El Nino Has Finally Arrived, Far Weaker Than Predicted 235
An anonymous reader writes "The periodic warm weather pattern called El Niño has finally arrived in the mid-equatorial Pacific Ocean, more than a year late and far weaker than predicted by scientists. "The announcement comes a year after forecasters first predicted that a major El Niño could be in the works. At the time, NOAA predicted a 50% chance that an El Niño could develop in the latter half of 2014. The agency also said the wind patterns that were driving water east across the Pacific were similar to those that occurred in the months leading up to the epic El Niño of 1997, which caught scientists by surprise and contributed to flooding, droughts and fires across multiple continents.
In the end, last year's forecasts came up short, in part because the winds that were driving the system petered out. Researchers, who have been working to improve their forecasting models since 1997, are trying to figure out precisely what happened last year and why their models failed to capture it."
In the end, last year's forecasts came up short, in part because the winds that were driving the system petered out. Researchers, who have been working to improve their forecasting models since 1997, are trying to figure out precisely what happened last year and why their models failed to capture it."
50% wrong or 50% right? (Score:5, Insightful)
"NOAA predicted a 50% chance that an El Niño could develop in the latter half of 2014"
With odds like that, how could they be wrong?
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With odds like that, how could they be wrong?
The race was rigged. By the mafia. Tony Soprano's crew made a fortune on this.
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If you predict a 50% chance 50 years in a row, and it really happens 80% of the times, you were wrong.
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Which is a good question to ask, completely separate from any global warming debate... Where can you go for statistics on how the normal weather percent-chance predictions match to the actual record?
I feel it in Houston (Score:3, Interesting)
It has been one of the coldest and wetist winters in awhile. High around 39 should not be a common occurrence on the gulf coast but it feels more like Seattle than a subtropical place. It got in the 70s only a few times last February.
El Nino was supposed to be big as a big surge of very warm water up to 150 ft deep and almost 1,000 miles long headed east. However the winds picked up and chilly Antarctic current which cools west South America mixed in for a few months so it is not so warm anymore.
Weather is complex and last decade (no I do not deny global warming) had a solar null which means cooler temperatures and more la nina events like those in the mini ice age from 1400 - 1840 which explains colder temperatures and dryer conditions. California hit a 500 year drought where the climate actually changed from mediterranean to desert. Same in Chile and Peru.
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So when the temperature falls, it's due to external factors - solar minimum, ocean currents, whatever - but when the temperature rises, it's solely due to human produced carbon dioxide? While that's not exactly specified in what you wrote, I hear that A LOT from global warming proponents.
The concept of warming temperatures being due to external factors, just like cooling temperatures, is completely inconceivable to a lot of global warming proponents.
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The concept of warming temperatures being due to external factors
There are no external factors for warming. Except if you want to call the factors that cool, and later go away and stop cooling, "warming" instead.
If you find a warming factor, publish it and farm in your Nobel Prize.
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http://images.nationalgeographic.com/wpf/media-content/photos/000/891/cache/89188_990x742-cb1425485788.jpg
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So, we have a western 1/3 of the country that's on average 5-7 degrees warmer than average. Then, we have a central and south east 1/3 that's 5-7 degrees colder than average. These two together make Feb 2015 a completely normal month, as far as averages go.
But then, we've got that 1/4 of the country in the north east around the Great Lakes that's at least 13 degrees colder than average. That will hugely skew the country's average for the month down, making Feb 2015 significantly colder than average.
I can
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But then, we've got that 1/4 of the country in the north east around the Great Lakes that's at least 13 degrees colder than average. That will hugely skew the country's average for the month down, making Feb 2015 significantly colder than average.
You seem to be very preoccupied with the weather in the US, which represents less than 2% of the entire world.
Here's an anomaly graph of the entire world, for the month of January 2015 (February isn't available yet):
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-... [nasa.gov]
The number on the top right (0.74) represents the average temperature anomaly for the world in deg C.
Re: I feel it in Houston (Score:4, Informative)
I'm not preoccupied with US weather. That was just the map that the poster I replied to used.
