The Age of Hyperbole: How Normal Weather Became ‘Extreme’

When was the last time the Editorial board of the NYTs sat on a stoop?
The bubble they live in will eventually burst.

Oh No! Tim Ball is channelling Al Gore’s undergraduate thesis on the role of TV in electoral outcomes .
The real quote from McLuhan is ” With the advent of television, advertising has become more important than products.”

Something that plays into this is civilization and building climate control. As people spend less time outdoors, they lose contact with the variable and violent nature of weather. People who sail or farmers or foresters etc understand the true state of nature better than folks who spend the majority of their lives indoors.
Building climate control plays into this because it has reduced our direct effort to modify the indoor climate (you don’t have to chop wood etc), one simply pushes a few buttons and the perfect temperature is achieved.
My fellow sailors have noted that modern life also disconnects people from wind and it’s power. The end result being that on the occasion when one is abruptly confronted with the true condition of the natural environment, it seems extreme.
We often note how much worse the seas are when you are in them (on a boat) than after you get back on shore and are enjoying a cold beverage looking out over the water.
Gerry Parker

oh well, I thought they burned people at the stake for that…
you know, casting spells and controlling the weather

RMB says: July 31, 2013 at 8:25 am
…. about not heating water form above …etc…
Take a look at solar ponds.

Solar Ponds
There are 3 distinct layers of water in the pond:
The top layer, which has a low salt content.
An intermediate insulating layer with a salt gradient, which establishes a density gradient that prevents heat exchange by natural convection.
The bottom layer, which has a high salt content.
If the water is relatively translucent, and the pond’s bottom has high optical absorption, then nearly all of the incident solar radiation (sunlight) will go into heating the bottom layer.
When solar energy is absorbed in the water, its temperature increases, causing thermal expansion and reduced density. If the water were fresh, the low-density warm water would float to the surface, causing a convection current.
….the salinity gradient forms a density gradient that increases with depth, and this counteracts the temperature gradient, thus preventing heat in the lower layers from moving upwards by convection and leaving the pond. This means that the temperature at the bottom of the pond will rise to over 90 °C while the temperature at the top of the pond is usually around 30 °C. A natural example of these effects in a saline water body is Solar Lake in the Sinai Peninsula of Egypt.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_pond
more here: http://www.enersalt.com.au/Local%20Publish/html/solar_ponds.html

MarkX, long wave radiation only penetrates a few mm and causes the water molecule ions to arrange in crystal like stuctures–causing what we know as surface tension with very little heating. Only visible light penetrates further and causes heating

How normal weather became extreme? Ask newspapers like The Independent: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/britain-basks-in-sunshine-at-last-but-is-it-all-part-of-the-same–global-pattern-of-freak-weather-8691112.html
Some of the skeptic posters could use a hand at the comments section of the Independent article.

@marx:
“If the water is relatively translucent, and the pond’s bottom has high optical absorption, then nearly all of the incident solar radiation (sunlight) will go into heating the bottom layer.”
Ok, but the bottom of the ocean isn’t translucent, it’s pitch black. Surely then, we should be seeing a pattern of warming in the upper layers where sunlight actually reaches first, then (maybe) an increase in the lower depths via convection?

Chris, No the water is not translucent to long wave and conributes little to warming

KNMI has new cool feature – extreme indices calculation for daily station data, like consecutive wet or dry days, number of wet or extremely wet days per month, fraction of precipitation on wet days etc. There is no trend for local stations I checked up to now /not surprising/.

According to Steven Goddard it’s because we’re ealing with criminals: http://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2013/07/31/dealing-with-criminals/

Bloke down the pub says: @ July 31, 2013 at 10:15 am
While it’s reasonable to say that hurricanes are not unusual, I think it’s pushing a point to say they are not an extreme of weather.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
They may be ‘Extreme Weather’ but they are not ABNORMAL weather.
Life is lethal and Ma Nature does not suffer fools gladly. Our technology has allowed these fools to continue living and multiply…. at least for a time. But do not worry they are busy trying to correct the problem.
“A government which robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul.” ~ George Bernard Shaw
Too bad the foolish parasites (Pauls) never bothered to find out what happens AFTER the ‘Socialist Utopia’ is achieved by the ‘Elite’.
THE CONCEPT
Fabian Socialist founders were George Bernard Shaw, the Webbs and H.G. Wells. They also founded the London School of Economics where many of today’s world political, banking and corporate leaders are trained. People like David Rockefeller, John F Kennedy, George Soros and where Bill Clinton and Pascal Lamy, the World Trade Organization Director -General who is calling for ‘Global Governance’, lecture.

