06 January 2007

It's NOT Global Warming!

The lack of winter in New England is not NOT NOT a sign of global warming.

  1. Didja notice the weather in the Upper Midwest? Global warming is a world-wide thing. If it's balanced out between one place and another, it doesn't count.

  2. Global warming also isn't a one-year thing. If you'd been talking about the past few summers' heat wave across Europe, you could blame that on global warming, but blaming one single summer on global warming doesn't cut it.

  3. El Nino is the most likely cause for this winter's weather, both the warmth in the Northeast, and the snow in the Midwest. El Nino is a short cycle in the weather that really CAN vary from one year to the next, so it's the most likely culprit.


So there. Stop calling it global warming already! *grr*

3 comments:

Anthony said...

Weren't scientists worried about global cooling just 30 or so years back?

From what I understand, its normal to expect swings in weather patterns even over a period of years.

zandperl said...

'Fraid I'm too young to know what scientists were afraid of 30 years ago. :-P

Yes, swings in weather patterns are expected, so for example this year's warm New England and cold Upper Midwest winter is a swing in a weather pattern. Climate change is all about long term "swings", that is for multiple years. This is why I mentioned that the multiple years of heat waves in Europe could be a form of climate change.

Global warming specifically is the idea that the current "swing" is much worse than any of those in the (geologically recent) past, and the records do show this. Temperatures now are higher than any time in the last thousand years. Basically the last time it was this hot was when the dinosaurs roamed the Earth.

Whether the current high temperatures of global warming are man-made ("anthropogenic") or not is a different question, and one I addressed elsewhere.

utenzi said...

I agree with you 100%, ZP. While I certainly agree with the global warming theory I find "scientists" that declare every single blip in the weather as proof to be quite tiresome. Weather trends are statistical in nature, not driven by singular events.