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A Warming Planet Can Mean More Snow
Ponca City, We love you writes "NPR reports that with snow blanketing much of the country, the topic of global warming has become the butt of jokes; but for scientists who study the climate, there's no contradiction between a warming world and lots of snow. 'The fact that the oceans are warmer now than they were, say, 30 years ago means there's about on average 4 percent more water vapor lurking around over the oceans than there was... in the 1970s,' says Kevin Trenberth, a prominent climate scientist. 'So one of the consequences of a warming ocean near a coastline like the East Coast and Washington, DC, for instance, is that you can get dumped on with more snow partly as a consequence of global warming.' Increased snowfall also fits a pattern suggested by many climate models, in which rising temperatures increase the amount of atmospheric moisture, bringing more rain in warmer conditions and more snow in freezing temperatures."
One question for the warmers reading. Can the theory of AGW be falsified?
If it gets hotter it is because of Global Warming.
If a hurricane hits it is because of Global Warming.
If there is a drought anywhere it is because of Global Warming.
But if we get a blizzard it is bacause of Global Climate Change.
If it floods it is because of Global Warming/Climate Change.
If the North polar ice shrinks it is Global Warming.
Yet when the Antarctic ice grows it is Climate Change.
When the Northern ice returns it is nothing to see here, move along.
When Phil Jones says there has been no warming for fifteen years, it doesn't mean anything. In fact, to date only the Moonies at the Wash. Times and Fox News consider his statement worthy of repeating. (He said it to the BBC, btw, not known as a bastion of Deniers.)
So my question is this: For a theory to be Science it must be falsifiable; so what would it take for one of you True Believers to reconsider your theory?
Democrat delenda est
The East Coast gets a bit of a blizzard (I live in DC but am from Minnesota). People start saying, "Global warming?! HA!"
...
Meanwhile Sagar Island shrinks away from rising oceans.
Meanwhile a UAB professor claims ocean acidification is yet another measurable effect of climate change.
Meanwhile Eastern Antarctica (the steadfast 'unaffected' part of Antarctica) begins to show signs of melting (via NASA and U of TX).
Feel free to keep using your local area to prove/disprove climate change. One day the facts will pile up
My work here is dung.
Is this finding facts to fit theories, or theories to fit facts?
Didn't make this argument when it didn't snow much last few years, did they?
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
Since a shortage of fresh water is our next big crisis, doesn't that mean that global warming is a good thing?
World is fucked. Oh well, time to jerk off.
A non-warming planet can also mean more snow year-to-year. And anyway it doesn't say anything about human-caused warming since we know the planet has gone through many warming and cooling cycles naturally.
Dear Global Warming,
I looked out my window, and saw another 8 inches of snow. I just wanted to tell you that you are a liar, and I hate you.
Sincerely,
ronz0o
Phil Jones has pretty much admitted most of the data is BS and nobody knows what it really means.
It all seems such a moot point to me... Honestly no matter what humans do to save or destroy the earth, in 4-5 billion years the sun is going to engulf the earth.
Save the whales, save the tree's, save yourself.... Death is the inevitable outcome of life.
On a more cheerful note I am going back to playing the Wii and enjoy my time here!
I rather thought all slashdotters knew and appreciated this simple notion. The weather is all about water moving around in the air. More energy into the water means more water into the air. More water into the air means more weather... more storms, more hurricanes, more snow... and what's really interesting is a new distribution of water. We will see deserts turn to jungles and jungles into deserts. The geologic record shows this kind of thing happening a lot. Some people think changes like these killed the dinosaurs.
Climategate U-turn as scientist at centre of row admits: There has been no global warming since 1995
At least now we know why they were illegally denying FOI requests for their data.
UN climate body admits 'mistake' on Himalayan glaciers
How many more "mistakes", falsifications, and fabrications need to be exposed before this scam goes buh-bye?
the best cable news team in America.
I am officially gone from
A guy I know ran with this today and was going on and on about it, going off about how climate-change advocates were such idiots and how this was a huge slap in the face for them, etc etc. He tried to sound really educated about it, talking laws of thermodynamics and saturation of 14.77 micron absorbtion and so on. I countered all his points but he wouldn't let up, of course selectively responding to the stuff I countered with and bringing up some new zany thing each time. I ran out of energy to deal with him, and was simply reminded of why I never really liked the guy.
