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Warmest 12-Month Period Recorded In US
First time accepted submitter seanzig writes "Dr. Jeff Masters of Weather Underground provides a good overview of the State of the Climate Report from NOAA's National Climatic Data Center (NCDC). May 2011 through Apr. 2012 broke the previous record (Nov. 1999 — Oct. 2000). A number of other interesting records (e.g., warmest March on record) and stats emerged. It just presents the data and does not surmise anything about the causes or what should be done about it."
The winter gardening this year was out of sight.
If it stays like this, I might never have to buy veggies again.
Hooray for warming!
Panic!
Because either the world is ending, or there is going to be a massive flamewar. Decide which one you want to panic over.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
1) Buy Ten-foot-pole.
2) Rent a flame retardant Hasmat suite (too expensive to buy it).
3) Hire some bystander who is oblivious to contents of manilla envelope.
4) Send innocent bystander on fools errand to present climate data.
5) While in underground bunker; DUCK!
>>"ad space available -- low rates!!!"
Any bets on how long it'll before they start swarming in here claiming that 17xx / 18xx / 19xx was so much hotter; how this was really the coldest period on record and that James Hansen is a commie?
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
Let me fill in the blanks for you. It's getting warmer because of anthropogenic carbon emissions. And no matter what you think should be done about it, nothing is going to be done about it because people are not going to agree on a common course of action.
So, better get used to it: it's going to get a lot warmer. But why that may be unpleasant and costly for some, it's not going to be the end of civilization.
...is trending cooler.
Enough cooler, apparently, to more than balance out the relatively local heat we've seen in the US, which is caused by a regional weather situation that's also apparently starting to change.
Part 1
It just presents the data
"just" makes it sounds like thats a bad thing. That's excellent science. Professional and respectable and my hats off to Dr Masters
Part 2
and does not surmise anything about the causes
Well, I think there's little disagreement that a "large" fraction is human caused, although obviously some small fraction is natural variation. "natural climate" is not a flat horizontal line as some demand.
Part 3
or what should be done about it.
Excellent. Usually part 3 is the establishment of a neo-pol pot regime, or national socialism, or some financial scam to make the rich richer and the poor poorer, or most commonly meaningless feel good frippery that will do absolutely nothing but "raise awareness".
I'm opposed to most of those solutions, along with a HUGE percentage of people who are in, or in my case have been abandoned by, the Republican party. Despite my/our disagreement being with Part 3, we get slandered and our words are twisted around into being deniers of Part 1 or Part 2. Very annoying. I will admit that at least some of us basically troll for fun by denying part 1 and part 2 above, because we hate the "solutions" to part 3.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Wonder what has Fox News to say now?
They have repeatedly claimed that snow implies that Global Warming is a hoax.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=P...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MN7-k-RXvSQ
This is why I don't like the arguers against AGW, they resort to such cheap shots that it's hard to take them seriously. It definitely works on their target demographic though.
Note: I am in no way implying that a hot summer is evidence of global warming.
This space for rent.
Excellent! Converting vast swaths of Canada and Siberia to arable land, combined with increased CO2 in the atmosphere to help vegetable growth, damn!
I'm glad we thought to do this and stave off a mass murderous ice age, which occur with disturbing regularity and short frequency.
Praise humanity!
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Your garden depends on winter to periodically kill diseases and pests.
Nobody presented it as proof of AWG. It says so in the goddamned summary.
Wait, AWG? I don't think the American Wire Gauge is in dispute here.
At least that's what all my environmentalist friends tell me when we have an unusual cold spell.
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
Actually Alaska had the most snow ever recorded, since they started keeping records. Alaska during the winter is 2012 is what I would call an "inconvenient fact" for the global warming alarmists.
sudo make me a sandwich
Nobody presented it as proof of AWG. It says so in the goddamned summary.
Wait, AWG? I don't think the American Wire Gauge is in dispute here.
It's a pain in the fucking ass. Now we've got AWG and metric cable types. I'm supposed to be able to find a substitute for a discontinued cable, specs in AWG, but replacements in metric, and every. single. fucking. time. I have to work out the characteristics because the sizes aren't exactly the same.
"But Beardo, why not just use the next biggest size and leave the conversion to the philosophers?"
Because weight is a critical factor, that's why.
---
ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
If it were "proof" the poster (me) would not have said "it just presents the data." Not including "contiguous" or "continental" in the summary was an unfortunate oversight on my part, but it's very clear in the article (just count the number of times it says "contiguous" or look at the big map in Figure 3). Nonetheless, I suspect that people in the continental U.S. would find it interesting that the past year has been the warmest ever recorded overall.
