Friday, February 11, 2011

Bulletin From The Front: Winter Brings Snow

The "conventional wisdom" holds that global warming brings more frequent winter snowstorms. Al Gore says it. Dr. Michio Kaku says it. The National Wildlife Federation says it. Some "scientists" say it.

Even assuming the validity of man-made global warming -- this is an appropriate time to note that the satellite-measured "temperature anomalies" in the lower troposphere between 70 degrees South and 82.5 degrees North dropped to only 0.083 degrees C in January -- is the conventional wisdom correct?

No--none of these zealots can "cite a peer-reviewed paper that definitively shows a link between the posited increasing blizzard frequency or intensity due to human-caused global warming, but [instead] resort to a hand-wavy, thought-experiment that uses the phrase 'completely consistent with' and 'all sorts of havoc' causing warmcold and drywet." In fact, water vapor anomalies are either declining or uncorrelated with CO2 concentrations. (Which may be why hurricanes haven't gotten worse, contrary to green fears.) Plus there's been cooling since the end of last year's El Nino.

In sum, there is no evidence global warming caused recent heavy snowfalls. Rather, as Dr. Ryan N. Maue reminds, "It’s snowed before, it’s flooded before, and it will again."

Welcome to winter--the conventional wisdom is worthless.

4 comments:

OBloodyHell said...

> Welcome to winter--the conventional wisdom is worthless.

The conventional wisdom is that AGW proponents are full of... well, that stuff you find in your toilet after a particularly big meal.

The acclaimed wisdom is that the religion of AGW gets a pass on any and all rational requirements when it comes to facts or data. Any ascribable event that "explains" itself as a result of AGW is inarguably "caused" by AGW.

After all, without CO2 there is no God...

OBloodyHell said...

... Have I mentioned that postmodern liberals are lunatics?

Ah... Why, yes... I have...

MaxedOutMama said...

In fact, the models predicted warmer winters mostly, which is why the UK was supposed to have snowless winters. Also nights in general were supposed to be warmer.

But the central fallacy is easy to detect. The primary mechanism for the runaway warming the IPCC predicted was really from the synergistic effect of more water vapor in the atmosphere, causing more warming, and therefore more water vapor in the atmosphere. Water vapor is a much more effective greenhouse gas than CO2. If, in fact, that water vapor results in colder winters and periods, then it must follow that the endless cycle of increasing water vapor isn't valid.

And if that is not valid, then CO2-induced warming will be very mild, an event which at this point I would consider a bonus. Without the synergistic effect, we are looking at net warming of less than 1.5 C.

However, if we would like to get into the realm of science as opposed to UN-derived political control schemes, the reality is that global temperatures appear to be following solar activity.

Right now the prediction for the current sunspot cycle is close to that of the Dalton minimum. And sure enough, it is getting colder. The heating period corresponded to several extremely powerful sunspot cycles; solar activity in the last century was very definitely the highest for about 500 years.

OBloodyHell said...

.

I'll cite once more an article from late 2009, via Anthony Watts, which uses perspective to blow the entire notion that we live in particularly warm or cold times, or that any recent "shifts" have been overly atypical or unusual:

NOAA Ice Core Data

.