Eastern US Cooling Despite Global Warming

[Tex] writes "While the rest of the world swelters, i'll be nice and cool...this article from NASA describes a general cooling trend over the Eastern US due to global warming. Warmer waters in the Pacific have created increased cloud cover on this side of the states, resulting in lower temperatures. Jeff Goldblum could probably explain this better... :)"

You mean this plot?

[ChrisWong]

Memories can be hazy. You mean this little graph over here [stanford.edu]? Oh wait, that's solar activity vs climate. Oopsie. Excellent correlation too. Chris

Colder at the poles, too...

[Pauli]

I read an article about the Inuits in Greenland, and they were saying that April 2000 was the coldest anyone had ever seen. The author of the article said that more severe weather in the polar regions is a consequence of global warming. So, yes, not everybody gets warmer due to global warming.

What would be evidence of NO global crisis ?

[RGRistroph]

Warmer temperatures are evidence of globol warming, colder temperatures are evidence of global warming. What would be evidence of no global warming ?

It is more than a little suspicious that these atmospheric modelers never come out with a prediction; it's always the case the observations just made fit the model of a global climate change (incedentally the model most likely to increase their own salaries as well).

This un-dis-provable assertion stuff belongs more in the class of religion than science. You can't disprove "God exists;" that doesn't mean that religion is somehow wrong, it just means that religion is not a scientific type of issue. A lot of these environmental types drift over into that area: any contridictory evidence just means that "the jury is still out" until they get what they want, and the faith can never be disproven.

They need to pre-publish their models and the expected measurements. Of course the expected values shouldn't be single values, but rather probability distributions. But then at least we can have the possiblity of failure, and we would make progress on the question instead of just listening every year to the same old models tweaked to predict crisis from last year's numbers to get next year's research grants.

Re:Colder at the poles, too...

[rakslice]

"Inuits" - Hint: Inuit = plural form of Innu. What is that "s" doing there? =)

Iqualuit, Nunavut spent some time above freezing during the last half of December; extremely wierd weather for that time of year.

Sorry, friend. Better luck next post.

[rakslice]

Next time, read the article first. Hint: "increased cloud cover"

(If you don't know why increased cloud cover causes blizzards, then there's nothing we can do for you. =)

Global warming -> local cooling?

[rjamestaylor]

That's what it sounds like...

Re:Another Explanation

[Actinophrys]

Meanwhile, corporatocrats who don't want to change business practices because of environmental effects do everything they can to run an ad hominem campaign against the supporters of that very dangerous theory.

Whenever something's an issue, most sources are paranoid garbage. Sigh.

oh well...

[TWX_the_Linux_Zealot]

... too much of this planet is too bloody cold anyway!!!

"Titanic was 3hr and 17min long. They could have lost 3hr and 17min from that."

Climate change doubters:

[gwyrdd benyw]

I have been hearing some scepticism from the peanut gallery as to the validity of the climate change theory. Allow me to provide some references and supplemental reading for you all:

Global Warming Is Here: The Scientific Evidence [igc.org]

Rumbles in the Arctic [tcp.com] - strange new events, never seen before in the Arctic, are terrifying the locals

Scientists Now Acknowledge Role of Humans in Climate Change [tcp.com] - yes, it's not just happening coincidentally

Hopefully, we can get a sensible discussion going here?

Another Explanation

[espo812]

Global warming causing local cooling? How about global warming dosn't exist in the first place? Al Gore blamed increased blizzards on global warming. Now global warming is being blamed for cooler temperatures? No.

Probability vs. Possibility

[HorsePunchKid]

Problems like this seem to arise everywhere in nature. People like to take the easy way out and just sweep the details under the rug and yell "chaos". While there are clearly infinite possibilities when it comes to a system as complex as a global climate, you have to keep in mind that some possibilities are too unlikely to worry about. And because the possibilities are so endless, it's easy to draw practically any conclusion you'd like, depending on what facts you choose. I'd also point out that there seems to be a lot of confusion about what "global warming" means. I can't say myself, but certainly, as in any probabilistic system like this, there's an average trend, then an expected deviation from the trend. So while it may be getting warmer on average, if the expected deviation from the average is also increasing, it's very reasonable to assume that we'd be getting some serious cold weather, too.

Re:Theory?

[Black Parrot]

> I don't know enough about global warming to either agree or disagree with the theory.

