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Where Are the Hurricanes?
Here we are at the beginning of August, and we are only up to Georgette in the Pacific. This is NOAA’s hurricane prediction for 2022:
When I look at those spreads on the right, I see tons of wiggle room (I’m surprised they don’t have 1-26 for named storms). Nonetheless, I just realized we haven’t had any big storms yet that I know of. What’s a climate change activist to do?
Published in Science & Technology
What, no standing firelight meeting with the guys on Thursday night? Do you starch those sheets or do they hold that shape on their own? And the hats? I really like the hats.
Incidentally, COP27, the UN’s next Conference of the Parties (and how Soviet does that sound, anyway?) will be held in Egypt in November.
Think Kerry will show up via video from his desk in Washington? Thank anyone will?
The science doesn’t support the alarm of the climate activists, but climate alarmism does support climate activists and keeps them feeling important as they jet about the world holding big expensive conferences in exotic places.
We were told for more than a year that our kids would be just fine doing all their learning via Zoom. They weren’t: no schools do particularly well with remote instruction for elementary kids, and schools that were already doing a poor job do even worse. But it was good enough for America’s children.
But the climate folks have to show up in person.
The lack of evidence is itself supportive evidence.
@henryracette you are an analytical guy, you should dig into the RCP8.5 which is used for base the most alarming forecasts. They call it “business as usual”, but it really involves a huge regression in technology to 1980’s Soviet era efficiencies and massive increase in baby production–massive!
Don,
No, Jerry is the analytical guy. I just mouth off about stuff I’ve read.
There’s been a movement away from RCP8.5, and a general acknowledgement that it’s too pessimistic a basis for models and not realistic — even by climate alarmism standpoints. But it still provides the basis for a lot of the alarmist talk.
There’s a reason “climate science” is synonymous with “climate modeling,” and that’s because it’s a lot easier to make models than to do science. With models, you can simply say things like “many of the feedback mechanisms are poorly understood and may be underrepresented,” and then tell the press that the world will end in 2080 unless we do something now. Based on the models.
By the way, something to think about.
RCP stands for Representative Concentration Pathway. It’s a guesstimate (truly) of future carbon accumulation in the atmosphere and the effect that concentration has on warming. It’s intended to establish parameters for the various models, and can be dialed up and down to justify more and less grim future scenarios.
It’s being gradually augmented or replaced by something called the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways. Those, in conjunction with Integrated Assessment Models, try to project future economic, social, technological, industrial, and geographic changes so as to predict the impact of all of that on carbon concentrations and, hence, warming.
The climate is a physical system. We don’t really understand a lot of it, particularly critical things like feedback loops. We can’t currently explain past warming and cooling comparable to anything occurring today or projected for the near future. We can’t explain early 20th century warming, which is about equal to late 20th century warming. But we have those models, which are big and complicated and kind of beautiful in some respects, and loaded with math and physics and assumptions.
That other stuff, the RCP and SSP and IAM and paleoclimate estimates and hockey sticks and the rest of it, none of that is physics. That’s all economics and sociology and wild-arsed guesses about technology fifty years from now. (Reality check: George Jetson was born five days ago. How are we doing?)
The point is, if there’s any such thing as a “climate scientist,” he or she is a person who deals with fluid dynamics, radiative heating and cooling, and atmospheric chemistry. The people guessing what new technology will exist, how many people will still be alive in Sri Lanka, and how much power Bitcoin is going to be consuming 20 and 30 and 60 years from now — those people are not physicists. They aren’t even lesser scientists (physics being the King of the Sciences).
And we sure as heck don’t want to be making policy based on this rat’s nest of estimates and suppositions.
By the way, according to the latest satellite measurements, which are supposed to be much more accurate than ground-based “looking at thermometers” measurements, the Earth is currently only 36/100ths of one degree Celsius above the baseline. One year ago in July they actually got a reading 2/100ths of a degree cooler than the baseline.(!) (The reading has since been smoothed over on the graph by the general trend)
https://www.drroyspencer.com/latest-global-temperatures/
We’re talking about fractions of one degree that not a single person would be capable of even noticing without highly precise instruments, let alone over a 43-year period. I think it’s remarkable that the temperature is so steady. It’s really ludicrous that people and scientists are worried that the planet is about to die because of this micro-temperature variation that nobody can notice without precise instruments. Contrast this with paleoclimatologist’s estimates that the Earth used to be 10 degrees warmer millions of years ago and it did not die. As recently as 11,000 years ago in the Younger Dryas Event, they estimate from Greenland ice cores that the Earth’s temperature fell and rose a full 10 degrees within just a couple of years and nothing drastic happened. This puts an absurdity to the often repeated phrase “But the current warming is happening at an unprecedented rate.” (The Dryas Warming being over a hundred times faster than what is being measured today)
I consider the whole Global Warming mania to be a hysterical hoax.
