Jed Rothwell wrote: > thomas malloy wrote: > >>> You do realize, I hope, that this has no bearing whatever on the >>> validity of global warming observations. >> >> You do realize, I hope, that this has been an ongoing pattern this year. > > An ongoing pattern where? In your state? In North America? This is not > the worldwide trend. Temperatures in Japan and Europe, for example, > remain at record highs this year. > > Also, trends that last only one year do not count. You have to look for > broader, longer trends. There have been several cold years in the last > few decades, but there have been many more hot years and the average is > higher than previous norms.
People without technical training often find it very difficult to grasp the difference between a single data point and a trend. Since the difference is fuzzy -- like the difference between a few grains of sand and a heap of sand -- this should not surprise us. Attempting to discuss such notions as fitting a least-squares trend line to the plot of the average global temperatures for the last 20 years is not going to get you very far with someone who thinks "mathematics" is the same a "arithmetic". And, of course, when you're dealing with someone who uses "faith based reasoning", attempting to prove *anything* by logic or by careful, detailed explanation is going to be an uphill battle. > > Finally, I believe global warming is thought to produce temperature > extremes including colder than normal temperatures in winter. Right -- in crude terms, major storms and unstable weather get an awful lot of their energy from evaporating sea water, and warming sea temperatures consequently provide more energy to drive them. So, you get more storms, and less stability, and the reduced stability results in more extreme temperatures of all sorts. In equally crude terms, warming the oceans changes the wind patterns, which results in redistributing the world's heat, and while that makes some places hotter, it also makes other places colder. Hurricanes (and typhoons and their other cousins from around the world) have been bad in the last few years and are expected to get worse in the future for the same reason: They're powered by warm seawater, and when the seawater's warmer, they have more power. Of course a chunk of this information comes to you from LLNL, where they mostly work on stuff that goes bang and where the thought police watch all the employees to make sure they're all loyal war mongers; none the less Thomas may feel the folks at LLNL are in cahoots with the left-wing socialist cabal which runs the mainstream media and so can't be trusted. Conspiracy theories all have one interesting feature in common: They cannot be disproved. Like creationism, they're intrinsically not falsifiable. This, alone, doesn't prove such theories wrong, of course. (Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're *not* out to get you!)
