What the latest cold wave tells us about climate change

[LouisvilleDem]

According to Cliff Mass, absolutely nothing.

http://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2014/01/does-cold-wave-imply-anything-about.html

<snip>

On one hand, some global warming skeptics suggest that such cold is clear evidence that global warming is nonsense.

On the other, global warming "advocates" explain the cold wave as another example of extreme weather forced by increased greenhouse gases.

The truth? Both are wrong.

This individual event says nothing about the impacts of global warming.

<snip>

An interesting article by a person who seems to me is clearly trying to stay true to the actual science on this issue. I had never heard of Cliff Mass before, but he seems to be dismayed by the politicization of climate change science.

[dipsydoodle]

1. You're suffering from a weather condition

due to the current shape of the jet stream over the USA and the pole which has disturbed the shape of the polar vortex which is always there anyway. That's aside from the fact that the US sucks cold air in from Canada anyway in the winter - its just that present there's even more cold / colder air.

Similar sufferers from an almost vertical jet steam were the 2010 Pakistan with its floods, Russia with its heatwave the same year and the UK last winter - this winter here is 7th warmest on record.

The issue with regards to global warming / climate change is the extent to which that affects the jet stream - currently indeterminant.

Meanwhile :

[mn9driver]

2. Climate. Weather. Not the same.

It's human nature to regard What Is Happening To Me Now as an indication of a trend. It's one of the things that make us so adaptable.

From a scientific point of view, this is just weather.

[kestrel91316]

4. Weather + Time = Climate. The skeptics and anti-science naysayers

want people to forget this, so they cloud the issue by saying that one has nothing to do with the other.

[mn9driver]

5. Yes. But

You will not find many climate scientists willing to call a single weather event or even a few years worth of weather, evidence of climate change.

There is a mountain of evidence that indicates AGW is real and is happening. I am quite convinced that it is. But that evidence does not consist of individual events or short term trends.

The denier industry focuses on particular years, like 1998, to make false claims about trends. They also point to cold weather events, like the polar vortex divergence we've just had, or individual quiet hurricane seasons to make invalid claims.

Even though it's satisfying to point at an event or a short term trend as "evidence" for or against AGW, these things are not, in themselves, evidence. They are small pieces that when combined with many, many other pieces, make the picture.

And the picture is clear: the earth is warming very rapidly in terms of global climate. Human greenhouse emissions are the cause. This warming has had and will have an increasing effect on a huge number of things. Some of them we can track and predict with a high degree of confidence: ice loss and sea level rise are two of those things.

Other things are more chaotic, especially atmospheric weather, and the trends are very difficult to see and predict. Rainfall patterns, heat waves, cold snaps, hurricanes and the like are chaotic events and climate science can only make broad guesses about their trends since the current models have not had a good predictive correlation with those extremely short term events.

Is climate change affecting our weather? Absolutely. Is it good science to point to an individual event or short term trend and claim it is due to climate change? No. Doing so just gives ammunition to those who wish to undermine the science by cherry picking whatever advances their particular agenda.

[LouisvilleDem]

6. Well said

I think the effort to connect all sorts of individual weather events to climate change is a mistake. It is unscientific and it undermines our efforts in the long run. Unfortunately, I've seen that impulse right here in this forum on couple occasions.

[pscot]

3. Cliff Mass is a well-known local idiot

who got canned by KUOW for editorialising about school curricula intead of predicting the weather as he was being paid to do.

[LouisvilleDem]

7. Irrelevant

Do you any evidence that what he said in the OP is incorrect?

[kristopher]

8. Inaccurate assessment of relevance

The credibility of a spokesperson absolutely is relevant when you are talking about disseminating a message to the pubic.

Here's a not so tricky trick question: Would Michael Vick be a good spokesman for the SPCA?

[LouisvilleDem]

9. I'm not interested in "disseminating a message"

I'm interested in whether or not what he said is true. So far, no one here has given evidence that it isn't.

[kristopher]

10. Yes you are, or you wouldn't be here.

Do you think his comments are particularly insightful, because they seem pretty mundane to me. I've made the same point here many times before myself; so, I agree with your initial point. But, the entire issue is raised in the context of public debate and understanding. You can't simultaneously bemoan the state of that debate while you eschew the relevance of how one participates in the debate. Well, I suppose you can but it doesn't make a lot of sense.

[LouisvilleDem]

11. Ok

Since you seem intent on talking about the author of the article in the OP rather than what he is saying, I'll indulge you. Cliff Mass was dismissed from his job at a TV station for occasionally going off the topic of weather and discussing math education and the admittance policies of a university. If you would like explain why this fact should have any bearing on his positions on climate change I'm all ears.

[kristopher]

12. Why use him at all if he has a reputation as a local idiot?

Why not just say the same thing yourself, you clearly have a grasp of the topic.

The point I'm addressing actually has nothing to do with him per se; I was interested in your perception that this preeminent Public Policy issue isn't impacted by Public perception of the spokesperson. That goes beyond wishful thinking.

[LouisvilleDem]

13. Agreed (nt)

[NNadir]

24. Gee...I hate to agree with you...

...and I suspect that you are being disingenuous with this reply.

After all, we have lots of people right here in the E&E pages who routinely cite - usually in huge cut and pastes - dumb-ass reporters who know nothing about epidemiology, radiation science, risk analysis, reactor engineering to announce that Fukushima is the second worst energy disaster of all time, after Chernobyl.

