Sunday, December 25, 2011

Modern-day climate change witch hunt - The Drum Opinion (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

These greens don't seem to realise how much they sound like medieval witch-hunters. In the Dark Ages, before man enlightened himself, witches were frequently hunted and burned on the basis that they were causing climate change - specifically very cold winters.

One of the driving forces behind the witch-hunting mania in Europe between the 15th and 17th centuries was the idea that these peculiar creatures had warped the weather.

...Johann Weyer, the 16th-century physicist who spoke out against witch-hunting, described how one woman was forced to confess to causing climate change:

"[A] poor old woman was driven by torture to confess - as she was about to be offered to Vulcan's flames - that she had caused the incredible severity of the previous winter of 1565, and the extreme cold, and the lasting ice."

Australian Droughts Show The Same Pattern As US Droughts | Real Science

Both peaked from 1920-1960.

I have this fantasy once in a while, that someone in the climate science world might have the brains and integrity to actually do some science – and try to understand what causes climate change.

Given that they get billions of dollars a year, is it unreasonable to expect them to do a little bit of work once in a while?

Aggie Joke : NOAA Details The Adjustments Which Dessler Says They They Don’t Make | Real Science

Aggie superstar Dessler says that the surface data hasn’t been through any adjustments. Below are the details of the adjustments which NOAA doesn’t make.

You Are Paying Obama’s EPA To Lie To Your Kids | Real Science

Below are some of the more notable droughts with CO2 below 350ppm. There is zero evidence that droughts are getting longer, more frequent, or worse. The worst droughts (by far) were during the 1930s and 1950s.

2 comments:

@Askgerbil said...

Some wishful thinking here.
The December 24 article in the NYT "Harsh Political Reality Slows Climate Studies Despite Extreme Year" says: "Many of the individual events in 2011 do have precedents in the historical record. And the nation’s climate has featured other concentrated periods of extreme weather, including severe cold snaps in the early 20th century and devastating droughts and heat waves in the Dust Bowl era of the 1930s.
But it is unusual, if not unprecedented, for so many extremes to occur in such a short span. The calamities in 2011 included wildfires that scorched millions of acres, extreme flooding in the Upper Midwest and the Mississippi River Valley and heat waves that shattered records in many parts of the country. Abroad, massive floods inundated Australia, the Philippines and large parts of Southeast Asia."

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/25/science/earth/climate-scientists-hampered-in-study-of-2011-extremes.html?_r=2&hpw

The article "Advocacy group's extreme weather map brings climate change home" published December 8 gives little reason for optimism: "A new map published today by the Natural Resources Defense Council makes it plain that extreme weather attributable to climate change..."

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/greenspace/2011/12/nrdc-extreme-weather-map-brings-climate-change-home.html

papertiger said...

No. That is a huge amount of wishful thinking by the New York Times, laden with a heavy dollop of BS, in service to "the cause".

"...shows that flooding has not increased in the United States over records of 85 to 127 years. This adds to a pile of research that shows similar results around the world. This result is of course consistent with our work that shows that increasing damage related to weather extremes can be entirely explained by societal changes, such as more property in harm's way. In fact, in the US flood damage has decreased dramatically as a fraction of GDP, which is exactly whet you get if GDP goes up and flooding does not." [R. M. Hirsch, K. R. Ryberg 2011: Hydrological Sciences Journal]