Martin Cothran, enabler of racists and Holocaust deniers, doesn't like that I busted a bad argument of his. He made the trite "it's snowing so Al Gore is fat" line of argument, and I pointed out that an individual weather event doesn't actually tell you about long term trends. He retorts:
I wonder how many posts Josh has made cautioning those who equate weather and climate when discussing warm weather events.
It would but puerile to criticize this logic teacher for employing a tu quoque fallacy here, especially given Cothran's established love of ad hominem arguments and other logical fallacies. More importantly, what he did isn't really tu quoque, as he was too lazy to actually establish that I ever confused temperature and climate. We might say that a "shorter Martin Cothran" here would be: "I know I am but what are you?"
By contrast, when I want to point out that Cothran is inconsistent and that the sometime logic teacher has only an instrumental interest in logic, I search through his archives and find actual instances where he abuses logical fallacies, ideally the same one he is criticizing (or instances where he criticized the same fallacy he now employs). When I want to point out that he is a hypocrite for complaining about guilt by association, I actually find examples of him using guilt by association, I don't just say "I bet he used guilt by association at some point, too, so it's OK for me to do it." It takes a little work, but I find it's worth it.
This is all by way of saying that a less lazy and meretricious hack would've checked the Great Gizoogle before implying I've got some history of inconsistency on the difference between climate and weather. But Cothran is an extremely lazy and meretricious hack.
In point of fact, I've been pretty good about this. A search of my archives for the word "warm" (as in "this is a warm summer, therefore global warming is real," as well as any instance of "global warming" or "his father was a swarm of bees") turns up a lot of stuff that isn't germane, and the rest all appear to be cases of me smacking down some idiot who doesn't know that weather is the short term pattern while climate is the long-term trend. I've made it clear about hurricanes, for instance, that we can't attribute a given storm or its intensity to global warming, though we can note that global warming will cause more extreme weather events, and that a severe hurricane is a reminder of the risks we face from unchecked climate change. And we can note that warm winters tend to be snowier (as anyone in cold weather climes knows from days that are "too cold to snow"). This simple fact was documented by an extensive study in 2006, and so can hardly be claimed as cherrypicking or special pleading. Not that Cothran will let actual evidence convince him he's wrong.
Note that the two examples Cothran offers of "warm weather events" are: "someone in Greenland notices a glacier starting to drip" and "someone in Alaska hasn't seen a polar bear in over a week." Neither of those count as either weather or climate, but if we correct his snide douchebaggery, we can link those to genuine climate stories.
The relevant data for glaciers is not whether they are dripping on day X, but their long-term trend in size. if they are melting faster than they used to, it suggests a long term increase in temperature, and long-term temperature trends speak to climate, not weather. Similarly, polar bear populations are dependent on long-term trends in sea ice extent and the timing of various sea ice-related events. A single bad year does not justify declaring them an endangered species, as the Bush administration did. To make that assessment requires a long-term trend in population levels. In the case of polar bears, researchers and "Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne cited dramatic declines in sea ice over the last three decades and projections of continued losses [which] mean the polar bear is a species likely to be in danger of extinction in the near future."
Events stretching over three decades go into the category of climate, not weather. So does the observation that the last decade is the warmest in recorded history; the previous champion was ⦠last decade! These long-term trends speak to changes in climate â a warming of the global climate. We might even call it a "global warming" or "climate change."
I won't claim that no one has ever cited a warm weekend as evidence of global warming, but the real evidence is from changes in climate, and there's no need to resort to dishonest and inaccurate conflation of climate and weather. We can leave that to mendacious hacks like Martin Cothran.
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One could argue that a full el nino la nina cycle is a boundary for weather vs. climate. (If one has to classify these things).
But having said that, climate is weather and weather is climate more than not. It isn't just that people cite weather that supports their view (it's snowing a lot in Minnesota this year therefore there is no global warming) but they even get that part wrong at several levels ... most non-experts can't describe a typical year in the region in which they live, IMO, with respect to temperature and precipitation.
The really sad part is that the global warming nay-sayers probably don't have to do any more than spew out their "it's snowing so Al Gore is fat" drivel. My pessimistic prediction is that it will prove even easier to convince people that global warming isn't real than it was to convince people that Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction were.
Someone better remind Phil Jones about your conclusions. Last I heard he was back peddling...
FtK
It helps to read primary sources, rather than 'winger tabloids like the Daily Mail...