Now, in response to yours, it shows that Antarctica is for the most part .5 to 2 degrees colder than the 1951-1980 average, yet the global warmists are saying that massive ice sheets are breaking off and melting because of (record?) high Antarctic temperatures.
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But you do know that the climate is heating up since roughly 1950?
So the averages increase every decade.
So it is super easy for a random month to be below average. I mean, it is much harder to be below ~20 degrees average, because you need to hit 19 degrees or less, than it is to be below 25 degrees average, because you only need to hit 24 degrees fro that. Surprisingly the "colder than average" month, compared to the last 40 years average, is still warmer than the average from 1980 to 1990 or from 1950 to
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Re: I feel it in Houston (Score:4, Funny)
I am in Portland and this has been one of the warmest and sunniest winters coming ever. Some times the weather gods are nice to us.
SHUT UP.
Do you really want even more of them moving here?
the winds... petered out? (Score:2)
It's all those damn turbines we're putting up. Slow down all the wind, and pretty soon there won't be any. Then what are you going to do, eh?
Therefore Global Warming NO REAL (Score:2)
...no.
The fact that they did not accurately predict the weather, does NOT have a bearing on the legitimacy of the theory of human-induced global warming.
None. Zip. Zero. Zilch. Not significant.
So you can stop posting about it.
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The fact that their models don't match reality does.
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The models for prediction El-Nino and other ocean currents aren't very good at this time. This is well known. But unless there's a permanent change to the oceans, we know that the currents fluctuate around a mean, and that their effects is superimposed on the global climate, which is noticeable on decadal time scales.
Mostly, they effect the climate by redistributing the heat in different ways, including transporting some heat to deeper ocean layers where it's hidden from surface temperature sensors, and tr
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The heat is in the ocean...is that Pause Excuse
There's no pause. There's just short time fluctuations around the trend. And you are completely right, this is nothing new.
Why can't you people admit you have no fucking clue what's happening?
The people who don't have a fucking clue are the ones that are screaming that there's a pause when the global temperatures don't break new records every single year.
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The people who don't have a fucking clue are the ones that are screaming that there's a pause when the global temperatures don't break new records every single year.
We did break temperature records in 2014. Cold temperature records. Records that were over a century old. Yet, somehow, according to the warming apologists, 2014 was still the hottest year on record.
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We did break temperature records in 2014. Cold temperature records. Records that were over a century old. Yet, somehow, according to the warming apologists, 2014 was still the hottest year on record.
Local low temperature records on a single day do not contradict a global maximum for the entire year.
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Cold temperature records. Records that were over a century old.
Care to point out a single one?
Good luck!
darn (Score:3)
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Unfortunately, we're near the end of the rainy season now. There's not much hope of an El Niño fixing the drought this year.
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Well, hell, why not? Just remember that it's Climate Change now though, not Global Warming. Among other amazing things, Climate Change is responsible for:
ISIS [dailykos.com]: Yup, somehow, Climate Change was one of the reasons we have ISIS.
Crime [sciencedirect.com]. Climate change is also responsible for more rape.
Prostitution [gmanetwork.com]. Yeah, see, climate change may increase prostitution too.
I know, I know, this comment is a little snarky, but even the people here on Slashdot that are hardcore global warming types can see that there's a whacko fringe
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Yes, it has nothing at all to do with the instability in Iraq caused by a pointless war there. War apologist much?
Because there can never be an event that has multiple contributing factors? There always has to be exactly one straw that breaks the camel's back?
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In fact it goes opposite to what global warming / climate change is expected to do. Global warming should result in more extreme weather, including more powerful storms.
Not trying to disprove global warming here. Isolated events taken out of context are not proof.
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Not trying to disprove global warming here. Isolated events taken out of context are not proof.
The problem is that every single event that refutes global warming is an "isolated event taken out of context," whereas every single event that points to global warming is "part of an undeniable pattern."
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Why are you so fucking stupid?
risk = damage x likelihood.
What would the damage be if global climate change is right? Is there 0% chance that CO2 traps heat? Is there a 0% chance that methane traps heat? Id there a 0% chance that ocean acidification will effect us?
