Slashdot Mirror
2006 Was the Warmest Year Ever
kpw10 writes "Dr. Jeff Masters from Wunderground has a great summary of this year's rather abnormal weather (his blog is the best source on the net for in-depth weather analysis). The post discusses some of the cyclical climate forces at work this year and compares this year's record temperatures to records from the past. There are some interesting differences, particularly in the extent of the northern hemisphere seeing record highs this year." From the article: "December's weather in the Northeast U.S. may have been a case of the weather dice coming up thirteen — weather not seen on the planet since before the Ice Age began, 118,000 years ago. The weather dice will start rolling an increasing number of thirteens in coming years, and an ice-free Arctic Ocean in summertime by 2040 is a very real possibility..." Here is the The National Climatic Data Center's report announcing the entry of 2006 into the record books.
The grandparent post is correct. Correlation is not causation.
Look closely at Gore's CO2 chart and you'll notice that the CO2 levels can lag the temperature rises. If CO2 was *causing* temperature to rise, CO2 level rises would precede temperature rises.
CO2 is a heat trap as your post suggests (known scientific model...) but water vapor beats the hell out of it in that regard. Rising temperatures lead to more water vaporizing. When water vaporizes, it forms clouds which increase the earth's albedo which reduces insolation which reduces temperature. Climate change is a hell of a lot more complicated than "rising CO2 levels equal higher temperatures."
The climate modelers want you to think they understand earth's climate. But their models have huge lag times between modeling and verification. Contrast the climatologist's problem with the meteorologist's. Both run models as to how the atmosphere is going to behave but the meteorologist's models are constantly being revised in the face of Nature doing something other than what the models predicted. Hell, Katrina hit New Orleans a few days after 6 out of 7 models said she'd harmlessly veer into the Atlantic. It's impressive that even one model made the right call about Katrina but the fact that 6 out 7 "scientific models" were wrong on that particular hurricane should make you cautious about believing forecasts. Climatology models run on much longer cycles and so get much less feedback as to their accuracy. Moreover, climatologists are building their models on very sparse, inaccurate data.
The number of weather reporting stations reached an all time high in the early 90's. When the USSR collapsed, a lot of meteorology stations shut down due to lack of funding. What's interesting is that their data was suspect because due to the USSR's central planning mechanism of allocating fuel based on where the temperature was the coldest, weather stations had an incentive to shade their temperature reports. "Ivan - you wouldn't believe how cold it was here yesterday!" "How cold was it Boris?" "Cold enough to warrant another lump of coal..."
Despite fewer feedback cycles and lousy data, Climatologists claim to be able to forecast global temperatures to the fraction of a degree. It's nonsense and yet a good number of slashdot denizens seem to believe it.