There is an article that is global by the same author, but it is several months old (hence why I didn't post it as "news"). Also, it draws more conclusions, though at he indicates his sources, provides reasoning, and presents opposing viewpoints.
More snow does not mean cooler temps. More snow means more moisture in the air.
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
Again how is more snow show that the warming trend is wrong? Snow is a product of moisture in the atmosphere not the temperature (unless it rises above say around 38 degrees). I would argue that more moisture is a product of warmer temperatures due to evaporation.
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
Reports like this are like a tin can on a fence for anti global warming people. At the time I write this, I see dozens of posts saying "and now all the global warming people will take this as proof", and not one global warming person taking it as proof.
For the record, this is not proof of global warming. It is a very extreme regional climate event of the type that climate change theory predicts will become common, but you can't attribute individual events to the long-term trend.
For the record, this means jack diddly in terms of global temperature change, the contiguous US is too small to matter. The past 3 months did not set a global record. However, it has been pretty warm: global temperature this year so far is in the top 25%... just like every other year this century.
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/global/
We've had unusually warm or record warm years for 12 to 15 years. There's evidence of it going back to the early 80s. So far it's following the predicted pattern, there's that nasty science, including the southwest being more mild. A shift in the jet stream was supposed to keep Arizona and Southern California mild compared to the rest of the country. Arizona has had a mild winter and now we are well into May with no 100 degree days. Some would call this proof global warming or climate change is false but it's due to the fact they haven't read what the models predicted. I've heard ridiculous claims that it was supposed to be 10 degrees warmer by now so it's false. I never read a single model that predicted that. The worst scenarios are for a roughly 10 degree increase in some areas in a hundred years, not ten. Three to five was the most likely outcome but we are actually running on the high side of all the models so it's likely to be worse than the best case scenario. Look at the statistics. If some one rolled ten or twelve sixes in a row with dice and could predict 90% of his rolls would that be proof of psychic powers? I think even James Randi would accept that as proof. We're seeing the same consistency in weather model predictions. People have claimed the lack of killer hurricanes as proof that it's all a lie while ignoring the explosion in deadly tornadoes. Also tornadoes are happening earlier and later in the year and they are happening from Maine to Southern California. Two places where they are very rare. Other factors can moderate hurricanes but tornadoes are cause by the mixing of warm and cool air. You have the right conditions you tend to get tornadoes. Usually there's only a portion of the country where conditions are right but now they can happen almost anywhere.
It was a very pleasant year. A gentle winter. Years like this come around time to time. So do nasty winters like the three where we had temperatures of under -25ÂF for weeks on end. Then there was the year where it snowed here every month, including June, July and August. Nasty. These things happen. According to recorded history they've been happening for millennia. According to studies of other things these warming and cooling cycles have been happening for hundreds of millions of years. In fact, traditionally, the Earth has been warmer than it is now. In fact, live and diversity flourished during the warming periods. People are upset because things are changing and they don't like change. Life is change. Change is life.
All of this global warming hysteria is distracting people from the real issue: pollution.
1) Post some random hot button article
2) Wait for people to make hundreds of idiotic and poorly informed ex recto assertions
3) ???
4) Profit!
Sure, and it is a valid point when one has a few weeks of cold or even a few months of cold. And by the same token, a year like this one by itself isn't that useful data. It is when data like this year is part of a larger pattern that it becomes a problem. In this context one has a very hot year by a variety of different metrics and that's on top of a gradual increase in average temperature over the last twenty years. Weather and climate are different, but lots of weather change over the long-term is eventually a sign of climate change.
true. You should write a book with the information you calculated in it. Might be valuable to others.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Two, over 80% of Alaskans believe climate change is happening, and over 55% believe it's human caused. I'm pretty sure those are both the highest for any "red" state. Why? We've warmed 3.0 degrees (C) in the last 50 years, which is more than a little insane. We (not me personally, I've only been here a few years) have watched it happen. Yes, this year, was a little bit below normal, mostly driven by interior regions (Fairbanks), while the coast, especially the north coast, was still above normal.
But don't worry, I'm sure they'll be able to remove the "contiguous" qualifier soon enough. For instance, every day in April, save one, was above-normal. But I'm sure that won't change what you believe either.
Those who fail to understand communication protocols, are doomed to repeat them over port 80.
How so? And who are these "global warming alarmists"?
Clever signature text goes here.
