"A SCIENTIFIC THEORY is judged by its predictive powers. Bah. Comrades, we must distinguish between mere bourgeois science, which is concerned with sterile facts and predictions, and Revolutionary Science, which is concerned with what will promote the Revolution."
Headline in
Instapundit , 20th December 2010.
The now notorious
talk of snow in the UK
becoming so rare that children would not experience it is looking a little foolish now that we have had two snowy winters in a row,
especially since increased snowfall and colder winters were expected by others, not obsessed with CO2 at the expense of everything else, who noted solar and other cycles pointed towards a colder period due in the northern hemisphere. Even the roughly 30 years patterns of minor warming and cooling we saw in the 20th century superimposed on the otherwise fairly steady warming observed since the early to mid 19th century, point to a cooler spell. These past two years, and the ironic coolings at the IPCC conferences in Copenhagen and Cancun, do not disprove the alarmist case, but they ought to weaken it and encourage more attention, and more funding, for those outside the very prosperous 'CO2 dominates the climate' camp. For example,
this research.
The
powerline blog expresses it thus:
'
But snow isn't all bad. Those British kids who were never supposed to know the joys of sledding, skating and, above all, snowball fighting are in luck:
'It's fun to ridicule the warmists because they are so often wrong, but their errors are in fact significant: a scientific theory that implies predictions that turn out to be wrong, is false. A principal feature of climate hysteria is its proponents' unwillingness to be judged by the standards that govern real science.'
Donna Laframboise has dug out some of the absurdly confident assertions of the IPCC with regard to what we were going to experience thanks to global warming:
'the 2007 climate bible written by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). It told us that winters would be warmer and less extreme. I invite you to take a look for yourself.
This table is titled
Temperature-Related Phenomenon and appears on a page titled:
Some Unifying Themes. The table contains phrases such as:
- more frequent heat waves / hot spells in summer
- more warm and fewer cold nights
- fewer frost days
- fewer cold outbreaks; fewer, shorter, less intense cold spells / cold extremes in winter [bold added]
Across from those phrases, on a case-by-case basis, the IPCC tells us these phenomenon are either “likely” or “very likely.” So, for example, the IPCC said it was
very likely that we’d experience fewer below-freezing days
everywhere in the world. We were further assured that all of the IPCC’s climate models are in agreement on that point.
Similarly, George Monbiot’s 2006 book was titled
Heat. Its subtitle was not:
How to Stop the Planet from Freezing. Rather, it insisted the planet was in danger of
burning. A year earlier, in a
Guardian newspaper column, Monbiot
told readers that “The freezes this country suffered in 1982 and 1963 are…unlikely to recur.”
As the final two weeks of 2010 count down, reality is not being kind to these prognosticators. Instead of sugar dustings of snow and mild temperatures, many parts of the world are in the grip of another unusually harsh winter:
- new record-low temperatures are being set in a variety of locales, including: Cuba, China, Japan, the UK, Kentucky, Florida, Georgia, Tennessee, and North Carolina
- snow and ice are stranding motorists in their cars in: Italy, China, the UK, Canada, and Indiana
- snow is interrupting air travel across Europe (more here with great pics)
- communities are coping with unusual amounts of snow from Helsinki to New York, from Minnesota to the UK
- people are dying of hypothermia in many parts of the US, including some unlikely ones: South Carolina, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin
- wildlife is being adversely affected by the cold in the UK as well as in Florida (more here)
In the UK a recent newspaper headline
read:
Millions facing fuel rationing over Christmas as heating oil runs low. In one of the world’s wealthiest countries some households face a four-week-long wait for furnace oil shipments, and the price has nearly doubled. Rather than being warm and comfortable, many people will spend their holidays cold and miserable – not to mention worried that their water pipes might freeze and burst (more
here). Meanwhile, a women’s World Cup skiing event has been
postponed due to too much snow in France.
Although the mass media barely mentioned this fact, it’s more than a little ironic that the Mexican resort town of Cancun broke cold weather temperature records
six days running during the United Nations’ anti-global-warming summit earlier this month.
We’ve long been advised that the symptoms of climate change are all around us – and that global warming is happening faster than predicted. But Mother Nature, it seems, has a wicked sense of humour.
.
In related news, I love this headline on yesterday’s Christopher Booker column in the UK
Telegraph:
It’s ‘the hottest year on record’, as long as you don’t take its temperature
Back in January I wrote a lengthy
blog post examining snowfall in Britain over the past decade. In the year 2000 the
Independent newspaper interviewed climate scientists and then
advised the public that soon children wouldn’t know what snow was. Global warming would result in “not only fewer white Christmases, but fewer white Januaries and Februaries.” I examined every one of Britain’s winters since the year 2000, however, and found no shortage of the white stuff.'
Elsewhere, we hear of climate alarmists responding to the snow up to their ears to assert that that is exactly what we should, now, expect from global warming. In fact, that is just what we should, now, expect from global warmists.
