<science> Regional climate is a well established, universally accepted method of climate description. The most common system is the Köppen climate classification (with the usual caution about Wikipedia citations). Footnote 4 is a detailed world map of the various zones.</science>
Hardly absurd, at least in the Camus sense. These “profession scientific organizations” (huh?) may use such milquetoast phrases when dealing with an ignorant public, but it is the science being pitted. Repeating catchwords and doublespeak is below y’all’s dignity and makes you sound totally clueless. I don’t know if you give any credibility to them tufo-puking NPR-listening liberal/hippie/commie McGovernik people at Fresh Air, but here’s an interesting interview about profiting from climate change. Although the Pete Seeger story is interesting, skip to the “windfall” cash part. It’s about a half hour long, but the guy makes some interesting observations at the end [ka’cling], only a poor person would disagree [ka’cling ka’ching ka’ching].
And thank you for not spamming three column-feet of useless drivel.
Considering the absolute fucking nightmare that Atlanta is right now, it’s ironic that the topic started off with commentary on record cold there.
The weather channel is blowing up, and there has been freezing rain in Mexico, Florida is still getting ice (freezing rain), and the National guard is trying to rescue people trapped all over the fucking place.
Horrific doesn’t even come close to describing what is happening right now.
Sure you can. They include solar radiation, atmospheric circulation, periodic orbital effects, pressure gradients, topography of the earth, ocean currents, and a very long list of others. Of course, to specify every possible one of these climate factors in total detail is impossible, as I noted before. But even quite coarse-grained descriptions are still useful in explaining how global climate works.
Your problem seems to be that you don’t really understand the term “climate”. You are evidently thinking of it as a distinctive characteristic set of atmospheric patterns in a particular area that is by definition different from other characteristic sets of atmospheric patterns elsewhere in the world. So naturally you imagine that the concept only has meaning in a regional or local context.
But what you’re missing is the fact that “climate” in the sense of general atmospheric patterns for the planet as a whole, i.e., global climate, is still a meaningful and useful concept for scientists, even though we have no other “global climates” to compare it to in the way we compare regional climates.
Careful, you’re falling into the common journalistic error of assuming that all extreme weather events can automatically be directly attributed to global warming. This isn’t so.
The science of climate change predicts that rising global temperatures will overall and in the long run produce more turbulent atmospheric patterns and consequently a higher incidence of extreme and severe weather on average. But it can’t determine whether any specific weather event was caused by the warming trend.
So while the current ice and cold in southern N. America are consistent with the predicted effects of global warming, they weren’t necessarily directly caused by it. We would inevitably be getting some extreme weather from time to time even if atmospheric CO2 levels had never got above 300 ppm.
Goddamn brother, you made me spew coffee. Now that is some funny shit right there.
Seriously, you made me laugh, so now I almost like you. Hell, I actually do, cause we don’t usually laugh at somebody we dislike. I mean, we don’t laugh at the jokes of people we dislike.
Now that is also funny as hell. Damn boy, I was learning my climate science before you was even a glint in your daddy’s eye parts.
And there ain’t no such thing as a “global climate”, in the same sense we use the world climate. Even Wikipedia, that bastion of idiocy at times, doesn’t try to define Global climate. It redirects to climate, but doesn’t contain any description, much lessa definition of “global climate”.
Climate is all about measuring and averaging of the variations in temperature, humidity, atmospheric pressure, wind, precipitation, atmospheric particle count and other shit like that over long periods of time. You can’t describe the global climate, cause that makes climate meaningless.
It’s just like there ain’t no global weather. if you don’t have global weather, you sure can’t average out to climate.
Damn, just the temperature changes in the hemispheres would fuck up the average so bad it would be meaningless. For something scientific to exist, it has to be measured. Or at least be possible to measure it.
When they say “researching the global climate change”, they aren’t saying there is a global climate, they is saying the research covers all the climate changes, globally.
