Joe's article is powerful. Would that some of the posters on this blog would take it to heart and stop the "attack the messenger" routine. Looking at the facts is the only way to the truth. Speaking of which, there doesn't appear to be much warming in January in the U.S. for the last 100+ years. I would love to hear a coherent theory for why that is.

Joe Bastardi's piece is awesome!

Graphs like this drive me nuts.
http://global-warming.accuweather.com/Reg110Dv00Elem02_01012008_pg.html

Anyone with a basic knowledge of statistics will recognize that they are using the wrong filter. They should throw out the outliers and use a low pass filter - which would show a sinuous pattern with a minimum in the late 19th century, a maximum in the late 1930s, a minimum in the late 1970s and a maximum in the late 1990s.

Such analysis would reveal the true nature of climate change.

Brett,

Thanks for tossing a bone to Bastardi, he's earned it.

While we've talked about the difference between weather and climate on many occasions, it is rather ironic that, in the midst of global warming, millions of people are suffering because of unusual cold. Makes you wonder if we're not worrying about the wrong thing.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/7231528.stm

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/7219092.stm

Spring time tornados are here folks way to early.
Want to end them this time of year?? Build my "TUNNELS" and keep them in cooling phase operation.

Joe Bastardi's sermon is a bit out-of-date. There was a lively discussion on the issue of direction of climate change back in the 1970's. Facts turned out to be on the warming side. There is very little prospect that further threshing of the same will produce anything, except more hot air. People are just not interested in going over the same things again and again.

The Earth is a closed system. Its mean temperature used to be 15 degrees centigrade. It is now 16 degrees as the atmospheric composition has changed. Each and every pattern in the turbulent process (known as daily weather) has changed a bit - they may look similar but still they are not exactly the same. Patterns do not repeat themselves if the inputs have been modified.

Basic physics say that the process will develop further and it will be warmer. When (or if) the mean temperature will be 21 degrees instead of 15, it will be another world indeed.

The Earth is a closed system

PJKM,

That may be the most clueless comment I have seen yet on this forum.

The dinosaurs were wiped out by a small object outside of the earth's system.

The regular pattern of glacial periods followed by interglacials is driven a relationship between the earth and the sun. Fluctuations in the behavior of the sun produce shorter term effects like the MWP and LIA.

Its mean temperature used to be 15 degrees centigrade

If you pick the right time period, the earth's mean temperature used to be 5C, or 25C, or anywhere in between. This idiotic CO2 worship being driven by people claiming to be intelligent scientists, is nothing short of bizarre.

Regarding my last post,I should have said "Makes you wonder if we're worrying about the wrong thing".

PJKM: Your mantra sounds a little dated. The PDO was identified and labeled in 1997, the AMO in 2004. Bastardi's concepts are current. Tsonis(2007) has a paper on the chaotic 4 major oscillations establishing synchronies by means of teleconnections that may widen your horizon. Your basic physics may need an upgrade though.

A god in a polytheistic way, is a scientific model. When you can't arrive at a solution, with empirical evidence then you construct a model instead. I hope that your observations are true, despite other facts and conclusions. But isn't it true that running up the co2 levels is not the best way to stop Global Warming, if it does exist. And if co2 levels were fine, wouldn't it be smarter to adapt to alternate forms of energy, because we are running out of oil.The real havoc will start, as the shortages are coming soon.Thanks for your honest Testimony to the facts.
Kipp

Great article from Joe.
As I read it, I kept remembering all the graphs I have seen of climate changes in history.
I keep seeing the same pattern repeated over and over and nowhere do I see anything unusual about today.
I hear all the cries of "unprecedented" this or "catastrophic" that but I still don't SEE any of it.

Can anyone please point to SOMTHING tangible that supports the Hysteria?

PJKM

The Earth is a closed system.

Are you speaking thermodynamically? No of course not, how then is Earth a closed system?

Its mean temperature used to be 15 degrees centigrade.

How long ago? What was it 500 years ago, 1,000 years, 1,500 years?

It is now 16 degrees as the atmospheric composition has changed.

Did anything else change? Why did the Little Ice Age end? Can you explain how 999,620 ppm all other gases are so heavily influenced by 380 ppm CO2?

Patterns do not repeat themselves if the inputs have been modified.

