Weather Does Not Equal Climate
For most of us in the Eastern U.S., January was a really tough month to endure. In Cleveland, it was almost ceaselessly cloudy, snowy and cold. It was really easy to get into a funk.
So, I have an iota of sympathy for Kevin O'Brien, a columnist in The Plain-Dealer, in regards to his February 5th editorial "Another Disappointing Year for Global Warming Hopefuls".
You see, I too was grumpy, and I too was damn tired of the bitter weather. As O'Brien rightly notes, it was the second-snowiest on record for Cleveland. According to National Weather Service data for Cleveland for the month of January, there were two stretches of at least seven days when the temperature didn't rise above freezing, and twelve morning lows below 10F. Thus, at one level, O'Brien's rant was somewhat understandable.
But I can't cut O'Brien much slack. Unlike O'Brien and others in the blogosphere (such as this February 4 oped in the Washington Times by Deroy Murdock entitled "Warming Up the Laughs"), I don't wildly extrapolate from one month's worth of weather to claim not only that climate change is bunk, but that the "global warming panic machine is quite detectably losing steam" or that "both troglodyte right-wingers and lachrymose left-wingers find Albert Gore's simmering planet hypothesis increasingly hilarious."
I concede that Al Gore and others have been guilty at times of overpromoting the cause: being a bit too flippant in describing the state of climate science as bullet-proof, and a bit too hyperbolic in suggesting impending ecological disasters as certain and imminent.
That being said, that doesn't mean that Gore et al don't have the story directionally-correct.
If you strip away the hype and review the sober assessments of the vast majority of highly-clinical climate experts who have weighed the enormous body of scientific evidence, there is little doubt remaining that human-induced climate change almost certainly is actually occurring, with the net effect of driving a trend of higher average temperatures across the planet. Legitimate questions certainly do remain about pace and impact, but the basic phenomenon is within the realm of little doubt. All one has to do is spend a few minutes reading the work, and the bona-fides, of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to get pretty comfortable with that conclusion.
For the skeptic crowd including O'Brien and Murdock, there seems to be one misapprehension that tends to underlie their often-angry dismissals of the entire climate change movement. It is a simple logical defect, no doubt stemming from a poor understanding of statistical principles, leading such critics to completely ignore (when convenient to do so) the difference between the concept of weather and the concept of climate.
I've been thinking up an analogy that better illustrates the distinction between weather and climate to deniers who pooh-pooh climate change on the basis of one cold month such as January 2009 in the Eastern U.S. I've been working on telling the following story, one that's a little more accessible for the typical layman (and this interview with Professor Daniel Esty of Yale University discusses polling data indicating that many fewer men than women are concerned about climate change):
Consider the 1998 New York Yankees, clearly one of the best teams in baseball history, with an astounding final regular season record of 114-48, and a post-season record of 11-2, culminating in a four-game sweep of the San Diego Padres in the World Series.
As great as this team proved itself over the course of a very long season, there were several multi-game stretches in which these 1998 Yankees compiled losing records. For instance, from August 19 to September 21 -- more than a whole month -- the Yankees were downright mediocre, with a record of 14 -18. From almost any vantage-point within that stretch, and only considering the games during that stretch, it would be easy for an observer to declare that group of Yankees a so-so team. However, over the much broader season, the verdict is unambiguously and incontestably the opposite: that the 1998 Yankees were an outstanding team.
Weather is to climate what one pitch is to an entire baseball season: an instantaneous reading of conditions, an infinitesimal snapshot, in the midst of something incredibly larger and broader.
Sure, we can have a record cold day, week or month - while at the same time being in the midst of a long-term upward trend of temperatures. This doesn't seem so hard to understand, really.
(By the way, many believers of climate change are often guilty of snidely commenting about a brutally hot summer day by saying something like "Enjoying the climate change?" while wearing a knowing grin. These are cheap shots that I wish would cease, because they too are inappropriate extrapolations from a small-sample, just like the practice I'm decrying above.)