It's unfortunate to let him have the last word, as of course all his fan-club will read the thread (I confess... this was on Facebook) and of course they will all just see it as a victory and continue to reinforce each others' delusion... but I really don't see how I could ever change his or any of their minds on the subject. My only real hope is that all these curmudgeons with their lazy conservative and antiquated views on things will eventually die off in time for the newer generation of educated youth to step in and hopefully turn things around in time.
To some extent I think the question of whether the globe is warming (or climate is changing, or whatever terminology comes next) is secondary.
Whether or not it's already happening in any measurable way today, I think we can all agree that it *could* happen in the future, so we (as a country, and a global society, and a species) need to be careful that it doesn't. To that end, studying human civilization's side effects on the biosphere seems obviously worthwhile.
I think the original batch of climate scientists were well-intentioned but did themselves (and us) a disservice by overplaying the initial data. They saw a potential problem in the future and tried to rally the public by saying "it's already happening!", but when that ended up not being very obviously provable, people started dismissing the entire concern. That, to me, is a huge mistake.
For the last time, climate is not weather.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
The thing many people overlook (the global warming people especially) is that if you go back and look at ice core samples and prehistoric patterns of glaciation, the current weather patterns look eerily similar to what has happened before.
Specifically: initial warming leads to the melting of the permafrost, which leads to a massive release of CO2 into the atmosphere. This promotes runaway global warming -- which unfortunately means greater ocean temperatures and much more evaporation. This means more rain and more SNOW.
Additionally, it also tends to disrupt ocean currents and the rotation of heat from the equator to the poles (i.e. the vast majority of Europe is at Latitudes higher than Canada is -- and if it weren't for the warm ocean currents they would have equally frigid weather).
The basic problem is that if you get enough extended period of heavy snow, you may eventually get enough snowpack to resist melting well into the summer months. This is exacerbated by the fact that snow, being white, reflects a HUGE amount of light/heat back into space. In essence, due to snow fall, cold weather is somewhat self-perpetuating.
Eventually you reach a situation where the amount of extra snow that falls in the winter is too great in certain latitudes to EVER completely melt in the winter -- and then things start going down hill from there. Thanks to the fact that evaporation / refreezing and then remelting acts as a wonderful method for desalinization of seawater, you also end up playing merry havoc with the ocean currents as well (and end up with much more coastal ice formation as the freezing point of the fresh water run off is much higher than that of pure seawater). Eventually the currents supplying heat to the North Atlantic basically shut down altogether and things go to hell in a hand basket (i.e. hell freezes over!).
The point that most of the "global warming" alarmists miss is that data shows that in the past both average global temperatures *and* CO2 levels peaked at levels significantly HIGHER than they are right now -- immediately before the planet plunged into the next ice age.
People need to realize that ALL of recorded human history has occurred in the current warm interglacial period -- which is only the most recent one. Furthermore, they need to realize that these warm interglacials of 20K-25K years are the EXCEPTION not the rule -- with ice ages of 100K years or more being the norm (with the interglacial periods between them).
While the movie "The Day After Tomorrow" was largely pure BS, there were some grains of actual science behind it (albeit they sped up the time table of events by several orders of magnitude to make it exciting).
The bigger question everyone fails to ask... Is all this crap we inject into the atmosphere good for us humans? Most likely not! So why not change for that reason alone, regardless if climate change is true or not.
Iraq billions
I don't know about you unfortunately, but I expect to be able to have chemists tell me more about chemistry than a behavioural psychologist can - not everything in science is equal. An economist for instance may consider themselves a scientist. A petition is meaningless here - what would be meaningful is an argument convincing enough that climate scientists agree with it.
People can say they have found a cure for AIDS, won the Falklands War by advocating biological warfare, won a Nobel Prize, been elected to the British House of Lords or all kinds of things but unless experts in those areas agree with them their opinion is meaningless. You have been conned by a very audacious trick of professional confidence tricksters - that of pretending that others are pulling a trick themselves. It is a high paying profession now to fly around the world pretending that scientists are freezing their arses of in Antarctica to fabricate data when instead they could be fabricating at home where it is warm.
Believe the climate scientists, not the PR firms paid to tell you otherwise, and not people like Monckton and Plimer that say what sells instead of what is found.
