A Cooling “Blast from the Past”
In keeping with the spring thaw snowstorm hitting the NE USA, I thought I’d provide this link. It’s to an article from Harper’s Magazine – in September, 1958.
The thesis then was that continued global warming would melt the Arctic ice cap. That would cause a rise in global sea levels – and more precipitation, including more snow.
However, unlike modern-day Cassandras Chicken Littles prophets of doom climate warming “true believers”, the theory then was that this ongoing global warming would trigger another ice age.
Seriously.
You see, some of that increasing amount of the snow would never melt during the summer. That non-melting snow would start to form permanent snow cover, then glaciers. Those glaciers would grow, then merge. Winds from the north would begin to cool the weather farther and farther south. Ice sheets would form, and begin to creep south. In fact, ice sheets up to two miles thick would cover the US and Europe in “several thousand years!”
Of course, they were also predicting in 1958 that the Arctic Ocean could be ice-free by 1978, too. They seem to have been a bit off about that, too. (smile)
Today, the Arctic is still supposedly melting. But now that’s allegedly evidence of runaway man-made global warming and a sign that the planet is about to overheat. Go figure.
Or at least, maybe today’s climatologists need to “go figure”. Maybe they need to acknowledge that perhaps they don’t really know enough about what’s causing the earth’s climate to change over time well enough to predict squat with accuracy.
After all, they’ve not exactly had a great track record over the last 60 years. Nor have they been exactly consistent in their predictions and claims.
(Hat tip to Drudge and to Michaal Bastasch at The Daily Caller, who provided this story containing the link to the Harper’s article.)
Category: Global Warming, Historical
Houston Chronicle guy today said we just had the warmest winter on record. Wonder if he’s going to try peddling that line in Boston?
So long as the ‘we’ he said refers to the United States, I imagine that’d be perfectly fine — whether you believe in ‘global warming’ or not, it’s entirely possible for Boston to have the worst winter imaginable, and yet average temperatures across the US to be higher than all previously recorded values.
I’m quite sure you know this already, but I figure it’s the sort of thing worth repeating nonetheless. If people want to debate the science, fine, but the whole “Well, it’s cold here, so screw that global warming stuff!” approach is as ludicrous as me looking at my swimmer friends, seeing all of them thin, and declaring the very real issue of obesity demographics to be made-up nonsense because I don’t see any evidence of it.
Confirmation bias is equally ridiculous IMHO
David, if he’s referring to Houston, that’s a bald-faced lie. It’s not even the warmest in the past 15 years.
http://www.srh.noaa.gov/hgx/?n=climate_iah_normals_summary
The only climatologists who are buying into this “climate change” nonsense (which, sadly, is most of them) are the ones who either have a political agenda of their own, or their bosses have a political agenda and they have to spout the party line to keep their jobs.
Obligatory….
THANKS OBAMA!!
😀
I vaguely remember something like that, but I was in grade school, so it was an oddity then (1958).
What is coming out of climate science is mostly better weather forecasting.
If it snows in April this year, I’ll let you know… again.
Am I the only one that keeps clicking looking for new from the MD front?
No.
And on Mark and Jonn’s FB pages as well.
No news except for the quote from earlier in the day.
” In recess. But dude this is awesome sauce.”
Perhaps you could give us an update?
I’ve been wondering that my self. We’ll hopefully have an AAR this weekend.
Read some tidbits below. (I am HULK SMASH angry, but hopeful)
TSO just posted on his FB page: “Whelp. I have no idea what happened but somehow I got restrained because of “Bobo” and “other whitey”.”
I *CERTAINLY* hope the AAR/Hotwash has *SOME* kind of *LOGICAL* explanation to this and *someone* besides the HEROs here, gets their junk stomped. (Legal Beagles and well, you know… Bethesda Butt Boys)
I am completely flabbergasted….
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v340/sithjuggalo/flabbergasted.jpg
What???
All,
Before we all lose our collective shit, TSO did post this comment in the thread…
“Bizarre ruling but all is okay. Settle down. Huge 1st amendment case now going to probably be appealed.”
So I an not going to get my proverbial panties in a bigger wad then they already are and I’m going to try to just unclench and trust TSO and Jonn.
/ that farking spandex chunk of *shit*
Gotta ask…Judge Vaughey?
ChipNASA, you are being a big meanie.
Well Antarctic Ice Sheets continue to grow so maybe they got some of that upside down and it’s actually going to cover South American and Africa first….
L Taylor will be here shortly to scold you and explain why you all are completely wrong.
Here are some snow cover maps from USNIC. This one is a world map for a month ago (2/21/2015):
ftp://140.90.213.161/autosnow/4kmNH/multisensor_4km_nh_snow_ice_sensor_latlon_2015052.png
Note how far south the snow line goes, including Japan, and some in Africa’s Atlas mountains.
This is a world map, today’s snow line.
ftp://140.90.213.161/autosnow/4kmNH/multisensor_4km_nh_snow_ice_sensor_latlon_2015078.png
Annual snowfall lines go in roughly 30-year cycles.
Hondo…Hey thanks! I remember this movie, “The Day After Tomorrow”. Written by Roland Emmerich.
From Wiki, “He is a collector of art and an active campaigner for the LGBT community, and is openly gay. He is also a campaigner for awareness of global warming and equal rights.”
So, there ya go, from the man with the final word, after Lars, on all things artsy, global warming and gay.