So I am wrong, care to educate me, o' weather scientist. Are you saying moisture density in the air is not increased by heat? And why would it have to be colder for more snow. I find that snow is more likely to fall closer to the freezing point, in fact the temperature generally rises when it snows.
Basically what I am saying is it can get too cold to snow (well not really but the probability the conditions for snow are vastly reduced), below 0F you really don't get much precipitation. Snow requires a few things to occur before you see those white flakes. 1 Moisture saturation, the more moisture in the air means the higher probability of snow, 2. Temperature, must allow the ice crystals to stay frozen on their way down, 3 a temperature difference between the lower atmosphere and the area where snow develops. On really cold days there is not enough heat to drive the saturated air to the very cold layers of the atmosphere where snow forms
Oh wait you said I was wrong? Hmm guess not.
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/SolarCycle/
Hmmm.
Matches periodicity, not intensity.
Of course if it's the subatomic particle stream
causing cloud seeding, then sunspot number
may be moot in lieu of intensity.
-AI
For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion
Except snow doesn't form down here, it forms high up in the atmosphere, to get that water up there you have to have heat to drive the saturated air up. Notice it snows far heavier on the warmer winter days. Once the temp drops well below freezing the chances of snow are greatly reduced.
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
Not including "contiguous" or "continental" in the summary was an unfortunate oversight on my part
Is it unfortunate that you neglected to be accurate, or that you got caught neglecting to be accurate?
Now I havent read the article (this is slashdot) but just looking at the summary, I find it amazing that two different annual period systems are in use yet nobody seems to even notice it. May to April and then November to October. Thats dredging the data.
With this sort of dredging tactic, there were 138 chances (assuming the authors didnt do rolling 52 week or rolling 365 daily comparisons) to fit the headline since November 1999. The fact that it took 138 sample periods to find 12 contiguous months that break the record, but not 137 or fewer sample periods, suggests something quite the opposite of what the standard AGW crowd will take away from your summary.
"His name was James Damore."
You've never heard of 'dew point', have you? It depends entirely on 2 variables, temprature and pressure. I'd say you just made a complete fool of yourself by telling the world you have no idea what causes rain, but that's not uncommon in AGW threads..
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Ok read your article. It seems the primary reason for the increased ice in the Bering sea as compared the rest of the arctic, which has seen a decline in sea ice coverage, was due to winds blowing the ice down to the Bering strait where it backed up until the ice wall finally collapsed and the ice then flowed into the Bering sea while the low temperatures helped keep it frozen.
Not sure what point you are trying to make with it, as it even mentions the record highs in the continental US.
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
Population of Alaska--722,718
Population of United States-- 311,591,917
Twenty Three hundredths of a percent of the united states
Land Area of United States-- 9166601 sq km
Land Area of Alaska-- 1481347 sq km
Sixteen percent.
I don't know where you get forty percent. Perhaps you need to seek shelter before the cold impairs more than your arithmetic.
Then please tell me how the moisture in the air gets to the upper layers of the atmosphere where it actually forms?
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
That is *exactly* the case, but we're talking about temperatures at the point where the phase change occurs, not the local weather.
Water evaporates faster the warmer it is - warm air heats the surface and speeds the process. Warmer air can also hold more water as water vapor, which is why 70% humidity in the dead of winter is actually still fairly dry air while 70% humidity during a heat wave is oppressively wet.
Clouds form when a body of that warm, moist air (a warm front) collides with a body of cold air (a cold front) and rapidlly cools down, causing the water vapor to condense around dust particles into microscopic water droplets, which eventually coalesce into drops/flakes/hailstones too large to remain suspended in the turbulent air and fall to the ground as precipitation.
Note though that you need to BOTH wet air and a something to cool it to get precipitation. The wetter the air and the faster the cooling the harder it will rain. If you lack either component, nothing happens. That's why Antarctica rarely gets snow; they've got plenty of cold, but rarely get warm, wet air since it's all cooled off and dumped it's moisture before it reaches them.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Have you lived anywhere cold? Every year it snows the most when the high is around 20 degrees or so. The cold cold cold days are clear and windy.
http://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/awg-wire-gauge-d_731.html
yeah, that was hard. How would you measure even what cable you have (assuming its not labeled) without measuring the diametre in mm?
Surely you can handle two decimal points with a micrometer. I am having a hard time understanding how this small conversion of known values could cause you that much grief. Perhaps it depends on your application, but still. How do you think people every figure out what gauge of wire they have? measure it!!!!