‘…and we cannot make the social life and the world-peace we are determined to make, with the ill-bred, ill-trained swarms of inferior citizens that you inflict upon us.’ …
In 1913, the eugenicists succeeded in getting the Mental Incapacity Act through parliament. As a result, some 40,000 men and women were incarcerated without trial, having been deemed to fall into various specious categories such as ‘feeble-minded’ or ‘morally defective’. …Edith Huthwaite, from Yorkshire, was categorised as a moral defective after being convicted by Ripon magistrates of theft. She was held for 18 years….

…Many early left-wing thinkers wanted government to direct social policy towards “improving” the human race by discouraging reproduction among those sections of society deemed to have undesirable genes. Supporters of state planning often found the idea of a planned genetic future attractive. As Adrian Wooldridge, author of Measuring the Mind: Education and Psychology in England 1860-1990, comments: “The Webbs supported eugenic planning just as fervently as town planning.” Beatrice Webb declared eugenics to be “the most important question of all” while her husband remarked that “no eugenicist can be a laissez-faire individualist”.
Similarly, George Bernard Shaw wrote: “The only fundamental and possible socialism is the socialisation of the selective breeding of man.” Bertrand Russell proposed that the state should issue colour-coded “procreation tickets” to prevent the gene pool of the elite being diluted by inferior human beings. Those who decided to have children with holders of a different-coloured ticket would be punished with a heavy fine. HG Wells praised eugenics as the first step towards the elimination of “detrimental types and characteristics” and the “fostering of desirable types” instead…
The eugenics movement Britain wants to forget New Statesman 1913 – 2013

Even the Gruniad verifies this: Eugenics: the skeleton that rattles loudest in the left’s closet: Socialism’s one-time interest in eugenics is dismissed as an accident of history. But the truth is far more unpalatable
VERIFICATION

Attacks on Intelligentsia: Early Attacks
In the years immediately following their accession to power in 1917, the Bolsheviks took measures to prevent challenges to their new regime, beginning with eliminating political opposition….
Bolshevik policy toward its detractors, and particularly toward articulate, intellectual criticism, hardened considerably. Suppression of newspapers, initially described as a temporary measure, became a permanent policy. Lenin considered the Constitutional Democrats (Kadets) the center of a conspiracy against Bolshevik rule. In 1919, he began mass arrests of professors and scientists who had been Kadets, and deported Kadets, Socialist Revolutionaries, Mensheviks, and Nationalists. The Bolshevik leadership sought rapidly to purge Russia of past leaders in order to build the future on a clean slate.
These harsh measures alienated a large number of the intellectuals who had supported the overthrow of the tsarist order…..
The disenchantment of the majority of intellectuals did not surprise Lenin, who saw the old Russian intelligentsia as a kind of rival to his “party of a new type,” which alone could bring revolutionary consciousness to the working class. In his view, artists generally served bourgeois interests, a notion that fueled the persecution of intellectuals throughout the Soviet period….
Attacks on Intelligentsia: Renewed Attacks
The pattern of suppressing intellectual activity, with intermittent periods of relaxation, helped the party leadership reinforce its authority….
The attacks extended to scientists and philosophers and continued until after Stalin’s death in 1953….
To speak for human rights or to support freedom of expression was to question the very basis of Marxism-Leninism and the legitimacy of the party’s rule. Among those harassed and persecuted were world-renowned artists and scientists, including Nobel Prize winners Boris Pasternak, who was forced to refuse his prize; Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who was forcibly removed from the USSR; and Andrei Sakharov, who was expelled from the Academy of Sciences and internally exiled to a closed city….
Attacks on Intelligentsia

