Snoqualmie Pass is getting snow today. Probably not so much that I can’t make it home on Friday but of interest because its so unusual for this time of year. It is snowing in Moscow Idaho (my home) and the Boomershoot site too. Maybe I should schedule Boomershoot 2009 for July 4th so the snow will be light enough the roads will be plowed and people can make it without snowmobiles.
Crank up those coal fired power plants and rev the engines in your trucks while waiting at traffic lights–we need to head off the next ice age.
Either Al Gore has crap for brains and/or his motivation is solely for political gain.
Update: Daughter Kim says not to blame Al Gore:
From: Kimberly
Sent: Tuesday, June 10, 2008 11:10 AM
To: Barbara Scott; James Huffman-Scott; Joe Huffman; Xenia JoyI apologize for the snow it was my fault I cut the dogs hair yesterday
Update2: From my weather advisory email alert:
OROFINO/GRANGEVILLE REGION-
135 PM PDT TUE JUN 10 2008…SNOW ADVISORY IN EFFECT FROM 8 PM THIS EVENING TO 8 AM PDT WEDNESDAY ABOVE 3500 FEET…
THE NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE IN MISSOULA HAS ISSUED A SNOW ADVISORY ABOVE 3500 FEET…WHICH IS IN EFFECT FROM 8 PM THIS EVENING TO 8 AM PDT WEDNESDAY.
TOTAL SNOW ACCUMULATIONS OF 1 TO 3 INCHES ARE EXPECTED TONIGHT THROUGH EARLY WEDNESDAY MORNING ABOVE 4000 FEET AND OVER THE WHITE BIRD GRADE ON HIGHWAY 95. ELEVATIONS DOWN TO 3500 FEET…INCLUDING THE CITY OF GRANGEVILLE…CAN EXPECT TO SEE ACCUMULATIONS UP TO AN INCH.
A SNOW ADVISORY MEANS THAT PERIODS OF SNOW WILL CAUSE PRIMARILY TRAVEL DIFFICULTIES. BE PREPARED FOR SNOW COVERED ROADS AND LIMITED VISIBILITIES…AND USE CAUTION WHILE DRIVING.
This could mean certain types of crops in the area will be killed by the cold.
Something the global warming doomsday people ignore is that, typically, farm yields are better with abnormally warm weather than abnormally cold weather. Hence to be on the safe side of things we should try to push things in the direction of excess heating rather than risk excess cooling.
The Glueball Worming orthodoxy will say, “This is nothing but an isolated anecdote, proving nothing.”
Of course, any time there is an isolated anecdotal hot weather incident, they’re all over it, screaming, “See? See? Global Warming! See? Proof! You can no longer deny it! The time for debate is over! See? See? Global-Warming-Global-Warming-Global-Warming! Now give us more government, fewer civil rights and more money, or else we’re all gonna Dieeeeeeee!”
The fact is, none of the Glueball Worming Believers predicted any of this current cooling trend until after it started happening. Thus, they know nothing about predicting climate changes– either short term or long term, much less the causes of the same. When I was a kid, they were going bonkers and scaring the shit out of elementary school students, predicting the coming ice age brought on by logging, farming and mining. They were totally wrong about that. Next they tried Glueball Worming, and they’ve been wrong about that. But none of it matters– it’s all been an attempt at rationalizing their idiotic, anti-capitalist agenda.
They should start calling us “Global Warming Infidels” (instead of deniers). It fits beautifully– They’re devout believers of something that cannot be known, they do not tolerate being questioned or opposed, they want to roll back or destroy Western Civilization, and they’ll stop at nothing to impose their will on others. Hey– they have an awful lot in common with the Jihadists! They should team up with them. Then they can shorten the term for us to simply, “Infidels” and it will work as a catch-all description of anyone who upholds the principles of liberty. In like fashion, I’ll call them simply “Jihadists” (shortened from “Climate Hoax Jihadists”). Works for me.
Let me set aside for a moment the question of whether or not global warming is real. Let me just examine what the effect on ordinary weather would be if it were real. The effects are rather different from what one might expect. In particular, ordinary weather, as experienced day to day, does not necessarily become warmer. Here’s why.
Because the earth is a sphere inclined on its axis and revolving around the sun while rotating, the atmosphere–which is merely a large mass of gases–is heated unevenly. Any mass of gas heated unevenly becomes turbulent. That turbulence in the atmosphere is what we call weather. The movements of air masses–fronts, troughs, storms, and so forth–that make up our weather are merely the observable phenomena that result from overall atmospheric turbulence.
If you make the whole atmosphere warmer on average, you still have uneven heating–only more of it. The effect is to make the unevenly heated atmosphere more turbulent. The heat engine is running hotter, running more actively. Temperature, rainfall, and wind variation increases. It’s the difference between how a pot of water acts when it’s on simmer versus when it’s on boil.
The result is that weather becomes more extreme and less predictable. Warm days in cold seasons, cold days in warm seasons, some areas becoming colder, other areas becoming warmer, more frequent storms in some places, rainy places going dry, drier places becoming rainier, and so forth is what one would see.
I leave the rest of the politics and the science to those who wish to pursue them further.
So, leaving aside the fact that you’re talking to us as though we were retarded and have never heard of the atmosphere, what you’re saying is;
A. If it gets warmer, it’s due to Glueball Worming. Further, if it gets cold, or the wind blows, or if we experience storms, it is due to Glueball Worming.