I really want to know if you are paid to be shill or you are actually as stupid as you seem.
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Well sed.
Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) (Score:4, Informative)
The real story is a lot more complicated that TFA indicates. The new el nino is just starting and it's six months out of phase with the usual timing. So instead of starting six months late, it could just as well be seen as starting 6 months early in the next cycle. And more importantly, it is now combined with a phase change in the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO). The two cycles combine to produce a much stronger warming effect. The negative PDO was responsible for the impression that warming had slowed. Now that it has reversed the warming will not just return to pre-1998 levels but will be much stronger. This could last for the next 10 to 15 years. Hopefully by then people with short attention spans will have realized that the planet is irrevocably getting hotter.
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Pure speculation on your part and contrary to the geologic record. For most of the Cenozoic it has been so warm that there have been no polar ice caps and yet, here we are now, back in an ice age.
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OK, over the timespan that is of interest to human socities, the planet is irrevocably getting hotter.
What happens a million, 10 million or 100 million years hence is of little bearing. The path of the next few hundred years is what matters to us personally. And within that timeframe it is irrevocably getting hotter.
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Bullshit. If I have a glass half full of boiling water, and a glass half full of ice water, the two glasses have an average temperature of around 50 degrees C. If I pour one into the other, the hot water will cool, and the ice water will warm; but the average temperature is still 50 degrees.
The heat was redistributed, but the average temperature hasn't changed.
This is exactly what ocean currents do; redistribute heat on the earth. A high El Nino/La Nina year like 1997, while it may warm the Arctic, cools
Re:Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) (Score:5, Interesting)
Empirically, ENSO has been tightly associated with bursts of warming -- nearly discrete jumps in global average temperature. The 1997-1998 super-ENSO event was very directly associated with a jump of nearly 0.15 C, and temperatures have remained basically neutral ever since except for peaks in "normal" ENSO years that quickly regressed to a mean. Indeed, if you look at the SST record (arguably more pristine than the heavily processed global temperature record, at least in the recent past) it exhibits a pattern called Hurst-Kolmogorov (punctuated equilibrium) jumps with the transitions often associated with ENSO. This is actually one of the arguments of skeptics -- global temperature is almost certainly regulated by CO_2 concentration, but only weakly/logarithmically and according to radiative theory, the total climate sensitivity (increase per doubling of CO_2) should be between 1 and 1.5 C, which is warming but unlikely to be catastrophic in any reasonable future CO_2 scenario. The unknown factor is how much of the warming is due to shifts in a punctuated, locally stable equilibrium from what amount to natural factors, the biggest of which are the multidecadal oscillations and associated shifts in global atmospheric circulation patterns (where as noted, ENSO especially is an empirical smoking gun in the shifts) but which also include discrete shifts in the thermohaline circulation patterns, especially at certain critical junctions in the Atlantic, and the possibility of nonlinear effects from solar variability. Since the system is highly multivariate, chaotic, nonlinear, and with profound feedback loops and self-organized dissipative structures in abundance, it is incredibly difficult to model and the general circulation models yield almost no useful information beyond "if you increase CO_2, it will more likely warm than cool" which we already knew from radiative theory in the first place and which is built into them in such a way that they can give no other answer. There is little reason to believe that the multimodel ensemble mean of means of the many different models has any real predictive force, however, and in fact that mean is systematically diverging from the observational record just as it has systematic deviations in its hindcast from the historical record.
This is why catastrophic global warming enthusiasts are so excited about the prospects of a new super-ENSO. If it happens, it could cause another Hurst-Kolmogorov jump, bump the average temperature a bit, and validate the models (or at least, rescue them from a richly deserved back-to-the-drawing-board oblivion). It is difficult to escape the feeling that they want this to happen, that they want the world to heat up disastrously to punish the human race for using energy and building civilization. One would think that evidence that TCS was not, in fact, 2 to 3 C but instead was 1-2 C (or even less) would be welcome news, but for them it would be acknowledging that the deliberately created panic, the political manipulation and selling of the catastrophic warming meme, and the associated shifts of enormous amounts of money into ameliorating a hypothetical disaster on the basis of unproven models has been directly responsible for the perpetuation of 1/3 of the world's population in a state of energy poverty.
rgb
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Do I "want it to get hotter"? In the long run....no... but I'm sure it is getting hotter. So now we have the frog in a pot analogy. We are being heated slowly and are not reacting... not jumping out of the pot. And by the time the skeptics are convinced, it will be too late to jump.
