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Re: [Phys-L] Finally weather is claimed by climate.



On 01/02/2018 08:12 AM, Don via Phys-l asked:

Does anyone recall better what the
argument was, and if climate scientists still think global warming
could result not only in warmer summers but also colder winters here
on the east coast?

1) It is recommended to use the term /Climate Change/
(rather than "global warming").

Rationale:
a) Different regions have different climates, obviously.
Although the global climate is changing, the /regional/
changes are larger, and not all the same. Furthermore,
most people don't move around much, so they tend to
care mainly about the climate in their own region.
b) Temperatures are part of the story, and long-time
long-distance averages are part of the story, but not
the whole story. There are predicted (and observed)
increases in extreme local weather of all sorts,
including hot spells, cold spells, precipitation
events, etc.

2) Modeling climate change on a region-by-region and
season-by-season basis requires a lot more work than
just modeling the long-time long-distance averages.
This is where the effort has been over the last ten
years, and where it will be going forward.

3) I'm not an expert, but the qualitative story as I
understand it has to do with /blocking/. In the
temperate regions we are accustomed to a succession
of fronts coming through. That leads to alternating
fair weather and cloudy weather, and to alternating
northerly and southerly components to the airflow
(superimposed on the prevailing winds).

Blocking refers to situations when you don't have
this alternation. You get long stretches of the
same weather. This produces extreme hot spells in
the summer *and* extreme cold spells in the winter.

This is a hardship on people and other living things,
since we are sensitive to the conditions here-and-now,
not just to the long-distance long-time averages.

4) I'm sure the twitterati know the difference between
climate and weather; they just pretend not to. Today's
weather is not proof of anything, one way or the other.

However, that being said, today's weather map no fronts
anywhere over the eastern half of the 48 states. That
is consistent with the blocking scenario. It may not
prove the theory, but it suuuuure doesn't disprove it.
http://aviationweather.gov/progchart/sfc

5) Keep in mind that there are vested interests that
would suffer trillion-dollar losses if we took serious
action to combat climate change. They would like to
prevent that, even though it means imposing much larger
losses on everybody else.

They don't directly care whether you believe in climate
change or not, so long as you don't /do/ anything about
it.

A trillion dollars is a lot of money. Wars have been
started for less reason. They will stop at nothing to
deceive the public and suborn the congress. A few
dishonest tweets are the least of your worries.