DEMOCIDE – DEATH BY GOVERNMENT
This is my fourth book in a series on genocide and government mass murder, what I call democide….
In developing the statistics for this and the previous three volumes, almost 8,200 estimates of war, domestic violence, genocide, mass murder, and other relevant data, were recorded from over a thousand sources…
Just to give perspective on this incredible murder by government, if all these bodies were laid head to toe, with the average height being 5′, then they would circle the earth ten times. Also, this democide murdered 6 times more people than died in combat in all the foreign and internal wars of the century….
. I have generally avoided, however, tales of brutal torture and savage killing unless such were useful to illustrate an aspect of the democide.
These chapters are ordered from the greatest of these killers to the lesser ones, as one can see from the table of contents. Part 2 presents the four deka-megamurderers, beginning with a chapter on the Soviet Union’s near 61,000,000 murdered, then including chapters on Communist China and Nazi Germany, and ending with a chapter on the now virtually unremembered killing of the Chinese Nationalist regime. Since these four regimes were the subjects of the previous three volumes,5 the four chapters simply summarize the democide and conclusions. I hope I will be excused for using Greek prefixes for labeling these regimes (deka- means ten or tens; mega- means million), but we need concepts for the various levels of government murder and there is no comparable English term (“murderer of tens of millions” is clumsy).
Part 3 presents in order the lesser-megamurders, those that have killed 1,000,000 to less than 10,000,000 citizens and foreigners….
After eight-years and almost daily reading and recording of men, women, and children by the tens of millions being tortured or beaten to death, hung, shot, and buried alive, burned or starved to death, stabbed or chopped into pieces, and murdered in all the other ways creative and imaginative human beings can devise, I have never been so happy to conclude a project. I have not found it easy to read time and time again about the horrors innocent people have been forced to suffer. What has kept me at this was the belief, as preliminary research seemed to suggest, that there was a positive solution to all this killing and a clear course of political action and policy to end it. And the results verify this. The problem is Power. The solution is democracy. The course of action is to foster freedom.

THAT in a nutshell is what CAGW and Agenda 21 are really about.

Gerry Parker says:
July 31, 2013 at 9:22 am
My fellow sailors have noted that modern life also disconnects people from wind and it’s power.
=========
after 20 years cruising offshore, returning home I found I could forecast the weather much better than the weather report. The weather man life doesn’t depend on getting it right.

cynical_scientist says:
“The ONLY reason why you can’t easily heat (as in directly warm up) water from above with a heat lamp is that if you make the surface layer warmer than the deeper layers, convection is not triggered. Hence only a very thin skin on the top of the water gets warmed”
This is plain wrong!!!!!—please watch the video above from minute 39 to 44 and you will learn why you can’t heat the water from above with long wave (heat) radiation. Most of the energy goes into assembling water crystals and not into heat.

Bill H says:
July 31, 2013 at 5:05 pm
Considering that heating radiation from the sun only penetrates a few meters into the ocean it can not directly heat below about 30 feet….
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
“heating radiation” = IR???
Solar radiation can penetrate much deeper (100 meters) but the low energy IR wavelengths of the greenhouse effect can only penetrate ~ 10 micrometers
GRAPH

Dat verhoogde broeikasstraling door CO2 de oceaan opwarmt is een AGW-fabel, de langgolvige infrarood straling van de atmosfeer heeft een veel te lage energie (golflengte) een komt niet dieper dan een fractie van een milimeter (10 micrometer). Dit is veel minder dan de grenslaag waar verdamping plaats vindt (500 micrometer), en dat is het enige wat de infrarood straling dan ook kan doen; helpen om water te verdampen….
http://www.klimaatfraude.info/oceaanopwarming-of-zeespiegelstijging-door-co2-is-niet-mogelijk_193094.html

Google translate:
That increased CO2 greenhouse radiation warms the AGW is a fable, the long-wave infrared radiation from the atmosphere has a lot to low energy (wavelength) is a no deeper than a fraction of a millimeter (10 micrometers). This is much less than the boundary layer where evaporation takes place (500 micrometers), and that’s the only thing the infrared radiation can do, help to evaporate water.
In other words any heating of the ocean is from solar radiation (but only to the depth of 100 meters) and not from bounced back ‘Earthshine’ If there is heat ‘Hiding in the oceans’ it is because of the changes in the amount of UV as noted by NASA – SORCE’s Solar Spectral Surprise