Ah, so global warming is made up because a SOFTWARE ARCHITECT and amateur astronomer says so. As a Solutions Architect and amateur astronomer I say the world is flat. Through observation: - From sea level it looks flat - I have been up in an aeroplane and it still looks flat. - My world map is flat (well okay it is vertical, but still in two dimensions). - A marble I place a little way away from me doesn't roll away like it does when placed a little off centre on my wife's exercise ball - I have lived in the top and bottom halves of the world map (or "hemispheres" to you unbelievers) and the above still applies I suspect that those of you who think it is round haven't taken into account that light bends when it gets close to a mass.
I'll tell you what a warming planet means:
- More/less heath
- More/less snow
- More/less rain
- Rising/lower sea waters
- More earthquakes
- More volcano eruptions
- More girls on slashdot
Yeah, I'm confused.
What I know is that:
We breathe oxygen/nitrogen and exhale CO2
Trees breathe CO2 and exhale oxygen
Plant more trees or avoid breathing.
Views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the author.
The "debate" doesn't exist, it's just PR firms and confidence tricksters making money by telling people what they want to hear.
The scandals here are as relevant as thinking that whatever a police photographer paid for lunch after taking a photo of a crime scene has any bearing on the murder they photographed.
If you think scientists are all evil tricksters then go talk to an old farmer or someone that has been involved with a ski resort for decades.
If it gets hotter it is because of Global Warming.
The consistent and scientific standard you're looking for is if mean surface temperature decreases over time. Global Warming, by contrast, is indicated by a rising mean surface temperature over time.
AGW is more complicated, probably a topic to wait on for people who haven't digested the above, but essentially comes down to trying to doing accounting for different warming contributions based on related measurements. The closer the accounting is to adding up, the more credible AGW looks. The farther, less.
what would it take for one of you True Believers to reconsider your theory?
A complete investigation on the part of each individual is a rather time-consuming proposition, so a lot of us use heuristics. One of mine tends to be that opponents of AGW are often doing things like:
(a) making no distinction between individual weather events and climate
(b) confusing the term "Global Warming" with " monotonic temperature/ice thickness increase across every point of the globe
(c) asserting there exists some input or dynamic that accounts for most of the warming and implying that climate scientists supposedly have ignored it, when in fact it turns out that there exist climate scientists who have considered and done the accounting on said input or dynamic (see increased solar output)
Now, I'm not a true believer, so maybe my bar is lower than some others, but I'd say that if I can go 2-3 years where less than 10-20% of the AGW criticism I read has one of these features (or similar ones: the list I gave is hardly exhaustive), I might start to give the opposition as much credibility as the proponents.
Tweet, tweet.
Reminds me of an old Persian (/Indian/Chinese/Turkish - it's one of those popular ones) story -
A villager goes to visit a wise man to gain wisdom. As he walks into the wise man's home, he sees him blowing into his cupped palms.
"Why are you blowing into your hands?", he asks.
"To warm them", comes the reply.
A little while later, the wise man's wife serves soup. The wise man blows into it.
"Why are you blowing into your soup?", the villager asks.
"To cool it", is the reply.
The villager finishes his soup and hurries to leave. When the wise man asks him why he won't stay, he says "I can't trust a man who blows both hot and cold."
The moral isn't that one can't trust scientists who claim global warming can have a local cooling effect. It is that, despite all indignant incredulity, the same cause can have different effects in different contexts and scales.
Karma fed to this user will be promptly burnt. Be warned; be wary.
Can global warming create more snow? I believe it can. Really, in a nutshell, global warming = more energy in the system. That's it. Personally I believe the planet is getting warmer. Note I said "Believe", not know.
Here's my issue. This issue has been politicized by people on both sides, although primarily the left from where I sit. It has been turned into a religion by people like Al Gore. There has been a lot of talk by idiot politicos who have made statements that no snow in 2005 was proof of AGW. Then this year the record snow is proof of AGW. Both statements are complete shit; a single season of extreme weather means fuck-all. There is proof of the MWP. There is not proof of the MWP being a global phenomenon, however, there is also no proof that it isn't. If AGW actually exists, then why the fucking with the data? Why the need to include non-reviewed and non-substantiated data in government reports? If the science is sound it should stand on it's own without augmentation.
