Weather Or Not

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Best I can tell, even climate scientists aren't willing to claim unequivocally that the current wave of horrific weather in the US is due to global climate change. But since volatility is part and parcel of the predictions of the effect of global warming, it's gotta make you wonder.

I'm well aware that a given snowstorm or flood or the wiping out of Joplin are just points on a graph; but I find it noteworthy that the areas of the greatest and generally unprecedented weather-related recent destruction in the US are in the hotbeds of climate skepticism: the middle and southern parts.

Which makes me wonder: how much of this sort of thing will it take for them (and by "them" I mean virtually the entire Republican party, the strength of which lies in those currently devastated areas) at least to consider the possibility that human activity has something to do with it; and at least to discuss rationally the wisdom of taking whatever measures that might mitigate it in our favor? One might think, for example, that a climate-denier politician might have a harder time holding a rally in what's left of Joplin than he would have had a year ago.

It's one thing, after all, to deny facts that are sort of abstract, in the sense that ignoring them doesn't affect a person's day -- like the age of the earth, or evolution, or Reagnomics (which affected decades, but which, being more than twenty-four hours old, is ancient history). When it blows your house down, you'd think it gets a little real.

So it's a dilemma in both directions: here I am acknowledging that single events can't be construed as proof, while suggesting that maybe the recent weather, happening as it is in the most recalcitrant parts of our country, might serve to wake their citizens to the possibility that the conventional unwisdom of their leaders ought to be questioned?

What irony it would be! Acts of god suggesting to the party of god that in ignoring the actions of man they're missing the party.

Chilling

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Not that I understand all of the esoterica on this blog, but I think the point is clear enough. The chart above shows average Arctic sea ice thickness for a given month over the years, with projections forward following the trends.

More impressive to me than the data themselves, and the speed with which things are changing, and the science behind it all, is the power of denial in so many of my fellow humans, weak and needy as we all are. And -- at least in the US -- the fact that the denial is based on some combination of politics, of all things, and religion (I guess). That virtually all deniers of climate change are members of the same political party says something very powerful about that party and its relationship with reality, the value it places on factuality as a basis for its policies and opinions.

Scary. Very scary.

Scientists, Subtly

Snowfall Made Simple

(And, just for the sake of repetition of the obvious: warmer air means more evaporation, more moisture capacity, and, then, almost like science -- more snow. In the winter. When it snows.)

Stupid On Display

So the "reporters" at Fox "News" have decided that snow in the East Coast disproves global warming. In a scoop of epic proportions (in the same way a shovel of horse crap is a scoop), they stuck a copy of Al Gore's book in the snow. Nothing like graphics to prove a point.

Now, anyone with a brain (a subset of humanity which, as has been amply demonstrated, does not include any of the "personalities" on Fox "News") knows snow in winter -- even record snow on an occasion -- neither proves nor disproves a damn thing. The fact that this January was the warmest one, globally, on record (while Florida froze, my area had its warmest ever, and let's not mention the Winter Olympics); the fact that the ten years just ended was the warmest decade on record; those bits of data carry a little weight. One season, in one part of the world: not so much.

With that caveat in mind, it'd be interesting to ask those yukking yokels, those proud prevaricators, those fatuous fabricators of Fox "News" what they think of the fact that at the very time they were getting their giggles garroting Gore, thirty-two people died of record heat in Brazil. And that, even after the unprecedented heat wave of a year ago, they broke another heat record a few days ago in Melbourne.

I guess it would affect them the way it affects Fox listeners: not a damn bit.

Keep up the good work, Fox and followers. You're like WWII collaborators; except this time, when your denial does its work, there'll be no one left to bring the full force of history to bear on you. So, lucky you.

[Yes, I realize this is sort of old news. But in my view you never can call enough attention to the kind of idiocy that passes for news and which is eaten like ice cream by Fox "News" viewers.]