As a potential lottery winner, I totally support tax cuts for the wealthy
To explain this clearly.
We might declare that a coin is "probably biased towards heads" if in 10 flips it lands heads 9 times. A proper test would consider only 10 flips, and if the coin were actually fair the chance of a false positive would be 1023:1 against. But a data dredger will declare the coin biased if at any point during hundreds or even thousands of flips that it landed heads 9 out of the last 10 times that its flipped. You can clearly see that the dredger will always eventually get the evidence they want, even when the coin is fair or in fact biased in the other opposite direction, that his/her chance of a false positive is 100%.
"His name was James Damore."
FFS, it's a joke. I dare you to come up with something about how AWG (cables) can be controversial.
---
ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
How is it inconvenient for the pro-science group? The increased snowfall (and the warmth of the contiguous states) has a known cause - the change in the jet stream. And the change in the jet stream has a known cause - a change in the arctic oscillation. And climate theory indicates that one of the things that happens when you lose the summer arctic ice cover is that the arctic oscillation changes. And what has been causing the summer arctic ice cover to disappear? Global warming. So, while this doesn't say that global warming caused the increased snow in Alaska as well as the warm winter in the contiguous US, it would be astoundingly incorrect to call this an "inconvenient fact".
It's nice to know there are (last ditch) ways to cool down the climate using Mt. Pinatubo as an example.
"Information in the fifth chapter of the book about global warming proposes that the global climate can be regulated by geo-engineering of a stratoshield[5] based upon patented technology from Nathan Myhrvold's company Intellectual Ventures.[6]"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SuperFreakonomics#Global_warming_section
Nobel Prize Winner Cruzen:
"Professor Crutzen has proposed a method of artificially cooling the global climate by releasing particles of sulphur in the upper atmosphere,along with other particles at lower atmospheric levels, which would reflect sunlight and heat back into space. The controversial proposal is being taken seriously by scientists because Professor Crutzen has a proven track record in atmospheric research. If this artificial cooling method actually were to work, then we would be able to help reverse the effects of the pollution caused by the burning of fossil fuels, buying us time to find a permanent energy replacement. This could be crucial in helping maintain the planets integrity and livability. [9]"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_J._Crutzen#Global_warming
What? Why do you think it matters when the period begins? And how do you think it indicates anything "opposite of what the standard AGW crowd will take away" from it? Since it's just the US (contiguous, at that) it doesn't indicate *anything* with regard to AGW. So how about you just leave it at that, instead of trying to stretch thin evidence and make flimsy claims.
Except for the reality that more snow means more moisture in the air which means higher temperatures. Go back in your records and look at the coldest winters compared to the winters with the most snow. My own personal experience backs this up growing up in Vermont. I remember those bright sunny blue sky days where it was -20F, so cold your nose hairs stick together. You ever wonder why the coldest days never had clouds?
At any rate, you should have learned in high school that the air can hold more water at higher temperatures. There is of course a saturation point but we're not yet in Vermont. Here in Arizona now we might be close to the other end of the spectrum as our summers have progressively been getting dryer and dyer as it gets hotter.
Of course you need to look at more than just local experiences and learn that most of this weather was predicted in the 80s which is quite sad.
but here in north central WV (not in the mountains) we also received a little bit of snow in April, and we haven't had that in I don't know how long. In fact, I believe I had less than 3" of snow all winter despite the previous year experiencing about 3 feet so it doesn't mean anything. So yeah March was warmer than usual but April was also colder than usual. It doesn't mean anything. There still were days when the records weren't reached in March here in WV, records that have stood for decades but we came close to them. So if the record highs were set decades ago then what does that tell you about this year? That's right, it is nothing special. Obviously I'm extrapolating local climate to being global climate, but then again, so did this report when it collected stats for a single country rather than the world. Apparently it was just a bit warmer than it was 10 years ago based on averages and I know the report isn't drawing any conclusions readers will, including me. This data isn't anything out of the ordinary and never will be. There is no general trend as can be easily gathered by the data depicted in the top 10 warmest 12 month period in the US chart in the report.
this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom. -- Lincoln, Gettysburg Address
What? Why do you think it matters when the period begins?
Suppose the headline read "Climate scientists find that in the continental U.S. that 137 of the last 138 samples from a rolling 12 month average were cooler than the period Nov 1999 to Oct 2000"
Now, why do you think that it doesnt matter? Seriously... why?
"His name was James Damore."
. . . I don't know where you get forty percent. Perhaps you need to seek shelter before the cold impairs more than your arithmetic.
