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How Weather Influences Global Warming Opinions
An anonymous reader writes in with this story about how people's belief in climate change shifts with the temperature. "Last week's polar vortex weather event wasn't only hard on fingers, toes and heating bills. It also overpowered the ability of most people to make sound judgments about climate change, in the same way that heat waves do, according to a new study published in the Jan. 11 issue of the journal Nature Climate Change. Researchers have known for some time that the acceptance of climate change depends on the day most people are asked. During unusually hot weather, people tend to accept global warming, and they swing against it during cold events."
The very same logic is used to fashion correlation from coincidence the World over.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
Global warming is exactly that- a global trend, not a local one. Locally, the effects have been most pronounced near the north pole, which is not exactly a place where many people live.
Global climate change seems to have resulted recently in a "warming" trend, but as we know from Al Gore's movie, if the North Atlantic current gets shut off we are in for a polar vortex on a much longer time scale.
I am not sure who coined the phrase "global warming"; is it a PR failure by the scientists involved or a reporting failure by the news media? To quote a well known meme: "why not both?"
so just as N.America has its lowest temperatures for decades
Australia is doing some of its hottest with a rounded 50C for the first time last week
Monday -> 27C and the rest of the week's forecast is
Tuesday -> 43C
Wednesday -> 39C
Thursday -> 41C
Friday -> 40C
its all about extra energy making things more variable, but no single weather event can be attributed to anthropogenic climate change
During unusually hot weather, people tend to accept global warming, and they swing against it during cold events."
Of course they do because many people (most maybe) do not understand the difference between climate and weather. They have either a poor understanding or perhaps no concept at all that short term temperature fluctuations are merely data points in a longer term trend. It is just like how people overreact to a few worse than usual days in the stock market even though the long term trend for the overall market for the last 100 years has been upwards.
Weather = what is happening today
Climate = average weather over time
1) There is Islamic terrorism, and U.S. militia terrorism, and atheist terrorism, and Christian terrorism, and others. I know of no one worth listening to who seriously disputes any of these.
2) If you're really sitting around worried about Islamic terrorists hitting your town, you need to get a hobby.
Kythe
"I don't live in a totalitarian police state because I've never been detained without charge or sentenced without trial or deprived of property without warrant."
"I'm not sexist because I'm female."
It would probably help if every time there's a hurricane like Sandy, Katrina, et. al. there wasn't some global warming advocate on TV arguing that this was evidence of global warming. You can't taut every weather event that supports warming as evidence and then turn around and dismiss every weather event that doesn't jibe with the narrative.
Nor do I find the argument that EVERY weather event (extreme, mild, or otherwise) somehow supports warming. You can't just set up a hypothesis and then say that there is no evidence that can ever possibly contradict it. That's religion, not science.
The cow says "Moo." The dog says "Woof." The Timothy says "Thanks, valued customer. We appreciate your input."
"There's no God because I haven't seen him"
"There are no unicorns because I haven't ridden one."
"The Loch Ness Monster doesn't exist because no one has ever videotaped it."
It's NOT "all the same." Sometimes the skeptics are right.
And yet we are to believe things like Katrina and Sandy are evidence FOR Global Warming? Aren't those things just as much "weather" as the national cold streak (which, btw, I've heard Global Warming advocates cite as evidence FOR Global Warming)?
It seems that every "weather" event is trotted out as evidence FOR Global Warming by someone. According to the advocates, there appears to be no piece of evidence that can possibly be used against Global Warming, but it can all be used as evidence it is happening. Actions like this make the whole AGW movement seem more like a religion than science.
"There's global warming because it's hot."
"I'm poor because someone else is richer than me."
"I can't be racist because I'm black."
If you think Stalin or Mao were motivated by atheism, then perhaps you also think that Hitler invaded Poland because he was a vegetarian? Or because he wasn't a buddhist?
Stalin was no more guilty of "atheism terrorism" than he was of mustache terrorism.
I find this ironic since the political AWG alarmism lobby deserves a lot of the blame for this
and the AWG denial lobby deserves a lot of the blame for the AWG alarmism body.
Unfortunately, when you have a well-funded denial campaign telling people what they want to hear (no problem here, ignore the commie academics, relax and enjoy your SUV) a lobby that doesn't resort to alarmism is a lobby that doesn't get listened to.
A bone fide climatologist would have made a more accurate documentary than Al Gore - which would then have been seen by an audience of, oh dozens of people who watch PBS at midnight.
Or, just wait 50-100 years until there's enough data to decide for sure whether Katrina or the polar vortex were just statistical blips or part of the AGW-predicted increase in extreme weather - if the latter then good luck building a time-machine to go back and fix the problem (hint: don't use the traditional DeLorian because if we go on using oil as if there is an infinite supply then, AGW or not, you won't be able to afford enough gas to get it up to 88 mph, and Mr Fusion is about as technically plausible as the flux capacitor) .
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
Climate scientists do NOT make those claims and have been explicitly stating that no single weather event can conclusively be linked to AGW.
Also, the "G" in AGW stands for GLOBAL, which seems to be a difficult concept for some North Americans to grasp.
While the polar vortex was wreaking havoc in America, much of Scandinavia was having an unusually warm winter, with flowering plants & bears coming out of hibernation.
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/jan/10/polar-vortex-us-mild-weather-scandinavia
So whose narrative does that jibe with?
Pain is merely failure leaving the body