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.
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?