Gleaning Facebook: Climate

Ugh. In Northwest Georgia we are enjoying a respite from the heat today… hope it continues.

The hottest 3 months ever recorded. 2014 is on track to break a lot of records, in a bad way.

Comments

Sam Burnham

Just goes to show you can manipulate global weather pattern data to make it fit your chosen agenda.

Terrell Shaw

How so?

Sam Burnham

Well, we're having a respite from the heat here. During part of the "hottest three month period ever" there was still substantial ice coverage on the Great Lakes and the Antarctic winter ice growth was 26 days ahead of schedule. And while Mr. Gore was leveraging the tragic storm in More, OK as evidence for his agenda's advancement, the truth is, the US is about to wrap up its 4th consecutive below average tornado season. Our current season is on track to finish with 25% fewer storms than normal. The hurricane data is pretty supportive of this trend as well. 

There are other countless reports that suggest cooler than normal temperatures from various parts of the world. 

So, if you collect data that benefits warming, you can make a study. Then compare the available records (usually 100-200 years depending on the part of the world you're measuring - just barely enough time to get an accurate measurement of climate, by definition).

Judging a climate by 3 months would be like judging The Count of a Monte Cristo by reading the third sentence of the second paragraph of chapter five.

Tersi Bendiburg

It's not too bad here in Tucker either, Terrell.

George Barton
Tornados and hurricanes change heat into kinetic energy, with a natural cooling effect. Those tidal surges take a lot of energy to form, and it all comes from heat. We need these storms right now. People will just have to move inland.

Terrell Shaw
Absolutely, Sam, but the overall picture is of a warmer planet, and one warmed in part by 200 years burning fossil fuels and polluting the atmosphere and destroying large areas of forests. Take a peek at overall figures for the whole planet.
http://climate.nasa.gov/key_indicators/

CLIMATE.NASA.GOV

Sam Burnham
There's a lot of interesting data on that link. And here's my feeling about this. I'm not a denier. I'm a skeptic. Maybe the Earth is warming, maybe it's cooling, maybe in the long run it's doing neither. If we dig out some of our geology, there's proof that just a few thousand years ago polar ice may have been as far south as we are. Where did it go? What caused it to melt?
We've seen the effects of fluctuating solar activity, volcanic activity, and who knows what all else causing change to weather patterns, which over a century or two could indicate a change in climate. But once the cycle ends it all goes back to "normal" or even swings the other way entirely.
If in fact the Earth is warming, and we put all our eggs in the carbon basket only to find out our solution was a knee-jerk reaction to sunspots the we've wrecked the global economy for nothing.
When temperature data is collected, there can be no deviation in location, time of day, or even the weather for a particular day. And our weather over the last year has shown that data just down the road might reflect something very different than weather here. Move 100 miles away and the variation grows immensely.
Maybe it's just skepticism but I just have trouble with collecting data for the whole globe or claiming the sea rose by a millimeter and expecting to take such measurements on face value.

Marsha Pledger
So sick of the heat

Terrell Shaw
Granted the following is anecdotal but: if the southeast is cooling the Lord's been grossly unfair to my immediate environs. Triple-digit days used to be much rarer in my coming of age and days in the single-digits more common as I remember them.