El Nino Has Finally Arrived, Far Weaker Than Predicted

An anonymous reader writes "The periodic warm weather pattern called El Niño has finally arrived in the mid-equatorial Pacific Ocean, more than a year late and far weaker than predicted by scientists. "The announcement comes a year after forecasters first predicted that a major El Niño could be in the works. At the time, NOAA predicted a 50% chance that an El Niño could develop in the latter half of 2014. The agency also said the wind patterns that were driving water east across the Pacific were similar to those that occurred in the months leading up to the epic El Niño of 1997, which caught scientists by surprise and contributed to flooding, droughts and fires across multiple continents.

In the end, last year's forecasts came up short, in part because the winds that were driving the system petered out. Researchers, who have been working to improve their forecasting models since 1997, are trying to figure out precisely what happened last year and why their models failed to capture it."

Comments

Let's do the Chicken Little Climate Change dance.

[MouseTheLuckyDog]

Awk Awk

It's the fault of global warming.

Awk Awk.

But, our climate models are perfectly accurate

[Anonymous Coward]

Downmod me now. You're still wrong.

Re:But, our climate models are perfectly accurate

[sjames]

Weather != climate.

If you flip a coin and get heads twice in a row, do you claim statistics is bunk?

Re:But, our climate models are perfectly accurate

[Anonymous Coward]

If you flip a coin, you're as accurate as NOAA's El Niño prediction.

Re:But, our climate models are perfectly accurate

[nierd]

I wonder where the idea that weather = climate comes from? Could it have been that it was used to promote global warming stories? http://www.independent.co.uk/e... Don't cry when the same people who were fed crap stories about snow never happening due to global warming turn around 15 years later and laugh about it. Do try and understand that when you have been actually paying attention (and not just wringing your hands and worrying) to the 'message' and what climate change is attributed to have caused, for 15+ years it's pretty obvious to see the hyperbole and just plain stupidity when it comes to global warming - sorry climate change, where it is never wrong, the science (which was settled) never changes unless there is a pause and then it changes to match the data and it was settled and now it's settled again. Or you know when we say there is an el nino when the criteria to actually announce that is a hard coded science flowchart requiring 5 months of elevated readings of which we only have 4 currently (assuming NOAA's data for this month is also elevated) - but you know that'd be using actual science to question why the rush to breathlessly declare el nino when it's not certain yet. That is really the question.

Re:But, our climate models are perfectly accurate

[sjames]

Nice try, but 15 years of weather statistics is climate. One winter is not. The science has been fairly consistent, only the specifics seem up for grabs.

You might also want to note that El Nino isn't itself part of climate change.

And I wouldn't crow too much about the name change. The term 'global warning' has mostly fallen out of favor due to idiots thinking a slightly chilly morning in the middle of winter meant it couldn't be real.

Re: But, our climate models are perfectly accurate

[Anonymous Coward]

Why 15 years? Because it fits your preconceived notions? Climate is much more than 15 years, and cherry picking your 15 years isn't much better than the opposition cherry picking one winter. But you're both the same

Re:But, our climate models are perfectly accurate

[riverat1]

One definition of climate is the statistics of weather, IOW the average and standard deviation of weather over some time period. The World Meteorological Organization defines the standard classical period for climate as 30 years.

One scientists misstatement about snow doesn't make climate science collapse.

Re: But, our climate models are perfectly accurate

[itzly]

Because after 15 years, many of the chaotic changes in weather average out. The sun cycle is 11 years, for instance. After 15 years, you'd expect a few El-Ninos and La-Ninas. You can calculate that a 15 year period is about the minimum. For a more robust number, you could take 30 years. More than 30 years isn't very useful. There aren't really any weather related patterns that last longer than that.

Re: But, our climate models are perfectly accurate

[AuMatar]

There was an ice age 10K years ago. So there are definitely longer term weather patterns on this planet. That's not evidence for or against global warming, but to claim we understand the climate well is disingenuous at best.

Re: But, our climate models are perfectly accurate

[itzly]

Of course, there are longer term patterns, but these aren't weather patterns. Glaciation cycles are caused by orbital patterns. On even longer time scales you have things like continental drift, and gradually increasing solar output. These patterns are interesting, and it's good to know they exist when you want to compare climates over similar time spans, but they aren't really relevant for the discussion about climate change.

Re:But, our climate models are perfectly accurate

[Anonymous Coward]

That is fair enough. But that also means that any article claiming the end of the world for any recent event is clickbait.
Make El Nino five or ten years late and there is reason to think about it. A year give or take in a 30 year span isn't much to argue about.

Re: But, our climate models are perfectly accurate

[Jane Q. Public]

Wow. This is the longest exchange on Slashdot I have seen in a long time in which all participants managed to say nearly nothing of substance.

Re: But, our climate models are perfectly accurate

[Anonymous Coward]

That's rich, coming from a troll who's written over a thousand comments here about climate science with nearly nothing of substance in hundreds of pages worth of your nonsense.

Re: But, our climate models are perfectly accurate

[Anonymous Coward]

No, they don't. The 15 year window is chosen because that's about the longest window you can take without the data making you look like a lying ass. Look at all of the data or STFU. But you can't do that, can you? Because then you'd have to acknowledge the obvious.

Re: But, our climate models are perfectly accurate

[itzly]

And then you come along and spoil it by posting such a deep and insightful comment.

Re:But, our climate models are perfectly accurate

[Anonymous Coward]

Weather != climate.

If you flip a coin and get heads twice in a row, do you claim statistics is bunk?

Too bad climate isn't based on statistics.

Re:But, our climate models are perfectly accurate

[nierd]

Wow the cognitive dissonance is stunning.

No kidding one winter isn't. That's the reason why the 'settled' science saying snowfalls would be gone in a decade (pub. 2000) is laughed at. Instead of embracing the joke and laughing at the kook element that is crying that the sky is falling the fact that you feel the need to 'defend' science (why is this a thing - science is what it is - evidence doesn't need defenders it speaks for itself) just doubles down on the hypocrisy.

There are plenty of us that thing the world is getting warming - are unsure but willing to let the actual evidence and further research prove how much is human forcing - and actually think most 'green' policies are fine at face value, however also think that the fervor used to tout 'climate change' is neither scientific or rational.

Re:But, our climate models are perfectly accurate

[nierd]

It wasn't one statement - it was multiple headlines over a period of a few years.

Don't put words in my mouth please I didn't say climate science collapsed. I said if you don't understand the joke here it is

I think the 15 years is being taken out of context (in all the replies) - 15 years is the period between publication of the first 'snow is gone in 10 years' article (2000) and today (2015) - it's not some magical number if the article was published 30 years ago I would have said 30. The only reason 15 years is relevant in my comment is because 1) that's how long its' been that the headlines were such, and 2) it is longer than the decade claimed after which snow was gone.

The headlines today aren't any less ridiculous - Science (the publication) just blamed the Syrian War on climate change. I'd actually go so far as to say the kook headlines are worse today than 15 years ago - and that's exactly what I mean when I say 'looking at 15+ years' - the ridiculous and unsupportable claims that climate change is the cause of every problem in the world at the same time.

Re: But, our climate models are perfectly accurate

[cbiltcliffe]

"Oh...ice ages aren't weather related patterns that last longer than 30 years, because that would disprove my incredibly ignorant comments about climate!"

Re:But, our climate models are perfectly accurate

[cbiltcliffe]

Nice try, but 15 years of weather statistics is climate. One winter is not

Err...that would be two winters. And a virtually non-existent summer.

Re: But, our climate models are perfectly accurate

[Anonymous Coward]

"There aren't really any weather related patterns that last longer than that."

Given that glacial/warm eras tend to last for more than 30 years, I'll beg to differ.

Re: But, our climate models are perfectly accurate

[itzly]

Weather related patterns are patterns that form as a result of the chaotic nature of weather. And these chaotic patterns are not responsible for ice ages.

Re:But, our climate models are perfectly accurate

[riverat1]

The "snow is gone" remark was never published in the peer reviewed literature. It was an off the cuff remark. It was only one scientist. It may have made the headlines but it was never part of the mainstream science.

Re:But, our climate models are perfectly accurate

[Anonymous Coward]

There are plenty of gullible people who believe weather == climate. In reality weather can affect climate over the long term on a geological timescale, but more importantly to those living on the planet today, climate influences weather. These people should read a first-year university-level textbook about meteorology to learn the distinction.

Re: But, our climate models are perfectly accurate

[cbiltcliffe]

An ice age is a period (an incredibly long one, I might add) of very cold, very dry weather across the entire planet. Of course it's weather related.

No, me deciding to work from home today rather than starting my car to drive to the office isn't going to start an ice age, so in that sense you're right, but you're using the most narrowly defined meaning of weather you possibly can, to avoid the fact that the climate of the earth has been in constant flux for millions of years, and somehow, now, the global warming apologists are convinced that we're suddenly causing it, and if we stopped burning fossil fuels, then the climate would become static.

Re:But, our climate models are perfectly accurate

[nierd]

Sure - that doesn't stop it from being the message of climate change (especially when it's not loudly denounced) nor does it stop the message being out of control today (climate change causes prostitution - yep real headline).

And yet when you try and use rational thought on those articles you get the same responses everywhere 'denier' 'koch shill' etc. My worry is that the politicization of the topic along with the fervor used to defend it against any challenge at all no matter how trivial (the reason you see people compare it to a religion - because defending silly claims is silly) eventually will do more damage to science as a whole than anything else in modern history.

I think it has a marked effect on our culture and is partially responsible for other ludicrous crap like anti-vaxxers but you know never question because 'denier' is a powerful and vicious derogatory against someone who disagrees (even if it's over nuance) - at least until enough people decide to claim the title and we go back to a dark age.

Re: But, our climate models are perfectly accurate

[itzly]

but you're using the most narrowly defined meaning of weather you possibly can

I'm using "weather" to mean the daily chaotic events that go on in our atmosphere. I'm using "climate" as the average weather of a period that's long enough that most of the chaotic noise of the weather is removed. That takes about 15-30 years, depending on the circumstances, and what exactly you're looking at. Looking over even longer periods, we'll see "climate change".

The purpose of these distinctions is to aid in usefulness. A change in climate must have a underlying cause that we should be able to identify. A change in weather is just chance. Longer term events, such as glaciation cycles are interesting too, but we know their cause (orbital cycles). We also know that our current climate change isn't caused by those orbital cycles, because they follow a certain pattern.

Re: But, our climate models are perfectly accurate

[itzly]

the climate of the earth has been in constant flux for millions of years, and somehow, now, the global warming apologists are convinced that we're suddenly causing it, and if we stopped burning fossil fuels, then the climate would become static.

Correct. The climate of the earth has been in constant flux. But unlike changes in the weather, you can't just simply throw your arms up in the air, and claim we're just having a "warm century". There must be a cause. And if that cause isn't the increased amount of CO2, then please tell us what it is.

Re:But, our climate models are perfectly accurate

[phantomfive]

In this case, it's the weather that matters. Lack of El Nino means no end to the California drought.

Re:But, our climate models are perfectly accurate

[sjames]

OK, for those of us who slept through grade school, 2 < 15.

Re:But, our climate models are perfectly accurate

[Anonymous Coward]

Why did this get downgoated? The total lack of sense of humor on the part of the alarmists hurts them more than they realize.

