The Decider Vs. The Enabler
by DarkSyde
Sun Jan 21, 2007 at 03:12:17 AM PDT
If big business and President Bush are getting religion on human induced climate change, it hasn't yet filtered down to the cadres of mis-informationists the administration is alleged to have enabled over the last six years:
Realclimate -- In an odd repeat of last year, we find ourselves well into the meteorological Northern Hemisphere winter (Dec-Feb) with little evidence over large parts of the country (most noteably the eastern and central U.S.) that it ever really began. Unsurprisingly, numerous news stories have popped up asking whether global warming might be to blame. Almost as if on cue, representatives from NOAA's National Weather Service have been dispatched to tell us that the event e.g. "has absolutely nothing to do with global warming", but instead is entirely due to the impact of the current El Nino event.
Case in point, Dennis Feltgen speaking on behalf of NOAA stating on national media:
"We're in an El Niño, which has absolutely nothing to do with global warming," Feltgen says. "It keeps a lot of the cold air locked up in Canada, and makes the West Coast of the United States stormy, which we've seen, and makes the southern one-third of the country wetter than normal."
Drink in that subtle implication: An empirically determined, global coupled ocean-atmosphere phenomenon is unrelated to a global warming trend, both occuring in the same interconnected, chaotic system ... ? It's almost like saying the destruction of Katrina was entirely due to a hurricane -- then adding it therefore had absolutely nothing to do with warmer sea surface temperatures.
Global warming implies, unsurprisingly, more energy in the air and water, which might produce larger, wetter storms. In summer, sure enough, that could potentially translate into more powerful hurricanes. But during wintertime, it might produce large, moist cold fronts which travel farther and last longer than they otherwise would have. Ergo, global warming could play a role in a hypothetical freak snowstorm in Florida -- or in very real massive blizzards in Colorado.
But just as a one lucky poker hand cannot be blamed on a stacked deck, a single storm, a single month, or even one anomalous hot or cold season, cannot be blamed definitively on a single cause, be it climate change or El Nino. Anyone who has taken climatology 101 knows that. One would assume that Mr. Feltgen is aware of it as well.
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