A Message about Global Warming....

[DarcyB]

This was last year on the 2nd day of spring for North Texas...remember that girls? But it seems so appropriate today, when we're expected to get to 8 degrees tonight just north of Dallas.

 

 

[mazakaal]

I was just thinking about global warming today. I was thinking about all the snowstorms and ice storms that I've been hearing about and experiencing here this winter, and wondering how those who support the theory of global warming actually explain this.

[Jumping In Puddles]

Global Weirding Is Here by Thomas L. Friedman

2/17/2010

 

 

Of the festivals of nonsense that periodically overtake American politics, surely the silliest is the argument that because Washington is having a particularly snowy winter it proves that climate change is a hoax and, therefore, we need not bother with all this girly-man stuff like renewable energy, solar panels and carbon taxes. Just drill, baby, drill.

 

 

When you see lawmakers like Senator Jim DeMint of South Carolina tweeting that “it is going to keep snowing until Al Gore cries ‘uncle,’ ” or news that the grandchildren of Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma are building an igloo next to the Capitol with a big sign that says “Al Gore’s New Home,” you really wonder if we can have a serious discussion about the climate-energy issue anymore.

 

The climate-science community is not blameless. It knew it was up against formidable forces — from the oil and coal companies that finance the studies skeptical of climate change to conservatives who hate anything that will lead to more government regulations to the Chamber of Commerce that will resist any energy taxes. Therefore, climate experts can’t leave themselves vulnerable by citing non-peer-reviewed research or failing to respond to legitimate questions, some of which happened with both the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia and the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

 

Although there remains a mountain of research from multiple institutions about the reality of climate change, the public has grown uneasy. What’s real? In my view, the climate-science community should convene its top experts — from places like NASA, America’s national laboratories, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford, the California Institute of Technology and the U.K. Met Office Hadley Centre — and produce a simple 50-page report. They could call it “What We Know,” summarizing everything we already know about climate change in language that a sixth grader could understand, with unimpeachable peer-reviewed footnotes.

 

At the same time, they should add a summary of all the errors and wild exaggerations made by the climate skeptics — and where they get their funding. It is time the climate scientists stopped just playing defense. The physicist Joseph Romm, a leading climate writer, is posting on his Web site, climateprogress.org, his own listing of the best scientific papers on every aspect of climate change for anyone who wants a quick summary now.

 

Here are the points I like to stress:

 

1) Avoid the term “global warming.” I prefer the term “global weirding,” because that is what actually happens as global temperatures rise and the climate changes. The weather gets weird. The hots are expected to get hotter, the wets wetter, the dries drier and the most violent storms more numerous.

 

The fact that it has snowed like crazy in Washington — while it has rained at the Winter Olympics in Canada, while Australia is having a record 13-year drought — is right in line with what every major study on climate change predicts: The weather will get weird; some areas will get more precipitation than ever; others will become drier than ever.

 

2) Historically, we know that the climate has warmed and cooled slowly, going from Ice Ages to warming periods, driven, in part, by changes in the earth’s orbit and hence the amount of sunlight different parts of the earth get. What the current debate is about is whether humans — by emitting so much carbon and thickening the greenhouse-gas blanket around the earth so that it traps more heat — are now rapidly exacerbating nature’s natural warming cycles to a degree that could lead to dangerous disruptions.

 

3) Those who favor taking action are saying: “Because the warming that humans are doing is irreversible and potentially catastrophic, let’s buy some insurance — by investing in renewable energy, energy efficiency and mass transit — because this insurance will also actually make us richer and more secure.” We will import less oil, invent and export more clean-tech products, send fewer dollars overseas to buy oil and, most importantly, diminish the dollars that are sustaining the worst petro-dictators in the world who indirectly fund terrorists and the schools that nurture them.

 

4) Even if climate change proves less catastrophic than some fear, in a world that is forecast to grow from 6.7 billion to 9.2 billion people between now and 2050, more and more of whom will live like Americans, demand for renewable energy and clean water is going to soar. It is obviously going to be the next great global industry.

 

China, of course, understands that, which is why it is investing heavily in clean-tech, efficiency and high-speed rail. It sees the future trends and is betting on them. Indeed, I suspect China is quietly laughing at us right now. And Iran, Russia, Venezuela and the whole OPEC gang are high-fiving each other. Nothing better serves their interests than to see Americans becoming confused about climate change, and, therefore, less inclined to move toward clean-tech and, therefore, more certain to remain addicted to oil. Yes, sir, it is morning in Saudi Arabia.

[Jumping In Puddles]

Here's a recent article and well worth a read if you really want to know how people who support global warming still support it:

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/26/opinion/26cohen.html?src=twrhp

 

Bundle Up, It’s Global Warming

 

Lexington, Mass.

 

THE earth continues to get warmer, yet it’s feeling a lot colder outside. Over the past few weeks, subzero temperatures in Poland claimed 66 lives; snow arrived in Seattle well before the winter solstice, and fell heavily enough in Minneapolis to make the roof of the Metrodome collapse; and last week blizzards closed Europe’s busiest airports in London and Frankfurt for days, stranding holiday travelers. The snow and record cold have invaded the Eastern United States, with more bad weather predicted.

 

All of this cold was met with perfect comic timing by the release of a World Meteorological Organization report showing that 2010 will probably be among the three warmest years on record, and 2001 through 2010 the warmest decade on record.

 

How can we reconcile this? The not-so-obvious short answer is that the overall warming of the atmosphere is actually creating cold-weather extremes. Last winter, too, was exceptionally snowy and cold across the Eastern United States and Eurasia, as were seven of the previous nine winters.

 

For a more detailed explanation, we must turn our attention to the snow in Siberia.