I do not "want" the TCS to be 3C but my wishes have nothing to do with what the actual case is. So yes, I would like to see extreme warming for the next 10 years so that we will jump to a new energy infrastruture not based o
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Dude, look at the map of climate zones sometime. Look at the range of normal temperatures, and the range of extreme temperatures. The entire shift they are talking about is basically moving one climate zone north -- order of 100 miles. It is utterly lost in the noise. It isn't frog slowly "boiling" in a pot. It is frog in a pot that is 15 C (that is, rather cold) on average (maybe) but that has a range of maybe 5 to 10 C either way on a daily basis, an average that itself varies by a lot more than 20 C
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a high El Nino/La Nina year cannot affect the average temperature of the earth to any significant extent.
True, but it can affect the surface temperature, which is only a small portion of the earth. The bulk of the heat resides in the ocean water.
Was the south pole on fire? Because unless it was, the southern hemisphere certainly wasn't warm enough to counteract the 6-10 degrees C cooler than average that the northern hemisphere saw.
The northern hemisphere was significantly warmer than average. Here's a map of the global temperature anomaly for 2014:
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-... [nasa.gov]
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According to that map, the UK was 1-2 degrees warmer than normal, and much of northern Europe was 2-4 degrees warmer than normal. Yet, news reports state the UK's summer was one of the coldest in decades, 5-6 degrees C colder than normal [weather.com], the end of 2014 was also exceptionally cold [theweathernetwork.com], and while Feb 2014 was slightly above average, during the 2004 to 2014 period, it was only 0.4 degrees higher than the 1860's average for the period from 2005 to 2014, which at 5.2 degrees [weatheronline.co.uk] is also the exact same as the Febru [metoffice.gov.uk]
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news reports state the UK's summer was one of the coldest in decades, 5-6 degrees C colder than normal [weather.com]
Read more carefully. Where you say "summer", they're talking about a "spell" around the 19th of August.
Guess what. If you look at the August data, you can see that Ireland/UK are colder than average.
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-... [nasa.gov]
But if you look at the entire summer (Jun-Aug), you get a different picture:
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-... [nasa.gov]
I stand by my assertion that something is seriously wrong with how we measure average global temperatures.
No, the only thing that is seriously wrong is how you read local weather reports, and extrapolate those both in time and area.
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No, in your example the average temperature will drop but the total heat of the system will remain the same.
In the commonly understood meaning of ice
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Despite the "climate change chicken dancer's" claims, a high El Nino/La Nina year cannot affect the average temperature of the earth to any significant extent.
That is nonsense. When we talk about "earth temperature" we talk about surface temperature.
El Nino transports hot water around and down into the deep of the ocean.
El Nina transports cold water up from the depths and distributes it over the ocean. While the first is merly spreading heat and in that way not changing the "average" as you explain, the s
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My high school OAC (grade 13, for non-Ontarians) chemistry mark was the highest of any student, in any school in the county, for both semesters of the year I took that class. I got an award for it, actually.
The amount of energy needed to melt ice into water without changing the temperature (remaining at 0 degrees C) is the exact same as the amount of energy you need to remove to freeze water into ice without changing the temperature. Which makes your claim about time scales (WTF does time have to do with
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Only a fool would argue with a Canadian about ice.
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because in the grand scheme of things man has little or nothing to do with squat. Long after we are gone, the sun will change phases, engulf this planet for real global warming and then the universe will die a heat death
Using that perspective, why not rob a bank today ?
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And yet temperatures continue to rise, ice continues to melt, sea level continues to rise and the oceans continue to acidify.
