Monday, January 20, 2014

 

Drinking Deep From the Flavor Aid Cauldron

Nicholas No Middle Initial Kristof of the NYT has gone full acolyte to the Alarming Global Warming Climate Change Science Cult here. He probably did it long ago but I don't read him very often so I don't know for sure. Again, I will not go over the whole thing just his list of scientific consensus.

But first, consensus is to science what a bicycle is to a fish--not quite anathema but not a necessary or valid part of the whole.

OK. Kristof writes, approvingly, that global warming is like an asteroid heading for Earth, is a disruptor of "weather, food, land" and is related to the California drought. It's always alarming with these guys. It's not so, however, fortunately, and particularly with the California drought.

Here is the December 2012 Palmer Drought Severity Index for the United States.



Here it is for December 2013.


What a difference a year makes, huh? So the months long California Drought is alarming and related to Global Warming how? Looks to me like the permanent Southwestern Drought is over. The longest  recent droughts in California began in 892 AD and 1209 AD and lasted 220 and 140 years respectively. Anthropogenic CO2 was effectively zero back then. My source for these inconvenient facts was the New York Times. Back to Kristof, king of the Chicken Little science dabblers.

For all the uncertainty, Nordhaus cites several areas of strong agreement among experts: Carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere exceed those observed for at least the last 650,000 years; hurricanes will grow more intense; the Arctic will become ice free in summer; oceans will rise up to 23 inches by 2100 (more if there were major melting of ice sheets); and the global temperature will likely be 3.5 degrees to 7.5 degrees Fahrenheit higher in 2100 than in 1900.

I'm willing to concede that the atmospheric CO2 for the past 650 Millennia has been below 398 ppmv, although there are scientists (Salby at The Hockey Schtick, for example) who say the ice core figures greatly under-measures atmospheric CO2. But the rest are bunk.

If the gradient of temperature differences between the poles and the tropics is less (and the official undeniable theory of the alarmist is that global warming will be amplified at both poles), then cyclones should be smaller, less powerful and less frequent, which prediction has the added advantage of syncing with observed phenomena.

I need the alarmist to name a date for the year they believe that the Northern Ocean will become ice free in Summer. Otherwise, it is not a prediction but a myth. And the alarmists, who jumped on the 2007 melting bandwagon and predicted 2013 as the year, were stupidly, spectacularly wrong; the sea ice area in late September 2012 was about the size of India, but the sea ice in late September 2013 was the size of Greenland and Mexico combined. When is this sea ice supposed to melt all away, Mr. Kristof?

Thanks for the specifics on the ocean rise. First, the oceans always rise, on average, during an interglacial although the rate slows way down the longer the interglacial lasts. If the ocean levels start to fall we're no longer in an interglacial but in the new ice age. But something's wrong here--21 inches is 533.4 mm. There are nearly 86 years to 2100. So for the rate of yearly sea rise to get us to the predicted 21 inches, the seas would have to rise 6.20 mm per year. That's about twice what they are supposedly rising now according to other acolytes, who are, unfortunately, undercut by the IPCC here. And the old standards, tidal gauges, show a yearly rate on average for the last 140 years of 1.78 mm. It don't add up.

The prediction about temperature are not much better. Here is the alarmists' 2000 temperature predictions on a graph.

Notice that the temperatures for 2000 to 2014 are not following the predictions. I know it's early yet. But we're .7 degrees Fahrenheit higher now than in 1900, so we'll need 2.8 to 6.8 degrees in the next 86 years to get to the predictions. The longer the temperature on average goes down, as it has for the past 11 years, the higher the rate of climb will have to be to make up for the early stumble.


There is no agreement about the things on which Mr. Kristof thinks there is strong agreement. That's part of the reason he is so deluded.

And because he and his ilk are so deluded is part of the reason most people think there is nothing alarming about the slight, beneficial change in the climate in the past century and a half.


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