Re: But, our climate models are perfectly accurate

[cbiltcliffe]

0 A.D. was a bit cooler than it is now. By 1000 A.D. global temperatures had warmed to roughly what we're at now. Then it cooled down again, reaching a minimum somewhere around 1700 A.D. (which, incidentally, is what the global warming apologists frequently use as the pre-industrial average temperature, rather than an unusually cold minimum.) Then it started warming again, until about 1997, when it appears to have leveled off again.

Did Jesus develop lots if industrial technologies that caused a rise in CO2 and a corresponding rise in temperatures for the next 1000 years? Did an economic downturn in 1000 A.D. cause Jesus Industries Inc. to collapse, reducing CO2 output, and thereby cooling the earth off for the next 500 years or so? There must have been a cause, and since we all know that human produced CO2 is the only possible thing that affects global temperatures, that must have been it, right?

When I say the climate has always been in flux, I don't mean we've been in and out of ice ages for millions of years, with a 20,000 year static climate between ice ages, and an 80,000 year static climate during an ice age. I mean it's been in flux. Every single year is either warmer or colder than the year before it. There is not now, nor has there ever been, a static climate on earth. Man-made CO2 global warming models all seem to assume that the climate would be roughly static between ice ages, but for human-caused warming. All evidence points to this assumption being false.

Re:But, our climate models are perfectly accurate

[cbiltcliffe]

Wow. The straw men in this article are thick and fast.
Nowhere did I state that 2 cold winters were more important than a 15 year average. I just pointed out that the "single winter" that the GP discounted was not only a single winter, but was significantly more "unimportant outlier data" than what they were admitting to.

Re:But, our climate models are perfectly accurate

[sjames]

So you're saying your post wasn't intended to have any relevance at all to the conversation?

WOW.

Re: But, our climate models are perfectly accurate

[Jane Q. Public]

That's rich, coming from a troll who's written over a thousand comments here about climate science with nearly nothing of substance in hundreds of pages worth of your nonsense.

We know who you are, and why are you lying?

Re: But, our climate models are perfectly accurate

[Anonymous Coward]

Lying about what?

Re: But, our climate models are perfectly accurate

[dave420]

Without any citations (to papers, not newspaper articles), your post is precisely indistinguishable from the frantic keyboard-mashing of any other denialist. Using terms like "bit cooler" and "roughly" really aren't helping you right now.

Re:But, our climate models are perfectly accurate

[dave420]

I think it doesn't really help your position to confuse an off-the-cuff remark from a scientist, outside their published work, with "the message of climate change". That's about as good an explanation of bias in effect that I can think of in this context. Seriously. You are terrible at this.

Re:But, our climate models are perfectly accurate

[Anonymous Coward]

I used to be a so-called "skeptic"; the evidence convinced me to change my opinion. This does not stop me from realizing that you actually raise a valid point: Any argument against any point that's touted as pro-AGW is automatically cried down as coming from a "denier." This is a miscarriage of science.

Re:Let's do the Chicken Little Climate Change danc

[sjames]

It looks like you're the only one saying that.

Re:Let's do the Chicken Little Climate Change danc

[KermodeBear]

Well, hell, why not? Just remember that it's Climate Change now though, not Global Warming. Among other amazing things, Climate Change is responsible for:

ISIS: Yup, somehow, Climate Change was one of the reasons we have ISIS.
Crime. Climate change is also responsible for more rape.
Prostitution. Yeah, see, climate change may increase prostitution too.

I know, I know, this comment is a little snarky, but even the people here on Slashdot that are hardcore global warming types can see that there's a whacko fringe in their camp that is beyond ridiculous.

Re:Let's do the Chicken Little Climate Change danc

[Anonymous Coward]

The Left: always wrong, even in weather reports..

50% wrong or 50% right?

[rmpotter]

"NOAA predicted a 50% chance that an El Niño could develop in the latter half of 2014"

With odds like that, how could they be wrong?

Re:50% wrong or 50% right?

[PolygamousRanchKid]

With odds like that, how could they be wrong?

The race was rigged. By the mafia. Tony Soprano's crew made a fortune on this.

Re:50% wrong or 50% right?

[Anonymous Coward]

Frequentism tells you all you need to know about that.

Re:50% wrong or 50% right?

[Anonymous Coward]

In the context of the homosexualization of America by the Democrats, it's no surprise that even the storms try to avoid touching us.

Re:50% wrong or 50% right?

[itzly]

If you predict a 50% chance 50 years in a row, and it really happens 80% of the times, you were wrong.

Re:50% wrong or 50% right?

[Anonymous Coward]

Because of Obama. God. Damned. Obama.

Re:50% wrong or 50% right?

[zippthorne]

Which is a good question to ask, completely separate from any global warming debate... Where can you go for statistics on how the normal weather percent-chance predictions match to the actual record?

Re:50% wrong or 50% right?

[BasilBrush]

Huh? What's global warming got do do with anything?

Re:50% wrong or 50% right?

[catprog]

If it normally occurs every 3 or greater years then the chance of a random year would only be 33%

Re:50% wrong or 50% right?

[Anonymous Coward]

And the difference in weather between a weak El Nino and and weak La Nina isn't much and within variability. But they have to believe they can predict everything to some specified precision, even it that precision is a coin toss. And the media think a prediction about what the weather might me is more interesting that just what it actually turns out to be.

My Name

[Anonymous Coward]

is El Nino. You killed my father. Prepare to DIE!!!

Awesome Models

[sgrover]

So these awesome weather models that have been driving so much controversy over global warming and everything else are not quite right? Hmm, soo let me get this straight. They can't predict the weather next week very accurately, but we are supposed to "trust" the experts when they tell us what is going to happen in the next few years or longer? And we are seeing constant reminders like this that their models are broken and prone to human error. Forgive me if I take ALL weather predictions with a degree of doubt, like I have for almost all my life.

Re:Awesome Models

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Those are climate models, not weather models, aren't they? I'm not sure that long-term weather forecasts are any more reliable than they were a few decades ago.

Re:Awesome Models

[sgrover]

From the NASA website (http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/noaa-n/climate/climate_weather.html#.VPqNHJ_08WM) "The difference between weather and climate is a measure of time. Weather is what conditions of the atmosphere are over a short period of time, and climate is how the atmosphere "behaves" over relatively long periods of time." So weather IS climate, just on a much shorter scale. Weather is TODAY's climate, and the collective weather over the past XX years defines a generic "climate" statement. With that in mind, predictions of Climate change should be relatively reliably reflected in current weather patterns. I would fully expect the predictions to be wrong occasionally, but there seems to be a growing trend of glaring wrongs with the current state of climate predictions. Therefore I submit that the current climate models are not yet good enough to be the defining factor in public policy, as many would have us believe they should be now.

Re:Awesome Models

[K. S. Kyosuke]

So weather IS climate, just on a much shorter scale.

Just like the position and speed of an atom in a cloud of heating gas is thermodynamic data, only much more detailed. Just because you know the cloud is heating doesn't mean you can predict where that one atom will be at a given point in time. I'm not surprised that one el Nino gets mispredicted. It means very little.

Re:Awesome Models

[Nemyst]

I'm always amused that every single time anything is ever shown wrong when talking about weather models (not even climate models!), we have at least one person posting something like this.

Re:Awesome Models

[Anonymous Coward]

They can't predict the weather next week very accurately, but we are supposed to "trust" the experts when they tell us what is going to happen in the next few years or longer?

RTFA - they got that wrong too. They're only claiming long-term trends now - 40-100 years out when they'll have racked in all that sweet climate science grant funding and retired.

Re:Awesome Models

[sgrover]

I'm fully aware of this phenomenon myself. However, I'm seeing a consistency to the wrongs. One would think the models would be altered to reflect real data, instead of ignoring "anomalies" on a regular basis. (of course, climate models are not very simple either...)

Re:Awesome Models

[Anonymous Coward]

The best scientists on earth can't tell you how a particular molecule in a balloon will move over the next second, but any kindergartner can tell you what will happen if you keep pumping more and more air into it.

Re:Awesome Models

[penguinoid]

If you're so confident in your political score-pointing criticism, how would you like to make a bet? Let's say, you predict the average temperature and rainfall for each day the next seven days, and I predict the average temperature and rainfall for each year the next seven years. Whoever is off by the lowest percent wins. And I assume you'd be willing to give me odds of approximately 1:365 in my favor since clearly my task is that much harder.

Re: Awesome Models

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm amused that when people (incorrectly) talk about weather models when they should be talking climate, that their ignorance is taken as evidence that the climate models are correct

Re:Awesome Models

[Crashmarik]

Lets see a mole of any gas 6.02214x10^23 atoms

Fifteen years has has 5479 days (rounded to the nearest)
a century has 36525 days.

So lets take the other way. What are the odds that a random sample of 10^18 atoms in a gas would have a significantly different temperature than the overall the temperature ?

Virtually zero.

Re:Awesome Models

[itzly]

Put a pan of cold water on the stove, and turn it on. After a while, watch the little swirls of water. Can you predict how they'll move around 2 seconds from any given time ? Probably not. Can you predict the average temperature 60 seconds later ? Probably yes. There's the difference between weather prediction and climate predication. Climate prediction is easier, because it deals with averages. Weather deals with chaos.

Re:Awesome Models

[riverat1]

The difference between weather models and climate models it that weather models solve initial value problems, given the current conditions how do we expect weather to evolve over time. They're good for maybe 10 or so days usually. Climate models solve boundary value problems, given the forcings involved in climate and their interactions and feedbacks what are the boundaries we expect future weather to vary within. So far globally the weather has remained mostly within the boundaries projected by climate models so they're doing ok.

Re:Awesome Models

[Anonymous Coward]

Whatever you call them, the models are fucking wrong.

I recall from the early days one of the Climatologist said something about how x years was too short to infer anything from lack of warming. Then, they upped to X+5, then X+ another 5. As the warming refused to corporate, they just added on more years.

And then all this garbage about the "hottest year ever". Tenths of a degree, well within the statistical noise of their useless models and questionable on its face since the "adjust" the data.

Re:Awesome Models

[TheRaven64]

Weather is a chaotic system, but often chaotic systems have longer-term trends that are possible to observe. For example, if you pour sand into a pile, then you can fairly accurately predict the shape of the cone that it will create, but the exact pattern of bounces for each grain is impossible to predict as it depends on the exact position, shape, and location of every grain that it hits on the way down and a tiny error in any of these will magnify to a huge error after a few bounces. It's a chaotic system that has macro-scale effects that can be predicted.

Weather is a chaotic system with very similar properties. The longer the timescale, the easier it is to predict. Predicting the average temperature difference between summer and winter, for example, is much easier than predicting the temperature tomorrow.

To give a simpler example, if I toss a coin 100 times, I'd expect you to be able to tell me, with a fairly small margin of error, how many times I will roll heads. I wouldn't expect you to be able to guess what the result of any individual toss will be more than about half the time.

If you think that predicting weather and predicting climate are similar problems, then I'd encourage you to read up a bit on chaos theory.

Re:Awesome Models

[serviscope_minor]

Well done for taking an analogy then crunching meaningless numbers to carry it through to the point of inapplicability.

Re:Awesome Models

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, well, apparently, the best climate scientists on Earth who can't predict even a short time into the future think they can make predictions on even longer scales.

Point being: All the "Global Warming" models have been wrong. This happened before, with the "Global Cooling" scaremongering. If I wanted "end of the world" scaremongering in my science I'd call it religion.

Re:Awesome Models

[cbiltcliffe]

In other words: "It's only a good analogy when it supports MY point of view, dammit!"

