Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
In discussing President Obama’s latest boondoggle, the one billion (with a “b) dollar Climate Resilience Plan, The US Under-Assistant Minister of Scientific Silly Walks, John Holdren, wandered way off of the party line. The party line in question, of course, is …
“Although we can’t ascribe any given weather event to climate change, we still insist that blah blah blah …”
Perhaps Holdren’s teleprompter was broken, but anyhow, here’s what he said (emphasis mine):
During a call with reporters on Thursday evening, the assistant to the president on science and technology, John Holdren, said, without any doubt, the severe drought plaguing California and a number of other states across the country is tied to climate change.
Now, that quote was bad enough, since everyone from the IPCC to my cat agrees that
• There is no link between historical post-Little-Ice-Age warming and extreme weather, and
• Droughts are more common in colder times than in warmer times, and
• For the last decade and a half there’s been no statistically significant warming, certainly not enough to cause increased extreme weather.
• We have neither the understanding nor the information necessary to ascribe ANY single weather event to climate change, and we’re a long ways from having either one.
But despite Holdren going way off piste in his comment, it wasn’t truly of the quality needed for a quote of the week. It wasn’t concise enough for an epigram … or for an epitaph, for that matter.
However, just when it all looked hopeless, Holdren rallied, came back and captured the gold by uttering the deathless words that will ring forever in the halls of climate academe:
Weather practically everywhere is being caused by climate change.
There you have it, folks, Holdren’s Law of Climate Causation, all you need to know about droughts and such … weather practically everywhere is being caused by climate change.
…
… and people wonder why the alarmists are having trouble these days peddling their nostrums? Well, mostly it’s not a communications failure. Mostly, it’s because we’ve been lied to before by these same folks (including Holdren), and Holdren’s current pathetic shilling for the Obamaclimate program is just more of the same.
The issue is not how the science is being communicated, as Judith Curry and many others seem to think.
The issue is that what is being communicated is so obviously not science, but merely poorly framed and scientifically absurd scare tactics, that as in this case, the communication just makes people point and laugh …
Regards to all,
w.
Mac the Knife says:
February 14, 2014 at 12:47 pm. Ever come across the idea of debt socialisation? That’s what POTUS is doing across your nation.
Why is it that the warmist narrative reminds me so much of the travelling medicine show of American antiquity?
Just when you think John Holdren could not possibly make himself look any more stupid…. he proves you wrong yet again. What an utter Bozo. Well, at least he will be gone by the time Mr. Obama’s term is up.
Nick Stokes says:
February 14, 2014 at 12:53 pm
You’re confused. Warming is a statistical effect, & only statistically significant warming is actually warming.
John Holdren, said,” without any doubt, the severe drought plaguing California and a number of other states across the country is tied to climate change.”
How can a one time one state regional event be tied to “global warming induced” climate change when there has been no global warming now for 17 years . Did not a paper by Gregory J,Macabe et al . called PACIFIC AND ATLANTIC OCEAN INFLUENCE ON MULTIDECADAL DROUGHT FREQUENCY IN UNITED STATES clearly show that more than one half of the droughts in United States are attributable to certain AMO and PDO patterns . This recent California drought has the same PDO/AMO pattern namely negative PDO and positive AMO] as back in 1895-1915 and again 1945-1975 when significant droughts took place in the southwest, especially in the 1950’s
And this man advises the president?
Holdren is illiterate on so many levels.
philjourdan,
“Well, he is right. Climate does cause weather. Without a climate, there would be no weather.”
No he’s not right. In fact he and you both have the causality exactly backwards. Climate is the aggregate of weather over space and/or time. Therefore, by definition, weather causes climate, climate does not cause weather.
MattS – which came first, the chicken or the egg? I did not say “caused” I said “without”. And it is true. If there was no climate, there would be no weather. Weather accumulated is climate, but no climate means no weather either.
Besides, my comment was sarcastic. He is saying that without the planet we would not have weather. from a strict point of view, he is correct. In space, there is no weather.
So without climate change there’d be no weather? What would that be like? When the weather report came on the radio, would there just be a kind of hissing sound, or would it be more dramatic? Imagine: no temperature, no visibility, no ceiling, no wind, no calm, no humidity or lack thereof. I could almost set those words to a trite little tune.
Mr. Holdren is famous for his bets. How should we formulate a good bet?
Louis Hooffstetter says:
“You can’t argue with stupid.”
You can but it’s like trying to teach a pig to sing. It doesn’t work and it annoys the pig.
I blame the 1976 black microdot.
Weather: (n) 1. Bad stuff caused by Climate Change. 2. Bush lied, people died. 3. Hemp-based plastics. 4. Karl Rove has a hurricane gun, I read about it on prison planet.
Climate: (n) 1. Peerreviewedscience97%consensusBooshdenierracisthomophobewereallgonnadiebutthisisntareligiousdeathcult. 2. Something peer-reviewed by 97% of Climate Scientists.
Climate change: (n) Climate.
Climate Scientist: (n) 1. A fluid resembling sentient country gravy that can freely shift definitions based on the whims of any person claiming loyalty to the Peer-Reviewed 97% Consensus of Climate Scientists®. 2. I know what I’m talking about & you don’t. 3. Any random entomologist who publishes a letter in the NYT. 4. Any random kid’s-show-host who publishes a letter in the NYT.