People who can not accurately predict next weeks weather have no business trying to predict changes to the weather five, ten, or twenty years down the pike. When a faith based religion masquerades as science there is no telling how much damage it can do. Remember when we used the earth-centric universe model? People were burned as witches if they questioned the settled science of the day.
Every pound of C02 my wood stove releases is used as food to the trees I will use as firewood later. And most of it will be converted to O2 that I will breath. I am in symbiosis with my environment. Go feed your ego somewhere else, Mr Gore.
I really don’t have a problem with them not being able to predict next week – that’s tough. But I understand that NONE of the models work retroactively on what has already happened, and THAT bothers me. The last few centuries are on record and the models ought to be able to track previous long-term trends, if they are any good.
Bingo. That’s called “basic model validation”.
If they can’t do that, well, . . . .
That’s not entirely true – models are very often used to reproduce scenarios from the past, and are then compared with collected data, and can do a fairly decent job. However, the public perception is that computers are incredibly accurate, and these models give you the answer to a simulation. Both of these are actually incorrect. Computers have inaccuracies when dealing with real (non-integer) values, and those inaccuracies can lead to considerable variance in model output depending on everything from the tools used to build the model to the type of hardware it is run on. Add in imperfect data –any real-world data is imperfect!- and, through what is commonly known as ‘chaos theory’, you’ll get changes over time in simulations. Small initial differences can lead to large changes over time. Which leads to the second point – you don’t run, Star Trek-style, a simulation of climate by saying, “Computer, what will the climate be in 2025?”, you typically instead choose a small subset of many parameters you’re interested in looking at -meaning, seeing what effect they have when changed- and then you run an ensemble calculation, where you run a model (or multiple models) with similar but slightly different initial conditions, and get a range of results. And then, looking at the large number of results you have, you can sort out what happened and have a hypothesis for why. Doing this, large retroactive trends are certainly reproducible, and this is usually done to establish a baseline before making changes to determine what would happen in a new scenario. Are they exactly reproducible? As in, saying exactly what the temperature was in Baltimore, MD on August 23rd 1974 at 2pm? No, of course not – that requires far more precision than is possible with either the models or the data. But can they show large trends in the atmospheric and oceanic systems, and reproduce trendlines, average temperatures and important data on things like chemical tracers? Yes, fairly well. These will always be ‘imperfect’, but so are most things we simulate. Trying to land something on the moon requires computers… Read more »
Please provide a citation showing data documenting a model that correctly accounts for both (1) the “little ice age” associated with the Maunder Minimum, and (2) the Roman/Medieval Warm period. I don’t believe one currently exists, but if one does I’ll acknowledge the fact that I was wrong after I’ve had a chance to examine the data.
Hondo, here’s a link to a NOAA study on paleoclimate which you may find interesting.
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/globalwarming/medieval.html
The best source for information on the MWP and LIA/Maunder Minimum actually comes from NASA’s SOHO website.
This:
http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2014/10jun_solarminimax/
And this is a research paper from the USGS:
http://geology.er.usgs.gov/eespteam/Atlantic/GPCabs.htm
The opening of this paper states that data suggest that extreme temperature swings and multidecadal temperature oscillations are common occurrences in the Holocene (that’s US – NOW) period. 🙂
I hope this helps you out. 😉
Here’s a pdf copy of that USGS study.
http://www.meteo.psu.edu/holocene/public_html/shared/articles/Croninetal-GlobPlanChng03.pdf
While I’m at it, using current and recent past temperature variations is not an acceptable way to approach climate variations. That requires information from other resources such as mud cores, pollen counts, stratigraphy, etc. Using only one kind of data to reach a conclusion or ‘simulate’ something does not work.
For example, while there are pictographs of lakes full of fish and game on a savannah and rain falling from the sky found in caves in the Sahara, which is now a desert, those are indications that at one time the Sahara may have been wet and green. Pictographs are not enough. However, mud cores from the west coast of Africa show that the climate of the Sahara can change literally in the blink of an eye, meaning one to two generations (40 to 80 years), going from dry desert to wet, green savannah. Those mud cores also show that these changes are regular cycles and have everything to do with the monsoonal seasons.
Failing to use all of these variables as a means of understanding past climate activity is poor science.
I remember when I was a kid in the seventies when some “experts” were predicting a man made ice age due to particles from burnt fossil fuels blotting out sunlight, that was supposed to have happened by the 1990s, and of course… Astronomers were observing the Martian polar ice caps melting a few years ago, and there aren’t any SUV’s or coal-fired power plants there. Are they going to blame the probe vehicles we sent there?
Shh! Don’t give ’em any ideas . . . .
Yep, it’s the Mar’s Rover. Damn thing is a gas hog!
Had my lawn power raked this morning.
Currently 67 degrees and very sunny here in the Snake River Plain of Idaho.
Good Bye Winter !!!
Claw – this is an extremely long shot, but I had a friend named Merle Kjer (pronounced “care”) that settled sorta kinda in your neck of the woods in the late 80s early 90s. He was a Pig Driver when I knew him and an OH-6 crewchief in Vietnam.
Ever heard of him?
Nope, never have.
Sorry.
This morning when I got up, I found 1 inch of snow on my front steps. That was the forecast, which is fine. It’s coming out of Alberta to the northwest. It’s now nearly 10AM. I have shoveled the snow off the front steps and sidewalk, 4 inches since 8AN, which is NOT what was forecast, and put out bird food because the birds are quite hungry. The falling snow covers it as fast as I can clear and replace it.
Global warming? No, it’s just erratic weather, which happens on a regular basis. Early spring snow is not unusual where I live. It’s just annoying.