Next Up – The Flood
Dr. Masters can be a very depressing read in the morning. In addition to charts, graphs, videos and analysis on the tornado explosion of the past week, he provides a preview of the 100-year flood that will occur on the Mississippi.
Congress had better be ready to spend some money, or to tell their Southern base to accept the “will of G*d” for their sins [voting for Republicants?].
This sort of weather, of course, cannot have anything to do with global climate change, because the “kerning was wrong” on those hacked British e-mails, and Al Gore has a big house.
3 comments
Was there a scientific consensus regarding global cooling in the 1970’s, Mr. Duff? If so, I must have missed it. What I saw was one (1) scientific paper which proposed that we might be entering a cooling cycle, followed by hoards of popular press popularizations of the notion. One scientific paper does not a consensus make, Mr. Duff. And like it or not, that’s how science works — via testing ideas multiple times until it’s clear that no matter how many times you run the experiment, you’re going to come up with the same answer. Nobody ever managed to replicate the cooling cycle paper, which is why it was discarded.
Of course, you don’t understand science, you just attack scientists. Why don’t you go back to living in a cave and hitting moose over the head with a big stick for your evening meal, then, since you hate science so much?
Actually the cycles that have been traced back thousands of years in tree rings and ice cores say that the earth should be cooling. All of the cyclical factors are prejudiced towards cooling, which is helping to hold down the total effect of the warming caused by green house gases. The warming would be twice as bad as it is without the cooling effects of the observed cycles.
The actual numbers leave no doubt that the average temperature of the world is increasing.
This increase causes localized changes. For example, Britain has been kept warmer than normal for its latitude by the presence of the Gulf Stream. The Gulf Stream is powered to a great extent by the downwelling in the Arctic as the current cools. As the current is not cooling as much as it did because of the warming in the Arctic, the Gulf Stream is weakening, and Britain should see cooler temperatures, more in line with the Canadian provinces that are due West.
Global climate change, which I have been using since 2006, is considered to be a more accurate term. It describes the effect of the global warming that is taking place.
One thing I learned in my working lifetime as support staff for a variety of scientists (list available on request) is that scientific reality does not listen to, or reflect, anyone’s ideology… including yours, Duffy.
When I first heard of global climate change… I was listening to a public lecture at Rice University on a variety of environment-related topics almost four decades ago… I withheld judgment: as BadTux says, one paper doth not a consensus make.
Thirty-odd years later, the consensus among respected climate scientists is overwhelming, and you… you, Duffy, not the rest of us on this thread… now have to pick and choose your ideologically correct contrarians, avoiding that consensus altogether, because the consensus that emerged did not conform to your socio-politico-economic views. Again, as BadTux might say, that’s not how science works.
But your children and grandchildren are the ones who will face the realities of what is coming. Enjoy the rest of your time; you probably won’t experience any of the bad stuff. But they probably will.