Al Gore is ranting in frustration that no one buys his climate BS any more.
[Mid-morning update]
Climate skepticism isn’t a fringe phenomenon:
CC. To what extent did you feel like you were standing alone in resisting the man-made climate change theory back in the 1990s?
“It was difficult. I knew that many of my colleagues at the Association of State Climatologists agreed with me. But many of them wouldn’t say anything because they were worried about losing their jobs or just plain having their professional lives made difficult. Frankly there’s a lot more money supporting the other side. Things would be easier if you just go along with them.”
CC. “You’d say that now there’s a lot more money supporting the man-made climate change side of the issue than there is on the side of the skeptics?
“Oh yes, it’s been that way for a long time.”
Yes, though you’d never hear it above the din of the screams about oil money.
[Update late morning]
Climate Depot responds to Gore’s rant.
[Bumped]
“Delicious tears” as Cartman would say…
I suspect that AlGore’s shrill cries of frustration won’t be the only ones we hear in the years to come. The entire basis of the socialist-welfare state is under threat of coming undone. The idea that we can continue to take ever increasing amounts of money from those who work and give it to those who don’t is heading for collapse. We can no longer afford paying millions of people (tens of millions) for not working. The government has lived far beyond its means for decades and the bills are coming due. The house of cards took generations to build and may come tumbling down quickly. If and when that happens, it likely won’t be peaceful. Look at the riots in London where angry Leftists are burning and looting (and yet, Tea Party members here are being called “terrorists”). We may see the same thing here when millions of parasites and free-loaders get cut off. This will not end well and yet, it is necessary if the country is to survive.
Well, I’m sure he finds it frustrating that snow in Washington DC in February is proof that he’s wrong but Dallas’s current heat spell, rank[ing] second on the all-time list for the number of consecutive days of 100-degree temperatures in Dallas, eclipsing a 29-day span in 1998, AccuWeather.com reported Tuesday, is unremarked upon. The three hottest heat spells are all since 1980.
Oh gee Chris! It gets hot in the summer! Must be Gorebull warming!
I have news for you. Record heat is not a rare phenomenon considering we have only been keeping accurate records for a little over a 100 years. Somebody is always going to be breaking a record somewhere because we are delaing with tens of thousands of places.
What you are doing is simply a glorified form of cherry-picking, lying with statistics.
Funny how WEATHER IS NOT CLIMATE doesn’t apply when the weather is hot.
Can’t you read a weather map?
There is a massive high-pressure pocket over Texas. This bubble is so strong, even a hurricane would probably bounce right off of it and head for easier targets.
The culprit? La Nina. You did notice that we had flooding in all of the places where La Nina usually causes flooding this year, right?
El Nino, meanwhile, is good to just about everybody other than California.
McGehee Says:
August 9th, 2011 at 7:40 am
Funny how WEATHER IS NOT CLIMATE doesn’t apply when the weather is hot.
Yes, intellectual consistency (or honesty) is rather lacking in the AGW or “climate change” cult.
30 days of triple digits. You know what we call that in Phoenix? Any day before, oh… November?
What? It gets hot in the summer? Who knew?
@M Puckett,
That should be past tense. We moved all the thermometers of record to the major airports, in between giant runways. Trying to untangle the result is a statistical mess.
I don’t see why, George — it’s never hot on the tarmac at Sky Harbor…
In other news, dog bites man — news at 11.
I’ve lived in around Dallas some 36 years now. It. gets. hot. here. every. summer. People start to complain about the heat when it gets over 85F. By that measure we have global warming in North Texas for 3 months straight — every year. But yet somehow this magic 100 degree number is just the end all be all of civilization. By and large, once it gets over 90 everyone’s internal thermometer starts to ignore the actual temperature numbers and just defaults to, “screw it, stay in inside!”, mode. I recall a few times we’ve had somewhat mild summers but those are usually accompanied with nearly constant, massive thunderstorms. If people aren’t bitching about the heat one year they are complaining about all the bad weather the next. You see, Dallas sits right on a dry line that migrates from the pan handle during the early parts of the day (which is why they usually get their tornadoes around four in the afternoon) and then slowly starts to shift over to the North Texas region by about 3 a.m. (which is why we get the majority our massive thunderstorms in the middle of the night) and then it starts to shift back out to the west after the Sun rises. If a low pressure zone swoops in from Colorado and parks itself over us it forces the dry line out east and we get days on end of near constant rain. I think i recall one year where we had a constant mist and fog for about 3-4 weeks straight. Then other times like this we get these high pressure zones that camp out over use, push the dry line out west, and we get burnt to a crisp.
In fact, if anything I think we’re extremely lucky we haven’t already had a massive F5 twister ripe through downtown Dallas, yet. A tornado did hit Fort Worth some time back that blew windows out of high rises and caused quite a bit of damage. But hey we live within a belt of highly dynamic weather systems so it was really only a matter of time before it happened really.
