More of the usual suspects and warm mongers are saying “I told you so” about the heat wave.
Because we’ve never had heat waves before.
12 thoughts on “Its Not Just The “Science” Guy”
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More of the usual suspects and warm mongers are saying “I told you so” about the heat wave.
Because we’ve never had heat waves before.
Comments are closed.
Judith Curry’s take is here.
Seth Borenstein has an (AP) article entitled: This U.S. summer is ‘what global warming looks like.‘ He interviewed more than 15 scientists in preparing this article (including me).
Her comments didn’t get included in the article but she includes them (questions and answers) over there. Here’s one:
SB: Is there any extreme that’s a function of climate change that we’re missing this summer? If so, what?
JC: Not that I know of.
I think she has a very understated, and very underrated sense of humor.
Her summary:
So is this what global warming looks like? Well, this is what the 1930′s and 1950′s looked like.
Must’ve been a lot of global warming in October 1871, too, to cause the fires in Chicago, Peshtigo, and elsewhere in the Great Lakes region. The global warming folks are like a kid with a hammer – everything becomes a nail upon which they can use their new toy.
Must be why so many of them have claw marks on their foreheads. No one told them they don’t need to use both hands.
And as they’re oh so fond of saying, “Weather isn’t climate. Unless we say it is.”
Blame Sagan. The original “political” TV scientist.
=TAPS
Wasn’t it the winter before last, when we were having bunches of new record lows set, that they were screaming it was just the weather?
It is unfortunate that so many scientists have forgotten the concept of falsifiability when it comes to climate change. I’m particularly disappointed with Phil Plait. I got interested in him due to his work in the skeptic community (particularly his take down of Richard C. Hoagland), so it’s a bit disconcerting to see him use the same rhetorical tricks that pseudo-scientists use to defend this stuff. Sagan was right when he said “scientists, being primates, have a fondness for dominance hierarchies.” The Climate Change (AKA, Global Warming) folks certainly do.
Summer of 1980 was as hot as the hottest Dust Bowl summer over pretty much all the central US from Texas to South Dakota. Dallas recorded its highest temperature ever (113) on June 29 (IIRC), and the DFW area had something like 50-something days in a row over 100. OKC had around 30 days in a row over 100. It basically started in early June and the heat wave didn’t break until late August. Global warming? No, just 2-sigma variation.
Jerry Pournelle keeps pointing out that the Earth has been warming at about 1 deg C per century since the 1800s; this is a natural consequence of coming out of the Little Ice Age. No reputable scientist of any stripe disputes this; however, this is not AGW. But using one year’s somewhat hotter than normal summer as “confirmation” of AGW is scientific malpractice.
Where I live (eastern Pennsylvania) we just had “the year without a winter”. Temperatures hardly ever got below 40º and there were only a couple of dustings of snow. Yet at the same time I knew that parts of Europe had their worst winter in 100 years.
So, if it happens that the next winter is unusually cold, can I call myself a climate scientist and announce a new ice age is coming?
You can call yourself anything you want and have the company of lots of self deluded folks.
Mr. Hoffman – No, you can’t. Largely because the start of an ice age is signalled by unusually cool summers, not unusually cold winters. Or at least that was the dominant theory until a few years ago.