The problem I have with this view is that it assumes that weather isn’t variable at all. We get things like a 100 year flood, or a 150 year hurricane season, or such, where it’s few and far between - but it does happen. I can look back in my own area’s history and see that about every 15 [+/- 2 years] years, we get a few very suck-ass winters in a row. On a longer term, using weather records, about every 30 years we also get so much snow that the city shuts down.
I don’t expect this to vanish simply because of 1 C of warming. I’d be suspicious of it at the 2 C level, with milder coming into play in the 2.5 - 3.5 C range and “spring winters” in the 3.5 - 4 C range, with elevating dryness up from there.
Don’t conflate single or short term events with what’s going on on the global scene. I warn the activists that saying Katrina is the earf trying to hurt us back of the same thing. (And I strain my eyes when people go “We will have a Katrina every year from here on out.” on the network news channels, too.)
As for the variable trends, I’d be careful doing that. When I look at temperature series, I don’t look at 1970 as a baseline. I look at the current available year for a baseline (so it becomes a negative or positive change compared to the most recent yearly average) and always look at graphs for as many years as I can. Finding patterns in select data is very, very easy. Especially if you use simple linear trending.
Using a polynomial trend helps you identify what can be short term downturns much easier. We all know that it raised, but while it was raising there was fluctuations. If there were 10 down turns this century that lasted 5-10 years, then we are either an extreme version of that same trend due to a confluence of events we can’t explain or we are breaking the mold. We don’t have enough evidence to predict either way, unfortunately.
Since we are holding relatively steady on average temperatures, though, I think that something we don’t understand is going on. We can accept that and still understand that things are a-changing.
I can also accept that some political shenanigans are afoot in regards to the climate emails, but, to be honest, I have several scientists in my family (not in climate science) and their fields are equally…erm…special. Arguments, rivalries, and claims like what we found in the climategate and climategate 2 emails can be found all over the place, not only in modern science but in old timey science as well.
If you purchased a flex fuel vehicle, odds are good that you can simply pipe in a new fuel and flash the ECM to time for it properly. I had a setup on my old car that would run LPG, Natural Gas, Gasoline, or E85. All I’d do is switch a dial in my dash to tell the ECM what to time for and to power that system’s pump/regulator (E85 and Gas obviously shared system-space, but were timed differently.)
My new car isn’t Flex Fuel compatible, but I got it for low gas burn at long commutes. I was looking into getting FF components installed and it was prohibitively expensive.