Climate change often generates counterfrabjious pseudocycles which mimic normal ranges of weather conditions but precisely because we know with certainty that catastrophic climate change is already underway, any apparent non-catastrophic condition is especially problematic because it lulls us into a false sense of rationality and calm. It is precisely when climate change is not obvious that we need to be the most concerned. #Science
Hah! Applying for a job with the IPCC, are you?
No one told me there would be math.
Counterfrabjous negates both a state of callooh and of callay but brillig still applies as do the slithy toves in the troposphere so long as mimsy continues to exhibit a robust inverse association with the borogoves.
Okay, I have no idea what it means but I like it!
It would only be a problem if you thought you did understand it.
The hysteria never stops. I remember clear back to 1988, when suddenly CNN weather people would go “It is a catastrophic -44 degrees today in High Point Montana – what does this mean for our future on the globe?”
They totally ignored that High Point Montana almost always records a -44 during some time in the winter.
“catastrophic human-caused climate change.” Make them say it every damn time. “Catastrophic human-caused climate change.” I want them wearing their hysteria on their sleeves.
Come to my arms, my beamish boy!
(Not you, @stad.)
Do you mean counterfrabjous — without the “i”?
I find it hard to believe that the PTB can modify the weather to any great extent, however I wouldnt mind if someone tracked rainfall measurements on Bill Gates’ scattered farmland and compared the results with rainfall totals of neighboring farmers.
This is quite an extreme claim. I’m no meteorologist, but it strikes me as violating the First and Second Laws of Thermodynamics, the principles of Conservation of Energy and of Angular Momentum, and Newton’s Third Law of Motion. (There. That’s my physics education in a nutshell.). To create or to obviate a storm would require the expenditure of billions of joules of energy, more than Mankind’s generating capacity.
Can you provide some evidence of this droll claim?
Seemed at the time that the gratuitous “i” sounded more sciency. And climate change is all about sounding sciency.
The problem with the man-made climate change theory is that it isn’t scientific. Sure, they have historical data ( some currently being rewritten or deleted) on which to base their claims, but almost all of them use modeling to “prove” we’re all going to die by ___ (pick a year) if we don’t change everything about the way we live.
They also don’t want their “studies” scrutinized, and anyone who challenges their assertions is a “climate denier” (which is a stupid term because we’re not denying the climate, just the hoax). Their studies are also not scientific because they cannot be (or are not allowed to be) subjected to Karl Popper’s Falsificastion Theory, which states a theory isn’t scientific if it cannot be tested, or isn’t capable of being proven false.
The historical data works against the theory depending on the timeframe. The earth was warmer than today in periods pre-industrialization. And we’ve also been in a period without warming for 20? years or so? Which is completely inexplicable given the theories of catastrophic human-caused climate change. Hoax.
Also, any decent skeptic would notice that all (manufactured) crisis problems have only socialist (fascist) solutions.
And when you question them, they go into hysterics, call you names, and try to get you fired . . .
Another way you know they’re wrong (lying). They can’t stand up to scrutiny.
Hmmm. That’s very provocative intellectually. I like that. I need to be more “sciency”! I can feel my funding rising already.
I read a book written by the guy who debunked the hockey stick graph, named Steven Mcintyre. In his efforts to verify (or debunk) Michael Mann’s hockey stick graph that showed an uptick in Global Warming during the 20th Century, he fought an uphill battle to try and look at Mann’s calculations and methodology. Mann completely clammed up when asked and would not share his information until a court order compelled him to do so. When Mann finally complied, what he did with his enormous data was to print everything out on stacks of paper more than a couple of feet high, rather than providing the digitized spread sheets and Microsoft excel files that could be easily mined for important information. Instead Mcintyre was forced to wade through tens of thousands of paper pages by hand to find the relevant facts and figures he was looking for. I think he finally got the University that Mann worked for, and thus owned the rights to his research, to provide him with the easily searchable digital files.
If I had irrefutable evidence that the Earth was getting unusually warmer, I would be going out of my way to provide my research to every relevant scientist on earth. As Mcintyre discovered, he had been the first such scientist to ask to review the hockey stick research five years after it had been published. Nobody else had ever bothered to investigate this supposed “bombshell” revelation until he came along.
Update:
I saw an article in the paper that said the numbers were being revised to show a “milder” hurricane season.
Science!
The “climategate” leaked emails showed extraordinary wagon-circling to prevent access to data. There was also some speculation about whether it was worth it for this group to keep supporting Mann.
The best part of the McIntyre-McKittfick dissection of the hockey stick was when random numbers were used instead of the study data–and the methodology stick yielded a hockey stick anyway.
I was having a chat last night with a smart, well-educated woman of the left. She said she’d just discovered a Facebook group of people who lived in her county (D.C. area) who were calling for an end to peer review, and she asked me what I thought of peer review.
I said that I was in favor of it because I think it’s a valuable part of the process, but that there were enough examples of irreproducible results and biased review to encourage skepticism of everything. I mentioned the Hadley/CRU climategate email dump and what it revealed about corruption of the review and publishing processes — and her eyes kind of glazed over: she’d never heard of it.
Hide the Decline