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Remember the whole "polar vortex" thing in North America last year? That thing that's repeating this winter? The bitterly cold temperatures are causing pipes to freeze. Pipes that are inside heated and insulated houses.
It's getting so damned cold from arctic air making it farther south than normal that people are being advised in some Canadian cities to keep their taps running 24/7 so they don't freeze, and their water bill will be adjusted so they don't pay for the extra water that they use.
If the arcti
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If cold air is getting pushed out of the Arctic, what kind of air do you think goes back in to replace it ?
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So you're saying the arctic air is warmer than the air half way to the equator?
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There isn't an equal balance of warm and cold air
There's not a perfect balance, but the local, day to day fluctuations we call weather are mostly a result of the same heat being distributed in different ways. Total heat on earth isn't going to be dramatically different between yesterday and tomorrow.
the sun is entering into a new solar minimum, meaning there is less warm air all around.
The amplitude of the solar cycle is about 0.1% of the total solar output. That's not a significant contribution.
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The amplitude of the solar cycle is about 0.1% of the total solar output. That's not a significant contribution.
It is a bit closer to 1%, but you are right, it is not really significant regarding the climate (or weather).
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Looking at the black running mean on this graph:
https://protonsforbreakfast.fi... [wordpress.com]
I see about 1W swing on 1366W average, which is 0.07%
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Well, I was more thinking about the sun itself. Minimum regarding sun spots and maximum, not sure about other cycles. The total between the lowest sun output and the maximum should be around 1% ... but perhaps I have memorized that wrong and it is 1 "promille" (strange that we have no sign for that on the keyboard)
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It takes a certain kind of mind to counter measurable and published evidence with a flawed thought experiment using a single condition experienced by a small portion of the world for a small portion of the year.
Even ignoring the problems with your thought experiment, why not instead try and prove the visible evidence we see, rather than try and disprove it.
Or are you merely exposing your true identity as Adam Savage? "I reject your reality and substitute my own."
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Remember the whole "polar vortex" thing in North America last year?
Not really. I live on the west coast of North America and it never affected us. The "polar vortexes" you are referring to only affected less than 5% of the surface of the Earth. February 2015 was in the top 5 warmest globally.
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Wow,
how can one be so stupid is beyond me.
The ice melts not in the winter when you have an arctic vortex. How retarded are you? Actually you have every winter an arctic vortex. The question is how many loops it has. Is it an even number of loops the north of america stays relatively warm, is it an odd number one loop is either over the US/canada *or* over skandinavia/europe.
Regarding the melting glaciers: they obviously melt during spring and summer. And as you seem to be an rally badly educated man: glacie
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Teh stupid hurts mah brain!. [thepoliticalcarnival.net]
Re:But, our climate models are perfectly accurate (Score:4, Insightful)
Weather != climate.
If you flip a coin and get heads twice in a row, do you claim statistics is bunk?
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Re:But, our climate models are perfectly accurate (Score:4, Insightful)
Nice try, but 15 years of weather statistics is climate. One winter is not. The science has been fairly consistent, only the specifics seem up for grabs.
You might also want to note that El Nino isn't itself part of climate change.
And I wouldn't crow too much about the name change. The term 'global warning' has mostly fallen out of favor due to idiots thinking a slightly chilly morning in the middle of winter meant it couldn't be real.
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Wow the cognitive dissonance is stunning.
No kidding one winter isn't. That's the reason why the 'settled' science saying snowfalls would be gone in a decade (pub. 2000) is laughed at. Instead of embracing the joke and laughing at the kook element that is crying that the sky is falling the fact that you feel the need to 'defend' science (why is this a thing - science is what it is - evidence doesn't need defenders it speaks for itself) just doubles down on the hypocrisy.
There are plenty of us that thi
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Nice try, but 15 years of weather statistics is climate. One winter is not
Err...that would be two winters. And a virtually non-existent summer.
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OK, for those of us who slept through grade school, 2 < 15.
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Because after 15 years, many of the chaotic changes in weather average out. The sun cycle is 11 years, for instance. After 15 years, you'd expect a few El-Ninos and La-Ninas. You can calculate that a 15 year period is about the minimum. For a more robust number, you could take 30 years. More than 30 years isn't very useful. There aren't really any weather related patterns that last longer than that.