Climate change cannot cause weather.
Climate is a construct. Long term weather statistics where we bicker about what counts as long term.
Climate Change doesnt cause weather, its the other way around. When the weather changes in significant detectable ways we call this climate change. changes in weather DEFINE climate change they are not caused by it.
The real question is what causes changes in weather. We know some of the factors
1. external forcing ( the sun, ghgs, land changes)
2. internal forcing: quasi periodic rearrangements of energy
3. shit happens.
if you change the forcings the weather changes. If the weather changes enough your long range stats change. Does adding c02 change the weather? Of course. dont forget the butterflies wings.
Does it change the weather in a significant predictable way over time such that we would conclude that the climate has changed? lots of definitions in there..
It doesnt help to frame a thorny problem in the backwards way Holdren did.
Willis:
According to Fox News, Holdren actually said that today’s weather is INFLUENCED by climate change rather than being caused by it:
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2014/02/14/obama-to-link-california-drought-to-climate-change/?intcmp=latestnews
““Weather practically everywhere is being influenced by climate change,” said John Holdren, assistant to the president for science and technology, previewing the event for reporters.”
@CD – Actually that still makes no sense. Weather is influencing climate and any change that goes with it.
Gotta love the climate oracles.
http://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2014/02/why-does-seattle-times-and-other-media.html
This isn’t funny really. Even my more well-read friends tell me that the weather recently is so wierd that it must be climate change. The consistent barrage of this BS from the MSM is having an effect.
As for the quote, I know what he meant. I’m not going to help him say it. It would still be wrong.
~~~~~~~~
Marcos says:
February 14, 2014 at 12:44 pm
I thought it was common knowledge that La Nina-like conditions result in the Western/South Western US being very dry…
It has been dry. The accepted index has not indicated La Niña . The last was ASO 2011 thru FMA 2012. See page 24
http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/analysis_monitoring/lanina/enso_evolution-status-fcsts-web.pdf
Must be something else going on.
Richard Howes says: “We need to PASS climate change bills to see what is IN climate change bills.”
Better yet, if you like your homeowner’s insurance, you can KEEP your homeowner’s insurance.
If my mild and pleasant February weather is the result of climate change, then all I can say is: Thank Gaia for climate change!
Nick Stokes says: February 14, 2014 at 12:53 pm
“For the last decade and a half there’s been no statistically significant warming, certainly not enough to cause increased extreme weather.”
Warming is warming. Its effect is totally unrelated to statistical significance.
“No statistically significant warming” implies the effect cannot be distinguished from chance. So what effect are you attributing to warming that cannot be distinguished from chance?
philjourdan says:
February 14, 2014 at 1:20 pm
“ In space, there is no weather.”
Oh dear, http://www.spaceweather.com/
Insert silly happy face here.
@John Hulquist – Oh Dear. I can see that sarcasm escapes most here. If I have to qualify every term ad nausea, the sarcasm is lost. I am sure they have some wonderful blizzards in space. But I do not think man can live in such a climate.
Sadly, “people are pointing and laughing” is wishful thinking.
People are buying into that sort of deceptive claptrap. Ehrlich, Schneider and Holdren: wrong but well rewarded. Schneider was committed to using deception and fear to sell policy demands based on his consistently incorrect predictions. The President’s (anti)science advisor seems to take his mentor’s work to a new level.
@Steven Mosher-Yes of course a change of climate means there was a shift in the “average” of weather. The question is whether the weather events in question are a part of such trends, or are anomalous departures from it or even contrary to it. And in the case of cold weather, the answer is unambiguous: warming means less of it. Period. Thus if we still see a large amount of cold weather, it means that the warming that has occurred, is not large enough to be noticed yet.
Shocking I know, you’d really think you’d be able to feel a shift in the global mean of less than a Kelvin.
Anyway, in other cases the answer is not as unambiguous or obvious and we have to look at theory and climate data to see if any linkages appear to exist and how large they actually are. If you can’t express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind.
Something tells me you’ve never bothered to do that. You just ramble on about butterfly wings.
I on the other hand, try to specifically look into alleged weather linkages to global climate changes. In most cases there is, statistically, nothing measurable there. In the cases where that’s not the case it is typically in the opposite direction people try to claim.
negrum says: @ur momisugly February 14, 2014 at 12:31 pm
Did he say whether humans caused the climate change? I suppose that is considered an accepted fact….
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
The politicians as usual changed the meaning. Here’s the official definition:
That’s from the official UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, signed by the good old USA a couple decades ago (http://unfccc.int/essential_background/convention/background/items/2536.php).
So when you are asked if you believe in Climate Change in a survey you are actually being asked if you believe in CAGW. That is why we are “Climate Change Den1ers”
“Weather practically everywhere is being caused by climate change.”
Bwahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha!
Hee. Hee.
Sniff.
Whew.
I feel better now, even though coffee is dripping out of my nose onto the desk.
That’s the kinda thing that Yogi Berra would say, and of course we’d know that he knew that it was tongue in cheek. Holdren’s statement, however, I’ll take at face value… that he really believes the idiotic things springing from his lips.
Thanks. I needed a good laugh today!