[Special to the Perspective] — The difference between weather and climate has been explained this way (which seems fairly good to me):
“Weather” is your mood and “Climate” is your personality.
Climate is a more permanent, underlying factor that causes the Weather.
There is also an old Jewish proverb that is one of my favorites: “For example is not proof.” The science of “anthropogenic global warming” is based around a lot of anecdotal evidence, some good data, and government funded computer programs. We have to be equally careful with anecdotal evidence such as the ones in items 1-9 going around lately, but consider the following:
1. The U.S. and Europe have had record, early cold/snow in 2013.
2. Australia has had very late (nearly summertime) snow and cold.
3. Cairo (Egypt, not Illinois) had snow for the 1st time in 100 years. Storm Alexa, the worst storm to hit Jerusalem for 60 years, left snow up to 19 inches deep in some areas.
4. The ice coverage area in the arctic ocean is higher than it has been in the last 7 years and that in the Anctartic has been trending higher for the last 30 years and more.
5. Solar activity is low now and projected to enter a period of 30 years of low activity.
6. Every data collection shows there has not been any global warming since 1998 — ironically the year after the Kyoto Protocol was signed.
7. The models developed by multiple agencies have been wrong in predicting the slight cooling over that period.
8. There are many cases of warmer temperatures than what we have now — such as in the medieval ages.
9. There is increasing consensus within the scientific community that the models have overstated the importance of greenhouse gases and understated the importance of solar radiation.
Add to the anecdotal evidence above a few other factoids:
A. The sun is overwhelmingly the source of heat on the Earth.
B. Carbon dioxide solubility in water drops with increasing temperatures.
C. Heat loss at night (the mechanism presumably responsible for global warming) is strictly based on radiation from Earth’s surface and atmosphere to the sub-zero cold of outer space. This transfer mechanism is not subject to sharp changes (ie a discontinuity), because neither the Earth’s surface temperature nor the blanket of greenhouse gases, nor the temperature of space can change suddenly. Indeed the temperature of space does not change at all and the greenhouse gas concentration has been increasing steadily. So basically nothing can explain reduced radiation at night – the supposed mechanism of globval warming conventional thought.
D. As opposed to the heat losses at night not changing quickly, we do know that solar activity does have ‘rapid’ changes.
E. The rapid changes in warming or cooling, therefore, must be due to higher/lower solar activity and incident radiation coming to Earth.
Combining A and B and E, a reasonable scientist would investigate that it is more likely that atmospheric CO2 lags heating rather than the other (more conventional) opinion that has dominated the public discourse for the last 20 years.
For more information:
o The CDIAC offers a lot of data and facts on concentration and sources of atmospheric CO2. CDIAC is a unit of the U.S. Department of Energy Climate and Environmental Sciences Division of the Office of Biological and Environmental Research.
o The sea ice extent in both hemispheres is available from The University of Illinois (where Dangerous Bill taught for many, many years) Polar Research Group is part of UIUC Department of Atmospheric Sciences.
o A study by Swedish scientist Leif Kullman and others analyzed fossils in the Scandes mountains. They found that tree lines for different species of trees were higher during the Roman and Medieval times than they are today. The temperatures were higher as well.
–Felipe Yanes
Editor’s Note: The literature is full of data, much of which contradicts the official “climate change” arguments. Mr. Yanes has pointed out some of the flaws.
Solar heating deniers (many of whom ask for government credits to add solar devices to private homes) lost the “anthropogenic global warming” argument so they now are trying to change it to the “man-made climate change” argument. Over the millennia, the climate has and does change as solar activity varies, the magnetic poles shift, the moon wobbles, and Earth’s axis tilts a few degrees one way or the other.
Science isn’t “fixed,” permanent, in stasis. Mr. Yanes’ reasonable scientist would discover that narcissistic comic book illustrators and fiction writers who defend AGW know little about actual science and have adopted the now conventional opinion that they have more control over their environment than even Jack Williamson believed.
They have to. Otherwise, they lose control of the rest of us.
As Carl Sagan reminded us 17 years ago:
“Science is more than a body of knowledge. It is a way of thinking; a way of skeptically interrogating the universe with a fine understanding of human fallibility.”
Solar heating deniers such as Al Gore deny there is any need to interrogate the universe skeptically. Their science is fixed, see.
“If we are not able to ask skeptical questions, to interrogate those who tell us that something is true, to be skeptical of those in authority, then, we are up for grabs for the next charlatan (political or religious) who comes rambling along.”
Like Al Gore and Paul Broun.
Politics is omnipresent in science now. Congress did indeed abolish its own office of technology assessment in a move critics saw as an example of politics overriding science. Its twelve-member board had six Congress critters from each party. The 111th Congress in Demoratic hands did not reinstate it.
“There’s no more than a handful of members of Congress with any background in science at all… We’ve arranged a society based on science and technology in which nobody understands science and technology.”
For the record, climate does change. Sometimes a little, sometimes a lot. Most times now we have the means to record what is happening. Few times do we have the models to forecast it. At all times we need unfettered research. That means wresting control back from the politicians.
Solar heating deniers have made Anthropogenic Global Warming a religion with the political scientists in Washington the high priests and apologists from the liberal left as their acolytes. And if the masses discover their political science is a sham, they lose control.
We are doomed.
Poly-Sci, as it was called when I went to college, was a university subject about the intricate science of politics. In this century, the colloquial term “political science” has become synonymous with the intrepid politics of science.
— George Poleczech