And so the line continues to blur between politics and trolling...thanks Newman! It's nice to not have America be the sad punchline of some joke at least once in a while.
Maze1125 said:
It is far far easier to predict long term changes to the global temperature than it is to predict short-term local weather.
The latter is a chaotic system where the slightest change can cascade and cause feedback loops that cause exponentially large results from very small input.
The former, on the other hand, is a simple system that only needs to consider how much heat comes in compared to how much goes out.
Eh...kind of. Short term forecasting, and especially Mesoscale phenomenon are very "in the moment" chaos, with many events occurring under our model's current resolution. But that doesn't really make climatology easier by comparison.
The problem is that evidence of how accurate our current climatological models are is weak simply because they haven't been running very long, relative to the time scale of the system we're measuring. If the model were an engine, it would be difficult to tell how smoothly it's running because we've scarcely heard it turn over...worse, it's possible the natural "engine" here is changing speeds even as we try to measure it.
(I actually attended a colloquial meeting at my university on this subject, and even the doctorate staff were dubious of some of the claims behind the proposed data assimilation methods to "accelerate" our verification process.)
Also, chaos in any system by nature makes anything harder to predict in the longer term because of the potential for propagation of errors. A lot of climatology is analog based as a result, which kind of sucks. (operational forecasting has analogs, and they tend to be very, very wrong)
All that said, this Newman fellow is still fucking bonkers, simply because his claim for GLOBAL cooling is predicated on trends with little to no real basis. Much of North America is experiencing a very cool summer right now, yet the last two summers years were among the hottest in recent memory.
You don't even need to cite the obvious effects of carbon emissions and the greenhouse effect to know that.
Besides, there's also...
-Re-radiation from impervious terrain (man-made surfacing, urban heat island; you can measure these easily with a car thermometer)
-Elimination and re-concentration of land vegetation for commercial usage (plants not only absorb direct sunlight, but most are comprised heavily of water, and thus are natural heat sinks. However, with dense agriculture comes potential front-loading of water and heat budgets inland. Trust me, being surrounded by corn, I am INTIMATELY acquainted with its ability to raise dew points)
-Garbage purging and its relationship to sea-surface algae (this stuff is bad new; it mucks with all sorts of things over time, but for this subject, it absorbs and traps more sunlight at the very surface of the ocean, which screws with the thermal gradient and thus the mixing)
..And all other manner of contributors that humanity has caused. We are changing the climate. It's to what extent that remains the tricky question.
Oh, if it weren't apparent, I'm a meteorologist with some experience and exposure to other earth sciences.
is he utterly wrong to think this way? maybe but right or wrong its still the wrong debate. at this point arguing if the sun or us is to blame is kind of like setting the table for dinner on the titanic.