A couple possibilities: Anonymous only counts the red states as part of the country, or is using a Mercator-projection map to visually compare areas.
Snow in Alaska means it is warm. Most of the winter, it's too cold in Alaska for snow. But that contradicts the "common sense" used by idiots like you, so I'm sure it will be ignored so you can continue to push your agenda.
Learn to love Alaska
You don't understand arctic weather, which is different from the lower 48. More snow implies an unusually warm winter. Now, while you are on a roll, care to guess what the "AK" in "AK Marc" stands for? I'll give you a hint, it's not Arkansas (sadly, the number one guess when I put AK on a form when I back in the lower 48).
Learn to love Alaska
I live in north-central Arizona and I can tell you for a fact that it's colder this year than last year and last year was colder than the previous five years. Five years ago, the flower garden was planted in late March and I could have breakfast on the back terrace. Last year and this year, it's too cold to plant and too chilly to even have lunch outside. This is B.S. I question the location of the temperature sensors.
Location is critically important. As an alumnus of Boston University, I often wondered about the air-quality sensors positioned in Kenmore Square which is the confluence of five very busy city streets and often had bumper-to-bumper rush hour traffic. Yet the air quality for the surrounding area was extrapolated from this location. Of course it's going to bias the results.
I also heard AWG makes a much better whooshing sound than metric cables when you swing them around over your head.
1. Buy up hundreds of acres of coastal land in Northern Alaska.
2. Burn stuff as much as possible.
3. Enjoy the thought that your descendants in the 26th century will be fabulously wealthy.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
thank you for being an exhibit of enviro-nazis being what they at heart are: mankind haters.
All that says is that the U.S. has a really abnormally hot 12 months starting in Nov. 1999, and had an even abnormally hotter 12 months starting in May 2011. Neither of these things say anything on their own about temperature trends even in the U.S., let alone globally. It's just supposed to be interesting that the 12-month average U.S. temperature record was broken, the same way it's supposed to be interesting (but isn't) when local papers say "Rainiest Year in UK Since 1903 :(" or "California June Sunniest Ever!"
Maybe it's also useful for scientists who use the NOAA report, who might investigate other variables to see if that "hottest 12 months" correlates with increased insect populations, or lower cancer rates, or whatever.
I think the problem is that you're trying to have an argument about what this data means with someone who never showed up. Not EVERY story about temperature or climate has anything to do with the politics of AGW.
Bring it on. Where I live, winter is six months long and there's only three-month growing season.
Liberty in your lifetime
Using your numbers, it works out that Alaska is 19.3% the size of the rest of the US. So it depends on how you phrase it. I always had a heck of a time with the story problems in math class.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Every year it snows the most when the high is around 20 degrees or so. The cold cold cold days are clear and windy.
Being from Wisconsin, I have to agree that the warmer winters tend to have the most snow. Cold winters tend to have the most accumulation while warmer winters tend to have the most precipitation. Once you get below 10f, the chance of snow drops dramatically. Below 0f will give you a very clear sky and snow almost never falls when the temp is below 0f.
The biggest snow storms tend to happen around 30f-34f.
Most AGWers act like AGW is as proven as gravity. So well proven that skepticism is deemed irrational. Given that I would have to assume that every year would be the hottest year on record. At least on a global scale. Was this assumption on my part of a continuously rising average global temperature every year incorrect? To me, even if global temperatures did rise steadily every year it wouldn't prove AGW. It would merely prove TGW or Temporary Global Warming. But I have to admit I am surprised at the implication that every year is not hotter than the one before. Surely there must be an obvious trend like that or people wouldn't be so convinced of the reality of AGW.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
I have faith that most regular Slashdotter know what it mean and most of the rest do pray to teh Google
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
How did you find the parent post, but not any of the posts declaring this proof of global warming? Do you have some kind of special search engine that filters out claims of AGW?
Is it unfortunate that you neglected to be accurate, or that you got caught neglecting to be accurate?
No, unfortunate that I gave "head-in-the-sand" types the opportunity to nit-pick a very minor point. Some of the other posters here were more eloquent and/or funny than I in pointing out the fact that Alaska is considerably smaller than the rest of the U.S.
Now I haven't read the article (this is slashdot) but just looking at the summary,
So, you wanted to take the time to post a comment about it, but didn't want to RTFA? I wonder what that implies...
I find it amazing that two different annual period systems are in use yet nobody seems to even notice it. May to April and then November to October.
