The ardency with which people believe in catastrophic climate change supersedes the need of paying attention to basic science. Economists and students of society versed in the theory of liberty have been experiencing this kind of distortion of good theory for a long time.
The theory of liberty is the only ecological theory of human society. It interprets human society as an ecological order that we can never create or control in its entirety and details, but can take advantage of if we adjust to an order larger than anything we could possibly bring about.
Mainstream "ecology"-based politics is not at all inspired by an appreciation of how ecological order operates, but by the rationalistic compulsion to know and control all, irrespective of whether it can be known or needs to be controlled comprehensively.
Subsequent to an insightful assessment of the AGW (Anthropogenic Global Warming) mind set, in the second paragraph reproduced below, Energy Tribune, explains why the claim that global warming must cause more severe storms is the opposite of what atmospheric science would predict.
The claims that global warming would produce all kinds of severe weather from cold to hot is new. It was only a few years ago that the alarmists were claiming the earth would get warmer and this would produce more heat waves, droughts and melting ice caps and glaciers. Then the global temperature stopped going up after 1998. At this point winters started getting colder and snowier around the world. The alarmists had to restructure their doomsday predictions because nature was not cooperating. The new spin is global warming causes everything. How can your prediction be wrong if you forecast everything to happen? The answer is you can’t. [...]
More specifically, as for the incidence and intensity of storm activity:
We live on a round planet and therefore the sun heats the world unevenly. The earth is cold at the top and bottom and hot at the equator. Storms transport heat away from the tropics and mix it with cold air at the top and bottom. This keeps our global temperature in check.
The strength of the storms depends on the magnitude of the temperature difference between the poles and the equator. This difference is greatest in the winter. In winter, temperatures at the North Pole can be 50 to 60 degrees below zero while readings in the tropics are in the 80s and 90s. A good way to see how the atmosphere reacts to this difference in temperature is in the speed of the jet streams. These powerful rivers of wind triple in strength from summer to winter. They blow about 60 miles per hour in the summer when the difference in temperature from pole to equator is the least. In the winter, these winds increase to near 200 miles per hour. The same is true for the winds on the ground. In the summer, the migratory storms move more slowly and have much less wind. In the winter, as the temperature differences increase, the storms become more powerful.
In a warmer world, we are told that storms will become more severe. There is no reason for this to happen. Global warming theory says the temperature changes will be most pronounced at the poles, much less so at the equator. As the temperature difference between the poles and the equator decreases, there will be fewer strong storms. As the winter temperature difference decreases in a warmer world, the energy available for stronger storms will decrease and so will the strength of the storms just as it does now from winter to summer. As the temperature contrast across the planet decreases, the winter storms would become more like summer storms are today. Less variation in temperature means fewer and weaker storms. Hurricanes would become less common and weaker in a warmer world. Hurricanes transport vast quantities of heat from the tropics to the higher latitudes. In a world of less temperature contrast the atmosphere won’t need to make as many hurricanes.
The severe winter weather over the last several years is due to global cooling, not warming. All data show the earth has been cooling since 2002. As this cooling continues the temperature difference across the planet will increase. This will result in stronger winter storms and more record winter weather events.
The recent snowstorms in Washington, DC broke the snowfall records set 126 years ago. The old record was 54.4 inches. The new record at the time of this writing is 55.9 inches. These numbers are within 97% of each other. There is an inherent inaccuracy in measuring snow especially in windy conditions. Also snowfall amounts are highly variable from one location to another in any snowstorm. Today we measure snowfall at far more locations than in the past.
Given these factors, we can say that the two seasonal snowfall numbers are basically the same. This means that a winter of similar magnitude and ferocity struck the Middle Atlantic region 126 years ago. The current winter is just a return of the same weather we had back then.
In summary, global warming did not cause the big winter of 1898-99 and it is not causing this year’s winter storms, either.
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