BBC's original interview with Jones: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8511670.stm
Further reading-
SkepticalScience: http://www.skepticalscience.com/Did-Phil-Jones-really-say-global-warmin…
OpenMind: http://tamino.wordpress.com/2010/02/16/growthgate/
RealClimate: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2010/02/daily-mangle/
#3, are you being deliberately dishonest, or just taking that on faith because it supports your preconceptions? The Daily Mail, to put it nicely, quote-mined Jones (see here: http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2010/02/daily_mail_caught_in_another_l… ). To elaborate slightly more, you shouldn't believe anything the Daily Mail prints, on any subject, as they will make things up to suit their agenda.
But you probably don't care. It tells you what you want to hear, and that's enough. Right?
I posted something with several links- which will probably go to the spam filter- in response to "FtK".
Oh, come on guys...all we've heard for the past few years is ~immediate~ doom in regard to global warming.
Now, the tune has changed drastically..."it's an extremely gradual thang we got going here folks. We haven't been able to detect anything of significance over the past 15 years". Hmmmmm....that's not what Gore has been telling us. I thought we had run out of time to save the world!
Heck, you've even changed the name of the crises from global warming to climate change..hehe. It's easier to work with that term, eh?
FtK: It seems to me that you are as confused about climate change as you are about evolution. The natural variability in the weather is such that 15 years is just too short to consistently get a significant regression between global temperature and year. However, we can say for certain that the last decade was warmer than the previous one, and I fully expect that the next decade will be warmer still.
'Climate change' because it involves things in addition to warming, changes in rainfall patterns, for example.
"Climate change" was the preferred term of the Bush Administration. It doesn't sound as bad as "global warming".
It should also be noted that Josh has used the term "global warming" in the above blog post, so the ones changing the name are not the scientists.
FtK is a fundamentalist creationist who usually only sources what the average person would call polarized right-wing sources for information. Given that, it's still a little much even for her to drag in the Daily Mail. In addition to being grossly dishonest and sensational and an open handmaiden of wealthy special interests, it's also not what any religion I can think of would call a "godly" publication. It represents the kind of trashiness, moral decay and decline and fall of civilization that we've been informed Darwinism leads to, in fact.
Marion (#10), it's true that the Daily Mail prints ungodly things like, ooh, pictures of scantily clad celebrities, but it also spends plenty of column inches lamenting the imminent downfall of civilisation due to gay marriage, drugs, teenage sex, environmentalism, welfare scum or left-wing social policies. So no, it's not a godly publication overall, but it prints plenty of things that a fundamentalist creationist with selective vision would approve of. And we all know people like FtK are good at ignoring anything that doesn't fit into their worldview.
FtK | February 16, 2010 1:23 PM:
(0) Humanity is currently emitting 29.3 billion tons of CO2 (the most important greenhouse gas) per year. 15 years of that would be 440 billion tons. The core reason action needs to be taken quickly is not "immediate" change of the climate, but the rapid rate at which humans are pumping out greenhouse gasses.
(1) If we start now, it will take decades to replace the world's coal power plants. Decades before GHG emissions decline to zero. Al Gore explained this in An Inconvenient Truth.
(2) 71% of the Earth's surface is covered by ocean, More than half of that is over 3 kilometers (2 miles) deep. 1.3 billion cubic kilometres (310 million cubic miles). The oceans take a long time to warm. Thus, the earth will keep warming for over a century after GHG emissions decline to zero.
This means that even though global warming happens gradually, because it has long lead times, we must act quickly, to prevent severe consequences. Again - Al Gore explained all of this in An Inconvenient Truth.
Ftk is a first-class moron. I would just ignore her ravings.
Oh wow, for the kids is still around, still not getting it. Did any of the explanations from atbc work?
Saying this is considered impolitic or "unfair" in view of the false equivalence in eg High Broderism, but: I and many others have noted a propensity for right-wing/libertarian types - even the non religious "rationalistic" wing - to indulge logical fallacies and brut, simple intuitive real man/woman type thinking and sentiments. That's not a pre-judice on my part, it is an observation (as from bitter (sic) experience.)
Note also, the climate deniers harp on the empirical data and evade the theoretical issue, known since the 19th Century, about CO2 absorbing IR and warming the air. Do they not know of the classic work by Svante Arrhenius in freakin' 1896:
"On the Influence of Carbonic Acid in the Air Upon the Temperature of the Ground", Philosophical Magazine 1896(41): 237-76
BTW speaking of carbonic acid in solution, that is messing up our oceans as well.