Saturday, October 29, 2011

What Hath Global Warming Wrought?

Snow near my brother's house by Philadelphia
It is snowing here in the Lehigh Valley.  Forecasts are for 4-8 inches.  It is not yet Hallow E'en.

Now, the IPCC models were always in agreement that most of the warming would take place in Northern Hemisphere winter nights (which actually doesn't sound so bad), so the trend toward colder over these past ten years or so is whiffing a lot like Popper.  But never fear: weather is not climate!  (Except when it is: cf. Katrina, Irene, Texas drought, etc.)  And it ain't global warming no more; it's climate change!  So any time the climate seems to change, it is due to climate change.  And never mind the dizzy spell from circular reasoning.  I suppose the orbits of the planets can now be explained by location change, too. 


The models also predict the atmosphere will warm first and most; but the satellite measurements persistently show otherwise.  Must be something wrong with the satellites, or the scientists who interpret them, or perhaps with the world itself, which insists on doing its own thing.  Surely, it cannot be because the climate models are not yet up to snuff.

Meanwhile, as a reminder, a glance at a chart I found back in 2009 shows the process rather well:
The arrow points to 2009.  The trend+MDO model predicts that temperature "anomalies" will continue to drop (on the average) until about 2030, then cycle up again until about 2060.  That's if the rebound from the Little Ice Age continues on a linear path.  (Personally, I think it will resemble more a logistic curve; but that's just me.)

3 comments:

  1. About spamming: to be able to use LJ, screen non-friends responses AND use LJ's captcha facility. Yes, it does have one, and I know because I use it.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I have to ask: do you think continuing to burn fossil fuels is a good thing? Aren't there other externalities to our current energy system worth considering?

    ReplyDelete
  3. I suppose. Just as there are to not burning them. Hydrocarbons are just too valuable as chemical feedstock to simply burn them for fuel. Nuclear is much better, though you may have trouble with your car exceeding the weight limit on bridges.

    It just has very little to do with the last 400 years of warming.

    ReplyDelete

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