Excavating the "Global Warming" Memory Hole - A Thermo-Exegesis

by Daniel Foty

Last weekend, I put together a light-hearted little post noting that "winter" (which wasn't supposed to be happening anymore) had brought the greatest snowfall on record to Burlington.  Furthermore, in the comments I noted that despite the now boringly-apocalyptic prognostications from "global warming"/"climate change" alarmists, a huge and growing collection of rock-'em sock-'em winter weather was running amok all over the northern hemisphere.

This prompted a question about the purpose of noting "weather events" like the Burlington snowfall and the other severe enwinterings in progress across Europe and Asia.

There were two replies to that.

The first is that noting them is a combined form of mocking of (and baiting of) "global warming" alarmists - since the alarmists are always very quick to blame even the smallest "warmish" weather events on "global warming" and cite them as "proof".... leading to the great fun of watching them go into yoga-class contortions trying to explain why all "coldish" events are simply "weather" that can be dismissed as meaningless.  (The slightly more crass - but still accurate - description of this is "Warm events are 'climate,' but cold events are just 'weather.'")

As the Right Honourable James Hacker, PM, once put it, "Oh, I get it - my facts are statistics, but your statistics are facts."

But the second reply was more serious - and to demonstrate that, we can look back through the literature to see what "global warming" alarmists were indeed predicting a decade ago.

More below the fold.

To self-quote from a comment that explained the "second reply"....

"The more serious reason is that if there really is warming in progress, then strong-winter weather should be becoming less frequent and less geographically extensive. Quite frankly.... it's not, and pointing out things like this keeps tallying the "events" list that should be shrinking with time but isn't. (And right now, the depth and extent of hard-winter in the northern hemisphere is pretty amazing - besides the huge snowstorm locally, and winter hammerings going on in east Asia and in North America, Europe (particularly the UK) and northern India are dealing with unusually wintry weather. At some point, if there is a huge warming catastrophe in progress, it should manifest itself in notable changes in local weathers (geographic plural intentional). This isn't happening.)"

My Australian friend Tim Blair recently dug up an article from ten years back that provides a good example of the alarmist oeuvre of the time - and which predicted what the "warming world" would soon look like:

Britain's winter ends tomorrow with further indications of a striking environmental change: snow is starting to disappear from our lives.

Sledges, snowmen, snowballs and the excitement of waking to find that the stuff has settled outside are all a rapidly diminishing part of Britain's culture, as warmer winters - which scientists are attributing to global climate change - produce not only fewer white Christmases, but fewer white Januaries and Februaries.

....

According to Dr David Viner, a senior research scientist at the climatic research unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia [!! - ed.], within a few years winter snowfall will become "a very rare and exciting event".

"Children just aren't going to know what snow is," he said.

Astute readers may also recall that over the past decade we've been regularly assailed with hyperventilation about how the local skiing and maple industries were in imminent danger of extinction.

Of course, children in Britain (and in most other parts of the northern hemisphere) are now quite familiar with snow.  The fun aspect now is watching as the alarmists are trying to deny that these sorts of silly (and experimentally-invalidated) predictions were ever made in the first place - hoping that they can just be dropped down the memory hole and forgotten.

Will I argue that there's a cooling trend in progress?  No, I won't do that.

If one bothers to look at the temperature records that we have in abundance (basically, about 125 years worth in North America), one realizes that the most outstanding feature of the "weather system" is the startlingly-large degree of internal variability inherent in it.

For example, if one looks at the records kept in Burlington (which go back to the 1880s), the long-term average high temperature for any particular calendar date at this time of year is 27F.  However, the variability around that mean value is truly impressive; one standard deviation is nearly 12F.  (I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader to work out the quantitative implications - not so much out of laziness or smugness :) but because I can't think of a single time when one of the hyperventilators screaming "STICK TO THE SCIENCE" actually possessed so much as a scintilla of mathematical or scientific qualification.  Readers are invited to have a go at describing the implications in comments.)

A stable climate (which is about all you can expect from a period of only about a century in duration) will produce a frightening array of "unusual" events of all sorts - in both space and time.  That seems to be about the best description of real-world events.  Be prepared.

