Really? Did anyone actually look at the NRDC's report, or take a moment to consider carefully their claims of record-breaking heat, snow, rain and wildfires?
You could start any number of places in evaluating the NRDC's report, but let's look at the criteria NRDC used. Record breaking snow? That's a sign of global warming? If you look at the data the NRDC provided, you see that all the records came from the cold front that hit the state October 29 and 30, about the time Sandy dropped a ton of rain on us. You can't blame the earth-heating greenhouse gas effect for unusual cold that time of year.
As for precipitation, from Sandy or otherwise, wasn't the prediction just a few years back that we would have more drought as a result of carbon dioxide emissions, because the land was going to sizzle and dry up? So why is rainfall being blamed on global warming? Furthermore, look at the data used by the NRDC. Six of the 17 rainfall records were set at Queen Shoals, which the NRDC could not even locate, and the previous record rainfall was . . . .0, or .01 inch. What does that mean? Here's the NRDC's criteria:
The record-breaking events we used are daily records that are higher than recorded rainfall for any day in that month in the period of record for that station.In other words, in May, July, August, October and December it had never rained at Queen Shoals. Is there any place in West Virginia that has had five months with no precipitation whatsoever? They said they used stations with at least 30 years of data, but that simply cannot be.
The NRDC report is internally inconsistent in what it offers as evidence of man-made climate change. It cites "the worst drought in 50 years", but doesn't that mean that there was a worse drought in the 60's, before carbon dioxide levels climbed? Actually, there were worse droughts in the 1950s. And have they forgotten the Dust Bowl of the 1930s? But even if the droughts are worse now, how does that jibe with their claims of greater precipitation as a result of global warming?
Last year was a bad year for wildfires? Couldn't prove it by me. I recall many worse years, when the smoke carried all the way from the southern coal fields, and Department of Forestry workers were pressed into manning firelines. Nothing like that in 2012.
The temperature records are a joke as well. Many of the record high temperatures are high minimum temperatures. Hardly something that one worries about when considering the effects of global warming. And even for the high records, you see Wayne County had 3 sites all set records on the same day - the airport, sewage plant, and Dunlow. That obviously increases the number of "records" but it's misleading as evidence of widespread heat records.
What struck me most about the NRDC's report was how few records were broken. Think of all the weather stations in West Virginia. (I tried to find a list, but couldn't) There are dozens, probably hundreds, of reporting stations - cities and towns, the airports, state parks, and sewage treatment plants were among those the NRDC relied upon. With hundreds of stations, and looking at monthly records, there are going to be hundreds of opportunities for breaking records in a given year. Now multiply the number of stations and months by the number of records one could keep, such as: highest temperature maximum, lowest temperature maximum, highest temperature minimum, lowest temperature minimum, windspeed, total precipitation, rainfall, snowfall, consecutive days with rain, consecutive days without rain, highest windchill, lowest windchill, highest humidity, lowest humidity . . . the list is almost endless. The chances of breaking a record for the month in one of those categories once during the year is pretty good for any individual station, and it's a certainty that there will be records somewhere in the state for one or more of those categories.
I could go on. For example, did the NRDC look at record lows that were set in West Virginia last year? Or at the lowest maximum temperatures on record? Of course not, that would have interfered with the misleading tale they wanted to tell. The NRDC is working hard to make hay while the sun shines, while Americans remember a warm summer in 2012. What they cannot avoid is that once again, on a global basis, there has been no rise in temperatures for the last 16 year, and even the big global warming proponents are conceding it will be a few years before they begin to rise again, if ever. The predictions of temperature increases made by the Intergvernmental Panel on Climate Change have been shown to be horribly wrong, and they are trying to repackage their story as one of "extreme weather." They should be ashamed of themselves.
Climate skeptics have such a hard time wrapping their head around the idea of "extreme weather."
ReplyDeleteThat's the prediction and that's what we're seeing. Both increased-intensity storms and increased intensity droughts.
And do you really need an explanation as to why record low temperatures matter?