You know who really pisses me off? Al "the debate is over" Gore. Al "we use 10 times the energy as the average family but buy carbon credits" Gore. Al "Fly around the planet in a privet jet but you need to drive a Prius at all time" Gore. Well, really? Fuck you Al. The science is not settled and you're a fucking hypocrite. AGW is a theory, just as relativity is a theory; there is a lot of evidence to support it, but it's still not complete. And I don't want to get started on the ponzi scheme that is carbon credits. Either producing excess CO2 is bad or it's not; buying someone else's allotment (that they probably weren't gong to use any way) is a crock. The excess energy you are using is still making more CO2 than necessary. Please explain why George Fucking Bush lives in a seriously eco-friendly house and you live in an energy wasting mansion with all the shit that comes out of your mouth?
When "scientists" and politicians say the science is settled about something as complex as global weather systems my bullshit meter pegs at eleven. The climate models need a lot more work. The accuracy of collected data is in some cases questionable. This doesn't mean that all the data is bad, but the theory cannot be presented as settled and complete at this point.
My over all point is that the politicians need to shut the hell up, because then know about as much about climate change as they do about finance: not very fucking much.
I still cannot find the droids I am looking for...
So one of the consequences of a warming ocean near a coastline like the East Coast and Washington, DC, for instance, is that you can get dumped on with more snow partly as a consequence of global warming
Like last week? That came from the West.
The game.
A detailed study was done of “the relationships of the storm frequencies to seasonal temperature and precipitation conditions” for the years “1901–2000 using data from 1222 stations across the United States.” The 2006 study, Temporal and Spatial Characteristics of Snowstorms in the Contiguous United States [PDF] (Chagnon et al., 2006) found we get more snow storms in warmer years:
Results for the November–December period showed that most of the United States had experienced 61%– 80% of the storms in warmer-than-normal years. Assessment of the January–February temperature conditions again showed that most of the United States had 71%–80% of their snowstorms in warmer-than-normal years. In the March–April season 61%–80% of all snowstorms in the central and southern United States had occurred in warmer-than-normal years. Thus, these comparative results reveal that a future with wetter and warmer winters, which is one outcome expected (National Assessment Synthesis Team 2001), will bring more snowstorms than in 1901–2000. Agee (1991) found that long-term warming trends in the United States were associated with increasing cyclonic activity in North America, further indicating that a warmer future climate will generate more winter storms.
Whereas ignorant knuckleheads just instinctively know the truth.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Could you give me an excerpt from an E-mail that clearly demonstrates the conspiracy to hide data in the IPCC. I've heard a lot of insinuation but never any direct quotes.
The Anti-intellectual is the easiest to stir up into a fervour, simply state that something threatens their rut and they will ignore all facts and all common sense in their mad crusade to destroy whatever they have perceived as a threat.
Oddly enough, you accuse Scientists of fear mongering when the media driving the anti-intellectual movement uses the exact same method and gets away with it.
The ages old "X will raise taxes" is the most widely used anti-climate change argument, also the most transparent and entirely based on fear mongering. Yet the somnabulant public tends to buy this like it's going out of fashion. Remember, most of this centuries tragedies were caused by one person saying that another group was destroying their livelihood, it's a big lie that never gets questioned.
Does mentioning the Big lie, count as Godwins Law?
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
On one hand we have thousands of climatologists from dozens of countries armed with super computers and the resources of government. They tell us we have a problem. Arguing against them are a bunch of people, most of whom are not climatologists or even scientists, who do not have super computers or any data of their own. They argue that there is a worldwide conspiracy to falsify data. Thousands of scientists from Europe, Asia, Australasia and the Americas all working in harmony to defraud the world, to drive up taxes and bring down civilisation - all led by the anti-christ Al Gore. Think about who you are siding with and why you believe in what you believe.
Climate science is a broad subject that incorporates a number of fields. For instance meteorology, geology and physical oceanography among others. But the core climate scientists who write the GCMs are physicists who study radiative transfer and expand their knowledge base into those other fields to capture the information they offer. Physics is a very statistically oriented field.
What you are saying is that quantum mechanics and general relativity are not real science!!! There are numerous physics Professors around the world for example that don't have a full grasp of the standard model or general relativity.
The suggestion that a random person of the street could make useful comments on the validity of either without years of study is utterly laughable.
I have a physics masters should my views on black holes be given as much weight as say Stephen Hawkins?
