Snowstorms and Climate Change

It always happens this time of year. A major snowstorm and the climate change deniers start braying like jackasses.

If there's heavy snow, then all this talk of “global warming” must be a myth! Right?

Wrong.

Meteorologist Jeff Masters, on his blog Weather Underground, pointed out that the two major storms that hit Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington, D.C., this winter were among the 10 heaviest those cities have recorded. The chance of them happening in the same winter (as they did)? Highly unlikely.

The 2009 U.S. Climate Impacts Report finds that over the past 50 years, large-scale cold-weather storm systems have gradually tracked to the north in the U.S.. As the climate had warmed, the frequency of storms in the middle latitudes has decreased while the intensity of those storms has increased. Hotter air holds more moisture, so storms release more snow. By contract, cold air is drier. If we were in a cold snap, we would not see so much snowfall.

The diminishing Arctic Sea ice speeds the warming of the northern atmosphere, due to the Albedo effect. White ice reflects sunlight back into space and cools the air. Dark ocean water absorbs the heat, warming the air and altering wind patterns. This weakens the jet stream and allows more cold air out of the Arctic and into the eastern USA as well as Europe.

Jeff Masters made this analogy to explain the effect: If you leave the refrigerator door open, the house cools, but the refrigerator gets warmer.

To quote the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's own website: “The data showing that the world as a whole has been warming on the average are unequivocal, and over time this means there will be fewer (but not zero) cold spells and more (but not constant) hot spells. In the 1950s, the number of record hot days was about the same as the number of record cold days, but in the 2000s we saw twice as many record highs as record lows.“

Anthropogenic climate change is science, friends, not faith. Faith involves belief in something that can't be scientifically proven, like the Earth is only 6,000 years old and was created in 6 days, or that all land creatures are descended from single pairs of breeding specimens that were on an ark built by a 600 year old man.

Sources:


http://www.noaa.gov/features/02_monitoring/snowstorms.html


http://news.yahoo.com/s/time/20101229/hl_time/08599203977700

16 of the Dumbest Things Americans Believe -- And the Right-Wing Lies Behind Them

Only sixteen?

"When one side breaks the social contract, and the other side makes a virtue of never calling them out on it, the liar always wins. When it becomes 'uncivil' to call out liars, lying becomes free."

Less Oil In Alaska Than Originally Thought

Turns out the USGS discovered the reserves are only 896 million barrels instead of 10.6 billion or less than 1/10th as originally thought.

Wrap your mind around that one.

Read the article here.

The Conspiracy Theory Top-10

http://www.truth-out.org/patriot-paranoia-a-look-top-ten-conspiracy-theories62368?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter

Chemtrails, Martial Law, FEMA Concentration Camps, Foreign Troops on US Soil, "Door-to-Door" Gun Confiscations, 9/11 As A Government Plot, Population Control, HAARP, The Federal Reserve Conspiracy and the North American Union.

Did I leave anything out?

Is Lindsey Williams telling the truth?

Yes, yes, the man who wrote "The Energy Non-Crisis" insists there's giant pool of oil sitting under Alaska's Gull Island.

However, petroleum industry experts beg to differ.

http://blog.mlive.com/readreact/2008/07/not_yet_ready_look_at_k_colleg.html

http://wilco278.wordpress.com/2008/07/12/mr-williams-and-gull-island-oil/

http://www.petroleumnews.com/pntruncate/690171677.shtml

I'll be blunt: The "Gull Island reserves" are a myth, and Rev. Williams could not have had any access to the material he claims.

Climate Denial Crockery - Heatwave Edition

Part 1:



Part 2:

How do you deny the deniers?

From New Scientist magazine:

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20627606.100-living-in-denial-why-sensible-people-reject-the-truth.html?full=true

To quote the article:

Whatever they are denying, denial movements have much in common with one another, not least the use of similar tactics (see "How to be a denialist"). All set themselves up as courageous underdogs fighting a corrupt elite engaged in a conspiracy to suppress the truth or foist a malicious lie on ordinary people. This conspiracy is usually claimed to be promoting a sinister agenda: the nanny state, takeover of the world economy, government power over individuals, financial gain, atheism.

...

Similarly, global warming, evolution and the link between tobacco and cancer must be taken on trust, usually on the word of scientists, doctors and other technical experts who many non-scientists see as arrogant and alien.

Many people see this as a threat to important aspects of their lives. In Texas last year, a member of a state committee who was trying to get creationism added to school science standards almost said as much when he proclaimed "somebody's got to stand up to experts".

It is this sense of loss of control that really matters. In such situations, many people prefer to reject expert evidence in favour of alternative explanations that promise to hand control back to them, even if those explanations are not supported by evidence.

Sorry folks! No U-Turn here!

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2010/02/daily-mangle/#comment-160092

To quote directly:

Yesterday, the Daily Mail of the UK published a predictably inaccurate article entitled “Climategate U-turn as scientist at centre of row admits: There has been no global warming since 1995″.

The title itself is a distortion of what Jones actually said in an interview with the BBC. What Jones actually said is that, while the globe has nominally warmed since 1995, it is difficult to establish the statistical significance of that warming given the short nature of the time interval (1995-present) involved. The warming trend consequently doesn’t quite achieve statistical significance. But it is extremely difficult to establish a statistically significant trend over a time interval as short as 15 years–a point we have made countless times at RealClimate. It is also worth noting that the CRU record indicates slightly less warming than other global temperature estimates such as the GISS record.

The article also incorrectly equates instrumental surface temperature data that Jones and CRU have assembled to estimate the modern surface temperature trends with paleoclimate data used to estimate temperatures in past centuries, falsely asserting that the former “has been used to produce the ‘hockey stick graph’”.

Finally, the article intentionally distorts comments that Jones made about the so-called “Medieval Warm Period”. Jones stated in his BBC interview that “There is much debate over whether the Medieval Warm Period was global in extent or not. The MWP is most clearly expressed in parts of North America, the North Atlantic and Europe and parts of Asia” and that “For it to be global in extent, the MWP would need to be seen clearly in more records from the tropical regions and the Southern hemisphere. There are very few palaeoclimatic records for these latter two regions.”

These are statements with which we entirely agree, and they are moreover fully consistent with the conclusions of the most recent IPCC report, and the numerous peer-reviewed publications on this issue since. Those conclusions are that recent Northern Hemisphere warming is likely unprecedented in at least a millennium (at least 1300 years, in fact), and that evidence in the Southern Hemisphere is currently too sparse for confident conclusions. Mann et al in fact drew those same conclusions in their most recent work on this problem (PNAS, 2008).

Unfortunately, these kinds of distortions are all too common in the press nowadays and so we must all be prepared to respond to those journalists and editors who confuse the public with such inaccuracies.

So there!