Re:Awesome Models

[cbiltcliffe]

And then all this garbage about the "hottest year ever".

If you're referring to 2014, I think it's just flat out wrong. Almost the entire northern hemisphere experience about a 9 month stretch that was 5-10 degrees colder than normal, to the extent of breaking cold temperature records that were a century old or more. Australia reported a heat wave for a couple of weeks at the beginning of 2014 that was about 4-5 degrees warmer than normal, but that's about all I've been able to find. That is certainly not even close to enough to compensate for the HUGE span of time that the north was significantly colder than normal.
If 2014 is the "hottest year on record," that points more to a failure in our methods of measuring average global temperature than the actual temperature being higher.

Re:Awesome Models

[angel'o'sphere]

If 2014 is the "hottest year on record," that points more to a failure in our methods of measuring average global temperature than the actual temperature being higher.
So you want to tell us, when the scientific community in agreement declares the year 2014 to be the hottest on record, the majourity of those scientists is wrong?
On what basis do you conclude/declare this? Because on your couch it was cold?

Re:Awesome Models

[Anonymous Coward]

The prediction will be inaccurate with the amount information given here. How much water is there? What's the altitude? What's the humidity? How much energy is the burner putting out at its current setting? What is heat conductivity of the container for the water? How full is the container?

Re:Awesome Models

[phantomfive]

So far globally the weather has remained mostly within the boundaries projected by climate models so they're doing ok.

Not according to scientists. Quote:

"The slowdown in the rate of global warming in the early 2000s is not evident in the multi-model ensemble average of traditional climate change projection simulations.......The loss of predictive skill for six initial years before the mid-1990s points to the need for consistent hindcast skill to establish reliability of an operational decadal climate prediction system."

Re:Awesome Models

[Anonymous Coward]

A century has 36524 days. No leap year on the 00s.

Re:Awesome Models

[NoOneInParticular]

I'm in Holland. Holland is in the Northern Hemisphere. We had the highest average temperature in 2014. The highest in 3 centuries. Hell, I remember March 9th 2014, having a barbecue with my family with 20+ degree celsius. Every month with the exception of August was warmer than average. 2015 is not a whole lot different: no winter to speak of, no frost, no snow, no ice. Temperatures are again in the high 10s. You might want to do a bit more research.

Re:Awesome Models

[riverat1]

People get excited about the hottest year but it makes more sense from a climate perspective to look at it in terms of decadal temperature trends. This graph does that. From it you can see that the 2000s were about 0.15 degrees C above the 1990s and so far the 2010s are about 0.05 above the 2000s.

Re:Awesome Models

[serviscope_minor]

Er, yes?

If you don't understand that then not only do you not understand science you fail at English too. An analogy is constructed to support a point of view. Picking apart an analogy is basically pointless because it is not the same as the underlying science and therefore has no bearing.

ALL analogies can be picked apart because by definition theyre not the real thing.

Re:Awesome Models

[Nemyst]

Temperature doesn't exist at the atomic level. It's a measurement of how much movement there is in a set of atoms. At zero Kelvin, there is theoretically no movement whatsoever. In a gas, atoms are moving in all directions and colliding with the container walls all the time (that's pressure), which changes their velocity and direction. They can also collide with one another, but that's much less frequent, comparatively speaking, since gases tend to have very low density.

Now, since the parent was talking about a cloud of "heating gas", it means the gas is being heated in some way. This can happen through a number of different ways, but most of those ways will only act upon a small subset of the full gas being considered. Thus, at any given time, the probably of a random sample of atoms in a heating gas to be of a significantly different speed (that which you call temperature) than the rest of the gas is actually measurably higher than zero, with how high depending on how much heat is being applied and in which manner.

Re:Awesome Models

[Crashmarik]

No the comment was not about temperature it was about hyperbole

BTW just as a friendly you note these might help you

Random Sample
A subset of a statistical population in which each member of the subset has an equal probability of being chosen. A simple random sample is meant to be an unbiased representation of a group.

Virtually
nearly; almost.

Central Limit Theorem
The arithmetic mean of a sufficiently large number of iterates of independent random variables, each with a well-defined expected value and well-defined variance, will be approximately normally distributed, regardless of the underlying distribution

So in the future when some someone says a random sample of size 10^18 is going to have virtually zero deviance from the mean you can check yourself before saying silly things.

Re:Awesome Models

[riverat1]

I don't think that paper says what you're implying it does. To quote from another part of the abstract:

However, a number of individual ensemble members from that set of models successfully simulate the early-2000s hiatus when naturally-occurring climate variability involving the Interdecadal Pacific Oscillation (IPO) coincided, by chance, with the observed negative phase of the IPO that contributed to the early-2000s hiatus.

So when you cherry pick the individual model runs that happen by chance to coincide with what actually happened with the IPO in the real world they did quite well. Since the IPO is not something that can be predicted with any accuracy more than a few years in advance you can't really expect climate models to do that well on short (decadal) time scales. Nevertheless when you look at the CMIP5 data that were used used in the recent IPCC AR5 report and the ensemble mean with the 95% confidence interval the temperature may be below the mean lately but it's still within the 95% confidence intervals. That's what I mean by "they're doing ok".

Re:Awesome Models

[cbiltcliffe]

The scientific community as a whole once believed the world was flat.
The scientific community as a whole once believed chocolate and red wine were bad for you. Or was that good for you? No, it was bad. No...good.
The scientific community as a whole has changed its mind on many things in the past, as new research has been done, or flaws in old research and methodologies have been found.

A huge part of the basis of science is attempting to disprove theories with new research. When you fail to question conventional wisdom, it's not science. It's religion.

Re:Awesome Models

[cbiltcliffe]

So, what caused the cooling trend from 1880 to 1905 or so? It would be very interesting to see data back to 1000 A.D plotted on that graph, which was roughly the middle of the Medieval Maximum, with temperatures roughly what they are today.

Re:Awesome Models

[riverat1]

The eruption of Krakatoa in 1883 probably had something to do with it but I doubt it's the whole story.

The Medieval Maximum appears to be primarily a Northern Hemisphere phenomenon centered around the North Atlantic. It's not likely that globally temperatures were as warm then as they are now.

Re:Awesome Models

[riverat1]

The scientific community as a whole once believed the world was flat.

I don't think a scientific community existed when people believed the world was flat. The Greeks had shown empirically that the Earth was spherical by the 3rd century BC.

A huge part of the basis of science is attempting to disprove theories with new research. When you fail to question conventional wisdom, it's not science. It's religion.

Do you think climate scientists are a special breed of scientists who don't question conventional wisdom? Do you believe that thousands of climate scientists around the world are all in on some conspiracy to subvert the truth about climate? It just doesn't make sense. They know the sooner or later the underlying empirical reality would make their science defunct. Any scientist knows they can make a name for themselves by overturning conventional wisdom. I can't believe that in the 25 years since the first IPCC report someone wouldn't have done that if it were possible.

Re:Awesome Models

[phantomfive]

No, actually I'm really looking forward to the next IPCC report to see how it deals with the fact that the models are all garbage. It's been obvious for a while to people who understand them, but there are always some zealots who will cling to things.

Re:Awesome Models

[riverat1]

The models are not garbage. It sounds like your expectation of what they should be in unrealistic. Gavin Schmidt, a person who understands the models because he helps write them (the GISS Model E climate model) wrote this comparison between models and observations in 2013. Weather is still well within the expectations of climate models.

Re:Awesome Models

[phantomfive]

He wrote it in 2013, we've had a lot of new knowledge come out since then. Also, realclimate.org is propaganda, can't you recognize that? Propaganda is recognizable from its style.

Re:Awesome Models

[phantomfive]

Careful man, average rainfall varies drastically from year to year. In California's central valley, for example, some years it comes to 5 inches, other years it comes to 25 inches. I feel confident I could beat you predicting rainfall for the next seven days, compared to you predicting rainfall for the next seven years.

It takes longer than seven years for the climate to average out.

Re:Awesome Models

[riverat1]

Schmidt wrote several of the updates but stopped after the 2012 update because nothing he would have just been repeating what he had said previously. Sure knowledge has advanced since then but it hasn't changed anything fundamental in climate science.

As for RC being propaganda, if you say so. It is written by several leading climate scientists and invited guests and covers the mainstream of climate science well. Their posts cover mainly scientific topics and you're free to try and debunk them if you can.

Re:Awesome Models

[phantomfive]

Schmidt wrote several of the updates but stopped after the 2012 update

That was nice of him to update it until then.

As for RC being propaganda, if you say so. It is written by several leading climate scientists and invited guests and covers the mainstream of climate science well.

Propaganda isn't so much about who says it, but about how they say it. "A scientist is only a scientist when he acts as a scientist" etc.

One way to recognize the propaganda with realclimate.org is to realize they are clearly partisan, that is, any dissent from the standard line is attacked. Compare that to the IPCC report, (at least, WG1), which makes an effort to recognize the weaknesses and holes in our knowledge (of course, even the Heartland Institute has opposite viewpoints).

Re:Awesome Models

[riverat1]

One way to recognize the propaganda with realclimate.org is to realize they are clearly partisan, that is, any dissent from the standard line is attacked.

As scientists shouldn't they be able to defend and in fact are obligated to defend what they understand to be true about their science? In the end empirical reality will show what is right and they know that so it doesn't make sense that they would promulgate something they know to be wrong.

I watched your Heartland cite. Although I didn't totally agree with Denning* I didn't see that he contradicted climate science in any fundamental way. His main point was that if the political right does not offer solutions for the climate change that is coming the other side will come up with solutions they won't like. I'd love it if the political right started offering solutions rather than just more obstruction.

* His statement that "CO2 emits heat" is not the way I would describe it but maybe he was just dumbing it down for his audience.

Re:Awesome Models

[phantomfive]

As scientists shouldn't they be able to defend and in fact are obligated to defend what they understand to be true about their science?

They have the right to say whatever they want, in any way they want. At the same time, we as listeners can recognize the difference between rhetoric and science.

I watched your Heartland cite. Although I didn't totally agree with Denning* I didn't see that he contradicted climate science in any fundamental way.

I'm sorry, I didn't mean for you to watch the whole thing, I merely tried to use it as an example to show that even a propaganda organization (the heartland institute) can at times present opposing viewpoints. If you watched it, I hope you enjoyed it.

Re:Awesome Models

[dave420]

You'd have a great point, but you don't seem to be able to recognize the difference between rhetoric and science...

Re:Awesome Models

[phantomfive]

You'd have a great point, but you don't seem to be able to recognize the difference between rhetoric and science...

This is science. This is rhetoric. Specifically, the latter is a sub-genre of rhetoric known as apologia.

The former might be reasonably construed as dialectic, but now we're getting way over your head. Go smoke another joint an be gone.

Re:Awesome Models

[ZorglubZ]

The last century (i.e., the last one hundred years) had 36525 days, because the 00s that are dividable by 400 are leap (or jubilee) years.

Welcome Back, Mr. Nino

[Anonymous Coward]

Yiiiiiiippppppppeeeeeee to Mr. Nino!

Re:Welcome Back, Mr. Nino

[HiThere]

I wish. This report, though, doesn't make me want to cheer. In the first place it's weaker than expected, and in the second place it's 6 months out of phase. I'm not sure that translates into summer rain, I suppose it could, but it could also translate into "This rain is going somewhere else. Sucks to be you." as wind patterns in warm months tend to be different than those in colder months.

