It’s Unseasonably Warm Out There …
…if you’re not in the lower 48, the northern band of Europe, Siberia, and parts of India/China. Everywhere else it’s quite warm, especially over the Arctic.
See?
As the National Snow and Ice Data Center notes:
These regional contrasts in temperature anomalies resulted from a strongly negative phase of the Arctic Oscillation (AO). The AO is a natural pattern of climate variability. It consists of opposing patterns of atmospheric pressure between the polar regions and middle latitudes. The positive phase of the AO exists when pressures are lower than normal over the Arctic, and higher than normal in middle latitude. In the negative phase, the opposite is true; pressures are higher than normal over the Arctic and lower than normal in middle latitudes. The negative and positive phases of the AO set up opposing temperature patterns. With the AO in its negative phase this season, the Arctic is warmer than average, while parts of the middle latitudes are colder than normal. The phase of the AO also affects patterns of precipitation, especially over Europe.
The phase of the AO is described in terms of an index value. In December 2009 the AO index value was -3.41, the most negative value since at least 1950, according to data from the NOAA Climate Prediction Center.
So to summarize it, a natural oscillation has moved all that cold Arctic air down south, but the Arctic is incredibly hot compared to average and areas of the world that are outside the influence of the oscillation are little changed from recent years. I don’t think I need to add much else.
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Sorry, the scam is not selling well anymore. The ever escalating hysteria from the warmers seems to be turning off rational thinkers.
Professor Mojib Latif, a leading member of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), is now predicting a 20 to 30 year cooling period globally based on oceanic Multi-Decadal Oscillations. He believes carbon may have some minor effect but most of the warming in the past few decades has come from these oceanic cycles and has been misinterpreted.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-…
Warmer: “Who are you going to believe? My computer model or your freezing gnutches?”
Yeah…you might want to uh click on the “previous post” button before you go on quoting Latif…
You too!
For the record: As a result of the NPR interview link provided me by mikkel, I now agree that Latif's comments were badly distorted in the Daily Mail piece I cited above. I won't be using that article again. Details are in comments on the previous post.
I remain a skeptic, but a better informed one. Sincere thanks to mikkel.
The big problem with today's weather pattern is it's affecting the majority of earth's literate population. So millions of people have recently increased their doubts because of current patterns, either unable or unwilling to look at the big picture.
You have to look beyond your back yard.
“The ever escalating hysteria from the warmers seems to be turning off rational thinkers.”
It turned us off long ago. So did its predictability, as well as the same goals as usual from these often very same people.
“So millions of people have recently increased their doubts because of current patterns, either unable or unwilling to look at the big picture. You have to look beyond your back yard.”
I am an environmentalist, Barky. But let's reverse that statement.
“So millions of left-wingers have recently increased their certainty that because of current patterns, we are going through “global warming” and it is completely caused by man.”
They, too, are unwilling to look at the big picture and out of their own backyards.
They do not even wish to consider how the Arctic Oscillation, and every other cyclic phase in our atmosphere, plays into the warming and cooling cycles of earth. And the are cycles. Do we have an impact on our environment? You're darned right we do. Pollution and environmental heracy should be stopped, always. But to attempt to sell this scam to people, simply so you can implement a global political goal, is equally wrong. We do need to concentrate massive resources into renewable energy and get out of the fossil-fuel game gradually (to minimize the economic impact).
But this “global warming……uh….we really meant….uh….climate change….yeah….climate change” is old. It is political, and it is dishonest.
Not buying it, Jeff. Logic dictates that all this burning of petrochemicals has to have some effect. It took hundreds of millions of years for plant & animal carbon to “cook down” into pools of oil and pockets of natural gas. We've burned significant portions of such fuel in 100 years. You can go from 300 million years of concentration of carbon into 100 years of release of CO2 and not expect consequences. It's inane to think otherwise. And that's only a part of the overall problem.