They aren't "in use." Look at the years. One yearly period broke the record, then the later one broke that record. Or are you questioning the use of rolling averages in general? I don't know what to tell you, if so. I'll do you a favor. Here's a Wikipedia article.
At time of writing, I saw two or three people declare this proof of global warming. Most people simply defended AGW, without using the 12-month period as evidence. They do this as part of the eternal argument with the other side, which uses every mention of temperature, climate, or weather to shit all over people who listen to scientists.
There's plenty of good evidence for AGW already without jumping at every outlier on the temperature charts.
Even an 9 year old can understand this: it's 90 degrees outside, therefore no snow.
Yes, but 90 degree days have nothing to do with what we're talking about. I live in New England and I can attest that months where the temperature is around 30 degrees are much snowier than months where the temperatures are in the single digits. I can also attest that 30 degrees is much warmer than 10 degrees, but if you don't believe me ask a 9 year-old.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Even an 9 year old can understand this: it's 90 degrees outside, therefore no snow.
Yes, but 90 degree days have nothing to do with what we're talking about. I live in New England and I can attest that months where the temperature is around 30 degrees are much snowier than months where the temperatures are in the single digits. I can also attest that 30 degrees is much warmer than 10 degrees, but if you don't believe me ask a 9 year-old.
This is basic science. You are like a person saying "in high school, I got to have sex with 160lbs women, but now I only get sex with 180lbs women, so Anthropogenic Women Largening is obviously happening." Now me, I still bag the baseline 115 in La Perla, so scientifically (based on sample size) the effect you are whining about is just not happening.
Yes, it was a record setting warm winter in the contiguous 48 states... but it was an extremely cold winter in Alaska (see ABC news story for example) and in parts of the former Soviet Union.
If somebody wanted to select just those parts of the global temperature data for this past winter, he could honestly write a story with a bold headline shrieking about record cold weather and then warning about the potential nightmare of a new ice age, lamentations about man's impact of the planet, etc. all designed to manipulate the public (the story would be honest about the data subset, but would obviously be misleading and manipulative in the larger sense). The point is that one should always be wary of anybody on any side of an argument when they run with a data subset whose boundaries are political lines on a map rather than some boundary that isolates the data within the boundary from affecting or being affected by things outside the boundary.
"Data" is only valid/important/relevant when it is not manipulated, adjusted, pre-selected, etc.
I think we are in the interesting part of Climate change right now. Energy levels (not temperature) have increased dramatically in a rather short time and the climate is trying to find a place for all that extra energy now. So the oceans are cycling rapidly (Nina/Nino phases), precipitation levels etc are changing. In essence we're cycling rapidly between extremes. Anecdotally in Utah, last year we had the largest snows on record, and this year is probably the driest on record. For my entire childhood (I'm nearly 40) these cycles were nearly a decade long now they are a cycling in a year.
This will probably continue for a decade or three as the system tries to stabilize the energy levels and sink some of the temperature increase into the oceans, etc. The models aren't perfect and the deniers point to that, but the reality is we simply don't know how the climate will stabilize these energy levels, we can only make predictions based on previous climates we have rudimentary knowledge of. I'll likely be dead long before the worst of climate change hits (major shifts in breadbasket areas), but I know I'm going to live during the most erratic climate change this world's ever seen.
The scariest part to me is how to plan for the future because there is one thing the models do predict and that's the bad weather (the kind that kills people) is going to increase dramatically. I was hoping the SW would get wetter as the models predict but it appears, at least during my lifetime, things are just going to get more erratic making it very difficult to predict and manage scarce water resources.
The funniest part about Climate Change and the Deniers is that the government is planning for it. The military and defense planners and many others are planning for summers where the Arctic passage that's never existed becomes a reality. And before people say this is because of Obama I'll point out this planning started under GW Bush. Those in the know and with power and influence are causing our government to react like Climate change is not only a reality but something that's very important strategically including how to get to all that oil that's in the arctic that no one ever thought would be accessible. This includes a certain pair of brothers that are highly invested in carbon based energy and fund much if not all of the deniers making plans to drill and tap that oil when the ice melts permanently.
It's sad but I don't think the US will change course on climate change until it's far to late to matter. I'd like to see the construction of 1000 nuclear reactors in the US and a shutdown of most of the coal power plants along with increased gas prices that drive the adoption of electric vehicles. The gas will likely happen on it's own anyway but coal won't stop without outside forces because the US has so much of it.
