The curious fit between French socialist thought & global warming alar

[olger]

-mists.

Ruminations by a friend of mine today.

"The curious fit between French socialist thought & global warming alarmist thought

In LAST EXIT TO UTOPIA (p. 196), Jean-Francois Revel writes, "The art of 'penser socialiste' [socialist thought] consists in perceiving the exact opposite of what emerges transparently from the data."

It struck me as I read this that global warming alarmists have carefully cultivated the ability to do the exact same thing. For them, now, cooling proves warming, and warming proves warming, and flooding proves warming, and droughts prove warming, and essentially everything proves warming.

But it goes beyond that. As multiplying research has shown, the methods climate science believers have developed to "process" or "adjust" or (favorite term) "homogenize" data have become so compliant that they can make any raw data turn out to be what they want them to be.

Willis Eschenbach, a critic of global warming alarmism, offers a great illustration of that ability in his analysis of how the Global Historical Climate Network "homogenizes" the raw temperature data from Darwin Station in Australia. You can read the whole critique in "The Smoking Gun at Darwin Zero" at http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/12/08/the-smoking-gun-at-darwin-zero/. But it all gets captured in this single magnificent graphic, showing that while the raw data indicated a 0.7 degree C per century cooling trend from about 1880 to 2010, the "homogenized" data developed by GHCN--and depended upon by the Climatic Research Unit at East Anglia (source of the Climategate emails) and the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change--shows instead a 1.2 degree C per century warming trend."

`oG

[karl]

Olger, the data are irrelevant. If there is no global warming we cannot have the global socialism the alarmists are calling for to combat it.

[Bravus]

Sigh

[Bravus]

http://thingsbreak.wordpress.com/2009/12/09/the-smoking-gun-darwin-station-temperature-adjustments/

[Kyran]

I love it how cooling is proof that it is warming. :D

[Bravus]

Local cooling can still support global warming. Note the difference between the scales. After all, your refrigerator leads to a net increase in the temperature of your home. It cools the inside, but only by taking that heat and venting it to the outside (feel the coils on the back sometime). And it does so inefficiently, so that more heat is released than was removed from the inside. This is just an illustration, not an analogy to climate change, but local cooling within global warming is *not* logically incompatible. Those who claim it is are simply illustrating their ignorance.

[Bravus]

It's also worth noting that Revel is a French anti-socialist, so his characterisation of 'socialist thought' ought to be taken with a salt lake...

[karl]

Local cooling can still support global warming.

[Bravus]

Nope, sorry. Local climate is the result of a huge range of very complex interactions, including massive ocean currents. England, for example, is only as temperate as it is, at the latitude it is at, due to a large warm ocean current. If global warming disrupted that current, as it could well do, England would rapidly get much colder. That would be local cooling caused by, and therefore supporting, the concept of global warming. The cooling and increased ice in West Antarctica when ice is melting everywhere else in the world has a similar explanation.

[karl]

Nope, sorry. Local climate is the result of a huge range of very complex interactions, including massive ocean currents. England, for example, is only as temperate as it is, at the latitude it is at, due to a large warm ocean current. If global warming disrupted that current, as it could well do, England would rapidly get much colder. That would be local cooling caused by, and therefore supporting, the concept of global warming. The cooling and increased ice in West Antarctica when ice is melting everywhere else in the world has a similar explanation.

Although local cooling "could be" explained by some computer modeling of global warming, it cannot be used as support for global warming because it absolutely cannot be proven that the local cooling was due to global warming versus some other event, including, but not limited to, global cooling. You yourself pointed out "local climate is the result of a huge range of very complex interactions." (Some of them unaccounted for in computer simulations.) Therefore local cooling absolutely cannot be used as support for the theory of global warming.

Global warming can suggest a mechanism for local cooling as in your illustration above, but the support cannot go the other way. Local cooling suggests no mechanism for global warming.