Not only is climate an assimilation over time of local weather conditions, it is also an assimilation across geography of weather conditions. For instance, while those of us in Cleveland and the Eastern U.S. were shivering in January, places elsewhere like Southern California experienced the warmest January on record, as documented in this article. If Kevin O'Brien had spent January in Los Angeles instead of Cleveland, maybe he wouldn't have written the same essay. (Well, he probably would have just waited for the next cold snap to trot out his faulty arguments: O'Brien tends to retread this "global warming is nonsense" column every time Cleveland experiences a longish spell of below-average temperatures.)
From a mathematical standpoint, one can intellectually consider the concept of climate as essentially the integral of weather over time and over space. Alas, I suspect that many of those who don't believe in climate change are probably not too well-versed in the principles of calculus.
Ultimately, I feel sorry for the most strident climate change deniers. People who speak with a conviction masking their lack of understanding often do so from an entrenched position of fear and ignorance, which is a terrible way to live.
As for the pitiful O'Brien, I thought about writing a letter to The Plain-Dealer in response to his February 5th oped, but I doubted that the editors - worried about reader attention span and comprehension - would print something of sufficient length and depth to present a reasoned argument.
So, I wrote this piece, but as a concession to brevity, I'll close by stating something simple, in the hope that he and others of his ilk will soon get it: "Weather does not equal climate."
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Making conclusions based on one month of data (or a few years for that matter) is pretty naive. Still, if some are to point out local weather events from last month, it's worth noting...
http://dat
So it was noticeably cold in the upper midwest and northeast parts of the U.S. and western Europe - areas that make up very small fractions of the Earth's surface. It was quite warm almost everywhere else. The small areas of cold are some key populated areas where important policy is made. As a result, it provided some good propaganda for the contrarian political hacks.
The problem is not so much one of the Earth becoming an uninhabitable rock, or even the extinction of the human race. Given our species' proven ability to thrive in almost every ecological niche, extinction (for us, anyway) has a very low order of probability. On the other hand, the ability of the biosphere to support the numbers of humans now present on the planet, given large-scale disruptions in the prevalent climate, largely driven by human activity since the beginning of the industrial revolution, is very much in doubt. The history of Easter Island is an excellent case study, in microcosm of where we are heading.
Most people relate GW with hot and cold as measured by a thermometer. The manifestation of GW is better described by an increase in energy in the biosphere. Temperature increase is only one of the manifestations of this energy increase. Wind velocities, atmospheric pressures and moisture are affected by this energy increase. More storms, active high and low pressure cells and a quickening of the water-vapor cycle also result.
More climate/weather extremes are expected, just as a car's springs bounce more when the potholes are deeper or the speed is higher (height, velocity= energy). Discernment of the "average" on a global scale takes decades of meticulous and complete measurements. We can't forget the effect of the oceans, sun, earth surface albedo, etc.
Just as the occurrence of Katrina or a few droughts in Australia are not a harbinger of GW (maybe they are but nobody can prove it), neither is a few extreme cold snaps somewhere in the US or wherever. However, something is happening whenever a preponderance of phenomena tend to drift in one direction. That appears to be happening.
The most comical anecdotal proof "deniers" use is the occurrence of heavy snowfalls. The fact is that heavier snowfalls are associated with greater amount of moisture in the atmosphere
I would appreciate any inputs/cor
There are many people kibbitzing weather (pardonthepun) global warming is man-made or if it has a component of it. I really wonder how many of these people understand the fine points of this multi-mult
My personal opinion, with all I know and read, it's that mankind has quite a bit to do with GW. Aside from that, the argument I make for taking action is based on the following premises:
1)The graphs showing the CO2 rise in the atmosphere are quite striking.
2)Anybody that knows Fractals and their behavior should suspect that there are precipitous "tipping point(s)" in a variety of phenomena that could be catastrophic for humanity,
3)The problem with steering a ship (not possible; e.g the Titanic), i.e. once we fall off the cliff from one or more of these "tipping points" it's very difficult, if not impossible" to go back.
