Offered as evidence that documenting climate change (or the lack thereof, depending on your point-of-view) isn’t as easy as the mass-media and pop culture would have you believe, seen at Watts Up With That:
Just when you thought this season’s cryosphere couldn’t be more strange …. The Southern Hemisphere sea ice area narrowly surpassed the previous historic maximum of 16.03 million sq. km to 16.17 million sq. km.
Personally, I’ve been of the opinion that I can believe that human-influenced climate change is occurring, augmented by long-and-short term climate cycles, which when put together creates a very complex puzzle. To the extent that some of this is preventable…or at least that preparations can be made for whatever the new climate norm ends up being… I worry that public support, currently inflamed by factoids and sensationalism in the media, could wane if a short-term cycle contrary to the long-term trend emerges.
Bah. Kids these days just have no appreciation for and too little understanding the beauty of a truly complex dynamic model.
1 response so far ↓
1 John Salmon // 5 Oct 2007 at 1:00 pm
Sure…but what’s the long term trend? How far back do you want to go? In truth, we should be heading into an ice age. Would some human-aided warming then be a bad thing? Historically, warm periods have been good for the human race. Then again, global warming obsessionists don’t much like the human race, from what I can see.
The more you read on the subject, the more you see how the numbers (in the surface record, that is)can be massaged to prove any point you want…There is no single (long term) data set that you can rely on. All the numbers are adjusted to compensate for the urban heat island effect (which turns out to affect small communities nearly as much as large cities) and other factors.
The only good numbers are in the satellite records, which only go back to 1978. And, in line with the story cited in your post, that record shows that virtually all of the warming so far is in the Northern Hemisphere. Nobody knows what this means. Nobody has a good model for the atmosphere. And anyone nobody knows what’s going to happen. Wrecking the world’s economy over this is silly.