know.’, what ever you ‘know’ is wrong! How do I know? Because it is obvious you have been listening to the wrong ‘science’! So to put you on the correct path
AGU, all about co2 and global warming
http://www.agu.org/meetings/fm09/lectures/lecture_videos/A23A.shtml
Alan, good article.
Some above have commented above on what I’m about to say. Alan and they got me posing some questions.
What the heck is climate?
Climate: the composite or generally prevailing weather conditions of a region, as temperature, air pressure, humidity, precipitation, sunshine, cloudiness, and winds, throughout the year, averaged over a series of years.
Alan says: “The climate is measured in terms of centuries or, at the very least, decades. The climate is a trend. The weather is what’s happening outside today.”
But in the confines of the climate change, how is that interpreted? How do we measure it? We can’t say, “Climate increased by 4.2 climate units last decade and is expected to decrease by 2.2 climate units over the next decade”. Climate derives weather but we can’t perform an integral function to tell us what the ‘total” climate is. It is all encompassing yet in the context of the climate change debate so vacuous. Is it one of the reasons the movement moved away from Global Warming to Climate Change? Things that make you go hmmm. Even though the global “temperature” is a meaningless stat, it is something which can we can put a number to and show a simple trend. And when that trend is plateauing (like it has been) and appears to to be moving towards a decline over the next few decades, it would be a simple measurement to demonstrate the fallacy of the theory, (and death to the gravy train). Therefore, they must move to something which is not measurable. It is there the warmists get away with their crap. Climate is something everybody knows but doesn’t understand and can’t really define in any meaningful or measurable way. The perfect situation for a gravy train/political action opportunity.
“Climate change” is a sneaky UN use of language and they gave it their own definition;
All the way back on May 9th 1992, UN defined “climate change” as man-made. See The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, (paragraph 6):
“Climate change is defined by the Convention as “change of climate which is attributed directly or indirectly to human activity that alters the composition of the global atmosphere and which is in addition to natural climate variability observed over comparable time periods” (article 1 (2)).”
In other words, there is no “climate change” without humans
Mikeyj says:
“Suggest you go read the mission statement. ‘Investigate man made climate change’.”
Indeed, not “Investigate man made global warming.”
Being a weather aficionado, this is a problem I don’t have. 106F (& a string of 100F+ days) in July 1966 in western MD w/burned-out lawns. Whole family had to flee to the basement to sleep (no air-con). -22F in Jan 1994. 4-foot deep pond frozen to bottom in Feb 1977. All-brown lawns from southwest VA to MD to PA in late summer 1988. Massive floods in Oct 1976. 80F two days in a row in late Jan 1974. On and on….
izen July 16, 2013 at 3:44 am says:
“Whatever you call it that indicates a trend in the climate. Undeniable, inelectable and exceptional.”
izen when you use a word I would hope that you know what it means. I do not think that inelectable means what you think it means*. When one uses Big Words incorrectly one just makes ones self look stupid.
* Apologies to El Gaupo