Chris Gerrib Says:
August 9th, 2011 at 7:04 am
“The three hottest heat spells are all since 1980.”
Ah, no..
….as long as JR Ewing and South Fork are spared…..
Speaking anecdotally, Tampa seems maybe slightly cooler this year than last year, though it got brutally hot a little early this summer. I was recently in North Carolina and was amazed how much hotter and more humid it was up there.
If this were evidence of a climate-wide crisis, wouldn’t it be hotter here, too? Or maybe we can’t extrapolate AGW from a heat wave?
Tampa gets a considerable bit of cooling from the Gulf too.
Right, but we always get that. I went to school in Gainesville, which was much hotter in the summers, despite being 100 miles north of Tampa.
Guys, I can give Gerrib credit for noting that Dallas is warmer this year than in the past 10 years. But did he also notice that solar activity has been picking up? Does Gore’s climate credits stop solar flares?
The Goreacle said sunspots and solar flares were “Bullshit”.
If we’re going to be picking and choosing spots of weather to make our case, Chris, how about Edmonton, Alberta? The last snowfall of winter 2010-11 was at the beginning of June, it rained almost every day in July, and now the leaves have started changing color already. Summer lasted about 5 days. Everyone at this latitude has been having strange weather since Eyjafjallajokull blew its top into the jetstream.
Pro Libertate Says:
“Right, but we always get that. I went to school in Gainesville, which was much hotter in the summers, despite being 100 miles north of Tampa.”
Hogtown!
Gainesville – gateway to Micanopy!
I went to school there too. Really hot in the Summer, but the temps eased off a little more, as compared to Tampa, in the Winter, as I recall.
It’s nice to see Gore lose it. Surest sign they have nothing left but invective.
Leland Says:
“Guys, I can give Gerrib credit for noting that Dallas is warmer this year than in the past 10 years. But did he also notice that solar activity has been picking up? Does Gore’s climate credits stop solar flares?”
No kidding..last week we had 3 earth-directed CME’s. Pow, pow, pow, one right after the other. Shut down the satellite.
The anti-Global Warming snark is as unproductive as the pro-Global Warming snark. The other matter is that the Earth’s climate is doing that thing that it is doing, regardless of what one or the other side in this debate believes.
I think I am beginning to understand how El Nino/La Nina plays into medium-term climate patterns and the question of whether global warming is “real.”
I once had this idea that I could measure the amount of air infiltration, a contributor to winter heating and summer air conditioning load, using a humidity gauge and steam tables. This sounds off-topic, but bear with me for a while.
The idea was that if I ran a dehumidifer in the house to maintain a constant humidity setting, if I knew the outdoor temperature and humidity (actually the dew point in the number I am after — can get that from steam tables or directly from the weather service) as well as the indoor temperature and humidity, and if the dehumidifier condensate drained into a bucket where I could measure the amount of water, I could calculate how much air is being exchanged between indoors and outdoors. Yes, this method takes a large amount of calculation, but there would be a huge use of this in doing “energy audits” without that “blower door” gizmo.
It was a good idea, but . . . The biggest problem with this idea is that there appears to be large “sinks” of moisture in a house that confound the moisture balance calculations. I suspect the gypsum wallboard with its hygroscopic mineral is such a sink. Furthermore, when the house cools off at night, indoor relative humidity tends to go down whereas when the house warms up from the sun in the late afternoon and early evening, humidity goes up. The simple explanation of this is that in warmer temperatures, the wallboard dries out, releasing humidity into the air; in cooler temperature, the wallboard soaks up mosture, lowering humidity.
On the other hand, just because I have this large source/sink of humidity in the house that confounds precise calculation of air exchange, there is evidence of a net inflow of moisture from the outdoors to the indoors resulting from air exchange with the outside. My rough engineering estimate is that over the course of a summer here in Wisconsin, I use about 1000 kWHrs in electricity between the A/C and dehumidifier, and I am condensing about a ton (2000 lbs) of water out of the indoor air over that time. I average a 55 deg indoor dewpoint temperature, and if I can get info on on average summer outdoor dewpoint (overnight low is a rough estimate), I could calculate the air infiltration.
The point of this is not that the large household moisture sink makes the air exchange calculation impossible but that it makes it hard. The same thing works for climate. It is not impossible to separate the CO2 contribution to climate from the data, but it is far from as easy as saying, “see, see, it is burning hot in Texas, Climate Change, Climate Change, Denier, Denier!”
On the other hand, just because the ocean current heat exchange mechanism is probably driving the Texas heat wave, this does not mean that CO2 warming is not happening and that it is impossible to measure it. It means that it is hard to judge what CO2 is doing over even 10 or 40 year intervals given long-term cycles in CO2.
To excuse a pun, this issue is generating more heat than light. Chris’ comment (or Al Gore for all that matters) is annoying because one hot summer in Texas or even a bunch of them does not a CO2 global warming trend make on account of the masking effect of the ocean currents. On the other hand, there is a scientific basis for regarding CO2 as having an effect on climate though there is uncertainty in the strength of the putative positive feedbacks, and the party-line rejection of the CO2 Global Warming hypothesis with tons of Right Blogosphere snark is getting to be equally annoying.
