If the causal relationship between global warming and extreme weather such as the flooding in the Midwest of the country is scientifically grounded, meteorologists have a professional responsibility to report it. The value of such informaion would go far in educating the public about global warming.

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http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com

/2008/06/uah_may_08.png

Look towards the right side of the graph. There you can see that according to satellite and balloon data the earth is as cold as it was in 1979.

Also bear in mind that Iowa saw the 33rd coldest winter on record with well below average temperatures and well above average snowfall. The flooding is part of the this cold spell.

The truth is inconvenient, isn't it?

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It's BS for fools....makes good copy on AlterNet.

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While I don't doubt that global warming is a contributing factor in increases of flooding, tornado severity and season lengths, and other sever weather changes, it's not the only contributor to economic disaster.

Real estate speculators and developers have, for decades, have opted to building on flat lands - often smaller working farms bankrupted by agribusiness corporations - and in flood plains.

Then there's the general stupidity and ignorance of the public at large. That beautiful meadow-like housing development lining the river's edge looks so nice when you buy it in August, but if you don't know about natural cycles, or recognize that the land was farmland because it flooded out periodically, then you bought into a disaster waiting to happen.

Attributing dramatic weather changes [even those with more catastrophic results] is legitimate. But let us not ignore the very real causes resulting from human ignorance and stupidity and, frankly, the capacity of urban-oriented people to be woefully out of touch with centuries old forces and cycles of nature.

If you don't want to deal with a house [or a city] that gets flooded out, then don't build on a flood plain.

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“So if the disasters that follow one another, from hurricanes to tornadoes to flooding, are consistent with global warming, why aren't the networks, the weather reporters, making the link?“

Because they don’t want to! Just like the Democrats will not acknowledge that massive immigration into the US also is consistent with global warming. If politicians (that includes Democrats) think a policy will help get them elected or reelected, they don’t give a damn what it does to the country or the people.

There has never been any hope that Republican would put people first, and I’m afraid that the Democrats have joined Republicans in that regard. How else do you explain the total failure of Democrats to do what is right for American citizens on so many issues? They do whatever corporate interests want.

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I read one piece on global warming last year and they commented that the Midwest would turn into a dustbowl with global warming. Wish they make up their mind what global warming is doing to the midwest. That is if there is such a thing?

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Climate change is certainly a factor in the storms that caused the Midwest flooding. What has not been noted is the speed with which rains get to rivers. Anyone driving rural roads in Minnesota and Iowa can't miss the fields that extend road to road with little or no wetlands, marshes, or woods. All land is tiled and ditched to take away any and all excess water. Rather than recharge the aquifer, we get flooding.

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Because we've never had floods or hurricanes or anything like that before. This is all new stuff.

Silliness.

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When the global warming debate began decades ago, the scientists behind it PREDICTED extreme weather-- just what we have now. When you predict something that comes true, that gives you substantial credibility.

By the way, massive flooding is now occuring in other parts of the world, including China and India.

For those who argue that this is "normal", the present flood (and the one in 1993) were classified as "500 year" floods. Like it's normal to have TWO 500 year floods in 15 years. That makes as much sense as their cherished religous belief that the earth is only 5000 years old.

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Unusually hot weather and unusually cold winters, just like excessive rains and drought, are fluctuations that are completely consistent with Global Warming theory. The people whose heads are actually out of their rectums will have also noticed that these patterns have been more extreme - and sooner that most scientists had predicted.

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http://lwf.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/research/cag3/cag3.html

You can check out the temperature and precipitation records going back to 1895 for the nation and each state except Alaska and Hawaii. I suggest annual precipitation for IA or Year to date. Note the variation year to year and the very wet years going back to 1910. Note also their trend lines which show an increase of about 3 inches last century. What it tells me is that heavy rainfall is nothing new, but when it happens, it's been heavier than in the past. But given the wide variation in rainfall, can you really draw any conclusions from 3 extra inches.

