This has been one heckuva (helluva) weather year on the east coast.  I’m sitting here while a three and half foot drift of snow is piled against my front door while snow continues to fall on a town where yearly records have already been shattered (I think I read that somewhere).  We’ve had a very [...]]]>

This has been one heckuva (helluva) weather year on the east coast.  I’m sitting here while a three and half foot drift of snow is piled against my front door while snow continues to fall on a town where yearly records have already been shattered (I think I read that somewhere).  We’ve had a very white Christmas, a dumping of two feet in January, and now another monster storm leaving us working from home (yeah right) and writing mediocre blog postings just to maintain the small bit of sanity that remains within us.

I was also in Orlando, Florida in January of this year when the high temperature was thirty five degrees Fahrenheit.  I don’t know where these people got all these hats and gloves, but I certainly didn’t have any and I was freezing my rear end off.

Needless to say this winter has turned the Carolinas into a fishtailing frenzy of wintertime extravaganza.

Every time we get this abnormally cold weather or excessive snowfall, people start saying things like, “How ’bout your global warming now John?”  And then start snickering and fist-bumping with their conservative buddies, and muttering things like, “dumb tree hugger” under their breath.

I often try to explain to them that global warming has only increased the Earth’s temperature by about 1 degree Celsius, and that climate change can actually result in more extreme weather on both sides of the temperate spectrum.  This is usually countered with some kind of belly laugh and big sigh.  I doubt we’re getting anywhere with this argument.

“ln the simulations I’ve analyzed, you can get some quite big blizzards up until the year 2040,” said Raymond Pierrehumbert, professor of geophysics at the University of Chicago.  “But between 2040 and 2080, it starts to get too warm to have much snow at all and it gradually sort of peters out.”

Experts say precipitation will likely increase in many parts of the country, while others experience drought.  In Illinois, storms with extreme precipitation have become more frequent by 3 percent each decade from 1931 to 1996, according to a study by the Illinois State Water Survey and the National Climatic Data Center.

Of course global climate change hasn’t been proven beyond an absolute doubt, so there is a chance that we could be creating a big fuss and of course, a better World, for nothing.  But evidently in the minds of nay-sayers the consequences don’t outweigh the sacrifices.

However, I think it is safe to conclude that snow storms and abnormally cold weather does nothing to disprove or discredit theories of global climate change.  And if these large groups of scientists are correct, we could be in store for some more extreme weather in the upcoming years, so hold on tight and enjoy it while it lasts, for it may not be around forever.

Well, Climategate is another name for the Climatic Research Unit e-mail hacking incident and it [...]]]> There are probably few out there that haven’t heard the term “Climategate” over the last couple of weeks, but what I’m not sure people are aware of is what it is and what information these infamous emails contain.  So….what the heck is Climategate?

Well, Climategate is another name for the Climatic Research Unit e-mail hacking incident and it is just that.  Some unknown souls, that I don’t think were affiliated with the Nixon administration, but evidently are not in strict agreement with the whole idea of climate change, decided to hack into the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia (UEA) in Norwich, England.  They stole over 1,000 emails, took phrases out of context, and anonymously disseminated them around the World.  Nobody really knows why they did this, but it is believed that is was done in an effort to sabotage the Copenhagen global climate summit which is currently underway.  Without going into some drawn-out explanation about this whole thing why don’t we just look at three of the emails uncovered in this little operation.  

The emails are mainly between climatologists Phil Jones, the head of the CRU, and Michael E. Mann of Pennsylvania State University, one of the originators of the graph of temperature trends famously named the “hockey stick graph” (seen above).

Email #1:  An excerpt from one November 1999 e-mail authored by Phil Jones reads:

“I’ve just completed Mike’s Naturetrick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie, from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.” 

Email #2:  Mann e-mail of 11 Mar 2003

 As a response to an e-mail indicating that a paper in the scientific journal Climate Research had questioned assertions that the 20th century was abnormally warm, Mann wrote:

“I think we have to stop considering Climate Research as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal.”

Email #3: Trenberth e-mail of 12 Oct 2009

An email written by Kevin Trenberth, a climatologist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, discussed gaps in understanding of recent temperature variations:

“The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t,”

 Of course these comments were taken severely out of context which makes them terribly misleading.  And just to make things a little more clear, according to PSU’s Mann, that statistical “trick” that Jones refers to in one e-mail — simply referred to the replacing of proxy temperature data from tree rings in recent years with more accurate data from air temperatures.

What I think we need to understand is that scientist are going to talk to one another in a much different way than they would talk to the general public.  In engineering school we used tricks all the time to change loads or make things easier to handle mathematically.  Trying to explain this to a bunch of anti-climate change activists, that are at times making death threats on scientists, is needless to say, impossible. 

The only email that looked suspicious at all to me is that first one that mentions tricks and hidden information.  However, after hearing the explanation, it makes a lot of sense, especially with an engineering background and some familiarity with the method of scientific calculations.  

In fact, the only thing that Climategate is exposing in my mind is that we are in a full fledged political war over climate change and it’s not for the right reasons.  We have to realize that oil, and other non-renewable sources of energy are huge, huge, huge, business.  So yes, this is about money.  There are quite a lot of people in this World that have built their careers and fortunes, as well as the career of their children, on non-renewable energy sources.  These people are willing to lie, cheat, steal, and perhaps kill to keep their livelihood in tact.

With renewable energy, we have the potential to make oil about as useful as a 1969 VW bug.  This would put the fortunes of many very rich people at risk.  And we know that when money is involved, people will at times behave in very strange ways.  Climategate was certainly one of those strange events.