Patterns may not change if one MINOR input is modified slightly. A problem with AGW thought is order of magnitude, many of you are placing way too much emphasis on a minor event.

Basic physics say that the process will develop further and it will be warmer.

Basic physics? :) Please explain.

When (or if) the mean temperature will be 21 degrees instead of 15, it will be another world indeed.

Wha? When (or if) the mean temp will be 2 degrees instead of 15, it will be another Ice Age as has happened many times in the past.

Talk to me buddy, I love it when someone spells "physics", but can you talk it?

Regards,

Steve

Reminder: The most predictable effect of climate change is increased extremes of all kinds. You will find there is a lot of this going around. This week finds exceptional flooding etc. and lots deaths around the world (yeah, you don't have to tell me that's normal, it's the scale that is gradually increasing at an almost exponential rate).

Each summer a lot of ice disappears from the poles, and the jet stream moves arctic air southward during the winter. This is normal and to be expected. I have not yet been able to find science to explain whether more arctic fluctuations are happening now, but did find some stuff which I will repost sometime when I can find the time.

I'm pretty busy at the moment (aside from disgust at flaming tone of many of what I call the "posse" on this blog) so will continue to drop in from time to time.

There is no evidence of a linear trend, but there is very clear evidence of a step change increase in the late 1980s. The mean increased by about 1 degree and there hasn't been a year since that has been more than 1 degree below average. There is no similar period in the record.

I personally believe this is nothing more than a short-term phase of a natural cycle that will soon pass. It hardly seems calamitous and we'll just have to wait and see what happens next.

I didn't realize that Australia had their hottest January on record. The mainstream media, which I've been told is very liberal, has only talked about the intense cold in China and the Middle East.

JB's article sounds like the usual stuff he writes. What he fails to understand is that nobody is shutting down the debate. However, we have more than enough information for actionable public policy decisions to be made. Deniers need to stop using "debate" as a stalling tactic to prevent decisions from being made. We can debate, but there are many deniers who, no matter how much you debate with them, will not believe AGW. Why? Because it runs contrary to their ideological worldview. And solutions to the problem also run contrary to their ideological worldview.

I've said it once and I'll say it again: it is constructive to debate skeptics. It is NOT worthwhile to debate deniers or ideologues.

I agree that Dr. Bastardi's article awesome. I'm glad he continues to work with evidence.

In this blog, the majority of people trying to shut down debate are skeptics, some of them likely professional, and I would remind them that Dr. Bastardi does not appear to support the kind of closed mind to evidence that they tend to exhibit.

In the world community at large, well over 90% of qualified scientists not funded by prejudicial industry have concluded that global warming is now accelerating and that it is caused by human activity. This blog, though it tries to be 50:50, has been taken over by a majority on the other side and discount all sources that disagree with them as phony.

I find this tragic, as a simple review of world weather extremes and look at the statistics shows the overall trends are pretty straightforward evidence, despite seasonal and locational anomalies. Reminder: extreme cold is part of this unless it is offset by a lack of warmth throughout the year over (say) 5 or 10 years.

I agree there's not much we can do about it, as world efforts are mostly aimed at decreasing the *increase* of CO2 etc. emissions and developing nations are vastly invested in catching up their comforts (and after all they are now funding us as well), just as we are unlikely to give up comforts until the wolf is at our own and/or loved ones' doors.

FYI, iceman, increased weather variability is an anticipated effect of warming. It's far too soon to expect the overall warming trend (only about 1 degree C so far) to overcome the cold snaps.

AGW scientists now want to imprison those with different points of view. This should make BT proud!

http://www.nationalpost.com/news/story.html?id=290513

David Suzuki has called for political leaders to be thrown in jail for ignoring the science behind climate change.

At a Montreal conference last Thursday, the prominent scientist, broadcaster and Order of Canada recipient exhorted a packed house of 600 to hold politicians legally accountable for what he called an intergenerational crime. Though a spokesman said yesterday the call for imprisonment was not meant to be taken literally, Dr. Suzuki reportedly made similar remarks in an address at the University of Toronto last month.

Hi Steve Bloom,

Not cold or snowy enough yet in California to make you happy?