Re:Let's do the Chicken Little Climate Change danc

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not just a whacko fringe, it's most of the left.

You know with charlatans like Algore, I get it. He's making millions of dollars off this crap.

As for the average brain-dead leftist, what's their excuse? And you can't convince these morons of anything, not even to concede a little healthy skepticism. Which as we all know makes them what they claim to hate most - religious zealots.

These are the same ass clowns who will lecture you about being anti-science, mock the "fairy tale" of Christianity. If they projected any harder they would turn into a fucking Hitachi.

Re:Let's do the Chicken Little Climate Change danc

[Anonymous Coward]

The left went all-in on their "global warming" propaganda - even buying off "scientists" for bullshit reports on the subject. They have no choice at this point except to double-down least they be seen for the lying cheats that just want power that they are.

Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO)

[duckintheface]

The real story is a lot more complicated that TFA indicates. The new el nino is just starting and it's six months out of phase with the usual timing. So instead of starting six months late, it could just as well be seen as starting 6 months early in the next cycle. And more importantly, it is now combined with a phase change in the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO). The two cycles combine to produce a much stronger warming effect. The negative PDO was responsible for the impression that warming had slowed. Now that it has reversed the warming will not just return to pre-1998 levels but will be much stronger. This could last for the next 10 to 15 years. Hopefully by then people with short attention spans will have realized that the planet is irrevocably getting hotter.

Re:Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO)

[Anonymous Coward]

I have read on Slashdot many times that the warming hiatus is a myth. Now you are saying it was real, but you can explain it, and it's over. I think you're just making shit up.

Re:Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO)

[Anonymous Coward]

"the planet is irrevocably getting hotter."

I am still amazed people get modded informative for BS like this. Know when teh planet will become irrevocably hotter never. because in the grand scheme of things man has little or nothing to do with squat. Long after we are gone, the sun will change phases, engulf this planet for real global warming and then the universe will die a heat death later still so what the Fuck is irrevocable about the 0 degree warming that has been seen over the last 14 years?

Re:Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO)

[itzly]

because in the grand scheme of things man has little or nothing to do with squat. Long after we are gone, the sun will change phases, engulf this planet for real global warming and then the universe will die a heat death

Using that perspective, why not rob a bank today ?

Re:Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO)

[camg188]

"The planet is irrevocably getting hotter"
Pure speculation on your part and contrary to the geologic record. For most of the Cenozoic it has been so warm that there have been no polar ice caps and yet, here we are now, back in an ice age.

Re:Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO)

[Anonymous Coward]

Note to come back to this thread in 5 years.

Re:Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO)

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not late; it's early!

Re:Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO)

[Anonymous Coward]

because in the grand scheme of things man has little or nothing to do with squat. Long after we are gone, the sun will change phases, engulf this planet for real global warming and then the universe will die a heat death

Using that perspective, why not rob a bank today ?

Using exactly that perspective there is absolutely nothing to be gained from robbing a bank today.
Sure, it may or may not be successful and he may or may not be richer, but the oceans will still boil away in about a billion years or so.
Makes it kind of pointless to look at what the temperature was like 2 billion years ago.

Re:Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO)

[CmdrTamale]

Using that perspective, why not rob a bank today ?

What's the rush? Maybe tomorrow....

--
All models are wrong, some are useful.

Re:Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO)

[duckintheface]

The point that is misunderstood by many people is that CO2 released today contributes to the greenhouse effect for hundreds of years. That means that even if we stopped releasing any fossil fuel carbon today (not going to happen), the temperature of the earth would continue to rise for a long time on the time scale of a human civilization. And that will do damage to the biosphere that will be permanent (i.e. last for millions of years). Massive loss of species has already begun and will get worse no matter what we do. The question is whether we destroy much of the genetic diversity of the earth or all of it.

I'm sure that as soon as the science deniers realize their folly they will call for SCIENCE to save them. They will call for massive atmospheric engineering projects to reverse the effects they have caused. But it will be too late and the "projects" will cause more harm to the complicated climate system than they will alleviate.

Re:Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO)

[bunratty]

From that perspective there is absolutely nothing to be gained from getting out of bed either. That's why it's not a useful perspective.

Re:Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO)

[cbiltcliffe]

Bullshit. If I have a glass half full of boiling water, and a glass half full of ice water, the two glasses have an average temperature of around 50 degrees C. If I pour one into the other, the hot water will cool, and the ice water will warm; but the average temperature is still 50 degrees.
The heat was redistributed, but the average temperature hasn't changed.

This is exactly what ocean currents do; redistribute heat on the earth. A high El Nino/La Nina year like 1997, while it may warm the Arctic, cools the tropics at the same time, keeping the average temperature the same. Despite the "climate change chicken dancer's" claims, a high El Nino/La Nina year cannot affect the average temperature of the earth to any significant extent. Since, considering 1997, it appears to do so, then our method for measuring the average temperature of the earth is badly flawed. We obviously have more temperature measuring locations in spots that are warmed by El Nino than spots
And before you say these currents are carrying this heat to the bottom of the oceans, remember that study last year that analyzed ocean temperature data from 2005 to 2013, and found the oceans didn't measurably warm during that period. That was the entire time period they analyzed data for.

Despite the climate change proponents claims, the peak global average temperature of 1997 was not, and could not, be caused by ocean currents. And, despite the majority of the northern hemisphere having the coldest year in decades in 2014, in some cases breaking winter cold temperature records that were a century old or more, and a summer that saw people with quilts and comforters on beds, rather than the single sheet or nothing at all that summer sleeping usually requires, the global warming proponents are still saying that 2014 was the warmest year on record. Really? Was the south pole on fire? Because unless it was, the southern hemisphere certainly wasn't warm enough to counteract the 6-10 degrees C cooler than average that the northern hemisphere saw. Sure, Australia had a heat wave at the beginning of 2014, with temperatures a measly 4 degrees higher than normal for a few weeks. Hardly enough to counteract the 9 months of significantly colder than average temperatures that the north saw.

Re:Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO)

[rgbatduke]

Empirically, ENSO has been tightly associated with bursts of warming -- nearly discrete jumps in global average temperature. The 1997-1998 super-ENSO event was very directly associated with a jump of nearly 0.15 C, and temperatures have remained basically neutral ever since except for peaks in "normal" ENSO years that quickly regressed to a mean. Indeed, if you look at the SST record (arguably more pristine than the heavily processed global temperature record, at least in the recent past) it exhibits a pattern called Hurst-Kolmogorov (punctuated equilibrium) jumps with the transitions often associated with ENSO. This is actually one of the arguments of skeptics -- global temperature is almost certainly regulated by CO_2 concentration, but only weakly/logarithmically and according to radiative theory, the total climate sensitivity (increase per doubling of CO_2) should be between 1 and 1.5 C, which is warming but unlikely to be catastrophic in any reasonable future CO_2 scenario. The unknown factor is how much of the warming is due to shifts in a punctuated, locally stable equilibrium from what amount to natural factors, the biggest of which are the multidecadal oscillations and associated shifts in global atmospheric circulation patterns (where as noted, ENSO especially is an empirical smoking gun in the shifts) but which also include discrete shifts in the thermohaline circulation patterns, especially at certain critical junctions in the Atlantic, and the possibility of nonlinear effects from solar variability. Since the system is highly multivariate, chaotic, nonlinear, and with profound feedback loops and self-organized dissipative structures in abundance, it is incredibly difficult to model and the general circulation models yield almost no useful information beyond "if you increase CO_2, it will more likely warm than cool" which we already knew from radiative theory in the first place and which is built into them in such a way that they can give no other answer. There is little reason to believe that the multimodel ensemble mean of means of the many different models has any real predictive force, however, and in fact that mean is systematically diverging from the observational record just as it has systematic deviations in its hindcast from the historical record.

This is why catastrophic global warming enthusiasts are so excited about the prospects of a new super-ENSO. If it happens, it could cause another Hurst-Kolmogorov jump, bump the average temperature a bit, and validate the models (or at least, rescue them from a richly deserved back-to-the-drawing-board oblivion). It is difficult to escape the feeling that they want this to happen, that they want the world to heat up disastrously to punish the human race for using energy and building civilization. One would think that evidence that TCS was not, in fact, 2 to 3 C but instead was 1-2 C (or even less) would be welcome news, but for them it would be acknowledging that the deliberately created panic, the political manipulation and selling of the catastrophic warming meme, and the associated shifts of enormous amounts of money into ameliorating a hypothetical disaster on the basis of unproven models has been directly responsible for the perpetuation of 1/3 of the world's population in a state of energy poverty.

rgb

Re:Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO)

[itzly]

a high El Nino/La Nina year cannot affect the average temperature of the earth to any significant extent.

True, but it can affect the surface temperature, which is only a small portion of the earth. The bulk of the heat resides in the ocean water.

Was the south pole on fire? Because unless it was, the southern hemisphere certainly wasn't warm enough to counteract the 6-10 degrees C cooler than average that the northern hemisphere saw.

The northern hemisphere was significantly warmer than average. Here's a map of the global temperature anomaly for 2014:

http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-...

Re:Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO)

[Anonymous Coward]

Did you flunk high school chemistry or physics? You must have. Melting point and freezing point are on a different time scale. Let me make this understandable for a 1st grader... It takes much longer to cool down than warm up.

Re:Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO)

[cbiltcliffe]

According to that map, the UK was 1-2 degrees warmer than normal, and much of northern Europe was 2-4 degrees warmer than normal. Yet, news reports state the UK's summer was one of the coldest in decades, 5-6 degrees C colder than normal, the end of 2014 was also exceptionally cold, and while Feb 2014 was slightly above average, during the 2004 to 2014 period, it was only 0.4 degrees higher than the 1860's average for the period from 2005 to 2014, which at 5.2 degrees is also the exact same as the February average for 2014 only.
How does a slight, less than one degree warming over 150 years for one month counteract the 5-6 degree colder summer and "bitterly cold" end of the year?

I stand by my assertion that something is seriously wrong with how we measure average global temperatures.

Re:Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO)

[itzly]

news reports state the UK's summer was one of the coldest in decades, 5-6 degrees C colder than normal [weather.com]

Read more carefully. Where you say "summer", they're talking about a "spell" around the 19th of August.

Guess what. If you look at the August data, you can see that Ireland/UK are colder than average.
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-...

But if you look at the entire summer (Jun-Aug), you get a different picture:
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-...

I stand by my assertion that something is seriously wrong with how we measure average global temperatures.

No, the only thing that is seriously wrong is how you read local weather reports, and extrapolate those both in time and area.

Re:Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO)

[cbiltcliffe]

My high school OAC (grade 13, for non-Ontarians) chemistry mark was the highest of any student, in any school in the county, for both semesters of the year I took that class. I got an award for it, actually.

The amount of energy needed to melt ice into water without changing the temperature (remaining at 0 degrees C) is the exact same as the amount of energy you need to remove to freeze water into ice without changing the temperature. Which makes your claim about time scales (WTF does time have to do with energy transfer and average temperatures of a region, anyway?) complete, unadulterated bullshit.

Re:Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO)

[cosmicaug]

Bullshit. If I have a glass half full of boiling water, and a glass half full of ice water, the two glasses have an average temperature of around 50 degrees C. If I pour one into the other, the hot water will cool, and the ice water will warm; but the average temperature is still 50 degrees.
The heat was redistributed, but the average temperature hasn't changed.

No, in your example the average temperature will drop but the total heat of the system will remain the same.

