Global warming vs El Niño
Have you noticed the latest weather phenomenon? The Chicken Littles have suddenly stopped expelling hot air about "global warming." I first noticed this a week or so ago when their minds were blown by the contradictions between East Coast warmth and Colorado blizzards. All of a sudden their minds could not compute. Then the head Chicken Little (who probably works in George Soros' basement) came out with a new "talking point" to help the lesser Littles explain the inexplicable weather and the phrase "climate change" quickly replaced "global warming."
I have not studied meteorology formally. I'm just one of the millions of amateur weather-watchers many of whom collect and provide data for professional meteorologists. Anyone who has observed weather over a few decades and has read the observations of the pros knows that meteorology, like all science, is growing and developing. Weather is an extremely complex subject. Until the recent computer era, understanding and interpreting weather patterns used to have to be done with educated guesswork and speculation based on hand-drawn spread-sheets. Computers are changing meteorology. Computers have also enabled the wide-eyed Chicken Littles to let their minds run wild imagining all sorts of new ways in which the sky could fall.
Now, I'm not saying that there is no global warming. There is. Temperatures have definitely gone up in the past decade or so but is it just a temporary phenomenon? Does it have something to do with the fact that the sun has warmed over the past decade and that the entire solar system has gotten hotter or have humans caused it? Only half-educated morons (or useful idiots being manipulated by anti-capitalists) will answer any of these questions with certainty.
With the balmy winter on our Atlantic Seaboard and in Western Europe, the Chicken Littles are running around screaming that the sky is falling but most professional meteorologists are blaming the weather on the latest El Niño. This article from the Washington Post is typical:
It's starts off screaming that the sky is falling but ends with a scientist saying that it's EL Niño.
The El Niño phenomenon is also not yet completely understood. It was originally recognized by fisherman off the coast of South America as the appearance of unusually warm water in the Pacific ocean, occurring near the beginning of the year. El Niño means The Little Boy or Christ child in Spanish. This name was used for the tendency of the phenomenon to arrive around Christmas.
El Niños have been studied for about 50 years but were thought of as mostly something that affected Peru and Chile. A link between El Niños and very wet winters on the West Coast of North America was first noticed in 1982. Meteorologists in the USA then backtracked and found mention of El Niños by Peruvian and Chilean meteorologists going back to 1902 with recurrences every 3 to 4 years. They saw that every occurrence of El Niño coincided with wet West Coast winters.
I've lived through six El Niños on the West Coast: in 1982-1983, 1986-1987, 1991-1992, 1994-1995 and 1997-1998. Every one of them was different. The only thing that they had in common was increased rainfall. Some were warm and humid. Others were cold and damp. When you start to study all the records of El Niños going back to 1902, you begin to see that, like all weather phenomena, it is connected to other events in other parts of the globe in an extremely complex interplay of temperatures and atmospheric pressures.
Computers have allowed us to begin to study weather holistically. Without computers, the interconnectedness of all global weather events is hard to comprehend. Unfortunately plenty of half-educated idiots, using computer-generated models, have jumped to all sorts of astonishing conclusions already mostly because it suits their anti-capitalist agenda or appeals to their hysterical personalities.
They seem to forget that there have been major climate changes throughout history that were not caused by humans but that did affect where humans settled and how they developed. What we know as the "Last Glacial Maximum" (which ended about 18,000 years ago) prevented the increasing human population from expanding into northern Europe and, as a result, humans became bottled up in the mild climates of Mesopotamia, the Nile Valley and around the coast of the Mediterranean where they were forced to eventually settle down and live in co-operation with each other. Without that last ice age, humans may have continued being nomadic tribes moving ever north and civilization may have been delayed for a few more millenia. But I'll leave such useless speculation to Al Gore.
Can humans change climate? Maybe. It's probably not a coincidence that the East Coast of the USA and Western Europe seem to be experiencing more "global warming" than the rest of us. The lands around "The Pond" are the most densely populated and most industrially developed nations in the world. It's not out of the question that increasing human population and industry can change climate.
Maybe even human minds can change climate. Can peoples' hopes and prayers change the physical world? Why are there fewer earthquakes in the Mediterranean nowadays than there were in the time of the ancient Greeks and Romans? Are the East Coasters and Europeans sick and tired of their nasty gloomy cold damp winters and longing for warmth and sunshine? I find that interesting but I'll leave such silly speculation to Pat Robertson.
BTW This season's El Niño is atypical in that it is split. No one knows what that portends. You can see that here on NASA's website.
Meantime, according to National Geographic, some scientists are worried that a "Mini Ice Age" May Be Coming Soon.
Even if the sky is falling, I prefer to quietly study and observe it rather than run around screaming like our hysterical Chicken Littles.