The kind of people who do this, the sort who announce that climate change itself, along with the more than six million people who Lancet reports have died each year on average from air pollution The Lancet, Volume 380, Issue 9859, Pages 2224 - 2260, 15 December 2012 insist that they be taken seriously, even if they have no fucking idea that the disaster at Banqiao - a renewable energy disaster - killed as many people as the Indian Ocean tsunami killed in 2004, roughly 200,000 people +/- 30,000.

http://www.internationalrivers.org/resources/the-forgotten-legacy-of-the-banqiao-dam-collapse-7821

I would agree, of course, that the credibility of a spokesperson matters, which is why I routinely cite the well researched and irrefutable argument made by one of the world's premier climate scientists, Jim Hansen - in the mostly widely read paper in Volume 47, covering all of 2013 in one of the world's premier environmental science journals, Environmental Science and Technology - that the nuclear energy enterprise, has saved 1.8 million lives in the more than 60 years it has operated commercially and prevented the dumping of about 64 billion tons of the dangerous fossil fuel waste carbon dioxide, roughly the equivalent of two years of total planetary dumping at current rates, said rates being the worst ever observed.

Pushker A. Kharecha and James E. Hansen Environ. Sci. Technol., 2013, 47 (9), pp 4889–4895

What I've heard in response from mindless, obviously scientifically illiterate bloggers here is that Jim Hansen is "incompetent" to add and subtract numbers, while by contrast - according to the barely literate bloggers here who posit themselves as "authorities" on authorities - dumb reporters, never ever required to pass a course in elementary physics or chemistry in their stupid and useless bourgeois lives, are "authorities."

Hansen is one of the leading scientific advocates for addressing climate change. It would seem to me that our anti-nuke bloggers here may be numbered as the massive mob of fearful and ignorant mobsters who are fighting his (albeit ever more futile) efforts to save his Grandchildren and the Grandchildren of anyone on this planet who may succeed to have them. I don't know what these people are - but I know what they are not, which is environmentalists - but it's laughable when they have the gall to talk (as mindlessly as they talk about everything else) when they announce who is and who is not an authority.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storms_of_My_Grandchildren

[pscot]

14. The article is pretty accurate

He's hedging. Outright denial would kill his credibility, but arguing normal variability is, in effect, denial. It's gotta be one or the other.

[LouisvilleDem]

15. It is not denial to argue normal variability

People that refuse to accept that there is a certain amount of natural variability are the people that are in denial.

[NickB79]

16. No climatologists argue there isn't natural variability

What they argue is that the cumulative effects we are now seeing add up to something OUTSIDE the bounds of the planet's natural variability.

What the deniers argue is that what we are seeing is still inside the bounds of natural variability, long-term statistics and climate record evidence be damned.

You are creating a strawman argument. A rather poorly disguised one at that.

[kristopher]

17. There is no straw man.

The statement regarding the inappropriateness of labeling single extreme events as proof of either climate change OR the absence of climate change are correct.

We scoff at the idiots who say this is proof that climate change is a hoax, but then some moron on the right side of the issue overstates the evidence and says the extreme nature is proof of climate change.

Both are wrong in the particular, even if the one worried about climate change is correct in the larger sense.

[pscot]

18. True

And Mass says he's not a denialist, he just thinks variability encompasses the changes we're seeing. It's not denial, but it tiptoes right along the edge. It's the sort of position that legitimizes the rantings of the denialists.

[kristopher]

19. No, it doesn't.

What legitimizes the rantings of the "denialists" (is there something wrong with "deniers"?) are equally untrue rantings from those who should know better.

Fine, you don't like the guy quoted in the OP, but we are far beyond that in the discussion and there is no scenario where making false statements in support of climate change will not turn around and bite us in the ass.

[NickB79]

21. You missed a key word in my post, kris

What they argue is that the cumulative effects we are now seeing add up to something OUTSIDE the bounds of the planet's natural variability.

I agree with you, this one snowstorm, or last year's heatwave, or Hurricane Sandy, or any other individual weather aberration isn't proof of or against climate change. They're all pieces of a puzzle that is up to us to put together in a logical fashion.

The trendline they build when all taken together, however, clearly shows we've moved outside normal bounds for climate variability. Hence, my strawman comment.

[kristopher]

22. I never doubted we agreed on the essence of the matter...

But I didn't miss that word or fail to read the sentence. The point I responded to was the assertion that a straw man was used.
LouisvilleDem was clear and concise and there is no room to misinterpret the statements. It simply can't be considered a straw man as it comports exactly with the first thing that Holdren says in his video. And the fact that Holdren saw the need to address it in that manner strongly supports LvD's concern about the improper claims. It really hasn't been that long ago that such assertions and implications were a routine problem on DUEE.

[kristopher]

20. The White House shows how this is properly explained

Polar Vortex Explained In Relation To Global Warming By White House

"By the way, that’s President Obama’s Science and Technology Advisor, Dr. John Holdren, speaking in the video."

Read more at http://cleantechnica.com/2014/01/10/polar-vortex-explained-relation-global-warming-white-house-video/#YtT2FqB2mGjFVTTU.99

[LouisvilleDem]

23. A good clip

This is how science should be explained to the public, with full disclosure of the uncertainty that currently exists. For example, I like the fact that toward the end he says "as will all science there will be continuing debate as to what exactly is happening, but odds are I believe this is what we can expect as a result of global warming".