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There was an ice age 10K years ago. So there are definitely longer term weather patterns on this planet. That's not evidence for or against global warming, but to claim we understand the climate well is disingenuous at best.
Re: But, our climate models are perfectly accurate (Score:4, Informative)
Of course, there are longer term patterns, but these aren't weather patterns. Glaciation cycles are caused by orbital patterns. On even longer time scales you have things like continental drift, and gradually increasing solar output. These patterns are interesting, and it's good to know they exist when you want to compare climates over similar time spans, but they aren't really relevant for the discussion about climate change.
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"Oh...ice ages aren't weather related patterns that last longer than 30 years, because that would disprove my incredibly ignorant comments about climate!"
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Weather related patterns are patterns that form as a result of the chaotic nature of weather. And these chaotic patterns are not responsible for ice ages.
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An ice age is a period (an incredibly long one, I might add) of very cold, very dry weather across the entire planet. Of course it's weather related.
No, me deciding to work from home today rather than starting my car to drive to the office isn't going to start an ice age, so in that sense you're right, but you're using the most narrowly defined meaning of weather you possibly can, to avoid the fact that the climate of the earth has been in constant flux for millions of years, and somehow, now, the global w
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but you're using the most narrowly defined meaning of weather you possibly can
I'm using "weather" to mean the daily chaotic events that go on in our atmosphere. I'm using "climate" as the average weather of a period that's long enough that most of the chaotic noise of the weather is removed. That takes about 15-30 years, depending on the circumstances, and what exactly you're looking at. Looking over even longer periods, we'll see "climate change".
The purpose of these distinctions is to aid in usefulness. A change in climate must have a underlying cause that we should be able to iden
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the climate of the earth has been in constant flux for millions of years, and somehow, now, the global warming apologists are convinced that we're suddenly causing it, and if we stopped burning fossil fuels, then the climate would become static.
Correct. The climate of the earth has been in constant flux. But unlike changes in the weather, you can't just simply throw your arms up in the air, and claim we're just having a "warm century". There must be a cause. And if that cause isn't the increased amount of CO2, then please tell us what it is.
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And then you come along and spoil it by posting such a deep and insightful comment.
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One definition of climate is the statistics of weather, IOW the average and standard deviation of weather over some time period. The World Meteorological Organization defines the standard classical period for climate as 30 years.
One scientists misstatement about snow doesn't make climate science collapse.
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The "snow is gone" remark was never published in the peer reviewed literature. It was an off the cuff remark. It was only one scientist. It may have made the headlines but it was never part of the mainstream science.
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Too bad there's no "not even wrong" moderation...
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So weather IS climate, just on a much shorter scale.
Just like the position and speed of an atom in a cloud of heating gas is thermodynamic data, only much more detailed. Just because you know the cloud is heating doesn't mean you can predict where that one atom will be at a given point in time. I'm not surprised that one el Nino gets mispredicted. It means very little.
Re:Awesome Models (Score:4, Informative)
Lets see a mole of any gas 6.02214x10^23 atoms
Fifteen years has has 5479 days (rounded to the nearest)
a century has 36525 days.
So lets take the other way. What are the odds that a random sample of 10^18 atoms in a gas would have a significantly different temperature than the overall the temperature ?
Virtually zero.
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Well done for taking an analogy then crunching meaningless numbers to carry it through to the point of inapplicability.
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In other words: "It's only a good analogy when it supports MY point of view, dammit!"
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Er, yes?
If you don't understand that then not only do you not understand science you fail at English too. An analogy is constructed to support a point of view. Picking apart an analogy is basically pointless because it is not the same as the underlying science and therefore has no bearing.
ALL analogies can be picked apart because by definition theyre not the real thing.
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Now, since the parent was talking a
Re:Awesome Models (Score:5, Informative)
The difference between weather models and climate models it that weather models solve initial value problems, given the current conditions how do we expect weather to evolve over time. They're good for maybe 10 or so days usually. Climate models solve boundary value problems, given the forcings involved in climate and their interactions and feedbacks what are the boundaries we expect future weather to vary within. So far globally the weather has remained mostly within the boundaries projected by climate models so they're doing ok.