What you fail to mention is that while the Bering Sea ice has set records the Barents and Kara Seas above Europe have unusually low. So the overall ice extent has still been below normal. This page at Arctic Sea Ice News and Analysis explains it pretty well. The high extent of ice in the Bering Sea has as much to do with high winds pushing the existing ice south which opened up leads which subsequently freeze over as it does with cold temperatures.
We might declare that a coin is "probably biased towards heads" if in 10 flips it lands heads 9 times.
You might, if you're an idiot. An intelligent person might say it's (more than a little) biased if it lands on heads 90% of the time. There's no need for absolutes and using small numbers.
A proper test would consider only 10 flips
100 flips is better. 1000 flips is better still. Of course for the same degree of bias you're looking for 90%. You'll just be more sure that you have the right result the more you consider.
You become really cretinous when you say " it landed heads 9 out of the last 10 times that its flipped". Flipped 9 times in a row had no part of the rule that was set. Even for the 10 flips, 9 in a row was not required. HHHHTHHHHH passes the rule but doesn't have 9 heads in a row.
Of course you probably want to blame this stupidity on the other side. But there is no other side. All this jibberish came from you. Even as an attempt at a straw man, it shows how little you yourself understand trivial probability.
Reading down this far, at the point in time I'm reading, there aren't any. Lots of denialists, coming up with all sorts of nonsense, some of it relating to AGW. Some scientific people calling them out on this nonsense. But not a single person claiming it's proof of AGW.
Scientifically minded people know that 12 months is weather, not climate, and contiguous states of the US isn't global. This doesn't even approach significance for global warming.
>I've never actually been to Antarctica, but I do know it snows a LOT there in the winter
Uh, wrong. Antarctica is actually pretty dry. The whole continent is technically a desert, averaging 166mm (6.5") of precipitation a year.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_of_Antarctica
Undoing mod points, but I have to add to your point here. More snow actually might mean warmer temperatures as well. The ability of air to carry moisture is greater at warmer temperatures, so more snow in a cold region might be a good indicator that the temperature has increased in that region.
"False hope is why we'll never run out of natural resources!" - Lewis Black
According to this source "The longest continuous temperature record is the Hadley Centre's Central England Temperature series. It starts around 1850." considering that is only 160 years it and comparing it to the time man have been on earth that would be equivalent to a person saying "this is the hottest I have been in the last few milliseconds. Perhaps is the time frame was larger I could believe it was an issue.
At first I was thinking "Great, now denialists will be even more embarrassed about using graphs that only go from 2000 (an unusually warm year) to 2008 (an unusually cool year) to show that the Earth is cooling." Then I realized that in a few years there will be another unusually cool year and they will just start their graphs at 2011 and end on that year.
So based on at most 50 years of satellite observation, out of the 4.5 BILLION years our planet has been around, the ice is "below" normal? If the history of the Earth was the movie "The Avengers," then we have been monitoring polar ice for a grand total of .00000953 minutes. (143*50/4,500,000,000) So watch that last .00000953 minutes and write a review of the movie. Is it a romance? Action? Good? Bad? You would know nothing about the movie. Just like we know NOTHING about climate patterns. We have a vague and circumstantial understanding from a very limited data set.
sudo make me a sandwich
I'll likely be dead long before the worst of climate change hits (major shifts in breadbasket areas), but I know I'm going to live during the most erratic climate change this world's ever seen.
Guess you didn't follow what happened to the wheat crop this year. Guess what? The breadbasket area has been hit hard already. We're further along on this progress than you think.
I'd like to see the construction of 1000 nuclear reactors in the US and a shutdown of most of the coal power plants along with increased gas prices that drive the adoption of electric vehicles.
I'd like to see us start trying to catch up on the solar production we fucked off on since the 1970s, when a panel could be expected to have most of its output for twenty years, yet repaid the energy cost of production in seven. Today a thin-film panel can be expected to last about fifteen years, and it pays off the energy cost of its production in three. I'm tired of hearing about how solar can't fill our needs when we're not even using it to fill the needs we can fill with it now. And I want to see us use a lot less energy; we piss away a lot of energy needlessly at pretty much all levels of society.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Maximum entropy! Yeah!
That is not science. That is manipulation of statistics.
since that's the inevitable end of the earth, why give a shit about any pollution, natural or creature-made, in any particular geological era? remember kids, man can't really kill the Earth
You become really cretinous when you say " it landed heads 9 out of the last 10 times that its flipped". Flipped 9 times in a row had no part of the rule that was set.
The only person that said anything about 9 in a row is you. The words you are quoting does not say what you claim that it says. The cretinous idiot is you.
"His name was James Damore."
