Global Cooling? - Dispelling An Enduring Myth With One Image

Courtesy John Cook at Skeptical Science

If the Earth’s temperature was the same year after year, then the effects of increasing greenhouse gases would be very easy to spot. Unfortunately, Mother Nature rarely makes things that easy to figure out. Besides the daily and seasonal cycles, we also have decadal temperature swings caused by the sunspot cycle and ocean/atmospheric oscillations. This tends to confuse non scientists, and fools many into believing claims that global warming has stopped. The Heartland Int. in Chicago (political think tank) has long been a major purveyor of this silliness.

John Cook, at Skeptical Science, has posted an incredible graphic that dispels this myth all by itself. This myth is very widespread, and if you google “global cooling” and you will see a plethora of web sites telling you the warming has ended and the planet is cooling. Those that believe this sort of thing will usually show a graph of temperatures to support it, but that graph will always cover just a few years. The image above shows why they do it that way; It’s kind of like saying that spring is cancelled because of an April cold snap!

Skeptical Science has an in-depth post that goes along with the graphic, and I highly recommend reading it. I’ll finally get to meet John Cook (at the December AGU conference) in San Francisco! He’s done an amazing job of showing the true science and dispelling the ubiquitous myths, that sound scientific, but are really just politics in disguise. Read it, and next time you’ll know when someone is giving you political belief dressed up to look like science.

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AGU Blogosphere | Dan's Wild Wild Science Journal | Dispelling An Enduring Myth With One Image:

Does Snow and Cold Weather Disprove Climate Change?

It’s Cold and My Car is Buried in Snow. Is Global Warming Really Happening?

For years, climate contrarians have pointed to snowfall and cold weather to question the scientific reality of human-induced climate change.

Their annual barrage of misinformation obscures the interesting work scientists are doing to figure out just how climate change is affecting weather patterns year-round.
Understanding what scientists know about these effects can help us adapt. And, if we reduce the emissions that are driving climate change, we can avert its worst consequences in the future.

What is the relationship between weather and climate?

Weather is what’s happening outside the door right now; today a snowstorm or a thunderstorm is approaching. Climate, on the other hand, is the pattern of weather measured over decades.

NASA and NOAA plus research centers around the world track the global average temperature, and all conclude that Earth is warming. In fact, the past decade has been found to be the hottest since scientists started recording reliable data in the 1880s. These rising temperatures are caused primarily by an increase of heat-trapping emissions in the atmosphere created when we burn coal, oil, and gas to generate electricity, drive our cars, and fuel our businesses. Hotter air around the globe causes more water evaporation, which fuels heavier precipitation in the form of more intense rain and snow storms.

At the same time, because less of a region’s precipitation is falling in light storms and more of it in heavy storms, the risks of drought and wildfire are also greater. Ironically, higher air temperatures tend to produce intense drought periods punctuated by heavy floods, often in the same region.

These kinds of disasters may become a normal pattern in our everyday weather as levels of heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere continue to rise.

The United States is already experiencing more intense rain and snow storms. The amount of rain or snow falling in the heaviest one percent of storms has risen nearly 20 percent, averaged nationally—almost three times the rate of increase in total precipitation between 1958 and 2007.

Some regions of the country have seen as much as a 67 percent increase in the amount of rain or snow falling in the heaviest storms.

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Global Warming Science

"There is no longer any doubt in the expert scientific community that the Earth is warming—and it’s now clear that human activity has a significant part in it." - The Union of Concerned Scientists

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Don't Confuse Weather with Climate

The recent spate of Arctic cold that swept the nation has many questioning whether global warming is nothing more than a myth. It's almost comical for me to hear these rationalizations that the sub zero temperatures are proof positive that global warming is nothing more than a liberal strategy to generate unnecessary concern and anxiety in to the hearts of every patriotic, God fearing, hard working, and loyal American. It's equally amazing to me that these same folks can be so narrow minded as to ignore the scientific data that is available. They also apparently do not know the difference between "weather" and "climate".


Weather is short-term changes in the atmosphere: fluctuations in temperature, humidity, precipitation, cloudiness, brightness, visibility, wind, and barometric pressure. It can change from minute-to-minute, hour-to-hour, and day-to-day. Climate, on the other hand, is the average of weather over an extended period of time; it's the description of the long-term pattern of weather in a particular area. Climate is what you expect (like a hot summer), and weather is what you get.


So why was the Northeast so bitterly cold in December '09 and early January of 2010? How can they justify the theory of global warming, given the unusual sub zero temperatures? Some believe it was due to the normal changes in cyclical patterns like El Nino. I imagine that is possible, but with that, we still shouldn't ignore the fact that scientists have shown that the polar ice caps are melting.


One interesting theory that supports the argument of global warming and offers a possible explanation for the recent frigid temperatures is that as the sea ice melts, they dump cold, fresh water in to the oceans (much like adding an ice cube to a hot cup of tea). The ocean currents that carry the warmer air aloft along the east cost and on to Europe are rapidly cooling down. As a result, it's allowing for more intense cold and winter storms in areas typically tempered by what were warmer currents.

http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2004/05mar_arctic.htm

I love the winter, the cold weather and lots of snow. I'd move to Alaska tomorrow if I could . . . the problem is, that at the rate we're going, Alaska could soon have palm trees. Okay . . . so I'm being a bit facetious, but I've lived in the unbearably hot, humid "Sunshine State" for twelve years. I sincerely miss my good friends there, but one of the happiest days in my life was the day I saw the sign that said "You are now leaving the state of Florida". I have no interest in ever living in that kind of climate again.