Writing about journalistic treatment of the superstorm and climate change, CJR's Curtis Brainard (10/30/12) criticizes the New Yorker's Elizabeth Kolbert for the wrong reason.
He takes issue with her statement (10/29/12):
As with any particular "weather-related loss event," it's impossible to attribute Sandy to climate change. However, it is possible to say that the storm fits the general pattern in North America, and indeed around the world, toward more extreme weather, a pattern that, increasingly, can be attributed to climate change.
He's unhappy with the second part–retorting that you can't attribute a trend toward extreme weather to climate change. But it's actually the first part that's most obviously problematic: Contrary to Kolbert, it's possible to attribute every weather-related event to climate change.
As Kevin Trenberth of the National Center for Atmospheric Research says, in a paper quoted by Brainard:
All weather events are affected by climate change because the environment in which they occur is warmer and moister than it used to be.
In other words, all weather that we will experience from here on out will be a result of human-caused global warming. There will never be natural weather ever again–at least not on a human timescale.
That's not to say that there wasn't any bad weather before humans started messing with it–of course there was. But we can look back and compare the weather we used to have with the weather we have now. For example: Did we used to have hurricanes hitting New Jersey in late October? If not, that's a difference between the old kind of weather and the weather we've made.
How do we like our new weather?
About Jim Naureckas
[...] 2012/11/01: FAIR: How'd You Like That Hurricane We Made? [...]
I love love love you hornets nest of global warming hoax deniers.You say that Lord Monckton has no right to report on the information openly available to everyone because(wait for it)…….he has no doctorate in the subject.No credentials.Well here is a question….what gives Obama the qualification to make decisions based on the same information he can never understand (according to you) that effects hundreds of millions of people?Where is his doctorate on the subject?Certainly Obama has never even held a proper job.Monckton has been asked to appear before Congress 3x as an expert.Obama never has ,or would be.Your answer…..Congress is a bunch of fools.As well is Monckton.Everyone but you and your religion it seems- are fools.And only those with a Doctorate are to be even listened to.Ok I got mine.How bout you load of geniuses?Should I simply accept you are not educated enough to absorb this information either?Done
Thanks for that link, MrPedroHazard – that was very useful.
Huw with a "u", by the way.
Best wishes to all.
Ok my lady says" I" am being just as arrogant as the rest of you.There is a place i never wanted to go.So sorry for that.Lets try to be more civil Mr Huw.Look I could site tons of new studies proving global wqrming is a hoax.Read- No need to panic about global warming in the recent wall street journal article.Signed by 17 top scientists.Read Prof Dr Jan Espers group of geology and their studies.Read John Haywards piece.John Coleman founder of the weather channel and his recent remarks.Mark Goulds No sign of global warming.I could go on all week with literally hundreds of Doctoral testimonials as new studies are emerging daily.Im almost ready to state that it is trending that way.The new study that shows zero ice melt in the Himalayan glacier fields for the past ten years is an absolute bedrock of all global warming models.And a stunning blow to most all of the key papers written on the subject.Suffice it to say that our governments grab for control of all key industries(with an eye to saving among other things those himalayan ice fields was very premature.)We can thank the cooler heads that prevailed for that.My problem with all of this has always been the governments reaction to new findings.The politics in the science,is the fly in the ointment.The near religious aspects of this belief.
michael, I don't think you will find that anyone else in this thread apart from you has been asserting that anything is a FACT. It's you, and you alone, who has been aggressively dogmatic.
Science doesn't speak of facts, whatever the man in the street thinks. Newtonian physics is not a fact, evolution is not a fact, the Big Bang is not a fact. The IPCC, so far as I know, has never said it is 100% certain that anthropogenic global warming is taking place. What it has said, I think, is that it is almost as certain as it can be. So, we have a bit of a Pascal's wager, it seems to me – and the potential consequences of doing nothing to curb GHG emissions (should that prove to be a mistake) are far more serious than the potential consequences of taking urgent action to do so (should that prove to be so).
I read the Wall Street Journal op-ed you cited. It didn't impress me especially. Your 17 scientists turned out to be 14 scientists plus a space engineer and an ex-astronaut. Given the profile of the medium they were writing in and the likely impact of what they were saying, I would have thought they would have recruited a lot more, and a lot more relevant, signatories if, as you suggest, there really are large and growing numbers of leading scientists who agree with them. My father was a quite distinguished scientist and he used to tell me how narrow most scientists' field of expertise is but how prone they are to pontificate well outside it. On that score, I can't see any obvious reason to listen to an astrophysicist, for example, on the subject of climate feedbacks.