B. If you make predictions that turn out to be correct, it is proof that you are right about Glueball Worming, yet,
C. If your predictions turn out be completely wrong over and over and over, that is further evidence, or even proof, of Glueball Worming, since Glueball Worming makes things harder to predict. Got it. That’s brilliant!
Everything is Glueball Worming. In that case nothing is Glueball Worming.
I’ve heard a similar argument all my life from those who want to convert me to some religion or other. If we are not capable of understanding every detail of how the universe came into being, that failure of understanding, in itself, is proof of the existence of God. That we cannot grasp God’s intensions regarding Human suffering, is proof of the existence of God. “God works in mysterious ways”, we are told, over and over and over, whenever we are brash enough to question the nuttiness of some things. Same reasoning. I’ll even give you the phrase, and you can use it all you want– “Glueball Worming works in mysterious ways, my friend” you can say, whenever someone points out that it’s been getting awfully cold these days. “Do not question that which you cannot understand”, you can say, over and over.
True Believers will never be dissuaded, as everything they see, hear, touch, taste smell and think, reinforces their beliefs. I am therefore not trying to dissuade you as I know it is a logical impossibility.
I’m talking instead to those who embrace the principles of liberty upon which this country was founded– giving them ammunition in their fight against the True Believers of the Glueball Worming hoax– the Jihadists.
Oh, and never mind all those silly, outdated notions of human rights. Allah’s laws (or Algore’s) are the only valid ones. No room for debate. Convert or die, right? That’s what this is coming to, isn’t it? I mean, if our very existence depends on it…
How many ways I have heard it said.
I’m not understanding why making the atmosphere warmer on average will cause the heating to be even more uneven. Without an explanation for that the following claims are baseless.
And I would think the real indicator would be heating of the water and land masses. The total energy stored in the atmosphere is nothing compared to that. And it is my understanding there is no evidence of the oceans increasing temperature in the last decade or so. I would expect the ocean temperatures to be critical to climate/weather prediction because the evaporation from the oceans influences cloud cover (reflection/absorption of incoming solar energy) and rainfall.
I haven’t looked deep enough into it to be certain but my impression from high level reviews is that people do not take into account numerous negative feedback mechanism such as increased temperatures increasing the cloud cover which decreases the reflection of incoming solar energy. Also increased CO2 and temperatures enables increased plant growth which results in increased amounts of carbon being bound up in plant foliage and decreased solar energy being absorbed by both the land and water. Algae and other plants convert the light energy into chemical energy via CO2 + energy -> C + O2. That chemical energy is energy that would normally result in heating of the land and water. A significant portion of the resultant plant mass is deposited on the ocean floor or buried in the ground resulting in carbon fuels for another eon.
Perhaps all this and more in taken into account in the models and I just haven’t dug deep enough into the literature to become aware of it.
I could buy into local temperatures going in the opposite direction of the global average. But I have difficulty believing that at any one time on the globe all the temperatures are below expected values. Conservation of energy laws always apply. Either the incoming radiation and terrestrial heat sources vary or we don’t know the amount of energy being reflected, absorbed, and transmitted through the various materials. It seems to me that we should have very good numbers on the solar and domestic heat sources and the spectral energy coefficients. Hence the only thing I can conclude is that the temperature of the various earth components at a two points in time are all that is needed to know whether we are cooling or heating. Of course this is a more difficult problem that one might imagine because we would need temperature sensors on a three dimensional grid with spacing on the order of a few hundred or perhaps thousand feet over the entire planet surface, upper layers of the ocean and most of the atmosphere.
As it stands I’m not at all convinced that human activities have anywhere near enough contribution to the issue that we could inadvertently affect global temperatures in a such a way that would swamp out the variation due to solar and other natural variations.
This entire concept of, first Global Cooling, then Global Warming, and now simply “Climate Change” started with the assumption that, A. People are bad, and the things people do are bad, and B. Something must be done about it.
Where it goes from there, intellectually, is of little further interest. The founding premise is complete hog wash, cooked up by angry, hateful, loser socialists who are looking for some Final Solution to the “problem” of Man’s dominance in the world. We may as well be debating the value of Jews in society and what to do about them. “Some Jews may be good people, or at least harmless, but others… And when Jews are getting worse, you may see some of them going out of their way to appear nice…” That sort of debate just doesn’t interest me, so long as it stays in the closet where it belongs. It’s when it gets out into public policy that I have great, big problem with it. Then it’s time to stamp it out, not by trying to convince the anti-Semites that Jews are good people, but by defeating them.
Why must the decision be binary? It could be BOTH.
I did say “and/or”.
Although I think the most likely he is of, or perhaps slightly above, average intelligence and could determine the truth of the matter if he cared to be objective. But that would be too inconvenient for his political agenda.
I’m sure he understands that a plausible half-truth that can motivate the populace is much more useful than complete truth that the populace has difficulty understanding.
Scott Adams wrote on this topic some time ago, and Robert Bethune is running into the same issues.
http://dilbertblog.typepad.com/the_dilbert_blog/2007/09/on-the-other-ha.html
Joe, there is plenty of evidence in the IPCC’s report on climate change that they did take the factors you say into account. Look at page 4 of http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar4/wg1/ar4-wg1-spm.pdf for info on the albedo effect of increased clouds and other radiative cooling effects. Keep in mind that this is merely the summary that they gave to the press, and not the actual full report, which from what I have read, has vastly more detail. And according to http://curriculum.calstatela.edu/courses/builders/lessons/less/biomes/SunEnergy.html, photosynthesis eats up 0.023% of the amount of energy that comes from the sun. Double or triple that, and it won’t make a bit of difference compared to the rest of the energy.