The End of The Season Is Upon Us

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Here’s the weather forecast for the next five days. It’s not looking promising … I think the season may finally be over. There’s a dusting of snow on the ground right now.

It’s forecasts like this one that increase my support for global warming.

2 thoughts on “The End of The Season Is Upon Us”

  1. Given your vast, vast background as a scientist, please, I beg you, enlighten us more on climate patterns. Continuing to push your belief that global warming is not happening, despite clear data to the contrary, drives me closer and closer to never visiting this blog again.

    Here is a recently published report by NASA on further proof of global warming. And, sorry, since it’s from NASA, there goes your belief that this is all just a “left wing media conspiracy.”

    http://climate.nasa.gov/news/index.cfm?FuseAction=ShowNews&NewsID=446

    Reply
  2. I’m sorry I’m going to lose you as a reader.

    I’m old enough to remember that the scientific community in the 1970s was convinced that we were all going to freeze to death in a new ice age. It was in my high school textbook, and we were told there was a “scientific consensus.” Here’s a link to a 1975 Newsweek article http://sweetness-light.com/newsweek_coolingworld.pdf

    Fool me once …

    I also remember the population bomb scare of the late 1960s; the predictions that all the fish in the oceans would die out by 1979 due to overfishing and pesticides; that US lifespans would fall to the 40s due to chemicals; the Three Mile Island Scare; peak oil and the gas lines of the 1970s; the predicted collapse of civilization by the year 2000 due to the complete depletion of natural resources; and on and on and on.

    That last one is really interesting. The depletion of resources was so much a part of the prevailing “consensus” that economist Julian Simon in 1980 was thought crazy when he bet Paul Ehrlich that the price of any five commodities that Ehrlich chose chose would go down, rather than up by 1980. Ehrlich (and nearly everyone else) was sure of the shortages and price hikes; he lost.

    I’m not a climate scientist but I do have a Master’s Degree in Public Policy Analysis (dual political science/economics—some would argue that economics is a science … the dismal science) and can tell you that government institutions are no more reliable than any other group (and perhaps less so). NASA has a vested, institutional reason for supporting global warming. Simply put, if they can convince us that global warming is a threat, then we need to give NASA more money to do more research—and perhaps come up with a solution.  A business that produced such bad data lose clients; NASA is in no such danger.

    Your link is about lake temperatures over the last 25 years. 25 years is not a lot of time. What were the temperatures 50 and 100 years ago? We don’t know. So we don’t know if this is long-term, short-term, or simply an aberration.

    Al Gore says that there is “scientific consensus.” Scientific consensus does nothing for me. It was scientific consensus at one time that the sun revolved around the earth and that Africans were inferior. Scientific consensus also congealed around such now discredited ideas as catastrophism, the flat earth, spontaneous generation, Newtonian gravity, steady state theory and other completely believed, but now discredited ideas. Science isn’t about consensus; it is not a democracy. Science is testing theories against data.

    I also find it telling that the environmentalists have changed the language on this one. It’s no longer global warming; now it’s “man made climate change.” That’s very convenient and quite suspicious. If the temperature goes up, it’s the result of climate change; if it goes down, it’s climate change; if there are more hurricanes, it’s climate change; if there are fewer hurricanes, it’s climate change. Now, no matter what local and (relatively) short term aberrations we observe, they can blame it on “climate change.” And they have a ready-made excuse for more government control, higher taxes and their own brand of Luddism.

    And there’s not room to even begin discussing the evidence of scientific fraud at the Climate Institute.

    The only thing that will convince me is if they have an accurate model for prediction. A good scientific idea not only explains, it predicts. But they don’t have a predictive model. All they can do is to extrapolate trends and try to explain what already has happened. And even the extrapolation doesn’t work, as the weather in 2008 wiped out the supposed average temperature gains of the last thirty years.

    Count me a skeptic … on anthropomorphic climate change, dead oceans, the new ice age, falling life expectancy, Santa Claus, the tooth fairy and the Easter Bunny, et. al.

    Reply

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