That's not what he's been saying at all. ""The science still holds up" though, he adds. A follow-up study2 verified the original conclusions for the Chinese data for the period 1954–1983, showing that the precise location of weather stations was unimportant. "They are trying to pick out minor things in the data and blow them out of all proportion," says Jones of his critics." http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100215/full/news.2010.71.html "But Jones is adamant that this doesn't actually change the conclusion of the analysis. In a subsequent paper, published in the Journal of Geophysical Research in 2008, Jones verified the original conclusions for the Chinese data for the period 1954–1983, showing that the precise location of weather stations was unimportant to the outcome." http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/feb/16/hacked-climate-science-emails-climate-change
So lets look at those errors:
(1) Himalayan glaciers could be gone by 2030
Yes, that's the error. And it was corrected after the error was pointed out.
(2) there's been a rising cost of disasters due to more CO2
This is based on the story by Jonathan Leake, I'm guessing. The IPCC report said that one study indicated there was an increase in costs due to AGW while other studies did not detect a trend. So the IPCC report was balanced. Isn't that what people want? I haven't heard of a retraction by Leake yet.
(3) 40% of amazon forest could be destroyed by warming
This was based on research by Richard North and reported by Jonathan Leake. The research by North has been shown to be in error and several errors were pointed out to Leake prior to his publishing the story, but that didn't stop him. I haven't heard of a retraction as yet, but since you're repeating the claim, I'm guessing there hasn't been one.
(4) 55% of Holland is below sea level.
This was based on data provided by the Dutch government, so I'm not sure you can call this an IPCC error. However, it was corrected when the Dutch government changed their value. And it wasn't used to make any conclusions in the IPCC report, so if you want to call it an error, it was a trivial one.
So there you have it. One real error and one maybe error. And here's the thing: when the IPCC is found to be in error, they correct it. That's something I don't see from skeptics. Heck, just this week someone repeated the claim that Mars is warming and that's been debunked for I don't know how long. Or I'll hear that scientists have to be pro-AGW to get funding and that's well known not to be true. I would really like the skeptics to be better because I don't think I buy all the claims of AGW, but all the skeptics (at least the ones that get any publicity) seem to have difficulty with logic and math and science and ethics. There's certainly some of that on the pro-AGW side, but it seems that all the best scientists are pro-AGW and only the second or third tier will lean to anti-AGW. I don't know, maybe there are some real top notch skeptics out there, but I bet if there are, that they're being quiet because right now it's really embarrassing to be affiliated with the skeptics.
>>there's been a rising cost of disasters due to more CO2
>This is based on the story by Jonathan Leake, I'm guessing. The IPCC report said that one study indicated there was an increase in costs due to AGW while other studies did not detect a trend. So the IPCC report was balanced. Isn't that what people want?
The IPCC based their claim on a preprint, unpublished, non-peer-reviewed article which, when eventually published, did not show a trend. The IPCC ignored actual peer-reviewed articles that showed no trend to do this. And maintained this position despite complaints by the "expert reviewers", going so far as to misrepresent the view of one of the scientists (Pielke) whose work had found no trend. So the IPCC report was *not* balanced on this subject. "balanced" would have been to show the *actual* consensus view of the peer-reviewed literature at the time: that there was no trend.
I'm not basing any of this on stories by Jonathan Leake. Leake wrote some stories based on what had been uncovered in the blogosphere, of which there's a lot more where those came from; the IPCC has responded with weak apologetics that included such silly claims as "only one error has been found".
> And here's the thing: when the IPCC is found to be in error, they correct it.
Your evidence for this is what, exactly? Like I said, there is no provision for correcting errors other than waiting for the next report to come out year later and hoping it gets fixed then. Even if they admit an error has been made, they don't republish the report fixing the errors and don't publish an errata listing them. Do they?
>That's something I don't see from skeptics.
Maybe you're following the wrong skeptics. My impression has been the reverse of yours. When people like Steve McIntyre or Craig Loehle or Ross McKitrick make a mistake, they admit it and fix it and redo the work to see if it made a difference. And they make their data public so anybody can check it. When people like Michael Mann or Gavin Schmidt or Phil Jones make a mistake, they deny it and hide their data from critics and pretend the error doesn't matter or doesn't exist.
I play Nerd-Folk!