12 thoughts on “Not Exactly Warming Up”

  1. Jonathan: Have you seen an iguana fall out of a tree yet?

    Carl: Didn’t you know that the weather on a given day is not the climate? Of course, OTOH, they figure out what the climate is by taking the days weather and and adding it to a chart of many days weather. But, I beg of you, please don’t go down that epistemic rabbit hole.

  2. I think the most fascinating thing about this current cold spell is the way different people are reacting to it. I heard that some Florida citrus growers were spraying water on their trees so they would ice over and protect the product. Up here in Wisconsin, ice storms bring down trees, power lines and other stuff as we saw earlier this winter.

    On facebook and blogs I frequent, I find very entertaining the people that are horrified about the low temp approaching zero (or higher, such as one person I saw complaining that it was below 50 in Texas). It is just a fact of life every winter up here. A couple more months and it is over. As a matter of fact the high temp will be in the thirties all week this week, and we may touch 40 this weekend, which is a relative heatwave in January. All of us athletes will probably take a jog outside if that happens.

    Some people just don’t know what a wind chill of -30 or -40 feels like. You literally die if you are outside in those temps for more than 5 minutes. Any exposed skin is almost instantly frostbitten if exposed, blah blah blah. Like I said, it is just another normal winter up here. I do feel bad for those who live in houses in Texas who have non insulated attics and worse yet, exposed plumbing in those attics. It shouldn’t be cold long enough (or cold enough for that matter) for their pipes to freeze, but it sure seems to have a lot of people worried.

    Like REM said, “should we talk about the weather”? Off topic, I really, really miss the old REM.

  3. Dan – just wait until REM has to pay more bills and they will dust off whatever used to make them great. Happened with Pearl Jam too. They can’t just put out sputtering albums of random navel gazing that no one buys and receive a big record company check anymore. I miss em’ too.

    Just wanted to show the irony of this big climate change push while we are in the biggest cold wave since 1985. I think a lot of people did think it was more than a co-incidence when we were having hot summers and Al Gore did his little tour. He gets scarcer when we had almost no summer (like this year in Chicago) and his winter tour of the UK or such would likely get postponed.

  4. This may turn out to be a bit more than a cold wave and more like a mini-ice age .

    The bitter winter afflicting much of the Northern Hemisphere is only the start of a global trend towards cooler weather that is likely to last for 20 or 30 years, say some of the world’s most eminent climate scientists.

    Their predictions – based on an analysis of natural cycles in water temperatures in the Pacific and Atlantic oceans – challenge some of the global warming orthodoxy’s most deeply cherished beliefs, such as the claim that the North Pole will be free of ice in
    summer by 2013.

    According to the US National Snow and Ice Data Centre in Colorado, Arctic summer sea ice has increased by 409,000 square miles, or 26 per cent, since 2007 – and even the most committed global warming activists do not dispute this.

    Given that no one knows what the tipping point for ice ages might be, and the possibility that an ice age may occur very quickly, I would short Al Gore’s many “green” stocks.

    Fossil evidence clearly demonstrates that Earth’s climate can shift gears within a decade, establishing new and different patterns that can persist for decades to centuries. In addition, these climate shifts do not necessarily have universal, global effects. They can generate a counterintuitive scenario: Even as the earth as a whole continues to warm gradually, large regions may experience a precipitous and disruptive shift into colder climates.

    Note that the regional theory may have been, in 2003, a way of reconciling the evidence with the conventional wisdom prior to Climategate.

  5. Mike – this is very depressing since 1) I make my living selling air conditioning and heating parts and equipment – in my industry we need both seasons, not just “cold” and 2) I like spring and summer since I run and bike. Perhaps Florida and other warmer climes will be seeing more of me if this cooling trend is true.

  6. There are a number of theories on why this is happening. Just don’t bother trying to look them up in Wikipedia as the climate pages are the exception that proves the rule about politicized editing. The current theories are:

    1. Ice age is coming – This was most popular in the 1970s but there are a couple of people talking about it
    2. The sun is getting quiet – We’re getting a much slower pickup for Solar Cycle 24 and several predictions of SC24 have already had to be revised. The theory is that the conventional models are getting solar input secondary effects wrong.
    3. The ozone holes at the poles were the cause of a large amount of the recent warming trend and with the changes in CFC et al emissions rules, the repairing ozone layer has led to the start of a dropoff since 2002.

    That last theory is still in print. I have an advance copy if anybody’s interested.

  7. Here’s where ‘global warming’ becomes quite the unfortunate misnomer. Global warming would be better referred to as ‘global weather change’. I’m no expert in the matter, but from my understanding and research, it doesn’t only mean that things will become hot. It means that temperatures and weather will become more extreme. More ice storms in places that seldom have them. Stronger storms, hurricanes, tornadoes. The weather patterns will all be affected as a result.

  8. Jeffrey – The problem with global climate change is that to remain scientific it must be falsifiable. Climate is always changing. If global warming is true whether or not the temperature goes up or down, how are we supposed to falsify it? You don’t generally see statistics on how many IPCC used climate models have been falsified, what percentage of the models used have failed, and what’s the average age of failure. It’s just a constant drumbeat that the consensus says and no realistic roadmap on how to falsify the thing. Past a certain point it begins to dawn on more and more people that what we’re seeing isn’t science but rather scientism.

    None of the CO2 led models match the observable atmosphere. The models all predict a tropospheric hot spot. The hot spot does not exist. In real science that would mean that none of the models are right and we need a serious rethink. This isn’t happening.

  9. When we have a heatwave somewhere in the world, will you publicly admit it is global warming?

    Probably not.

    If a beggar owning $1 receives another dollar are they on the way to becoming a millionaire? Or does it prove that the world is is getting richer?

    It’s about longer term trends. Climate is weather over at least 30 years. The overall trends are that the earth as a whole is warming.

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