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Again: Weather is not climate

One of the biggest misnomers in Bay Area journalism is the Sunday SF Comicle section titled "Insights".  You would have to read for weeks and weeks to get any actual insight and you should be on guard for misinformation.  This past Sunday was no exception.  Some random podcaster named Adam Johnson was given 32 column inches of front-page space to proclaim something that even he eventually admits isn't true.  Here are a few excerpts from the piece

Each day they open a paper or turn on a TV and see increasingly extreme weather conditions that, more often than not, are presented as entirely random or an act of God — divorced from or incidental to the human political and economic decisions that are actually causing them.

Exaggerate much?  After four years of serious drought, we got massive amounts of atmospheric river rain and the reservoirs are full.  Opposite "extremes" make cause and effect cloudy.

But climate change and extreme weather are not separate and need to stop being treated as such by newsmakers. Given the existential stakes of catastrophic climate change and the extremely limited timetable humans have to reverse — or at least mitigate — its most extreme effects, the dearth of coverage that clearly connects the dots grows more conspicuous and, frankly, immoral by the day.

Then eight paragraphs later, Johnson notes

Ask any reputable scientist and they will tell you that it's virtually impossible, due to the inherent nonlinear dynamic of climate, to ever blame one specific weather event on climate change, as such.

It's not "virtually impossible".  It's just impossible.  And it's not impossible for any single weather event–you could bundle 25 together and it's still impossible.  As noted here, some scientists will use a 10-year average, but most run with a 30-year average to assess "climate".  One has to wonder how bad business is at the Comicle that they have to outsource major pieces to people who are data-deficient (there isn't any in the whole piece) and who burst their own premise right in the article.

Here's the misinformation headline and a fun photo of the SF Comicle box in front of Mollie Stone's.  And no, I am not the graffiti artist.

Lack of Insight

Comicle notation

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8 responses to “Again: Weather is not climate”

  1. Joe

    Here’s some more from the WSJ this week:
    The global-warming industry has declared that July 3 and 4 were the two hottest days on Earth on record. The reported average global temperature on those days was 62.6 degrees Fahrenheit, supposedly the hottest in 125,000 years. The claimed temperature was derived from the University of Maine’s Climate Reanalyzer, which relies on a mix of satellite temperature data and computer-model guesstimation to calculate estimates of temperature.
    One obvious problem with the updated narrative is that there are no satellite data from 125,000 years ago. Calculated estimates of current temperatures can’t be fairly compared with guesses of global temperature from thousands of years ago.
    A more likely alternative to the 62.6-degree estimate is something around 57.5 degrees. The latter is an average of actual surface temperature measurements taken around the world and processed on a minute-by-minute basis by a website called temperature.global. The numbers have been steady this year, with no spike in July.
    Another problem is that our temperature data are imprecise. It has been estimated that 96% of U.S. temperature stations produce corrupted data. About 92% of them reportedly have a margin of error of a full degree Celsius, or nearly 2 degrees Fahrenheit. The lack of precision of reported temperatures, whether estimated or measured, is not reassuring.
    Temperature stations also tend to be limited to populated areas. Much of the Earth’s surface isn’t measured at all. Although the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration likes to present global temperatures starting in 1880, regular temperature collection in places such as the north and south poles began much later.
    ——————
    Lets not even get into the “125,000 years ago” rathole.

  2. Cassandra

    So much vamping for virtue with the Climate Disaster Clique.
    Money going to builders and promoters of questionable contraptions to cool our planet- wait it doesn’t need cooling…
    An acquaintance flies all over the world pursuing an interest in birdwatching and lauds the fact that the water served on the flight is in cardboard boxes rather than plastic.
    How about watching the birds in the backyard and drinking out of the hose?

  3. hollyroller@ gmail.com

    Dear Cassandra,
    -What are your views on Vaccinations? All Vaccinations.
    -What is your opinion regarding Earth?
    -In particular, Flat or Round?
    One more question.
    -Is Avian Flu a threat to Humans?
    I/We do not expect a response to these questions.
    Nevertheless, it would be “Super Cool.” “Fun Too.”

  4. Joanne

    Oh yes, “Do as I say not as I do” spewed to the masses. The hypocrisy of it all and everyone seems to be jumping on the bandwagon!
    Thinking the truth lies somewhere in the middle. Live a simpler life to begin with.

  5. hollyroller@ gmail.com

    I don’t get it Joanne. Please elaborate.

  6. Phinancier

    Dr. John F. Clauser, joint recipient of the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics, has criticized the climate emergency narrative calling it “a dangerous corruption of science that threatens the world’s economy and the well-being of billions of people.”
    Nobel Laureate (Physics 2022) Dr. John Clauser was to present a seminar on climate models to the IMF on Thursday and now his talk has been summarily cancelled. According to an email he received last evening, the Director of the Independent Evaluation Office of the International Monetary Fund, Pablo Moreno, had read the flyer for John’s July 25 zoom talk and summarily and immediately canceled the talk. Technically, it was “postponed.”
    Dr. Clauser had previously criticized the awarding of the 2021 Nobel Prize for work in the development of computer models predicting global warming and told President Biden that he disagreed with his climate policies. Dr. Clauser has developed a climate model that adds a new significant dominant process to existing models. The process involves the visible light reflected by cumulus clouds that cover, on average, half of the Earth. Existing models greatly underestimate this cloud feedback, which provides a very powerful, dominant thermostatic control of the Earth’s temperature.
    More recently, he addressed the Korea Quantum Conference where he stated, “I don’t believe there is a climate crisis” and expressed his belief that “key processes are exaggerated and misunderstood by approximately 200 times.”

  7. Joe

    Finally, some scientist has quantified something I have known about generally for years. Imagine you have two of the exact same cars parked side by side with windows rolled up in a sunny parking lot and one is white, the other black. After a period of time, which interior will be warmer? The black one as it absorbs more heat. Now onto the climate measuring errors due to the same principle:
    Now, a new study by German engineer and scientist Moritz Büsing has shown some serious flaws in the methods of measuring temperatures, and the release of this work will no doubt draw fire from climate scolds in Germany, the rest of Europe – and the United States.
    According to a new study, weather station data has been shown to non-climatically and erroneously record warmer-than-actual temperatures due to the steady and perpetual aging process almost universally observed in temperature gauges.
    When a weather station temperature gauge’s white paint or white plastic ages and darkens, this allows more solar radiation to be absorbed by the gauge than when the gauge is bright white and new. Within a span of just 2 to 5 years, a gauge has been observed to record maximum temperatures 0.46°C to 0.49°C warmer than in gauges that have not undergone an aging process. This artificial warming is not corrected in modern data sets, and it builds up over time – even when the gauges are cleaned or resurfaced every few years.
    If these systematic artificial warming errors were to be corrected rather than ignored, the 140-year (1880-’90 to 2010-’20) GISTEMP global warming trend plummets from the current estimate of +1.43°C down to +0.83°C, a 42% differential. The temperature reduction can be even more pronounced – from +1.43°C down to +0.41°C – if a set of conservative assumptions (described in detail in the paper) are removed.
    ———————-
    There you go.

  8. Spurinna

    Too many making money off the climate change scam…
    Like the homeless-industrial complex involved in not solving drug-related homelessness.

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