GayandRight

My name is Fred and I am a gay conservative living in Ottawa. This blog supports limited government, the right of the State of Israel to live in peace and security, and tries to expose the threat to us all from cultural relativism, post-modernism, and radical Islam. I am also the founder of the Free Thinking Film Society in Ottawa (www.freethinkingfilms.com)

Thursday, January 22, 2009

No matter what - all evidence is consistent with global warming...

Here's a good case study in the evidence - no matter what - it all supports global warming..
A new paper is out in Nature that argues that the Antarctic continent has been warming. In an AP news story, two of its authors (one is Michael Mann from the Real Climate blog) argue that this refutes the skeptics and is “consistent with” greenhouse warming:

“Contrarians have sometime grabbed on to this idea that the entire continent of Antarctica is cooling, so how could we be talking about global warming,” said study co-author Michael Mann, director of the Earth System Science Center at Penn State University. “Now we can say: no, it’s not true … It is not bucking the trend.”

The study does not point to man-made climate change as the cause of the Antarctic warming — doing so is a highly intricate scientific process — but a different and smaller study out late last year did make that connection.

“We can’t pin it down, but it certainly is consistent with the influence of greenhouse gases,” said NASA scientist Drew Shindell, another study co-author. Some of the effects also could be natural variability, he said.


Of course, not long ago we learned from Real Climate that a cooling Antarctica was “consistent with” greenhouse warming and thus the skeptics were wrong:

. . . we often hear people remarking that parts of Antarctica are getting colder, and indeed the ice pack in the Southern Ocean around Antarctica has actually been getting bigger. Doesn’t this contradict the calculations that greenhouse gases are warming the globe? Not at all, because a cold Antarctica is just what calculations predict… and have predicted for the past quarter century. . .

. . . computer models have improved by orders of magnitude, but they continue to show that Antarctica cannot be expected to warm up very significantly until long after the rest of the world’s climate is radically changed.


Bottom line: A cold Antarctica and Southern Ocean do not contradict our models of global warming. For a long time the models have predicted just that.

So a warming Antarctica and a cooling Antarctica are both “consistent with” model projections of global warming. Our foray into the tortured logic of “consistent with” in climate science raises the periennel question, what observations of the climate system would be inconsistent with the model predictions?

3 Comments:

Blogger sanhan said...

Hmmm, so the environmental socialists have come up with a new argument that is designed to silence any and all arguments opposed to their assertion that the human race is destroying the planet. Am I to understand that whether the antactic gets warmer OR colder it all means the same thing, the earth is warming? I gots me tinfoil hat and me koolaid, commence lobotomy!!

2:37 PM  
Blogger Old and Confused said...

As reported by WUWT here is part of the original press release "On the other hand, a number of Antarctic weather stations have been in place since 1957, the International Geophysical Year, but virtually all of them are within a short distance of the coast and so provide no direct information about conditions in the continent’s interior.

The scientists found temperature measurements from weather stations corresponded closely with satellite data for overlapping time periods. That allowed them to use the satellite data as a guide to deduce temperatures in areas of the continent without weather stations."

In other words where there is no data available make some up that supports your viewpoint.

2:47 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Global warming is God.

5:11 AM  

Post a Comment

Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]

<< Home