Sunday, March 14, 2010

LGF and AGW, Once Again

Here we have Charles at LGF, again, not understanding what the "science" supposedly says about global warming. I'm also curious why the Canadian climate scientists mentioned in the story are so "appalled" at the warmest Canadian winter on record. Scientists are normally "fascinated" or possibly "interested" in such events. "Appalled" implies an emotion a scientist might feel toward bad science, or meddling administrators, or a surprisingly poor public education system.

Back to Charles being ignorant. Here's a graph of the temperature record for North America dating back to 1750:



And here's what the article in question mentions:
Environment Canada scientists report that winter 2009/10 was 4 C above normal, making it the warmest since nationwide records were first kept in 1948.

[...]

“It’s beyond shocking,” David Phillips, a senior climatologist with Environment Canada, told Canwest News Tuesday. Records have been shattered from “coast to coast to coast.”
The problem with this report is easily seen in the graph above. The average temperature of North America has, since 1750, warmed approximately 1 degree Celsius. So we're to believe that global warming caused the 2009/2010 Canadian winter to be 4 C above normal? How does that fit on the chart? Here's a pic of where a 4 C over normal temperature would fit on the graph above:



Alert Hockey Canada... I think I just found Crosby's Olympic stick!

I know the response to my complaint, that Canada is not all of North America, but it is a significant chunk. So what, did the rest of North America cool so that the average temperature remained on track in the graph? I don't think so. I think this shockingly warm winter was an anomaly having nearly nothing to do with anthropogenic global warming. If you read the article they come up with all sorts of conjectures that could explain why AGW might have something to do with the warm winter, but no hard science.

So what is the point of this article on the warm Canadian winter? Seems to me its only purpose is to try to get regular folks stirred up about AGW, to somehow get them to think that we're about to be cast in a Hollywood disaster flick, and that we'd better accept the massive economic boondoggle they want to engineer in order to stop the melting.

So bite me. And Charles... sit on it, Malph.

1 Comments:

Blogger Borepatch said...

It also appears that 80% of the weather stations have been purged, with more higher latitude ones than lower latitude ones being eliminated. Interpolation software uses temperatures from further south stations to "estimate" temperature for the now purged northern ones.

There are very serious questions as to data quality in the data sets, particularly over the last 2-3 years.

6/16/2010 5:21 PM  

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