I have not studied meteorology formally. I'm just one of the millions of amateur weather-watchers many of whom collect and provide data for professional meteorologists. Anyone who has observed weather over a few decades and has read the observations of the pros knows that meteorology, like all science, is growing and developing. Weather is an extremely complex subject. Until the recent computer era, understanding and interpreting weather patterns used to have to be done with educated guesswork and speculation based on hand-drawn spread-sheets. Computers are changing meteorology. Computers have also enabled the wide-eyed Chicken Littles to let their minds run wild imagining all sorts of new ways in which the sky could fall.
Now, I'm not saying that there is no global warming. There is. Temperatures have definitely gone up in the past decade or so but is it just a temporary phenomenon? Does it have something to do with the fact that the sun has warmed over the past decade and that the entire solar system has gotten hotter or have humans caused it? Only half-educated morons (or useful idiots being manipulated by anti-capitalists) will answer any of these questions with certainty.
With the balmy winter on our Atlantic Seaboard and in Western Europe, the Chicken Littles are running around screaming that the sky is falling but most professional meteorologists are blaming the weather on the latest El Niño. This article from the Washington Post is typical:
It’s nice out there, but global warming dampens the fun
WASHINGTON - Never has good weather felt so bad. Never have flowers inspired so much fear. Never has the warm caress of a sunbeam seemed so ominous. The weather is sublime, it's glorious, it's the end of the world.
"Amazing, but it makes me think we might not be here too much longer, because of global warming," said Laura Ingoldsby, a grad student getting ready for a jog on the towpath at Fletcher's Boathouse.
[...]
But Dennis Feltgen, a National Weather Service meteorologist, says climate change isn't the culprit. It's El Niño. Warm water in the tropical Pacific, changed wind patterns, lots of balmy air blowing our way from the southern United States.
"We're in an El Niño, which has absolutely nothing to do with global warming," Feltgen says. "It keeps a lot of the cold air locked up in Canada, and makes the West Coast of the United States stormy, which we've seen, and makes the southern one-third of the country wetter than normal."
It's starts off screaming that the sky is falling but ends with a scientist saying that it's EL Niño.
The El Niño phenomenon is also not yet completely understood. It was originally recognized by fisherman off the coast of South America as the appearance of unusually warm water in the Pacific ocean, occurring near the beginning of the year. El Niño means The Little Boy or Christ child in Spanish. This name was used for the tendency of the phenomenon to arrive around Christmas.
El Niños have been studied for about 50 years but were thought of as mostly something that affected Peru and Chile. A link between El Niños and very wet winters on the West Coast of North America was first noticed in 1982. Meteorologists in the USA then backtracked and found mention of El Niños by Peruvian and Chilean meteorologists going back to 1902 with recurrences every 3 to 4 years. They saw that every occurrence of El Niño coincided with wet West Coast winters.
I've lived through six El Niños on the West Coast: in 1982-1983, 1986-1987, 1991-1992, 1994-1995 and 1997-1998. Every one of them was different. The only thing that they had in common was increased rainfall. Some were warm and humid. Others were cold and damp. When you start to study all the records of El Niños going back to 1902, you begin to see that, like all weather phenomena, it is connected to other events in other parts of the globe in an extremely complex interplay of temperatures and atmospheric pressures.
Computers have allowed us to begin to study weather holistically. Without computers, the interconnectedness of all global weather events is hard to comprehend. Unfortunately plenty of half-educated idiots, using computer-generated models, have jumped to all sorts of astonishing conclusions already mostly because it suits their anti-capitalist agenda or appeals to their hysterical personalities.
They seem to forget that there have been major climate changes throughout history that were not caused by humans but that did affect where humans settled and how they developed. What we know as the "Last Glacial Maximum" (which ended about 18,000 years ago) prevented the increasing human population from expanding into northern Europe and, as a result, humans became bottled up in the mild climates of Mesopotamia, the Nile Valley and around the coast of the Mediterranean where they were forced to eventually settle down and live in co-operation with each other. Without that last ice age, humans may have continued being nomadic tribes moving ever north and civilization may have been delayed for a few more millenia. But I'll leave such useless speculation to Al Gore.
Can humans change climate? Maybe. It's probably not a coincidence that the East Coast of the USA and Western Europe seem to be experiencing more "global warming" than the rest of us. The lands around "The Pond" are the most densely populated and most industrially developed nations in the world. It's not out of the question that increasing human population and industry can change climate.
Maybe even human minds can change climate. Can peoples' hopes and prayers change the physical world? Why are there fewer earthquakes in the Mediterranean nowadays than there were in the time of the ancient Greeks and Romans? Are the East Coasters and Europeans sick and tired of their nasty gloomy cold damp winters and longing for warmth and sunshine? I find that interesting but I'll leave such silly speculation to Pat Robertson.
BTW This season's El Niño is atypical in that it is split. No one knows what that portends. You can see that here on NASA's website.
Meantime, according to National Geographic, some scientists are worried that a "Mini Ice Age" May Be Coming Soon.
Even if the sky is falling, I prefer to quietly study and observe it rather than run around screaming like our hysterical Chicken Littles.
posted by Joubert at 8:47 AM
The Alliance
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