Because weight is a critical factor, that's why.
That's easy. Cut off all that heavy insulation, and even the higher-diameter metric cables will come in under your weight budget.
It may look like I'm doing nothing, but I'm actively waiting for my problems to go away.
--Scott Adams
1999?
The earth is over 4.5 billion years old, I am sure there were a few warmer days at some point in time.
Anyways I have absolutely no worries about the Earth. Humans are not going to destroy the planet, the Earth existed long before we arrived, and it will last long after we are gone.
Global warming is a social/economical issue, period. Yes some animal species are going to go extinct, but what many don't realize is that new ones emerge all the time too. But species extinction is nothing new only that Greenpeace and Peta exist now to make us feel guilty because some rare form of spotted slug couldn't handle a .1 degree change in temperature of some puddle in the middle of the Andes or something, or some cute species like the lazy Panda evolved to only eat one form of inefficient food source that Ikea decided makes a good chopping board.
The problem with our current society is that a few thousand years ago if an area of the world became uninhabitable, people moved. Today people are locked by regional and political borders so as their lakes and rivers dry up, crops fail, or their sea levels rise, instead of doing something sensible like migrate they are forced to have to stay because governments will not tolerate mass exodus or emigration.
Global warming is not an ecological disaster, period. The ice caps melted, and the ice caps grew and expanded over and over and over again. The earth has recovered from FAR worst disasters then a rise in CO2 levels, and there are scientific studies that have shown the earth can combat a rise in CO2 (i.e. plant life thrives off of CO2 and suck up all the CO2).
We have to stop treating this like some ecological disaster and stop feeling guilty just because we are initiated with scenes of polar bears on floating chunks of ice from the WWF. We are not going to STOP global warming, period. The biggest factor overlooked in Global Warming is that the sun's solar output is nearing its peak levels and does so every few thousand years or so. The sun is far more powerful then people give it credit for, and while CO2 might factor into trapping a little of that energy against the earth, ultimately the sun is what is causing the warming trend.
Global warming is an artificial "disaster" caused by politics.
Instead of shoving Green environmentalism down everyone's throats the world's governments should start forming contingency plans to start accepting global warming and start dealing with the aftermath. How will the world handle mass exodus and transplanting large population centers? You driving a Hybrid or composting is not going to stop some Pacific Rim family from being swept out to sea because of an increase in Tsunamis and Cyclones. Sorry, thinking otherwise makes you incredibly vapid and naive, pretty much a smug douche in every aspect.
That is the crux of why people are all about environmentalism these days. Environmentalism is easy. Its easy to lecture reducing your carbon footprint. Its easy to assume we have some control over environmental change. Its easy to buy into yippie concepts like carbon offset taxes and LED lighting. Its easy to point fingers and blame. An entire economic market has arisen to make it easier for people to feel less guilty about Global warming by spending money.
By happenstance the combination of the invention of social networking, CO2 levels and high solar output have combined into the perfect storm of slander and finger pointing that is hiding the obvious truth, its going to get a lot worse before it gets any better. So lets stop focusing on the "marketing" of environmentalism and start thinking about how to DEAL with global warming.
Whether we caused it, or the Earth was already in the process of doing so, Global Warming is HERE. Its not coming, its not irreversible, and its not going to stop because of clever marketing or the incessant guilt driven by smug and futile non-profits.
How we deal with it is more important then why it happened. What do we do NEXT? I would like to know, but its just easier not to think about it and instead bicker and lay blame.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
The above was implying that trends should be completely ignored in systems where there is some noise (which is what I was trying to say above in the portion you quoted). There's no point trying to dignify it with specifics such as those you've given that the above poster would never have thought of. I don't think he's even using the same definition of chaos, he's only trying a petty little trick to suggest that all of the data is worthless.
Don't feel too bad, when those of us actually from Arkansas put AR on a form the most common guess outside of the area is Arizona. People are stupid everywhere...
Now do you see where he is coming from? There is no point trying to second guess and dignify his response when I doubt he will respect or agree with any mathematics that you bring to the table.
Wow. Someone's real mad I stepped on his holy cow.
I stand by that statement btw. The scientific method is hypothesis -> repeatable experiments -> theory. Ever since physics experiments started costing millions or billions it is very fair to say that.
But I guess for you science is just a different religion. With no buts and ifs and essentially no explanations, just a number of statements one must be punished for disobeying. And that you do such a thing immediately after making an obviously wrong statement is telling. I wonder if someone like you actually pretends he's helping science move ahead ?