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.