Me neither. But I have seen the plots showing the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere over the last 10K years, and the spike starting with the Industrial Revolution is a bit hard to ignore. It cannot be doubted that we've changed our planet's atmosphere significantly.

What the result of that is, if anything, is another matter. But since current theory holds that the current surface conditions on both Mars and Venus are the results of runaway systems, I think letting ours get out of balance is probably not a very good risk for our species to take. At least until we have self-sustaining colonies on other planets.

--

Re:You mean this plot?

[Black Parrot]

> Memories can be hazy. You mean this little graph over here?

No, not the same chart. The one I saw was flat for about 9.8 Kyear, and then shot up on what looked like an exponential curve.

--

Re:Theory?

[SEWilco]

Maybe he saw a partial plot of the first chart here [uga.edu], but one which started 10,000 years ago because there was an ice age 15,000 years ago. Global cooling kind of messes up global warming charts, as things warmed up without humans. Right now we're as warm as 120,000 years ago.

Note that previous page [uga.edu] of that site mentions that weathering of silicate rocks uses carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Also, the geological carbon cycle has 1,800 times more carbon than the atmosphere. Our climate has a lot more variation [ciesin.org] than our last thousand years. Well, maybe you'd rather just look at the last 300 years, if the Little Ice Age messes up your statistics. Or the last 30 years, as some have used, because the 1960s had an unusually cold winter and so makes "warmer" easier to show. And please do ignore that we've stopped the prairie fires that used to cover the central plains of North America.

Note that the main greenhouse gas is water vapor [clearlight.com] which is just a wee bit hard to measure and control. And we can only hope that we don't see another Iceball Earth [abc.net.au].

Theory?

[Gen-GNU]

<SARCASM>
Wait! Hold the presses! Global warming is a theory?
</SARCASM>

It is important to remember that global warming is, in fact, a theory. When I see a report saying, in essence "I know that what your seeing appears to be contrary to my theory, but here's why it is actually helping", I immediatly wonder at the motives of such a statement. This research appears to be done by people who support the global warming theory. As such, it's results are biased towards proving that theory.

I don't know enough about global warming to either agree or disagree with the theory. I do know enough about human nature to distrust this report.

Re:Theory?

[RedWizzard]

I notice that dispite your generally sarcastic description of global warming data that first page you mentioned states:

Historical evidence and what we know about the Earth's energy balance and the Earth's atmosphere point to an increased greenhouse effect caused by people.

Re:Another Explanation

[RedWizzard]

Now you've gone and done it. It's Politically Incorrect to question the dogma of Global Warming. They keep massaging the stats, taking a trendline from the bottom of one solar cycle to the top of another, and repeating the GW mantra that any changes must be the result of Evil Human Technology.

What if you, and the other doubters are wrong? Just how extreme do the changes have to be before you believe it's a fact? In 10 years time will the doubters be saying "but Earth was this temperature 1.5 million years ago" instead of the current "Earth had this temperature 200,000 years ago"? What if you do realise it's a problem in 5 years time and it's too late because a bunch [newscientist.com] of positive [newscientist.com] feedback loops have been discovered?

Re:You mean this plot?

[RedWizzard]

Here [newscientist.com] is an article pointing out that the sun activity correlation fails to account for all of the warming that has occured since 1985. Note that one of the researchers involved in the original work referenced in the parent co-authored this new finding.

Re:Global warming -> local cooling?

[Cspine]

Wrong conclusion.

The article said that there has been a trend of global temperature increases. The fact that the eastern US is cooling is merely an effect of the global climate changes.

That is, the fact that there is more cloud cover is usually an indication of higher rates of evaporation, i.e. higher temperatures.

So basically this articles doesn't really mean anything accept to confirm the global warming theory.

Re:Another Explanation

[Black Parrot]

> Global warming causing local cooling?

Actually, there's some concern that global warming may trigger another ice age.

Global warming --> Greenland ice starts melting --> cold water runs into North Atlantic --> Gulf Stream shuts down --> Europe freezes --> more sunlight reflected into space rather than absorbed --> new ice age.

Or something like that.

> Al Gore blamed increased blizzards on global warming. Now global warming is being blamed for cooler temperatures? No.

Global *, where * = climatic change of any type, will show up first as disruptions of traditional local patterns. Some places will get *++, others will get *--. Deal with it. And buy an all-weather wardrobe before the prices go up.

--