I note that the op-ed completely ignored the issue of the acidification of the oceans, which is another effect of rising concentrations of CO2. I wonder why not.
I found their invoking of the principle "Cui bono?" grotesque, really. "Cui bono?" doesn't mean "Follow the money," it means "Who benefits?" Well, let's see: who stands to benefit most, the politician who tells the voters, "I'm afraid the future looks grim, we're all going to have to reduce our standard of living" or the politician who tells them, "Everything's just fine! Just carry on as you are"? Nobody votes for austerity. At least, no one in my country does – maybe yours is different.
And who stands to profit most, the oil companies, gas companies and coal companies or those that manufacture renewables? Don't bluster about Al Gore, michael – just compare the salaries of the CEOs of BP, Shell, Exxon &c &c, or their turnovers, or the dividends they pay their shareholders, with those of – well, I can't think of any huge multinational corporations that build solar panels or lag people's lofts.
Evidently, your country is very different from mine. In Britain, there is no massive government funding for academic research into climate change, there are no large and growing government bureaucracies working in this area. There are no green taxes that are not offset by green grants (eg incentives to insulate your house better and to run a more fuel-efficient car). What taxpayer-funded subsidies there are for "green" businesses are nothing compared to the subsidies to the oil industry, the nuclear industry and the aviation industry, for example. And I don't know of a single charitable foundation that promises to save the planet, so I don't know who that jibe is aimed at.
The only prominent climate sceptics I can think of in Britain are a clutch of populist journalists writing in right-wing newspapers; one or two minor scientists (a "celebrity" botanist and a geologist); and Margaret Thatcher's old Chancellor of the Exchequer. Oh, and your beloved Lord Monckton, who has next to no profile over here because he gets a lot more money and adulation in Australia and the US. All of the succession of chief scientific advisers to the Government to my knowledge concur that the current change in the Earth's climate is a serious threat and is substantially man-made. The Royal Society agrees. The Met Office agrees. I can't think of a single substantial scientist in Britain that demurs – though I note that a professor of technology at Cambridge signed the WSJ op-ed, so that's one professor in a not-very-relevant field in a major British university who does.
None of these people are obviously haters of humankind (as you seem to like to characterise them). I'm certainly not. All of the things I have had to give up, such as flying overseas, or invest in, like a more efficient boiler, have cost me. There isn't any obvious advantage for me in believing that my son and my great-nephews and -nieces may live in a much less hospitable planet than I do. On the other hand, I don't find it difficult to see why someone like you might prefer to believe that the future is bright and there really is no reason to try to rein in our consumption.
Well I do love England.Spent a lot of time there.My people were Scotts.And yes sometimes you do show a common sense that is missing here.For instance we are voting for a new president.98% of his followers think he is doing a great job on the economy.Enough said.Look your father will be first to tell you that the peer group network can create its own life for a hypothesis.One stat …begets a thousand concurring views.Ten thousand stories,and absolute certainty.I believe that is a huge part of what has happened here.Now that models are crashing as we speak to the right ,and the left, these scientists stubbornly cling to the basic idea.They say maybe after we reconfigure ALL the models- it will prove our theories.Ok maybe it will….and maybe it wont.You ask how this could benefit anyone.Well leave that at our doorstep too.This administration used Global warming to make a grab for one sixth of our economy.People like Al Gore who was on his way to be the first green billionaire.Follow the friggin money trail.How about all those scientists cooking the books.ALL being subsidized with grants.They created a monster.25 years ago the exact same scientific groups were saying we were moving into the next ice age.They had all the data.But no political push to make it a global religion.As for my mention of facts…. of course I am talking about the historical temp record.Look i am an environmentalist.I live my life in a way I think you would find acceptable.I can afford to remove myself from a lot of the grid and live what would be considered a pretty "green" life.My choice.In this country ,when government comes a calling to TELL us how to live…. we have about a thousand ways to say go pound sand.As far as the oceans and the air don't worry about it.The way we are going printing money,borrowing, and spending we will be done in about 12 years.Dragging a good part of the world with us(yeah you Brits too)Then the world can go back to being a pasture.Problem solved
[...] pointing to superstorm Sandy as an outcome of human-caused global warming. I argued on FAIR Blog (11/1/12) that saying that global warming caused Sandy is simply accurate–and later tried to make my point [...]