Democracy Has Prevailed.

January 7, 2014

It's DAMN Cold Outside!

And you know what that means, right?

GLOBAL WARMING IS A HOAX!

It's as simple as pi, right?

Slate has a rundown on some of the more famous climate deniers.  First there's Donald Trump:
This very expensive GLOBAL WARMING bullshit has got to stop. Our planet is freezing, record low temps,and our GW scientists are stuck in ice
And of course Drudge:


While The Wire's got Senator Inhofe:
With the Polar Vortex threatening us all this week, Senator Jim Inhofe took to the Senate floor on Monday to run through just about every reason he personally does not think climate change is a real thing. Because it's cold outside! Get it?
And let's not forget the local source of anti-intellectual science denial, the Tribune-Review.  Today's bit of global warming bullshit is from the very funny and immensely insightful, Randy Bish:


But does science (real science not the stuff they're drinkin in cloud cuckoo land)have anything to say about the vortex?

Yes, it does.  And while it's too early to say for sure, there's some interesting data on the subject.  From Time:
Unsurprisingly, the extreme cold has brought out the climate change skeptics, who point to the freeze and the recent snowstorms and say, essentially, “nyah-nyah.” Now this is where I would usually point to the fact that the occasional cold snap—even one as extreme as much of the U.S. is experiencing now—doesn’t change the overall trajectory of a warming planet. Weather is what happens in the atmosphere day to day; climate is how the atmosphere behaves over long periods of time. Winters in the U.S. have been warming steadily over the past century, and even faster in recent decades, so it would take more than a few sub-zero days to cancel that out.

But not only does the cold spell not disprove climate change, it may well be that global warming could be making the occasional bout of extreme cold weather in the U.S. even more likely. [Emphasis added.]
Here's the hypothesis:
Sea ice is vanishing from the Arctic thanks to climate change, which leaves behind dark open ocean water, which absorbs more of the heat from the sun than reflective ice. That in turn is helping to cause the Arctic to warm faster than the rest of the planet, almost twice the global average. The jet stream—the belt of fast-flowing, westerly winds that essentially serves as the boundary between cold northern air and warmer southern air—is driven by temperature difference between the northerly latitudes and the tropical ones. Some scientists theorize that as that temperature difference narrows, it may weaken the jet stream, which in turns makes it more likely that cold Arctic air will escape the polar vortex and flow southward.
As the writer said, it's still preliminary but the Arctic sea ice is still vanishing and the Earth is still warming up.

Despite the fact it's (as of this writing) below zero out there.

1 comment:

Professor Chaos said...

Gee, I don't know whom to believe, every legitimate scientist or a game-show host with a bad combover?