Hi Mark,

If NOAA says it was the warmest month ever in Australia, it must be true. However, RSS data doesn't appear to support that contention - with Western Australia slightly above normal and Eastern Australia slightly below normal.

http://www.remss.com/data/msu/graphics/tlt/medium/global/ch_tlt_2008_01_anom_v03_1.png

Compare the small positive anomaly in Australia with the huge negative anomaly in Afghanistan.

Steve Bloom-

How did you decide that we have seen increased weather variability?

With regard to everyone-

It's statements like this that have the majority of the American public convinced, in a purely non-scientific manner, that global warming is happening in dramatic fashion. By non-scientific, I don't mean that the argument has no scientific base. While I don't see much, there is some merit to the theory. All I mean is that; the American public doesn't understand the science enough to take a scientific stand on the issue. They hear that "increased weather variability" is a definitive sign of global warming. Thus when they get a thunderstorm in february and then snow the next week, or similar events like that they assume it must be global warming.
There have been several posts over the last months of people stating definitively that they have seen weather dramatically worse recently than in their past. The conviction with which they are written only goes to demonstrate how easily people believe that dramatic global warming is occuring.
If someone wasn't aware of what the actual temperature was in numerical form, they wouldn't notice an extra degree. If it's 59 degrees every day for a week and then 58 degrees for the next week and then 60 degrees the following week, you wouldn't notice unless you saw the number. The amount of people who convince themselves that the weather is dramatically warmer or stormier don't do so scientifically, they are merely told that things are worse, therefore they will recognize that as fact.

Regards, Elliot

Steve Bloom,

I have heard that. At the same time weather variability is pretty "normal" either way.

One point, there is a good deal of uncertainty about the implications and effects of a warmer world. If the world warms it is possible that some areas will actually benefit.(I'm not saying that it's okay if the warming occurs, just stating what might happen.) On the other hand, there's little doubt a significantly cooler world would be devastating for humanity.

Mark: And there are other deniers who accept the hypothesis of AGW, like me; we simply believe the impact it had on the temperature rise over the term of the instrument temperature record is negligible. Let me ask you this hypothetical: If all of the causes of the 20th-century warming were finally quantified and CO2 turned out to represent only 5% of it, would you still feel the need for all the hoopla surrounding it?

I'm not so sure you can blame weather extremes on AGW. The LIA was replete with extremes as well.

One of the worst famines to occur in Western Europe (1318-1321) was the result of severe flooding due to an almost endless procession of North Atlantic cyclones from April 1318 through Spetember 1318, as well as the summer of 1320. Both years saw extreme bitter cold the following winters.

In 1666, the UK and most of Scandanavia suffered one of thier worst heatwave/droughts in history. In September of that year, almost half of London burnt down during the Great London Fire. The same Continental polar high that produced drought in the spring and summer induced one of the coldest winters in UK history.

North America saw its most severe drought in history during the coldest decades of the LIA. This drought occured over the Tidewater states.

This same pattern of floods, heatwaves, and droughts occured through out the world during the LIA. In some locations it snowed as early as September, and as late as June; other areas saw devastating precipitation followed by catastrophic droughts.

As the noted anthropologist Dr Fagan pointed out, the LIA was known as much for its extreme weather as for its cold.

Iceman,

I saw your comment on a previous thread about buying Extreme Weather. It's not a scholarly book, but it's excellent for the layman(woman) interested in anomalous weather.
Regarding your interest in the 1899 cold wave, are you a fellow lover of cold for its own sake? In weather/climate message boards I've run across a fair number of people who love snow, but people who like me who love cold in general are more rare.

Well, looking at that map it doesn't seem completely correct. Here in northwest Jersey my records showed a +2.91 degree off the average. It's saying 4-6 degrees warmer. I guess I have an error of margin, but so do they...

Suzuki's increasingly strident tone is in keeping with the IPCC's push to get draconian legislation in place before they are proven completely wrong. Suzuki is a biologist with a PhD specializing in fruit flies but he has the ear of the media by working for the CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation), which makes him doubly dangerous. He is the Al Gore of the North and just as much of a hypocrite. It is truly sad when attempts to shut down dissent revert to the tactics of the Inquisition; the AGW faithful must be truly embarrassed by this spokesman.

Thanks Brett for the link to Joe's article. It brings to light many important points that are lost on many who post to this blog. I keep reading/hearing that weather is not climate, but then many peo