How Hot Is It?

It got up to 95 degrees today in Rockford. I think the heat index was above 106 F. That is half way to boiling. Be very careful. I don't use air conditioning. It costs too much. But I do shower a LOT. Just sitting at the computer during the hottest part of the day I started to feel dizzy. Uh. Oh. I headed for the shower at once since that can be a sign of incipient heat stroke. That was it. As soon as I got out of the shower and in front of a fan the dizziness went away.

I Heard The Roar

There was a TORNADO WARNING for Rockford, Illinois that expired a few minutes ago. As I was heading to the basement I stuck my head out the door and heard the roar. It kind of sounded like continuous thunder. Scared the hell out of me. And I don't scare easy. All has passed now - everybody in the family has checked in and we are all fine. I'm still waiting for further reports to see if there was any major damage in the area. There are lots of leaves and a few tree branches down in my neighborhood. Nothing too serious here.

Cross Posted at Classical Values

Not Possible

Watts Up With That is looking into complexity and finds prediction in complex situations difficult according to the IPCC.

Third Assessment Report: “In sum, a strategy must recognise what is possible. In climate research and modeling, we should recognize that we are dealing with a coupled nonlinear chaotic system, and therefore that long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible.”

It all starts from the simple idea that increasing internal radiation reflection (Greenhouse Gas Theory) increases temperature. Fine so far. But there are complications. The climate system is not simple physics. For instance: surface water absorbs energy. And the Earth's surface has a LOT of water. Well the water evaporates and you get clouds. Clouds are very complicated. Sometimes the water vapor precipitates out of the atmosphere and you get rain, or snow, or sleet, or hail. This is part of an energy transport system (heat pipe)in the atmosphere. Clouds also complicate the radiation picture. They reflect from both sides. Which matters day AND night on Earth but only day for incoming radiation. And that is just one aspect of the system. Vegetation varies radiation depending on type and amount.

The simple and not so simple physics of a number of climate parameters, are programmed into the climate computer models. Many of these parameters, it is acknowledged, are not completely understood or that there is serious contentious debate about in the scientific literature. ie aerosols, clouds, solar pacific and atlantic oscillations, volcanoes, etc,etc

Engineers (or economists now, perhaps) will advice climate scientists, model are not reality, reality is often more complicated than any computer model. Take a step back, view with hindsight with respect to risk in the financial markets. At the trouble the cream of the last few decades of science graduates – turned computer modellers – left the world’s economy in, following the modelling of credit risk amongst many other economic assumptions.

Engineers have always been the biggest sceptics (I prefer the Brit spelling) of the CO2 causes global warming hypothesis.

Engineers spend decades in efforts to match simple deterministic systems to complex environments.

Back in the 80s I (electronics engineer) used to worry about second order effects (deviations from simple laws) caused by the non-linearity of materials. We are now in third order territory with occasional forays into fourth order effects. Climate is like 14th or 40th order stuff. And very non-linear. It is possible (not likely) for 12th order effects to have first order results (chaos).

Is it possible to do decent predictions in short time frames? Maybe. I saw Piers Corbin on Nightline the other day and he has claimed to have predicted much recent weather and predicts a cold winter in the Northern Hemisphere.

Piers Corbyn’s presentation showed the major advances in power and skill now achieved by his Solar-Lunar-Action-Technique (SLAT) of weather & climate forecasting which now includes the ability to predict from months ahead extreme events all over the world and changes in the Jet Stream such as those which caused the West Russian heatwave and the Pakistan super-deluges and floods and marked their ending in mid August 2010. In his presentation Piers showed a film of the double sunspot superfast solar coronal ejection on 14th August and the consequent Sudden Ionospheric Disturbance and the predicted jet stream disruption – See:

http://www.weatheraction.com/docs/WANews10No31.pdf.

For WeatherAction summer forecasts 2007, 08, 09 and winter forecasts 2008/9 and 09/10 which beat all-comers see:

http://www.weatheraction.com/docs/WANews10No33.pdf

He seems to be doing OK so far. BTW he is a "CO2 causes global warming" sceptic.



Some urls:
http://twitter.com/piers_corbyn
http://www.weatheraction.com/

And some books:

Red Hot Lies: How Global Warming Alarmists Use Threats, Fraud, and Deception to Keep You Misinformed

The Chilling Stars: A New Theory of Climate Change

Heaven and Earth: Global Warming, the Missing Science

Cross Posted at Classical Values

How To Deal With A Tornado

Also included at no extra charge: how not to deal with a tornado.