4)Even if we are wrong (there is always a small chance of that) then we are saddled with a cleaner environment and a more responsible populace
How many bullets should we be willing to chamber and how many trigger pulls should we take? I think our course of action is very clear.
'Zactly right HG. Stuebi's post here is the latest trend I'm seeing in the denier community; don't deny A.G.W. all together, just focus on the uncertainty about what it means, and soft-pedal it--so the earth gets a few degree warmer, that could be nice.
The author's comments are accureate and well intentioned, but most of the anti-GW blogging is not affected by facts or logic. There will continue to be bloggers citing with glee that such and such a place had a lot of snow, ignoring that average annual world recorded temps continue to increase, especially in the polar regions.
Global warming is an observation, not a theory.
It always rains before a drought.
Well of course weather doesn't equal climate. But climate is indeed a function of weather - for global warming purposes, the average temperature smoothed over some base timeframe.
Temperatures have been flat/falling globally since 1998. It's still warmer in 2009 than it was in say 1900, and I won't dispute that. However, looking at 1900-2009 reveals a flatter slope of a temperature trend (versus 1900-1998). That at least creates a divergence problem from the ever-rising CO2 trend - it might even suggest that negative feedbacks (not positive as the IPCC tends to claim) dominate the climate system.
At the same time, it's probably pretty fruitless to use linear regression to model a process that we KNOW is nonlinear over the long-term. You can keep pointing to the major linear trend in a peak-to-trough analysis of the most recent temperature fluctuatio
Except that if you take the usual annual variations into count, we are still warming. Temperatures have not been falling. Within the error bars the trend is unchanged:
http://epa
Now, so called skeptics like to omit the error bars in their discussion (maybe because they don't know what they mean?), but a simple look at the graph shows no significant change over the past decade.
Now, I did point this out a couple of hundred times in different blogs and so did thousands of other people. Yet this pseudo-argument keeps coming up, from which we can only conclude that for those who need the world to be flat, it will always be so, no matter how round it is in reality.
"climate is indeed a function of weather "
No, It's the other way around.
Here's the problem. You guys refuse to say what measures would be proof that the "climate change" is natural. Five years of global cooling? Ten? Twenty? Please tell us. Exactly what would have to happen for you to tell us that the "climate change" we are seeing is just part of a natural cycle?
You managed to completely miss the author's (correct) point.
So let me try again. If the only point is to say that short-term weather is not correlated to long-term climate, the author is correct. But I sense that his real point is to argue that global warming is anthropogenic. That is the point to which I address my comments.
PS: It is false to say that there are people who don't believe in climate change. Everyone agrees that the climate has been changing since the beginning of time. The author has gotten caught up in the humorous attempt to re-brand "global warming" as "climate change". I challenge anyone to supply the name of a single person who does not believe that the earth has gone through climate change.
hwo don;t believe in cliamet change.
you are correct.
amet,
one day does not equal
The lame attempt to rebrand "global warming" as "climate change" activists is misguided at best. The problem with this claim is this: Everyone on earth agrees that the climate is changing. It's been changing since the dawn of time.
l warming arguments now that the erath has been cooling
hink everyone agrees that climate change has been happening since the beginning of time. Anthropogenic
If there were some actual examples of that, I might begin to believe you. However, since all the evidence is showing more than a century of WARMING, which is continuing through the present day, I'm certainly NOT going to believe any claims of cooling!
Reminds me of an old line written by Robert Heinlein. People move to California expecting Climate, and they get Weather.
But seriously, in addition to your points (that even a single month is not enough to overcome the fact of Global Climate Change) I would also like to point out to anyone who's ever used those spray decongestants, like Afrin. You use it, and your nose clears up, and then about two hours later it comes back and it's MORE congested than before! The same sort of thing is happening to the Planet Earth where the overall trend is increased temperatures, but that there can easily be local temporary snap-back which is worse than before!
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