Saturday, July 24, 2010

Record cold hits South America; carbon dioxide blamed

BBC News - Peru declares emergency over cold weather
The Peruvian government has declared a state of emergency in more than half the country due to cold weather.

Most of the areas affected are in the south, where temperatures regularly drop below zero centigrade at this time of year.

However, this time temperatures have dropped to as low as -24C.
...
This week Peru's capital, Lima, recorded its lowest temperatures in 46 years at 8C, and the emergency measures apply to several of its outlying districts.

In Peru's hot and humid Amazon region, temperatures dropped as low as 9C. The jungle region has recorded five cold spells this year.

Hundreds of people - nearly half of them very young children - have died of cold-related diseases
, such as pneumonia, in Peru's mountainous south where temperatures can plummet at night to -20C.
Temps bring climate concerns back to forefront
A cold snap complete with historically low winter temperatures has blanketed countries such as Bolivia, Uruguay and Chile. More than 40 deaths have been reported as temperatures that normally hover in the 20 Celsius range have plunged to freezing.

Weather extremes were named by climate change scientists several years ago as one consequence of the build up of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Even without scientific warnings, the rash of natural disasters and unusual weather patterns we've seen over the last few years would strike me as eerie.

2 comments:

VangelV said...

Weather extremes were named by climate change scientists several years ago as one consequence of the build up of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Even without scientific warnings, the rash of natural disasters and unusual weather patterns we've seen over the last few years would strike me as eerie.

Eerie? What I find eerie is the lack of knowledge about the issues. CO2 emissions can't cause both warming and record cold temperatures at the same time because that is not how the mechanism is supposed to work. And the claims of extreme weather was false. Most of the models actually predict less severe events because the temperature differential between polar and equatorial regions would be reduced and it is this differential that drives weather phenomenon.

The simple fact is that the world is no longer warming as it was when the PDO went into its positive phase. As Phil Jones admitted, there hasn't been statistically significant warming for 15 years even though emissions have been at record highs and CO2 concentrations have gone up.

So what we have is a failure of the theory over the short term. Add to this the failure over longer periods and there isn't much to support the AGW myth. The ice core data showed that changes in CO2 levels follow changes in temperature trends, not the other way around. That means that the AGW proponents have mixed up cause with effect, hardly what credible scientists would do. The way I see it, the debate is about over and the AGW side has lost by refusing to discuss the issues, hide the data and methods that have created the alarmist conclusions, and pretend that cooling and warming are both caused by the same human activity. Time to move on.

Anonymous said...

Amazing how VangelV manages to mangle the science, cherry-picking with abandon and misstating what is known about the climate system.