… the SIM instrument is the first to monitor the daily activity of certain parts of the spectrum, a measurement scientists call solar spectral irradiance.
In recent years, SIM has collected data that suggest the sun’s brightness may vary in entirely unexpected ways. If the SIM’s spectral irradiance measurements are validated and proven accurate over time, then certain parts of Earth’s atmosphere may receive surprisingly large doses of solar radiation even during lulls in solar activity.
“We have never had a reason until now to believe that parts of the spectrum may vary out of phase with the solar cycle, but now we have started to model that possibility because of the SIM results,” said Robert Cahalan, the project scientist for SORCE and the head of the climate and radiation branch at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md….
…Some of the variations that SIM has measured in the last few years do not mesh with what most scientists expected. Climatologists have generally thought that the various part of the spectrum would vary in lockstep with changes in total solar irradiance.
However, SIM suggests that ultraviolet irradiance fell far more than expected between 2004 and 2007 — by ten times as much as the total irradiance did — while irradiance in certain visible and infrared wavelengths surprisingly increased, even as solar activity wound down overall.
The steep decrease in the ultraviolet, coupled with the increase in the visible and infrared, does even out to about the same total irradiance change as measured by the TIM during that period, according to the SIM measurements.
The stratosphere absorbs most of the shorter wavelengths of ultraviolet light, but some of the longest ultraviolet rays (UV-A), as well as much of the visible and infrared portions of the spectrum, directly heat Earth’s lower atmosphere and can have a significant impact on the climate….

Effects of clouds and stratospheric ozone depletion on ultraviolet radiation trends Dan Lubin* & Elsa H. Jensen†
*California Space Institute, University of California….
ANTHROPOGENIC depletion of ozone in the lower stratosphere has been of global environmental concern for two decades, but the environmentally relevant quantity—the flux of solar ultraviolet radiation (UVR) reaching the Earth’s surface—remains poorly quantified on a global basis. The three most important parameters governing surface UVR fluxes and trends are solar elevation, total vertically integrated ozone abundance and cloud opacity. Here we use global satellite measurements of total ozone abundance and cloud reflectance to examine how the trends in UVR resulting from established trends in total ozone abundance1,2 compare with the potentially large natural variability in UVR that results from variations in cloud opacity. We find that throughout many temperate regions—including large parts of continental Europe, North and South America, New Zealand, Australia and southern Africa—interannual variability in cloud opacity is sufficiently small that by the end of this century, trends in summer average local-noon UVR dose rates relevant to mammalian skin cancer or plant damage should be significant with respect to cloud variability.

So the amount of UV entering the ocean depends on ozone and clouds per this paper.
From NASA again.

Ozone Production and Destruction
Stratospheric ozone is created and destroyed primarily by ultraviolet radiation. The air in the stratosphere is bombarded continuously with ultraviolet radiation from the Sun.When high energy ultraviolet rays strike molecules of ordinary oxygen (O2), they split the molecule into two single oxygen atoms. The free oxygen atoms can then combine with oxygen molecules (O2) to form ozone (O3) molecules.
O2 + UV light -> 2 O
O + O2 + M -> O3 + M (where M indicates conservation of energy and momentum)
The same characteristic of ozone that makes it so valuable, its ability to absorb a range of ultraviolet radiation, also causes its destruction.When an ozone molecule is exposed to ultraviolet energy it may break back into O2 and O. During dissociation the atomic and molecular oxygens gain kinetic energy, which produces heat and causes an increase in atmospheric temperature.
Ozone production is driven by UV radiation of wavelengths less than 240 nm. Ozone dissociation typically produces atomic oxygen that is stable when exposed to longer wavelengths, up to 320 nm, and shorter wavelenghts of 400 to 700 nm. Longer wavelength photons penetrate deeper into the atmosphere, creating regions of ozone production and destruction. When an ozone molecule absorbs even low energy ultraviolet, it splits into an ordinary oxygen molecule and a free oxygen atom.
O3 + UV, visible light -> O + O2
The free oxygen atom may then combine with an oxygen molecule, creating another ozone molecule, or it may take an oxygen atom from an existing ozone molecule to create two ordinary oxygen molecules.
O + O2 -> O3 or O3 + O -> O2 + O2
Processes of ozone production and destruction, initiated by ultraviolet radiation, are often referred to as “Chapman Reactions.”….

“During dissociation the atomic and molecular oxygens gain kinetic energy, which produces heat and causes an increase in atmospheric temperature. I am not going to get into it but this heat causes the atmosphere to be more ‘Puffed-up” Back to NASA.