Paul Milenkovic Says:
“The anti-Global Warming snark is as unproductive as the pro-Global Warming snark.”
On the contrary: the AGW types who cooked the data; called anyone who disagrees “deniers”, and who claims it’s “settled science” and who brooks no dissent; who likens dissenters as Holocausters….
…deserves all the snark that can be mustered.
the party-line rejection of the CO2 Global Warming hypothesis
You confuse “rejection” with skepticism. And regardless of the validity of the hypothesis, Gore has been BSing us. It is perfectly appropriate (and entertaining) to show the charlatan for what he is.
the party-line rejection of the CO2 Global Warming hypothesis with tons of Right Blogosphere snark is getting to be equally annoying.
You had me in full agreement right up until this sentence. Which of these do you object to, the snark or the rejection of the AGW hypothesis? I think a little snark is justified considering the Left tried to foist upon all of us the biggest scientific fraud of all time. Piltdown Man was a piker.
Oh noes! snark! Next, someone will throw-out the accusation of “not being nice.” At best this is appeal to civility, at worst, a feint.
Gregg,
Yep, Hogtown. I just went to Micanopy for the first time (20 years after I graduated). Nice little town.
“Which of these do you object to, the snark or the rejection of the AGW hypothesis? I think a little snark is justified”
I object to the snark. I am not making an appeal to civility, rather, I am appealing to “geekiness”, that is, that people commenting on the AGW question would have some insights into things, such as jet contrails, ocean currents, radiation-induced cloud formation, SO2 haze, and so on.
The Wattsupwiththat Web site is perhaps as close as you can come to a geek slant rather than a political slant on the subject, but even that gets political.
It is interesting that Piltdown Man has been introduced into this discussion. As a Catholic Christian, I was under the impression that apart from some fringe sects, Christianity was more or less cool with Darwin’s Theory. I remember visiting a friend’s house who was of a Protestant Fundamentalist persuasion who had a poster mocking the popular version of Darwin’s Descent of man showing the sequence of ape-like beings leading up to Modern Man.
The poster featured Nebraska Man and Piltdown Man as evidence of fraud and by implication the Theory of Evolution was a demonstrable fraud. It was eye opening to me at the time and people still not only disputed evolution but that there was concrete evidence (such as the Piltdown fraud) to dispute evolution.
As it turns out, after Darwin’s Origin of Species and Descent of Man, most scientists came to “believe” in evolution, but the evidence was largely indirect, circumstantial, or based on theory rather than hard evidence, even in the fossil record, and in the rush to prove the Theory of Evolution, a lot of bad science was done, such as Nebraska Man (over zealous interpretation of a fossil tooth) and Piltdown Man (today accepted as an outright fraud). In other words, evolution “had to be true” hence that belief colored how data was collected and interpreted.
Hence based on the theory of CO2 functioning in the climate as a greenhouse gas, global warming, or I guess they broadened to make it climate change so either warming or cooling confirms the theory, has to be true, and this belief is coloring the data gathering, interpretation, and computer model building.
My own belief or hunch or engineering intuition I have on the subject is that we are at the Piltdown Man stage of Global Warming science. That is, the evidence (Mr. Gore’s “the evidence is overwhelming”) for Global Warming happening right here and now is rather thin. To say that Texas burning, both figuratively and literally, is evidence of Global Warming doesn’t even rise to the level of snark it is that lame. Like with Piltdown, I am almost sure that there is distortion of the science bordering on fraud going on. People want Global Warming to be true just as there is a political agenda to want Evolution to be true.
But that people want Global Warming to be true so badly that they can control what kind of car we drive and are willing to cook the tree ring data, all of that doesn’t make Global Warming to be false. As Rand just reminded me, being a skeptic is not being a denier. But drive-by snark (Chris and Al Gore started it! We deserve to snark back! It is only fair!), such snark only confirms the Left-Liberal prejudice that we are not honest skeptics but that only people who don’t “believe in Global Warming” are those crazy wingnuts.
Al Gore made a lot of bets on alternative energy and energy conservation companies that can payoff only if some kind of CO2 emission regulations are implemented. Now that the global warming research has been exposed for the criminal fraud that it is, coupled with the financial problems, it is unlikely that any such regulation will be passed in the foreseeable future. Gore stands to loose a lot of money.
This should not surprise at all. Those of you in the space movement in the 80’s and early 90’s should remember how corrupt Al Gore was, especially with regards to space privatization legislation that was passed at the time.
People like Al Gore never changed.
“I was under the impression that apart from some fringe sects, Christianity was more or less cool with Darwin’s Theory.”
Speak not of this to any leftists lest their stereotypes of others shatter.
“The anti-Global Warming snark is as unproductive as the pro-Global Warming snark.”
For me the unproductive part was the global warming crowd ruining the conservation movement.