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Anyone seem to notice a striking correlation between Ethanol production being massively produced in the Midwest and massive floods? Seems NASA scientists have. Perhaps its the fact that corn production causes a massive depletion of soil, or the fact that ethanol production creates large amounts of water as a byproduct (which has to evaporate and go somewhere, right?), or the increasing use of pesticides (corn crops use 40% of the worlds pesticides...and climbing), etc... I could go on and so can anyone who cares to do the research on Ethanol and how its cost taxpayers $3.65/gallon to PRODUCE plus cost of the fuel itself (or around $30billion in subsidies for less than 1% of our fuel consumption)...
$30 billion here to wrecklessly lead the public to believe we are saving the environment, $40 billion there in a failing drug war, no wonder why are taxes and gas are sky high. I'm sure we could all go on and on.
If you are going to make Ethanol at least use a viable source such as Hemp, that actually replenishes soil, can be used for biodiesel as well, construction, food (for humans and animals alike), etc...oh wait even though Hemp can not get humans "high" its illegal too. Thanks for the rant space, please do the research and educate yourselves as the media and our government do not.

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Drive down down the road and you do not see much, visit a Midwest relative and ask to go fishing and you will find that the small farms have been eaten up by the big farmer who has bull dozed in all the ponds and brush from the fences, causing major Eco changes. The average 140 acre farm used to have about 3 pond on them, fed by natural springs. These ponds evaporated for small rains, now they weather has the build up into major storms to rain. The farmer to day is too sophisticated to go fishing or hunting, so he does not need this, but our Eco system does need it. Might gain 1 bushel of corn from a bull dozed in pond or a plowed yard, not worth it. Wake up America.

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NOAA study forecasts greater extremes in weather (June 20, 2008)

[snip]
WASHINGTON - As greenhouse gas emissions rise, North America is likely to experience more droughts and excessive heat in some regions even as intense downpours and hurricanes pound others more often, according to a report issued yesterday by the US Climate Change Science Program.
[/snip]

U.S. experts: Forecast is more extreme weather (June 19, 2008)

[snip]
WASHINGTON - Droughts will get drier, storms will get stormier and floods will get deeper with a warming climate across North America, U.S. government experts said in a report billed as the first continental assessment of extreme events.
[/snip]

Weather and Climate Extremes in a Changing Climate (U.S. Climate Change Science Program, 19 June 2008)

There's the data and the analysis from the experts. It's too bad that data and expertise don't matter to people who refuse to accept the reality of climate change.

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Global average temps have dropped since 1998 and are predicted to continue to do so for 10 to 20 years. Antarctic ice is increasing and arctic ice is rebounding from low levels of the past few years. More and more scientists are questioning the models that employ assumptions about positive feedbacks to predict drastic future warming, when negative feedbacks may in fact dominate. The doomsters are using models that accord quite poorly with observations. CO2 is not a particularly strong greenhouse gas, and the models predict warming because of assumptions regardings CO2's effect on water vapor concentrations, assumptions which could be very wrong!

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Interesting how people turn a blind eye to what they do not understand. The Earth goes through cycles, Ice Ages and Warming Periods. Whenever there are Polar Ice Caps, the planet is in an Ice Age. When there are no Ice Caps, this is called a Warming Period.

Currently we have Ice Caps, they are there. What, you're surprised that they are not perpetual, that they are melting? Wake up nothing lasts forever.

Once the Ice Caps Melt, this creates greater solar reflectivity. This reflectivity through a complex ecological reaction eventually creates gases that block solar reflectivity; eventually the planet begins to cool down and a new Ice Age starts.

Eventually the human race as we know it will be extinct. Either through our own hubris bringing about ecological disaster, or nuclear war. The most unlikely option is that as a species we actually start doing something to survive other than just exist and thrive and evolve into something above homosapien

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from http://blogs.news.com.au/dailytelegraph/
timblair/index.php/dailytelegraph/comments/archibald_prize/


"Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, but the effect is strongly logarithmic. The first 20 ppm achieves 1.5 degrees of heating, but it takes more than another 400 ppm to equal that. By the time we get to the current level of 384 ppm, carbon dioxide is tuckered out as a greenhouse gas. From here, every 100 ppm extra may be worth 0.1 of a degree.