There is nothing “doublespeak” about the term “global climate”; as I noted above, it’s a standard scientific concept. And so far from being a “milquetoast phrase” or “catchword” limited to scientists’ interactions with “an ignorant public”, it’s well attested in specialist research, as in the following example from the journal Physical Review Letters of the American Physical Society:
I don’t know where this weird internet meme of “there’s no such thing as global climate” has come from, but it is a silly and ignorant rhetorical trick that bears no relation to the technical vocabulary of actual climate science.
[QUOTE=watchwolf49]
I don’t know if you give any credibility to them tufo-puking NPR-listening liberal/hippie/commie McGovernik people at Fresh Air, but here’s an interesting interview about profiting from climate change.
[/QUOTE]
Irrelevant. Just because some people may figure out ways to profit from changing climate, or because some people may have financial incentives to exaggerate negative impacts of climate change, doesn’t mean that climate change is scientifically discredited in any way.
Shallow cynicism about possible ulterior motives, on the “kaching! kaching!” level, is no substitute for actual understanding of the scientific issues involved.
I rather like this quote when it comes to explaining that:
[QUOTE=Eric Pooley, Environmental Defense Fund]
“We can’t say that steroids caused any one home run by Barry Bonds, but steroids sure helped him hit more and hit them farther. Now we have weather on steroids.”
[/QUOTE]
As I said, this is your problem: you think that the common use of the word “climate” to mean “a local set of atmospheric patterns that can be compared to other local sets of atmospheric patterns” is the only possible way to use the word meaningfully. It’s not.
As the examples I cited above illustrate, scientists who research global climate change most certainly do say there is a global climate. When you claim that there’s no such thing or that it makes no sense to use such a term, you are simply wrong.
You have to be able to describe, in a scientific manner, something that you claim exists. If there is a “global climate”, then define it. What is the average temperature, humidity, atmospheric pressure, wind, precipitation, and atmospheric particle count of the global climate?
No need to define every last thing, just the basics. How many cooling days a year? How many warming days? What’s the average date of the first frost? The average winter snowfall? How about the average hours of sunshine for December? Simple things that we use to discuss a climate.
if you can’t define something, you can’t talk about it as if it exists. Not in SCIENCE! Bitch.
You can keep saying it exists, but you are going to have to define it. Or I will mock you.
Now the global mean temperature anomaly, that certainly is something we can measure, or at least estimate. So you can talk about the global temperature. It will have little to do with the current clusterfuck in Atlanta and the southeast US.
“Global climate” is a set of climate variables evaluated over the planet as a whole.
There are different ways to pick the set of climate variables and the coarseness (or spatial resolution) of the evaluation grid for different purposes. The WorldClim Global Climate Data, for example, uses four monthly variables (average minimum, mean, and maximum temperature and precipitations) along with 18 bioclimatic variables; see the link for more details.
[QUOTE=FXMastermind]
Or I will mock you.
[/quote]
Well, you are definitely much better at ignorantly mocking my arguments than at actually refuting them.
What are they then? If you claim something exists, at least give us the definition. What is the “set of climate variables evaluated over the planet as a whole” that defines the global climate?
If there is one thing I consider the sign of a complete loser, it would be somebody who WASTES TIME ARGUING about something that can’t ever be resolved. Like that thread.
At least with SCIENCE! there is a chance to learn something.
Why bother? As was once explained to me about the phenomenon known as the Internet troll, they will either (a) ignore factual arguments, (b) demand more evidence no matter how much you give them, or (c) try to obfuscate the evidence with bullshit (either sourced from the likes of conspiracy blogs, or by citing a legitimate paper and shamelessly misrepresenting what it’s saying).
But what the hell – here are a few examples where you elected option (a) with regard to my cited refutations of your preposterous statements about water vapor here and here, or the example here where you cited a paper and not only utterly failed to understand its purpose and its scientific premise, but apparently failed to comprehend straightforward English sentences. Or maybe that’s just the modus operandi of the common bullshit artist. Either that, or your knowledge of climate science is actually negative.
There certainly is. You should try it. But you seem more interested in discussing snow in Atlanta as proof that science is wrong about global warming. Perhaps you should submit a paper to Nature about it. :rolleyes: