The Weather’s Not Weird–Honest

This isn’t going to be what you expect.

I hate to quote the Wall Street Journal. It’s moved a little right of center in recent years. This is a story about climate change which has became as politically charged as it is scientifically controversial. A left or right spin could make a difference in how things are presented.

That being said the Journal has an eye opening revelation from one of its European editorial writers.

If you’ve gone through the past few years thinking weather’s become weird be prepared for your eyes to be opened… or maybe closed. This isn’t going to be what you expect.

Weather hasn’t really changed! As its source the Journal uses the Twentieth Century Reanalysis Project from NOAA which “contains objectively-analyzed 4-dimensional weather maps and their uncertainty for most of the 1900’s.” “Objectively-analyzed” means unbiased. In other words we now have trustworthy detailed weather maps for the pre-satellite early 20th Century!

As it happens, the project’s initial findings, published last month, show no evidence of an intensifying weather trend

Basically unusual weather has always been with us. I think we’re more conscious today because it’s easy to see what’s going on everywhere. Bad weather which might have evaded you, like an Australian typhoon, is now front-and-center on your TV and/or computer.

Back to the Journal article.

“In the climate models, the extremes get more extreme as we move into a doubled CO2 world in 100 years,” atmospheric scientist Gilbert Compo, one of the researchers on the project, tells me from his office at the University of Colorado, Boulder. “So we were surprised that none of the three major indices of climate variability that we used show a trend of increased circulation going back to 1871.”

I guess I’m a little surprised too.

8 thoughts on “The Weather’s Not Weird–Honest”

  1. You shouldn’t care that the Wall Street Journal is your source because you disagree with their Op Ed page on most days. You should always seek the truth. Regardless of the source.

      1. My comment was more general than it was specific to this article. That’s the problem with climate change; we do not know what is truth and what is fiction.

  2. A little right of center???? They’re Tea Bagger enthusiasts. And Murdoch has been quite open about his willingness to print “news” in ways which foster his Right Wingnut agenda. For those who respond “New York Times” I’ll raise you a Judith Miller.

    Anyway, the weather thing is more of the same.

    Pielke, from his own wiki page:
    However, Pielke has criticized the IPCC for its conclusions regarding CO2 and global warming and accused it of selectively choosing data to support a selective view of the science.[5]

    Compo is also a long time denier.

    It’s just the usual Murdoch propaganda.

  3. I was doing fine until “none of the three major indices of climate variability that we used show a trend of increased circulation.” Trend of increased circulation, what’s that?

  4. I am not a meteorologist, don’t even play one on the TV, but, IIRC, it boils down to this (pun intended). Did do college physics, though.

    In classical physics, if one adds heat to a closed loop fluid system, that heat yields increased flow in the fluid. This is basic thermodynamics.

    In terms of the atmosphere and weather, if there is added heat (global warming), there should be signs of increased movement in the atmosphere (air and water vapor are both fluids, so far as a physicist is concerned). One of the consequences, seen in the last few decades, is increased volatility of weather systems. Now, whether (pun, again) that heat is dissipated through circulation, necessarily, or through other means is indeterminant. The heat could, as we have seen over the last few decades, be dissipated through stronger storm systems, increased mixing of hot and cold latitudes, increase in ocean temperature, increase in surface temperature, increase in upper atmosphere temperature, and the list goes on.

    The atmosphere isn’t quite as closed loop as a physics lab experiment.

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