So how does the IPCC achieve 5 degrees of heating from a doubling of the pre-industrial level of carbon dioxide to 560 ppm? They do it by cheating. Their computer models are written so that a little bit of carbon dioxide-caused heating puts more water vapour in the air. Water vapour is the major greenhouse gas, so they have the heating compounding away until they get a number that will melt icecaps, kill polar bears and all the other effects of their apocalyptic visions. Their view of the Earth’s climate is that it is tremendously unstable, prone to thermal runaway at the slightest provocation. In fact it is the opposite, a buffered system that dampens disturbances. Tropical seas can’t get warmer than 31 degrees because they start evaporating too rapidly to get any hotter. Similarly, high level tropical clouds part to vent radiation to space. The Earth is just about perfect for sustaining equable living conditions over a good proportion of its surface

What is strange is that the wailing of the global warming proponents is in the face of a temperature record that does not support their theory. Peak global temperature was in 1998 and we have had ten years of cooling since. The satellite record shows that the temperature of the Southern Hemisphere has been flat for the last 30 years. The Earth’s failure to warm has become quite annoying to the global warmers, and signs of cognitive dissonance are appearing in their camp. Surely a few more years of cooling will leave only the true believers in their misanthropic ideology, and the truly idiotic. Or is that moment with us now?"

There's more at the link.

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It's amazing how much energy the denialist squirrels will put into digging up their nuts.

"C. Archibald's low-ball estimate of climate change comes not from the modtran model my server ran for him, but from his own low-ball value of the climate sensitivity."
My model, used for deception

For anyone sincerely interested in learning about climate science, a good place to start is HERE.

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Yesterday the U.S. Climate Change Science Program released an assessment report titled “Weather and Climate Extremes in a Changing Climate” (PDF) with a focus on the United States. It does not show a clear picture of ever increasing extreme events in the United States. And it does not clearly say why damage has been steadily increasing.

The report contains several remarkable conclusions, that somehow did not seem to make it into the official press release. They include: over the long-term U.S. hurricane landfalls have been declining, nationwide there have been no long-term increases in drought, despite increases in some measures of precipitation, there have not been corresponding increases in peak streamflows, there have been no observed changes in the occurrence of tornadoes or thunderstorms, there have been no long-term increases in strong East Coast winter storms (ECWS), called Nor’easters, there are no long-term trends in either heat waves or cold spells, though there are trends within shorter time periods in the overall record.

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On the average, regarding outward radiation from the Earth (which is what CO2 is supposed to affect): 80 percent of the heat radiated back from the surface is absorbed in the first 30 feet by water vapor. How much is absorbed by carbon dioxide? Eight hundredths of one percent. One one-thousandth as important as water vapor.

This begs questions about the widely publicized mathematical models researchers run through supercomputers to generate climate scenarios 50 or 100 years in the future. In short, the data fed into the computers overemphasizes carbon dioxide and accounts poorly for the effects of clouds—water vapor.

Climate models cannot be verified or falsified (if at all, because they are so complex) until after the fact. Strictly speaking, they cannot be considered to be legitimate scientific products.

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Well it sure is fun playing the devil's advocate. But I did notice something. People responded to the source of my information, not the content. Also, for sea ice data, see:

http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/

For temp data, see:

http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/research/hadleycentre/

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Downloaded from:
http://www.skeptic.com/
the_magazine/featured_
articles/v14n01_human_
induced_climate_change.html

Dr. Tapio Schneider discusses the science behind human-induced climate change.
He is a climate scientist and Professor of Environmental Science and Engineering
at the California Institute of Technology.

How We Know Global Warming is Real
The Science Behind Human-induced Climate Change

by Dr. Tapio Schneider

Atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations are higher today than at any time in at
least the past 650,000 years. They are about 35% higher than before the industrial
revolution, and this increase is caused by human activities, primarily the burning
of fossil fuels. Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, as are methane, nitrous oxide,
water vapor, and a host of other trace gases. They occur naturally in the
atmosphere. Greenhouse gases act like a blanket for infrared radiation, retaining
radiative energy near the surface that would otherwise escape directly to space. An
increase in atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide and of other greenhouse
gases augments the natural greenhouse effect; it increases the radiative energy
available to Earth’s surface and to the lower atmosphere. Unless compensated for
by other processes, the increase in radiative energy available to the surface and the
lower atmosphere leads to warming. This we know. How do we know it?

How do we know carbon dioxide concentrations have increased?