In the commonly understood meaning of ice water, you will have a mixture of ice and water. Such a mixture is understood to have a temperature of 0 degrees centigrade but additional heat needs to be lost to make the transition from liquid water at 0 degrees C to solid water at 0 degrees C (heat of fusion). The mixture of your water at the boiling point and your ice water will equilibrate at a temperature below 50 degrees C. The actual temperature will depend the percentage of water that is in the form of ice in the ice water.

So if the heat can go somewhere other than to change the temperature of water you can have changes of the mean temperature of the water.

Likewise in the rest of the comment, a global energy balance surplus need not mean a short term global surface temperature increase and an energy balance deficit need not mean a short term surface temperature decrease because the energy balance affects more than air temperatures. The oceans, in fact, act as a massive heat sink (and the data is there showing that surplus heat is going there). That is, additional heat affects more than surface air temperatures, it affects ocean temperatures. As a result, anything which affects the heat balance into this heat sink will affect air temperatures. This means that a heat surplus can be masked if additional heat gets temporarily dumped into the ocean but it also means that if the process that is dumping surplus heat into the ocean decreases you will see an atmospheric temperature rise.

Re:Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO)

[angel'o'sphere]

Despite the "climate change chicken dancer's" claims, a high El Nino/La Nina year cannot affect the average temperature of the earth to any significant extent.
That is nonsense. When we talk about "earth temperature" we talk about surface temperature.
El Nino transports hot water around and down into the deep of the ocean.
El Nina transports cold water up from the depths and distributes it over the ocean. While the first is merly spreading heat and in that way not changing the "average" as you explain, the second one puts cold water on top of the warmer water and cools down the surface temperature considerable.

The temperature claims in your rest of the post are utter nonsense ... the north had no "colder than average" temperatures. Hint: read the news and get your head out of your arse.

Re:Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO)

[duckintheface]

Do I "want it to get hotter"? In the long run....no... but I'm sure it is getting hotter. So now we have the frog in a pot analogy. We are being heated slowly and are not reacting... not jumping out of the pot. And by the time the skeptics are convinced, it will be too late to jump.

I do not "want" the TCS to be 3C but my wishes have nothing to do with what the actual case is. So yes, I would like to see extreme warming for the next 10 years so that we will jump to a new energy infrastruture not based on fossil fuels. And I would particularly like to see it get very hot and dry in Oklahoma so that something will shut Mr Inhoff up. And if we jump and it turns out that the TCS is 1C? That's fine because the move to non-fossil fuels has many other benefits like less pollution, less susceptibility to terrorism (distributed source energy), and a move away from cars and toward mass transit, bikes and walking whcih makes for a more compact and heathly way of living. It's also fine becasue, even with TCS of 1C, we will still have to make the jump sometime. An early move gives us more time to get it right.

Re:Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO)

[Anonymous Coward]

way to fuck up your conclusions by wildly inserting you personal bias.

so explain the Miocene then.

Re:Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO)

[Anonymous Coward]

It takes much longer to cool down than warm up

What the hell are you talking about? I've had years of college chemistry and physics and I can't make any sense out of that.

Newton's law of cooling is dT/dt = -k(T - T0). Where is the time-reversal asymmetry? It isn't there. Reverse time and heating takes exactly as long as cooling.

You seem to be basing that on experience with every day objects, not on real knowledge of the subject. The engine in your car takes longer to cool than to heat. That's not a law of physics: it's because the heating and cooling are happening with different mechanisms (heating from chemical reactions, cooling from convection).

Is there some way to interpret "it takes much longer to cool down than warm up" that doesn't imply you are a special kind of idiot?

Re:Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO)

[disambiguated]

Only a fool would argue with a Canadian about ice.

Re:Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO)

[serviscope_minor]

OK, over the timespan that is of interest to human socities, the planet is irrevocably getting hotter.

What happens a million, 10 million or 100 million years hence is of little bearing. The path of the next few hundred years is what matters to us personally. And within that timeframe it is irrevocably getting hotter.

Re:Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO)

[Anonymous Coward]

What massive engineering projects?
Like chemtrails?

Re:Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO)

[cbiltcliffe]

Only a fool would argue with a Canadian about ice.

Heh heh. True. But there does seem to be a fairly large population of fools on the Internet, doesn't there?

Re:Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO)

[loufoque]

I like how you're confusing the northern hemisphere with North America.
Maybe you should actually look at data before making such bold generalizations.

Re: Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO)

[Anonymous Coward]

> And, despite the majority of the northern hemisphere having the coldest year in decades in 2014

Apparently, you're living somewhere else. 2014 was not the coldest year in decades, quite the opposite.

Re: Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO)

[stoatwblr]

The problem with more co2 equals more warming is twofold.

1: higher temperatures mean higher sea levels, through ice melt and/or thermal expansion - both are problematic for coastal populations.

2: If the temperature climb is high enough then stored methane (methane hydrates or permafrost swamps) can start bubbling out, leading to runaway warming.

The second is more worrying as it appears to be starting in siberia and in shallow arctic seas. Methane is quoted as 20 times more warming than co2 over 100 years but in the first decade of release it's more like 100-250 times as warming.

We're facing an uncertain future. Whilst the extreme doomsayers are unlikely to be right, the deniers are equally unlikely to be correct. The real question is how much things will change and how quickly.

Re: Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO)

[stoatwblr]

The problem with more atmospheric co2 equals more warming is twofold.

1: higher temperatures mean higher sea levels, through ice melt and/or thermal expansion - both are problematic for coastal populations.

2: If the temperature climb is high enough then stored methane (methane hydrates or permafrost swamps) can start bubbling out, leading to runaway warming.

The second is more worrying as it appears to be starting in siberia and in shallow arctic seas. Methane is quoted as 20 times more warming than co2 over 100 years but in the first decade of release it's more like 100-250 times as warming.

We're facing an uncertain future. Whilst the extreme doomsayers are unlikely to be right, the deniers are equally unlikely to be correct.

The real question is how much things will change and how quickly, with secondary questions about how political systems adapt to cope.

Re:Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO)

[TheRealLifeboy]

... the science deniers...

There's no science denier as great as the one who it blinded by religious and political zeal in an attempt to change the fabric of the world to suit the New World Order agenda.

Re:Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO)

[Anonymous Coward]

Why is it that 'skeptics' are so 'skeptical' about science that is accepted by just about every learned body on the planet but don't bat an eyelid at gobbledygook like this?

Re:Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO)

[rgbatduke]

Dude, look at the map of climate zones sometime. Look at the range of normal temperatures, and the range of extreme temperatures. The entire shift they are talking about is basically moving one climate zone north -- order of 100 miles. It is utterly lost in the noise. It isn't frog slowly "boiling" in a pot. It is frog in a pot that is 15 C (that is, rather cold) on average (maybe) but that has a range of maybe 5 to 10 C either way on a daily basis, an average that itself varies by a lot more than 20 C annually in much of the world, getting raised to a pot that -- if we don't condemn the poorest people in the world to remain poor for most of the next century and do keep burning coal to make electricity to make their lives better, cheaper, and uplift them out of 18th century poverty and into (I dunno) maybe the 20th century -- will go up 2 whole degrees C. Frogs don't cook at 17 C. The frog might well be more comfortable. I would.

I do like the way you minimize the impact of spending order of a trillion dollars a year combatting CO_2 without recognizing that this is a choice, and it comes at the expense of other ways we might spend the money -- like ending world poverty, which would probably cost less than half of that. You worry about a future catastrophe. How about the ongoing catastrophe, the catastrophe right now, caused by spending all of this money in measures that: a) benefit the very energy companies you no doubt would condemn as the culprits far more than any other groups -- so much so that if CAGW theory didn't exist, they would have a strong motivation to invent it. Anything that increases the marginal cost of energy is going to increase the profits of energy companies before it does anything else, because they make marginal profits. b) don't even work. Carbon trading is an expensive joke. Thorium might work (Uranium does work) but the same people who hate CO_2 hate U235 even more. Wind energy is an expensive joke nearly everywhere, suffering as well from massive NIMBY syndrome and for very good reason. Most other resources such as geothermal or hydro are already exploited and/or regional. Natural gas is lovely but again it is a carbon based fuel, everybody NIMBY's fracking, and I personally like it for heating houses and cooking and hate the thought of using it all up making electricity.

The only two contenders for replacing the coal infrastructure in the long run are solar, largely PV solar, and fusion. Solar isn't a good candidate for replacing coal, but it can certainly eke it out. It isn't ready for prime time as a replacement because electricity is difficult and expensive to store in anything vaguely like the quantities needed to sustain demand at night, and is difficult to transport the 5000 mile plus distances needed to e.g. provide power to the entire temperate zone and points north in the winter, especially if one plans to use that power to heat houses because burning fuel isn't allowed. There is a disconnect so vast that it is difficult to begin to describe it there. We don't have the storage technology, and there are no feasible alternatives visible in the technological pipeline to provide it although there are a bunch of very expensive projects to demonstrate how to do it lots of very expensive ways. Could a breakthrough make this all work? Sure. And if and when it does, one won't need to subsidize the transition or promote it, it will just happen because electricity will be cheaper that way.

Nuclear fusion would solve the problem once and for all for the projected future of the human species. The problem there is that it is like saying that "we should run our energy infrasttructure using magic" because so far getting steady state fusion energy from anything less than balls of mostly hydrogen a million miles or so across just doesn't seem to work. Sure, maybe Lockheed-Martin will do as they just promised and deliver commercial fusion in four years and six months (counting down), but if they do again we won't

Re: Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO)

[rgbatduke]

When in the history of science has it been reasonable to call somebody that disagrees with your interpretation of the science a "denier"?

As for sea level rise, the evidence is that SL is rising and indeed has risen roughly 9 inches in the last 140 years without anybody really noticing. It is projected to rise another 10 to 15 inches in the next 85 years -- if warming proceeds as expected (outside of egregious exaggerations pushed by e.g. James Hansen). This wasn't catastrophic in the past, is not likely to be catastrophic in the future, although it can certainly be problematic for some very low lying land areas, especially ones also afflicted with subsidence (as subsidence and uplift are substantial ongoing coastal processes independent of AGW). "Catastrophe" involves melting either Greenland or Antarctica, and neither one is melting at anything like a substantial rate.

Methane is a pet peeve of mine as well. Most of the methane is tied up as clathrates at enormous pressures and extremely cold temperatures in the ocean. Most of the ocean is within a hair of 4 C and isn't going to warm enough to care about no matter what on any reasonably short time frame (centuries, millennia). Most of the recent papers on the subject are finally coming to recognize that this is a fantasy -- if bottom warming alters methane production, it won't be because of CO_2 but rather geothermal activity, e.g. vulcanism. Also, the ocean eats methane -- they went to study methane released in the Gulf Oil disaster and found rather to their surprise that there hardly was any -- most of it was eaten en route to the surface. In the atmosphere it quickly rises and is broken down by UV and ozone. It isn't clear how much methane would have to be released, how steadily, to maintain an increasing profile in the atmosphere but it is likely to be a big number.

If you want to pick on a thing that could be at least locally catastrophic, I'd go for increasing oceanic CO_2 lowering the basic ocean pH over time. I'm still skeptical of any global disaster, because I think the biosphere is a lot more resiliant than that (and because for most of the Earth's past history over the last 500 million years CO_2 has been over 1000 ppm and shellfish in general did fine) but aragonite etc is at least in principle vulnerable in organisms that rely on it. There, as you say, if things change too quickly some species in some locations might -- big word, might -- face extinction.

but, but .......science

[bricko]

But computer models are always right and we can NOT investigate further....science is settled.