H/T Jccarlton at Talk Polywell

Tell Me The Climate Is Not Changing

Louisiana is having some snow.

Louisiana got its earliest snowflakes ever as people across the South awakened to a dusting of powder.

Snow started falling in the region late Friday and continued into Saturday morning.

Snow also caused a few cancellations Saturday at Washington's Dulles International Airport.

The National Weather Service says several Louisiana towns reported two to three inches of snow.

It is getting harder all the time to Hide the Decline.

And yeah. One early snow fall does not a climate make. I wonder if two record early snowfalls in Houston are closer to a climate? We will know in two years. Or twenty.

Record Highs

Sacramento California has been reporting record highs this summer.

Don't tell Al Gore, but global warming is taking a holiday in Sacramento this week. The maximum temperatures Sunday and Monday set records each day -- as the coolest "highs" for the dates since record-keeping began in 1877.

Forecasters credit a deep marine layer and a potent low-pressure trough with funneling the cool air this way. It's as if Mother Nature cut herself a wedge of Santa Barbara weather and plopped it down on Sacramento's plate.

We're talking, for once, about the all-time lowest maximums, instead of the all-time highest. Monday's downtown high was just 74 degrees, 3 degrees cooler than the previous record of 77 degrees set in 1906, according to the National Weather Service. Sunday's downtown high of 76 frosted the previous low maximum of 78, set in 1962.

I'm wondering if like the Gore effect there might not also be a Newsweek effect.

Since the late 1980s, this well-coordinated, well-funded campaign by contrarian scientists, free-market think tanks and industry has created a paralyzing fog of doubt around climate change. Through advertisements, op-eds, lobbying and media attention, greenhouse doubters (they hate being called deniers) argued first that the world is not warming; measurements indicating otherwise are flawed, they said. Then they claimed that any warming is natural, not caused by human activities. Now they contend that the looming warming will be minuscule and harmless.

So what I want to know is: why isn't my check in the mail?

However, I'm not a true denialist. The IPCC projection of sea level rise has gotten me seriously worried. My advice to people living close to the shore? “Run for your lives before it is too late” the IPCC predicts a 3 mm per year rise in sea level. That is one foot in a century. Think of the devastation that wave would cause if it happened all at once. A one foot wave is unprecedented. It will be the end of civilization as we know it. OTOH “dude, surf’s up”.

OK so could a 5 deg F temperature change could be deadly to the flora and fauna on earth. You are telling me that a system that varies over a range of 120 deg F in a year’s time is going to be seriously disturbed by a predicted 5 deg F change? And is already out of whack from a 1 deg F change? You are telling me that the biota will not adapt? That adjustments will not be made?

You are telling me that we must assume a signal which is much less than the noise will have big effects on the system? Doubtful. That 120 F yearly variation and 20 F daily variation tends to anneal out the effects of very small very low frequency variations at least until they get significant relative to the yearly variations.

Well any way, I'm willing to become a full fledged denialist if it pays well. I think $2,500 a month would be sufficient to start. Just let me know the check is in the mail.

Several sites have suggested this Marc Morano article:

The only problem is -- Newsweek knew better. Reporter Eve Conant, who interviewed Senator James Inhofe (R-Okla.), the Ranking Member of the Environment & Public Works Committee, was given all the latest data proving conclusively that it is the proponents of man-made global warming fears that enjoy a monumental funding advantage over the skeptics. (A whopping $50 BILLION to a paltry $19 MILLION for skeptics – Yes, that is BILLION to MILLION - see below)

Mann. I'm on the wrong side in this argument. I guess the check will not be in the mail.

There are also some good links here.

H/T papertiger

Cross Posted at Classical Values

The Climate Has Changed

I can remember back just a few short months ago. Our climate was in the lower 20s. Perfect for creatures adapted to the cold. Now it is in the upper 80s destroying the habitat of the cold climate creatures.

And if that is not enough to bother you, the climate is heating at an unprecedented rate. Normally climate scientists talk about changes of tenths of a degree in decades. Here we have something like 60 degrees change in six months. If the temperature keeps going up at its current rate we will all be boiled to death in less than two years.

We shoulda done something about it when we had a chance.

Brought to you by commenter papertiger who reminded me that I have been insufficiently diligent in providing climate porn. Is boiled to death in less than two years good enough for you?