I thought we were all going to be swimming to work on Cap Hill because of sea level changes caused by HEAT.
When did it become an ice age threatening again?
Taking global warming or climate change or whatever it's being called today seriously would be easier if y'all would decide what the catastrophe actually is. I actually think people should use energy more wisely, that maybe some expectations of lifestyle should be changed to stop possible environmental harms. But it's hard to take folks who blame everything from a snowstorm in (gasp) winter to heat in (shockingly) summer as a sign of impending doom.
Who invented this myth that Seattle has a cold winter? It doesn't. You know what happens in Seattle in the winter? It rains. You know what happens to most of the rest of the country? It snows. Has the temperature in Seattle ever fallen below 0 F? Not since at least 1948 (based on Seatac records).
@11: Legitimate scientists aren't blaming the polar vortex on global warming. They're just pointing out that the preponderance of evidence still points to a human impact on climate change.
@11. Don't play dumb. Global average temperatures have been increasing for decades. Weather != climate. Australia is roasting right now. It's their summer, and temps are oven hot.
@11: D'aww, it doesn't understand geoscience.
Here's something to think about: rising average temperature affects air and water circulation. Atmospheric scientists have been predicting for decades that changes to the jet stream could cause extremely cold weather in much of North America. You see, this mass of cold air that's been plopped on us is always sitting around being cold; it's just that usually the jet stream stays further north and the polar vortex doesn't have quite such an extent, so the cold air is kept further north. Not so this year.
When are you going to admit that maybe people who devote their lives to studying this stuff understand it better than you? Hell, I understand it better than you and my knowledge of the atmosphere is fairly limited, as it's only tangential to my study of paleontology.
@14 - Actually some climate scientists are making the link between the waviness of the polar vortex and climate change. It's not my field so I'll refrain from formulating an opinion but it is worthwhile noting that Cliff Mass also disagrees with the IPCC SR5 report on extreme events because the IPCC finds evidence for an increase in some extreme events tied to climate change.
Also, Mass's assertion that media should chill on hyping the link between climate change and extreme events isn't based in reality because media hardly ever mentions such link as shown by the recent FAIR study: "A new FAIR survey of the national network newscasts (CBS Evening News, NBC Nightly News, ABC World News) finds that extreme weather is big news. In the first nine months of 2013, there were 450 segments of 200 words or more that covered extreme weather: flooding, forest fires, tornadoes, blizzards, hurricanes and heat waves.
But of that total, just a tiny fraction--16 segments, or 4 percent of the total--so much as mentioned the words "climate change," "global warming" or "greenhouse gases."
I thought we were all going to be swimming to work on Cap Hill because of sea level changes caused by HEAT.
When did it become an ice age threatening again?
Taking global warming or climate change or whatever it's being called today seriously would be easier if y'all would decide what the catastrophe actually is. I actually think people should use energy more wisely, that maybe some expectations of lifestyle should be changed to stop possible environmental harms. But it's hard to take folks who blame everything from a snowstorm in (gasp) winter to heat in (shockingly) summer as a sign of impending doom.
http://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2014/01/do…
Here's something to think about: rising average temperature affects air and water circulation. Atmospheric scientists have been predicting for decades that changes to the jet stream could cause extremely cold weather in much of North America. You see, this mass of cold air that's been plopped on us is always sitting around being cold; it's just that usually the jet stream stays further north and the polar vortex doesn't have quite such an extent, so the cold air is kept further north. Not so this year.
When are you going to admit that maybe people who devote their lives to studying this stuff understand it better than you? Hell, I understand it better than you and my knowledge of the atmosphere is fairly limited, as it's only tangential to my study of paleontology.
Also, Mass's assertion that media should chill on hyping the link between climate change and extreme events isn't based in reality because media hardly ever mentions such link as shown by the recent FAIR study: "A new FAIR survey of the national network newscasts (CBS Evening News, NBC Nightly News, ABC World News) finds that extreme weather is big news. In the first nine months of 2013, there were 450 segments of 200 words or more that covered extreme weather: flooding, forest fires, tornadoes, blizzards, hurricanes and heat waves.
But of that total, just a tiny fraction--16 segments, or 4 percent of the total--so much as mentioned the words "climate change," "global warming" or "greenhouse gases."
http://fair.org/home/tv-news-and-extreme…