Re:but, but .......science

[NoMaster]

But computer models are always right and we can NOT investigate further....science is settled.

What fucking idiot has ever claimed that?

In other news, the strawman still needs a brain...

Re:but, but .......science

[ScentCone]

What fucking idiot has ever claimed that?

Just people like Al Gore, who are making millions off of that assertion.

Re:but, but .......science

[itzly]

Please show the quote where Al Gore claims that computer models of El-Nino are always right, and how he is making millions off of that assertion.

Re:but, but .......science

[Anonymous Coward]

I think it's pretty clear to even a moron that the models he speaks of are of the "warming climate" models. The ones that say we should be boiling the oceans by now. The ones EVERYONE thinks of when you say "the models" in the context of Global Warming.

Re:but, but .......science

[itzly]

Clearly, the GP comment "But, but, but computer models are always right and we can NOT investigate further....science is settled." refers to computer models of El-Nino, because that's the topic of this article.

The ones that say we should be boiling the oceans by now

No one says that.

Re: Let's do the Chicken Little Climate Change dan

[Anonymous Coward]

The political problems in Syria are very much timed with huge crop losses causing food price issues that are very likely the fault of global warming.

Re:Let's do the Chicken Little Climate Change danc

[Anonymous Coward]

ya'll are some special kind of retard, that's for sure.

I feel it in Houston

[Billly Gates]

It has been one of the coldest and wetist winters in awhile. High around 39 should not be a common occurrence on the gulf coast but it feels more like Seattle than a subtropical place. It got in the 70s only a few times last February.

El Nino was supposed to be big as a big surge of very warm water up to 150 ft deep and almost 1,000 miles long headed east. However the winds picked up and chilly Antarctic current which cools west South America mixed in for a few months so it is not so warm anymore.

Weather is complex and last decade (no I do not deny global warming) had a solar null which means cooler temperatures and more la nina events like those in the mini ice age from 1400 - 1840 which explains colder temperatures and dryer conditions. California hit a 500 year drought where the climate actually changed from mediterranean to desert. Same in Chile and Peru.

Re: I feel it in Houston

[Anonymous Coward]

I am in Portland and this has been one of the warmest and sunniest winters coming ever. Some times the weather gods are nice to us.

Re: I feel it in Houston

[Anonymous Coward]

http://images.nationalgeographic.com/wpf/media-content/photos/000/891/cache/89188_990x742-cb1425485788.jpg

Re: I feel it in Houston

[93 Escort Wagon]

I am in Portland and this has been one of the warmest and sunniest winters coming ever. Some times the weather gods are nice to us.

SHUT UP.

Do you really want even more of them moving here?

Re:I feel it in Houston

[cbiltcliffe]

So when the temperature falls, it's due to external factors - solar minimum, ocean currents, whatever - but when the temperature rises, it's solely due to human produced carbon dioxide? While that's not exactly specified in what you wrote, I hear that A LOT from global warming proponents.
The concept of warming temperatures being due to external factors, just like cooling temperatures, is completely inconceivable to a lot of global warming proponents.

Re: I feel it in Houston

[cbiltcliffe]

So, we have a western 1/3 of the country that's on average 5-7 degrees warmer than average. Then, we have a central and south east 1/3 that's 5-7 degrees colder than average. These two together make Feb 2015 a completely normal month, as far as averages go.

But then, we've got that 1/4 of the country in the north east around the Great Lakes that's at least 13 degrees colder than average. That will hugely skew the country's average for the month down, making Feb 2015 significantly colder than average.
I can virtually guarantee, though, that the warming apologists will be saying in 9 months or so, that every month this year has been warmer than average so far, and 2015 is on track to be the HOTTEST YEAR EVARRR!!!!!1!!11!1eleeventy.
I know this, because the exact same thing happened in 2014. Almost everywhere on earth was average or significantly colder than average (like, 6-10 degress C colder than average for most of the northern hemisphere) for the entire year, with the exception of a 3-4 degree C above average heat wave in Australia for the first few weeks of the year. Yet, somehow, in December, 2014 was on track to the the warmest year on record, ever.

Re: I feel it in Houston

[itzly]

But then, we've got that 1/4 of the country in the north east around the Great Lakes that's at least 13 degrees colder than average. That will hugely skew the country's average for the month down, making Feb 2015 significantly colder than average.

You seem to be very preoccupied with the weather in the US, which represents less than 2% of the entire world.

Here's an anomaly graph of the entire world, for the month of January 2015 (February isn't available yet):

http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-...

The number on the top right (0.74) represents the average temperature anomaly for the world in deg C.

Re:I feel it in Houston

[angel'o'sphere]

The concept of warming temperatures being due to external factors
There are no external factors for warming. Except if you want to call the factors that cool, and later go away and stop cooling, "warming" instead.
If you find a warming factor, publish it and farm in your Nobel Prize.

Re: I feel it in Houston

[angel'o'sphere]

But you do know that the climate is heating up since roughly 1950?
So the averages increase every decade.
So it is super easy for a random month to be below average. I mean, it is much harder to be below ~20 degrees average, because you need to hit 19 degrees or less, than it is to be below 25 degrees average, because you only need to hit 24 degrees fro that. Surprisingly the "colder than average" month, compared to the last 40 years average, is still warmer than the average from 1980 to 1990 or from 1950 to 1980, for that matter.

So: your point is pointless. Working with averages is a mess, get used to it and start thinking instead of claiming nonsense.

Re: I feel it in Houston

[NoOneInParticular]

Europe was 1.2 degrees warmer than average in 2014, beating the record of 2011. Also Russia experienced a very warm winter. I think you have a bit of a bias to the North-American part of the Northern hemisphere.

Re:I feel it in Houston

[Anonymous Coward]

Climate is not weather. They are different things.

Re: I feel it in Houston

[HiThere]

I'm in the Calif. Bay Area, and it's been warm and dry here, also. But I don't think of this as good fortune, as that means drought and invasive species. Even if this develops into a summer rainy season it's not going to yield as good a climate as we had in the 1950's-90's. (Do note I'm including one major [7 year] drought cycle in the good weather.)

Re:I feel it in Houston

[Anonymous Coward]

One does not exist without the other. The sooner you understand this, the sooner you can be a contributing part of the conversation.

Re: I feel it in Houston

[cbiltcliffe]

I'm not preoccupied with US weather. That was just the map that the poster I replied to used.

Now, in response to yours, it shows that Antarctica is for the most part .5 to 2 degrees colder than the 1951-1980 average, yet the global warmists are saying that massive ice sheets are breaking off and melting because of (record?) high Antarctic temperatures.

Re: I feel it in Houston

[cbiltcliffe]

I find that figure for Europe very difficult to believe, as last year was full of news stories from Europe of below average temperatures. Can't say anything about Russia, as I don't read or speak the language, and don't really follow english language Russia Today.

Re:I feel it in Houston

[cbiltcliffe]

I didn't use either of those words in my post. Stop trying to straw man me.

Re:I feel it in Houston

[riverat1]

So when the temperature falls, it's due to external factors - solar minimum, ocean currents, whatever - but when the temperature rises, it's solely due to human produced carbon dioxide? While that's not exactly specified in what you wrote, I hear that A LOT from global warming proponents.
The concept of warming temperatures being due to external factors, just like cooling temperatures, is completely inconceivable to a lot of global warming proponents.

No it's more like there is a warming signal in the background from the rise in CO2 and ocean currents and whatever mostly affect where the heat gets expressed. If a bit more of it is going into the oceans then the atmosphere doesn't heat as much but the heat is still getting stored and it will come out eventually. Recent solar variation has had a miniscule effect on temperatures. There certainly can be external factors that would increase surface temperatures but we haven't observed any lately that would account for the changes seen.

Re:I feel it in Houston

[Anonymous Coward]

It is caused by a MASSACRE. Already wrote about it elsewhere and those guys know. Unpredictable and waning means _some_ are running out of victims. Simply put: each sudden death produces low pressure. Anyone in modeling should be able to continue from this point on even if it would mean income lost to me.

Re: I feel it in Houston

[dave420]

So you get your science information from the press? No wonder you are so confused! And for you to actually say that in the middle of a discussion, instantly removing any credibility you had, with just a few small words, is truly staggering. Incredible stuff.

Re:I feel it in Houston

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't get into religious arguments with these nutbags or next think you know global warming will be caused by too many penises on the planet and they'll start lopping them off.

You'll only get mine from my cold, dead hands!! Ummmmm, yeah

Re:Awesome Comment

[psinet]

They can't predict the weather next week very accurately, but we are supposed to "trust" the experts when they tell us what is going to happen in the next few years or longer?

There is quite some difference between predicting an outcome of a chaotic system (tomorrow's weather) and accurately enumerating data sets already acquired in the past.

Your 'Climate Skepticism' (global warming denial) is very thinly veiled. Top points for smugness, though.

the winds... petered out?

[fustakrakich]

It's all those damn turbines we're putting up. Slow down all the wind, and pretty soon there won't be any. Then what are you going to do, eh?

Therefore Global Warming NO REAL

[psinet]

...no.

The fact that they did not accurately predict the weather, does NOT have a bearing on the legitimacy of the theory of human-induced global warming.

None. Zip. Zero. Zilch. Not significant.

So you can stop posting about it.

Re:Therefore Global Warming NO REAL

[sycodon]

The fact that their models don't match reality does.

Re:Therefore Global Warming NO REAL

[itzly]

The models for prediction El-Nino and other ocean currents aren't very good at this time. This is well known. But unless there's a permanent change to the oceans, we know that the currents fluctuate around a mean, and that their effects is superimposed on the global climate, which is noticeable on decadal time scales.

Mostly, they effect the climate by redistributing the heat in different ways, including transporting some heat to deeper ocean layers where it's hidden from surface temperature sensors, and transporting it back at other times.

As far as significance for the longer term global warming trend, there's isn't much. Over a period of a few decades, the fluctuations in ocean current start to average out.

Re:Therefore Global Warming NO REAL

[Anonymous Coward]

The heat is in the ocean...is that Pause Excuse #21 or #36? I don't recall.

Seriously dude, that the oceans store and move heat isn't some recent discovery, I learned that in 5th grade science...1972. And news for ya, they have been doing it forever, not just during the Cherry Picked Global Warming time frame.

Why can't you people admit you have no fucking clue what's happening? You are like the stupid inventor who calls his family to the garage to witness his latest invention on to have it not work. Then he says "it just needs a few tweaks".

YOU HAVE NO CLUE!

Re:Therefore Global Warming NO REAL

[itzly]

The heat is in the ocean...is that Pause Excuse

There's no pause. There's just short time fluctuations around the trend. And you are completely right, this is nothing new.

Why can't you people admit you have no fucking clue what's happening?

The people who don't have a fucking clue are the ones that are screaming that there's a pause when the global temperatures don't break new records every single year.

Re:Therefore Global Warming NO REAL

[cbiltcliffe]

The people who don't have a fucking clue are the ones that are screaming that there's a pause when the global temperatures don't break new records every single year.

We did break temperature records in 2014. Cold temperature records. Records that were over a century old. Yet, somehow, according to the warming apologists, 2014 was still the hottest year on record.

Re:Therefore Global Warming NO REAL

[itzly]

We did break temperature records in 2014. Cold temperature records. Records that were over a century old. Yet, somehow, according to the warming apologists, 2014 was still the hottest year on record.