The concentrations of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in atmospheric
samples have been measured continuously since the late 1950s. Since then, carbon
dioxide concentrations have increased steadily from about 315 parts per million
(ppm, or molecules of carbon dioxide per million molecules of dry air) in the late
1950s to about 385 ppm now, with small spatial variations away from major
sources of emissions. For the more distant past, we can measure atmospheric
concentrations of greenhouse gases in bubbles of ancient air preserved in ice (e.g.,
in Greenland and Antarctica). Ice core records currently go back 650,000 years;
over this period we know that carbon dioxide concentrations have never been
higher than they are now. Before the industrial revolution, they were about 280
ppm, and they have varied naturally between about 180 ppm during ice ages and
300 ppm during warm periods (Fig. 1). Concentrations of methane and nitrous
oxide have likewise increased since the industrial revolution (Fig. 2) and, for
methane, are higher now than they have been in the 650,000 years before the
industrial revolution.

How do we know the increase in carbon dioxide concentrations is caused by
human activities?

There are several lines of evidence. We know approximately how much carbon
dioxide is emitted as a result of human activities. Adding up the human sources of
carbon dioxide — primarily from fossil fuel burning, cement production, and land
use changes (e.g., deforestation) — one finds that only about half the carbon
dioxide emitted as a result of human activities has led to an increase in
atmospheric concentrations. The other half of the emitted carbon dioxide has been
taken up by oceans and the biosphere — where and how exactly is not completely
understood: there is a “missing carbon sink.”
Human activities thus can account for the increase in carbon dioxide
concentrations.
......the article continues. Go to the URL above.

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Never thought I'd agree with him, but:

"Anthropogenic global warming is a scientific hypothesis, not an article of religious or ideological dogma. Skepticism and doubt are entirely appropriate in the realm of science, in which truth is determined by evidence, experimentation, and observation, not by consensus or revelation. Yet when it comes to global warming, dissent is treated as heresy -- as a pernicious belief whose exponents must be shamed, shunned, or silenced."

Belief in models, BTW--the computer models that predict warming and that have many assumptions regarding feedbacks. The current warming has been going on for 120 years (rebound from the LIA). Yes the earth is warming, and it also cools, and it warms, and it cools.

I am open to empirical evidence. I find it very disturbing that an area of science becomes dogma, and those who present differing viewpoints are vilified. It's no wonder that "environmentalism" turns so many people off.

I have a Ph.D. in environmental policy, and know how to think critically. It's really scary how irrational people get when someone threatens their GW belief. FYI, I fully support moving away from dirty fuels to a more hydrogen/renewable economy, and I have devoted my career to environmental protection. I just don't think you are doing anyone any favors by turning science into religion.

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From the WSJ (so for lessbread et al it is immediately discredited):

Scientists, like journalists, are called upon to plumb the depths of the unknown and to fairly and objectively report their findings to their own professional community as well as the general public. Scientists, like the journalists of yesteryear, have specific methods for ensuring that the public trust placed in them is not abused. The most fundamental of these methods is the well-known, if not so creatively named, scientific method. The essence of the scientific method is the formulation of hypotheses (ideas) and the using of these hypotheses to make predictions that can be experimentally tested. In the words of Sir Thomas Eddington in “The Philosophy of Physical Science,” “Every item of physical knowledge must therefore be an assertion of what has been or would be the result of carrying out a specified observational procedure.”

Nevertheless, over the past several decades an increasing number of scientists have shed the restraints imposed by the scientific method and begun to proclaim the truth of man-made global warming. This is a hypothesis that remains untested, makes no predictions that can be tested in the near future, and cannot offer a numerical explanation for the limited evidence to which it clings. No equations have been shown to explain the relationship between fossil-fuel emission and global temperature. The only predictions that have been made are apocalyptic, so the hypothesis has to be accepted before it can be tested.

The only evidence that can be said to support this so-called scientific consensus is the supposed correlation of historical global temperatures with historical carbon-dioxide content in the atmosphere. Even if we do not question the accuracy of our estimates of global temperatures into previous centuries, and even if we ignore the falling global temperatures over the past decade as fossil-fuel emissions have continued to increase, an honest scientist would still have to admit that the hypothesis of man-made global warming hardly rises to the level of “an assertion of what has been or would be the result of carrying out a specified observational procedure.” Global warming may or may not be “the greatest scam in history,” as it was recently called by John Coleman, a prominent meteorologist and the founder of the Weather Channel. Certainly, however, under the scientific method it does not rise to the level of an “item of physical knowledge.”"

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