So much for Global Warming!

How many idiots are going to say that the next couple of days?

Nothing like using a singular event to completely dismiss a pattern.

(You can question the pattern, mind you.)

I have already heard it a dozen times. It makes me mad and angry.

People with any knowledge of the subject know that this trend of Global Climate Change means more energy in the overall system and thus more extremes and the effects will be felt differently throughout the world. It also tends to mean more storms, more droughts and thus more problems. For many areas it will mean both hotter summers and colder winters. More dangerously it will probably mean more major storms like hurricanes and monsoons.

Well, it's hard to doubt the actual pattern:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...ure_Record.png

Alternate explanations of it are possible, but they seem scientifically implausible in the face of the evidence.

Every time it snows, I hear some chucklehead crowing about how global warming isn't real and I lose a little bit of tooth enamel from grinding my teeth every time.

Hey, looky there! Stuff heats up right after the industrial revolution.

Been there, done that given the snowfall in the UK in December.

However, given that the scientists were saying the Himalayan Glaciers would be melted in 35 years, it came as a bit of a shock to them to find the majority of them had actually increased in size.

The EAU Temperature data was, if not actually debunked, having enough problems with it to be considered unreliable.

Climate Change is an undeniable fact. Global Warming, otoh, may not be as we expect.

The problem seems to be that people just don't understand what "global" means. If the average all over the entire globe raises, that doesn't mean specific regions aren't going to have cold weather. You can try talking about climate change so that people don't get hung up on the warming part, but it isn't as precise. As referenced above, the doomsday prophecies that scientists have made about what will happen in specific regions have definitely done a lot of damage to people's perceptions.

I am reading "State of Fear" by Michael Creighton right now and it is driving me nuts! It was published in 2004 and while it is just a good science-based adventure yarn (which is why I'm reading it) it is also quite skillful at countering the average person's only semi-coherent belief that global warming exists (count me among the average semi-coherent types).

I am determined to finish it (what does it say about ME if I refuse to read intelligently written material that argues that I'm wrong) but when I'm done I want to do two things: (a) watch "An Inconvenient Truth" again; and (b) check to see if Creighton's views on AGM are any different now from when he wrote the book.

He was apparently arguing against global warming as a crisis shortly before he died, so I'm betting he didn't unless he had an eco-conversion on his death bed.

He was a fairly outspoken, anti-environmentalist.

Oh, I didn't know he was dead.

I hate it when people die before their obstinately wrong views, which will be tested with the passage of time, can be disproved.

Michael Crichton was no more qualified to talk about Global Warming or Climate Change then I am. He was not a practicing climatologist, he was not a climatologist at all, he wasn't even a scientist but an MD. Further he had some really stupid ideas that made his anti-AGW beliefs look fairly rational.

Quote:

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At Harvard he developed the belief that all diseases, including heart attacks, are direct effects of a patient's state of mind. He later wrote: "We cause our diseases. We are directly responsible for any illness that happens to us." Eventually he came to believe in auras, spoon bending, and clairvoyance.

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This is cited in his own book:

He wrote some good books and some crappy ones. But then so did Tom Clancy, but Clancy never pretended to be an actually expert on espionage.

Sadly news programs treated him as seriously as some shows treat Jenny McCarthy and the Anti-Vaxxers

Huh. He was even nuttier than I'd thought.

You mean I can stop reading the book?!?!? YAY.

Nah, I'll finish it, just to see where he goes with it. I'm not very far in yet, but I'm guessing

Spoiler (mouseover to read):

environmental terrorists engineer a tsunami, quake or something else to make it falsely appear that AGM is destroying Vanuatu

Don't tell me if that's right, I don't want to know.