What the Cold Says about Warming

January 9, 2015

Nothing, kinda.

Posted by greenman3610
Filed in Crock of the Week

12 Comments »

12 Responses to “What the Cold Says about Warming”

neilrieck Says:

January 9, 2015 at 7:04 am
Humans for the most part are just dumb animals. We think everything is hot when we are hot; we think everything is cold when we are cold. We (individually) think we are so damned smart, yet, only know that the Earth moves around the Sun because scientists tell us so. Yet when 97% of peer-reviewed scientists tell us the planet is warming “globally” we think we know better. What’s worse is this: most people reading this believe in the underlying principles of democracy where the majority vote rules. So even if you remove the “peer-reviewed” requirement for scientists to have an opinion in this matter, the final result is still greater than 50% so the case should be closed on this issue. This means the current American intransigence is not a matter of science. It is a matter of political tribalism where people in one tribe actually mean “I don’t believe in climate change” because it is what the other tribe believes to be true. Their are times when humanity collectively behaves as if we were dumb apes.

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- dumboldguy Says:
  
  January 9, 2015 at 9:09 am
  You are both too kind to “humans” and too hard on “apes” with this comment (and don’t forget that humans ARE “apes” of a soer). Apes have evolved to a level of intelligence that has allowed them to adapt to and survive for a very long time in certain ecosystems/biomes, and to do so in harmony with other life forms.
  
  Humans have evolved to a level of intelligence that has allowed them to create technologies that are destructive to the entire biosphere and are pointing towards mass extinction. We do this because we “think” that it is our place to dominate and control natural processes that have taken 4.5 billion years to evolve, and we do it in the name of “progress” and “free markets”. That is beyond “dumb”—-it borders on criminally insane.
  
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- rayduray Says:
  
  January 10, 2015 at 12:57 am
  Re: “Their are times when humanity collectively behaves as if we were dumb apes.”
  
  That’s not quite right.
  
  Here’s a better restatement:
  
  At all times humanity collectively behaves as dumb apes. Occasionally we have the odd instance of intelligence. But this is rare.
  
  Reply
Peter A. Dimitriou Says:

January 9, 2015 at 10:41 am
I am so tired of hearing people including scientists like Jeff Masters say things to the effect well you can’t blame a single event on anthropogenic climate change, well sorry Jeff you can at this point. .3 inches of snow in December in my region of michigan is unheard of and then the fast onset of the extreme cold like a switched has been flipped is a fingerprint of a climate system whose weather patterns are under duress. the language has to evolve on this to more accurately reflect our experience. anotherwords stop pretending it is not happening and start providing information useful to people in their every days lives.

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- ubrew12 Says:
  
  January 9, 2015 at 3:16 pm
  I think there’s definitely a connection between a loopy, easily stuck Jet Stream and Climate Change. Jennifer Francis explains it pretty well in this video (start at minute 24): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ETpm9JAdfcs
  
  But while this may explain the severity of a particular event, I guess most of these pundits like Masters don’t want to get drawn into the false claim that ANY particular event, by itself, is caused solely, or even predominantly, by Climate Change. It’s a difficult thing to bring up. Weather is where ‘the rubber meets the road’ as far as Climate Change goes, but most Weather events are still reflective, mostly, of more traditional causes (like winter).
  
  Reply
  - rlmrdl Says:
    
    January 9, 2015 at 4:22 pm
    ubrew, yup.
    
    The huge, wait a bit, HUGE change here is a mainstream US media outlet like NBC,
    a) featuring Jeff Masters
    b) pointing out that there IS friggin weather in OTHER places on earth apart from the US
    c) That the global trend is up and that even in hallowed Murkin places like Alaska and California, and yes Peter, Michigan, reflect the climate disturbances that really, no really guys, actually, like, you know, Monday-night-football-really, are happening.
    
    Without changing the language, the idea is slowly percolating into the thick skulls of the paid media channels that the climate changers have been right all along and now, finally, they are starting to report the story in exactly the way it SHOULD have been reported for the last 30 years.
    
    Progress. Not much and way too late to make enough difference in enough time, but at least as we finally boil in our own sweat, most of us will actually understand what is happening to us. I guess that’s some kind of plus.
    
    Reply
- lesliegraham1 Says:
  
  January 9, 2015 at 5:30 pm
  You beat me to it.
  It’s infuriating when people who should know better – like Masters – parrot this outdated denialist meme.
  There are dozens of events that can be and have been easily and directly linked to global warming and, of course, EVERY aspect of our weather is now manifesting from within a changed climate system. Ergo, EVERY weather event is affected – from a miniscule to a huge degree – by the new climate it is manifesting within.
  How can it possilby NOT be?
  
  Reply
  - David Minor Says:
    
    January 9, 2015 at 7:47 pm
    I think most of the time when you observe a weird weather event, the probability of it occurring somewhere in the world given no climate change isn’t vanishingly small, because the weather’s so random anyway. However, if you observe loads of those weird events at once, the probability of THAT occurring given no climate change /is/ vanishingly small. Hence the idea that looking at large numbers of events is a lot more informative than looking at individual ones.
    
    But yeah, at a certain point, the weather gets so freaky that even the probability of a single one of your observations occuring anywhere in the world given no climate change becomes vanishingly small. At that point then yeah, sure, blame everything on climate change.
    
    Reply
    - rayduray Says:
      
      January 10, 2015 at 1:04 am
      Re: “At that point then yeah, sure, blame everything on climate change.”
      
      You know, you started out swell. I thought you were going to say something intelligent. Then you completely lost it. Please, in the future, make sure your comprehension of the facts, your intelligence and your prose are more prominent than you silly and infantile cynicism. Which makes your scribbling look dumb.
      
      Compare your imbecility with this other scribbler: http://robertscribbler.wordpress.com/
      
      Baby, you got a lot to learn.
      
      Reply
      - David Minor Says:
        
        January 10, 2015 at 1:10 pm
        Eh? I’m not quite sure what you’re trying to say – that individual events with a vanishingly small probability given no climate change can’t be blamed on climate change? That seems strange to me, although I’m not a statistician – care to elaborate?
      - David Minor Says:
        
        January 10, 2015 at 2:54 pm
        To give an example, say you get ten consecutive years where it doesn’t get below freezing on Christmas day in Britain. It’s perfectly reasonable to blame that pattern on climate change, because you’ve got a deep understanding of how and why the climate’s changing, and the probability of your observations under normal conditions is very small. If you just focus on one year though, it doesn’t make much sense to blame it on climate change, at least statistically speaking, because it’s probability under normal conditions isn’t all that small.
        
        However, if it gets to the point where it’s above 40 celsius on ten consecutive Christmas days, then I would think you’d be perfectly justified in blaming the temperature of an individual Christmas on climate change, because that absolutely never happens under normal circumstances.
        
        Is this controversial or something?
- neilrieck Says:
  
  January 11, 2015 at 8:14 am
  Correct. I live in Waterloo Ontario in southern Canada. Although it has been very cold for the past 7-8 days, all our lawns were 100% green for November and December. The current extreme cold is due to the jet stream which means that we are getting someone else’s bad weather (which is a different view than saying “there is no warming”). Meanwhile, a 15-year long drought in Australia along with record high temperatures has resulted in numerous fires so, globally, you can see that extreme heat elsewhere is worse than our recent North American cold-snap. Now take a look at the water shortages in California which appear to have started 20 years ago and are continuing downward; take a look at the low water level of Lake Mead behind Hoover Dam; I fear that this situation will result in the loss of a lot of human life.
  
  Reply