April 1, 2009: Deep Solar Minimum
…Quiet suns come along every 11 years or so. It’s a natural part of the sunspot cycle, discovered by German astronomer Heinrich Schwabe in the mid-1800s….
The current solar minimum is part of that pattern. In fact, it’s right on time. “We’re due for a bit of quiet—and here it is,” says Pesnell.
But is it supposed to be this quiet? In 2008, the sun set the following records:
A 12-year low in solar “irradiance”: Careful measurements by several NASA spacecraft show that the sun’s brightness has dropped by 0.02% at visible wavelengths and 6% at extreme UV wavelengths since the solar minimum of 1996. The changes so far are not enough to reverse the course of global warming, but there are some other significant side-effects: Earth’s upper atmosphere is heated less by the sun and it is therefore less “puffed up.” …
A 50-year low in solar wind pressure: Measurements by the Ulysses spacecraft reveal a 20% drop in solar wind pressure since the mid-1990s—the lowest point since such measurements began in the 1960s. The solar wind helps keep galactic cosmic rays out of the inner solar system. With the solar wind flagging, more cosmic rays are permitted to enter, resulting in increased health hazards for astronauts. Weaker solar wind also means fewer geomagnetic storms and auroras on Earth…..

Sept. 23, 2008: Solar Wind Loses Power, Hits 50-year Low
In a briefing today at NASA headquarters, solar physicists announced that the solar wind is losing power.
“The average pressure of the solar wind has dropped more than 20% since the mid-1990s,” says Dave McComas of the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, Texas. “This is the weakest it’s been since we began monitoring solar wind almost 50 years ago.”…
Curiously, the speed of the million mph solar wind hasn’t decreased much—only 3%. The change in pressure comes mainly from reductions in temperature and density. The solar wind is 13% cooler and 20% less dense.
“What we’re seeing is a long term trend, a steady decrease in pressure that began sometime in the mid-1990s,” explains Arik Posner, NASA’s Ulysses Program Scientist in Washington DC…..
“The solar wind isn’t inflating the heliosphere as much as it used to,” says McComas. “That means less shielding against cosmic rays.”
In addition to weakened solar wind, “Ulysses also finds that the sun’s underlying magnetic field has weakened by more than 30% since the mid-1990s,” says Posner. “This reduces natural shielding even more.”
Unpublished Ulysses cosmic ray data show that, indeed, high energy (GeV) electrons, a minor but telltale component of cosmic rays around Earth, have jumped in number by about 20%….

More info from Physicist Nir Shaviv in language a layman can under stand.
http://www.sciencebits.com/NothingNewUnderTheSun-II
http://www.sciencebits.com/NothingNewUnderTheSun-III
And the earth’s global temperature has not been increasing for the last ~ 15 to 17 years or since the late nineties….

Dr. Ball, as a Canadian you should have a better understanding of McLuhan. His intent was to communicate that the existence and capabilities of the medium were far more important than its transient content. That there are radio, TV, phones, and the Internet affects the culture and people more (= is the message) than what they happen to be carrying (apparent messages).

From Bob B on August 1, 2013 at 11:03 am:

The brand-new science shows “water crystals” growing from a “battery” effect at the air-wtaer interface causing water molecules (dipoles) to align themselves from the energy of the long wave IR.

From 1992: http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2FBF00655849#page-1
Studies on the electrical double layer structure at the water/air interface
And this is just a quickly-Googled example. This “brand-new science” is old hat, the double layer “battery effect” structure has long been known, can be brought about by UV, common chemicals in seawater, etc.
Wrapping it up as “water crystals” does not make it “brand-new”, nor convey to it special newly-discovered powers.
Besides, you’ve completely ignored what was said. You’re arguing there is no heating from LWIR, which wasn’t being debated. What happens is a slowing of the loss of LWIR from the oceans, which you completely bypassed to defend (again) what wasn’t being argued.

Please watch video above from about 38mins to 44mins

On dial-up? I don’t have the hours to download just three minutes of this nonsense.
Man, I love it when I find free wireless for fast downloads like software updates, or do the anti-virus updates on the Windoze partitions in minutes vs overnight. But if DSL makes one susceptible to watching hour-long videos you know are anti-scientific garbage to demonstrate an “open mind”, it might not be worth getting!

Gail, some references
Kadaka, Dr Pollock discovered some of these effects in 2003
Johanna, I did explain it but the video provides wonderful images of the “water crystals”
http://www.uweb.engr.washington.edu/education/pdf/mork.pdf
http://faculty.washington.edu/ghp/research-themes/water-science/
http://www.i-sis.org.uk/liquidCrystallineWater.php
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16952332