 

Annual cycles like El Niño/Southern Oscillation, solar variability and global ocean currents cannot account for recent winter cooling. And though it is well documented that the earth’s frozen areas are in retreat, evidence of thinning Arctic sea ice does not explain why the world’s major cities are having colder winters.

 

But one phenomenon that may be significant is the way in which seasonal snow cover has continued to increase even as other frozen areas are shrinking. In the past two decades, snow cover has expanded across the high latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere, especially in Siberia, just north of a series of exceptionally high mountain ranges, including the Himalayas, the Tien Shan and the Altai.

 

The high topography of Asia influences the atmosphere in profound ways. The jet stream, a river of fast-flowing air five to seven miles above sea level, bends around Asia’s mountains in a wavelike pattern, much as water in a stream flows around a rock or boulder. The energy from these atmospheric waves, like the energy from a sound wave, propagates both horizontally and vertically.

 

As global temperatures have warmed and as Arctic sea ice has melted over the past two and a half decades, more moisture has become available to fall as snow over the continents. So the snow cover across Siberia in the fall has steadily increased.

 

The sun’s energy reflects off the bright white snow and escapes back out to space. As a result, the temperature cools. When snow cover is more abundant in Siberia, it creates an unusually large dome of cold air next to the mountains, and this amplifies the standing waves in the atmosphere, just as a bigger rock in a stream increases the size of the waves of water flowing by.

 

The increased wave energy in the air spreads both horizontally, around the Northern Hemisphere, and vertically, up into the stratosphere and down toward the earth’s surface. In response, the jet stream, instead of flowing predominantly west to east as usual, meanders more north and south. In winter, this change in flow sends warm air north from the subtropical oceans into Alaska and Greenland, but it also pushes cold air south from the Arctic on the east side of the Rockies. Meanwhile, across Eurasia, cold air from Siberia spills south into East Asia and even southwestward into Europe.

 

That is why the Eastern United States, Northern Europe and East Asia have experienced extraordinarily snowy and cold winters since the turn of this century. Most forecasts have failed to predict these colder winters, however, because the primary drivers in their models are the oceans, which have been warming even as winters have grown chillier. They have ignored the snow in Siberia.

 

Last week, the British government asked its chief science adviser for an explanation. My advice to him is to look to the east.

 

It’s all a snow job by nature. The reality is, we’re freezing not in spite of climate change but because of it.

 

Judah Cohen is the director of seasonal forecasting at an atmospheric and environmental research firm.

Edited February 2, 2011 by Jumping In Puddles

[tammyw]

I agree that the term Global "Warming" messes people up. But everything I've read is in line with the Global Weirding of weather.

[kmacnchs]

A friend put up something funny on her FB profile during last year's winter mess: (something like...)

 

This weather is mother nature's way of getting back at the people who said she was having hot flashes. :lol:

[FaithManor]

:lol::lol:Well, it would be really nice if mother nature would take some evening primrose oil, red raspberry tea, and some calcium and just deal with her menopausal bad attitude with chocolate instead of a temper tantrum.

 

Faith

[Negin]

http://www.newsweek.com/2010/11/09/the-truth-behind-wild-weather-and-global-warming.html

[Kathleen in VA]

It's 62 degrees here in Northern Virginia - weird.:D

 

I think what some people disagree about is what causes this weird weather. Is it man's contribution of CO2 or is it just a naturally occurring phenomenon that we don't need to concern ourselves with? Is it caused by humans or is more directly related to the changes in the sun's surface?

 

I haven't read enough about it to have an opinion, just wanted to say that I think the disagreement has more to do with the source of the change, rather than the change itself.

[secular_mom]

:lol::lol:Well, it would be really nice if mother nature would take some evening primrose oil, red raspberry tea, and some calcium and just deal with her menopausal bad attitude with chocolate instead of a temper tantrum.

 

Faith

:bigear: what does the red raspberry tea do?

[Barb_]

A snowstorm is weather. Even a particularly snowy winter is an example of weather. Climate change (global warming) doesn't refer to weather observations in Chicago or Philadelpia or Atlanta over the course of a week or even an entire winter. Global warming refers to average patterns of temperature increases observed *over the entire earth* over the course of decades or centuries.

 

Think of it this way: the average rate of taxation across all populations in the US has increased over the past 50 years. Cutting income taxes for just the working poor, or on inherited estates or across the board in a particularly bad economy doesn't negate the average increase across the decades. Same idea.

 

Barb

[prairiebird]

This is the field I work in, and I actually prefer describing it as a climate shift accelerated by human activities. Some of the articles linked are okay, some are more sensationalist, but there's absolutely no doubt that things like sea temperatures are increasing, permafrost is retreating, plant cycles and insect life cycles are adjusting etc. Weather extremes are one noticeable occurrence.

 

It's important to remember that climate data is looked at in more of a longterm scenario rather than season by season.

 

We are actually just working on adjusting the USDA plant hardiness map because things are starting to thrive in more northerly areas than they have before- not just an erratic. Plants are pollinating at earlier times than in their history and all the stuff linked to that isn't adjusting as fast.

 

 

I am in the botany side of things, but one example from our research might be that -- Bird A migrates to the north and depends on Insect A to pupate and take to the air right when Bird A's clutch of eggs hatch so the babies can eat. Permifrost is melting earlier though, so now Insect A goes though it's cycle earlier than Bird A is migrating to get up north, so the babies are starving because they are still migrating at their usual time.

[Trish]

I read somewhere that they've only been tracking carbon dioxide levels since 1958 -- so,how can they really compare things?

[FaithManor]

But wait, I have found the answer...it's not global warming!!!! It's not global weirdness!!! It's not even Mother Nature's time of the month problems!!! Heat Miser and Cold Miser got in another fracus and Cold Miser won!

 

Faith