Local low temperature records on a single day do not contradict a global maximum for the entire year.

Re:Therefore Global Warming NO REAL

[angel'o'sphere]

Cold temperature records. Records that were over a century old.
Care to point out a single one?

Good luck!

Re:Therefore Global Warming NO REAL

[cbiltcliffe]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2...

January 6, 2014, Chicago, -16 F. Previous record of -14 F set in 1884.
January 7, 2014,Central Park in New York City was 4 F (16 C). The previous record low for the day was set in 1896.

Oh...that's right. You only asked for a single one.
Well, perhaps these southern Ontario record breaking lows will make you feel better, as they're not quite 100 years old:

https://ca.news.yahoo.com/blog...

Hamilton hit -22 C, previous record of -17.2 C set on March 4, 1962.
London, -24 C, previous record of -22.8 C, set in 1950.
Windsor, -17 C, previous record of -14.4 C, set in 1943.

Re:Therefore Global Warming NO REAL

[cbiltcliffe]

Sorry, that Central Park temperature of 4 degrees F converts to -16 C, not 16 C.

Re:Therefore Global Warming NO REAL

[riverat1]

There may have been some individual station records broken in February 2015 but overall it was a warm winter across the US.

Re:Therefore Global Warming NO REAL

[dave420]

There you go again showing everyone that you really don't understand this. Just because a certain location has a momentary low temperature does not magically mean that it was cold there for an entire year. You're not too good at this whole "science" thing.

darn

[slashmydots]

It's a shame this hasn't so far made it rain in the California area. At least freak weather patterns can help sometimes by simply causing different weather. Hopefully that changes in the near future. Then again, California's economy and politics are so fucked up, the weather might as well crap out too.

Re:darn

[WalksOnDirt]

Unfortunately, we're near the end of the rainy season now. There's not much hope of an El Niño fixing the drought this year.

Re:darn

[Anonymous Coward]

It is 2015, Slashdot. And we get El Niño.

Re:darn

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, my joke was ruined! I swear I copy-pasted the A~+/- high characters, now they got fixed :(

Re:Awesome Comment

[Anonymous Coward]

It is a sin to even question your faith. Don't forget.

Re:Let's do the Chicken Little Climate Change danc

[riverat1]

And yet temperatures continue to rise, ice continues to melt, sea level continues to rise and the oceans continue to acidify.

ahhhh....That old scam

[Anonymous Coward]

Just because you say "climate is not weather" over and over again in an attempt to drug the culture into not seeing the obvious, that does not make it so.

That's like saying "altitude is not rate-of-climb" or "accelleration is not velocity" or "Depth and Pressure are two different things!" (all statements, like yours, are technically true but can be used to boldly decieve the public while getting no "pants on fire" ratings from popular fact checker websites)

In each case, the one is intimately connected to the other. Sure, velocity and accelleration are two different things, but the one does not occur without the other and the one effectively creates the other - so if a person is wrong about the one, HE IS WRONG ABOUT THE OTHER. Same with weather/climate. If you cannot accurately measure and predict accelleration, you cannot accurately predict velocity. If you cannot accurately measure and predict weather, you should not be trusted to accurately predict climate - particularly when your models cannot even predict and fully explain past known events when fed the actual data that led up to those events.

Mantras are NOT how you defend REAL science (not even if they rhyme or are set to a nice tune).

Re:ahhhh....That old scam

[sjames]

Too bad there's no "not even wrong" moderation...

Re:ahhhh....That old scam

[NoOneInParticular]

We're perfectly capable of predicting that a boiling pan of water will run dry, and even predict when exactly, without even having the faintest idea where exactly the next bubble will surface.

Re: Let's do the Chicken Little Climate Change dan

[Anonymous Coward]

No, you fucking moron.

Re:Let's do the Chicken Little Climate Change danc

[Anonymous Coward]

is this why brisket is more expensive than ever?

Re: Let's do the Chicken Little Climate Change dan

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, it has nothing at all to do with the instability in Iraq caused by a pointless war there. War apologist much?

Re:Let's do the Chicken Little Climate Change danc

[GuB-42]

In fact it goes opposite to what global warming / climate change is expected to do. Global warming should result in more extreme weather, including more powerful storms.

Not trying to disprove global warming here. Isolated events taken out of context are not proof.

Hiatis crap

[Anonymous Coward]

You know there is more to this planet than the good ole US of A. Maybe you guys have had a hiatis for the last 10 or 15 years but here in Australia we've been breaking weather records every year for about the same period.
  Australian Bureau of Meteorology is now considering revising up the (standard) average temps because now every year for the last 10 or 15 years have been unusually above average, summer & winter. Snow season is even starting later now than ever before, and finishing earlier.
Major bush fires that that histrically occur every 10 or 12 years now occur every 6 or 8 years.
Hiatis my arse....
Weather records are being broken all over the world. Not just every now and then like before, but every year.
To anybody with common sense that should seem at least a little strange....

It may not be entirely our fault ( varying output from the sun and such)...but we're certainly not helping matters......

besides the amount of oil and gas in the ground is not unlimited ( won't last for ever)..... It took millions of years to put it there and in a few hundred years we've managed to pull a very large portion of it out again.

Re:Hiatis crap

[Anonymous Coward]

Who gives a shit about the rest of the world?

You foreign fuckers can all cook for all we care.

In fact, the sooner you all do, the sooner the US can relieve its population pressure and take full control of strategic petroleum reserves.

So hurry up and die already

Re:Let's do the Chicken Little Climate Change danc

[cbiltcliffe]

Remember the whole "polar vortex" thing in North America last year? That thing that's repeating this winter? The bitterly cold temperatures are causing pipes to freeze. Pipes that are inside heated and insulated houses.
It's getting so damned cold from arctic air making it farther south than normal that people are being advised in some Canadian cities to keep their taps running 24/7 so they don't freeze, and their water bill will be adjusted so they don't pay for the extra water that they use.

If the arctic air coming south is so cold that it's causing issues like this, how is it even remotely possible that the arctic is warm enough for glaciers to be melting in huge amounts due to temperature?

Re:Let's do the Chicken Little Climate Change danc

[cbiltcliffe]

Not trying to disprove global warming here. Isolated events taken out of context are not proof.

The problem is that every single event that refutes global warming is an "isolated event taken out of context," whereas every single event that points to global warming is "part of an undeniable pattern."

Re:Let's do the Chicken Little Climate Change danc

[itzly]

If cold air is getting pushed out of the Arctic, what kind of air do you think goes back in to replace it ?

Re:Let's do the Chicken Little Climate Change danc

[Anonymous Coward]

If cold air is getting pushed out of the Arctic, what kind of air do you think goes back in to replace it ?

That's not how things work. There isn't an equal balance of warm and cold air - the sun is entering into a new solar minimum, meaning there is less warm air all around.

!yet

[h8sg8s]

These are some of the same climate scientists openly discussing geo-engineering of the climate. Just as you can't automate what you don't understand, you can't 'fix' something if you can't accurately describe how and why it's broken. Hands off until they can please..

Re:Let's do the Chicken Little Climate Change danc

[Anonymous Coward]

North America has insulated houses now?

Re:Let's do the Chicken Little Climate Change danc

[Anonymous Coward]

Temperatures aren't rising, they are actually going down. Temperature has some minor instances of feedback with the things like carbon but the VAST majority of temperature fluctuations come from solar activity or lack thereof and all long-term data show we are about to enter another iceage as the sun enters into a solar minimum. Ice is melting but more is taking it's place (hence the ocean acidification as water is taken out of the cycle to be tied up in ice). Here's a prime example of actual data correlating solar activity with temperature changes for you: http://seoblackhat.com/images/co2-vs-temp.jpg

>inb4 this retard uses the "correlation != causation" meme

Re:Let's do the Chicken Little Climate Change danc

[itzly]

There isn't an equal balance of warm and cold air

There's not a perfect balance, but the local, day to day fluctuations we call weather are mostly a result of the same heat being distributed in different ways. Total heat on earth isn't going to be dramatically different between yesterday and tomorrow.

the sun is entering into a new solar minimum, meaning there is less warm air all around.

The amplitude of the solar cycle is about 0.1% of the total solar output. That's not a significant contribution.

Re:Let's do the Chicken Little Climate Change danc

[Anonymous Coward]

Kudos for an incredibly stupid question. Did it occur to you to actually check what the weather in the Arctic was like during these polar vortexes?

I grew up in Valdez, Alaska. I wasn't there for the avalanche mentioned in the article, but it's pretty epic, no? The whole town was cut off from the world by a snowslide/ice dam for a couple of weeks. Fun times. But the glacial melting is just unreal. Ten thousand year old ice is vanishing, there are glacier overlooks built where you can't actually see the glacier any more. The Columbia Glacier retreated like twenty miles. The low altitude, smaller glaciers are the ones melting fastest, and they're the most visible/accessible.

It's cool though. You haven't seen any of that, so it must all be made up. Wishful thinking beats reality any day, I'm sure.

Re:Let's do the Chicken Little Climate Change danc

[thegarbz]

It takes a certain kind of mind to counter measurable and published evidence with a flawed thought experiment using a single condition experienced by a small portion of the world for a small portion of the year.

Even ignoring the problems with your thought experiment, why not instead try and prove the visible evidence we see, rather than try and disprove it.

Or are you merely exposing your true identity as Adam Savage? "I reject your reality and substitute my own."

Re:Let's do the Chicken Little Climate Change danc

[riverat1]

Remember the whole "polar vortex" thing in North America last year?

Not really. I live on the west coast of North America and it never affected us. The "polar vortexes" you are referring to only affected less than 5% of the surface of the Earth. February 2015 was in the top 5 warmest globally.

Re: Let's do the Chicken Little Climate Change dan

[mean pun]

Yes, it has nothing at all to do with the instability in Iraq caused by a pointless war there. War apologist much?

Because there can never be an event that has multiple contributing factors? There always has to be exactly one straw that breaks the camel's back?

Re:Let's do the Chicken Little Climate Change danc

[ITRambo]

I believe that up until recently, what is currently called a "polar vortex" was called "arctic air" in a weather forecast. Polar vortex, while being a historical term dating to the 1800's, was rarely used to describe the phenomena of cold cyclonic polar air pushing south. Using it commonly now makes it seem like winter weather patterns have suddenly and drastically changed. They haven't, not in just a couple of years.

Re:Let's do the Chicken Little Climate Change danc

[F34nor]

Why are you so fucking stupid?

risk = damage x likelihood.

What would the damage be if global climate change is right? Is there 0% chance that CO2 traps heat? Is there a 0% chance that methane traps heat? Id there a 0% chance that ocean acidification will effect us?

I really want to know if you are paid to be shill or you are actually as stupid as you seem.

Re:Let's do the Chicken Little Climate Change danc

[cbiltcliffe]

So you're saying the arctic air is warmer than the air half way to the equator?

Re:Let's do the Chicken Little Climate Change danc

[angel'o'sphere]

Wow,
how can one be so stupid is beyond me.

The ice melts not in the winter when you have an arctic vortex. How retarded are you? Actually you have every winter an arctic vortex. The question is how many loops it has. Is it an even number of loops the north of america stays relatively warm, is it an odd number one loop is either over the US/canada *or* over skandinavia/europe.

Regarding the melting glaciers: they obviously melt during spring and summer. And as you seem to be an rally badly educated man: glaciers exist in the Alps, in the Himalaya, in Africa on the Kilimancharo, in New Zealand, I bet you have them in the Rockies and in the Andes, too.