Comments

[Vermont Woodchuck]

This subject has gone into the realm of preposterous, taken there by the Gores and the CRU crowd.

what was it, 36-7 years ago we were going to have glaciers in Williston, hurry and spread carbon soot on the ice in the Arctic.

Now we're back to this:
"The mini ice age starts here"
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1242011/DAVID-ROSE-The-mini-ice-age-starts-here.html

I'm all in favor of yanking anyone on a soapbox, off it roughly, and lobotomizing them on the spot!

[the vermont patriot]

Well, it's not too difficult to find a plethora of blowhards throughout the history of this issue, but the fact that is driving this is 10 of the hottest years have occurred since 1997 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temperature_record_since_1880, http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/research/anomalies/index.html. Has anyone tried to see how hot the temperatures are in the Australian desert?

This is GLOBAL warming, not just northern hemisphere weather. CO2 levels have been on a steady rise since they have been recorded starting in the 50's. It doesn't make sense to think that the world's daily consumption of oil (around 70-80 MILLION barrels a day) is not going to influence our world.

Also, more heat in the southern hemisphere is more significant than more cold in Europe because of the heat carrying capacity of water compared to land mass. It is the average temperatures of the oceans that are more significant than any weather event, either hot, cold or wet.

This concentration of heat in the worlds oceans is going to create convulsive reactions to global events: hurricanes will be stronger, heat waves will be hotter and last longer, and winter snows will be bigger (sometimes!). There really is no predicting what one weather season is going to look like in any specific area. Our input of CO2 is only increasing and we are only at the very beginning of this process. There are going to be severe variations all over the planet, but the net result will be a global increase in temperature (otherwise known as Global Warming).

Keep looking at real data. Ocean temperatures are important to monitor but also the status of our global ice. I've never heard anyone argue that the disappearance of our global ice (from the north pole to the south pole to our mountaintop glaciers) is a sign of global cooling!

Frankly, you only need to look at average GLOBAL temperatures and the status of our ice sheets to determine whether or not GLOBAL warming is real. And there really is only one correct answer. Now, was I hyperventilating?

[Daniel Foty]

Hyperventilating? Yes, your self-diagnosis is absolutely correct.

As noted in the post, all we get as "feedback" nowadays from the other side is the regurgitation of pre-provided talking points. It's bad enough that it's just the passing-through of propaganda - the additional problem is that the talking points have been discredited, yet those passing them on are unable (or unwilling) to face up to that changed landscape.

The notion that the last ten years were "the hottest on record" long ago was tossed out the window, the extent of Arctic sea ice is growing, and by the measures that even the propagandists have been pushing, the past ten years have seen at best a plateau but more likely a notable cooling trend.

As I noted sometime back, even before the CRU whistleblower blew the lid off the nonsense behind this whole thing, the warming crowd was already becoming frustrated by the failure of nature to warm up as they expected (and desired), as this clearly frustrated piece in the (decidedly leftist) German publication Der Spiegel makes clear:

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,662092,00.html

The methods used to "hide the decline" couldn't even do that any longer.

It's hot in the Australian desert? It's summer down there. And we're back to the problem noted in the post - that any warm spell anywhere is PROOF.... while a siege of winter weather all around the northern hemisphere is dismissible. I fearlessly predict that over the next several months the northern hemisphere will warm while the southern hemisphere cools.

As for this: "It doesn't make sense to think that the world's daily consumption of oil (around 70-80 MILLION barrels a day) is not going to influence our world." This isn't a scientific statement - it's a disembodied belief system. It's funny how years back you could find statements along the lines of "It doesn't make sense to think that we can put all these satellites in orbit and not affect the weather." Science is about establishing scales, and quantitatively linking cause and effect; it is not about beginning with belief systems because they sound good.

I could go on for a long time here, but this is like reviewing a paper for a peer-reviewed (!!) journal - the good ones are easy to do and require a short review, while the bad ones require a great deal of work and a long write-up.

But I'll close with this: "Frankly, you only need to look at average GLOBAL temperatures and the status of our ice sheets to determine whether or not GLOBAL warming is real. And there really is only one correct answer."

I fully agree. And all of the real evidence now makes the answer clear. There is no "climate crisis." Period.