Wednesday, July 04, 2007
Global Warming is Not Happening and We Are Winning in Iraq
I know everybody who reads this blog is a global warming sceptic, but I feel it is necessary to point out that southern Europe has been suffering a heatwave and Britain has been subject to a series of low pressure systems causing more or less continuous rain for two months. Both these eventualities were predicted by climate models - though they do appear to be happening sooner than expected. But, of course, I know this shows the climate models are wrong about everything, that the weather is perfectly normal and that the whole Iraq venture has been the most glorious success.
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A blog about, among other things, imaginary ideas - What ifs? and Imagine thats. What if photographs looked nothing like what we see with our eyes? Imagine that the Berlin Wall had never come down. What if we were the punchline of an interminable joke? All contributions welcome.
Do you know, that almost sounds sarcastic. Obviously not though because, as we all know, sarcasm doesn't work in print.
ReplyDeleteAnyway thank you for the excellent and cheery news regarding our Mesopotamian campaign and the frightful weather we are suffering at present.
Come to Philly, Bryan. Usually, it's semi-tropical here at this time of year. Not this year.
ReplyDeleteIt's July, it's raining in Wimbledon and it's sunny in the South of France.
ReplyDeleteWhat kind of climatology genius predicted that?
A heatwave in July? How unusual. Meanwhile here in NYC, we are having relatively cool weather which is one of the several different types of weather we get each summer.
ReplyDeleteAnyway, I just checked our climate models and apparently we win in Iraq on January 20, 2009. Any relation to the day that Bush leaves office is purely coincidental.
And I should add that the last time I attended Wimbledon (27 years ago) the weather was quite lovely except when it was raining.
ReplyDeleteI think there is anthropogenically driven global warming, of some degree, but I don't think the current weather patterns in Europe have any relevance whatsoever. Britain has a maritime climate, and Southern Europe has a continental climate. A series of low pressure fronts causing prolonged rain over the UK; surely not?
ReplyDeleteYou have to go all the way back in the meteorological records to, ooh, 1997, to find a June as wet as this June.
If anthropogenic global warming exists, it exists as a trend, and a trend is a statistical concept, a characteristic of a collection of events, not a property of individual events, and certainly not verified by the weather in any particular month or year.
Gordon, while everything you said is certainly true, it seems to me that one important aspect of global warming was overlooked: logic and reason have not been the stong suit of millennialist movements throughout history, and it is unfair to expect either from the worshippers in the Church of Global Warming. Everything they don't like or any weather pattern they are inconvenienced by is to them incontrovertible evidence of the truth of their gospel.
ReplyDelete[To the humor impaired: N.B! I am not denying the possibility of global warming. I am ridiculing the idea that otherwise normal variations in weather patterns are evidence that Florida is about to slip under the waves in the next year.]
Florida is about to slip under the waves in the next year
ReplyDeleteLast winter, here in the Great Frozen North, we had unseasonably mild weather to mid-January--no snow, above freezing, greening grass, etc. What would formerly have been seen as a blessing caused a mild millenialist-style panic. All the politicians (especially Conservatives) started wearing green ties and assured all they recognized this was proof and they were committed to doing something now. Before it was too late. For the children. They were vague on what, but new interdepartmental working groups and conferences were popular options.
ReplyDeleteThen in mid-January the temperature plummeted to minus 25 and stayed there for the better part of eight weeks. Everybody hauled out their old ties and started talking about hockey.
I'm not a global warming sceptic. Does that mean I have to stop reading your blog?
ReplyDeleteI'll make an exception in your case, Maxine.
ReplyDelete