If the arctic air coming south is so cold that it's causing issues like this
Actually, it is not even arctic air. That was likely an american TV layman's explanation. It is simply "continental climate". Air that cools down in central Canada, or central USA and drifts towards the north west of the USA.

If there was no global warming, you had this weather every year and much much colder. How damn young are you that you don't know that?

Re:Let's do the Chicken Little Climate Change danc

[angel'o'sphere]

The amplitude of the solar cycle is about 0.1% of the total solar output. That's not a significant contribution.
It is a bit closer to 1%, but you are right, it is not really significant regarding the climate (or weather).

Re:Let's do the Chicken Little Climate Change danc

[itzly]

Looking at the black running mean on this graph:
https://protonsforbreakfast.fi...

I see about 1W swing on 1366W average, which is 0.07%

Re:Let's do the Chicken Little Climate Change danc

[angel'o'sphere]

Well, I was more thinking about the sun itself. Minimum regarding sun spots and maximum, not sure about other cycles. The total between the lowest sun output and the maximum should be around 1% ... but perhaps I have memorized that wrong and it is 1 "promille" (strange that we have no sign for that on the keyboard)

Re:Let's do the Chicken Little Climate Change danc

[Hognoxious]

Awk Awk.

Well sed.

Re:Let's do the Chicken Little Climate Change danc

[Anonymous Coward]

Global Warming is a statistical element, it is not CO2, pollution, or even abnormal weather pattens. And no matter the cause weather human related, or just a coincidence it is happening. Who knows what effect it will have on the planet, we do know that the planet has been quite a bit warmer than it is now, so we should be fine for a while anyway. But if it keep going beyond that point which some predictions have estimated it might then we will be in trouble.

Yeah, right "every single event"...

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, if you pre-select the events to include ONLY those you think indicate that AGW is wrong, of COURSE you'll find your "fact" true.

But that's just cherry picking.

Pick ALL the cherries.

Not just East Coast US, but West Coast US, Arctic, Australia, Brazil, etc...

And in that case you find that the vast majority of cases are warming climate changes and a minority aren't unusually warm,

Would it work for you if I told you Australia has had the worst drought in recorded history and a record number of summer high temperature records broken, therefore claim "every single event proves AGW"? No? Then don't cherry pick the ones that seem to support your beliefs and preconceptions.

I see no proof of that.

[Anonymous Coward]

You claim "snow is gone in 10 years", but no such claim has been made. You've merely CLAIMED it happened.

1) One claim about snow being gone was undefined as to WHEN it would happen, with another claim being "we won't know how to deal with snow (in the UK)", which came true within 5 years

2) If you mean "Arctic sea ice gone", then that 10 year was
a) the shortest period possible for the model
b) which was a model that had the most dramatic and rapid loss of sea ice
whereas the consensus was by the middle of the 21st Century, and we look to beat that by over a decade.

But you don't say what the hell you think went on, nor show evidence it actually happened, so I'm just guessing here.

Re:Let's do the Chicken Little Climate Change danc

[riverat1]

Teh stupid hurts mah brain!.

Re: Let's do the Chicken Little Climate Change dan

[Anonymous Coward]

and then we have the NSA and CIA who are the parents of the ISIS animals.

Re:Let's do the Chicken Little Climate Change danc

[Anonymous Coward]

and see, how the trollboard downgrades posts like previous. Shame on you slashdot fuckers!

Re: Let's do the Chicken Little Climate Change dan

[Anonymous Coward]

The political problems in Syria are very much timed with huge crop losses causing food price issues that are very likely the fault of global warming.

Modded "Informative"?!

Is this what passes for intelligent thought these days?

Clearly, the state of public education is a much more imminent existential threat than the state of atmospheric CO2 levels.

Re:Awesome Comment

[ScentCone]

Your 'Climate Skepticism' (global warming denial) is very thinly veiled. Top points for smugness, though.

No, your 'Agenda Denial' is very thinly veiled. Trotting out your straw man about someone "denying" climate change is the lazy way to avoid addressing the real issue. The real issue is that people are making specific claims about "settled science" model predictions of exactly X number of inches of ocean change, or Y change in temperature or precipitation in a given area, or Z change in glacier or sea ice, which clearly means that Policy A and Tax B and Redistribution Of Income Model C are clearly required and should be run by newly established International Entity D staffed by newly needed bureaucrats E, F, and G, all of whom stand to gain the power to steer vast sums of money to their own cherry-picked NGOs, contractors, and kickback-powered corrupt third world governments.

The biggest backers for calling the models correct and science "settled" are those who have a vested interest in a huge new government-layer middleman operation with enormous reach into daily lives and cash flow across all industries and societies. There are a class of people who really see themselves as perfect for that role, and look for every opportunity to mandate the existence of such.

The main denial in play here is the denial that such people and such a fervently wished-for agenda exist.

Re:Let's do the Chicken Little Climate Change danc

[SgtAaron]

I believe that up until recently, what is currently called a "polar vortex" was called "arctic air" in a weather forecast. Polar vortex, while being a historical term dating to the 1800's, was rarely used to describe the phenomena of cold cyclonic polar air pushing south. Using it commonly now makes it seem like winter weather patterns have suddenly and drastically changed. They haven't, not in just a couple of years.

I believe this ties into the phenomena of the naming of winter storms by a certain cable weather channel.

Re:Let's do the Chicken Little Climate Change danc

[SgtAaron]

Regarding the melting glaciers: they obviously melt during spring and summer. And as you seem to be an rally badly educated man: glaciers exist in the Alps, in the Himalaya, in Africa on the Kilimancharo, in New Zealand, I bet you have them in the Rockies and in the Andes, too.

There are hundreds of glaciers in the Cascade range of mountains in the northwest US. And sadly to say, they all seem to be retreating. Just the other day news broke of a glacier cave on Mt. Hood, near Portland, OR, that had been around for ages but is now collapsing. Not that I venture into glacial caves myself :-) And we have had one hell of a weird winter in this part of the world, which did not help the cave. While we watch the news and see what our family and friends are dealing with everywhere east of the Rockies, I have flowers blooming in my front yard two weeks ago! And I'm in the middle of Oregon!

I guess if you live long enough, you really can see it all. Heh

Re:Let's do the Chicken Little Climate Change danc

[Anonymous Coward]

You should just quit while you're ahead. You're not going to convince anyone with your juvenile ranting.

Get your PhD in Physics and Meteorology, then you can start making statements and back it up with evidence.

Win the Nobel Prize (or, in your case, the knob-end prize) and then you may be onto a winner.

Good site for the specifics

[Anonymous Coward]

This site has a pretty good writeup of it: www.weatherwest.com

Re:Let's do the Chicken Little Climate Change danc

[riverat1]

Yes, the snow at pass levels in Oregon (around 5,000 feet) is nonexistent this year. In a normal year there would be at least 4 or 5 feet of packed snow by now. The one glacier that is still growing in the Northwest is the one in the crater of Mt. Saint Helens but of course the crater and glacier didn't even exist until after the 1980 eruption.

Re:Let's do the Chicken Little Climate Change danc

[riverat1]

The problem is that every single event that refutes global warming is an "isolated event taken out of context," whereas every single event that points to global warming is "part of an undeniable pattern."

Unfortunately that's just part of human nature. We tend to take note of singular events more than long term trends. The reality is that all weather events happen on a background of a changing climate from global warming. The evidence of climate change is in the statistics of how those individual events are changing over time.

Re:Let's do the Chicken Little Climate Change danc

[tbannist]

Temperature has some minor instances of feedback with the things like carbon but the VAST majority of temperature fluctuations come from solar activity or lack thereof and all long-term data show we are about to enter another iceage as the sun enters into a solar minimum.

Actually, that was the argument that was settled in the 1970s. Back then some scientists figured we would be heading into a new glacial period which would outway the human contributions to global warming. They were wrong, we aren't going into a new glacial period, instead it looks like human activity will end the Quaternany Period by melting both Ice caps. An event which we think hasn't happened in the last 2.6 million years.

Ice is melting but more is taking it's place (hence the ocean acidification as water is taken out of the cycle to be tied up in ice).

No, actually, it's not. Somewhere around 95% of the world's glaciers are losing mass year-over-year. Ocean acidification is not caused by water being removed from the oceans. We know this because a) sea levels are rising, instead of falling and b) ocean acidification is sufficiently explained by rising CO2 levels in the atmosphere. Extra CO2 is absorbed into the oceans, which causes the acidification.

Re:Let's do the Chicken Little Climate Change danc

[Anonymous Coward]

The amplitude of the solar cycle is about 0.1% of the total solar output. That's not a significant contribution.

When 0.1% is well beyond the temperature changes we've seen and the solar cycle is responsible for nearly 100% of all the heat we have - yeah, 0.1% is pretty friggin' significant and you would have to be a fool to believe otherwise.

50% = Guess != Prediction

[fygment]

Seriously.

Do you think that errors in a model are cumulative?
Do you think the models used here are similar to, identical to, or components of, the global climate models?
If so, then the global models are not capturing all the processes that influence climate, correct?
If so, then the global models yield answers with a margin of error, correct?
Therefore, find out what the error is on the current climate models used to predict global climate change, because an error of +/- 2 degrees on a prediction of 2 degrees increase (say) is kind of important.

And good luck with that. Because there are no error values reported. And there probably can't be; we don't know what we don't know.

Based on that, how much do you want your governent to act on climate change "predictions"?

Re:Let's do the Chicken Little Climate Change danc

[miach]

(anecdote not data) It's been colder here in PA than it was at a friend's place in central Alberta - so yes.

You are correct

[Anonymous Coward]

Good observations. Now here are the facts you didn't mention: the jet stream is being controlled by the U.S. Government. They are the ones responsible for this crazy weather....not "global warming", which is a scam designed to appeal to the average simpleton of America.

Anyone who wants to chime in with some idiot remark about "tin foil" hats or such, is an imbecile who should keep silent and save themselves the embarrassment of their idiocy being exposed in front of the world. What I stated above is fact.

The aircraft contained a shipment of state of the art software defined radio equipment, along with four engineers who held the patent on it. That's why the aircraft was hijacked by the US, its passengers interrogated, tortured, and killed, then reloaded on to the place to be crashed in Ukraine.

- shiftless (410350)

Oops

[Anonymous Coward]

The part about the aircraft is not relevant to your comment, obviously. I got things mixed up and thought were in the other thread. But yeah, the U.S. did hijack MH370 as stated, and they're controlling the weather too. Now if only the average American were intelligent enough to see it.

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Re:Let's do the Chicken Little Climate Change danc

[rgbatduke]

It's especially not significant compared to the ~7% annual variation as the Earth swings in its elliptical orbit. This 91 W/m^2 is truly the elephant in climate forcing variations -- everything else is comparatively a mouse.

Interestingly, the annual temperature variation of the Earth countervaries with this -- the Earth is coldest when it is closest to the sun and warmest when it is furthest away. This is spite of the fact that in the tropics where the variation due to inclination is the least and one expects the strongest effect there is no major shift in land/sea area exposed and hence the albedo difference that supposedly cancels the more than 45 W/m^2 peak insolation relative to the mean.

The climate really is a highly nonlinear system and not all of it makes sense in terms of naive models. Yet. Pretending that we understand it when we don't may sell catastrophe (and hence research into contingent catastrophe), but it doesn't do science itself any big favors.

rgb