Update: This was privately challenged and I thought you deserved the background. It is not from modern scientific experiments, it is from the assertions of historians and prehistorians, mostly modern but not always particularly environmentalist, that warming frequently brings more moisture, cold brings more dryness. Now that I look at this, I realise that I am trusting them a lot on their having done the research into written records or dendrochronology or whatever. Most have also asserted that sometimes it is the opposite, which probably should have made me more suspicious. Yet I think this is an accumulation of impressions over reading about a lot of different times and places, so I am going to stick with it at present. I will willingly defer to anyone who actually knows more about this and provides a more comprehensive or nuanced explanation.
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I would actually like to extend them a small concession. We all grow frustrated with the contention that all these more-wintry events are really a sign of global warming, because it seems like "Right. So whatever the data is, you claim it proves your beliefs." Yet in the case of snow, they have a point. Unexpected snow is as much a product of a change in moisture as a change in temperature. Not that many of them predicted that this would happen - no, of course not. They were and are bought into the idea that any change is automatically a catastrophic one generally, and therefore...whatever our Intervention of the Month is. But they were right to be alert for it, I suppose, and notice what is happening. Changes in moisture are also climate change, and in the past, those have been as devastating as Local Cooling. (Cooling is historically the problem, not warming.) Every change has multiple effects, and likely devastating in some localities even when it is overall beneficial. Such as the 1st-3rd C's in the Roman empire.
So it's not what you predicted dude, yet it actually is a small check mark in your column. But more importantly, it is a trumpet sound to look at complexity and tradeoffs, which is precisely what you have been ignoring. Some of you - the actual researchers relying on hard data, mostly - already knew that. It's the rest of you, whose "environmentalism" is a sham, based on forcing economic and cultural changes that benefit your tribe, or aesthetic values of returning the world to your summer-camp and managed-wilderness fantasies that I want to smack awake.
It may be a small check mark, but I doubt it.
ReplyDeleteThe real problem with the cult is that it's a-scientific - mainly because the theory is rendered unfalsifiable.
That's what a lot of people get without using that terminology-if any weather-related occurrence is evidence for the theory, then it can't be disproved.
Most proponents of AGW respond just like conspiracy theorists when confronted with a disproof - "that's exactly what they want you to think", or in this case "Exactly! It's Climate Change, you know".