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So far globally the weather has remained mostly within the boundaries projected by climate models so they're doing ok.
Not according to scientists [nature.com]. Quote:
"The slowdown in the rate of global warming in the early 2000s is not evident in the multi-model ensemble average of traditional climate change projection simulations.......The loss of predictive skill for six initial years before the mid-1990s points to the need for consistent hindcast skill to establish reliability of an operational decadal climate prediction system."
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And then all this garbage about the "hottest year ever".
If you're referring to 2014, I think it's just flat out wrong. Almost the entire northern hemisphere experience about a 9 month stretch that was 5-10 degrees colder than normal, to the extent of breaking cold temperature records that were a century old or more. Australia reported a heat wave for a couple of weeks at the beginning of 2014 that was about 4-5 degrees warmer than normal, but that's about all I've been able to find. That is certainly not even close to enough to compensate for the HUGE span of
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If 2014 is the "hottest year on record," that points more to a failure in our methods of measuring average global temperature than the actual temperature being higher.
So you want to tell us, when the scientific community in agreement declares the year 2014 to be the hottest on record, the majourity of those scientists is wrong?
On what basis do you conclude/declare this? Because on your couch it was cold?
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People get excited about the hottest year but it makes more sense from a climate perspective to look at it in terms of decadal temperature trends. This graph [noaa.gov] does that. From it you can see that the 2000s were about 0.15 degrees C above the 1990s and so far the 2010s are about 0.05 above the 2000s.
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Weather is a chaotic system, but often chaotic systems have longer-term trends that are possible to observe. For example, if you pour sand into a pile, then you can fairly accurately predict the shape of the cone that it will create, but the exact pattern of bounces for each grain is impossible to predict as it depends on the exact position, shape, and location of every grain that it hits on the way down and a tiny error in any of these will magnify to a huge error after a few bounces. It's a chaotic syst
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I'm fully aware of this phenomenon myself. However, I'm seeing a consistency to the wrongs. One would think the models would be altered to reflect real data, instead of ignoring "anomalies" on a regular basis. (of course, climate models are not very simple either...)
Re:Awesome Models (Score:5, Insightful)
The best scientists on earth can't tell you how a particular molecule in a balloon will move over the next second, but any kindergartner can tell you what will happen if you keep pumping more and more air into it.
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If you're so confident in your political score-pointing criticism, how would you like to make a bet? Let's say, you predict the average temperature and rainfall for each day the next seven days, and I predict the average temperature and rainfall for each year the next seven years. Whoever is off by the lowest percent wins. And I assume you'd be willing to give me odds of approximately 1:365 in my favor since clearly my task is that much harder.
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Put a pan of cold water on the stove, and turn it on. After a while, watch the little swirls of water. Can you predict how they'll move around 2 seconds from any given time ? Probably not. Can you predict the average temperature 60 seconds later ? Probably yes. There's the difference between weather prediction and climate predication. Climate prediction is easier, because it deals with averages. Weather deals with chaos.
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Your 'Climate Skepticism' (global warming denial) is very thinly veiled. Top points for smugness, though.
No, your 'Agenda Denial' is very thinly veiled. Trotting out your straw man about someone "denying" climate change is the lazy way to avoid addressing the real issue. The real issue is that people are making specific claims about "settled science" model predictions of exactly X number of inches of ocean change, or Y change in temperature or precipitation in a given area, or Z change in glacier or sea ice, which clearly means that Policy A and Tax B and Redistribution Of Income Model C are clearly required
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What fucking idiot has ever claimed that?
In other news, the strawman still needs a brain...
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Please show the quote where Al Gore claims that computer models of El-Nino are always right, and how he is making millions off of that assertion.
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Clearly, the GP comment "But, but, but computer models are always right and we can NOT investigate further....science is settled." refers to computer models of El-Nino, because that's the topic of this article.
The ones that say we should be boiling the oceans by now
No one says that.